The Winter of Artifice

THE VOICE

Djuna is lying down in a cell-shaped room of the tallest hotel in the City, in a building shooting upward like a railroad track set for the moon. A million rooms like cells, all exactly alike, and reaching in swift confused layers towards the moon. The rapid birds of elevators traverse the layers with lightning flashes of their red and white eyes signalling, and without a single quiver of their wings. Their eyes red and white lights signalling UP or DOWN, to the sun terraces, the observation towers, the solarium, or the storage rooms in the underground. All the voices of the world captured by the radio wires in this Babel tower, and even when the little buttons are marked off, this music of all the languages seeps through the walls of the hotel, a continuous flute chant of complaints. The people riding up and down the elevators are never permitted to crash through the last ceiling into pure space, and never allowed to pierce through the ground floor to enter the demonic regions below the crust of the earth. When they reach the highest tip they swoop down again back to the heavy repose in darkness. For Djuna the elevator does not stop at the sun terraces. When it clicks up there she feels a great anguish. She is certain it will pass beyond and through the ceiling, as she does with her feelings, explode in a fuse of ascension. When it stops dead on the ground floor she feels again a moment of anguish; it will not stop here, but bury itself below, where there is hysteria and darkness, wells, prisons, tombs.

Passing through the carpeted hallways, she can hear the singing, the weeping, the quarrels and confessions seeping out. Her footsteps are not heard in this convent of adulteries. The chambermaid is passing, carrying old newspapers, magazines, cigarette butts, breakfast left-overs. The boy is running with telegrams, special deliveries and telephone messages. He passes and with him a knife thrust of icy wind angrily banging the doors opened on intimate lives. Trays of food for the lovers and for the unloved. The house detective.

Merely passing down the halls noiselessly over the carpeted floor Djuna is aware of confessions seeping out. In all the eyes she sees only the secret desire to confess. The elevators disgorge people feverishly eager to confess. They ask for the room of the modern priest, where a man in an armchair is listening to the unfaithful lying on the divan, looking down at them, with his own face against the light. Looking down at them to keep fresh in him the wound of compassion. When the glance rests on human beings from this position, where he can see the frailty of the hair, how it parts, falls, where it thins, where he can see the brow like a sharp landslide, discover the delicacy of the skin as it alone reveals itself when watched obliquely, all men seem in need of protection. From where he looks all noses slant without audacity, point without impertinence, a tender root to the mouth merely. The eyes are covered by weary eyelids, their motion slower when watched from above, a curtain of hyate livensitive skin lowered with the gravity of sleep or death. Without the thrusting light-duel of the eyes, without the glaze and fervor of expression, courage, cruelty, humor, all men look crucified, passive, covering dolorous secrets. The mouth without its sensual openness, its breath, appears like a target mark, a vulnerable opening, a wound in the human being through which all his sorrows dribble in hysteric foam.

The man listening to confessions is strapped to his armchair and he sees them all struggling, defeated, wounded, crippled. They are laying themselves open before him, demanding to be condoned, absolved, forgiven, justified. They want this Voice coming from a dark armchair, a substitute for god, for the confessor of old.

Djuna, lying down, remembers all this that she has lived, and that so many others are living after her. This talk in the dark with one who becomes a part of herself, who answers all the doubts in her. This man without identity, the Voice of all she did not know but which was in her to bring to light.

The Voice of the man who helped her to be born again.

He was taking her slowly back to the beginning, and this talking to a man she could not see was like a dialogue with a Djuna much greater than the every day Djuna, a Djuna, she felt at times as clearly as one feels the pushing of the wind on street corners. The larger Djuna pushing the smaller one to act and speak greatness, not smallness or doubt or fear. The Voice had unburied this larger Djuna, had confronted her with her desires, permitted them to fuse. Before this they lay separate with an abyss of yearning and hunger between them, one the smaller Djuna in a world she feared as tragic, now the larger Djuna in a world she no longer feared. The Voice had spoken to dispel the turmoil in her, the dissonances, and the divisions: I want to reconcile you to yourself. As if she had grown into two irreconcilable branches and by this lost her strength.

“Hans,” she was telling him, “is both very near to me and at the same time very far. I can’t understand it. I don’t want to lean on you any more, but I must. I feel at times an abyss under my feet. When he moves away I cannot be quiet and alone. He seems bound to me and then completely unbound. He leaps out of my orbit and then inside again. He changes. I look at him one morning and he seems dispersed, ghostly. One day there is warmth in him, the next none. There are times when he kisses me and I feel it is unreal. He is like sand, like water, like wax, like cotton. When he returns to me I can see the imprint of others on him, I hear their voices, their thoughts in him. What does this mean? Does love die in one day, like this? Or is it my faith in the love? Is he gone from me? I feel as if I were running down empty corridors, leading me nowhere. I feel dissolved in doubt. We went out together last night, we drank together. Some one was courting me. And Hans became like soup, and when he is like soup he fraternizes with everyone, even this man who was trying to take me away from him. He falls into states of effusive display, he loves everybody. His whole self opens in warmth and hospitality. There was no longer any Hans but this man for everyone to take hold of, to sit near to. He is promiscuous, I tell you. I can’t bear it, how near they come. They talk in his face, they breathe his breath. Anyone at all has this privilege. He is like a whore. Anyone at all can talk to him in the street, sit at his table, share his house and perhaps me. He gives away everything. He makes all the promises, asks questions, informs himself of everyone’s needs. He melts away in a kind of sensual generosity. When I see him this way, I feel him lost. I returned alone to the hotel. In the hotel room I looked out of my window at the electric signs, and I pictured him like a drunken sailor, embracing everyone in the street, falling into the avid arms of the whores, yielding, laughing with his mouth so open, unsteady on his legs, without memory of me, and the more the electric signs blinked, danced before me, the greater I imagined his debauch. Instead of a heart I felt a hole in my body. A black hole where my heart had been. If this is love, this falling into a mesh, this knotted, bound, knotted union to another body which makes all the gestures made by the other so tormentingly alive in me… what will I do? I cannot stand separate from him. If is as if I am inside of him, the same flesh, feeling all he does even when away from me, and it is me he gives away to other people. I kept looking at the electric signs which were lighting the red dance halls where he was, lost to me. I never thought of the next day, never thought of a return, only of his body torn from me, and this black hole left in its place, and each moment of his betrayal was a life-time. Every movement of this night was slowed up, the electric lights moved more slowly, to make the night last longer. What interminable hours—he had been out for many years, laughing, enjoying the dance hall women. Will I die like this every night? This night without faith was longer than all the rest of my life. I can’t free myself of this image. I am more lonely than before, when I loved no one. This jealousy really stops the life in me, strangles me. What am I going to do? I waited all night for the sound of his door opening. He came back and laid his head right where the hole had been. He was not drunk. I was sobbing. He was amazed: ‘What have I done? I would not hurt you, not you. I would not want to hurt you, but what have I done? How can you suffer when nothing has happened? You must have faith.’ That’s what he said. He was right. There is something wrong with me. I want to live only with the intimate self of the other. I only care about the intimate self. I hate to see people in the world, their masks, their falsities, their surrender to the world, their resemblance to others, their promiscuity. I only care about the secret self. I suppose I only want the dream and the isolation.

“I have the fear that everyone is leaving, moving away, that love dies in an instant. I look at the people walking in the street, just walking, and I feel this: they are walking, but they are also being carried away. They are part of a current. Each moment that is passing takes them somewhere else. I confuse the moods which change and pass with the people themselves. I see them carried into eddies, always moving out of some state they will never return to, I see them LOST. They do not walk in circles, back to where they started, but they walk out and beyond in some irretrievable way, too fast, toward the end. And I feel myself standing there, I cannot move with them. I seem to be standing and watching this current passing and I am left behind. Why have I the feeling they all pass, like the day, the leaves, the weather, the moods of climate, into death? ”

“Because you are standing still and measuring the time by your standing still, the others seem to run too fast towards an end, which, if you were living and running with them, you would cease to be aware of. The death you are aware of is only in you because you are watching.”

“I stand for hours watching the river downtown. What obsesses me is the debris. I look at the flowers floating, petals completely opened, the life sucked out of them, flowers without pistils. Rubber dolls, punced, bobbing up and down like foetuses. Boxes full of wilted vegetables, bottles with broken tops. Dead cats. Corks. Bread that looks like entrails. Torn envelopes. These things haunt me. The debris. Well, when I watch people it is as if at the same time I saw the discarded parts of themselves. Detritus. And so I can’t see their motions except as acts which lead them faster and faster to the waste, the end, to the river where it will be thrown out. The faster they walk the streets, the faster they move toward this mass of debris. That is how I see them, caught by a current that carries them off. “

“Only because you are standing still. If you were in the current, in love, in ecstasy, the motion would not show only its aspect of death. You see what life throws out because you stand outside, shut out from the ferment itself. What is burnt, used, is not regretted by anyone who is the fire consuming all this. If you were on fire you would enjoy throwing out what was dead. You would fight for the lightness of your movements, loving, hating, dancing, caressing. It is not living too fast and abandoning oneself that carries one towards death, but not moving. Then everything deteriorates. When parts of yourself die they are only like leaves. What refuses to live in you will become like cells through which the blood does not pass. The blood must pass.

“There must be change. When you are living you seek the change; it is only when you stop that you become aware of death. Death and abandon. Death and separation.”

Djuna walked out in the street, blind with the rush of memories. She stood in the center of the street eddies, and suddenly she knew the whole extent of her fear of flowing, of yielding, of depending on another. Suddenly she began walking faster than whoever walked beside her, to feel the exultation of passing them. The one who does not move feels abandoned, and the one who loves and weeps and yields feels he is living so fast the debris cannot catch up with him. She was moving faster than the slowly flowing rivers carrying detritus. Moving, moving. Flowing, flowing, flowing. When she was watching, everything that moved seemed to be moving away, but when moving this was only a tide, and the self turning, rotating, was feeding the rotation of desire.

Djuna no longer watched death. She was dancing, and she was dancing away from Hans, and back to him, leaving more space and air between them. But thinking of him, attentive to her returns. Thinking constantly of Hans but dancing into new lives. Alert, and a little impatient, aware of time (to be there when he returns). She opened many doors. (I am not here to stay. He must not be kept waiting.) He is behind every move she makes. She is still swallowing food for him, looking at women with his eyes, feeling the sensuality of the day through his skin. She laughs his laughter, feels all the currents passing through him.

Could anyone help her to forget Hans for an hour? Could Edgar help her, Edgar with his astonished eyes saying to her: “I cannot tell what you will be to-morrow, that is why I love you. You feed on miracles and transformations. You may have been afraid but you never died.” The whiteness of his room like the whiteness of the streets. The world excluded from his room. They met in quietness and elation. Elation in royal blue and whiteness.

Out in the snow again she does not feel her body. She is afraid of becoming a saint. Edgar might save her, Edgar waiting for her every day carrying flowers in silver paper. Flowers in silver paper! With this bouquet in his hand the world loses all its insensate rotation and askewness.

She has a fear of becoming a saint. She feels her body slipping away from her.

She is dancing with Edgar in the luminous turning disk in a shower of changing lights, but when her dress opens a little at the top she can smell the mixed odor of herself and Hans. She still feels Hans’ moisture between her legs. But she is still afraid of being lured back into the whitest corners of the dream, afraid of the nun’s wings like small ship sails. She likes to feel other desires around her. She would like many men to come and take hold of her, so her body would cease slipping from her. She finds herself so far from her desires, so far from her own flesh, this flesh, these feet walking over wet snow in sandals because she has so strong a sense of wonder she cannot believe her feet will get wet, her throat ache. Her love for Hans spilling over in multiple desires to be made woman many times over again, to remain woman at his side, to stay in his world because it is his world and he is in it. She sees the dirty snow, like the soiled bandages of a crippled city. She loves the world too much, it is implanted in her like man himself; no hatred pours from her, yet she is grateful to Edgar because his desire, his hand on her, the flowers in silver paper, everything that is simple, life-like. Ordinary, like his words ‘I love your gaiety, you’re a thoroughbred,’ because the place the dog tied at the entrance with the coats and hats, the waiter’s smile, the snow brought from the street marking the dance floor with stains, all this can arrest this ascension in her, this vast rotation in space, this proximity to all forms of departure. He said she was a thoroughbred, and not a saint. She had been made woman by Hans. Hans alone held in his hand all the roots of her being, and when he pulled them, in his own motion outward, he inflicted a torture which destroyed all the roots at once and sent her into space. Edgar wanted to come close to her, and she would let him, while imagining Hans’ pain. She would be Hans observing her own severance from him. A meeting of eyes, a silence, a blind meeting with Edgar, covered with flowers in silver paper, in a world that stood still. Below the level of feeling where Hans could watch the scene and be in turn transfixed to the pain of stillness while the nightmare enveloped and pierced him: and so Hans saw the clothes falling, heard the music, witnessed the scene of a Djuna lying down and saying: Why do you leave me so alone, through what fissure between us does this stranger penetrate and approach me? I am quiet and yielding like a plant. Unafraid and full of joy at feeling your pain, Hans. You are the man of the crowd and of the street. Here I lie with a stranger covered with ordinary flowers in silver paper. I am punishing you for being different, I am removing myself to permit you to breathe. What makes me lonely, Hans, are the cheap and gaudy people you go with. I lie here untouched by this stranger, who is only caressing you inside of me. He is complaining like a woman: you are not filled with me. This was a meeting like a curse in a dark, chaotic world to learn to put space between you and me.

