A Spy in the House of Love
Page 11
“Is it my fault if they only turned one of their faces towards me?”
“You’re a danger to other human beings. First of all you dress them in the costume of the myth: poor Philip, he is Siegfried, he must always sing in tune, and be everlastingly handsome. Do you know where he is now? In a hospital with a broken ankle. Due to immobility he has gained a great deal of weight. You turn your face away, Sabina? That was not the myth you made love to, is it? If Mambo stopped drumming to go home and nurse his sick mother, would you go with him and boil injection needles? Would you, if another woman loved Alan, would you relinquish your child’s claims upon his protectiveness? Will you go and make of yourself a competent actress and not continue to play Cinderella for amateur theatres only, keeping the artificial snow drop which fell on your nose during the snow storm long after the play is over as if to say: ‘For me there is no difference at all between stage snow and the one falling now over Fifth Avenue’? Oh Sabina, how you juggled the facts in your games of desire, so that you might always win. The one intent on winning has not loved yet!”
To the lie detector Sabina said: “And if I did all you ask of me, will you stop haunting my steps, will you stop writing in your notebook?”
“Yes, Sabina. I promise you,” he said.
“But, how could you know so much about my life…”
“You forget that you invited me yourself to shadow you. You endowed me with the power to judge your acts. You have endowed so many people with this power: priests, policemen, doctors. Shadowed by your conscience, interchangeable, you felt safer. You felt you could keep your sanity. Half of you wanted to atone, to be freed of the torments of guilt, but the other half wanted to be free. Only half of you surrendered, calling out to strangers: ‘Catch me!’ while the other half sought industriously to escape final capture. It was just another one of your flirtations, a flirtation with justice. And now you are in flight, from the guilt of love divided, and from the guilt of not loving. Poor Sabina, there was not enough to go around. You sought your wholeness in music… Yours is a story of non-love… And do you know Sabina, if you had been caught and tried, you would have been meted out a less severe punishment than you mete out to yourself. We are much more severe judges of our own acts. We judge our thoughts, our secret intents, our dreams even… You never considered the mitigating circumstances. Some shock shattered you and made you distrustful of a single love: You divided them as a measure of safety. So many trap doors opened between the night club world of Mambo, to the Vienna-before-the-war of Philip, to the studious world of Alan, or the adolescent evanescent world of Donald. Mobility in love became a condition for your existence. There is nothing shameful in seeking safety measures. Your fear was very great.”
“My trap doors failed me.”
“Come with me, Sabina.”
Sabina and Djuna went up to her studio, where they could still hear the drumming.
As if to silence it, Djuna placed a record in her phonograph.
“Sabina…” But no words came as one of Beethoven’s Quartets began to tell Sabina, as Djuna could not, of what they both knew for absolute certainty: the continuity of existence and of the chain of summits, of elevations by which such continuity is reached. By elevation the consciousness reached a perpetual movement, transcending death, and in the same manner attained the continuity of love by seizing upon its impersonal essence, which was a summation of all the alchemies producing life and birth, a child, a work of art, a work of science, a heroic act, an act of love. The identity or the human couple was not eternal but interchangeable, to protect this exchange of spirits, transmissions of character, all the fecundations of new selves being born, and faithfulness only to the continuity, the extensions and expansions of love achieving their crystallizations into high moments and summits equal to the high moments and summits of art or religion.
Sabina slid to the floor and sat there with her head against the phonograph, with her wide skirt floating for one instant like an expiring parachute; and then deflating completely and dying in the dust.
The tears on Sabina’s face were not round and separate like ordinary tears, but seemed to have fallen like a water veil, as if she had sunk to the bottom of the sea by the weight and dissolutions of the music. There was a complete dissolution of the eyes, features, as if she were losing her essence.
The lie detector held out his hands as if to rescue her, in a light gesture, as if this were a graceful dance of sorrow rather than the sorrow itself, and said: “In homeopathy there is a remedy called pulsatile for those who weep at music.”