The Winter of Artifice

DJUNA

The café table was stained with wine. His blue eyes were inscrutable, like those of a Chinese sage. He ended all his phrases in a kind of hum, as if he put his foot on the pedal of his voice and created an echo. In this way none of his phrases ended abruptly.

Sitting at the café he immediately created a climate, a tropical day. In spite of the tension in me, I felt it. Sitting in a café with his voice rolling over, he dissolved and liquified the hard click of silver on plates, the icy dissonances of glasses, the brittle sound of money thrown on the zinc counter.

He looked like Prokofieff. Like a Chinese sage. Like a German scholar.

“How did you come to meet Johanna?” I asked, thinking that if she were his wife I could not understand her not being there, why she was not there listening to his voice, looking over the book he brought always in his pocket, forgetting to drink because he had been talking about his book which was getting so enormous that it had to be clipped every day.

“I met her in a dance hall. She was working as a taxi girl in a dance hall on Broadway.”

“She must have seemed so different from the other women there.”

“Not at first, and yet when she began to talk… Her talk and her voice. She sat down and she confessed her whole life to me. And what she confessed was all untrue.”

“Will she come back?”

“I don’t know. She’s often made promises like that. She may never come back. For the moment I don’t want her back. I don’t like what happens to me when she’s around. She humiliates me, paralyzes me, it’s torture.”

He opened his soft animal mouth a little, as if in expectancy of a drink.

“Whereas now, Djuna, I’m happy, I’m too happy.” Then he began to laugh, to laugh, with his head shaking like a bear, shaking from right to left as if it were too heavy a head. “I can’t help it. I can’t help laughing. I’m too happy. Last night I spent the whole night right here. It was Christmas and there were too many bed bugs in the hotel room.”

He’s a man whom life makes drunk. He is like me. I was surprised how gently he had walked into my life, how quietly he seemed to be living, when all the time his writing was whipping and lashing around, coursing like lava with burning bitterness and caricature. His softness of speech could not temper the watchful curiosity of his analytical blue eyes. Beneath the furry human warmth I sensed a non-human purpose. Behind this Hans with his southern roguishness wearing his hat tipped to one side and perpetually calling for drinks, I divined a more austere personage bent upon creation.

“Johanna… Johanna wanted to kill me for all that I wrote about her.”

“It is a very cruel book.”

“But she’s a terribly cruel woman.”

“I admire her courage to hurt… After all, she fed your work. She gave you a tremendous experience.”

“You’re only thinking of me as a writer,” he said, and then I knew that this was not so because while he talked I had been noticing that he was very thin, that although his voice was warm and ample, his body was thin, and that at forty his hair was almost white, and I knew that if Johanna had been good for his novels, I wanted to be good to him, to Hans the man who was hungry, thirsty, abandoned.

“When I read your novel about Johanna and Hildred, do you know what struck me as strange, Hans? That you the husband, lover, writer, should have been such an indistinct personage. You made the portrait of the two women full length, with bold, emphatic strokes. But when it came to yourself, you made yourself out an abstraction, just a writer, observing, noting, suffering, yes, but all of it furtive, modest, self-effacing. Why? It is as if Johanna crowded you out, as if you considered yourself unimportant except as a recorder, unimportant as a man, I mean. I couldn’t find you. I could only find a man who was telling a story.”

“Always thought of myself as unimportant… I’ve lived so blindly. No time to think much. Tons and tons of experience. Johanna always creating trouble, misery, changes, flights, dramas… No time to digest anything. And then she says I die when she leaves me, that pain and war are good for me. All the time I’m with her I’m choking with anger. After scenes with her I get terrible pains in the pit of the stomach.”

This man who cannot be distinguished in a crowd, who can pass through it like an ordinary man, so quiet, so absorbed, with his hat on one side, his step dragging a little, like a lazy devil enjoying everything softly, why did I trust this man, confide in him… He carries such a fertile world in his head, and yet he can sit like a workman before his beer, and talk like a cart driver to the whores, so that all of them are at ease with him. His presence takes all the straining and willing out of things. He is like the south wind blowing when he comes, melting and softening, bearing joy and abundance.

“Nobody was ever your friend and hers, too,” I said musingly. “The war is too strong between you. One must always make a choice between you.”

He said: “I could not bear to lose you. You are so close to me, yet you mystify and frighten me too, when you are sitting in your black armchair, like a queen… I can’t explain what I mean. I wrote you a letter, a crazy letter which I tore up. I wrote you a crazy letter, a love letter, Djuna.”

I wanted to shout, to run, to dance, to sing. But I was silent. Hans said: “Now you’re veiled again. You’re unreal.”

“Johanna…”

“I can very well imagine Johanna saying to me: ‘I can understand your loving Djuna’.”

We looked at each other. I let the moment dissolve into silence, lose itself in the cold light of the café. All the warmth and the reality were dispersed, dissolved, lost.

But when I saw him walking towards me, the sleeping drug of unreality was dissolved. He would not stop before the café table, I felt. He would never stop walking towards me and into my very being; he would walk right into my being with his soft, lazy walk and purring voice, and his mouth half open.

A strange long silence as if before the end of the world, the end of my immense loneliness. I was dizzy with the end of this lonely world of mine breaking up and crumbling at his coming. He was coming so gently to fill it, to fill it. He tore down the thick veils of dreams and distance between us with an all-engulfing kiss.

“And I thought we were in love with each other’s writing!” I laughed.

We were walking towards his room.

And while we walked together he said: “Your eyes are full of wonder, as if you expected a miracle every day.”

Lying on his iron bed, he said: “I am the last man on earth. Why did you single me out?”

But I was not to be deceived by his humility. All things were born anew in the shabby room when my dress fell on the floor.

I could not hear his words. His voice rumbled over the surface of my skin, like another caress. I had no power against his voice. It came straight from him into me. I could stuff my ears and still it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

“I’m afraid of breaking you,” he said. “I feel a little embarrassed with you. You seem so fragile.” He covered me with his coat. “Only come to me again, come close to me, come close. I promise you it will be beautiful. I will never hurt you. I could never hurt you.”

“But I don’t care if you do,” I said laughing. “I want you to be always yourself, and I know there is cruelty in you too. I want to grant you all the privileges; you can be undivided, artist and saint, hungry animal and clown.”

“You urge me, you invite me to be myself, so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even. You invite me to venture anything. I adore you for that.”

I lit his cigarette. He gave me an awkward smile and said: “I feel humble, Djuna. But it is all so good, so good.” He gave to the word good a mellowness which made the whole room glow, which gave a warm color to the bare window, to the woolen shirt hung on a peg, to the single glass out of which we drank together.

Behind the yellow curtains the sun seeped in; everything was the color of a tropical afternoon.

“How I have wanted this!” he whispered, “I feel you, I feel your hotness right down to my toes.”

The small room, like a deep set alcove. Warm mist, warm blood. The high drunkenness which made Hans flushed and heavy-blooded. His sensual features expanded, his heavy nose palpitated, his throat quivered.

“As soon as you come, I’m jubilant.” And he did a somersault on the bed, two or three of them. He pinched me merrily, looking up at me with a puckish face, his eyes brimming with malice and cunning.

Then suddenly he sat back on the bed, and the drunkenness went out of him. He became pale and sober, his eyes serious and exalted. He looked frail, and his face seemed impenetrable and Oriental.

He opened a book and began to read to me about China. “I stole it for you,” he said, “you must read it.” And his voice was tender. He offered me a slow, almost naive smile, and shook his head over his reading like a very gentle bear.

I went out for wine and food, out into the soft evening. And to everybody I wanted to say: “Give me the best you have. To-day is a day like none other.”

“This is a fine wine, Djuna. Let’s drink to my failure. There’s no doubt about it, no doubt whatever that I am a failure.”

“But I won’t let you be a failure! I won’t let you! I don’t want you to be a failure. I want you to be published, recognized, listened to.”

“You say ‘I want’ as if that made things happen.”

“It does.”

“I talked a lot of nonsense,” he said, “about your frailness. You have strength too, but of a different order. More elusive. No, you won’t break. You have a delicious sense of humor. I want always to see you laughing. You give me something rare. I don’t know if I am capable of making a woman like you happy. I’ve never fucked a woman with a mind, you know. A woman who has written books. They always scared me away. But you… well, you don’t look like a writer at all! You have the loveliest, the loveliest ass. Give me another glass. I don’t know what I expect of you. I expect miracles.”

I was drunk with his glowingness.

“I can’t let you go. I want to go places with you, obscure little places, just to be able to say: ‘here I came with Djuna.’ I’m insatiable. I’ll ask you forthe impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You’ll tell me, probably. You’re quicker than I am. And you’re the first woman with whom I feel I can be absolutely sincere. I’m wondering when you will come to stay overnight, when I can have you for a long spell. It torments me to see you for a few hours and then surrender you. You make me happy because I can talk with you. I feel at ease with you. This is a little drunken, but you know what I mean. You always seem to know what I mean. You know what I have not yet said and you know what I have not yet written. And you’re always so sure that it will be good, Miss Know-it-all, the well-known critic. Are you sure, as sure as all that? Or are you merely in love? Or are you playing a trick on me? Sometimes I don’t believe a word you say. When you’re gone I don’t know what to believe.”

“I don’t know what to believe either. You change from an old, wise man to a young savage: you’re both soft and obscene, tender, timid and cruel too. You’re all things at once. Your writing is explosive, destructive, full of caricature. You’re a bomb-thrower!”

“I believe in violence more than ever. I believe it’s the only holy, pure thing in life.” He paused a moment, reflectively. He looked up at me slyly, then mockingly, then gravely again. He seemed to grow savage inside, deep within, as if his very words were converting his blood into ideas, and the ideas into blood again.

“You’re so full of hatred when you write.”

“It isn’t just hatred. It’s beyond that. I don’t hate and I don’t love. I have no illusions. I feel as if I were the last man on earth. I’ve told you that before. I feel as if I were a scourge, an avenger. A Tamerlane. You want to know why I’m not published? Yon think it’s just because I use obscene language, dirty little four-letter words which the Post Office objects to? Nonsense! It isn’t the obscene words, as they say. It’s the obscene feeling. It’s the violence; it’s what’s raging inside me, that bomb in there that goes off whenever I sit down to write—that’s what they fear. But people are going to listen to me in spite of themselves, because I’m a force. I’m not going to shock them, I’m going to destroy them. I’m going to deal death and dynamite, not drugs and sleeping potions. Violence is pure, violence is holy. I’m savage, moral, earnest, deadly. I want to consume the whole world, devour it, chew it to pieces, and spit it out again—fresh, terrible, beautiful, alive in all its parts, alive and singing. ”

His voice reached an ample, assertive tone. The small room seemed too small to contain him. There was cruelty and mischief in his eyes, yet his mouth was still tender.

“You’re going? That hurts. That’s not right. I have lots more to say to you. Come back here. Button your coat properly. It’s raining. I don’t want you to get wet. I’ve got to stay here until the concierge goes to sleep, or she’ll ask me for the rent again.”

The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna. I have infinite possibilities for delicate perversions. I have the capacity to burn like a torch, the love of suffering, the love of terror and death and of descending. Evil is life; I want to live out the evil in me. I want to surrender to Johanna. I want the life she led, desecration, humiliation, poisons, savagery. The demon in me is like the demon in Johanna. It is a demon of frenzy.

I feel such exaltation at the thought of burning and dying quickly. I want to live out my caprices, my fantasies, my erotic desires.

In Johanna I love the darkness, and the abyss.

“If Johanna returns she will poison us against each other. I fear that.”

“There is something between us, a tie which it is not possible for Johanna to understand or to break…”

“For that she will hate us, yes, and she will fight that with all her strength, and all her weapons.”

“And her weapons are… lies…”

He sat down with shoulders bowed, and his head bowed. I saw the grey-blond hair glistening.

How divided his love was at that moment I would never know. My love was so immense at that moment that I felt I could make Hans the ultimate gift… I could give Hans whatever he wanted, give him Johanna.

I smiled, a mask smile. “Her lies, her unnecessary complications make novels. Novels are made out of complications…”

“She never trusted me as you do.”

“I trust you because I understand you.”

I felt mowed down, anchorless with feeling, with terror and pain. But I smiled. “If I had the means to help Johanna come back—would you want me to do it?”

Hans winced and suddenly lurched towards me.

“Don’t ask me such a question. Don’t ask me!” He was suffering. I was asking myself if the full body of Johanna would triumph over all else, over understanding, over the ecstasies of our working together, over the double climaxes always of body and mind burning in unison, over this double flame of creation and love.

I hated my own gaiety which was not only a challenge to life, to pain, but to a tormented self. I challenged and mocked myself for that tightening of the flesh and the ebbing of secret tears. I loved him with a knowledge of him which Johanna never had. It would have been a relief for once to have been unjust and to hate. I could not. I could only hate myself and my own understanding which made me say: “The destroyers do not always destroy. Johanna has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer. And the writer is alive.”

“You give me smething rare. When I am with you I don’t understand how I can love two women…”

“You’re a big man, Hans, a very big man. There’s so much room in you, so much love. There are no limits to you, no boundaries. For that I love you. For being a big man.” And I laughed. “Maybe I’m just the biggest of the idiots.”

“No, you see more, you just see more, and what you see is there all right. You get at the core of everything…”

I imagined myself writing to Johanna: “Johanna, have pity on me. Do not take him away from me too soon. It is easier for you to find a match. I can find the man who will make the woman submit many times, yes, many times, but I cannot find a man who can make my head bow, this full, ripe world inside ofmy head. It is so rare, Johanna, when I can bow altogether, from head to foot, and woman wants secretly to be able to bow and love altogether. I can never be taken whole into a man’s arms, Johanna, take pity on my great hunger. You ask only to be worshipped. I ask that my lover should create beyond me… Take pity on my torment. You don’t carry in yourself the power to stand silently behind a chair, watching with breathless stillness the pages added to his work. You can only love his books for what they contain of you. You can’t love the miracle of the seed sprouting. You only love his work as an offering to you; you don’t love the labor of the creator. You don’t love the source of creation. You only want some one to make your portrait.”

And then I felt guilty before Johanna: I felt myself flushed and burnt with guilt and shame. Johanna was the weaker one, the one who was not there to defend her life. I felt the strength ofmy love to be a crime against Johanna. My whole being shrivelled with a feeling of guilt. I imagined myself restituting to Johanna the love I was sharing with her. I would be Johanna’s genius. I would tie him to her more absolutely than before. When Hans and I would lean over each other’s work, to fill out her portrait, I would engrave the wonder of her everywhere, reveal it, so that he could never free himself of her. I would melt into Johanna so that he could not detect any more flaws in her; I would explain her lies and ennoble and embellish them. I would create a Johanna with Johanna’s beauty and my own imagination and colors. I would be everywhere at once, defending each fragment of her, blinding him, infusing his work with the legend of Johanna. While he caressed me I would poison him with the inextricable mixture of Johanna and myself. The deepest treachery to man ever played. I was a creator of images, of characters and masks. I would recreate Johanna in Hans’ mind. It was I who would tell Hans what dreams, what desires, what impulses Johanna had. And I would give Johanna these gifts which Hans made me of his passionate rages, his curses, his secrets, his mind’s fertility.

I would not become absolutely mad until the end, until I had written the last phrase of the portrait of Johanna which was to change Hans’ image. I would be the witch of words. a silent swift shadow darkened by uncanny knowledge, forgetting myself, my human needs, in the unfolding of the tale, renouncing human joys, with only the pale beauty of a watcher—a watcher who never let life flow into herecause this life belonged to another.

He was wearing bedroom slippers and he was writing, with a bottle of red wine as a paper weight on his pages. Circles of red wine on the pages. Stains. The stains of living. The edge of the table was burnt by cigarette stubs.

He didn’t care. He said that what he had written was not as good as yesterday but he didn’t care, he was enjoying it just the same, he wasn’t worrying about art, everything was good, because if he was an artist as I had said he was, then whatever he said was right, and to hang with perfection, that was for old maids, and he was out of cigarettes and if I would give him one he might finish that page. I had come at the wrong moment, I was interrupting him, but that was good too, that was life, life always getting in the way of writing, but that was good, he believed in that, let the interruptions come, let people walk in, he was glad to be stopped, because everything was good, to write was good, andnot to write was good, and eating was good, and sleeping and fucking, and now he had finished the page and he was hungry, and he wished we might go to the movies, good or bad, it was restful, good or bad he enjoyed it, everything was good…

He seemed constantly in communication with the world, as if he were forever sitting at the head of a gigantic banquet. With two agitated hands he commanded the cymbals. “I want to show you the whore with the wooden stump who waits for clients near the Gaumont cinema. I want to show you the café where the nigger jazz players go after work. I want to show you a restaurant where prize fighters and chorus girls have dinner.”

I felt my wrist watch pulsing against my pulse, fast, fast, fast. The hours pulsing against my life, pulsing too quickly.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

The room was black. Hans was asleep in my arms, heavily asleep now. I heard the accordeon. It was Sunday night in Billancourt. The music made my veins swell, as if it were hot liquid passing through me. He lay asleep in my arms. And all this would vanish at Johanna’s coming. No duration. Like a Sunday holiday. It was like a holiday, with the accordeon playing, and the Sunday crowd laughing and shouting. I must not be sad because it was only a holiday. To-day I was welded to him, and to-morrow Johanna would be back.

