Winter of artifice; three novelettes (18 page)

At night Lilith could not sleep. She lay tangled, restless. Lilith who found the absolute only in fragments, in multiplicity. Remembering the eagerness of the V^oice with his finger pointing: "You see? You see? That is what it means. You live in the myth." She lived in the myth. And she was

lost in it. Always bathing in a world much larger than other people's, the world of dreams. Always caught again in a whirl, a quest, a continuous, diabolical quest of an absolute that does not flow serenely but is pursued and grasped by sheer wakefulness. In flight always, and she fearing to sleep for fear of its passing. Desire unexploded in her, with the fuse lit and the little flames running up and down with Dyoni-sian joy; the httle flames running around the heart of the dynamite and never touching it. The little flames kept her breathless, nerves bristling with their heads up, necks stretched, thirsty eyes, peaked ears, all the little nerves waiting for the orgasm that will send the blood running through them like an anesthetic and put them to sleep.

Lilith, lying sleepless, seeing in the yellow faces at the bar the faces of future crimes, drug addicts who with knife or poison would bring a kind of sleep, a pause, a rest from this pursuit of a fugitive absolute. Lilith wishing for the crime, the drug, the death, the deliverance. But the nerves are still awake, waiting for the pause of sleep or death, waiting for the dynamite to explode, for the past to crumble, waiting for an absolute uncapturable. Do all violent fires have a hundred flames pointing in all directions, was there ever one round flame with one tongue? Why did this force which did not erupt in quicksilver through the veins, why did it rush out in a typhoon whirl to round up the monsters walking through the streets, to question their intentions, to imagine their perversities, to slide between the foam of lust, between the most knotted and twisted desires? This man with his little girl, why were his eyes so wet, his mouth so wet, why were her eyes so tired, why was her dress so short, her glance so oblique? Why was that young man so white? There was the scum of veronal on his lips. Why did that woman wait under the

lamplight with her hand in her muflf? This force which did not explode in Lilith was a poison; it spilled into the streets, ran into the gutters. She wanted to be dismembered and devoured but she encountered always wings, eyes opening on the heavens, flames turning to the mystic blue of the night lamps in convents and hospitals.

In Lilith the seed would not burst; the body left the earth, pulled upward by a string of nerves and spilled its pollen only in space, because the fairy talc wore too light a gown, a gown that made a brcez.c, a space between feet and earth. Lilith's footsteps would soon not be heard and her blood would turn to quicksilver, blue like the night flames of places where people weep.

• • • •

Lilith entered Djuna's room tumultuously, throwing her little serpent-skin bag on the bed, her undulating scarf on the desk, her gloves on tlic bookshelf, and talking with fever and excitement: "I'm falling in love with the Voice. I feel he is like a soul detective, and that the day he captures me, I will love him."

"It's a mirage," said Djuna.

She knew that Lilith was pursuing another mirage: the love of the \^oice for what the Voice said to her, because the V'oice reached into the roots of her being.

"A mystical illusion," repeated Djuna. "A mirage. You know what happens to a woman when she pursues a mirage, if she has a love affair with a mirage?"

"\^^^at can happen to her? It's poetry."

"It may be poetry, Lilith, but her nature revolts against it. At some moment or other your body will revolt because it's not real."

"But it is only in his presence that I feel true, natural."

"But don't get any closer to him. If you come closer you will defeat you own salvation. But then. . .you are too lovely, he won't let you pass without making an effort to retain you. That is what happened to me. I lost the father in him—because I wanted to. I tempted him as a man, and when he became a man and desired me, then I was angry at him, as if it had been only a test, a test of the savior in him. And he is no savior. He is trying to save himself too. I liked upsetting him. Then when he became a man and ran after me I was very angry—it seemed to prove that he was only human."

"The world is very small, Djuna. If what you say is true it is very small. I'm going to choke in it. He can't be merely human. He must be something else, something more. He has a magic power."

