Winter of artifice; three novelettes (17 page)

The Voice said: "I am not entirely sure that the little girl in you ever died, or her need of a father. What am I to you?"

"The other night I dreamed you were immense, towering over everyone. You carried me in your arms and I felt no harm could come to me. I have no more fears since I talk to you like this every day. But lately I have become aware that it is you who are not happy. I think too of the way you play upon souls. It must give \ou a feeling of great power, the way they expose themselves."

"Power, yes. . .power. But every moment the human being in me is killed. I am not permitted any weaknesses. It is true that I could take people's great need of love and understanding and play upon it. When they open their secrets to me, they are in my power. But I want them to know me, and they don't. Even when they love me, it is a love that is not addressed to me. I remain anonymous. I am only allowed to watch the spectacle, but I am never allowed to enter. If I enter into a life I am still the oracle or the .seer. You are the first one who has asked me a question about myself."

People came to him for strength; their image of him was of his tallness, his firmness, his wisdom. I lis strange phrases which acted on them like someone breaking their chains. Simple 149

phrases. He defended them, supported them, transported them. An apocalyptic strength in him. Something above confusion and chaos. A total man, not made as they were of wavering moods, dispersed fragments, changes and contradictions. An alchemist who could always transmute the pain. The Sphinx who answered all questions. The one before whom one could become small again, in whom one could find a refuge. He lulled them, lifted them up out of whatever agonizing region they were trapped in. Brought them where they could live better, breath better, love better, live in harmony with themselves, he reconciled them to the world, conquered the demons and ghosts haunting them. But when they look at the man inside the armor of impersonal phrases they find him smaller, older, different from their image. The little man rises, his shoulders are stooped, he shakes off the stiffness of his limbs, the cramp of the attentive echo, shakes the blood that was asleep during the trance of clairvoyance, shakes off the role imposed on him.

In their dreams they saw him as god, or as a demon. But always above. When the confession ended he was no longer above.

Lilith said: "I feel the real you behind the analyst. All you say comes out of you. No one else could act the same way towards human beings. It is not a system. It is your own goodness, your own compassion. I am sure they do not all use the same words, the same tone. There is magic in you."

"I am only a symbol."

"You are more than a symbol. I know separate and personal things about you. I have watched you. You have a love of the absolute, a passion for extracting the essence.

"That's all very true."

"You have a gift for life which you have never used." 150

"I was not permitted to use it. I was not loved for myself but for my understanding, for the strength I gave. It was always unreal and false."

"I could say to you what you said to me: did you reveal your true self.' Wasn't it you who insisted on wearing the mask of the analyst? You who became a Voice? An impersonal Voice? Look how you sit now, while we talk. You never move. You always sit in the same chair. I know nothing about you. Naturally, I can only attach my.self to an image. I wish ... I am going to a.sk you to do something very difficult. Suppose, just for once, that you lie here on the couch and I sit in your chair—like this—and now I'm you and you're me. What did you dream last night?"

She was laughing while she made him change places. He looked uneasy, bewildered.

"Whv arc vou so uncasv?" she asked, "what arc you afraid to reveal? Tell mc what you are most ashamed to tell."

"Not to you, because you still need me, and while you need me I must remain a mystery to you."

"I don't need you."

"You do. Even what you're doing now is only because you need a victory over me. I made you confess, you want to make me confess. As soon as you find someone who has the kev to you you want to reverse the roles. You can't bear to be discovered or dominated."

"Youre wrong, you're utterly wrong," said Lilith violently. "I only did it because I am interested in you as a human being, because I am wondering about this man we all use and whom no one really knows."

"We'll see who is wrong," said the \^oice, but this Voice was not as firm as when he sat with his back to the light.