It is as if she were in an eleva shooting up and down. Hundreds of floors of sensations varying faster than temperature. Up into the sun garden, no floors above. Deliverance. A bower of light. Proximity to the stars. Faith. At this height she finds something to lie on. Faith. But the red lights are calling: Down. The elevator coming down so swiftly brings her body to the concert floor. But her breath is caught midway, left in midheaven. Now it is music she is breathing, in which all anger dissolves. It is not the swift changes of floor which make her dizzy, but that parts of her body, of her life are passing into every floor, into the lives of others. All that passes into the room of the Voice he pours back now into her, to deliver himself of the weight. She follows the confessions, each anguish is repeated in her. The resonance is so immense, resonance to wind, to lament, to pain, to desires, to every nuance of sensibility, so enormous the resonance, beyond the entire hotel, the high vault of sky and the black bowl of hysteria, that she cannot hear the music. She cannot listen to the music. Her being is brimming, spilling over, cannot contain its own knowledge. The music spills out overflows, meets with the overfullness, and she cannot receive it. She is saturated. For in her it never dies. No days without music. She is like an instrument so tuned up, so exacerbated, that without hands, without players, without leadership, it responds, it breathes, it emits the continuous melody of sensibility. Never knew silence. Even in the darkest grottoes of sleep. So the concerts of the Hotel Chaotica Djuna cannot hear without exploding. She feels her body like an instrument which gives its strongest music when it is used as a body. Ecstasy reached only in the orchestra, music and sensualitly traversing all walls and reaching ecstasy. The orchestra is made with fullness, and only fullness rises to God. The soloist talks only to his own soul. All fullness rises.

Like the fullness of the Hotel. No matter what happened in each room, what contortions, distortions, growls, devourings, murders, when Djuna reaches the highest floor, the alchemy is complete. Music rises. Ecstasy rises. Like the fullness in herself. No cord untouched, no cells closed, no nerves silent: at the tips of her nerves a million eyes, and her moisture dripping in snow white drops everywhere.

The telephone rang and announced some one waiting downstairs to see the Voice. It was urgent. And this some one came, shaking an umbrella dripping with melted snow. She entered his room walking sideways like a crab, and bundled in her coat as if she were a package, not a body. Between each word there was a light gasp of hesitancy. Ineach gesture a swing intended to be masculine, but as soon as she sat on the couch, looking up at the Voice, flushed with timidity, saying shall I take off my shoes and lie down? he knew already she was not masculine. She was deluding herself and others about it. He was even more certain while watching her take off her shoes and uncover her very small and delicate feet. Not that the feet were an indication, but that he felt the woman in her through her feet, through her hands. They transmitted a woman current. The simple act of taking off her shoes betrayed that her caresses were those of a girl, girls in school arousing but the surface of each other’s feminine senses and believing when they had travelled on lakes of gentle sensation that they had penetrated the dark and violent center of woman’s response. All this he knew, and he was not surprised when she opened with “I find it hard to confess to you, I’m a pervert. I’ve had a lot of aff with women.” He wanted to smile. He could have smiled, she could not see him, but he could see her passing her delicate girl hand through the strands of her heavy hair with gestures meant to be heavy with disaster and dark implications. She could not, with any of her words, charge the atmosphere of the room as she meant to, with the darkness of her acts. The atmosphere continued delicate like her hands and feet. No matter what she was saying about her last love affairs, about her spread the smell of herbs. She spoke breathlessly, with little repetitions and light gasps of awe and surprise at herself:

“I loved Hazel so. I was swallowed up by her, just as before that I loved Georgia, and she could do anything with me. I would even help her to see her lovers. I would do anything she asked me. She got tired of me, and I went off alone to Holland, and I could not play the violin any more, I wanted to die. I made love to other women, but it was not the same. What terrible things I have done in my life, you can’t imagine. I don’t know what you will think. I can’t see your face and that bothers me. I can’t tell you because maybe you won’t want to see me any more. Georgia told me one lies down and talks, it is like talking to oneself except that this Voice comes and explains everything and it stops hurting. I feel fine here lying down, but I am ashamed of so many things and I think they are very bad things I did, this sleeping with women, and other things. I killed a woman who got married. It was in my birth place, in the South. She got married and then died the night of the wedding, and I did it. I thought all the time before the wedding that she ought not to love a man, there is no tenderness in men, and then I thought of the blood, and I prayed she should die rather than be married, and so I wished it, and she died. And I am sure it was my fault. But there is something much worse than this. It happened in Paris. I was working at the violin. I remember. My room was on the level with the street and the windows were open, and I did not realize the windows were open; I was playing away, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I looked at the bow and looked at it for a long while and I was taken with a violent desire to pass it between my legs, as if I were the violin, and I don’t know why I did it, and suddenly I saw people laughing outside… I nearly died of shame. You will never tell this to anyone? I can’t see your face. I can’t tell what you are thinking about me. When I don’t know what people think I always imagine they are laughing at me, criticizing me. I don’t feel that you condemn me, I feel good here, lying down. I feel that at last I am getting some terrible things out, getting rid of them maybe. maybe I will be able to forget them, like the time I gave a little boy an enema with a straw, and I thought I had injured him for life, and a few years after that he got sick and died, and I didn’t dare walk through the town because I am sure it was the enema that did it. Don’t you think it was? I don’t know why I did that. I wish I could see your face. I want revenge above all, because I was operated on, and I was not told why, I was told it was for appendicitis, and when I was well I found out I had no more woman’s parts, and I feel that men will never want me because I can’t have a child. But that is good. I don’t like men, they have no tenderness. Not being able to have a child, that means I am a cripple, men won’t love me. But I’m sure I wouldn’t like it with a man, I tried how it felt once with a toothbrush, and I didn’t like it. I had the funniest dream just before coming to you; I had opened my veins and I was introducing mercury in them, in each vein at the finger tip. Why can I never be happy? I’m always thinking when I’m in love that it will come to an end, just like now I think if I don’t find more things to tell you, I won’t be able to come again, and I am afraid of this coming to an end, afraid you will not think me sick enough.”

A week later, ten days later, she is lying down and talking to the Voice:

“Last night I was able to play. I felt you standing like an enormous shadow over me, and I could see your large signet ring flashing, and what was stranger than all this, I smelled the odor of your cigar suddenly in the middle of the street. How can you explain this, walking casually through a street, I smelled your cigar and that made me breathe deeply: I always walk with my shoulders hunched up, you’ve noticed it, I walk like a man, I am sure I am a man after all, because when I was a child I played like a boy, I hated to dress up in pretty things and I hated perfume. I don’t understand why the smell of your cigar, which reminds me of my talks with you, made me want to breathe deeply. It’s very funny. I haven’t thought about Hazel for the last few days; maybe I don’t love her any more, I only feel I love her when we are separating, when I see her going off on a train; then I feel terrible, terrible. Otherwise I am not very sure that I love her, really. I feel nothing when she is there, we quarrel a lot, that is all. With Georgia it was different, she made me feel she was there: Lillian, do this for me, Lillian, do that for me, Lillian, telephone for me, Lillian, carry my music. She was always deathly ill, I had to run around for her all the time; she was always dying, but always well enough to receive lovers. Always clinging to me, talking about her great loneliness, her love affairs. This talking to you is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. How strange it is to talk absolutely sincerely, as it comes, to say everything in one’s head, not to have to think beforehand. I am getting well, but I don’t want you to send me away. When I was a child I always wanted to go to Africa. I had a scrap book all about Africa and maps, time-tables, boat sailings, information, pictures of airplanes, trains, of the ships that could take me there. My school was very far away, I had to walk for two hours, and I called it Africa. I would set out for it all prepared as for a trip. I liked going to school because it was Africa, and I thought about it at night. And then they built a new school right next to my home, five minutes away, and I never went to school again, I never learnt anything; I was expelled and I made a mess of it, my father never forgave me, he was so mad he threw a knife out of the window and it hit our mare in the leg and that made a terrible impression on me, it was my fault too. Yesterday when I left you I was thinking about God, and what do you think happened to me? Walking out of the hotel I stumbled on the steps and I found myself kneeling on the sidewalk, and I did not mind it at all, it was wonderful, so many times I have wanted to kneel on the sidewalk, and I had never dared, and now thinking about you and what I could say to you the next time so you won’t think I’m cured yet and send me away… There is something I have now which you can’t take away from me, ever since I came here I have a feeling so warm and sweet and life-giving which belongs to me, I know you gave it to me, but it is inside of me now, and you can’t take it away. There was another time when I was thankful and I wanted to kneel in the street and that time I pretended to lace my shoe and I just kneeled there, and everybody let me, thinking I was lacing my shoe.”

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Mischa came to the Voice limping, but be only talked about his hand. He can no longer play the ‘cello. His hand is stiff. He is mute about his leg. His mother was a Cossack woman, who rode horseback. His father was obsessed with hunting. He himself had never wanted woman, except when they wore red dresses. Then he felt like biting them. Woman seemed to him something soft and blind, something to hide into. When he saw a woman he wanted to become small and hide in her. He used to call his mother, in Russian, his Holy Secret. His hand had been twisted, cramped for many years. He holds it out to show the Voice. He talks constantly about his hand, how it feels, if it is stiffer to-day than yesterday. He played the ‘cello when he was very young. He was a child prodigy. He remembers early concerts, and his mother afterwards taking him between her large, strong horse-woman’s knees and caressing him with pleasure because he had played well. His mother was like no woman he had ever seen. She had long, black hair which she liked to wear down when she was at home, a sort of forest of black hair in which he would hide his face. His good-night kiss was never anywhere but inside this black hair. Absolute blackness then, the hair tickling his eyelashes and getting inside his mouth. Hair so violent and strong, with a smell that made him dizzy, hair that entwined itself around him. His mother looked like a Medusa. Her hair must have been made of snakes. Her face, somehow, fixed into one expression. The eyes never blinked, he believes. She kept them open on one. And the voice of a man, and a bass laughter. A laughter that lasted longer than any he had ever heard. He could hear it from his bed at night. He dreamed of climbing with the help of his mother’s long, heavy hair to a place where his father could not reach him. His father, all in leather, armed with guns, carrying wounded blood-dripping animals, surrounded with dogs. It seemed to Mischa that he had found his mother’s voice in the ‘cello. There were deep notes in the ‘cello which sounded and resounded in him like his mother’s voice.

For days after this Mischa does not talk. He cannot play the ‘cello, he cannot move his hand freely, and there are things he doesn’t want the Voice to know. But he feels that the Voice is watching, feeling his way deftly into his secrets. He feels that the Voice is not convinced at all that it is the hand which causes Mischa’s suffering. He feels slowly surrounded with intricate questions, pressed closer with unexpected associations. He feels like a criminal, but he cannot remember the crime. The Voice envelops him in questions. The Voice has become a digger. Mischa feels a great anguish, as if he had committed a crime and were now concealing it. And he cannot remember what it is. He feels the place where it is buried. What is buried? There, under the flesh, as it were, at the very bottom of a murky smouldering mud well, there is something buried. Something which the Voice pushes him towards. An image. What? An image of his mother, his magnificent Medusa mother standing in her room. He is a little boy of eight or so. He had not been able to sleep. He had limped quietly to her room and knocked very faintly at her door. She had not heard his knock. He had opened the door very slowly. He knew his father was not there, that he was out hunting. His mother was standing before him, very tall, and in a long white robe, her nightgown. And on this white robe there was a blood stain. He had seen the stain. He had smelled the blood on her. He had cried out hysterically. He ran out of her room to look for the father. He picked up a riding whip. His father was returning from the hunt. He was standing at the door, taking off his leather coat, laying down his gun. There was a blood stain on his sleeve. The animals he had killed were lying in the hall. The dogs were still barking, outside. Mischa went up to his father and struck him, struck at the man who had stained his mother’s white robe with blood, who had hunted her as he hunted the animals.

As he told this he held up before him the stiffened hand.

He thought the Voice would speak about the hand, but the Voice asked him: “And the lameness?”

Mischa winced and turned his face away. Behind this that he told lay his secret. Behind the facade of the image, the scene which he saw so clearly, lay a terrain of broken, pointed, cutting fragments, and on this a dead leg. A heavy dead leg, like some discarded object. But not buried. It had always lain there, unburied. Dead. He was more aware of it than of anything about his life. The dead leg rested right across the whole body. Wooden. He had nailed his hand on it. The life, the present, the colors, the music, women, were all hung around this dead leg, like furniture, pictures. Not alive. There had never been any Mischa. Mischa was in that leg, imprisoned, bound in it, lying on an abandoned plot, and the intense presence of it turned everything else into a transparent film: behind every form of transparency lay the leg which carried him. A casket in which he had enclosed his faith, his impulses, his desires. The pain of lameness, of knowing, even as a child, that one carries a fragment of the death in one. To live with a dead fragment of oneself, as if carrying a tomb around with one. The fierce graspingness of death already setting in. To be crippled, humiliated, left out of games, not to be able to ride horseback. The lameness concealed at concerts, but not before woman. The wounded look in the fixed glance of the mother when she watched him walk. Her love for him not joyous, heavy with compassion. When she kissed others she radiated an animal pride, her nostrils quivered. When she kissed Mischa it was as if part of her died at the very touch of him, in answer to the part in him that was dead. Mischa trembled when he had to walk across a room. He hated women because of his lameness, because they too closed a fierce part of themselves when they approached him, made themselves more tender, more attenuated, and looked at him as his mother had looked at him. He was ashamed. So terribly ashamed. The Voice said very gently: “You preferred to offer your hurt hand to people’s eyes. You offered the whole world your hurt hand. You talked about your hand. You showed your hand so no one would notice the lameness. The hand did not shame you. The hand that struck your father was rightfully, humanly punished by immobility.”