Lilith enveloped Djuna in great softness. They lay talking in the dark. Only the softness, only to feel the softness and warmth of woman, the weight of her arm, the curve of her neck. Only to hear her breathing and talking and laughing in the dark. To lie there, wishing perhaps to be a man for a moment, but as a woman knowing there is no other way of possessing a woman but as a man.

"Try and close your eyes, you'll find another world that is immense at night, Lilith."

"I never remember the night. Why don't I find a man who makes me feel what I feel with you? You are so warm, you are so quick. You are always where I am. Our impulses towards each other happen at the same moment. You are never late or slow or indifferent, and you have the gift of gesture. When I feel anguished, lost, alone, you always have the gift for saying what I need to hear. After we are together you write me letters, and I need so much to feel what we said, to be able to touch the words. It's the only thing I believe in, Djuna, 160

everything else is ghostly. You say everything with your body, like a dancer. All your body talks, your hands, your walk. I believe you."

"But none of this is love, Lilith. We are the same woman. There is always the moment when all the outlines, the differences between women disappear, and we enter a world where all feelings, yours and mine, seem to issue from the same source. We lose our separate identities. What happens to you is the same as what happens to me. Listening to you is not entering a world different from my own, it's a kind of communion."

"And meanwhile everybody laughs, jeers, and calls us all kinds of names."

What softness between women. The marvelous silences of twinship. To turn and watch the rivulets of shadows between the breasts, to lie on the down of the bed sleeping over one's own body, like sleeping in the forest at night. The marvelous silence of woman's thoughts, the secret and the mystery of night and woman become air, sun, water, plant. Feel the roots resting in the soil, the feet well planted in the coolness, in the brown pressure, firm against this creamy wall of earth. When you press against the body of the other you feel this joy of the roots compressed, sustained, enwrapped in its brownness, with only the seeds of joy stirring. A pleasure ebbing back and forth. Sun pressing luxuriantly against the body. Mystery and coolness of darkness between the four walls of another's flesh. The back of Lilith, this soft, musical wall of flesh, the being floating in the waves of silence, enclosed by the presence of what can be touched. No more falling into space. No more quest, anxiety, seeking, yearning, turning within this compact wall of tender flesh. Touch the delicate tendrils of hair, you touch moss and an end to hunger. This hand holds a strand of hair, the world complete, reduced, in the palm of the hand.

U>I

You have entered from the dissonances of the street, from the separate, hard fragments walking without legs or head or arms, always mutilated, into the immense vault of an organ chant. Djuna lay at the center of the wheel. Lilith warm and near. The earth turns with a chant of roundness, fullness. It turns into a smooth, full round of plenitude. The spokes pass fast and are not seen at this moment. Only the drunkenness of rotation. Other days the wheel slows down and one gets caught in the spokes. One falls between them, they cut and mangle one. You are caught. The rhythm is broken, you dangle, you are mutilated.

« * * *

"I never noticed," said Lilith to the Voice, "that the sun comes into this room. I always felt it was a dark room because of all the secrets."

"Perhaps it is in you there are no more secrets."

"I don't know. Your understanding saved me from pain and confusion. I feel dependent on you. You have the vision. I get lost. You teach, you are humanly tender and protective. Do you really think a woman can find her way alone, completely alone?"

"In the world of feeling, yes, but not in the world of interpretation."

"I don't mind my dependence on your interpretations."

"Do you know the meaning of your name? It's the un-mated woman, the woman who cannot be truly married to any man, the one whom man can never possess altogether. Lilith, you remember, was born before Eve and was made of red clay, not of human substance. She could seduce and ensorcell but she could not melt into man and become one with him. She was not made of the same substance."

"Do you think I am altogether like the first Lilith?" she asked without looking at him.

