Winter of artifice; three novelettes (19 page)

If she refused she would find a note under her door the next day: "You belong to the night. I have to give you up to the

night, to your mystery." She smiled. Her mystery was so simple, but he could not understand it.

The next day he wrote her a long letter and slipped it under her door. Tied to it was a diminutive frog. "This," he wrote, "is my transformation, to permit my entrance through the closed door."

But this diminutive frog she held in the palm of her hand resembled him so much that it made her weep. Indeed the frog had come just as in the fairy tales; and just as in the fairy tales, she must keep her faith and her inner vision of him, must keep on believing in what lay hidden in this frog's body. She must pretend not to notice that the Voice was born disguised, to test her love. If she kept her inner vision the disguise might be destroyed, the metamorphosis might occur.

She sat on the floor with the letter in her lap and the frog in the palm of her hand, weeping over his ugliness and humiUty and the faith she must retain.

She was asking him questions about his childhood. He stopped in the middle of a story to weep. "Nobody ever asked me anything about myself. I have listened to the confessions of others for twenty-five years. No one has ever turned and asked me about myself, has ever let me talk. No one has ever tried to divine my moods or needs. There are times, Lilith, when I wanted so much to confess to someone. I was filled with preoccupations. Do you know what I fear most in the world? To be loved as a father, a doctor. And it is always so I am loved."

She used his own formulas against him. When he complained that she left him alone she gave him mysterious explanations: that the reality of living always brought tragedy, that she preferred the dream. The Voice was forced to admit gallantly that he preferred the dream. The explanations en-

chanted and eluded him and saved her from saying: "I don't want you near me because I don't love you."

His concern with the accuracy of the psychological interpretations was so great that once, after the discovery that she had lied to him (he thought he had cured her of lying) he said: "Let me solve this thing alone. Don't bother about details of any kind. What do our personal lives matter when the whole man-made world is at stake?"

The only joy she experienced was that of being completely understood, justified, absolved in all but her relationship to him. I le always asked her what she had been doing. No matter what she told him, even about the trivial purchase of a bracelet, the Voice pounced upon it with exxitement and raised the incident to a complete, dazzling, symbolical act, a part of a legend. The little incident was all he needed to compose and complete this legend. The bracelet had a meaning—everything had a meaning. Every act revealed more and more clearly this divine pattern by which she lived and of which the Voice alone knew the entire design. Now he could see. He repeated over and over again: "You see? You see?" Lilith had the feeling that she had been doing extraordinary things. When she stepped into a shop and bought a bracelet it was not, as she thought, because of the love of its color or its shape, or because she loved adornment. She was carrying in herself at that moment the entire drama of woman's slavery and dependence. In this obscure little theater of her unconscious the denouement brought about by the purchase of the bracelet was a drama which had everlasting repercussions on her daily life. It signified the desire to be bound to someone, it expressed a desire to yield. You see? You see? Not only was the bracelet or the lovely moment spent before the shop window magnified and brought into violent relief—as an act

full of implications, of repercussions—but all she had done during the week seemed to open like a giant hothouse camellia whose growth had been forced by a travail of creation from the moment she first drew breath.

While the Voice tracked down each minor incident of her life to expose the relation between them, the fatality and importance of the link between them, the heavy destined power of each one, she felt like an actress who had never known how moving she had been, she felt like a creator who had prepared in some dim laboratory of her soul a life like a legend, and only today could she read the legend itself out of an enormous book.

This was part of the legend, this little man brusquely deciphering each incident, marveling ever at the miracle which had never seemed a miracle before, her walking along and buying a bracelet, as miraculous to the Voice as lead turning to gold in an alchemist's bottle. She had not only covered the earth with a multitude of spontaneous acts but these acts accomplished so slidingly, so swiftly, could all be illumined with spiritual significance, divine intentions, loved for their human quality or feared for their uniqueness. He worshiped them for the very act of their flowering.

He revolted now and then against her uncapturableness, but she subtilized the situation. She did not want reality. She feared reality. She was really a flame. No one could possess a flame. She annulled the boundaries, confused the issues. All the definite decisions, outlines, reahties, she melted into a dreamlike substance. She enchanted him, hypnotized him with inventions and creations, so that he would cease his clutching, become cosmic again. She talked him out of the reality of her presence.

What he did not know was that at the same time she was

losing her faith in all interpretations, since she saw how they could be manipulated to conceal the truth. She began to feel the illusory quality of all man's interpretations, and to believe only in her feelings. Every day she found in mythology a new pretext for eluding his desire for her. First she needed time. She must become entirely herself and without need of him. She was waiting for the moment when she would have no need of him as a doctor. She was waiting for the man and the doctor to become entirely separate and never to be again confused in her. This he accepted.