Mischa was weeping, his face turned to the wall. Now that he looked at the lameness, the leg seemed to become less dead, less separate from him. The leg was not so heavy, not so gruesome, as this secret of the pain he had enclosed in it, his fear and pain before the leg. Every nerve and cell in him tense with the fear of discovery, tense with rigid pretending, dissolved in new tears before the fact which appeared smaller, less dark, less oppressive. The crime and the secret did not seem so great as when he watched over its tomb. The pain was not so much like a monster now, but a simple, human sorrow. With the tears the great tension all through the body softened. He was a cripple. But he had committed no crime. He had struck his father, but his father had laughed at the scene—and his mother too. They had hurt him more than he had hurt them. The tears were like a river carrying away the rigid tension. The walls he had erected, the nightmares he had buried over and over again in his being, the tightness of fear, the knots in his nerves, all dissolving. Everything was washed away. And the big knot in his hand, that was loosen teno. It was the same knot. The muted hand that could no longer draw his mother’s voice out of the ‘cello. The static hand that could no longer strike. The crippled hand for the world to look at, while the real shamed Mischa walked surreptitiously before them hoping to conceal his dead leg from the world.

Exaltation lifted him from the couch, out of the room. He was running out of this room filled with knowing eyes, through the softly carpeted hall, passing all the rooms filled with revelations, to the red lights that bore him down to the street.

In the street he did not feel the sea of ice, slush and sleet. The warmth in him was like a fire that would never go out. He was singing.

Under his feet, in the underground drug store, Djuna sat eating at the counter. The young man was mixing his sallies with the drinks: “Are you a show girl too?” he asked her. The sea elephant, owner of the place, swam heavily toward her with a box: “I kept this box for you, I thought you would like it. It smells good.” The sea elephant sank behind the counter, behind waves of perfume bottles, talcum powder, candy packages, cigar boxes. She was left with the sandal wood box in her arms.

She carried it through the lobby. The lobby was full of waiting people, lumped there, waiting without impatience, reading, muttering, meditating, sleeping.

Every time she passed through the lobby her throat tightened. Behind every chair, every palm tree, every sofa, every face half-seen in the dim light of the lobby, she feared to recognize some one she knew. Some one out of the past. She could repeat to herself as she passed that they were all lost, that in the enormous city they had lost her tracks. She had crossed the ocean, destroyed their addresses. Stretches of long years and of sea lay between that first half of her life. The city had swallowed them. Yet each time she crossed the lobby she felt the same apprehension. She feared the return of the past. They sat in the lobby waiting, waiting for a crevice, a passage-way back into her life. Waiting to introduce themselves again. They had left their names at the desk. So many of them.

They were waiting to be admitted. They wanted to come upstairs and enter her present life. Djuna herself did not understand why this should be such an intolerable idea. Perhaps not so much their coming back, if they came for a visit and sat in a chair and talked. But they might act like a sea rushing forward and sweeping her back again into the undertows of early darkness. Surely she had thrown them out with the broken toys, but they sat there, threatening to sweep her back. Stuffed, with glass eyes, from a slower world, they look at her on this other level of swifter rhythms, and they reach with dead arms around her. She wanted to escape them in elevators which flew up and down like great, swift birds of variety and change. Moving among many rooms, many people, among great secrets and feverish happenings. Their tentacles like the tentacles of earth waiting for the return to where she came from. Could all escape be an illusion? That was her fear, seeing duplicates of the people who had filled her early world.

She would go and have her hair washed, which was as good as weeping. The water runs softly through the roots of the being, like warm rain, and washes away everything. One falls into rhythm again. She would have her hair washed and feel this simple flow of life through the hair. She passed into the hair-washer’s cubicle, out of the lobby of the waiting past.

Djuna was soon poised again on the threshold, suspended, faced with the same fear of traversing the lobby. There was a moment of extraordinary silence in the enormous hotel; she could not tell if it was in her. A moment of extraordinary slowness of motion. Then came a dull, powerful sound outside. A heavy sound but dull, without echo. Djuna felt the shock in her body. The shock traversed the entire hotel, the silence and the panic was communicated, transmitted with miraculous speed. All at once, it seemed, without words, everyone knew what had happened. A woman had thrown herself from a window and fallen on the garage roof. Thrown herself from the twenty fifth floor. She was dead, of course, dead, and with a five month child inside her. She had taken a room in the hotel in the morning, given a false name. Had stayed five hours without moving from the room. And then thrown herself out with this child in her. The sound, the dead heavy body sound, resonant still in the structure of the hotel, in the bodies of the people communicating this image one to another. Djuna could see her bleeding and open. The impact. Fallen, fallen so quickly back to the bottom. Birds fell this way when they died in the air. Had she died in the air? When had she died? Ascension high, to fall from greater heights and be sure of death. Loneliness, for five hours in a room with this child who could not answer her if she talked, if she questioned, if she doubted, if she feared…

The radios were turned on again. People moved fast again, normally. The silence had been in every one, for one second. Then everyone had closed his eyes and moved faster, up and down. One must get dizzy. Move. Move.

Djuna sat in the room of the Voice. The little man no one ever saw, he was standing by the window.

“Look,” he said, “they are skating in the Park. It is Sunday. The band is playing. I could be walking in the snow with the band playing. That is happiness. When I had happiness I did not recognize it, or feel it. It was too simple. I did not know I had it. I only know it when I am sitting here strapped to this armchair and listening to confessions and obsessions. My body is cramped. I want to do the things they do. At most I am allowed to watch. I am condemned to see through a perpetual keyhole every intimate scene of their life. But I am left out. Sometimes I want to be taken in. I want to be desired, possessed, tortured too.”

Djuna said: “You can’t stop confessing them, you can’t stop. A woman killed herself, right there, under your window; that noise you heard was the fall of her body. She was pregnant. And she was alone. That is why she killed herself.”

“I listen to them all. They keep coming and coming. I thought at first that only a few of them were sick. I did not know that they were all sick and bursting with secrets. I didn’t know there was no end to their coming. Did you ever walk through the lobby? I have a feeling down there that they are all waiting to be confessed. They all have more to say than I have time to hear. I could sit here until I die and even then there will be women throwing themselves out of the window on the same floor on which I live.mes ;

White lights! Going up! Hans opening his door, laughing: “I was just lying in bed and thinking of you, and wanting you.”

It was always different. Sometimes it was like a little tongue of fire inside her that flicked out towards his thrusts, enveloped him like a little tongue of fire circling the thrust that touched the kernel of sweet acid in her, disrupting a current of silver fire passing through the veins. The nerves slept as under an enchantment, the eyes closed, slipping down sand dunes of warm waves lapping over each other. Great pulsations, like the very heart of ecstasy, breaking open a river of pulsations, the body resonant with the heavy horsehoofing gongs against the walls of feeling. Pleasure curling inside of her like leaves burned. In this tumult of blood, wine, incense, the kernel in her quietly opening like a fruit. A gasp in the veins, when the white blood spurts against the soft wall of fruit flesh in which it rolls, the womb breathing it in, flicking its tongue of flame, panting around each turn and flicker, reaching for the hardness with an infinite thirst, like a mouth opening and closing.

She remained full of echoes. Reverberations in the flesh, prolongations. The body still resounding. He, his desire being like a thrust into the woman, reached a finality. He could rise free, and alone again. In her the blood remained. She was impregnated. She awakened filled. She could not detach herself. He could awaken lighter, having passed the weight of his desire into her, without webs or threads around him. His desire a knife, a thrust that had reached its end. Her desire like a casket. She loved with necklaces, with bracelets, with chains, with sediments, with residues. Her spongy antennae had not only drunk like the stems of plants, but the branches had folded themselves around the miracle to perpetuate it. She loved as woman, with echoes, with infinite layers of repetitions, with caves of mysterious deposits, with scars, with mirrors, with a labyrinthian retention. She was, as all women, the perpetually abandoned one. She had a greater difficulty in shifting, in turning away. Every morning, it was the mandragore pulled out of the earth, it was the seed torn out of its fur pockets, it was a return to the void, a tear in the spider web of unity. Her continuity was born of echoes: she was a mirror and an ocean in which he bathed and which she could not reject on the shore of daylight; she was the night enfolding, enwrapping, lulling, encompassing, and she could not thrust out, as he did, into the daylight.

He awakened, and she did not. He passed into other realms. The longer his stay in the enfolding whirls the greater his leap into space again. He awakened, talking of mysticism. He awakened as Laotse, sitting with eyes closed with laughter, laughter sitting on the edge of his high cheeks, laughter in the corners of the mouth, the laughter of great knowingness, but also the laughter of great separateness. The man without wound, sitting on the humorous bull, contemplating the sacrifice of sperm and honey with the great simplicity of a ceremony, a ritual.

She did not awaken. She lay in the darkness of the blood marshes, feeling the tearing between day and night. An ocean bearing nothing on its heavy waves: waves hollowed out in emptiness, waiting for his return. A night hung like a damask ciborium, waiting fo pressure, for a rent in the indigo silk, for an explosion. A plant weighed down by the sap. No laughter runs through plants.

Lilith was waiting for the steamer bringing her brother from India. She watched the people stepping off the gangplank. She feared she would not recognize him. When he had left he was a boy. A boy in a plaster cast of hardness, of dissimulation. Intent on defending himself against all invasion by others, against feeling, against softness, against himself. A boy swinging between violent, brutal acts, and fits of weeping like a woman. Would she recognize the compressed mouth, the ice blue eyes, the pose of nonchalance, the briefness of speech, the tension and the sudden breaks in the tension? A boy in a plaster cast of hardness. Untouchable. At times she suspected that he had refused to recognize her presence in him. Perhaps it was he walking there, so rigid in his clothes. No. So many people, so many valises, trunks, confusions, explosions of joy. And then suddenly there was no one else passing down the gangplank.

Lilith stopped one of the stewards: “Do you know Eric Norman? Can you tell me if he’s sick? I can’t find him anywhere.”

The steward promised to go and see. Lilith imagines Eric lying in his bunk, sick. She waits, already suffering as she suffered when he was small, in trouble. The steward returns: “I found him. He’s not sick, but his papers are not quite in order, so he can’t step off the boat until to-morrow morning. He wants you to come on board.”

The blue eyes watching behind eye glasses. They face each other without words. There is a break in their pause as if the bodies would break at the shock of the meeting. Then he smiles brusquely, and the talk breaks through the barrier of fifteen years.

“You look swell,” he says. “Are you as bossy as you were? Remember how you wanted to do the fighting for me? You wouldn’t let me fight my own battles with the boys. You came with an umbrella and beat them. They laughed at me for having a sister fighting for me. I had to go so far away to get away from you. You look swell! Who do you fight for now? Who do you help cross the street? Who do you stop the traffic for now, with insults at the drivers? You look swell, much sweller than before. But you can’t boss me now.”

All the passengers had left the boat but a few of the crew and the purser who was adding numbers and names on long green sheets of paper, behind barred windows. A few of the crew were cleaning the cabins and decks. They had drawn the curtains, covered the chairs and pianos and couches. They had waxed the floors, turned over the mattresses, folded up the blankets, put out the lights. The enormous parlors and lounge rooms looked ghostly. So many chairs in rows, with stiffened arms open on emptiness. The ship anchored in earth, it seemed, so steady it was. Room after room without dust, lights, glitter. Funereal. The mirrors reflecting nothing but a brother and sister walking through the enormous ship, through a labyrinth of linoleum hall-ways, passing doors open on a million empty cabins. The bunks like skeletons, showing the springs and the boxlike edges. Silence… A sudden shadow lurking of a sailor polishing brass knobs. Brother and sister walking through the city of abins. No smell in the kitchen, no rolling and swaying or cracking of wood. A carcass at rest. No music in the salons, no glitter of silverware chiming in the dining room. Repose of furniture, windows, lights. A funereal watch of covered chairs. A dead backstage. No vestige of the people who passed. Clean.

Brother and sister stranded. Not allowed to land. Walking on a frontier not marked on the marine or earthly charts. Frontiers of memory. The anchor dug deep into the sandy marshes of memory. Here in the skeleton of the marine monster, with its empty windows unblinking, its empty decks, empty salons, deserted by musicians and sailors, beyond the earth and beyond the sea, they sit before a banquet of memories, with the anchor lying deeply coiled in the octopus legs of memories. The ship was the world of their childhood, filled with indestructible games. He had carried it all to India, he had dyed it in foreign colors, his childhood, he had bathed it in exotic music, rinsed it in poisonous rivers, injected it with Oriental maladies, burned it with unnameable fevers, had choked it in strange incenses, perfumed it with yellow flesh, buried it in Mahometan cemeteries, throttled it in new loves. It had turned to ivory, to a mineral in his breast. She had covered it with hatred, he had lost it in opium deliriums, but there it was in their breast, turned to ore, to stalamite. The more they had pressed down on it the stronger the compression, the more it had gained in rarity, in fixity. In indestructibleness. A diamond lodged in the breast.

Brother and sister walking through the skeleton of the monstrous ship which took him away and brought him back with the same diamond lodged in the breast. Bathing in the acid of the past, they bared the bones unbleached and this diamond.

The first voyage with chairs, tables, rags, fancies, was the most prolonged in all their existence. The one they had boarded together at birth had never moved; they were locked in it forever, without passengers and without landing permits. All the other cabins empty, and they cursed forever to sail inside the static sea of their fantasies. Riveted to the shore of the past, forbidden to land, with the anchor set deep in rust.

Another day in the confessional. Lilith lying down and talking. Lilith watching the Voice with something like hostility, expecting him to say something dogmatic, some banality, some unsubtle generality. She wanted him to say it, because if he did he would be another man she could not lean on, and she would have to go on conquering herself and her own life alone. She was proud of her independence. She was waiting for the Voice to say something unsubtle that she could laugh at.