What baffled me was that it should be possible for Hans to lie so close, knowing only what I wished to tell him. That there should be no traces on my body of the lapses in my courage.

My thoughts, like elastics, were stretched to their thinnest meaning. I was waiting for him to awake. He would push everything into movement again. He was all movement. He lived by gusts.

It was the gusts I enjoyed. I might sit for a whole day afterwards and sail my lingering mind like a slow river boat down the feelings he had dispersed with prodigality. In my mind, like a sanctuary, I gathered his passions, his drunkenness, his speeches, his honesty, his jubilance, his pranks, his contrariness, his naturalness…

Johanna and I were not so honest… never so honest…

“Hans, wake up,” I said softly, “wake up! I have something to say for your book. Johanna and I are hypocrites, hypocrites. We always want to embellish ourselves, to make our motives appear sublime.”

“Why did she lie so much?”

“For many reasons. Because she loved you and could not bear to hurt you. Or because she loved herself and could not bear to spoil her own image of herself. Or because she feared not to be loved as she was. Or because she wanted to improve on life, because she had read too many books and they went to her head. (I too was once top heavy. When I was asked where I came from I could only answer: books!) Or because you wrote certain things about her and she wanted to live up to them. (The other day when you called me a chameleon, I immediately thought of ways to become more so, because the idea interested me). She did deprive you of so much, by her lies. Everything she gave you was false. I want to give you back Johanna washed of all pretenses. I can do it. Ask me questions. Ask me…”

“Why don’t you lie to me?”

“Because we have other things to do together. We don’t have much time to play games—to invent. I sometimes regret the fact that we don’t have time to play, that you will never see me mysterious, provoking, elusive. In a way, I have been cheated of something, by coming just when you needed peace in which to work. Johanna could lie, could be noisy, dramatic, could run away, could come back, could torture you, make you laugh, deceive or make you drunk, I am only allowed to sit still, but I don’t mind. Look at to-day, we have your new pages to read, and the next ones to dream over. I have to give you a different kind of mystery. There’s nothing to throw at each other, for the moment, but questions and answers. What was the meaning of this or that event? Do you think I have done justice to it?”

“I always suspected that when Johanna gave me so many lies it was because she had nothing else to give but mystery, but fiction. Behind the mystery there was nothing.”

“That we must find out together. Let’s begin now.”

“There’s plenty of time, plenty of time for everything,” said Hans. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go out and have a juicy steak, with plenty of onions on it, and red wine. And let’s send Johanna a cable and tell her I don’t want her any more. I know now I don’t want her to come back, that I need you terribly. If when she comes back I act exactly as she wants me to act you must not feel that I disappoint you or fail you. Her rages terrify me. What I feel with you which I don’t feel with Johanna is that beyond love we are friends. Johanna and I are not friends. You are the only woman I can be faithful to in my way. Let’s not go out. There’s some stuff in the kitchen. I feel like getting to work right now. I want to show you some notes I made.”

“Sit down then. Let me cook the dinner. Let me play at being the wife of a genius.”

He smiled. “It’s funny to see you going to the kitchen in your stately rose dress.”

As I sat there looking intently at the cups and saucers which did not match, at the liqueur glass made out of an egg holder, at the chipped plates, at the stains on the tablecloth and the mend in the corner of it, I felt that I loved this meal more than all those I ate elsewhere because it showed the traces of living. Hans made no effort to disguise the imprints of living; each object was a proof of life’s using, wearing, breaking and staining of things. Everywhere else there had been an effort made to erase the damage made by life, as there had been an effort made to escape its stains, its destruction, and I saw in him and at this table, the bare, naked life, the debris of it, the ravages small or large, like the greyness of his hair, his fatigue, his heavy note books, all as rich in the acceptance of nature as the rich soup steaming hotly in the pan it was cooked in; everything without the disguise which diluted its colors.

The ancient garden slumbered like an old man in the sun. The trees swayed and the breezes sang. The books lay about on the grass.

“According to the Chinese,” said Hans, “there was a realm between heaven and earth… this is it.”

I cooked for him. Suddenly I loved cooking because it was for Hans. I cooked richly and the odors of pungent flavors seeped through the house. I loved to see him eat, and to eat with him. I could see the food turning to rich blood in him. Red meat, buttered and peppered food, and red wine. The alchemy of his joy giving a high flavor to every moment. The miracle of his fieriness converting food and sleep and rest into joy.

Desire coursing. Dreams of semen. Earth. Semen. Incandescence. A furnace of caresses and of talk. I felt heavy and burnt. Not bodies but flames, and added to the fuel the flame of our talk, our moods. I was crying and laughing with joy. Solitude. Summer heat. Tornadoes and exquisite calms.

The night. Books. “Djuna. I want to keep you under lock and key. To hide you. You are too rare. When I lie here with you I am no longer restless. You have a gift for illusion. It’s always a fairy tale with you. Even when you are cooking, even when you sewed my curtains, even when you cure my stomach aches, you are the Princess. With you I feel whole and ecstatic.”

And he lay still, lulled by my softness, resting on my love, the core of bitterness and fury in him lulled.

Suddenly, he leaped up with a whip-like alacrity and a smashing, overwhelming vigor and exuberance, like a man who had suddenly been electrified. He began to talk about his childhood, about Johanna, about his life in the streets, about the women he had loved and ditched, and the women who had ditched and “bitched” him, as he put it. He seemed to remember everything at once, as though it were a ball inside him which unravelled of itself, and as it unravelled made new balls which he would unravel again another day. Truth, lies, humor, fantasy, dreams, a hodge-podge which however fantastic, however wild or inaccurate, rang out with a fierce sincerity, with a gong-like reality that shattered the feeble realities of fact or dream even. Had he actually done all these things he was relating to me with such kaleidoscopic fury and passion? Had he really killed a boy with a snow ball? Had he really struck his first wife down brutally, with his bare fist, when she was with child? Had he really butted his head against a wall in sudden anger and knocked himself unconscious, as he said—because the woman he loved had rejected him? Had he really taken abortions and thrown them off the ferry-boat in order “to pick up a little extra change”? Whether he had or not really didn’t matter. I knew that he was capable of doing the thousand and one mad, rash, crazy, contradictory things he talked about.

All the layers of his vinous past he laid and unravelled before me, all his masks, his assumed attitudes, his mimicries, his buffooneries. I saw him pretending, driven by obscure revenges, by fears, by weaknesses. I saw him in the world another man from the one I knew. Before me he shed all his poses, all his defences. He was not on his guard to fight for his independence; he was not impelled to lie in order to startle or amuse; he was not urged to cover his timidities with a carapace of callousness.

The legend of hardness, violence and callousness. Like a tale to me, distant and unreal, in contrast to the softness I knew. And I knew which was the rind and which the core of the man.

Just as he loved the falsities and the legends he created around himself, he loved also to rest from these pranks and trickeries and attitudes. He loved to stand there so whole and so certain of what he was deep down, crystallizing in the white heat of my faith.

“You always know,” he said, “what is to be disregarded in me, what must be laughed away, what is unimportant, like the changes of leaves on a tree. You are never deceived about the core.”

Then all the laughter, the shouts, the clownishness and nonsense and reminiscence subsided into a pool of serenity and reflectiveness. His voice became a soft murmur, trailing off in dreamy introspection.

“Why, that sounds as if it might be the beginning of my book, of my Self-Portrait!” he exclaimed.

And when all the gestures and vociferousness and restlessness seemed lulled, suddenly then he sprang up again with a new mood—a fanatic philosopher who walked up and down the room punctuating the torrent of his ideas with fist blows. A nervous, lithe walk, body light and airy, head heavy, the brow ponderous, the glance compact, riveting the phrases. And the voice incandescent. Ideas like leaves on a pyre which never turned to ash—on an everlasting fire. Suddenly the words, the ideas, the memories were all drawn together like the cords of a hundred kites, and he said:

“I’d like to work now.”

In a few moments I heard the crackling of his typewriter.

There remained in the air the echoes of his resonant voice, the hot breath of his words, the vibrations of his pounding gestures, the disturbance created by the gusts of his enthusiasm.

“What would Johanna think,” said Hans, “if she were to blow in now and find us talking about her like two sober craftsmen?”

I had sunk myself into my enjoyment as into a hammock.

“Maybe you’re the woman who will write the truth some day,” he said, “maybe you’ll be the one honest female of our time. Keep that head of yours clear when Johanna comes. Don’t let her delude you.”

“I could say the same to you.”

“You’ll see,” he responded quickly, “I’m another man. I know now what I am. I won’t let her override me. I don’t like what she does to me: she humiliates me. I won’t stand for it any more. I won’t!”

“Maybe you’ll forget all that—with the warmth of her.”

“Huh! Johanna’s warm only when she’s in your arms. Afterwards she’s cold, cold as steel. It’s you that’s truly warm, constantly warm. All you say is warm, all you think is warm, all you write is warm.”

He fell asleep. He rolled over and fell asleep. No noise, no care, no work undone, no imperfection unmastered, no word unsaid ever kept him awake. He could roll over and forget. He could roll over with such a grand indifference and let everything wait. When he rolled over the day ended. Nothing would be carried over into the next day. The next day would be absolutely new and clean. He just rolled over and extinguished everything—work, books, talk, love, laughter, people, himself, the whole world. Just rolling over.

He sat before his third glass of pernod. I looked at the hole in his coat and the stains on his hat.

“In my book,” I said, “all the men will wear glasses and have monumental brows! The women are not thrown on beds but on piles of manuscripts and open books. The dawn is reached and grasped with talk, hunger is stimulated by long discourses. Money is used to supply more paper, more carbons, to rent stronger typewriters.”

“Too realistic,” muttered Hans.

“It’s like the stains on your hat. I’m a woman and you must let me write about human things, trivial things maybe. I leave the problem of form and language to you, together with being and becoming, and physiognomies, and destiny versus incident, and the collapse of reality, and the coming fungoid era, and the middle brain and the tertiary moon… I want to put in all that you leave out. The shape of your hat, for instance. I can tell it from a thousand hats when I see it hanging on a peg. Your hat is like a Rembrandt. It belongs with your Self-Portrait. It’s human and battered, and it’s really not a trivial thing at all—it’s deeply significant. It’s your hat. It’s unique.”

Then I saw the glint in his eyes—the pernod glint, which was really npewritehe pernod but some gem-like layer ofhis being that the drink had peeled away, a glint that was hard, cruel, mischievous. His phrases seemed to break and scatter, to run wild like a machine without springs. They gushed forth from this contradictory core of him.

He was gloating over the childlike pranks he had played on his friends. “There was a guy I used to write pathetic letters to—in New York. Never failed to touch him. And then, as soon as I had gotten the dough, I’d send him a long cable thanking him. I liked to spend his money recklessly. I despised him for being so soft.” He bowed his head in a humble, yet sly way, and laughed softly to himself. “If I had money I would be as hard as nails. I’d never lend a penny to a starving artist. Never! You might as well throw your money down a sewer… You should have seen the two bums I picked up last night—two trollops, I mean. Whew! Were they hideous! I like them that way—the uglier the better. I like beautiful women and I like monstrous women. I don’t know which I like more. Andre was with me. He was peeved. He thought I was being unfaithful to you.”Here he laughed to himself again. “Listen,” he went on, “do you know what’s so awfully good about whores? It’s this: you don’t have to write them long letters. You don’t have to make love to them. There’s nothing gained and there’s nothing lost. It’s the algebra of love. The more grasping they are, the more whorish they are, the better I like them.” And he laughed again, without looking at me. It was a monologue. He was being “sincere” again, “truthful”! This painful sincerity was to prove to everybody that he had learned to embrace the ugly as well as the beautiful.

I looked at the sulphurous-colored pernod and drank it.

Summer evening. We were eating in a small restaurant opposite the Gare Saint Lazare, a restaurant wide open on the street. We were eating in the street and it was as if the street were full of people who were eating and talking and drinking. With each mouthful I swallowed I devoured the noises of the street, the voices and the echoes they dropped, the swift glances which fell on me like a piece of lighted wick from a guttering candle. I was only the finger of a whole bigger body, a body hungry and thirsty and avid. The wine running down my throat passing through the throat of the world. The warmth of the day like a man’s hand on my breasts, the smell of the street like a man’s breath on my neck. Wide open on the street like a field washed by a river.

Shouts and laughter exploded near us from the students going to the Quat’z Arts Bal. Egyptians and Africans in feathers and jewelry, with the sweat shining on the brown painted bodies. They ran to catch the buses and it was like a heaving sea of glistening flesh, soft flesh shining between colored feathers and jewelry, with the muscles swelling when they laughed.

Hans leaned over. “I want to lay you on the table—right here. I’m crazy about you. Lean over more. Lean over, I want to see your breasts.”

A band of students entered the restaurant, shouting and laughing. They circled round the table, like savages dancing around a stake.

Hans was laughing softly: “The other day when I left you, I was a little spiffed, you know. And hungry as hell. I ordered a good meal—a good meal. And I’m enjoying it. And then I notice a little whore opposite me, eyeing me up and down, and sort of looking at me wistfully, hungrily. I invited her to eat—naturally. She’s hardly sat down beside me when I run my hand up her skirt—I must have been cockeyed. Anyway, I finally took her to a hotel down the street—and all the while thinking of you, our afternoon, and wondering how the hell I could be doing this, but doing it just the same. And sort of hating myself for it, and yet enjoying myself—do you understand? But when we got to the hotel and it came time to lay her—I don’t know—something happened. I just didn’t have my heart in it, I guess. I couldn’t do a thing. And you know what a whore is! She worked over me like a steam engine. And the more she worked the less interested I got. It seemed to me as if it were all happening to some one else. I remember watching her curiously, as if I were examining a bug under a microscope. Very strange. I seemed to go dead under her. And wasn’t she contemptuous, though! As though I had insulted her. I guess she thought I was a pervert, or an impotent bastard. But she had her money. That seemed to soothe her a little bit. I felt sort of glad, sort of relieved, that I hadn’t given her too much. It was your money, after all… I don’t know, that’s how it was. Sort of queer and sudden. Can you understand it?”

I kept my eyes steady, saying quietly that I understood. But my body was bewildered, hurt beyond all words, beyond all understanding.

“One more thing,” he continued. “I must tell you this—and then I am through. I’ve got to get it off my chest… One night—it was Andre’s night off—we went to a cabaret. And sure as fate, we soon had a couple of Janes around our neck. They stuck to us like glue. To make it short, we took them home with us. We sat down in the kitchen and had a little snack together, the four of us. They weren’t bad, but they were greedy. Finally we began to talk turkey. They were holding out for some absurd sum—200 francs a piece, I think it was, or something like that. They might just as well have asked for the Woolworth Building. Anyhow, I was for letting them go. I told them so. I even showed them my torn socks. But Andre, the dope, he insisted that they stay. I don’t know what he gave them—but suddenly they became cheerful again. They began to sing and dance—they acted as if they had lost a screw or two. One of them was an acrobatic dancer. She wanted to show us a few tricks. And so she stripped down and began to do somersaults and handsprings—and every time she came down her high-heeled shoes made the chandelier clatter. They made a hell of a rumpus—the concierge threatened to have us put out next day. Next morning Andre was furious. ‘You try to tell me you’re in love with Djuna,’ he said. Well, I am—you know that. I think you might even have found a perverse pleasure in watching me, had you been there.”

I bowed my head. “I understand… I understand,” I kept repeating. He was still swimming on the airy, elastic waves of his drunkenness. The students were singing and laughing so hard they had to wipe their eyes. I looked at Hans and felt the whole world rocking.

The sign over the Hotel Anjou was in red lights. The red lights shone into the room. A red well. Blood madness. Blood rhythm. A charging, a hoofing, a clangor, a rushing through the world. Thumping. The torrent pressure of a machine panting, sliding back and forth, back and forth. A machine t/font>yielding honey. Swing. Swing. The bed- like stillness and downiness of summer foliage, heavy summer foliage rocking the warm, wine-filled senses. Rolling. Rolling. Clutching and folding. All curves filled. Steam. Steam. The machine on giant oiled gongs yielding honey, rivers of honey on the bed of summer foliage. The boat slicing open the lake waters, ripples extending to the tips of the hair and the roots of the toes. Honeysuckle juice and pistilled tongues, the jet of fountains on odored sheets, the room filled with fever and blood-red lights.

He sank into sleep. I lay at the bottom of the red well, laughing, while my joy mounted in endless spirals.

Through the open window came the riotous shouts of the students and the groaning of the heavy buses. I ran to the window naked and watched them. I looked at the patches of brown flesh and I wished I were there at the ball. Hans has made me suffer, but I am going to destroy pain with drunkenness. I want to go to the ball. I want to let life flow around me and drown me.

Hans awoke. He laughed seeing me standing at the window naked. “You’re curious and wild like a savage,” he said. “Come here!”

“I want to go to the ball!”

“Come here,” he said angrily. But I stood there in the halo of the red light and shouted: “I want to go to the ball!”

“I won’t have you leaning out of the window naked!”