The Voice is talking to Djuna:

"Do you think Lihth loves me? If Lilith loved me I would give up all this and begin a new Hfe. I want to give up analysis. Otherwise I would go mad. Do you know what has happened to me during the last four days? Everything that I think of becomes the theme of the day, and all the people who come talk to me about the same thing. First I had a dream of jealousy. I was crazily jealous of someone, I don't know who. I awakened filled with a kind of fury and hatred as if someone were taking the woman I wanted away from me. I may have been jealous of Lilith, I don't know. But I awakened jealous. And then the people began to come, one after another. I had no more time to think over my dream. But every one of them talked about jealousy. First came a woman who was jealous of her husband's first wife, now dead. It was her own sister who had died, and whose husband had then married her. But he still loved her sister. The first time he took her he called out the name of the dead wife. He sought out the resemblances, he liked her to wear the same colors. And this woman felt it, and was tortured because she loved him. He lived in a dream, wrapped in the past. He took her without really taking her, as in a trance. She was in such despair that she thought of nothing else: how to kill his love for her dead sister, how to kill this other woman who had not died for him. She observed that he was very jealous. She sought out the men he was attached to, and gave herself to them, always in such a way that it would be known to him. And then he began to suffer. He became slowly aware of her, of her being loved by other men. She became more vivid in him through his hatred of her. By the presence of the pain and anger, he began to awaken to her, to her presence, nearness, seduction. He passed from long periods of dreaming to long moments of suffering. He lived

with this violent consciousness of her sensual life. She would not let him touch her. Finally the pain became so intolerable that it aroused him to a violent awareness of her, desire for her; and in this fury somehow, the past was destroyed, like some vague dream. He became aware of the woman in her, her yicldings, her sensual responses, of their life in the present. This was the first story I heard in the morning. I was possessed with jealousy of Lilith, and everyone who came to me seemed possessed with jealousy. I felt my own jealousy in them, and it increased it, magnified it. I asked myself: what kind of feelings has Lilith towards me? Why has she become so vividly alive and why do I hate the way she gives herself? It seemed to me the world was full of jealousy, and it was contagious. It lay at the bottom of every nature. I saw everyone being jealous either in the past, the present or the future. One man talked to me continuously about scenes which had never taken place, which he imagined. He lies for hours imagining this betrayal, reconstructing the scenes in every minute detail, until he goes nearly crazy believing it. His jealousy was really infernal, suffocating, blind, not knowing where to strike and without any reality to support it. A continuous state of doubt. At the end of the day I was shattered. It seemed to me that whatever was in me was awakened in these people and that I was only awakening things which ought better to be left asleep. I was increasing the awareness of pain, and breaking down all defenses against it. Yes, I know they are false defenses, but they are at least as good as the stones over a tomb. They give the illusion that the dead cannot return. But I do not even leave the stone. I take away the symbol of the burial. And that's not all. The next day I awakened with anguish, with a kind of fear. A nameless fear. A kind of universal doubt. I doubted everything. Above all Lilith. I feared to know, to know really

what she felt. I would have given my life then to lose all my lucidity. And all day, all day the cripples talked to me about fear. I asked them questions I never asked before. Describe what you fear most. They exposed so many fears. But as I asked them it was like asking myself, and awakening my own fears. Fear. The whole world is based on fear, even behind the jealousy of the day before lay fear. Fear of being alone, fear of being abandoned, fear of hfe, fear of being trapped in tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one's hatred, of committing a crime, fear of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation. I asked myself: was it the fear in me which uncovered all this? It was like opening tombs again. It was contagion, Djuna, I tell you... .Today I don't know whether this is a healing or a contagion. I am only discovering that we are all alike, and my patients desperately do not want me to be like them." • • * *

Djuna walked slowly after leaving Lilith. The day was softer and the snow was melting under her feet. She felt in love with everyone, in love with the whole city. She remembered the tendrils of wild hair on Lilith's neck, and she felt herself inside of Lilith, burning with the cold fire which devoured her. She heard again her voice charged with secret pain, a voice wet with tears passing through a wide mouth made for laughter, a wide, laughing mouth, avid and animal.