They were talking about Mischa. He told her that she was an obsession in Mischa’s life. That he saw her as the mother, the sister, the most unattainable of all women, and for this he wanted to conquer her, to free his manhood. Then she confessed how at first she had loved Mischa, but when she had felt his smallness, his way of hiding within woman, she had felt protection but no desire. She had wanted to give him an illusion but feared not to be able to sustain it to the very end. She begged the Voice not to tell him the truth, which would wound him, but to tell Mischa she was a little mad. This would explain the change in her, put all the blame on herself, and Mischa. a might enjoy discovering there were other abnormal people in the world. The Voice agreed with her. He asked her if she did not mind other people thinking she was not normal. She hesitated and then:

“No, I don’t mind. I like them to think me puzzling, mystifying and unpredictable. I feel then that I keep my real self a mystery.”

The Voice laughed a little at this.

“I see you don’t need any help at all, you are quite content, quite strong, quite able to manage your own life.”

At these words Lilith began to tremble, and then she felt her attitude crumble, the facade crumbling all around her. She became intensely aware of her weakness, her need of another. She said nothing but the Voice understood and continued:

“You have acted beautifully towards Mischa. As few women will act. In general women consider men as enemies, and they are glad when they humiliate or demolish them.”

“I could not hurt Mischa. Whenever I see him I remember the story he told me about his first sensual curiosity. His mother had discovered him weighing his sex in his hand, reflectively examining it, had beaten him with a whip and left him locked up in the room. He wept hysterically, then quieted down and, dipping a finger in the tears, he had written on the wall: evil boy. He waited for the words to vanish, but they seemed to remain like stains on the wall, and he grew hysterically afraid the words would never dry and that the whole city would know about his doings.”

Lilith liked the way the Voice’s questions crackled at her from all directions. He was behind her and she was not ashamed to speak of anything. At the same time she felt that she could not deceive him even by a shade of falsity, for he was so attentive to every hesitation, every inflection of the voice, every gesture she made, and especially the silences. Every silence put him on a new scent. He was really the hunter of secret thoughts. They would reach a kind of blank wall. She would repeat: “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t think so.” But the truth was apparent by what she felt at his words. Whenever something had hurt her, and he touched upon it, she felt a churning of feelings, a warning: Here is the place. He uncovered her wars against herself.

“I see myself always too small or too large. I awake one day feeling small, and another day bursting with a power which makes me believe I can rule the whole world.”

When he talked it was like a stirring of quicksands. She felt the whole sandy bottom of her life, a complete insecurity, a rootlessness. He said perhaps she was a woman who was not the enemy of man, but she remembered days of great hatred for man. He talked about the yielding and fear. Fear of being hurt, he said. Why? She did not know. How could man hurt her? He had hurt her already.

“The first feeling I had was that my father was not tied to anything. He was not tied to my mother, he was not tied to us, he was not tied to the women he made love to. He was tied to nothing. He was always leaving, forgetting, throwing out, betraying. “

font size=”2”>When she made this very simple statement Lilith suddenly felt the most intense anguish. She turned her head to look at the Voice and said: “I can’t go on.”

“You must go on.”

“The first thing I saw was a father escaping from the mother. Running away from us, from the house. From everything. I saw my mother left maimed, like some one who had lost an arm. I saw our house sold and disrupted. It was like a deluge. Everything was carried away. The strange, mysterious atmosphere we lived in as children, our games which were like an enchantment from which we never freed ourselves: nothing was ever the same. I saw the furniture out in the garden, being sold at auction. I saw my father leaving and sending postcards from all over the world. The world was immense, it seemed to me, and he was in all of it except the corner where he left us. He not only took himself away, but our faith in the marvellous too. The world of our childhood closed with his departure.”

“All these departures, these upheavals, gave you a hatred and fear of change. You, in your anger and pain, stood in the center and refused to move, decided to make a fixed core within you. You accepted outer change, but fought against it by an inner static groove. You would not move. Everything else around you could move, change, but you, because of your mistrust of pain and loss refused to move. You would be the island, the fixed center. For fear of a second loss, a second abandon, a second wound. That is why you never again gave yourself, that is why you are cold. You are afraid of giving yourself wholly.”

Lilith felt a deep anguish as he talked. She could not tell if the Voice was right or wrong, but she could feel with his words the invasion of a most dolorous secret. Exactly as if this set, tense, granite core of herself were being touched and found not to be granite. Found to have nerves, sensibilities, and memories. She remembered at this moment that when she heard that stones had a heart beat, a kind of faint pulse which had never before been registered, she had cried out angrily: “How terrible, everything in the world feels. Exactly what I feared. That is why I am always so tender with everything. To think that even a stone can feel!”

And now the Voice was entering into this secret pain, exposing the vulnerability and the fear in her, and the anguish was immense.

Lilith said:

“Now I hate you. You took away the little protection I had, the little cover I kept over things. I feel humiliated to have exposed myself. I who so rarely confess!”

“And why don’t you confess?”

“It is always I who receive the confidences. People confess their doubts and fears to me. I am afraid of showing my weakness. Why? I think I will be less loved.”

“Do you love those who expose their weakness?”

“Yes, even more. I feel them very near to me. I feel them human and I love them.”

“Then don’t you think they might es. Shehe same towards you?”

“I feel I have been given another role, a non-human one. I don’t know why.”

“Because the father failed you… You cannot depend on others. You prefer to be depended on.”

Lilith went out into the street. She felt the day much softer on her skin. The snow was melting. It seemed to her that she let the day get nearer to her, permitted it to touch her. That before she looked at the day like a stranger. Now she felt the day all over her body, the temperature of it, the sensual touch of it. She remembered Djuna laughing and saying: “the kind of day you feel between the legs.”

Djuna felt everything with her skin, her finger tips, her hair, the soles of her feet. She was like a plant. Every time Lilith saw Djuna she felt this strange, continuous vibration life of leaves, plants and water. There was a mobility, a constant motion and vibration, a continuous change and variety. Djuna ate and drank people; they passed into her.

She, Lilith, had never imagined this until to-day. She was breathing with the day, moving with the wind, in accord with it, with the sky, undulating like water, flowing and stirring to the life about her, opening like the night. What had happened? Only the Voice saying to her, “Don’t you love those who confess to you? Don’t you love their blindness, their blunders, their furies, their hatreds? When they talk to you about their crimes, don’t you dissolve yourself with a kind of human passion, with a desire to carry them, share everything that happens to them?” Yes, yes, cried the being of Lilith. Then YOU… Why do you… But then if I, Lilith, if I leaned, the others would find nothing there to rest on. If I become human, then where will the others go? They would go to the Voice, more of them. If I show anything but this strength, what will happen to them? He asks me what will happen to me? I don’t think I care much what happens to me. I have a feeling that I am responsible for them. How restless he got, the Voice, when I asked him if he thought certain people had a destiny which forbade them to be human. I must have touched something which affected him. I will make him talk. I will question him.

But the Voice did not answer her questions. The Voice pried and prodded into her marriage.

The man Lilith had married was very simple. He had not found the way to woo her, to break down her resistance. Every night it had been the same flight, the same locked door against him, a hatred of his desire. She showed all her claws, her wild hair, her hatred of sex. Finally, one day they discussed it, coolly. She asked him: “What is it like? Tell me.”

He did not know what to say, so he made a drawing. The drawing revolted her and frightened her all the more. She would not even let him kiss her after the drawing. Finally he persuaded her to have it done by a doctor. She preferred the idea of a knife. It was a knife which first cut into her being.

“I tried to feel as a woman afterwards. It was a terrible thing, it was as if the knife had made me close forever rather than open, as if it had made me cold forever. There were times when I felt strong excitement in me, warmth, desire. I yielded to anyone who wanted me, all but my husband. I kept myself drunk so I would not see too much. Adventures, but no feeling. No deep response. They all remained strangers to me. I never wanted to see them again. You don’t know how they tried to stir me, what long sieges, what furious attacks. One night I went to the Burlesque. I looked at the chairs and they all seemed stained with sperm. And suddenly I thought: I’m in the wrong world, this is all gymnastics. Do you believe I will ever feel anything? Do you think they killed the feeling in me that time? I can’t bear this any more. I have a constant feeling that I’m living on the edge of something about to happen, and that I can never reach. My nerves are set for a climax of some kind. I feel tense and expectant. It is so agonizing that I begin to wish for a catastrophe which would relieve the expectancy. I wish for all the calamities, all the tragedies to happen at once. I want scenes, quarrels, tears, I want to be devoured, I want to strike at people. I feel restless. I can’t stay very long anywhere. I can’t sit and I can’t sleep. I always have this feeling that I must seek a relief from this waiting, a shattering moment before I can rest, sleep. As if death were waiting, death were pursuing me, watching me. The whole world arouses me. I feel love for people in the streets, music stirs me at times like a caress; I desire violently, and I wait. I feel the storm coming, I feel the anguish, but everything continues the same, sluggish, without break, without lightning. Something in me wants to break, to explode. Instead, I have to take pleasure in breaking the lives of others. I am constantly seducing others, enchanting them, capturing them, while wishing they could do it to me. I want so much to be captured. Every one obeys me but they don’t find the key to me. I like to feel their hearts beating faster, I like to see their eyes waver, their lips tremble, to feel the emotion in them. It is like food. I am fascinated by their feeling. I am like a huntress who does not want to kill, but I want to feel the wound. What do I expect? To be caught in the desire of the other and bathe in it. To burn. But I am always disappointed. No one can take possession of me. It is as if they were all blind, circling around me. I warm myself and then become aware that the current is not passing through me. But they never say the magic word, never make the magic caress that will break this coldness in me. It is as if I were an idol of some kind. I always dream of this: I see myself standing very rigid, and I am covered with jewelry and luxuriant robes. I wear a crown. Don’t you think I will ever turn into a woman? I want to be shattered into bits. Yet at the same time I know I do everything to create my own inaccessibility. I wear strange clothes which estrange people. And then I hate them for failing to reach me. I create the legend, I know. It is not my fault. When I awake I do not look at the weather. I look at the mood I am in. And then I dress for it, and I live it out. It is hard to explain. I have the feeling that I do come from very far. While I sleep I know many things have happened. I do not remember them all. It is true I don’t wake up near everything. That is why sometimes when I come into a room I do look at the people as if they were not of my own race, quite. It is true I feel they look at me and see this distant personage. I sit down next to them and I choose the most remote subject, the most remote from daily life. Immediately they obey this direction, they leap out of their present life into my realm. I feel compelled to do this, while at the same time I want warmth and simplicity. I feel alone. Sometimes they are taken with a furious madness to do violence to me, to clutch at me. But it’s like a desire for a tabooed object, for a secret temple, for some forbidden person. For what is untouchable. And I, the woman inside of all this, I feel this. I feel I have created this personage and that I sit outside of her, lamenting because they are worshipping a sort of image, and they don’t reach with simple, warm hands and touch me. I’s as if I were outside this very costume, desiring and calling for simplicity, and at the same time a kind of fear compels me to continue acting. You are the only one I feel near to, you and Djuna the only ones who don’t make love to my shadow.”

“But it is your own making. We are simply the ones who can’t be mystified and entangled in your appearance. We’re simply the ones who did not get lost in the labyrinth you create. You hide yourself and then you weep because people get lost in all this external form of your life. It’s only locking doors against those who wish to come near, the same door that you locked against your husband.”

Such simple words he said, yet Lilith left him feeling a great warmth towards him, something that resembled love. She was falling in love with the Voice. She felt that he was the subtle detective who made all these discoveries in her, who made her state the very nature of what hurt her. He liked the game of tracking down her most difficult thoughts. It was only after many detours that she could make these long revelations. It was if he possessed her, somehow, in a way she could not explain to herself. There was a silent, subtle force in him. It was not in the words he said. It was something he exhaled. He confronted one with one’s self, naked, one’s true self as it was at the beginning. He destroyed the deformations, one by one, the acquired disguises of the personality. It was like a return to the original self. It was a return to the beginning where everything was pure.

He took her back, with his questions and his probings, back to the beginning.

She told him all she could remember about her father, ending with: “the need of a father is over.”

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

“The other night I dreamed you were immense, towering over every one. You carried me in your arms and I felt no harm could come to me. I have no more fears since I talk to you like this every day. Yes, one more fear, only one. I find it hard to tell you. The day I left school, the day I wore my hair up for the first time, I examined myself naked in the mirror, looking for the first real proofs of the metamorphosis. It was in the moonlight, because I believed in baths of moonlight. I was looking for the woman, and I decided that my breasts were too small. I thought: ‘nobody will love me’.”

The Voice laughed a little: “But of course, that is not true. You only imagined this because you compared yourself to your mother. Didn’t you tell me she was like a Rubens woman?”

“Yes, and I used to think at times that if I were a man I would love women like my mother. I liked her heaviness, her richness.”

“But you are not the mother type, are you? It was all due to your admiration of your mother. You never saw yourself as others see you.”

“But you don’t know really. What I say is true. If you don’t believe me… You are the only one I can ask this from. Will you really tell me? Will you tell me the truth? I’ll show you.”

She unstrapped her blouse and exposed her breasts. She heard him stop breathing. She looked at his face. She saw a smile, a brilliancy in his eyes she had never seen. She had never seen the blood in his face. He made a gesture of the hand, as if to show her they fitted in his hand. He could not speak. Lilith now laughed to think of herself looking at the Voice with round eyes, the eyes of Virgins on stained glass windows. She laughed now at her fear, at the question she put and at his answer. It took him a long time to say finally:

“The breasts of Diana the huntress.”

After this she would not lie down any more.

She sat up and faced him.

“Lately I have become aware that you are not happy. I think of the way you play upon souls. It must give you a feeling of great power, the way they expose themselves.”

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

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

In their dreams they saw him as a god, or a demon. But always above.

When the confession ended he was no longer above.

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

“I am only a symbol.”

“You are more than a symbol; I know separate and personal things about you. I have watched you. You have a love of the absolute, a passion for extracting the essence. You have been denying the human being in you.”

“That’s all very true.”