I wrapped the brocaded curtain around myself and went on watching. Finally with arms extended I turned back to the bed where he lay, and as I approached the bed I made the gesture of closing my fists tight. Then slowly, as I neared him, I opened my fists again. “See, I wanted to hold on to you, but look, I am opening my hands. Have your little whores, if that will make you happy. Anyway, I am a gay whore myself.” And dancing around the bed I exclaimed gaily: “See what a gay whore I am! Twenty francs, please, Mister!”

When I rushed out of the hotel a gust of summer heat enveloped me. I used to wait for the seasons sitting behind a window, watching and waiting, and now they catch me living so fast, they come upon me with my dress only half buttoned, my hair wild, running for a taxi because I am late.

I had arrived too early and Hans was out. Andre opened the door to me. I stood in the middle of the room without moving at first, breathing this air in which he lived, the only climate in which I myself could live.

I looked at the photograph of Johanna tacked on his wall. The fevered profile, taut even in the photograph, so alive that I shivered a little, expecting the face to turn towards me with that slight twitching of the lips and the occasional tic of the eyelids. I half expected her to open her mouth and pour forth that eddying voice with the spinning phrases which gave one vertigo. There was in her portrait the imperious fever of her rhythm, like her wide, crunching walk. Looking at the taut, fevered mask of Johanna, I dreaded the malice behind her pretense; I remembered the hatred which Hans had ascribed to Johanna, the fierce possessiveness of the woman.

My eyes turned instinctively to his desk which was littered with notes. I read them over slowly… Johanna… Johanna’s life in the cellar on Sullivan Street… Johanna selling cigarettes and candy… Johanna’s cock and bull stories… Johanna’s drunken orgies with Hildred… Johanna’s extravagances… Johanna’s fear of humiliation… Johanna the female Stavrogin… Johanna’s bracelets… Johanna’s cat’s eyerings… Johanna this, Johanna that…

Johanna had made the world rock for him and that had been her great gift to him. The moment when the world rocks and mouths join, and the earth spins like a mad top, when the dreams rise like pyramids… And now Hans was erecting pyramids of notes. Johanna had shed her hair on his pages, her perfume, her torn dresses, her shadow as she dressed, her tears, her nail lacquer, her painted eyelashes, her broken bracelets. The notes were stained and brimming with her presence.

A volume of Proust was open on the desk. It was marked with Johanna’s name, with references to Johanna’s lies, Johanna’s friends. The last page on the typewriter was a description of Johanna’s jealousies, the scenes she created, the brusque reconciliations. Johanna. Johanna.

I picked a book out of his bookcase. Johanna’s name in the margin. I looked at the maps on the walls, the large maps Hans made of his future novels. “Life with Johanna on Sullivan Street.” A list of incidents, of the friends who surrounded them, of the quarrels and the despairs and the separations.

My joy crumbled. He loves no one but her.

But Hans came in then, and without looking at his desk, or at the photograph, or at the open book, he turned wholly to me, with all his ideas, his plans, his love.

“Roll up your sleeves,” he said, “there’s work to do. This description of Johanna is giving me trouble. Read it. Tell me how it strikes you.”

If only Johanna would die. If she would die. She does not love him as I do.

“The worst of lies,” I said to Hans, “is that they create solitude. I know Johanna must have been lonely at times. When you treat life and men like a play, and you can never speak or be what you really are, you get lonely.”

“You speak feelingly about it. I have no doubt you’re experienced in that pretending too. Now tell me, why do you think Johanna so often repeated that I would never know the greatest secret of her life, even when I was absolutely sure of her love for the other woman?”

“There was another secret…”

“You believe all that about the drugs?”

If she would only die! But then she would only live more vividly as a legend…

“I enjoy Johanna best when she is not here,” said Hans, “for then I can peacefully write and think about her. When she is here I feel choked and crushed. With you I shall call it the Golden Age between Wars. It is in time of peace that art is born.”

Slipping his hands through my hair, gently, he began to talk about Johanna. I knew that he was noting things in his mind, noting and thinking of his work. I knew too that it had fallen to my destiny to nourish the creator and love him in order to give him the strength to write about her, and that it might befall another woman to nourish Hans while he would be writing about me. In a flash I saw it all in a strange cycle of life and creation, life sustaining the creation, which was always concerned with the more distant experience, with the past.

“How is one to recognize a lie?” said Hans.

“By its dissonant tone. It is like a false note.”

“You have too musical an ear.”

“I have studied my own lies, I have trained my ear. For example, I am sure that both Johanna and I invent personages… I have often thought to myself: ‘I must keep silent.’ I must let this man look at my face and allow his dream of me to take form. I must give his imagination time to invent. While he is looking at me, if I say nothing, he is forced to interpret me by the color of my skin, the wave of my hair, the color of my dress, the shape of my neck, the few rare gestures I make. I feel him building an image. I see the image take form in his eyes. It lies in his eyes like a reflection in a river. I don’t want to open my mouth and speak. If I say what I want to say he may think I am just an ordinary woman. The image of me which he has been weaving like a spider web and which is trembling on the edge of his eyes like reflections of houses in a river may suddenly sink. I may see his eyes waver for a second and then turn into the glassy brilliance of reality and disillusion. Or even if I should smile—my smile may not conform to that intensely desired image he has been carrying about. I would like to answer people’s impossible wishes. I have tired myself desiring impossible things. I have so often sat and watched a beautiful face, beautiful while impassive, because its stone-like stillness allowed my fancy to create its meaning. And I have seen so often the disintegration of my fancy at the mere appearance of a smile. I have so often sat behind a face dreaming and desiring ardently that this face should answer my craving. I have experienced so often the demolition of a whole universe by a few words. I have been so fearful of those words, of hearing the voice, of seeing the face move, so fearful that my image, my dream, should be swept away. If the man spoke first and said: ‘You seem to me like a Hindu woman, so childlike and secretive,’ I can be that also. I can be all things. Whatever you want can become a game for me. I can play the role of the child-like secretive Hindu woman. If the man says: ‘You seem perverse to me,’ then I gather together all my knowledge of perversion, all I have read or seen on the stage and I play it all with such earnestness that finally I come to believe it myself.”

“You and Johanna…”

“I am sure that we have both played like this. It makes life difficult. People feel a certain falseness and then they seek to discover the reality, our reality. This reality we evade with al our cunning. And all this contributed to Johanna’s tenseness and her fear of being discovered. We want to be loved without being known. We are like porcupines with silver spikes. We imagine that our true selves cannot bear the light of common every-day simplicity. I am sure that as soon as she felt that the other’s image of her was in danger through something she said or did, she rushed to destroy the effect, to deny it, saying it was a jest or a game, mystifying and eluding any final judgment.”

“False mysteries.”

“Look at the pounds of notes her false mysteries have inspired. Let me read your last pages.”

When I had read them I said: “You’re the only man I would scrub floors for!”

“We could be very happy together. You would fall behind in your writing!”

“Good! I fall behind in my writing. I become the wife of a genius.”

“To-day, if there were a choice to be made between you and Johanna, I would surrender Johanna.”

“No, no,” I laughed. “No.”

“Johanna can be replaced, but I could have a thousand women after you and they could not efface you or replace you…”

“You’re drunk, Hans. I’m sure you’re drunk.”

I feared that he might say: “We will continue to find a rich interest in each other even if Johanna returns and I resume my life with her.” At the thought of this I felt the need of touching his suit, his arm, to exorcise my fear. Then I observed the mischievous twist of his mouth and I installed myself in the present, in my enjoyment of the hour.

We were sitting in the garden.

“Something happened to me yesterday,” said Hans musingly. “I happened to read over Johanna’s few letters and they moved me. I was about to send her a cable. Instead I wrote about her. And when I awoke this morning it was all over.” He handed me the last pages. “What do you think of them?”

They were among his best, I felt, after reading them carefully. Fevered and yet cohesive, strongly knitted. Spear blows. I thought how the beauty of these pages made it possible for me to subordinate my natural jealousy and possessiveness to my passionate devotion to the writer, the creator who required full latitude. I felt a separate, an immense, proud servitude to the splendor of his writing. I wanted my love to be an aliment. I wanted to augment his well-being, to feed him, to watch over him. He sat with a new compactness, a new strength in him, a new wholeness.

I imagined many books being born out of our intimacy. And I melted <…>

There were other people there, there had often been other people around us, with us, but I had only noticed and heard Hans. I was only attuned to Hans. I was conscious only of Hans. To-night I made an effort to become aware of the others, of Andre with fanatic blue eyes talking about astrology, of Louise with a voice like a wood-pecker, of Boris, who said the streets were worn by Hans’ wanderings.

Boris was saying that Nichols, the caricaturist, had gone insane, and had been sent to the hospital, that Hans ought to go and see him. Hans rubbed his hands with sly glee, shook his head, and danced about, exclaiming: “Superb! Superb! Let’s have a drink to Nichols’ insanity. I want to go and hear what he has to say. I hope he really is insane. That doesn’t happen every day.”

“Your humor is not humor, it’s demolition. You’re always breaking windows. That’s why the air around you is full of oxygen.”

I swallowed his laughter like bread and wine, while he jubilated like a gnome.

Encouraged by the darkness of the garden I began to talk flowingly.

“To-night,” I said, “is a fine dark night in which an artist might well be born. He must be born at night, you know, so that no one will notice that his parets only gave him seven months of human substance. The rest he must always add himself—and he does. He creates himself. He is born with a mania to complete himself, to create himself beyond the womb. His reality is sometimes questionable. One does not know if he survived the frailty of his birth conditions, whether or not he really sits at café tables and stains his fingers with nicotine. He is so multiple and detached, fluid and amorphous, that his central self is constantly falling apart into fragments and is only recomposed by a book, by his work. With his imagination he can flow into all the moulds, multiply and divide himself, and yet whatever he does, he will always be two. He will always be the Indian who worshipped his mistress but who made a flute out of her bone when she died. He will always be the man who weeps when his mistress dies, but who says: ‘A flute made out of human bones has a more haunting, a more penetrating sound’.”

I turned to Andre’s fanatic Celtic eyes for confirmation.

“Take me, for example. I am aware that when men look for the woman in me, the woman suddenly turns into fog, into night, into wind and sky. I am artist. Men run about in the fog looking for a woman. But I am not a being one can lay hold of and keep. I cannot be held and kept like a gold nugget. I am artist. I am fog, rain, tempest, sun, words. I am composed of words and fire and war. Is that clear?”

“You’re never clear,” said Hans brusquely.” I trust neither your ideas nor your way of putting them. You put things so clearly and beautifully, so crystal-clear—it all looks so simple and true. You’re so terribly nimble and clever. I distrust your cleverness. You always make wonderful patterns, I admit. Everything is in its place. Looks convincingly clear—too clear. And in the meanwhile where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas any longer, but submerged, sunk in some dark, obscure realm—like a submarine. One only thinks one has been given all your thoughts. One only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity—but there are layers and layers—you’re bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You’re the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubts, most disturbances.”

He said all this with great irritation and vehemence. Andre added:

“One feels that she gives you a neat pattern and then slips out of it herself and laughs at you.”

“Furthermore,” said Hans, “you have a half serious way of saying certain things—a funny fantastic twist to your phrases, like the way you talked about yourself just now, which puts one off the track. I know there is something else behind what you are saying—I can’t put my finger on it.”

I laughed. Three distinct feelings invaded me: one was an intellectual realization that in sum Hans’ criticism was flattering; another was a mischievous joy in having irritated, eluded and puzzled him; and finally there was a feeling of bitterness that he should suddenly fight me, attack me.

I sat in the quiet garden rehearsing swiftly, like an ever lost paradise, our days together—confidence, openness, peace. And here was the first sign of war. War. War was to be expected. Inevitable. Hans was war.

I endeavoured vainly to find my gaiety again. I saw that Hans no longer noticed me.

I thought: “Now the two slow-minded ones, the ponderous Hans and Andre have found solidarity against my nimbleness. They think I am not profound because I am swift. Well. I shall be more and more nimble, more and more treacherous.”

Hans said:

“Andre agrees with me that you are far too quick—always too quick, that you take swift decisions, and make swift judgments, and live too quickly, and write too quickly. That your quickness is not to be trusted.”

“That’s my natural rhythm,” I retorted.

“Well, you ought to slow up, that’s all I say.

Slow up. Read more slowly, listen, linger, dwell on things. Ponder them.”

“Well, you need me to focus you. You’re always going astray, with your roundabout ways.”

“Besides, what irritates me is your aristocratic nonchalance, that’s what it is. If I were married to you, I’d make you eat with the servants every day, I’d make you fraternize with everybody. I’d like to see you really friendly with them. Even when you’re kind you appear aloof, even when you’re full of compassion you really remain apart. If there were a revolution to-day, I would side with the people, and you, you’d have your neck cut off immediately. It’s a neck like Marie Antoinette’s, just made to be cut off. It’s too slender…”

I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. The night, so sweet before, now seemed poisoned. “It’s good that you turn against me, it’s very good, for now I will be true only to myself. It is good because it hardens me, makes me lone and courageous. For I am soft and too easily devoured by my love. Turn against me, and I am alone with myself. I will never bat an eyelash, never weep. I cast you out, and by this new hardness in me, I will live. I have been swallowed by love. Devoured by it.”

In the morning I awoke so heavy, weighed down by my hatred. Hard face and brittle voice. I found Hans waiting for me in the garden. He said:

“I am upset about last night, about my insincerity. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean.”

“Didn’t mean?” I repeated, and waited, all wrapped in my silence and watchfulness.

“Your silences are more terrible than other women’s shoutings and sobbing. Yes. I was carried away by my desire to conceal my love. The truth is I was swept away by your tirade. I wanted to kiss you. And then I saw you looking at Andre with such admiration. Your looking at him bothered me.”

“Perhaps you’re acting again,” I said.

“No,” said Hans quietly. “I can’t lie to you.”

“It’s simply that you enjoy difficulties. You like creating troubles. Our few days of harmony aroused your usual craving for discord, for war.”

“No, you’re wrong. I don’t want war. But for a moment I lost confidence in you. You were so enthusiastic about the astrologer, your voice was so warm when you questioned him and talked with him. Tell me something… Oh, well, what a man wants is to believe that a woman can love him so much that no other man can possibly interest her, even if he be a magician!”

What a man wants! (Then we could have again that openness if I were truthful?)

“What a man wants,” I said, “is what I have given you up to now with a wholeness you can never imagine.”

He looked tender and dazed.

“I feel so battered,” I said. “Our first duel has come to an end.”

“It was all very interesting,” said Hans. “I like launching into a role, into a part which baffles those who believe they know me. When you are angry your eyes turn violet. I would like to write that up in the style you used for the story of the opium fiend.”

His unaccountableness will eventually make me lose faith in him. Whenever he or Alraune steps in, the water boils, the lids explode, poison runs through one’s veins.

“You stole a phrase from me only the other day, do you know? You take what you need like a beast feeding. I feel like a human pudding,” I said.

Perhaps, I thought, my desire to preserve the bliss and the peace is a futile effort to resist the flow of life. War is inevitable. It is like snow or rain. Let the avalanche come then: snow, rain, volcanoes, torrents, floods. And with them a gigantic humor. Like an everlasting moon, I want to fix ecstasy in its niche. Hans knows better. It’s good. He forces me back again into isolation. I have no more devotions. I am hungry and I am going to eat; I am going to steal, to sell myself, to wander. I am going to love my own books better than I love Hans’. No more sacrifices for him. If he acts ridiculously, insanely or sentimentally enough for me to hate him I will be able to attend to my own growth and become a magnificent woman. Until now I have been a woman in whose womb men could rest in utter security.

Defeat this tragedy concealed within each hour, which chokes one unexpectedly and treacherously, springing from a melody, an old letter, a line in a book, the color of a dress, the walk of a stranger. How? Make literature! Seek new words in the dictionary, chisel new phrases, pour the tears into a mould. Style, form, discipline. Whip yourself and others into a frenzy. Lie. Exhaust yourself and your capacity for emotion. Cut out the newspaper clippings carefully. Have your photograph taken. Tell everyone what you owe them. Tell your lover he has made you a woman, tell your editor he has discovered a genius, and then turn around again into your solitude. Like a dog biting his tail, or like a scorpion caught in a circle of fire devouring himself, so that when you gaze at your own image you say to yourself: “If the Chinese had not discovered that wisdom is the absenf ideals, I would have discovered it myself to-night.”

He made me lie down on the black rug. But I did not believe in his feelings. I felt I was being possessed by a cannibal.

