Ladders to Fire (4 page)

Paul then cried out: “This is the beginning of
the end!” Larry looked up from his meal, for the first time struck with a clearer
glimpse of what had been haunting the house.

Through the high building, the wind complained,
playing a frenzied flute up and down the elevator shafts.

Lillian and
Djuna
opened the window and looked at the city covered with a mist. One could see
only the lighted eyes of the buildings. One could hear only muffled sounds, the
ducks from Central Park lake nagging loudly, the fog horns from the river which
sounded at times like the mournful complaints of imprisoned ships not allowed
to sail, at others like gay departures.

Lillian was sitting in the dark, speaking of
her life, her voice charged with both laughter and tears.

In the dark a new being appears. A new being
who has not the courage to face daylight. In the dark people dare to dream
everything. And they dare to tell everything. In the dark there appeared a new
Lillian.

There was just enough light from the city to
show their faces chalk white, with shadows in the place of eyes and mouth, and
an occasional gleam of white teeth. At first it was like two children sitting
on a see-saw, because Lillian would talk about her life and her marriage and
the disintegration of her home, and then
Djuna
would
lean over to embrace her, overflowing with pity. Then
Djuna
would speak and Lillian would lean over and want to gather her in her arms with
maternal compassion.

“I feel,” said Lillian, “that I do everything
wrong. I feel I do everything to bring about just what I fear. You will turn
away from me too.”

Lillian’s unsatisfied hunger for life had
evoked in
Djuna
another hunger. This hunger still
hovered at times over the bright film of her eyes, shading them not with the
violet shadows of either illness or sensual excess, of experience or fever, but
with the pearl-grey shadow of denial, and
Djuna
said:

“I was born in the most utter poverty. My
mother lying in bed with consumption, four brothers and sisters loudly claiming
food and care, and I having to be the mother and nurse of them all. We were so
hungry that we ate all the samples of food or medicines which were left at the
house. I remember once we ate a whole box of chocolate-coated constipation
pills. Father was a taxi driver but he spent the greatest part of what he made
on drink along the way. As we lived among people who were all living as we were,
without sufficient clothing, or heat or food, we knew no contrast and believed
this was natural and general. But with me it was different. I suffered from
other kinds of pangs. I was prone to the most excessive dreaming, of such
intensity and realism that when I awakened I felt I lost an entire universe of
legends, myths, figures and cities of such color that they made our room seem a
thousand times more bare, the poverty of the table more acute. The
disproportion was immense. And I’m not speaking merely of the banquets which
were so obviously compensatory! Nor of the obvious way by which I filled my
poor wardrobe. It was more than that. I saw in my dreams houses, forests,
entire cities, and such a variety of personages that even today I wonder how a
child, who had not even seen pictures, could invent such designs in textures,
such colonnades, friezes, fabulous animals, statues, colors, as I did. And the
activity! My dreams were so full of activity that at times I felt it was the
dreams which exhausted me rather than all the washing, ironing, shopping,
mending, sweeping, tending, nursing, dusting that I did. I remember I had to
break soap boxes to burn in the fireplace. I used to scratch my hands and
bruise my toes. Yet when my mother caressed me and said, you look tired,
Djuna
, I almost felt like confessing to her that what had
tired me was my constant dreaming of a ship which insisted on sailing through a
city, or my voyage in a chaise through the snow-covered steppes of Russia. And
by the way, there was a lot of confusion of places and methods of travel in my
dreams, as there must be in the dreams of the blind. Do you know what I think
now? I think what tired me was the intensity of the pleasures I had together
with the perfect awareness that such pleasure could not last and would be
immediately followed by its opposite. Once out of my dreams, the only certitude
I retained from these nocturnal expeditions was that pleasure could not
possibly last. This conviction was strengthened by the fact that no matter how
small a pleasure I wanted to take during the day it was followed by
catastrophe. If I relaxed for one instant the watch over
my
sick mother to eat an orange all by myself in some
abanoned
lot, she would have a turn for the worse. Or if I spent some time looking at
the pictures outside of the movie house one of my brothers or sisters would cut
himself or burn his finger or get into a fight with another child. So I felt
then that liberty must be paid for heavily. I learned a most severe accounting
which was to consider pleasure as the jewel, a kind of stolen jewel for which
one must be willing to pay vast sums in suffering and guilt. Even today,
Lillian, when something very marvelous happens to me, when I attain love or
ecstasy or a perfect moment, I expect it to be followed by pain.”

Then Lillian leaned over and kissed
Djuna
warmly: “I want to protect you.”

“We give each other courage.”

The mist came into the room.
Djuna
thought: She’s such a hurt woman. She is one who does
not know what she suffers from, or why, or how to overcome it. She is all
unconscious, motion, music. She is afraid to see, to analyze her nature. She
thinks that nature just is and that nothing can be done about it. She would
never have invented ships to conquer the sea, machines to create light where
there was darkness. She would never have harnessed water power, electric power.
She is like the primitive. She thinks it is all beyond her power. She accepts
chaos. She suffers mutely…

“
Djuna
, tell me all
that happened to you. I keep thinking about your hunger. I feel the pangs of it
in my own stomach.”