“You have a gift for life… which you have never used.”

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

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

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

“Why are you uneasy?” she asked, “what are you afraid to reveal? Tell me what you’re most ashamed to tell.”

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

“I don’t need you.”

“You do. Even what you’re doing now is only because you need a triumph, a victory, over me. I made you confess, you want to make me confess. As soon as you find some one who has the key to you, you want to reverse the roles. You can’t bear to be discovered or dominated.”

“You’re wrong, you’re utterly wrong,” said Lilith violently. “I only did it because I’m interested in you as a human being, because I’m wondering about this man we all use and whom no one really knows.”

“We’ll see who is wrong,” said the Voice, but this Voice was not as firm as when he sat with his back to the light.

The Voice is talking to Djuna:

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

“This was the first story I heard in the morning. I was possessed with jealousy of Lilith, and everyone who came to me seemed to be possessed with jealousy. I felt my own jealousy in them, and it increased it, magnified it. I asked myself: what kind of feelings has Lilith toward me? Why has she become so vividly alive and why do I hate the way she gives herself? It seemed to me the world was full of jealousy, and that it was contagious. It lay at the bottom of every nature. I saw everyone as being jealous either in the past, the present, or the future. One man talked to me continuously about scenes which had never taken place, which he imagined. He lies for hours imagining this betrayal, reconstructing the scenes in every minute detail, until he goes nearly crazy believing it. His jealousy was really infernal, suffocating, dark, blind, not knowing where to strike and without any reality to support it. A continuous state of doubt. At the end of the day I was shattered. It seemed to me that whatever was in me was awakened in these people and that I was only awakening things which ought better be left asleep. I was increasing the awareness of pain, and breaking down all defences against it. Yes, I know they are false defences, but they are at least as good as the stones over a tomb. They give the illusion that the dead cannot return. But I do not even leave the stone. I take away the symbol of the burial. And that’s not all. The next day I awakened with anguish, with a kind of fear. A nameless fear. A kind of universal doubt. I doubted everything. Above all, Lilith. I feared to know, to really know what she felt. I would have given my life then to lose all my lucidity. And all day, all day the cripples talked to me about fear. I asked them questions I never asked before. Describe what you most fear! They exposed so many fears. But as I asked them it was like asking myself, and awakening my own fears. Fear. The whole world is based on fear, even behind the jealousy of the day before lay fear. Fear of being alone, fear of being abandoned, fear of life, fear of being trapped in tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one’s hatred, of commiing a crime, fear of one’s violence, bestiality, of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation. I asked myself: was it the fear in me which uncovered all this? It was like opening tombs again. It was contagion, Djuna, I tell you…

“To-day I don’t know whether this is a healing or a contagion. I am only discovering that we are all alike, and my patients desperately do not want me to be like them. The third day I dreamed of death. And the first man I talked with said: ‘There is something I must know, I must absolutely ask some one. You must tell me this: when a man is dead is his sex stiff, too? Is it as hard as it is in the morning? This has been an obsession with me, all my life. In death… if one died while inside of a woman, would one lie stiff in her? Or could one, after being dead, still have one last spasm? The nails keep growing, the hair too. Could it happen again after death if one died inside of a woman?’ “

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

She felt the restlessness of the Voice, sitting and listening all day, pinned to his confessions, disguised by the anonymity of vision, and desiring to play an active, personal role in these scenes perpetually unfolding before him. Too near, everything was too near. She felt the multiple footsteps of those walking along with her, not like a march, but like a symphony. In the shock of feet against pavements she felt the whole collision and impact of human being against human being. They resounded in her. Everything resounded in her. She smiled, thinking of what an immense music box she was. The relation between music and living was not merely an image. What a heavy connection between the sound box of instruments and the body, and what sameness between the caresses of the hands! Djuna felt at once so aroused that it was unbearable. She felt all her loves at once. Maternal, fraternal, sensual, mystical. So many loves. What was she? The lover of the world? Crazed with love, with remembrance of every touch and flavor, of every caress and word. And simultaneously with the communion, this communion with eyes closed, this taste of the wafer on her tongue, this sonorousness of sea in her ears, this constant simoun wind burning inside of her, came the pain of separation again. When people came as near as this, and breaths were so confounded and confused, then Djuna knew she was possessed.

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

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

Djuna stopped walking. Everything had come too near, too near. The cells were full to overflowing with the warm invasion. The moon was shining hypnotically round, a fixed stare, and all the taboos which held the body upright were dissolved by this stare of the moon calling the blood to its own cycle. The moon was circling now inside of her body, with the same rhythm. Djuna lost her face, her name. She was tied to the moon by long threads of red tangled blood. She moved now like one much larger than herself. She moved like a woman tied to the moon, in a space so vast, pushed by a rhythm so strong that the small woman in her was lost. The moon enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night without dawn.

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

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

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

Djuna was one with the moon, thrusting hands made of roots into the storm, while her heart beat like a drum through the orgy of the moonstorm.

Lilith talking to the Voice. Lilith had a headache.

My father had headaches like this, and he went mad. Do you think I will go mad? I dream of being under ether and I awake in terror. My father’s madness started with headaches. He began slowly to lose his memory. But I kept thinking—perhaps my father is not mad, but has had a dream. This dream has come and installed itself in his life. The dream is his life. What was this dream? Could I understand it? If I could see it, share it with him, enter his world and stay in it, perhaps he wouldn’t go mad. I feel that madness is only solitude. Ynly go mad when you see something no one else sees. There is a moment before madness when people have not yet cut the cord of connection and at this moment some one can hold them back. It’s what you do every day. There was the dream of the man who ate flowers so that the Revolution might not come… He was locked up. Only because he got confused with the symbol, he lived in the symbol. But if you understand it, nothing is mad. Everything is a dream, but we don’t always know the meaning. I wanted to know my father’s fantasy but he enclosed himself in it. I only discovered it when it was too late. And now I will admit all this I’m saying is to elude something I find very hard to tell you. You’ll be angry. The truth is I accepted an invitation to spend a night with Harold and a woman. When I arrived I was shown into his apartment, but he had not yet returned from a party. He had left a note, an erotic book for me to read, and drinks. I just sat there and dreamed about all my curiosities, all my erotic longings, my desire for woman. Arline came first and sat on the edge of the bed which was set in an alcove. Then Harold. Arline was blonde, with lax gestures, as in sleep. She began by taking my hands and admiring them, then she kissed me like a man. I slipped my hand under her skirt. Harold was kneeling down before the two of us and looking under our dresses. Harold made love to me more than to Arline. Do you think it was because I was the guest of honor? We took all our clothes off. I tasted a woman for the first time, and I didn’t like it. It tasted like a sea shell. But I loved her breasts and mouth. And it amused me that while we both caressed Harold we kept looking over his body at each other with something like human closeness. The man seemed the stranger. We would stop caressing him to kiss each other. When Harold, satisfied, fell asleep, Arline and I went on kissing and saying, how lovely you are, how soft you are. It was the abandon I liked. I felt nothing. I was desperately craving for love.

I took Arline home in a taxi. In the taxi, facing an Arline all dressed, I felt shy. The intimacy when we were naked and now the strangeness. Arline telephoned me and it was strange. I know nothing about her except her body, the feel and odor of her, and yet when she called up I felt less lonely, I felt a sort of body warmth, almost like love, just because I had touched her, and felt her. Arline’s voice was lax, and like the voice of a plant. She wanted to spend the night with me. She wanted to see me alone. Arline came as if she were dancing, displacing everything around her, she was terribly drunk. We had dinner together and hardly talked. Just smiled at each other, held each other’s hands, asked foolish questions. Whatever she told me was not part of her body at all. Her body suggested infinitely more, but everything in it was asleep.

Arline was blind. Her eyes said nothing, her mouth said nothing. Her eyes so blind, her speech drunken. When she talked she was just a little girl taking small parts in second rate shows, often out of work, not caring, yet not able to do anything but act. She was indifferent towards the part she acted, and indifferent to the actions of her body, as if she were separate from it. In my room she asked for another drink. She opened the drawers of the dressing table, looked at my clothes, pulled everything out, laughing. Then she said: Kiss me! She caressed me. The night we had been with Harold I felt that Arline did not respond ultimately, completely. I had not felt the violent, quick throbbing under my fingers. I wondered if Arline knew that I hadn’t. And then Arline asked me, asked me with a very slow, very implicit smile. I told her the truth. She said: “That’s why I loved you, you were making believe too. I knew it.” We laughed together, caressed each other into drowsiness; Arline fell asleep,h her body lying right across mine, so that I could not move. My hand was still resting on her leg. I lay there wishing violently to be hypnotized. I felt that if some one made me sleep like this and then took me something would happen to that unyielding part of me. I dreamed of some one caressing me until I fell asleep and then taking me. I remembered the time when I first began to feel with my body. I was in the bath tub. By mistake I turned on the water of the shower, and a jet came down on me and fell between my legs. Like a caress. I thought to be in love must be like this, this marvellous, warm water falling. And every night I fell asleep imagining these caresses falling over me like the water of the shower. Lying there, with the body of Arline asleep, her mouth a little open as if some dream would issue from it with a ribbon, as if she were about to tell me what extraordinary things she was seeing while asleep. There was so much space around her now, and her breathing changed tonalities, as if she were watching a spectacle.

I envied her her sleep, I thought if some one would force his desire upon me when I am asleep I would close around it like a plant. It would be so simple and soft, speckled with goldness. When Arline leaves me her gestures will fill my room. It is the only thing I believe in. The gestures! What a terrible need of the voice, of body warmth, what a need to put my head where the heart beats, to watch the palpitation of the throat. Afterwards Arline will recede and vanish. Something else will fill the room, some dream of her which will decompose her simplicity, which will disincarnate her, make smoke and fog and ribbons of her. Far away Arline will become a dream. It is that which gives me anguish. When she leaves she will sink into enormous space.

Lilith lying there, tangled, restless. Finding the absolute only in multiplicity, an absolute composed in space, an absolute in fragments. The smile of Arline, who laughs because she is making believe, as if by this she had escaped tragedy. The eagerness of the Voice, with his finger pointing: “You see? You see? That is what it means. You live in the myth.” Living in the myth. Perhaps. But she was lost in it. Even Arline did not remain Arline. Now, because she was asleep, she was bathing in a world much larger than she knew. Lilith touching Arline asleep, wishing she would remain Arline.

But the next instant she is caught in the whirl again, a quest, a continuous, incessant, diabolical quest of an absolute that does not flow serenely but is pursued and grasped by sheer wakefulness. In flight always, and she fearing to sleep for fear of its passing. Desire unexploded in her, but the cord lit and the little flames running up and down the cord with Dionysian joyousness: a dancing, the little flames running around the heart of the dynamite and never touching it. The little flames kept her breathless, nerves bristling with their heads up, necks stretched, thirsty eyes, peaked ears, all the little nerves waiting for the orgasm that will send the blood running through them like an anaesthetic and put them to sleep.

Lilith, lying sleepless, seeing in the yellow faces at the bar the faces of future crimes, drug fiends who with knife or poison would bring a kind of sleep, a pause, a rest from this pursuit of a fugitive absolute. Lilith wishing for the crime, the drug, the death, as deliverance. But the nerves are still awake, waiting for the pause of sleep or death, waiting for the dynamite to explode, for the past to crumble, waiting for an absolute uncapturable. Do all violent fires have a hundred flames pointing in all directions, was there ever one round flame with one tongue? Why did this force which did not erupt in quicksilver through the veins, why did it rush out in a typhoon whirl to round only the monsters walking through the streets, to question their intentions, to imagine their perversities, to slide between the foam of lust, between the most knotted and twisted desires? This man with his little girl, why were his eyes so wet, his mouth so wet, why were her eyes so tired, why was her dress so short, her glance so oblique? Why was that young man so white? There was scum on his lips—the scum of veronal. Why did that woman wait under the lamplight with a hand in her muff? This force which did not explode in Lilith was a poison; it spilled into the streets, ran into the gutters. She wanted to be dismembered, devoured, and she met always with wings, with eyes opening on the heavens, flames turning to the mystic blue of the night lamps in convents and hospitals.

Arline was still asleep. In Lilith the seed would not burst; the body left the earth, pulled upward by a string of nerves, and spilled its pollen only in space, because the fairy tale wore too light a gown, a gown that made a breeze, a space between the feet and earth. Lilith’s footsteps would soon not be heard, the blood would remain quicksilver, blue like the night flames of places where people weep.

Lilith entered Djuna’s room tumultuously, throwing her little serpent skin bag on the bed, her undulating scarf on the desk, her gloves on the book shelf, and talking with fever and excitement:

“I’m falling in love with the Voice. I feel he is like a soul detective, and that the day he captures me, I will love him.”

“It’s a mirage,” said Djuna.

She went to the window. There was snow and ice on the rim of it, like a window giving on Iceland. She tried to open it a little, but it was jammed with snow and ice. She had a feeling they were blocked in, snowed in with tremendous obstacles. She knew Lilith was pursuing another mirage. Adventures, a mirage. The love of the Voice for what the Voice said to her, because the Voice reached into the roots of her being.

“A mystical illusion,” repeated Djuna. “A mirage. If you know what happens to woman when she pursues a mirage, when she has a love affair with a mirage?”

“What can happen to her? It’s poetry.”

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

“But it is only in his presence I feel true, natural.”

“But don’t get closer to him. If you come closer you will defeat your own salvation. But then… you are too lovely, he won’t let you pass without making an effort to retain you. That is what happened to me. I lost the father in him—perhaps I wanted to. I tempted him as a man, and then he became a man and desired me, then I was angry at him, as if it had been only a test, a test of the saviour in him. And he’s noe’s noee’s trying to save himself too.”

“You bitch, you bitch,” laughed Lilith.