Hans’ appetite. The gifts I had made him of my feelings. His appetite for my ideas, for my moods, for the books I gave him. How he devoured the vibrancy of my flesh, my thoughts of him, my awareness of him! How he devoured new people, new impressions. His gigantic, devouring spirit, in quest of substance, in quest of inspiration, in quest of exoticism. My fullness, which I knew to be inexhaustible, was soon absorbed by him. My continuous dissolutions and recreations and rebirths, all the changes in me, the opening up of new realms, all this could be thrown into the current of his life and work and be absorbed by it like twigs by a river. He could read the fattest books, tackle the most cumbersome tasks, make the most immense plans, attack the most solemn systems and ideas, produce the greatest quantity of writing. He had the appetite of the age of giants. He excluded nothing. Everything was food: the trivial and the puerile, the ephemeral and the gross, the details, the scratchings on a wall, the phrase of a passerby, the defects of a book, the pale sonata, the snoring of a beggar on a bench, the flowers on the wallpaper of a hotel room, the odor of cabbage on the stairway, the color of an electric bulb in a toilet, the fragment of a voice trailing in the night, the walk of a whore, the haunches of a bare-back rider in the circus. His analytical blue eyes devoured details, his mouth seemed open and ready to taste, his tongue flicked and the saliva came to his lips, his hands seemed ready to leap and to grasp, hands like the feathers of a bird all set to beat out into the air, a body all ready to leap, always alert, the whole substance of his body a sensitized sponge. Drinking, eating, absorbing, with a million cells of spongy substance. Every pore of his body sensitized, pregnable, saturated.

Lost, as it seemed, into the universes he explored, yet deep down, always ready to retire within himself with his prey, to nourish upon the substance alone, afterwards, in the great solitary feast of the creator, the greatest and the most solitary of banquets to which those who supplied the nourishment were never invited.

While he lay over me with his unabatable attentiveness I knew he was watching the alterations of my face, listening to the cries I uttered, and the final deeper, savage tones. I closed my eyes before this watchfulness of his and sank into a blind, moist drunkenness. I felt myself caught in the immense jaws of his desire, felt myself dissolving, ripping open to his descent. I felt myself yielding up to his dark hunger. An immense jaw closing upon my feelings, my feelings smouldering, rising from me like smoke from a black mass. Take me, take me, take my gifts and my moods and my body, take all you want.

I am being fucked by a cannibal.

It is all that is human in me that he devours. He eats me as if my love for him were something he wanted to possess inside his body, at the very core of his body, like fuel. He eats me as if my faith in him were a food he needed for daily sustenance.

He is not concerned to know whether I can live or breathe within the dark cavern of his whale-like being, within the whale-belly of his ego.

I was surprised that when this cannibal had ended his feast there was left in its place a still greater richesse. It was his devouring appetite that produced this miracle: it restored to all things their taste, their savour. It aroused an equal hunger, a feverish quest for new adventures, new foods. It set the blood and the pulse of life throbbing. His hunger was contagious; it gave birth to hunger, and with the hunger the savour of all things was restored. His appetite made things alive. It seemed to stir the activity of the earth, to call out vigorous sprouting and growth, the bursting of seeds and the flowering of the earth’s driest crust. It was like water over a desert, the moisture of his sensual mouth, the moisture of his sensual desires.

Each day Hans’ pages arrived in the mail, unfolding a full and human portrait of his life with Johanna. And the more Hans elaborated on the real details of his life the more I took refuge in fantasy and fairy tale, struggling to stuff my ears against his voice, struggling to blind myself to the vividness of the image.

I was jealous of everything, even of Hans’ insults and furies against Johanna, even of his hatred, or his cruel caricatures of Johanna’s lies. I was jealous of the suffering Johanna had inflicted on Hans, of their terrors, their hysterias, their reconciliations. I suffered to see with what well-nourished splendor Hans was writing—he was writing out of the joys I had given him. It was my love which sustained him like a fuel, incited him to new efforts. Our talks had awakened in him a new preoccupation with Johanna, because I had revealed to him what Johanna had never revealed: the secret inner functioning of a woman’s mind and feelings. It was this knowledge which I had nurtured in him that was now serving him to rediscover the meaning of all he had experienced with Johanna. Hans transposed his knowledge of me and used it like a new instrument in the rediscovery of Johanna.

Certainly no woman had ever been asked for so much courage. He was testing me to the limit, like a torturer. Yet I did not want to disrupt his work with the story of my pain. Work! Work! I incited myself. Work! Sift the petty substance of woman, crush it, write, be large, be altogether the artist. So soon! Too soon! Only a few days of bliss. I am a human being, not a goddess. I am a human being! This was an Olympian role Hans was thrusting upon me.

Like a crab sinking into the sand, I sank into my writing. But the poison of feeling could not be dissolved. However deep I sank, and with my ears and my eyes full of the sand of my inventions and fantasies, this loud core of feminine feeling burned bitterly, burned through all my armour.

In the morning it seemed to me that my arteries had hardened, that my blood had coagulated, that my tears had frozen, that I was made of stone; even so the pain weighed in me more heavily than stone, and I knew I would never be able to rid myself of it.

And then Hans came. A serious, tired Hans. I looked at him as from behind an ambush, waiting to divine his mood. He said he had absolutely needed to come, that he had not slept for several nights, that he was worn-out. I was silent. I forgot my sorrows. Hans was tired. The book and he must be nurtured. What do you want, Hans? Lie down. Have some wine. Yes, I have been working. Don’t kiss me yet. We’ll have lunch in the garden. Yes, I have a lot to tell you—but it can all wait. I am deliberately postponing everything which might disturb the breathing of your book. Everything can wait.

Hans’ pale, intense, eyes were blue, so very blue.

“Djuna, I came to tell you that as I was working on the book I realized everything between Johanna and myself had died three or four years ago. That what we lived out together the last time she was here was only an automatic prolongation, like a habit. No impetus ever comes to a dead stop. It was a tremendous experience, an upheaval. That is why I can write so frenziedly about it—but it is the swan song I am writing now. You must be able to differentiate between my dramatizations, my evocations, and my true, present feelings. I tell you I love you. I want you to come away with me. I dream of our working together. I want you close to me.”

I sat dazed, silent, opening my eyes wide, wide. He added:

“Certainly I had to live all that through, but precisely because I have lived it through I am finished with it, and capable of experiencing a new kind of love. I feel stronger than Johanna, I won’t be humiliated, destroyed by Johanna again. I know now that I want to break with her. I dread her return, the possible destruction of my work. All these days I have been thinking of you, how I have worried you, hurt you. And meanwhile there is your writing and no one gives a damn about it, and no one tries to help you.”

At this I laughed:

“But you give a damn! Besides I can wait. It is you who are behind time, you who must be given a chance to catch up.”

I watched the full mouth, and the pale blue eyes, that odd mixture of delicacy and bestiality, of toughness and sensibility. He became again weird and bright. His talk about his work seemed to throw off sparks, so high it bounced, so elastic, and so full, full to the bursting point always.

I felt that just as a woman carries an embryo in her womb, so I was carrying inside me the image of a fulfilled genius and that every day he became this image more and more exactly, every day he added to his stature, to the stature of this image, as if he used it for a model. And every day my love seemed more justified. Every day my vision of him melted into reality.

Everything became sparkling and vibrant. The warmth with which I surrounded him glowed like a magic ambiance in which he moved and expanded to greater dimensions.

The great joy, the greatest joy, is not to discover one’s greatness but to find on earth a match.

The table was too full and so the manuscripts and books lay on the floor. He made me lie on the black rug. My head touched the carbon paper. He pushed it away, saying: “We don’t want any carbon copies stat!”

He showed me some more of his notes, made in cafés, in the train, in the subway.

“For your collection,” he said. “I often imagine myself in another man’s boots a hundred years from now. I can see him enjoying my notes as I have enjoyed Balzac’s in the museum. It’s a hellish thing to say, perhaps.”

“Not so hellish as that. Looking at the photographs of Lawrence’s home, I often have the feeling that I should like to go and see that dismal house where you were born. I have the feeling that you are a personage, that I love the most remarkable man of our age!”

“That’s inverted megalomania,” said Hans.

He pulled out from under the pile of folders a thick manuscript.

“Here are my dreams for the month, all kinds of dreams. I’m going to do something with them some day—make something of them. Did you ever notice how feeble dreams usually are, in books? Writers are just as crippled when it comes to giving their dreams as they are inhibited in revealing their experiences. I’m going to record every detail—and especially the unfinished things, the shreds, the fragments.”

I told him my dream of God’s hand appearing behind a mountain, fingers pointing accusingly and how I said to whoever was standing beside me: “Can’t you see it’s made of cardboard, that it’s manipulated by strings? You can tell it’s a fake, like the marionnettes at the Javanese theatre, by the way it trembles and shakes… And after that I had another dream. It was about the birth of Johanna. Wait—I’ll read you the notes I made… I dreamed that like the Alraune of the legend, she was conceived in the poisonous womb of a whore from the seed of a man who was hanged. That she was a mandrake with fleshy roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple bell-shaped corolla. Narcotic flesh. A stemless plant with thick roots and pale purple flowers that shrieked when it was touched. And those who heard it shriek went mad. I dreamed that she was born with gold-red jungle eyes, eyes always burning, glowing as from a cavern, from holes in the earth, from behind trees… snake, lizard basking with solitary, motionless eyes, all fire and cold, snake cold and slippery, coiling on its alert tongue of fire. The last film of fire was like the transparent curtain of death, the glaze of the idol that worships itself. Her smile, her lapidary smile, the liquid, blood-red light of sard behind which the flesh crumbled away, revealing the sepultures of love. Earth-laden, her heavy flesh was projected out into the night. Earth-laden and studded with a thousand eyes. The dead cold of a meteor which had been warmed to all degrees of incandescence. The heavy molten drag of flesh torn from its chromosphere.”

Hans said:

“Let’s cultivate our insanities like precious flowers. Water and nurture them, as the Jews nurtured hysteria to obtain prophecies from the possessed… Do you know what I dreamed? I leaned out of a window and shouted in a voice I had never herd before: ‘Help! Help!’ The hare-lipped market woman’s voice when the vegetables are stolen, the chicken being guillotined, the dog under a taxi… to the sound of these things in my voice the people ran. They stood gasping at my door. I was trembling. I pointed to the bluish green mirror where I had seen that I was murdered. The blood was coagulating. The skin was green like that of a drowned map. There was a gash, a gash across the face. ‘Help! Help!’ Why are you so inert? I have been killed! I was asleep here on this bed which smells of bestiality. I was dreaming of Venetian alchemist bottles. I was discovering a mixture. I had succeeded in fusing the sparse elements of myself into a long-necked bottle of jade-green transparency. At last I had been able to look at myself bottled. And then I was murdered. Envy, I tell you, envy of the one who has dreams. The people stood there breathless. A woman’s toe stuck out of a hole in her bedroom slipper. When I first began to talk it seemed like a mouse that wanted to run away from the light. It was turning in upon itself. Then it ceased moving as if I had stepped on it. It lay flat. Inert. I danced furiously before them. I poked them with the coal shovel. I saw in the mirror a murdered man agonizing. A woman came forward. She opened her handbag. ‘Look,’ she said. I saw in her pocket mirror an unblemished face—my own. I was alive. Whole.”

There was tacked on Hans’ door a paper with his name and address carefully printed. I asked him:

“Are you afraid to forget your name and who you are and where you live? Have you ever feared amnesia, or wanted it? I have desired it because it is like an atrophy of the ideal self. The conscience goes to sleep, and therefore the critical self. You can then walk the streets and act as you please without qualms. It is only our name, our address and our relations which bind us, like so many memoranda, to the role which is expected of us. The important thing is not to perpetually resemble that fixed image of ourselves, but to create and believe in transformations.”

“In my case,” said Hans, “what’s difficult is to keep any image of myself clear. I have never thought about myself much. The first time I saw myself full length, as it were, was in you. I have grown used to considering your image of me as the correct one. Probably because it makes me feel good. I was like a gigantic wheel, very heavy, surcharged with ideas and plans and inventions, but without a hub.”

“And I’m the hub now, eh?” I said laughing.

“Yes, you’re the hub, and no matter how far I wander off, no matter how enormous the circles I make, you’re always at the centre.”

“No, the hub is really yourself. A knowledge of yourself which you obtained from my love. My love was the catalyzer! It reintegrated you… Unwind that last page in your machine so that I can read it. I like to read it as it comes out of the oven, so hot and fresh.”

“Your tenacity amuses me,” said Hans.

“And your letting things happen amuses me. I love your not holding on to anything. You have declined all the responsibilities of life except that of creating books. You’re one of the authentic artists. You never let anything fall into a mould. I like the way your mind spills out so recklessly, spilling confusion, chaos and wealth. How you flow, spread, expand, enlarge. While I weave, gather and remember. ”

“And laugh secretly at my pompous speeches.”

“Our styles too have married, you know. My writing is the wife of yours.”

This is my Seventh Day. After so much straining and waiting, after so many empty years, after so much isolation and so much striving, I have arrived at my Seventh Day, and I am enjoying it. I rest now, I rest from my straining for perfection. I rest in this rich ambiance created by Hans, this warm climate I have always sought. He has created a world for me. I rest in the present with an Oriental enjoyment. I rest in the perfection of the moment. I have arrived at the end of my hard work to a long lasting holiday, a holiday with Hans. I say this even to-day when it happens that I am lying in bed and that I cannot move because of the pain.

For hours I amused myself with my own thoughts and memories. I played with the hours and with scenes. I labored like a chiseller, with minute care, wondering if I had given some lasting form to the hours most precious to me. I remembered the afternoon when Hans was lying on the couch in my bedroom while I was dressing foran evening party, standing before my long mirror perfuming myself. The window was open on the garden, and he had said: “This is like a setting for Pelleas and Melisande. It is all a dream.” The perfume made a silky sound as I squirted it with the atomizer, touching my ear lobes, my breasts, my neck. “Your dress is green like a Princess’,” he had said. “I could swear it is a green I have never seen before and will never see again. I could swear the garden is made of cardboard, that the trembling of the light comes from the footlights, that the sounds are music, even that noise of wood being sawed. You are almost transparent there, like that mist of perfume you are throwing on yourself. Throw more perfume on yourself, like a ‘fixatif‘ on a water color. Let me have the atomizer. Let me put perfume all over you so that you won’t disappear and fade like a water color.”

I moved towards him and sat on the edge of the couch. “You don’t quite believe in me as a woman,” I said with an immense distress quite out of proportion to his fancy, “yet it happened that while I was perfuming myself I was thinking how I might get you a new suit. Your suit is frayed at the sleeves. The skin of your wrists is so white and fine, as if it could easily be burnt or scratched.”

“This is a setting forPelleas and Melisande, ” he said, “and I know that when you leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more.”

It was as if he too had taken the essence of the hour like a blood-colored ink and were tattooing it on my memory. The color of the day, the color of Byzantine paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust held together only bytoms were ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold so thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous space lying behind the illusion, the absence of color and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder. This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees, which was flowering inside the room, on my black hair, on the skin of his wrists, on the frayed suit sleeve, on the black carpet, on the green dress, on the bottle of perfume, on the sienna-colored nails, on his voice, on my anxiety—the very breath of living, the very breath he and I took in to live and breathed out to live—that very breath could blow it all down, mow it all down.

The essence, the human essence always evaporating.

The air of that day, when the wind itself had suspended its breathing, hung between window and garden; the air itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word, and a displaced leaf or word might change the whole aspect of the day.

The essence, the human essence always evaporating.

The temperature of the day, the temperature in which the blood flowered and the skin unfurled its minuscule pores like the petals of the most secretly folded flower. The temperature of that day which could be repeated in time, perhaps a hundred times in my life: the temperature would be reproduced but never the hour with Hans lying on the couch watching me dressing, never his words or my response to his words, which were a dark wish to enclose the whole day in a strangling hand, to snuff out its color and temperature, so that no fragment of it would ever repeat itself, a fragment which might recall the whole, a fragment which might come upon me ten years later perhaps while I would be sitting in Asturias. The gold, the breathlessness of the air, the temperature, without his presence, his words and my response. The tantalizing incompleteness and uniqueness of an event, repeating only the setting perhaps, under a variance of moods, of feelings and of personages. And for that future day when I might again stand before my mirror perfuming myself, doing only a fraction of what I did on that other day, for the pain that unfinished, unreproduceable hour aroused in me, I would kill it, or I would sit for many hours juggling with words in order to imprison it.

Have I got it now? I asked myself. Have I got it, or will I return to these words one day and find them faded, find that it has all faded like a painting after a hundred years, that the colors are altered and unrecognizable?

I am only recomposing the whole of that hour because I am ill and thus so much closer to the fear of death. To-morrow when I get well I will rejoice that a different hour will replace this one I worship; I will rejoice that no moment of life ever repeats itself whole.

I wanted to send for Hans, but I hesitated. He was only for the joyous days, the courageous days. I wanted only the good things for him. While I was lying there he sent me a letter and this letter which was written to the sick Djuna overflowed with his own jubilant mood, with rutilant good health. In the last few days, he related, he had discovered a hundred new things which interested him.

He could not imagine my m gonor divert me from it. He could never divine others’ moods. His own were immense and loud and they filled his world and deafened him to all others. Like to-day: “I feel such well-being,” he shouted.

Until to-day I had believed in his phrases. It was enough that he said now and then: “I want to give you things.” It did not matter if he did not give them. It did not matter that he added: “But I wouldn’t give you perfume. I don’t understand your wanting foolish things like perfume.”

He came to see me, all buoyant with his own mood. He sat before me and said:

“What’s the matter with you? You look so frail. What’s all this moodiness about?”

His blue eyes looked cold. He talked about his work, about his jaunt through the country, about his lunch on the road and the marvelous wines he had tasted.