"I don't know. The way you talk about dependence does not mean love. It means the love for the father, who is the symbol of God. You are seeking a father "

A\'hat she read in his eyes was the immense pleading of a man, imprisoned inside a seer, calling out for the life in her, and at the very moment when every cell inside her body closed to the desire of the man she saw a mirage before her as clearly as men saw it in the desert, and this mirage was a figure taller than other men, a type of savior, the man nearest to God, whose human face she could no longer see except for the immense hunger in the eyes. And she felt a kind of awe, which she recognized. Every time she was faced with a sacrifice of the self, with the demand of another, a hunger, a prayer, a need, there came this joy. It was like the joy of a prisoner who finds the bars of his cell suddenly broken down. The mirage took the place of all actual physical sensation. It was as if all the walls, all the limitations, all the personal desires were transcended. It was not an ecstasy of the body, but a sudden break with the body, a liberation and a stepping into a new region. With the abandon came this joy as of a transcendent flight upward, breaking the chains of awareness. Abandon brought a drunkenness, the fever of generosity, the joy of self-forgetting. A joyous victim, a victim of imperfections of the universe which it was in her power for the moment, to redress, to alter. In her power, for the moment, to make all the gifts promised long ago by the fairy tales. What usually prevented the fairy talcs from materializing was the lack of faith and the lack of love. Human life at this moment seemed the unreal and miniature city, with too many boundaries, too many laws. Giving was the only flight in space permitted to human beings.

While the Voice who was no longer the Seer talked, what she saw was a dark-skinned mythological crab, the cavernous

sorrows of the monkey, the agedness of the turtle, the tenderness of the kangaroo, the facile humihty of the dog.

In the Voice she felt the ugliness of tree roots, of the earth, and this terrific dark, mute knowing of the animal, for though he was the one most aware of what happened inside others he was the one least aware of what happened in himself. It was too near. He could read the myths and man's dreams but not his own soul. He did not know that the man in him had been denied. He was begging to be made man. The man had been buried within the sage. He had grown old, withered, without having fulfilled his life on earth. That is what his eyes were begging for: a life on earth.

It was a father she was looking for, not a lover.

He said: "With you one travels so far away from reality that it is necessary to buy a return ticket."

She liked him better serious than laughing. He did not know how to laugh. His pranks were pranks of the mind, his humor, paradox, the reversal of ideas. He had not learned what she had learned: not to clutch at the perfume of flowers, not to touch the dew, not to tear all the curtains down, to let exaltation and breath rise, vanish. The perfume of the hours distilled only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by human fingers. The friction of words generated only pain and division. He had not learned to formulate without destroying, without tampering, without withering. An awe of the senses.

His understanding was infinite, like a sea, but Lilith was sailing on it alone. He was everywhere, immense, but not a man, because his understanding ended where the life of silence and mystery began.

He was walking at Lilith's side now in full daylight. His clothes hung about him as on a cross of wood. They did not dress him, make him incarnate. His small hands made brusque

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gestures as if made of bones. Clothes take the shape of a man's body, of his gestures. They bear the imprint of his character, his habits, his moods. The hat reveals if he is mellow and tolerant, if he is gay or lavish. Every line, fold, wrinkle, testifies to his tenderness or roughness, his sensuality or asceticism.

The Voice's clothes did not fit him, were never a part of him. They were not molded by his body, kneaded to his moods. Nothing that men wore seemed to be made for him. The tailors had not cut for his body, his body was not made for clothes. His hat stood stiffly detached from him. It seemed either too large or too small for him. Either his hats were formal and the face under them too lax, or the hat was humorous and nonchalant and his face too serious and heavy. Or else he looked humiliated. In every detail his clothes were a misfit. The body was denied: it did not flow into the clothes, espouse them. There was a kind of blight upon his body; it was the idea made flesh, the idea always standing in the way of natural gestures, the idea upright and standing in the way of rhythm. His flesh was the color of death. He had died in the body and never been resurrected. Heavy with melancholy, jealousy. The life of the mind had shriveled the body too soon. It was a sad flesh tyrannized by the idea, drawn and quartered on a pattern, devoured by concepts. No matter how clear or divine the soul was, the flesh was dark and sad and muddied like the very ancient flesh exiled from joy and faith to the kingdom of thought.

When they returned from the theater or a dance and stood before her door there was always a pause. The Voice would say: "Come and talk with me awhile longer. I hate to surrender you to sleep."