“My mother died,” continued
Djuna
.
“One of my brothers was hurt in an accident while playing in the street and
crippled. Another was taken to the insane asylum. He harmed nobody. When the
war started he began to eat flowers stolen from the florists. When he was
arrested he said that he was eating flowers to bring peace to the world. That
if everybody ate flowers peace would come to the world. My sister and I were
put in an orphan asylum. I remember the day we were taken there. The night
before I had a dream about a Chinese pagoda all in gold, filled with a
marvelous odor. At the tip of the pagoda there was a mechanical bird who sang
one little song repeatedly. I kept hearing this song and smelling the odor all
the time and that seemed more real to me than the callous hands of the orphan
asylum women when they changed me into a uniform. Oh, the greyness of those
dresses! And if only the windows had been normal. But they were long and narrow,
Lillian. Everything is changed when you look at it through long and narrow
windows. It’s as if the sky itself were compressed, limited. To me they were
like the windows of a prison. The food was dark, and tasteless, like slime. The
children were cruel to each other. No one visited us. And then there was the
old watchman who made the rounds at night. He often lifted the corners of our
bedcovers, and let his eyes rove and sometimes more than his eyes… He became
the demon of the night for us little girls.”

There was a silence, during which both Lillian
and
Djuna
became children, listening to the watchman
of the night become the demon of the night, the tutor of the forbidden, the
initiator breaking the sheltered core of the child, breaking the innocence and
staining the beds of adolescence.

“The satyr of the asylum,” said
Djuna
, “who became also our jailer because when we grew
older and wanted to slip out at night to go out with the boys, it was he who
rattled the keys and prevented us. But for him we might have been free at
times, but he watched us, and the women looked up to him for his fanaticism in
keeping us from the street. The orphan asylum had a system which permitted
families to adopt the orphans. But as it was known that the asylum supplied the
sum of thirty-five dollars a month towards the feeding of the child, those who
responded were most often those in need of the thirty-five dollars. Poor
families, already burdened with many children, came forward to ‘adopt’ new
ones. The orphans were allowed to enter these homes in which they found
themselves doubly cheated. For at least in the asylum we had no illusion, no
hope of love. But we did have illusions about the adoptions. We thought we
would find a family. In most cases we did not even imagine that these families
had children of their own. We expected to be a much wanted and only child! I
was placed in one of them. The first thing that happened was that the other
children were jealous of the intruder. And the spectacle of the love lavished
on the legitimate children was terribly painful. It made me feel more
abandoned, more hungry, more orphaned than ever. Every time a parent embraced
his child I suffered so much that finally I ran away back to the asylum. And I
was not the only one. And besides this emotional starvation we got even less to
eat—the allowance being spent on the whole family. And now I lost my last
treasure: the dreaming. For nothing in the dreams took the place of the human
warmth I had witnessed. Now I felt utterly poor, because I could not create a
human companion.”

This hunger which had inhabited her entire
being, which had thinned her blood, transpired through her bones, attacked the
roots of her hair, given a fragility to her skin which was never to disappear
entirely, had been so enormous that it had marked her whole being and her eyes
with an indelible mark. Although her life changed and every want was filled
later, this appearance of hunger remained. As if nothing could ever quite fill
it. Her being had received no sun, no food, no air, no warmth, no love. It
retained open pores of yearning and longing, mysterious spongy cells of
absorption. The space between actuality, absolute deprivation, and the
sumptuosity
of her imagination could never be entirely
covered. What she had created in the void, in the emptiness, in the bareness
continued to shame all that was offered her, and her large, infinitely blue
eyes continued to assert the immensity of her hunger.

This hunger of the eyes, skin, of the whole
body and spirit, which made others criminals, robbers,
rapers
,
barbarians, which caused wars, invasions, plundering and murder, in
Djuna
at the age of puberty alchemized into love.

Whatever was missing she became: she became
mother, father, cousin, brother, friend, confidant, guide, companion to all.

This power of absorption, this sponge of
receptivity which might have fed itself forever to fill the early want, she
used to receive all communication of the need of others. The need and hunger
became nourishment. Her breasts, which no poverty had been able to wither, were
heavy with the milk of lucidity, the milk of devotion.

This hunger…became love.

While wearing the costume of utter femininity,
the veils and the combs, the gloves and the perfumes, the muffs and the heels
of femininity, she nevertheless disguised in herself an active lover of the
world, the one who was actively roused by the object of his love, the one who
was made strong as man is made strong in the center of his being by the
softness e,
ve
. Loving in men and women not their
strength but their softness, not their fullness but their hunger, not their
plenitude but their needs.

They had made contact then with the deepest
aspect of themselves—
Djuna
with Lillian’s emotional
violence and her compassion for this force which destroyed her and hurled her
against all obstacles, Lillian with
Djuna’s
power of
clarification. They needed each other.
Djuna
experienced deep in herself a pleasure each time Lillian exploded, for she
herself kept her gestures, her feeling within an outer form, like an Oriental.
When Lillian exploded it seemed to
Djuna
as if some
of her violent feeling, so long contained within the forms, were released. Some
of her own lightning, some of her own rebellions, some of her own angers.
Djuna
contained in herself a Lillian too, to whom she had
never given a moment’s freedom, and it made her strangely free when Lillian
gave vent to her anger or rebellions. But after the havoc, when Lillian had
bruised herself, or more seriously mutilated herself (war and explosion had
their consequences) then Lillian needed
Djuna
. For
the bitterness, the despair, the chaos submerged Lillian, drowned her. The hurt
Lillian wanted to strike back and did so blindly, hurting herself all the more.
And then
Djuna
was there, to remove the arrows
implanted in Lillian, to cleanse them of their poison, to open the prison door,
to open the trap door, to protect, to give transfusion of blood, and peace to
the wounded.

But it was Lillian who was drowning, and it was
Djuna
who was able always at the last moment to save
her, and in her moments of danger, Lillian knew only one thing: that she must
possess
Djuna
.