“Here is the book you wanted,” I said.

But I was tired of giving. I could not keep myself from saying:

“The other day you said you would come and help me finish my article, revise it. You came, and you chose to paint a water color instead.”

“That’s true,” said Hans, unflurried.

“The other day when there was a rumor of war, and we were discussing what we would do, I was concerned for your security… I made plans… I was full of anxiety. And you, what did you think of? Of your manuscripts—what would become of your papers, your notes, your letters. You never thought of me.”

“It’s true,” said Hans.

“You gave Andre’s little slut the only pair of fine stockings I own—I never have a decent pair of stockings myself; I’m always buying you books instead of getting stockings. Your feeling of pity for her was greater than any desire to protect me. I know I’m talking about little things, but they’re so full of significance! You don’t know what love is!”

“About the selfishness, I don’t know what to say. About not loving you, well…”

He began to laugh. “You’ve just got to believe in that.”

He said it so simply.

“You were quick, you know. Ordinarily you wouldn’t be hurt by my selfish enjoyment of life. You would relish it. When I wrote you that exultant letter about my being filled with the Holy Ghost, I thought to myself afterwards how queer it is that I should want to palm it off on the Holy Ghost. You are the Holy Ghost inside me. You make my spring.”

I began the day in a golden mood which I carried like a fragile egg. I carried it against my breast, warming it. I rushed to Hans to awaken him, to present him with it, to tell him it was a tropical day, to bring him out into the sun. I offered him my mood like another gift.

But Hans awoke depressed. Some one had been knocking at his door—some devil with a fiendish persistence. And he had refused to open, as usual. He had been lying there in fear, cursing and sweating, unable to get up and unable to dismiss the incident. He had been lying there prostrated, paralyzed with fear. Whenever there came an unexpected knock Hans would imagine it was some one come to threaten him. A knock at the door could fill him with absolute terror. All his life there had been this frightful knocking at the door—creditors, lovers, jealous husbands, inquisitive friends, bores whom he couldn’t shake off, miserable devils whom he had befriended and couldn’t get rid of, lunatics, tramps, chess fiends, rumhounds, etc., etc. A constant evasion, a perpetual fear of pursuit and of persecution, a tremendous feeling of guilt. His life with Johanna had been a sort of elaborate “underground” existence—a maze of lies and intrigues, of scandals and treacheries and petty deceits. A knock at the door could darken his whole day. It made him furtive, upset, distraught. It was impossible for him to pull himself together again.

I laid my mood aside and attuned myself to his. As he talked I saw with naked eyes what our life together was, and what I saw was again an ultimate loneliness with intermittences of companionship.

Looking around when left alone in the kitchen, as if I were looking at everything for the last time. Looking attentively at the painting on the wall of a couple making love on a bench in front of a urinoir posted with ” Maladies des voies urinaires” and ” Chocolat Menier.” Looking at the menu, hanging on a nail, of the things Hans and Andre imagined they were going to eat every day. Bouchees a la Reine, Pate de foie gras truffe, Dinde aux champignons, Canard a la puree de marrons, etc. Looking at the maps on the walls of the streets Hans had played in as a child, looking at the lampshade made out of a corset which Hans had bought from the Marche aux puces… as if I were parting from them and the roguish spirit playing in them. Looking at Hans’ coat hugging the chair, seeing the form of his shoulders and ribs, and feeling his body without the tightening and clutching pains of suffocating jealousies. Parting not from Hans but from the immense pain of jealousy. Taking only the joys he gave me. Sifting away the whole, the dark dependence, the passion which alone caused torture, so that he might mention Johanna and his whores without bleeding me. The multiple bleedings of jealousy through which all my strength had wasted itself, all my joys dispersed and lost themselves. Taking only the joys, his soft swagger, the rough touch of his coat, his mouth and his coups de belier in my womb. Ejecting the pain, the total giving. Placing a distance between the life-giving climate and that shabby kitchen so that all my substance might not be enclosed in his pranks, the effervescence of his voice when he said: “That’s good.” The word good in Hans’ rich mouth generated goodness and richness. That’s good. And: ” What is it?” He could say “What is it… what’s the matter?” with the most sensitive, the most mellow intonations, as if he cared supremely, supremely, with a melting sympathy. ” What is it?” He awaited the answer, melted, with the softest expression of his otherwise steel-bladed curiosity.

Even his coat could seem to be stirring with his easy flowing life, even to his clothes he gave the imprint of liveliness. Even his coat could stiralive the love in me which wanted only to be liberated from intensity… To enjoy… I wanted to enjoy… to enjoy…

I parted not from the past, but from past pain, retaining only the humor of the sketches on the wall, and the deep flowing grooves of a mellow undemanding love.

During a sleepless night I thought: Hans, my love, I can love you better now that you cannot hurt me. I can love you more gayly and more easily and loosely. I can endure space and distance and betrayals. Only the best and the strongest for you, Hans, my love, the eternal wanderer, the artist, the faithless one… Nothing is changed except that to-day my courage was born. Lie here, breathing into my hair, over my neck. No hurt will come from me. No judgment. No woman ever judged the life stirring within her womb. To torment you is impossible to me. It is like allying myself with the world against my own flesh and blood. I cannot be against you because I am too close to you. I was harder to-day than I have ever been, for the game of it, but I got no joy. I will always stand by you, with you, against the world. I will laugh with you even if it is against me.

He sat on the edge of my bed, and I watched the transformations in him. I watched the moist, half-open mouth close musingly, the scattered talk crystallizing. The man so easily swayed, caught, moved, now collecting his strength again. At that moment I saw the big man in him, the man who appeared to take his work like a drug, who appeared to be merely enjoying recklessly, idling, roaming, but deep down set upon a terribly earnest goal. Intent on handing back to life all the wealth of material he had collected, intent on restituting to the world what he had taken from the world with his enormous creator’s appetite.

A moment before, flushed by drink, he had been scattering his riches, ideas, imaginings, fantasies, emotions, all diffuse, fragmented. The moment when he crystallized and set himself to work was beautiful to watch. He was not altogether serious yet, was still laughing while he caressed me.

“What magnetic force have you there? It’s like electricity,” he said, “What have you there inside you that I can’t tear myself away from?”

“At this moment, with your hair uncombed and some of my rouge on your mouth, you look absolutely illiterate!”

“Woman, woman, she’s always holding man back from his high purpose.”

I lay on the bed still sunk in my joy, but watching him with secret pride.

“I’m going to write about the death of the soul,” he said.

“And what of the Lemurian man?” I laughed, jumping up. “And what of the surrender to the biologic?”

“You’re always too quick,” he said, “always too impatient. I’m still in the womb.”

“Listen, Hans, I feel your book swelling up inside me like my very own child. Better than my very own, because your book inside me is like a fecundation, while writing my own books is like Narcissism. I love to be fecundated. I’m a female, I’m absolutely female, and I glory in it.”

I stood in the middle of the room laughing and combing my hair.

“I glory in it. I say, let a woman write books, but let her above everything else remain fecundable by other books—especially if they are good. It’s the woman who writes books in solitude who dies. You paint the gigantic fresco, the cosmic fresco; I bring crumbs like an indefatigable ant.”

“And you laugh secretly at my important speeches… You’re no ant.”

“I’m the night then. The all-mother with enormous protective wings covering the world, blanketing it, lulling it. You sleep on the security I give you, on the warmth. I am the night who watches over you through curtained windows with very wide open eyes.”

“You will put me to sleep.”

“In the morning I awake singing because I know you have slept profoundly, lulled by the beautiful lies I tell you, beautiful lies like fairy tales.”

“You lie awake thinking up new lies every day.”

“I lie awake because you snore. You’re so happy you snore. I love to hear you snore, Hans. I love you because you’re natural. I love you because you forget to have your hair cut, and because you scrub yourself spic and span like a Dutchwoman scrubs the cobblestones in the street. I love you because you live in streets where people wear bedroom slippers and don’t comb their hair. I get rested from my burning fever for perfection.”

“Don’t talk any more about rest,” said Hans. “I haven’t written a line to-day.”

“That’s all right, we’re writing chapters all the time, you and I. We write when we sit in a café doing nothing. We’re writing when we dream at night, we’re writing while we eat and even while we fuck. We’re the most industrious couple alive. I wish we could be lazy, layoff. Our profession is in our blood. We can never walk out on it.”

“I’m going to sit down and add to my Self-Portrait. I want to write about the time when I was fifteen years old and expounding Nietzscheu salready had a dose of clap.”

When I heard the typewriter’s dry crackling, I was happy.

I felt myself softly closing the door upon the world. I drew in long mystical bolts. I pulled in rustless shutters. Silence. I imprisoned within myself that mood and texture of Hans’ being which would never go into his book, that which only a woman could see and know.

Johanna arrived last night. Johanna arrived last night.

I repeated this to myself as if I could not understand it. Only the night before I had been with Hans, and now Johanna was here.

Day of hallucination. I imagined Johanna in Hans’ room, preparing to possess his life again. I choked over my food. I tried to work, and I choked over my work. Johanna in Billancourt. I remembered Hans’ pleading words: to wait.

When I slept the pain suffocated me. I had to get up and walk about. When I awoke in the morning the pain lay on the back of my head like a stone. What would become of Hans now, of his life, his work, his joys? What would Johanna do to him?

The most terrible pain of all is the pain which does not explode, which makes no sound, which beats against nothing, which refuses to be exhausted by cry or gesture. The most prolonged and intricate of tortures. There is no air, no rain, no thunder, no lighting, no darkness, no fire. There is nothing to fight. The pain is in the tissues, in the cells, in the silence, in the breathing, invisible and soundless. To shift, to move away, to elude the torture was impossible, since there was no separation between me and the pain. No space, no distance, no voice, no face that one could strike.

I took a long walk alone. The “vigne vierge” was blood red on the walls and fences. I walked against the wind, weeping for Hans, for the lover I could never forget, soft, tender, dangerous, defenceless in women’s hands. My love, Hans, whom I had filled with strength and self-knowledge. I would always be there for him, always his. The day Johanna hurt him I would be there to love him again into wholeness. No one knew the softness in me for Hans, the softness, the forgivingness, the patience, the knowledge I had of his weakness, the love of his weakness…

As she walked heavily towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the doorway, I saw for the first time the woman I had always been hungry to know. I saw Johanna’s eyes burning, I heard her voice so rusty and tragic saying: “I wanted to see you alone,” and immediately I felt drowned by her beauty, felt that I would do anything Johanna might ask of me.

I wanted to say: “I recognize you. I have often imagined a woman like you.” But I was too timid, tead I sat silent in the tall black armchair.

Johanna did not sit still like an idol to be worshipped. She talked profusely and continuously, with feverish breathlessness, like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long, and when she walked about she was eager to sit down again. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked. Restless and keen, making jerking gestures with her hands and shoulders, drinking hurriedly, speaking hurriedly, smiling swiftly, and listening to only half of my phrases.

“You’re beautiful, beautiful,” I said simply.

“Women, what things women see,” said Johanna as if she were talking to herself, but looking at me all the while. “The way you hand over the glass of Madeira—you have the gestures of a temple dancer.”

Johanna’s dress shimmered like black water. We sat wide apart on the green couch, fearful of the silence between our phrases and of the way our eyes clung to each other. Johanna left many of her phrases unfinished. She described everything rapidly, hazily, so that the impression was blurred and strange. She would not linger too long over any of her phrases, as if in fear of their effect. If the phrase was bitter she would smile to blunt it.

After a short circuitous anecdote, she would come back to me.

“Hans’ description of you,” she said, “simply left out everything that was important. You are all nuances. Even your pallor is different from mine. Mine is white and yours golden.”

“And you,” I said, “you’re the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.”

“It’s a good thing then that I’m soon going away. You would unmask me too quickly.”

At this I looked at Johanna and my eyes said so clearly, “I want to become blind with you,” that Johanna trembled a little and turned her face away.

“I thought your eyes were blue,” she said, “but I See now they are a strange and beautiful grey-gold. You glide when you walk.”

I noticed the hole in Johanna’s sleeve. And suddenly I felt ashamed not to have a hole in my sleeve, too.

“Let me look at your feet. They are so lovely and delicate and alive. And you wear sandals. I love sandals. I never wore anything else until… until…”

She looked down at her worn shoes. I saw that she was wearing cotton stockings, and it hurt me to see Johanna in cotton stockings.

“Let’s go out and get some sandals,” I said.

“Later, later,” said Johanna hoarsely. And then we both began to tremble. Johanna began to talk again, vaguely. The intimacy vanished. Her talk was like a turbulent river, like a broken necklace. Suddenly Johanna was silent, and then a changed voice she resumed:

“What a lovely way of dressing you have! I love this dress, its faded color, the little velvet jacket, the lacing over the breasts. I love the way you cover yourself, too: there is so little nudity showing—just your neck really. I never wanted to imitate any one else before, but now I should like to become as much like you as possible.”

Her hands were shaking.

“Johanna,” I thought, “I want to touch you.”

“When you look up at me you look like a child. When you look down you look like a sage, very old and very sad,” said Johanna.

There was a long silence.

“Let me sit on the floor and put my head over your knees,” I said.

“No, no,” said Johanna in a low, frightened voice.

“I will make you a cape like mine. I want you to wear my cape draped around your body.”

“Johanna, Johanna,” I thought, “I want to touch you. Why are you afraid? I want to kiss you.”

When Johanna talked again volubly, recklessly, I did not try to silence her. Now I knew we were talking against a deeper, inner talk, against the things we could not say.

I waited at the corner of the Rue Auber. I would see Johanna in full daylight advancing out of the crowd. I would make certain that such a thing could be, that Johanna was not a mirage which could melt as dreams melt in the morning.

I was secretly afraid that I might stand there at the corner of the Rue Auber exactly as I had stood in other places watching the crowd and knowing no Johanna would ever appear, because Johanna was an invention. As people passed by I shivered at their ugliness, at their drabness, at their likeness to each other. Waiting for Johanna I experienced the most painful expectancy, as if for a miracle. I could not believe Johanna would arrive by these streets, cross such a Boulevard, emerge from a handful of dark, faceless people. What a profound joy to watch the crowd scurrying and then to see her striding forward wearing her shabby shoes, her shabby black dress, her shabby cape and an old violet hat with a royal indifference.

“I hate the daylight,” said Johanna, and under the brim of her hat her eyes darkened with anger. The dark blue rings under her eyes were so deep they marked her flesh. It was as if the flesh around her eyes had been burned away by the white beat and fever of her glance.

In the café her pallor turned ashen. I saw ashes under the skin of her face. Hans had said she was very ill. Would she die? I trembled with fear. Would Johanna die before I had put m arms around her? Then I would follow her there too, I would follow her anywhere to tell her I loved her. I would keep Johanna’s sombre beauty from death.

“There are so many things I would love to do with you,” said Johanna. “With you I would take drugs. I would not be afraid!”

“With you I would do anything, go anywhere.”

I looked at Johanna’s hair, the blond strands tumbling out of the hat, wind-blown; at her eyebrows peaked like a demon’s, at her smile slanting perfidiously, a gem-like smile which made a whirlpool of my life, of my feelings.

“You’re strong, although you look so frail,” said Johanna, taking my hand…

I did not seek the meaning of Johanna’s words. I was suspended to her feverish mouth, to her discolored lips badly rouged. I felt in myself a new, man-like strength, a desire to protect her. I felt dizzy and feverish, and ready to abandon everything for her.

A man passed by and laughed at our absorption.

“Don’t mind, don’t mind,” I said softly, without taking her hand away. I enveloped and disguised my own tremblings and timidities in an Oriental calm. Johanna drank and smoked feverishly.

“I don’t want to do you any harm,” said Johanna.

“You can’t do me any harm.”

“I destroy people without wanting to. Everywhere I go everything gets confused and terrifying. I wish you had known Hildred. She made masks. She had supple and slender hands like yours. She made the Count for me. Oh, you don’t know the Count. Let’s go and get him, please. Let’s go there before we go for the sandals.”

We rushed to her hotel in a taxi. Johanna brought out the Count, a marionette with a depraved face, criminal’s hands, purple hair, violet eyelids, consumptive cheeks. She sat him in front of us in the taxi and laughed. “He was on the stage with me.” When the taxi started, he fell over, bowing to us with the lamentable weeping willowiness of his purple hair.

“I would like to go back to New York now and become beautiful for you. I will go away and make a new start. I’ll become a great actress. I won’t appear any more with clothes that are held together with safety pins! I’ve been living stupidly, blindly, doing nothing but drinking and smoking and talking. I’m afraid of disappointing you, Djuna.”

“I’m ashamed of all I have written. I want to throw away everything and begin anew for you, in a new language,” I said.

We walked down the street aimlessly, unconscious of our surroundings, arm in arm, with a joy that was rising every moment and with every word we uttered. A swelling joy that mounted with each step we took together and with the movement of our legs brushing against each other.

The traf eddied about us. Everything lost in a fog. Only the voices distinct, carrying such half-phrases as we could utter out of the drunkenness that our walking in rhythm caused in us.