She felt the restlessness of the Voice, sitting and listening all day, pinned to his confessions, disguised by the anonymity of vision, and desiring to play an active, personal role in these scenes perpetually unfolding before him. Too near, everything was too near. She felt the multiple footsteps of those walking along with her, not Uke a march, but like a symphony. In the shock of feet against the pavements she felt the whole collision and impact of human being against human being. 154

They resounded in her. Everything resounded in her. She smiled, thinking of what an immense music box she was. The relation between music and living was not merely an image. What a clear connection between the sound box of instruments and the body, and what sameness between the caresses of the hands! Djuna felt at once so aroused that it was unbearable. She felt all her loves at once, maternal, fraternal, sensual, mystical. So many loves! What was she? The lover of the world? Crazed with love, with remembrance of every touch and flavor, of every caress and word. And simultaneously with the communion, this communion with eyes clo.sed, this taste of the wafer on her tongue, this sonorousness in her ears, this constant simoon wind burning inside of her, came the pain of separation again. When people came as near as this, and breaths were so confounded and confused, then Djuna knew she was possessed.

In the morning the body had been clear like a statue, and as cool. The body moved with the harmony of its form, it stood in altitude, like the spire of a cathedral, it was light and free and passed through the moments easily like the wind, feeling neither doors nor walls nor anger. There was in it the tranquillity of depths, of what lay below the level of storms. It was a mountain asleep without fire in its bowels. It lay asleep as it arranged itself, it moved in accord with its own pattern, with an even tread.

It was the moment of silence. The day begun in crystal clearness was blurred by the ascension of blood passing throught the cells. The blood rising through the body like the sap in the trees. Antique vases filled with wine.

Djuna stopped walking. Everything had come too near, too near. The cells were full to overflowing with the warm invasion. The moon was shining hypnotically round, a fixed

stare, and all the taboos which held the body upright were dissolved by this stare of the moon calling the blood to its own circle. The moon was circling now inside her body, with the same rhythm. Djuna lost her face, her name. She was tied to the moon by long threads of red tangled blood. She moved like a woman tied to the moon, in a space so vast, pushed by a rhythm so strong that the small woman in her was lost. The moon enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night without dawn.

Before the storm in her there was a suspense, there was time for fear. The trees were afraid, the sky was breathless, the air rarified, the earth parched.

Now her heart was no longer a heart, it was a drum beating continuously. The skin of her body was stretched like a drum. The tips of her hair were no longer hair, but electric wires charged with lightning. The hair was linked to lightning, the heart was a drum; the skin was a fruit skin exposed to warmth and cold.

The blood was rising and drowning the smaller world of the woman, a curtain of red falling over the eyes, drowning pity. Her tongue lashed like a whip, her voice whirled like a simoon wind, her hands tore everything apart breaking all bonds with man, father, son, lover, brother. Her body was filled with drumming fever, with a delirium. Djuna was in a jungle, alone with her storm. She was alone in the forest of her delirium. Desire leaping wild and blind. The human eyes were closed. The storm was panting in her, the moon smiled, her anger seemed immense like the space around her. An enormous fury, as of an animal long taunted, so that when the blood rose every word withheld, every act of yielding, erupted. She trusted no one as she drank alone in the jungle of desire. Her nails were longer, tearing apart everything she had lulled. The

storm of blood brought a cloudburst of laughter, the lightning struck down the love, broke all the bondages, drowned the pity. Djuna was one with the moon, thrusting hands made of roots into the storm, while her heart beat like a drum through the orgy of the moonstorm.

• • • •

Lilith talking to the Voice. Lilith had a headache.

"jMy father had headaches like this, and he went mad. Do you think I will go mad? I dream of being under ether and I awake in terror. My father's madness started with headaches. He began slowly to lose his memory. But I kept thinking— perhaps my father is not mad, but has had a dream. This dream has come and installed itself in his life. The dream is his life. What was this dream? Could I understand it? If I could see it, share it with him, enter his world and stay in it, perhaps he would not go mad. I feel that madness is only solitude. You only go mad when you see something no one else sees. There is a moment before madness when a person has not yet cut the cord of connection and at this moment someone can hold him back. It's what you do every day. There was the dream of the man who ate flowers so that the war might not come! He was locked up. . .only because he got confused with the .symbol, he lived in the symbol. But if you understand it, nothing is mad. F.verything is a dream, but we don't always know the meaning. I wanted to know mv father's fantasy but he enclosed himself in it. I only discovered it when it was too late."