But when he was not being the doctor, she discovered, he was not a man but a child. He wept like a child, he raged, he was filled with fears, he was possessive, he complained and lamented about himself, his own life. He was desperately hungry and awkward in life, clutching rather than enjoying. The human being hidden in the healer was stunted, youthful, hysterical. As soon as he ceased to be a teacher and a guide, he lost all his strength and deftness. He was disoriented, chaotic, blind. As soon as he stepped out of his role he collapsed. Lilith found herself confronting a child lamenting, regretting, impatient, fretful, lonely. He wrote inchoate love notes with ink blots, he leaped to meet her in the street, perspiring and nervous. He was jealous of the man who washed her hair. The child that she awakened in him was like the child in those who had come to him for care, unsatisfied, lamenting, tearful, sickly. Neither her powers of illusion nor her dreams had worked the miracle. He remained nothing but A VOICE. • • • •

Awareness hurts. Relationships hurt. Life hurts. But to

float, to drift, to live in the dream does not hurt. Her eyes

were closing. She was drifting, drifting. Drunkenness. It was

not the Hotel Chaotica which had many rooms, but she, Djuna,

when she lay on her bed, folding them all together, the layers and all the things that she was not yet.

When I entered the dream I stepped on a stage. The lights cast on it changed hue and intensity like stage lights. The violent scenes happened in the spotlight and were enveloped by a thick curtain of blackness. The scenes were cut, interrupted, or broken with entr'actes. The mise en scene was stylized, and only what has meaning was represented. And very often I was at once the victim and observer.

The dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped me into its undulations, the spiraling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.

If the walls of the dreaiti seemed lined with moist silk, and the contours of the labyrinth lined with silence, still the steps of the dream were a series of explosions in which all the condemned fragments of ?nyself burst into a mysterious and violent life, with the heavy maternal solicitude of the night ever attentive to their flowering.

On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness. I could still see the daylight between the fringe of eyelashes. I could still see the interstices of the world. This was the penumbra, where the thoughts were inlaid in filaments of lightning. It was the place where the images were delicately filtered and separated, and their silhouettes thrown against space. It was the place where footsteps left no trace, where laughter had no echo, but where hunger and fear were im-170

mense. It ivas the place where the sails of reverie could swell while no wind was felt.

The vegetation no longer concealed its breathing, its lamentations. The sand no longer concealed its desire to enmesh, to stifle; the sea showed its true face, its insatiable craving to possess; the earth yawned open its caverns, the fogs spewed out their poisons. The drea?n was full of danger like the African jungle. The dreain was full of animals. All the animals killed, stuffed, imprisoned by man, walked alive in the dream. The faces mocked all desire to identify, to personalize: they changed and decomposed before my eyes.

There was no time: events passed without leaving a trace, a footprint, an echo. They left SPACE around them. Even a crowded street lay perpendicular between two abysses, as if it belonged to a planet without gravitation.

The dream was a filter. The entire world was never ad-7mtted. It was a stage surrendered to fragments, with many pieces left hanging in shreds.

At the tip of the spiral I felt passive, felt bound like a munrmy. As I descended these obstacles loosened.

The loss of memory was like the loss of a chain. With all this fluidity came a great lightness. Without memory I was irmnensely light, vaporous, fluid. The memory was the density which I could not transcend except in the dream.

I was not lost, I had only lost the past. Sand passing through the hourglass which never turned. Passing.

When the dream fell to one side, wounded, and the daytime into another, what appeared through the crack was the real death. The crack of daylight between the curtains, the slit between night and day was the mortal moment for it killed the dream. The soul then lost its power to breathe, lost its space.

Nights when I awaited the dream, as one awaits the ship that is to take one far away, and the nightmare came in its place, then 1 knew that I had something to expiate. The nightmare was the messenger of guilt. The night^nare brought me whatever suffering 1 had rejected or eluded during the day or given to others.

Now it was not altogether the dream nor was it the daylight. It was the moment when one was awake with a million eyes and a mouth that had said everything and was now struck with silence; a place so high that breathing ceased and divination began.

It was the twilight of mercury. It was here that everything happened to me. The daytime was only a sketch. In the daytime all the gestures were thickened by remembrance. Only in the dream was the loved one wholly possessed, only in the dream was there ecstasy without death. Life began only behind the curtain of closed eyelashes.

The woman who walked erect during the day and the woman who breathed and walked and swam during the night were not the same. The day woman was like a cathedral spire, and the opening into her being was a secret. It was inaccessible like the tip of the most labyrinthian sea shell.

But with the night came the openness.