Johanna said:

“I wanted to telephone you last night. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to have talked so much. I didn’t say at all what I wanted to say. I went to a café in the evening as if drugged, full of thoughts of you. People’s voices reached me from afar. I couldn’t sleep at night. What have you done to me?”

I felt dazed with joy.

“I didn’t say what I wanted to say either. I feel overwhelmed. I can’t think any more.”

We went to the shoe shop. There the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our visible joy. I held Johanna’s hand firmly and commanded. I was firm, wilful with the shopkeeper. Give me this, the best—don’t you see, it’s for Johanna? The best then, the very best you have. When the woman said she did not have broad enough sandals for Johanna’s foot, I scolded her. And then to Johanna: “When people are nasty to you I feel like getting down on my knees before you. I love you, Johanna.”

We walked down the street looking down at our sandalled feet. People stared at us and said: “Look at the actresses.”

“I’d like to get drunk,” said Johanna, “youreyes frighten me. You seem to know so much and yet you’ve never come out of your peaceful house.”

“Drunk! I’ve never once been drunk,” I said.

Johanna laughed.

“But I don’t want you to begin now. It would be like watching a child learning to walk. You don’t need to get drunk—but I would like to because then I could say anything I chose… and I’d want you to think it was because I was drunk, because then you’d forgive me.”

“You too have fears, although you look so strong.”

“It’s good that you never ask questions about facts. Facts don’t matter. It’s the essence that matters. You are all essence… I’d like to have some of the perfume I smelled in your house.”

I thought: “And she needs shoes, stockings, everything!”

Bodies close, arm in arm, hands locked. The city fallen away. We were walking into a world of our own for which neither could find a name. We entered a softly lighted place—mauve, diffuse which surrounded us with velvety closeness. We took off our hats and drank champagne. The Russian singers stared at us. Russian voices and Johanna. The violet rug, the green windows, the dusty lights, the swelling of guitars. Johanna was their essence.

Johanna talked about the effects of hasheesh. I had known such a state without hasheesh. When everything is so clear and transparent, when you know all there is to be known on earth, and you tchild learlike a visionary with a dancing irony and a cool brilliance.

“Let’s take drugs together, Djuna. Let’s take drugs together.”

“Not to-night, Johanna.”

Johanna took off her silver bracelet and put it around my wrist.

“It’s like having your own hand around my wrist. It is still warm, like your own hand. I’m your prisoner, Johanna.”

We walked out again. We crossed the street. We asked a policemen for the Rue de Rome. He laid his white stick on the Count and smiled at us. I said: “Are you going to arrest him?” And we laughed and walked on.

“Do you know,” I said, “there was an old Roumanian woman who had predicted I would love a woman. She lived in a very small house, with small doorways. She had cut off the legs of the chairs and tables so that everything seemed diminutive, like a house in a fairy tale.”

Johanna took my hand against her warm breast and we walked thus, my hand warmed by her breast.

We passed an old doorman we knew. He greeted us. I said to him: “The Count was almost arrested a while ago.” We all laughed.

“You give me life,” said Johanna. “I almost died when I read Hans’ last book. He is so cruelly unjust to me.”

Her eyes twitched now and then as if the light hurt her.

“I don’t want to die now. But he hates me. I don’t know why, but he hates me.”

Her nostrils quivered with furious pride. Her whole body, eyes, mouth, all shriveled with fury as if she had been whipped.

“It isn’t me, Djuna, it isn’t me!”

Even at this moment when Johanna’s vehemence rang so true I feared to ask her: “Did you love Hildred… did you love Hildred more than Hans?”

Then Johanna’s eyes, Johanna’s voice, Johanna’s talk appeared to wither in panic before this question. I could see and feel the flight, the evasion, the tortuousness. Johanna’s glance deviated, her voice became tremulous, uncertain.

“Hildred was a little mad. She used to write poetry for me. I wish you could have read it, you would have loved it.”

“What became of her?”

“I don’t know,” said Johanna. She opened her eyes wide into space, her face became clear, transparent, and I saw it illumined by a halo of innocence. An innocence which permeated her whole being for a moment. An innocence which radiated from her like a gem. So still and crystal pure.

So many questions now rushed to my mind. I wanted to ask: “Is it true what you tell me about the drugs? Is it true you have never taken any?” But I knew already how Johanna’s face darkened when any questions were put to her, and how humiliated she was by any attempt made to clarify her statements. And I knew that was not the way to reach Johanna, that Johanna’s essence slipped out between facts. So I smiled and was silent, and listened to Johanna’s voice, the way its hoarseness changed from rustiness to a whisper, a faint gasp, so that the hotness of her breath touched my face.

I watched her smoke hungrily, as if smoking, talking and moving were all desperately necessary to her, like breathing, and she did them all with such anguish and intensity.

Johanna and I looked at each other, and this look was like a long, long drink which made us shiver with pleasure.

“Did you ever do this,”I asked. “Did you ever walk in rhythm to a word, sing this word to yourself, with each step you take, until you get drunk on it, until it goes to your head. I came towards you repeating the word: ‘danger, danger, danger.’ I love you because you are danger…”

We were standing close together in a dark corner of the station. Standing unsteadily, our feelings spinning, spinning around us, in a maddening turmoil. Our faces drawn violently closer and closer, until the lips almost touched, until we saw each other in each other’s eyes, until our breaths mingled, until we could not speak for the gasp of joy which surged in us. Fever mounting, mounting, the magnet which soldered our mouths together into a blinding, earth-rocking kiss.

“Your eyes are full of pity, Djuna.”

“Do you need pity, Johanna?”

“I need a refuge from Hans, yes. Always. As soon as I see him again I realize he is my greatest enemy. And you don’t know. Before I came I suspected… As soon as I saw you my doubts were over. Hans has portrayed me as the everlasting liar. Do you trust him, Djuna?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. I trusted him at the beginning. He not only betrayed me with women, but he betrayed my personality. He invented a cruel personage who caused him suffering in order to whip himself into writing. I don’t believe in him as a writer. I don’t believe in him as a man either. He is all that he accuses me of being. He is a comedian, a buffoon. He is false. He is neither fantastic enough nor simple enough. He doesn’t want simplicity or honesty. He’s an intellectual. He’s false, false, false.”

Her resentment rose as she talked, like a fever. It burned her eyes, her face. There was such a deep-reaching misunderstanding between them, like a wide chasm. Impossible to render any justice, yet justice was what Johanna demanded. She was begging to be judged, absolved.

She was pleading:

“You don’t know, when we first married, what an interest Hans had in evil. It was then I began to invent for him, to create situations, or at least to exaggerate them. I felt that he wanted that.”

I wanted to ask: “Did you never lie before you met Hans?” I knew that no one begins to lie at a certain hour of one’s life. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because I had also lied when I was a child—about the games I played which I insisted were real and should be believed by my parents and my brothers. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because it had always seemed to me that life must be embroidered on, colored and invented. I knew that when I lied about myself it was not so much because it was expected of me, but because I fancied that my inventions might be more interesting than the truth. From the beginning Johanna too must have taken her fancies seriously. That was the origin of her pretenses. And then some one had come who expected lies, who delighted in unreality, and Johanna had answered this demand. And within her, as within all, there wept and whined a child who was tired of inventions, and who wanted to be loved for her true self, for an unadorned, undramatized self.

I knew that if I asked Johanna to-day: “What were you before you met Hans? What were you when you were ten years old?” Johanna would not answer that she had been an “extra” in a dance hall, nor that her mother had kept a boarding house. Johanna would pause before answering and consider what might come closest to my image of her. I knew that Johanna would not say what she was, or what she thought, but whatever conformed to what she fancied I expected her to be and to think. I knew that to unravel the twistedness of Johanna’s life would take years of gentle and sharp detection. The whole pattern of Johanna’s life would have to be turned inside out. I would have to take Johanna like a fruit and peel the rind of flesh to find the core. Everything which composed the external Johanna was a concealment of her, not an expression. I would have to divest her of her costumes, of her talk, of her facial masks—and then what would I find? Probably a child, a child whining because it was lost and lonely, for lies have that power that they create solitude more effectively than anything else. They disguise the soul. They disguise and conceal and deform, and create enormous distances between the self and the appearance. And everyone is deluded by the appearance. Even love is offered to a reflection, to the appearance.

If I were to unmask you, Johanna, I should only be revealing myself! You are the face of my unmasked self. A thousand times I will unmask you, Johanna, because it is only you and I who know the inexhaustibility of women’s masks. And the last will fall only when we are dust. We see the face beneath the mask, you mine, I yours, because it is the same face. I am your words, Johanna, and you are my acts. You have acted for me. And you have my face, the face of my feelings. I am the bitterness in your words, the softness you are forbidden to betray. The need of mystery you bear like a curse; men have cursed you by enslaving you to your own mystery. I am free because I am able to dispense with mystery.

Johanna was begging to be seen as a martyr to Hans’ work, as the woman who acted always sublimely, as the woman who loved only beauty. See only the beauty in me, only the beauty.

“But I see you all, I e your lies too, I see you exactly as you are, and I love you,” I said.

“You have swallowed Hans’ stories,” said Johanna bitterly. “You also think me a liar.”

“I’ve spent this whole year trying to make Hans understand you, through me. I have trusted him.”

“Well, then you have failed as much as he has. He only pretends to understand in order afterwards to turn round and destroy. He is like a spy who enters your secret life only to report on it later, to expose it.”

“You should not fear exposure,” I said gently.

“Yes, because he only exposes the ugly, the ridiculous.”

I could not deny that Hans was a caricaturist, but only when he was angry, out of revenge.

“But I never did anything to deserve his vengefulness!”

“You betrayed him, Johanna.”

Johanna denied this swiftly, denied it vigorously. She intimated that she could skirt all life, all situations and remain unscathed and faithful. This statement made me angry.

“Don’t say that to me,” I said. “Don’t you dare say that to me. I am a woman, Johanna. I know it is not true. I know that women like us, even when we don’t want to give anything, cannot let a man go without some gift. You can call it pity, if you wish to embellish it. We are not women who take without giving back something. We forget it is ourselves they want. And you know this want touches us, all want touches us, because we are so hungry ourselves, because we are so voracious for love.”

Again all of Johanna’s being seemed to escape before my directness in a panic. Behind the mask a thousand smiles, behind the eyelids ageless deceptions. A deception so ingrained that I knew she would never transcend it.

And I knew that if I wanted Johanna to tell me the truth it was only to answer one question, one vital question which was life and death to me. I knew that Johanna sensed this question lurking behind our talk and our confidences, that she was on her guard against it, that it lay between us like a dagger, which neither of us wanted to pick up. I knew that what I wanted to ask was: “Do you love Hans? Have you returned to stay with Hans? Who is it you abandoned Hans for, and will you hurt him again?”

Johanna knew I wanted toknow this. And so our phrases, even when begun with impulsiveness, would end abruptly and unexpectedly whenever we felt ourselves approaching the core of our anxiety. To elude the ultimate question we crowded the atmosphere with smaller ones. We unearthed the past to evade the present and the future. We watched each other with love and fear. I knew that if I urged Johanna to openness Johanna could say: “It is you who are the liar, the deceiver. It is not for me that you helped Hans, that you served him as I once served him. Such things are only doneched each for love.”

My image ofHans up to now so clear became blurred. Because now that Johanna was living with Hans he was again fighting windmills, exhausting himself in blind, petty rages. She was inflicting venomous wounds, undermining his confidence, attacking his book—because he hadn’t given what she considered a true portrait of herself!

I was tormented with anxiety because I could do nothing for him, noteven see him for a moment. Johanna was watchful and tense, like an animal on a scent.

We sat together at cafés, our knees touching, looking at each other lucidly at first, and then surrendering toour own power over each other as to a consoling drug. We postponed the bitter war, eluded the moment of revelation. I felt like a puppet who was being torn apart. I could no longer keep clear and separate my image of Hans and Johanna. They were drawing me into their own tangle as into a whirlpool. I felt myself being drawn into their war, being forced to admit, to confess my allegiance. Johanna wanted the absolute, the choice, the decisive open choice. She was always insisting: “Whom do you believe, Hans or me?” Always working feverishly to divide us. It was always the ridiculous aspect of Hans, the caricature of him which she revealed to me, knowing well that a defeated Hans would hurt me, knowing well that a raging, frantic Hans was the supreme antithesis to the Hans I had been living with.

Johanna was making a supreme effort to reassert herself, to dominate and possess him again. But why does she want to possess him again only to leave him again dispossessed and reduced?

It was this implacable destruction, this necessity forone to triumph over the other, which incensed me. Why couldn’t Johanna be great without killing Hans? Why couldn’t Hans be great without first killing Johanna? Why must either of them be enriched and saved only by means of the other’s death?

Destruction the sole measure of strength - that was an attitude I found impossible to share. Strength is evinced through creation, I thought. I would not feel greater by triumphing over Hans. I could only feel great if Hans were made greater through me.

War! The necessity of war!

Johanna and I in a taxi, holding each other closely. Johanna saying: “You are giving me life, you are giving me what Hans has taken away from me.” And I heard myself answering with fevered words of passion. Our knees locked, our hands locked, kissing in full awareness of our rivalry. Our enmity rumbling low, deep, watchful.

It was like madness forme to be carrying this diamond lodged in the middle of my forehead, the hard light of my lucidity, of my vision, thinking of means to save Hans while exchanging warm kisses with Johanna. Who is the innocent one?The onewho loves. I feel that Johanna does not love Hans. Who is the human being? The onewho really suffers from the loss of his love. I feel that Johanna would never suffer as I would. She would suffer only in her pride. Who is the cleverest? Who the strongest? The one who loves the least, the one who fights for the triumph of his own ego.

Johanna said: “I am afraid of your eyes,” and she made herself small in my arms. “Your eyes pierce every veil.”

And as Johanna whispered in my ear I recollected the closing words of Hans’ letter: “Thanks to you I am not being crushed this time. Don’t lose faith in me, I beg you.”

Hans came to see me. He tried to kiss me and I would not let him. No, I could not bear that. No, he should not touch me—that would hurt me. He was baffled.

“I want you more than ever,” he said. “Johanna has become a stranger to me. The first two nights with her I could not feel any passion. I love you, and with you alone I feel the connection between the image I carry in me and my desire. There’s no such thing as loving two women. You have displaced Johanna.”

Before he had finished I had surrendered. The closeness seemed profoundly natural. There was nothing changed.

After a while he said:

“Doesn’t Johanna bore you? I find that she talks too much.”

“We have so much to say to each other.”

“Nobody can say to Johanna: ‘Listen, listen deeply.’ I can only make her listen by violence. What do you do that she listens to you?”

“I just look at her.”

“But what do you have to say to each other?”

“If I gave you my own idea and my own image of Johanna, Hans, you would love her. There’s a great deal of mystery in our world, a great deal that will never be clear to you. You think I must know more, because I am a writer, that it must all be clear to me. But all I can say is that there is a world which is closed to you. Johanna has slipped between your fingers. I won’t tear her to pieces as you have done.”

I touched Johanna’s bracelet without looking at it, like a talisman.

“I sit down and try to tell you, to tell you what I’d much rather go on living ecstatically, unbeknown to you—to all. You beat your head against the walls of our world, yes, and because I am an artist you think I will give away the mystery. I will say what Johanna is. I will tear the veil. But to-day I hate my work, Hans. I don’t want to formulate, to force out the delicate, the vague, the voluptuous into the daylight of words. I renounce my mind and my work. I would much rather just live.”

We were lying on the couch, under the window of colored stones. Many, many afternoons we had lain on this couch, looking up at the light coming through the colored stones.

It was not the window which gave on the garden, on its old ivy like the long arms of a furry-haired monkey twisted around the walls. It was not either the window which opened on the sky, showing the bare skeleton of trees in winter. It was for us a window opening on a world we had made together according to our own vision. The Orient-blue stones, the turquoise, the geranium red, the midnight blue, the Veronese green, the chrome yellow, the carmine, those were like the colors of our own moods which gave to sky, sun and moonlight and daylight their own individual hues, which deformed the shape of trees into unknown trees, an unknown world. This other world we entered as soon as we were alone, with a language of our own. This world, slowly, given them, created out of a particular manner of looking at things, at people at events, at new books, pivoted on the axis of a twin vision and purpose, on my faith in his purpose and his vision, my devotion to his purpose… this widely expanded world, made out of vast ideas, out of caresses, out of faith, out of fears and courage… it was this world we saw lying on the couch after the blood fusions, after the intermingling of breath and blood through the colored window with its constellations of hues like the hues of our moods and our particular vision. At first indistinct, and then so immense and potent and indestructible, because everything always flowered between us. This window opened on our multi-formed and multi-colored universe, with its big rhythms and sweeps and profound intensity.

Everything else was an excursion.

“What did you and Johanna talk about?”

I told him everything that these two days with Johanna contained. I exposed all my feelings to him, all my fevers, all my turmoil. I let him read into me nakedly. All former surrenders to him seemed but half a gift, compared with this exposure of myself, this breaking up of myself, this absolute dissolution of myself into him.