“I liked upsetting him. Then, when he became a man and ran after me I was very angry—it seemed to prove that he was only human.”

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

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

“Try and close your eyes, you’ll find another world that is immense, at night, Lilith.”

“I never remember the night. Why don’t I find a man who makes me feel what I feel with you? You are so warm, you are so quick. You are always where I am. Our impulses towards each other happen at the same moment. You are never late or slow or indifferent, and you have the gift of gesture. When I feel anguished, lost, alone, you always have the gift for saying what I need to hear, as if you knew when I am wandering alone, when I need to be called. After we are together you write me letters, and I need so much to feel again what we said, to be able to touch the words, to feel palpably that what happened to us is real. It’s the only thing I believe in, Djuna, everything else is ghostly. You say everything with your body, like a dancer. All your body talks, your hands, your walk. I believe you.”

“But none of this is love, Lilith. We are the same woman. Every woman in this hotel is the same woman. There is always a moment when all the outlines, the differences between women disappear, and we enter a world where all feelings, yours and mine, seem to issue from the same source. We lose our separate identities. What happens to you is the same as what happens to me. Once a month, you and I are exactly alike; and you know it. Listening to you is no longer watching a world different than my own, it’s a kind of communion.”

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

What softness. To lie on a wave. The marvellous silence—two women, one woman becoming plants. To turn over and watch the rivulets of shadows between the breasts, to lie on the down of the bed sleeping over one’s own body, like sleeping in the forest at night. The marvellous silence of woman’s thoughts, the secret and the mystery of night and woman become air, sun, water, plant. Feel the roots resting in the soil, the feet well planted in the coolness, in the brown pressure, firm against this creamy wall of earth. When you press against the body of the other you feel this joy of the roots compressed, sustained, enwrapped in its brownness, with only the seeds of joyousness stirring. A pleasure ebbing back and forth. Sun pressed luxuriantly against the body. Mystery and coolness of darkness between the four walls of another’s flesh. The back of Lilith, this soft, musical wall of fleh, the being floating in the utter waves of silence, enclosed by the presence of what can be touched. No more falling into space. No more quest, anxiety, seeking, yearning, turning, within this compact wall of tender flesh. Touch the delicate tendrils of hair, you touch moss and an end to hunger. This hand holds a strand of hair, the world complete, reduced, in the palm of the hand. You have entered from the dissonances of the street, from the separate, hard fragments walking without legs or head or arms, always mutilated, into the immense vault of an organ chant. Djuna lay at the centre of a wheel. Lilith warm and near. Or Hans talking rumblingly into her ear. The earth turns with a chant of roundness, fullness. It turns into a smooth, full round of plenitude. The spokes pass fast and are not seen at this moment. Only the drunkenness of rotation. Other days the wheel slows down and one gets caught in the spokes. One falls between them, they cut and mangle one. You are caught. The rhythm broken, you dangle, you are dragged, you are mutilated.

The steps of Georgia at the door. A voice with a mustache, the heavy pounding of her enormous feet. Her hands about to strike. Her breath like a beaver, her feet like giant ducks’ feet, her hands slapping the air. When she entered the room of the Voice it was like an attack. Thrusting herself into it as if her shoulders would hatchet down the obstacles.

She made the room seem small. She was not talking to the Voice, but smelling him, breathing over him, with her tongue flicking constantly over the wet lips, as if she had just finished eating him and were seeking the flavor again with her saliva.

Her lips were wet with appetite. She breathed, she snorted, warm and musky. She sat down as a gorilla sits on a branch with her arms ready to climb. When she said: I love, it was incongruous. She ought to have said: I am hungry. I am thirsty.

She had hair on her upper lip, hair in her nose, and hair like seaweeds on her head. The Voice was haunted by the vision of this hair, imagined that she might have hair inside her too, that her sex must be lined like the backs of sea-urchins.

She was very angry because the Voice had not answered her telephone call during the night. She had needed him desperately.

“I never answer the telephone at night,” said the Voice.

“And why not?”

“Because everyone would telephone at night. That is the moment when everyone feels the solidtude. Didn’t you ever sit by a telephone at night when in anguish and feel like calling some one, just to hear a voice? At night people don’t resist their impulses, their obsessions. One feels like addressing another human being just to make sure one is still among them.”

“That’s true. But I called for a more important reason. I have to conduct my orchestra to-morrow, and I have a new obsession. If you don’t help me somehow I’ll never be able to conduct. There was a story about my father which I didn’t tell you yesterday. I remembered it as son as I left you. When I was a girl I knew about his affairs with women. He confided in me. I knew exactly how he behaved, and the most cynical details. There are times even now, when I am making love, I suddenly become aware that I am acting like my father, I feel like him at the moment. One of his favorite amusements was to come to my door in the morning to wake me up, because I was lazy and found it hard to get up. He would knock very hard with his stick, then say: ‘Guess what I’m knocking with, guess!’ At first I didn’t. I laughed without knowing. Then one day I understood his laughter. For years this caused me a great shock. I used to hear this knocking of my father in my dreams. Then I forgot about it. I became an orchestra leader. One day, wanting to amuse a woman I loved, I knocked at her door with my orchestra baton: guess what I am knocking with? That night while conducting, while I was waving my stick, the whole scene came back to me. Do you think that’s why all women are so fascinated by me? I think about it day and night. The stick burns my fingers; I will never be able to conduct again.”

“Didn’t you often wish to be a man?” asked the Voice.

“Yes, often. I envied my father. When he told me about his adventures—and he always gave me the fullest details—I used to feel what he felt as he talked about women. I was aroused by his stories. I used to envy him his enjoyment of woman. I felt being born a woman was a curse. I could take a woman, but not the same way… I didn’t feel I could possess her. Very often I had dreams in which I was a man. If only you would come to my concert!”

“Why?”

“Because you alone make me feel I am a woman. I feel that I get confused, lost, that somehow or other I butt my head against obstacles, blunder, but that you can take all this and direct it, transform it; that you lead me out of this great disorder. I fall into fears. Will you come? I will feel that you are the director, not I—you conducting me. Mischa is playing a solo—he wants you to come too.”

Lilith came to Djuna’s room, shed the long, white cape, and sat pulling the petals of her flower open. She could not bear buds. She would take the closed flowers and open them completely, like the flowers Djuna had seen floating dead on the river.

Lilith filled her room with perfume, turned around it several times as if it were too small for her.

“Come with me to the concert.”

“I am too tired.”

“You have a secret. You’re expecting some one.”

“No, Lilith. But it’s true, I have a secret. I have an opium. It’s the dream. I go to bed thinking: will I dream to-night? I await the dream with the same impatience as the lover.”

“Hans is not coming?”

“Not to-night.”

“Come to the concert.”

“Not to-night.”

“You mean the dream, the dream means so much to you? It isn’t that you love me less?”

“No, Lilith.”

Djuna locked her door: Will I dream to-night? Turned out the light. What will I dream to-night?

Awareness hurts. Knowingness hurts. Ideas hurt. Lucidity hurts. Relationships hurt. Life hurts. But to flow, to drift, to live as nature, does not hurt. Her eyes were closing. She was drifting, drifting. Drunkenness. It was not the Hotel Chaotica which had many rooms, but she, Djuna, when she lay on her bed, folding them all together, the layers, and all the things that she was not yet.

When she entered the dream she stepped on a stage. The lights cast on it changed hue and intensity like stage lights. The violent scenes happened in the spotlight and were enveloped by a thick curtain of blackness. The scenes were cut, interrupted, cut out in sharp relief, or broken with entr’actes. The mise en scene was stylized, and only what had meaning was represented. And very often she was at once the victim and the observer. She was on the stage and at the same time sitting before the stage and watching. She was at times aware that it was only a spectacle, and at other times engulfed by the images, so that she was one with them, and then one with the nightmare.

When she sat and watched what was happening to her on the stage of the dream she felt a deeper anguish, like that of a passive, chained prisoner watching out of a cell window. If she was in action, even when tortured, she felt less pain. In passion and drama there was no time for anguish.

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

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

On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness. She could still see the daylight between the fringe of eyelashes. She could still see the interstices of the world. This was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the penumbra, the frontier, the edge of the world where the thoughts were inlaid in the filaments of lightning. It was the place where the lights were arranged like foot lights, where the images and gestures were delicately filtered and separated, and their silhouettes thrown against space. It was the place where footsteps left no traces, where laughter had no echo, but where the hunger and fear were immense. It was the place where all the sails of reverie could swell and yet no wind was felt.

The light was stained with bright colors brought into being by the friction of the eyelid upon the eyeball, and this eyeball turning on its axis threw the light full on a buried world. The air was different, it was saturated with knowingness, it transmitted perception. The vegetation no longer concealed its breathing, its sleepiness, its lamentations, its shrivellings.

The sand no longer concealed its desire to enmesh, to stifle; the sea showed its true face, its insatiable craving to possess; the earth yawned open its caverns, the fogs spewed out their poisons. The dreams were full of danger, like the African jungle. The dream was full of animals. All the animals killed, stuffed, imprisoned by man, walked alive in the dream. The faces mocked all desire to identify, to personalize: they changed and decomposed before her eyes. They were evocative only. They puzzled and baffled, exposing only the identity of a whim, altering perpetually, eluding continuity.

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

The dream was a filter. The world was never admitted. It was a stage surrendered to fragments, scenes telescoping, slices interweaving, with many pieces left hanging in shreds…

On the tip of the spiral she felt passive, felt bound like a mummy. She was lying down, with chains and bands of cloth around her. As she descended these obstacles loosened, the body moved. At first she was voiceless, numbed, feeling only the descent into the dream and a blanket covering the face.

The loss of memory was like the loss of a chain. With all this fluidity came a great lightness. Without memory she was immensely light, vaporous, fluid. The memory was the density which she could not transcend.

She was not lost, she had only lost the past. Sand passing through the hour glass which never turned. Passing.

By day, as if obeying a command, she followed the dream, step by step, blindly. She felt lost and bewildered if the day did not bring its replica. She felt compelled to recover a flavor, a color, to recapture the personage, the moment, the place. If she found it she remembered it. But at the same moment she became aware of the part of the dream which was missing. The missing fragment was unrecoverable. Yet she felt its presence. It was lying under the earth. It was like the broken arm of a statue, lying near the statue, but buried in the earth. The mutilated structure loomed in vivid colors, but static. So it presented itself during the day, attended with an uneasy, yellow aura of incompleteness.

If she could find the missing fragment of the dream in the daylight she might reconstruct the entire tapestry. She was seeking a window she had seen in a dream. She was walking through the city at night, looking for the window, and she found it. It was the window of a house open on two avenues. In the dream it was the window of Proust’s house. It was also the window of a house she had lived in, she could not remember wheity at nt she was certain that she had already known the feeling of standing at this window looking down at the two avenues like opened legs. She was certain that she had stood many times hesitating between these two avenues. Her route constantly split in two, the whole structure of her life constantly splitting open into two sections. The nature of her mind running like a double river. She could never make a choice. She would follow the avenues until the pain of being thus quartered became ecstasy and the two avenues fused together into a point of absolute sorrow. The drama was this window opening on the dual aspect of existence, on its dual face. The drama was this window she had seen in a dream, which was the window of Proust’s house when he was writing the endless book in which he made no choice, but followed the contours of the symphony and the labyrinth of remembrance. She had chosen as an answer to the dream this pursuit of the dream without memory. Yet she left behind her a ribbon of memory which wove itself inexorably and slowed up her walking and dreaming. But while she followed the dream she was free.

At some point the pattern of her life hung like a frayed cloth and the street of dreams turned into blackness.

That is why she left certain places in great precipitation. She was following a dream. She was in a hurry. When she entered certain rooms filled with people she had never seen in the dream, she became instantly aware that THIS WAS NOT THE PLACE. The need of flight was imperative, compulsive.

When she found the place, she sat very still and satisfied. She sat in a trance remembering the dream and seeking to recapture the lost pieces. She had caught her dream. Or her nightmare. Caught up with it. Then it seemed to her that all the clocks in the world chimed in unison, for the hour of the miracle. As the clocks chimed at midnight for Cinderella, for all metamorphoses. The dream was synchronized. The miracle was accomplished. All the clocks chimed midnight for the metamorphosis. It was not time they chimed for, but the catching up, catching up with the dream. The dream had a way of always running ahead of one. To catch up with it, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. The life on the stage, the life of the legend dovetailed with the daylight, and out of this marriage sparked the great birds of divinity, the eternal moments.

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

Nights when she awaited the dream, as one awaits the ship that is to take one far away, and the nightmare came in its place, then she knew she had something to expiate. The nightmare was the messenger of guilt. The nightmare brought her whatever suffering she had rejected or eluded during the day, or given to others. The dream was the refuge which permitted her endless voyages; the nightmare imprisoned and tortured her.

Now it was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the place where many of the effects were due to shadow, to silences and to space. A marvellous mise en scene, such as human beings knew nothing of when they awakened. It was the moment when one was more than awake, a million times awake, awake backwards and forwards, with a circular fever faster than the rotation of earth, awake with a million eyes and a mouth that had said everything and was now struck with silence; a place so high that breathing ceased and divination began.

It was the twilight of mercury.

The room was turning black. She was splitting herself into two women, and she felt the half of her that was standing up and the half of her that was lying down.

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

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

But with the night came the openness.

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

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

She ceased to be a woman. The secret small pores of the being began to breathe a life like that of plant and flower. She went to sleep a human being and awakened with the nervous sensibility of a leaf, with the fin knowledge of fish, with the hardness of a coral, with the sulphurous eyes of a mineral. She awakened with new finger tips, new tendrils, new wings, new legs, leaves, branches. She awakened with eyes at the end of long arms that floated everywhere and with eyes on the soles of her feet. She awakened in strands of angel hair with lungs of cocoon milk.