The day body made of rigid bones, made rigid with fears and dissonances, was set against yielding. At night it changed substance, form and texture. With the night came fluidity. With the night there ran through the marrows not only blood which could commingle with other bloods, but a mercury which ran in all directions, swift, mordant, uncontrollable, spilling and running in star points, changing shape at each breath of desire, spilling and dispersing without separating.

With the night came space. No crowded city. The dream 172

was never crowded. It was filtered through the prism of creation. The pressure of time ceased. Joy lasted longer and suffering less, or else all the feelings were telescoped into a second. Tnne was arranged and ordained by feeling. Fear was eternal, anger immediate and catastrophic. Sifted and enveloped in a niineral glow, each object of the eternal landscape appeared on the scene with space around it. The space was like an enormous silence in which there was no sword of thought, no rending comments, no thread ever cut. I walked among symbols and silence.

I ceased to be a wo?nan. The secret S7nall pores of the being began to breathe a life of plant and flower. I went to sleep a human being and awakened with the nervous sensibility of a leaf, with the fin-knowledge of fish, with the hardness of coral, with the stdphurous eyes of a mineral. I awakened with eyes at the end of long ar?ns that floated everywhere and with eyes on the soles of my feet. I awakened in strands of angel hair with lungs of cocoon milk.

With the night ca7ne a mtdtiplied breathing and new cells like honeycombs filled with a strange activity. Filling and refilling with white tides and red currents, with echoes and fever. Cells, beehives of feelings, inundated with new forms of life dissolving the outline of the body. All forms became blurred and the woman who was lying there slowly turned into a heavy sea, carrying riches on her breast, or became earth with many fissures of thirst, drinking rain.

With the night came the boat. This boat I was pushing with all my strength because it could not float, it was passing through land. It was chokingly struggling to pass along the streets, it coidd not find its way to the ocean. It was pushed along the streets of the city, touching the walls of houses, and I was pushing it against the resistance of earth. So many

nights against the obstacles of mud, marshes, garden paths through which the boat labored painfully.

I was not altogether asleep. The night was like a very black silk curtain, but there was still a slit of daylight. I felt the approach of the dream. But while there was a slit of daylight there were words floating around her. They were sharp, they cut like knives into the feelings, they separated, they scalded, they uncovered the skin, they exposed, they killed the feelings. The moment words cut into the dream, into the feeling, they cut into the pulse and the pulse ceased to beat. The slit of daylight was made of steel.

The boat was passing through the city unable to find the ocean that transmitted its life voyages. The light cut into the bones with bony words that could not commune or change substance for communion.

By day I followed the dream step by step. I felt lost and bewildered if the day did not bring its replica. I felt compelled to recover the lost flavor, colors, to recapture the personage, the moment, the place. When I found it 1 was aware at the same moment of the part of the dream which was missing. The missing fragment was unrecoverable, yet 1 felt its presence during the day attended with an uneasy, yellow aura of incompleteness.

If I could find the missing fragment of the dreajn in the daylight I might reconstruct the entire tapestry. I was seeking a window I had seen in the dream. I was walking through the city at night, looking for the window, and I found it. It was the window of a house open on two avenues. In the drea?n it was the window of Prousfs house. It was also the window of a house I had lived in, I could not remember when. But I was certain that I had already known the feeling of standing at this window looking down at the two avenues like opened legs. I was certain that I stood many times hesitating between

these tivo avenues. My route constantly split in tivo, the whole structure of my life constantly splitting open into two sections. I could never make a choice. I would follow the avenues until the pain of being thus quartered became ecstasy and the two avenues fused together into a point of absolute sorrow. The drama was this window opening on the dual aspect of existence, on its dual face. The drama was this window I had seen in a dream, which was the window of Proust's house when he was writing the endless book in which he made no choice but followed the labyrinth of remembrance. I had chosen as an answer to the dream this pursuit of the dream without memory. Yet I left behind a web of memory which wove itself inexorably and slowed up my walking and dreaming.

Only while following the dream was I free but at some point the pattern of my life hung like a frayed cloth and the street of dreams turned into darkness.

When I entered certain rooms filled with people I had never seen in the dream, I was instantly aware that this was not the place. The need of flight was imperative.

When 1 found the place, I sat very still and content. I was reme^nbering the dreain and seeking to recapture the lost pieces. 1 had caught Tuy dream. Then it seemed to me that all the clocks in the world chimed in unison for the 7?iiracle. As the clocks chimed at midnight for all metamorphoses. The dream was synchronized. The miracle was accomplished. All the clocks chimed at midnight for the metamorphosis. It was not time they chiTned for, but the catching up, catching up with the dream. The dream was always running ahead of one. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. The life on the stage, the life of the legend dovetailed with the daylight, and out of this marriage sparked the great birds of divinity, the eternal moments.

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