I gave myself to him by truth. Nothing else was of importance but our world, the integrity of our world. It was not important that I should have found another who was part of myself, a fragment of myself. It was not important that I should have found Johanna who completed me, because I as an artist had lived marginally, whereas Johanna had given all her life to sensations and gestures. It was not important that I should have found the face I wanted to see in the mirror, that other side of myself, daring, fiery, manifesting itself in acts. My free self! The incarnation of my imaginations, of my inventions. That was not important—that was the pursuit and the love of the self. To love Johanna was merely to love myself, the desired, unrealized, unformulated half of my self.

What I loved to-day, far, far above this self, was Hans. Hans, the other.

To-day I had been treacherous to woman and to myself and to the shadows of myself. I had yielded up the proud and isolated self and all self-seeking.

And he—he lay there quietly, almost broken by a gentle, tolerant wistfulness.

“You and Johanna have something to give to each other. The love you describe is wonderful. I certainly can’t hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I’ve just realized that what I give is something coarse plain, compared to that.”

I stopped him.

“You don’t know what you have given me!” I could not continue. My eyes blurred.

Johanna, Hans and I. His manuscripts spread on the table. Hans was saying very gently:

“I can’t work here. I’d like to go to Djuna’s place a few days. You understand, Johanna, this is the most important period of my life as a writer.”

“You don’t have to leave,” exclaimed Johanna hastily, “I’ll leave, I’ll go away as soon as I can get the money. I’ll go away to-night—I’ll always find some one to stay with.”

“I’m not asking you to leave,” said Hans, “only to leave me alone. I can’t work when you’re around. I can’t work! And the way I feel now I’d commit a crime in order to finish this book!”

I understood this strange, abstract mood, his brassiness. His eyes were black and hard. He was again the supreme egoist, the artist. But Johanna was weeping hysterically, her whole body shaking, raving wildly about him not being a human being, that she must fight him to protect herself against him, that if she stayed with him she would kill herself or do something mad. His work offended her, as a woman. She could only allow it if it glorified her.

At this moment I was not a woman. I was a writer too. I wanted Johanna to go and leave Hans to his work. I felt inhuman myself. Everything was blurred and distorted and magnified by the demon in both of us, the demon of literature.

Johanna’s grief left me unmoved. What stirred was Hans’ cry: “Let me work!”

Johanna got up, trembling.

“You’re better,” she said to Hans, “you’re better in some way that I can’t understand, and you’re worse in a way which crushes me. There’s something in you I can’t seize. I won’t be a slave to your ideas! You’re too spiritual a man. I’m the wrong woman for you.”

I wanted to say: “You love only the man, and the man is only half of Hans.”

Johanna stood ready to leave us, with her hair falling about her shoulders. At this moment her beauty seemed to have reached its climax. I was awed by the ripeness, the opulence of her body under her black cape, by the savage, almost phosphorescent glint of her eyes, by the dewiness and petal transparency of her skin. Johanna at this moment did not seem like a woman, but like some mythological figure of woman. Never did the aureole of this beauty shine so like a legend. I was awed. And awed too that this beauty could be submerged and swept away by a greater power—the great unswerving flow of creation. And it was to this force of creation that I responded as to a greater passion—the great inhuman passion.

Johanna left the room. Hans and I looked at each other with a profound understanding. Then I rose to follow Johanna. In the dark hall I took her in my arms. I caressed her hair, I lulled her with sweet words. I whispered her name caressingly. “My little Johanna, my poor little Johanna.” I caressed her like a child until her sobs subsided.

Johanna and I in a taxi. My arms becoming strong. It is I who am throwing back Johanna’s head. It is I who am kissing Johanna’s throat. And Johanna melting. An orgy of soft flesh. Johanna in my arms taking refuge from her fears of me, so that I might not judge her, not measure her. I would not see her while she lay in my arms. I could see only the forked lightning of her fear.

When I left the taxi I saw the blurred face of Johanna staring through the window. I saw this face behind the window, pleading like the face of a woman drowning. The face of the child frightened and unsure of love, frightened and struggling to wield power through mystery and mystification. A child caught in the great dark strain of lies and fantasies. Every gesture one of frenzied singularity to compel love and admiration. Johanna, little Johanna, beautiful Johanna, sometimes wise and sometimes empty! Johanna with her life all exterior and without core. Believing only in drama, in gestures, in appearance, in war, in outward and visible movement. Believing that a kiss can silence all judgment, believing like a whore that the soul can be traded, the body offered in exchange. Johanna, the born whore, who would triumph as a whore. But Johanna, the soul will not be traded!

This face behind the window, pleading, I saw in it the face of a woman drowning. I saw Johanna struggling to the bottom of the sea, with terror written on her face, the terror of monsters invisible to men. I could see in her face the submerged continents over which the ghost of Johanna borne on a manticore, had wandered. Johanna had seen the mantic religiosa which waits for its prey in a devotional attitude, and the giant crabs that cling to the marabou hair of shell flowers and choke them; she had seen the slimy coil of the octopus strangling the slippery necks of eels; she had seen the wrecks of ships gathered in glutinous cradles of moss, the rotted wood crawling with worms and the bodies of the dead, swollen and burst, staining the water with twisted entrails. She had been terrorized by the gold clarity of the sea on which the giant black birds threw purple shadows, and by the monstrous, phosphorescent eyes of the night which guided her course. She had experienced every terror and they trembled now in her face as she gazed at me through the watery taxi window.

A smile of immeasurable distress…

But in another instant, like a cloud passing over the face of the moon, it was effaced by another smile, the smile of the whore. It was this old, impenetrable smile which brought back to my mind the full impact of that moment when Johanna’s head, like a heavy flower broken from its stem, had fallen on my shoulder. It was this whore’s smile of Johanna which set the world rocking again as I stood there watching the taxi carrying Johanna off. Pity, protection, solace—they fell away from me like gifts of trivial import. I walked away unsteadi, like a man returning from a heavy debauch. I forgot about Johanna’s terror, forgot the child-face peering hungrily through the taxi window.

The taxi had taken care of my impulse, had thwarted it, with that banal fatality with which the petty and the trivial often arrests the most stupendous gestures. The taxi, the ordinary reality in which it moved, the rhythm it obeyed—allowing just that fatal, ordinary moment it required for two persons to part—it was this which had ordained the evolution of my emotion and the duration of it. It was this which allowed me to let Johanna depart with her deep distress, like a whore one has finished kissing, instead of withholding her and making her the gift of my love.

The trifling incident that had arrested the expression of my impulse, the passivity I had displayed, my inertia when confronted with the need of vital action which ought to follow every flash of understanding, the way I submitted to the taxi driver’s automatism, all this was no more amazing than the feeling I had that this was the moment when I understood Johanna’s potentialities or desires as I would never again be able to. Or rather, that this was the moment when I might have conveyed to her how deeply I understood her aspirations, but that I could only express this if Johanna were dead or removed from me by some contrast in our moods, some effective enmity between us. Thus fulfilling the inner fatality which makes of fusion the most evanescent of human attainments.

UNLESS SOME DAY JOHANNA SHOULD READ THIS BOOK.

We were walking together over dead leaves crackling like paper. Johanna was weeping, and I was weeping with her and for her. We were walking through the city as it sank into twilight and it was as if we were both going blind together, with the bitterness of our tears. Through this blurred city we walked, hazily and half lost, the light of a street lamp striking us now and then like a spotlight, throwing into relief Johanna’s distorted mouth and the broken line of her neck where the head fell forward heavily, as if she had been guillotined. The buses came upon us out of the dark, violently, with a deafening clatter and we had to leap out of their way, only to continue stumbling through dark streets, crossing bridges, passing under heavy arcades, our feet trembling on the uneven cobblestones, as if we had both lost our sense of gravity, as if we were treading already some other substance.

Johanna’s voice was plaintive and monotonous, like a lamentation. Her eyes wavered, but always fixed on the ground, as if the whole structure of’ her life lay there, burnt and tattered, and she were watching its consummation.

I was looking straight before me, through and beyond the dark, the lights, the traffic, beyond the buildings. Eyes fixed, immobile like glass eyes, as if the curtain of tears had opened a new realm.

Johanna’s phrases surged and heaved like a turgid sea. Unformed, unfinished, dense, heavy with repetitions, with recapitulations, with a baffled, confused bitterness and anger. I could find nothing to say for the moment—because Johanna was talking about God. Yes, Johanna was talking about the god in man—the god she had sought in Hans.

“I wanted to serve him,” she was saying, “I wanted to make him great, because I felt that he was good, that he was so infinitely better than myself… I felt that I was vile and foul, a liar and a beast. But Hans! Jesus, there was something so good, so charitable in him. He had such an immense compassion… And then when I read what he had written about me—the drabness, the cheapness of my life… No, he’s no god, I know that now! I know that he is treacherous. Only the other night, Djuna, after you left, the other night when I came back to him, I came back to confess everything. I wanted to make myself clean again, I wanted to kneel before him—I did get down on my knees—and have him forgive me. I felt then, as I had often felt before, that he was the most wonderful being I had ever known, that he was the only truly human being I knew. I felt him to be holy—truly. He was like a saint to me. I felt so humble, so less than nothing. I came back to worship at his feet… But what happened? I came back to find him hard, indifferent, cynical. He almost laughed in my face. I seemed so insignificant to him that even my devotion, my worship of him, meant nothing to him… No, he’s no god to me… not any more! I am the god now. It’s I, I, who am the god! Not him! The sacrifices I made for him have made me great. I am bigger than he is now! I have known what it meant to sacrifice one’s self, but now I don’t need to sacrifice myself any more. I’m beyond that… beyond him. Once I needed a god to serve. I needed Hans so—he was a god to me—and I had to serve some one. But he failed me. I have served some one who is less than I am…”

She seemed to contemplate for a moment with great self-pity the isolation which this death of Hans as a god had brought upon her. The light of the street lamp struck her and it revealed the gesture of defeat so vividly that I found nothing to say.

This seeking of god in the dark city, this aimless wandering through the streets touching men and seeking god… this was a fear I had known too… seeking god in Hans, in live men, not in the past, not in the distance, but a god with arms, a god with a living breath, a god we wished to possess for ourselves, alone, in our own isolated woman’s soul. God was still inextricably woven with man and with man’s creation. Yet between this realm, this dark immediate realm which Johanna was weeping over, with her eyes fixed on the ground, I saw another sphere in the form of a circle. One circle issuing from the other. And I wanted to tell Johanna that we were moving from one circle into another, moving and rising, and that Johanna was only suffering from the pain of being thrust out of one circle into another, one groove into another, and that this leap it was which was the most difficult to make. The pain of parting with one’s faith, one’s old love, when one’s desire is rather to renew this faith and preserve the passion. But Johanna was weeping because Hans had said: “leave me alone,” or “let me work,” or “let me sleep.” And I found it impossible to explain to her what a struggle was required to emerge from the past clean of haunting memories and regrets. Impossible to explain to Johanna the inadequacy of our souls to cut life into final, total portions. Impossible to tell her that this pain, this great pain could be healed more quickly with a knowledge, a vision into the next circle. Impossible to answer Johanna’s great need of a frontier against which she might lean as upon a closed door, closing a door upon all pain. I could not take Johanna’s hand and make her raise her head and lead her into the new circle, raise her above pain and confusion, above ess of the city. And these sudden shafts of light upon us could not illumine the realm beyond, where the circle of pain closed and ended and one was raised into another circle. I could not help Johanna emerge out of the immediacy of her pain, leap beyond the strangle-hold of the present.

And so we continued to walk unsteadily over the dead leaves of his indifference, weeping together over an injustice which was as irremediable as the fall of dead leaves on our path. And I was kissing her because there was no other way to atone for a crime I had not committed, a crime ordained by the flux and continuity and mobility of life.

Johanna, Johanna, I wanted to say, will you walk thus with me when it is I who comes to the end of a circle, when it is I who shall be thrust out of the circle of Hans’ love?

When we met under the red light of the café we recognized in each other a mood of irony. We would dance together on our irony as on the chiming sparks of a dizzy star. We would laugh at him now, running with seven-leagued boots over the universe, laughing.

“He’s working so hard, so hard, he’s in a daze,” said Johanna. “He talks night and day about Death. I went to sleep the other night while he was talking to me.”

I was lonely, deep down, to think Hans had been at his work for two weeks without thinking of or noticing either of us. And my loneliness drew me close to Johanna.

“He was glad we were going out together,” continued Johanna rapidly. “He said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn’t any idea of time; he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”

A feeling of immense loneliness invaded Johanna.

We walked, as if we had wanted to walk away from our mood, as if we wanted to walk into another world. We walked up the hill of Montmartre, with houses lying on their sides like heather. We heard music, music so off tune that we did not recognize it as the music we heard every day. We slid into the shaft of light from where this music carne—into a room which seemed built of granified smoke and crystallized human breath. A room with a painted star on the ceiling, and a wooden, pock-marked Christ. Gusts of weary, petrified songs so dusty with use. Faces like empty glasses. The musicians made of rubber, like the elastic, cloud-like bouncing rubber-soled night.

“We hate Hans to-night. We hate man.”

The craving for caresses. Wanting and fighting the want. Both frightened by the vagueness of our desire, the indefiniteness of our craving. A rosary of question marks.

Johanna whispered:

“Let’s take drugs to-night.”

e pressed her strong knees against me, she inundated me with the moist brilliance of her eyes, the paleness of her face.

I shook my head, but I drank, I drank. No drink equal to the taste of war and hatred. No drink like bitterness.

I looked at Johanna’s fortune teller’s eyes, and at her taut profile like a tiger sniffing his prey in a bamboo sea.

“It takes all the pain away, it wipes out all the ugliness, all the foul, dirty reality.”

She leaned over the table until our breaths mingled, and she fixed her snake-like eyes upon me.

“You don’t know what a relief it is. The smoke of opium like fog. It brings marvellous dreams, and gaiety. Such gaiety, Djuna! And you feel so powerful, so powerful! You don’t feel any more frustration, you feel that you are lording it over the whole world, with a marvellous strength. No one can hurt you, humiliate you, confuse you. You feel that you are soaring over the world. Everything becomes larger and deeper. Such joys, Djuna, as you’ve never known or imagined. The touch of a hand is enough… the touch of a hand is like going the whole way… the tip of the finger on the breast can give an orgasm. And the time, how it flies! The days pass like an hour… it is all like down, so soft and lulling. You would love the heaviness of the body, the laziness, and the smells, the smells which fill the room. No more straining and desiring, just dreaming and floating and enjoying…”

“I’ve known all this without drugs,” I murmured.

“No, never as strongly, as powerfully. Everything you’ve ever known, every joy is a hundred times more acute, more overwhelming… Take drugs with me, Djuna. I want to do it with you. It’s with you I want to do it.”

I yielded, and consented with my head and my eyes. Then I saw that Johanna was looking at the Arab rug merchant who stood by the door, with his red hat, his kimono, and his slippers, his arms loaded with Arabian rugs and pearl necklaces. Under the rug I saw he had a wooden leg with which he was beating time to the jazz.

Johanna laughed hysterically, shaking her whole body with drunken laughter.

“You don’t know, Djuna… this man… with his wooden leg… you never can tell… he may have some. There was a man once, with a wooden leg like that. He was arrested and they found his wooden leg just packed with ‘snow’. Maybe I’ll go and ask him.”

And she got up with her heavy, animal walk, and talked to the rug merchant, looking up at him alluringly, begging, smiling up at him in that secret way she had of smiling at me. A burning pain invaded me to see Johanna begging. But the merchant shook his head, and smiled innocently, shook his head firmly and smiled, and offered her his rugs and the necklaces.

When I saw Johanna returning empty-handed I drank again, and it was like drinking fog, long draughts of fog.

We danced together, the floor turning under us like a phonograph record. Johanna dark and potent under the brim of her mannish hat.

A gust of jeers seemed to blow through the place. A gust of jeers. But we danced, cheeks touching, our cheeks chalice white. We danced, and the jeers cut into the haze and splendor of our dizziness like a whip. The eyes of the men were insulting us. The eyes of the men called us by the name the world had for us. Eyes. Green, jealous, crucified, tortured eyes. Eyes of the world. Eyes sick with hatred and contempt. Caressing eyes. Eyes ransacking our conscience. Stricken yellow eyes caught in the flare of a match. Heavy torpid eyes without courage, without dreams. Mockery. Frozen mockery.

Johanna and I wanted to strike those eyes, break them, break the bars of green wounded eyes condemning us. We wanted to break the walls confining us, suffocating us. We wanted to break out from the prison of our own fears, break every obstacle. But all we found to break were glasses. We took our glasses and we broke them over our shoulders and we made no wish, but we looked at the fragments of the glasses on the floor wonderingly, as if our mood might be lying there also, in broken pieces.

We danced mockingly, as if we were sliding beyond the reach of the men’s hands, running like sand between their insults. We scoffed at these eyes which brimmed with knowledge, for we knew the ecstasy of mystery, and of fog, and the words they uttered fell like heavy stones through the fog of our ecstasy. The eyes and the words of men fell through like stones, while we danced mockingly away and down the rolling hills of fog, fire and orange fumes of a world we had seen through a slit in the dream. Spinning and reeling and falling, spinning and turning and rolling down the brume and smoke of a world seen through a slit in the dream.

The waiter put his ham-colored hand on Johanna’s arm:

“You’ve got to get out of here, you two!”