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

With the night came the boat. This boat she was pushing with all her strength becase it could not float, it was passing through land. It was chokingly struggling to pass along the streets, it could not find its way to the ocean. It was pushed along the streets of the city, touching the walls of houses, and she was pushing it against the resistance of earth, of cobblestones, of sand, of lava. So many nights against the obstacles of mud, marshes, garden paths through which the boat labored painfully.

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

The boat was passing through the city, unable to find the ocean that transmitted its life voyages.

The light cut into the bones with bony words that could not commune with anything or change substance for communion.

She recognized him. He was the transformable man. He was the man without identity. He came into the dream and acted like a lover. He took her, but if she looked at him a second time he was no longer the man she had given herself to, he was changed. He was not the lover, he was the father. Or if it was the father who first came into the dream now he turned into the Voice, or oftener still into a woman with dishevelled hair as in moments of love. And the woman, when she was approached, turned out to be the long-haired Mischa. She could not hold the identity for more than a moment. The faces changed. All the personages were constantly altering, and the moment she recognized them they become some one else.

She was wearing a light, airy green dress. She was expecting the Voice, but it was Hans who came. She felt his tongue in her mouth. He began to embrace her but then he vanished. She felt a great despair. The atmosphere was yellow and heavy. When she came back the Voice had killed himself with a knife. He lay crumpled up and he looked like a child. She begged him to come to life.

In the corner, watching, was the father. She was embraced and possessed by Hans, but when she looked at him it was the father. The father had more sperm than any man. The richness of the father in sperm was frightening. He said: “My daughter, I have no more god. I have no more god.” He was the god. His embrace awakened her because she had come to an unutterable place. She was struck blind. She had no more feelings. She let this inhuman, this impossible flow of sperm into her from the god and she became blind. The other women around him wept because the daughter was being loved by the father.

She was going to the father with her face tattooed with needles to impress him with her beauty. She felt very beautiful with all the needles in her face. But when she returned home and looked at herself in the mirror her face fell apart, in triangular pieces, shattered. She rushed to her mother: “What shall I do?” The mother took out a comb with great simplicity and began combing her hair, which was silver white. She said: “This is all you do, just comb your hair gently.”

Te father was reconciled to the mother. They wrote messages to each other on a pad. She read what was written on her father’s pad: “Thou shalt love thy daughter, it is written in the Bible.”

She was beautifully dressed, with gold and jewels, a long cape of brocade, with furgloves, and she entered a hall where the music came out of the walls. It was the King who wanted to dance with her and who whispered adoring phrases in her ear. She was laughing and the laughter trickled through the walls. The King put his ear against the wall and said: “Instead of listening to the sea in sea shells I listen to your laughter. We will dance to it.” She did not feel the ground under her feet. She said: “We are inside the music, that is why we don’t see the musicians.”

There was a secret between them. A fire burst upon the hall from the garden. It moved forward like the waves on the shore, waves of smoke and flames rolling in a long line across the garden. She wanted to close the door, but then she understood that if she shut the door the others would be locked outside with the fire, so she opened the door and called them. Her dress was vaporous and enormous around her, like sails. It was raining. The rain was spoiling her dress. She took a carriage. The carriage moved too slowly and they were lost. She wanted to get back to the castle and the dance hall. Her feet were twinkling. She did not mind being wet, she was so happy.

There came the woman so round and full-fleshed, like the mother. So large and full, the Rubens woman, with enourmous breasts. But it was not her mother. She loved her breasts and caressed them. As she caressed the woman she felt her masculinity. She asked: “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” The woman answered: “I thought perhaps you would not like it.” No, it was true, she did not like it, she turned away. But the Rubens woman came back in another form. She was not deluded, she knew it was always the same woman. She was the whore, the woman animal, the lioness. She came back as a heavy luxuriant goddess, too, the goddess of abundance. Her flesh was down, a bed of sensuality, every pore and curve of her. She was the immense statue, the oldest of all the whores, with her mask of avidity. Her hands were grasping, her flesh throbbing in a mountainous heaving way, without electric sparks, rolling, fermenting, saturated with moisture, folded in many lapping layers of voluptuous inertia. Her flesh was without eyes, without antennae. It was without ears, without nerves, without currents. It was a bed of flesh, burning without fire, trembling only from caresses and then dying again. Dead when not touched; like layers of silk, tempting the hands. A river bed of engluing moss, of adhesive rubber plants. Perspiring milk from the heavy flow of desires, the moist currents flowing into the canals of her prone body; all the fluid currents of desire seeping along the silver bark of her legs, around the violin-shaped hips, descending and ascending with a sound of wet silk around the cones and crater edges of her breast. Flesh mother, the oldest of all the whores, who on dark nights of punishment took Hans away from her and left her weeping. She the whore and goddess of earth, whom on other nights Djuna destroyed with lightning, standing like an idol covered with splendor, breathing out a fire which turned the woman into a crumpled heap, like a dead animal. But the woman reappeared. She reappeared in the sparkling costume of the burlesque queens, she came dressed in the tight skirt of the street walker, always preying and waiting. And Djuna did not always hate her; she loved her heavy, obscene walk, her navel glance, her animal passivity, her spreading herself at a café table like a seal, her drunken sullenness. Djuna wanted to enter the woman in her, and be lost in her too, like the feelings of man when he entered and lay in her. She was inside the whore feeling the entrance of man, aware of her feeling, the woman’s feelings and the man’s feelings.

Djuna wanted to kill the Rubens woman. She prepared a bath for her with a strong acid. She said to her: “Let’s take a bath together.” The Rubens woman slapped her when she was naked, laughing. Djuna covered her own body with wax so that the acid would not touch her. She said to the Rubens woman: “This bath comes from Egypt.” The Rubens woman began to dissolve, still laughing. She dissolved completely. The bath was full of jellied substance. She touched it. It was like Jello which she did not like to eat as a child. She felt she must conceal this somewhere. She dug a deep hole in the earth. She filled the hole with the acid. It took her a long time; the hole seemed to get deeper and the jelly more and more abundant. She was so tired she fell asleep. When she awakened it was daytime and the jelly had all come to the surface again. The Voice was looking at the spectacle with his eye glasses shaking. His little hands rubbing together, and his voice unsteadily saying: “Everything is a symbol. The poet is the one who calls death an aurora borealis.”

While the concert was going on the Voice sat at the back of the box and showed only the refracted light on the rim of his glasses. Georgia, in her long black dress, looked like Rasputin. Her heavy hair straight and long, her two black arms, the chaste black monk gown, agitating herself over the instruments, projecting her strength into them.

Lilith sat below, but not lost among the other faces. Watched by the searchlight of the Voice’s glasses, her face, very white, was open to the music and her restlessness was for a moment suspended. When Mischa came out she thrust herself forward as if she wanted to envelope him in her own strength.

Lilith had gone backstage before the concert.

Georgia had fixed her with her wolf eyes and said: “I am playing for you.” So Lilith felt as if the concert were coming from her. And the Voice had told Georgia: “You will conduct well,” as if it were an order. So the Voice felt the concert was his creation; he was leading, he was the strength of it, in it, directing. And the music had been ordained to transmit the currents of his desire across the space to a Lilith on fire with desires. Mischa was giving a silver icy chant which Lilith accepted as an expression of her disenchantment. All the disenchantments—the Voice stepping out and metamorphosed into a man such as she had seen by the million all around her, less than all, a non-face, a non-body, a non-presence, a vanishing of his force, all the light gone out of him as soon as he stepped out of his mysterious Voice role; in the daylight his skin the color of death, his eyes the blurredness of death, his words the dullness of death. Music carrying in its immense waves a foam crest of delusions, in its falling, running, spilling downfall a moment of suffocation, in its undertows waiting for the moment of despair to engulf one. Lilith falling over with a vertigo of despair, struck in the center of her being by the constantly inaccurate shafts of sex—never thrusting her for life but bleeding her, mereaccuounds.

Georgia would pursue her, panting, having sensed in Lilith the response—and not the ultimate non-response. Throughout the multitude of identical rooms Lilith could see men and women embracing convulsively. The same images—but resonances of all kinds, as varied in power as this music now swelling and dying in plaits of sand combed with silver combs. All the little rooms alike and Djuna lying swathed in the fumes of her dreams from which she would never awaken, wanting only the scenes which resembled the dream and skipping the vast deserts and infernos of daily living.

Lilith had skipped no part of the voyage, yet remained unsatisfied—plunging nowhere for a permanent place in which to erect her illusion, like this music passing and vanishing, leaving no signs of its passage.

Mischa is falling asleep. The room looks the same as the Voice’s room, or Djuna’s room, or Lilith’s room. Mischa is asleep in the same kind of bed, with the same radio over his head, and the furniture stands around him in the same mathematical order. Where the desk ends, with its little glass top, covering a laundry list, a telephone list, a card from the drugstore, the dressing table begins. And where the dressing table ends there is space for the lamp. The armchair is placed against the window. The room looks like the inside of a chestnut. The furniture is made of chestnut, the rug has the color of new chestnuts, the lamp has the color of old chestnut. In the same sized drawer in which Djuna folds her lace nightgowns Mischa keeps his faded shirts, Lilith her boyish scarfs, the Voice his notes of what he has heard during the day for future conferences. All the letters are written on the same paper. Mischa feels a shiver of horror, feels the madness of sameness. He thinks of all the rooms at once, and what may be happening in them. They are all washing at the same moment, quarreling, writing letters, or twisting themselves with desire or pretense of desire. Mischa thinks that if everyone died to-night and the great city were left abandoned for a hundred years, the tall, empty structures left to mold and rust… those who would come with their geological passions, their instruments, their research maps, they would be convinced that these people were all absolutely identical. Not alike as twins, but a million beings soldered together, forced into the same motions.

While he looked at his room he could not sleep. It seemed to him that the room was made to efface Mischa. Mischa’s moods, his differences, his disharmony with everyone. In the corner stood his ‘cello in its black sarcophagus.

He wanted to sleep. He wanted to sleep.

The room did become smaller and smaller, and darker, as if he were being placed in a real chestnut which closed around him. And as soon as it became smaller, he saw windows flung open and flames bursting from them. Behind the flames the faces of madmen shrieking and grimacing. The walls crumbled. The bars were twisted open. The madmen crawled out between them, then ran in all directions, with their hair standing on end. Some of them still wore their straight-jackets. They fell on their backs and could not pick themselves up. They lay there like scarabs and the crowd ran over them. Bells. Whistles. Dust raised. Stones rolling. Hands twisted trying to rend the air. When the people crashed into each other they looked at each other. They saw the same face. It was the face of a madman. The eyes protruded and the mouth hung lower on the right side. They touched each other. It was a mirror they were touching. Another mirror. Another mirror. A thousand faces all alike. They ran, they bowed, they kneeled, they fell on their faces, they wept, and all of them were doing exactly the same thing… They rushed into a house. A tall man was sitting in an armchair. He was looking down at his insides which were exposed. He was watching how the blood moved, how the liver functioned. Intestinal functioning, like the wheels, chains, canals, labyrinths of a factory. Microbes climbing through the arteries in military order. Food deteriorating. Canals like inside a coal mine; little wagons travelling up and down, carrying food. Bridges. Canals. Plants growing. Seeds falling. It was the Voice who was oiling the mechanism with an eye-dropper. The Voice who picked up a few drops and placed them in a bottle. He examined it with a microscope. Enlarged it showed the inside of an egg. Inside of this egg there were clouds, and resting on the clouds two eyes shedding tears, with their roots dangling behind. The tears fell into an oyster opening and closing. A woman slipped her tongue into the oyster.

The inside of the Voice was now like a printing press shaped like a liver, a heart, the entrails. Words fell into separate letters inside a small drawer. Words and letters were running through the intestines like the words in a printing press. The pages came out in neat piles. The Voice read them. The pages were dripping blood on the rugs. The Voice closed the little door of his insides and leaned over towipe the stains away. The mad crowd surrounded him. He pointed to the sky. The sky was the roof of his room. The stars and moon were made of cardboard and moved with strings like puppets. The Voice pressed a button. The motions of the planets were reproduced, but shakingly, hesitatingly, as if the machine were not working very well. The madmen looked on, bewildered. The Voice opened the little door to his brain. The brain like the skeins of tangled wool. The ribbon of a movie film, a travelogue picture passing very fast. Monuments, streets, churches, but appearing upside down. A little boy was buying a newspaper from another little boy in the street. In his room he spread the newspaper on the floor and made a paper boat and a bird. He wrote in big letters: “Dear Papa and Mamma, please return Pinocchio to the library or you will be fined for it.” He sat on the paper boat and immediately it sank. Then the paper boat floated up again, half open, lying on its side, floating down the river.

The Voice closed the little door to his brain. He turned the X-ray machine on the crowd. He turned it upon the women standing there. On the stomach of one of the women. One could see inside her womb a dead child. Inside another woman twins lying entangled. One twin is dead and the other is writhing, seeking to escape. Inside another woman there is a child asleep, covered with fur. Inside another woman lies a coiled snake, asleep.

A woman is following Mischa stealthily. He falls. She leans over with a heavy stick and beats his legs until they break. She leans over to look at them. They are the knotted roots of trees; mushrooms are growing all over them. The woman runs to the village to get a coffin. They try to place Mischa in the coffin, but he is too long for it. They begin to saw off his legs, and then the body is placed in the coffin. The woman picks up the legs. They stand alone like a pair of boots. The boots begin to sink into the sand.

The noise of strong suction was not the noise of the sand finally sucking his legs down, but the breakfast contraption being violently sucked closed again, and on the rug lay the tiny box he hated, with a breakfast arranged like a mathematical calculation. He looked at it from the receding shores of his dream. He wanted to return to the dream. There was nothing left of it. An island there, a deserted island where many things had happened. He could see it receding. The sand must still be in his clothes. His legs buried. He looked at them. They were asleep. But no scar left where they had been sawed off.