I arrived with a bottle of vodka under my arm. I was already drunk—on the idea of the vodka. A high drunkenness, like an Arabian magic carpet.

I found Johanna in a sullen mood, sullen as a gypsy, a rampant dark sullenness, earth-colored, snake- tongued.

Hans came out of the kitchen looking pale, abstracted. He came out with a dazed expression, as if he had left his body on the table with the thick manuscript he had been slaving over.

“Look at him,” said Johanna, “that’s the ghost I have to live with.”

The bottle of vodka stood on the kitchen table. Hans put his hands around it lovingly, absentmindedly.

The three of us were now sitting around the stained kitchen table, looking mutely at the bottle of vodka. Suddenly Johanna pounced on it, uncorked it swiftly, and spilled out three brimming glasses of it.

“Sometimes,” said Johanna, “when I read what you’ve had to say about me, I don’t know whether I’m a goddess, a whore, or a criminal.”

“You flatter yourself,” said Hans, and I saw that his eyes were cruel and angry, his face flushed, and that he was looking at me too with a secret, vengeful anger which the drink had brought to the surface.

“To-day I was looking at a necklace in the Trocadero,” he continued. “A necklace which would have suited either of you. It was a big, clumsy necklace of bones which the men of Africa used to put around the necks of the women who lied. It would have suited you swell, the two of you!”

And he drank some more.

I felt a deep disquietude. I felt this anger, this hatred flaring up between us like a strong, brutal wind; I felt caught up by it, and at the same time, in some strange, inexplicable way, I felt unwilling to defend myself. It was like the taste of something acrid and new, like a poison, like a simoun storm in the desert, which made one nervous and yet heavy with fever. I picked up my vodka and drank with them—as if to signify my deep desire to sink with them into that dark, fiery realm of war and hate.

And then I noticed that Johanna’s body had begun to loosen visibly, that it had become like lead. I saw her mouth widening, saw her eyes growing bleary, her legs outstretched, heavy, inert, wooden. Johanna had suddenly lost her luminosity. Johanna suddenly looked to me exactly like a common, ordinary whore.

As the fiery vodka dulled me, I felt immensely weary of my constant ascensions. I wanted to be lost with Hans and Johanna, to yield, to forget my name and identity, and all that was expected of me, my promises and my pursuit of perfection. I wanted to follow Hans and Johanna into disorder, and indifference, and carelessness, and unscrupulousness, to borrow and take and beg and live only in the moment…

I laughed and said: “This vodka is like the sun, it burns all caring away, it burns consciousness away, it burns everything away…”

But when I saw the looseness of Johanna’s mouth and the abandon of her body on the chair, I said in a heavy voice:

“I don’t like you when you’re drunk, Johanna.”

Hans toppled over and fell asleep against the table, hiding his flushed red face in his arms, and laughing softly now and then.

Johanna’s Viking body was crumbling. I tried to drag her to bed, but she was too heavy for me. Like David I could fling stones at Goliath, but a drunken Goliath I could not carry to bed.

Hans awakened and helped me, tottering as he did so under the burden.

Johanna laughed, wept, vomited… In keeping with her role Johanna was going through the gestures which I had imagined myself to be making when I had seen Johanna drunk. It was Johanna who vomited for me all the lives and adventures I had embellished by the alchemy of illusion. I vomited with Johann the reality of adventure, my desire for drunkenness, for high color, for excess. Absolute drunkenness cancels the joys of drunkenness, intense living destroys intensity, reality destroys the dream. Everything beautiful has to remain suspended and unfinished.

Johanna wept, laughed, and threw the towels at my face. I wiped the floor.

Johanna raved:

“I love you, you are cruel and clever. You have been cruel and clever, Djuna, that’s why I got drunk. You’re cruel, terribly cruel.”

But when Johanna said I love you, it had the emptiness of a gasp. She had exhausted the meaning and potency of these words with her comedies. It was an automatic gasp. The impetus was feeble, deflated. Automatically she might repeat for ever “I love you,” but the actress in her had exhausted the potency of the words.

She was like a foaming sea, Johanna, a sea churning up wreckage, skeletons of ships which I had glimpsed in full sailing. The debris of her doubts and fears: “Hans, Djuna, you’re both too cruel and clever. I’m afraid of you both.”

At this moment I remembered the face of Johanna, the child staring through the dimmed taxi window, but before this caricature of Johanna’s distress, the pity I had felt then was gone.

Pity, illusion, the dream, all had been spilled in vomit, wiped up, washed down the sewer and lost.

Johanna slid off the bed and had to be hoisted back again. Hans was laughing softly, drunkenly, as he wiped the floor.

But I was unable to laugh. I was enslaved by my own inexorable seriousness. It seemed to have devolved on me, the weary task of representing tragedy, the necessity of bearing up my seriousness in spite of all ridicule. The discarded seriousness of others had fallen on my shoulders because I had known always that those who discard tragedy like an old glove or a frayed collar are throwing away something the preciousness of which was always clear to me. Exactly as if I had become a kind of rag-picker for the fragments of tragedy.

Driven again by this ridiculous seriousness, I stood there in the middle of the room, unable to laugh with Hans. I was caressing Johanna and putting cold rags on her forehead. I was vomiting with Johanna all the illusions, fantasies, grandiose gestures, colorful extravagances, vertigoes so seriously and noiselessly. In keeping with her destiny Johanna was continuing to add to the chain of her external movements, expressions and gestures.

I lay all dressed at Johanna’s side. My first night with Johanna. No more Johanna. The stench of vomit. A body. Earth. A body. Heavy earth. Inert earth. Johanna!

I craved at this moment the supreme drunkenness of creation. I was hungry again for my own ecstasies, my solitude, my lightness, my joys. My ecstasies without vomit: not those which filled the being with poisons which must afterwards be ejected as the whore that men empty themselves into is ejected at dawn.

Then came the moment when a curtain seemed to fall over my life. As this curtain fell, I strove wistfully to gather up the last movements. Johanna and I had been walking together in sandalled feet. I had seen the sandalled feet treading the asphalt. I had looked down at them and said thoughtfully: “I like to see ourselves walking.”

Because I was already no longer walking, neither walking, nor eating, nor sleeping. I was already writing—writing even as the curtain descended. I had yielded my maximum of human feelings. I had ceased to exist. I had lost my humanness. And before Johanna had become aware of this transformation, I had run away. The human being in me was dead.

Johanna had given me violets. I vomited them up too. Violets. More things. Another abortion. Trying to efface the failure of one gesture with another. Objects. The world of things, which in the end turns the stomach. These violets had been extremely touching. Johanna, still heavy-headed, after having torn down her pyramid of illusions, had rushed to buy me violets, to atone. Very sublime, these violets which I had thrown away. But I would not let myself be bribed. The violets were crushed between the tin-voiced typewriter keys. And with violet ink I recorded the night.

The following night I returned to Johanna.

We were alone.

We were alone without daylight, without past, without any thought of the resemblance between our togetherness and the union of other women. The whole world was being pushed to one side by our faith in our own uniqueness. All comparison was proudly discarded. Johanna and I alone, naked of knowledge and naked of other experiences. We remembered nothing before this hour; we were innocent of associations. We forgot what we had read in books, what we had seen in cafés, the laughter of men, and the mocking participation of other women. Our individuality washed down and effaced the universe. We stood at the beginning of everything. We were naked and innocent of the past.

We stood before the night which belonged to us as two women emerging out of sleep. We stood on the first step of our timidity, of our faith, before the long night which belonged to us. Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of calculation, of premeditation, or of experience.

Two women. Strangeness. All the webs of ideas blown away. New bodies, new souls, new minds, new words. We would create it all out of ourselves, fashion our own reality. Innocence. No roots dangling into other days, other nights, or other people. The potency of a new stare into the face of our desire and our fears. Johanna’s timidity and mine. Johanna’s awkwardness and mine. Our fears. A great terror slashing through the room, cutting icily through us, like a fallen sword. A new voice. Johanna’s voice hoarse, breathless, and mine like an exhalation of hers, a breath, almost a voicelessness, because we were so frightened.

Johanna sat so heavily on the edge of the bed, her earthy weight like roots sinking into the earth. Under the weight of her jungle stare I trembled.

Our bracelets tinkled.

The bracelets had given the signal. A signal like the first tinkle of beads on a savage neck. I took my bracelet off. We put them on the table, side by side.

The light. Why was the light so still, like the suspense of our blood? Still with fear. Like our eyes. Shadeless eyes that could not melt.

The dresses. My dress rolled around me like a long seaweed. I wanted to turn and drop it on the floor, but my hands lifted it like a Bayadere lifting her skirt to dance, and it rose like an umbrella slip and then fell, fell, like a leaf under a rain-shower.

Johanna’s eyes were like the forest. The darkness of the forest, the watchfulness behind an ambush. Fear. I journeyed into the darkness of it. I walked from the place where my dress had fallen, carrying my breasts like gifts in my half-opened hands; I carried them to her as if expecting to be thrust by her mortally.

Johanna loosened her hair and said: “You are so extraordinarily white.” With a strange weight, like a sadness, she spoke. It was not the white substance of me, but my significance, the whiteness of my newness to life, which Johanna seemed to sigh for. “You are so white, so white and smooth.” And there were deep shadows in her eyes, shadows of one old with life; shadows in her neck, in her arms, and on her knees, violet shadows.

I wanted to reach out for her. I saw that Johanna wanted as much to become I as I wanted to become Johanna. I saw how we both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. I saw in both of us the dark strain of wanting to be the other, to deny one’s self, one’s form, one’s reality. Johanna and I both struggling to deny our lives and our bodies: Johanna thinking she desired my newness, and I desiring Johanna’s deeply marked body.

I drank the violet shadows, drank the imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors, other caresses. How all the others clung to Johanna’s body, made her heavy, heavy with the loss of herself, lost in the maze of her gifts! How the lies and the loves, and the dreams, and the obscenities and the fevers weighed down her body, and how I wanted to become leadened with her, poisoned with her!

Johanna looked at the whiteness of my body as into a mirror. She was herself standing at the beginning of all things, unblurred, unmarked. She wanted to stand at the beginning of all things. And I wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the very bottom of the violet wells.

“Nubile, nubile,” dreamed Johanna. “I could so easily break you in two.”

Through the acrid forest of her being there was a vulnerable opening. I tread into it lightly. Caresses of down, and Johanna could do nothing against the moth invasion. Myrrh between our breasts. Incense in our mouths. Tendrils of hair raising their heads to the passing of wind in the tips of our fingers. The skin flowered under the brushing of lips and we discovered a softness like that of clouds about to burst and spill their honey. Clouds about to burst. Kisses curling into the conch-shell necks. The soft raised mounts touching as the salted pollen burned a passage-wy. Tendrils of hair bristling and between our closed lips a moan, a sigh, a sob.

Pounding of drums. Delirious sensual diffusions. Effulgence of face and breasts.

“How soft, how soft, how soft you are,” said Johanna, “how soft and treacherous.”

Cool. green-eyed fury and passion. The defence of lies. Weaving lies swiftly, like spider webs. Lies. Lies. I love no man. I love no man.

“But I see his image in your eyes. I feel him in you.”

Disguise. Infernos of doubts. Johanna, Johanna, we are not enemies. I was laughing. Peaks of faith and infernos of doubts. The taste of sacrilege. The mouths he kissed. The women whose savour he knows. Poisonous kisses. Culpable joys. Him. The one man within two women. Jealousy dormant, lying at our side, between our caresses, slipping in between our caresses.

(Johanna, Johanna, if you arouse hatred between us, you break the magic alliance and thrust us both into a world which is not as aware of us as we are of each other! All that he has failed to notice! All that he has failed to love in both of us, how delicately we have culled it, nourished each other, assuaged that famine for love, for minuteness in love! Assuaged with a woman-knowledge. Must we awake to the great pain of rivalry, the bleak war, when this hour contains all that slips between his fingers! The jewels in your voice which fall on my fantastic registering, the filigrane of my gestures which your eyes alone can follow, the words fallen which I alone can hear, the arrows of humiliations which I cover with velours and fur and brocade, the velours and incense of our words for each other, our power to lift every ordinary hour to a level of wonder— is it all to be lost, Johanna? It must not be lost. Stay in my arms. Let us keep our perfidious alliance. Together, we are queens, and we triumph. At war with each other, nourishing the hatred, we cripple each other.)

But jealousy had stirred in our flesh. We lay together, hair almost braided together, while the dawn entered the room.

(Johanna, you are afraid? You are doubting? Everything you fear is true. But you should be rejoicing that it is I and none other, I who am half of you! You don’t understand me. There is no treachery, only intermarriage, a trilogy, and passion running triangularly. But you look upon me as upon an enemy. I only completed you. But I am not complete without you. You crush the possibility of a miracle. You and I destroying solitude and fear and pain in one kiss, in one night—all the pain and rancor between women, centuries of war, buried in our twinsoft flesh, Johanna. You and I revolving around him. Your vulnerability and mine. I would always find a way to heal his thrusts.)

The grey dawn entered the room, a grey, gelatinous dawn, which showed the dirt on the window, the crack in the table, the stains on the wallpaper. Johanna and I sat up on the bed as if the dawn had opened our eyes. Slowly we seemed to descend from some dangerous height, with the weight of our fatigue and the appearance of the daylight. I saw on Johanna’s mouth the rouge spread by our kisses so that the shape of her mouth seemed lost. It was as if the colors had run.

Every cell of our dream seemed to burst all at once, with the doubt which had entered Johanna’s mind. Johanna’s face was changed. Her eyes seemed glazed, and her profile shrewd. Her serpent back stiffened, and I saw her gathering herself together as if to pounce. I felt the danger and I struggled to open my eyes, to prepare myself.

Doubt. Doubt was hardening and crystallizing in Johanna. It crystallized her features, her eyes, it tightened her mouth, it stiffened her body. I shivered with cold, with the icy incision of this new day which was laying everything bare.

Bare eyes looking at each other, with bare, knife-pointed questions.

Johanna leaped from the bed and stood before me, tense, ominous, and her words burned and rent the air like summer lightning.

“I’m not duped by your love of me,” she hissed. “I know you’re playing a foul trick on me. But you didn’t fool me. I knew about it long ago. I’ve been acting all the time. I pulled off a Lesbian act on you. You thought I loved you! I hate you! I could murder you. You sicken me with your lies. Say something! Don’t lie there with round, innocent eyes. I know that you and Hans…”

“I love you, Johanna,” I said quietly, “I love you.”

“And I loathe you!” screamed Johanna. “You’re shrewd and you’re devilish. I’ll say this much for you—at last he’s found his mate! Clever you are! Far more clever than him! You’ll devour him… Funny, he always said I would devour him. But wait! When he gets you he’ll get a real spider. Wait till he finds out that he’s got a Lesbian on his hands. He used to call me a Lesbian! Me! Me!”

She strode back and forth like a panther, she jerked her head spasmodically, and then turned on me tempestuously with a shriek in her voice:

“Say something! Say something, will you! I’d like to walk over your damned face, I’d like to crush it out, your damned innocent face, you little viper!”

She took the bracelets and flung them out of the window. Then she walked over to me, and with that hard, gem-like smile of the whore, and that low, begging voice, that obscene, begging voice of the whore, she said:

“Give me the money to go away! You can do that for me at least! I want to go back to the man I really love. Don’t worry—I won’t kill you!”

She moved away, heavily, as she spoke, almost stumbling, and with that crazy, peaked, demonic smile of hers she cried:

“Do you hear me? Now—now you have the final chapter for your book!”

At this I leaped up with a sob: “Cheap! Cheap!” I shouted. “Don’t be cheap! I’ll forgive you anything, Johanna, but for God’s sake don’t cheapen yourself.” Hysterically, my voice thin and desperate, I repeated again: “It’s so cheap! So cheap! Don’t you say that! Not you, Johanna!”

Then suddenly all my anger seemed to be washed away. All my resentment. I seemed to be falling into darkness. Fog. The weight, the tremendous weight ofmy head pulled up by the clouds and swung in space, the body like a wisp of straw—clouds dragging my head, body loose and dangling—dragging me over the world. I could not stop, descend, rest. I could hear the movements of the planets and stars, the rushing, the shifting and shuffling of circles. I could hear the passing of mysteries and the breathing of monsters. I lived within a mystery. In the dark I always stretched my hand and touched Hans. My eyes were closed. The eyes of reality. To feel and to flow without destroying the dewiness of events by dissection… The dew… The night. The moisture of things and of human beings. The aureole of our breath…

But it was not the night. It was day. It was a lead-colored day and Johanna was shaking me violently.

“Put your dress on quickly. I’ve an idea Hans has been listening behind the door all night.”

She seemed electrified. We were both trembling.

“If you won’t admit anything, I’ll make him confess. But I don’t want him to find us in bed together…”

When I was dressed Johanna went stealthily to the door, and then opened it brusquely. There was no one there. I followed her out of the room and watched her open the door of the other bedroom. I looked over Johanna’s shoulder.

Hans was lying there, asleep. His face roseate, his mouth joyous. Even when his eyes were closed they seemed to be laughing.

HE WAS PROFOUNDLY ASLEEP AND SNORING.