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

“Maybe it’s in you there are no more secrets.”

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

“Not if she’s a real woman.”

“I must have become a real woman right here, for I feel the dependence now, and I don’t mind it. I like it.”

Then Lilith stopped because she saw he did not like what she was saying.

“Do you know the meaning of your own name?” asked the Voice. “It’s the unmated woman, the woman who cannot truly be married to any man, the one whom man can never possess altogether. Lilith, you remember, was born before Eve and made out of red earth, not of human substance. She could seduce and ensorcell but she could not melt into man and become one with him. She was not made of the same human substance.”

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

“I don’t know. The way you talk about dependence does not mean love. It means the love for the Father, who is the symbol of God. You are seeking a father… How exactly do you think of me?”

But before she could answer his question the little man left his analyst’s chair and walked up to her. Lilith heard his breathing and felt he did not want to hear the answer.

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

Human life at this moment seemed the unreal and miniature city, with too many boundaries, too many laws, and too many simplicities. Giving was the only flight in space permitted to whomever could abandon the human substance. Better to be made of red clay, as she was, for she would never die, and she would never die because of this joy that came in being more than one woman, and for the moment the woman the Voice wanted.

What would he demand of her?

While the Voice, who was no longer the Seer, talked, what she saw was the dark-skinned mythological crab, not quite a man, but an animal, with the cavernous, pre-historic sorrows of the monkey, the agedness of the turtle, the tenderness of the kangaroo, the facile humility of the dog.

In the Voice she felt the ugliness of tree roots, of the earth, and this terrific dark mute knowing of the animal, for though he was the one most aware of what happened inside others he was the one least aware of what happened in himself. It was too near. He could read the myth, and man’s dreams, but not in himself. The man had been denied. He was begging her to be made a person, a man. The man had been buried, had grown very old, withered, without having achieved his life on earth. That is what his eyes were asking for: a life on earth.

Lilith knew it was all based on a lie, and he could not be lied to. That is why he never lived: he had not learned to let himself be lied to. He will be another victim. I don’t know, I feel possessed and diabolical. I like the pleasure I give him.

It was a father I was looking for. And I found him. But he is a father who turns white with passion, who trembles with doubts and jealousies. He says that with me one travels so far away from reality that it is necessary to buy a return ticket. He is afraid of not being able to come back. I like him better serious than laughing; he doesn’t know how to laugh. His pranks are pranks of the mind, his humor is paradox, the reversal of ideas, the trickeries and trapeze stunts of ideas. He has not learned what I have learned—to not clutch at the perfume of flowers, to not touch the dew, to not tear all the curtains down, to let exaltation and breath rise, vanish. The perfume of the hours distilled only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by human fingers. Flesh touching flesh generates perfume. The friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying, without tampering, without withering. An awe of the senses. Silence.

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

He was walking at Lilith’s side now, in full daylight. His clothes hung about him as on a cross of wood. The clothes did not dress him, make him incarnate. His small hands made brusque gestures as if made of bones. Clothes take the shape of a man’s body, of his gestures. They bear the imprint of his character, his habits, his moods. The hat reveals if he is mellow and tolerant, if he is gay or lavish. Every line, fold, wrinkle, testifies to how he sits, to his tenderness or roughness, his sensuality or asceticism. The hat is moulded by the hand and is carried either with pride or insolence, with nonchalance or rigidity.

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

When they returned from the theatre or a dance and stood before the door of her room there was always a pause. The Voice would say: “Come and talk with me a while longer. I hate to surrender you to sleep.”

If she refused she would find a note under her door the next day: “You belong to the night. I have to give you up to the night, to your mystery.” She smiled. Her mystery was so amazingly simple, but he could not understand it.

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

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

She sat on the floor with the letter in her lap and the frog in the palm of her hand, weeping over his ugliness and humility and the faith she must hold on to. She remembered Djuna’s words: if you fall in love with a mirage your body will revolt.

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

She used his own formulas against him. When he complained that she left him alone she gave him mysterious explanations: that the reality of living always brought tragedy, that she preferred the dream which never culminated in tragedy. The Voice was forced to admit he preferred the dream. The explanations enchanted and deluded him, and saved her from saying: “I don’t want you near me because I don’t love you.”

His concern with the accuracy of the psychological was so tremendous that once, after the discovery that she had lied, he said: “Let me solve this thing alone. Don’t bother about details of any kind. What do our lives matter when the whole manmade world is at stake.”

The only joy she experienced was that of being completely understood, justified, absolved in all but her relationship to him. He always asked her what she had been doing. No matter what she told him, even about the trivial purchase of a bracelet, the Voice pounced upon it with excitement and raised the incident to a complete, dazzling symbolical act, a part of a legend. The little incident was all he needed to compose and complete this legend. The bracelet had a meaning—every thing had a meaning. Every act revealed more and more clearly this divine pattern by which she lived and of which the Voice alone knew the entire design. Now he could see. He repeated over and over again: You see? You see? Lilith had the feeling that she had been doing extraordinary things. When she stepped into a shop and bought a bracelet it was not, as she thought, because of the love of its color, or shape, or because of her love of adornment. She was carrying in herself at that moment the entire drama of woman’s slavery and dependence. In this obscure little theatre of her unconscious the denouement brought about by the purchase of the bracelet was a drama which had everlasting repercussions on her daily life. It signified the desire to be bound to some one, it expressed a yielding of some kind. She had voluntarily bound and enslaved herself. You see? You see? Not only was the bracelet or the lovely moment spent before the shop window magnified and brought into violent relief—as an act full of implications, of repercussions—but all she had done during the week seemed to open like a giant hot-house camelia whose growth had been forced by a travail of creation from the moment she first drew breath.

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

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

He revolted now and then against her uncapturableness but she subtilized the situation. She did not want reality. She feared reality. She was really a flame. One could not possess a flame. She annulled the boundaries, confused the issues, effaced the black and whiteness. All the definite decisions, outlines, realities, she melted into a dream-like substance. She enchanted him with a sea of talk, hypnotized him with inventions and creations, so that he would cease his clutching, become cosmic again. She talked him out of the reality of her presence.

What he did not know was that at the same time she was losing her faith in all interpretations, since she saw how they could be manipulated to conceal the truth. She began to feel the illusory quality of all man’s interpretations, and to believe only in her feelings. Every day she found in mythology a new pretext for eluding his desire for her. First she needed time. She must become entirely herself and without need of him. She was waiting for the moment when she would have no more need of him as a doctor. She was waiting for the man and the doctor to become entirely separate, and never to be again confused in her. This he accepted.

But when he was not being the doctor, she discovered he was not a man but a child. He wept like a child, he raged, he was filled with fears, he was possessive, he invaded her room without delicacy, he complained and lamented about himself, his own life. He was desperately hungry and awkward in life, clutching rather than enjoying. The human being hidden in the healer was stunted, youthful, hysterical. As soon as he ceased to be a teacher and a guide, he lost all his strength and deftness. He was disoriented, chaotic, blind. As soon as he stepped out of his role he collapsed. Lilith found herself confronting a child, a child lamenting, regretting, impatient, fretful, lonely. He wrote inchoate love notes with ink blots, he leaped to meet her in the street, perspiring, nervous. He was jealous of the man who washed her hair. The child that she awakened in him was like the child in all those who had come to him for care, unsatisfied, lamenting, tearful, sickly.

He wanted to go to the sea shore with her. Lilith and the Voice then, walking along the boardwalk. Crowds. Discord between sea and voices, between wind and flags, between shop windows and sand. Grating. Or was it Lilith grating at the touch of the Voice’s hands, like sticks of wood falling on her.

The crowd walking, chewing, breathing, grunting. The wind slicing open dyed hair, teasing false feathers. The salt so bitter on this skirt of the sea’s dance trodden by bold houses with mangy-faced facades.

Open-jawed shops with loud speakers selling furniture and horoscopes. The Voice slipping coin after coin in the slot machine for music. “Do you want more music? Do you want more music?&qot Coins in the slot machine for music.

Long boardwalk of monsters with walrus faces, the rictus of the ray fish, the eyes of telescope fishes, and woodpecker’s voices. Sand in everything, lips which seemed peeled of their skin. The rust, the rust in reality slowing down her rhythm to a sob.

The sea sullen, withdrawn.

Men dragging the enormous net thrown from the end of the pier for deep sea fishing. The net was empty. The fish were being carried away. On the ground lay the jellied star fish unwanted, unsaleable. The sailors jerked out their knives and threw them into the fishes, pinning them to the boardwalk. Laughter. Another knife. No blood stains, but stains of sea ebbing from the wounds. Entrails of gelatine breaking. Coiling and recoilings of gelatinous pain. The sailors laughing.

The sea inside Lilith churning with revolt. The sea in her ebbing heavily back and forth away from human touch.

He moves wooden arms around her: they fall crossed in front of her, clasping nothing. The scarecrow is agitated. Do you want to dance? Do you want waffles? What do you want?

The sea inside of her recoiling angrily against all touch. Recoiling from the sand in his voice. He is chaining words together to establish a current. Words chained together. The chaplet of meaning might produce the semblance of a symphony. He was chaining together with meaning what need never have been separated and should have been continuous like a symphony in the blood.

“Everything was unreal before you came, Lilith. No woman loved me for myself. I created and invented them. I did not have to create you.”

All that he said vanished faster than music and was without echo in her.

Only the flow of words, dying quickly because underneath her is this sea, her nature which will not flow into him; underneath was her lie and his blindness to the lie.

The Voice talked to create the semblance of a symphony, seeking to conjure up life by interpretation. This rhythm was illusion; it was only the rhythm of thought. He could not touch her. The sea was angry. People were walking without rhythm, caressing without rhythm. People were talking and weeping and dancing without rhythm. The miracle did not take place. It did not happen in the body. The miracle did not happen, the simple miracle of love.

According to the pattern written with indelible philosophical ink, this is the moment when life should glow. But the sea in her heaves with discontent and has no answer, no yielding either.

She no longer heard the music from the boardwalk, the angry snoring of the sea. Before her stood a tall man in armour. She was kneeling before him. She was caressing the polished armour, seeking the sex with her mouth. The man in the armour did not move. She struck at it with a hammer. As the pieces of armour fell off, the body fell apart. All the pieces lay on the floor—the heart, the hands, the head, the feet, but no sex. The woman was still seeking it with her mouth. Another man was walking towards her. There were noeyes in his face. He turned around. The eyes were placed in the back of his head. He saw her. He walked away from her with arms outstretched. She followed him. He saw her but he walked away faster and faster. Finally he sat down and sobbed. Enormous tears came out of his eyes, but they were like soap bubbles, they rose in the air. He sat there weeping from the back of his head.

A kitten was biting her toes. She sat down and covered her feet with her dress. A man took the kitten and opened its paws with a knife, as if they were oysters. A man who was pursued came into her room through an attic window over her head and threatened to choke her. Hearing a noise he tried to hide. The door opened and four men were there to catch him. But Lilith loved the man and felt pity for him.

She was sitting in front of the Voice, their knees were touching. He was saying that she was not ill, she did not need any more care, but she must wear this dress of which he showed her a picture. It was a flowing white dress. Lilith said: “But it’s a wedding dress!” He said: “You were never really married.” She saw that they had been living together in a completely padded apartment, sound-proof. Satin-lined. But she was not a woman. She was a lamp-light, five-pointed, standing in the fog. She felt the black-rusted iron casing around her, and the glass chapel head. Inside the glass chapel there was a tongue of light, and on her shoulder was a sparrow. She was awake and twinkling without eyelids. She felt yellow, wet, and multiplied hundreds of times along the street; she felt dust in her eyes which she could not shake off because of the iron frame.

In the Castle there were twelve guest rooms. The rooms were richly furnished but with beds only. Each room had a different kind of bed. In the first one there was a luxurious four-postered bed with a silken canopy. In the second twin beds of rose-wood. In the third an immense crib of carved wood. In the fourth a small Russian crib lined with horse fur. In the fifth an Empire style bed with gold ornaments. A copper bed, and a bed of white fur. On the white fur bed she saw a beautiful fig split open with the red pulp looking like flesh. She touched it and it felt like the inside of a woman. A crime was committed in one of the rooms. Everyone was looking for the body. She knew where it was, but she would not tell. Some one spotted a line of blood along the wall. There was a violently bad odor, the smell of a cadaver.

Looking out of the window she saw a lake. There was a woman in an automobile riding over it, trying to land. But she drove into the wing of the wharf and could not free herself. Lilith reached out with her hand, took up the automobile, and laid it on the narrow sidewalk before the hotel. The woman was old and haggard. Lilith said to her: “Do you want some coffee?” She began to make coffee and the coffee pot grew immense—it boiled and sputtered and danced beyond her control. It was a huge factory grinding and smoking and boiling. The woman before Lilith is monstrous, paralyzed in a posture of agony. Hands contorted as if cut off at the wrist. Her legs are covered with blood-suckers. Everybody turns away from her, fainting with horror. Lilith did not want to hurt her feelings: she continued to look at her as if she were beautiful. The monster sprawled on the floor and stretched her swollen legs, saying: “I have six toes on each foot.” As Lilith looked at her she was aware that the monster’s eyes were piercing and divinatory. Lilith looked at her more fixedly, disregarding her ugliness. Then slowly the monster’s body straightened, her hands grasped Lilith softly, and she looked almost beautifulered wi<…>

It was not a woman, but the Voice. And the Voice was knocking at her door. He stood there with his pulpy hat in his hand, entangled in his valises.

Neither her powers of illusion, nor her dreams, nor even the night itself had worked the miracle. He remained nothing but the Voice with a death-like breath.