The Four-Chambered Heart coti-3

by Anais Nin

  The goodness which at times shone so brilliantly in him was a goodness without insight, too; he was not even aware of the changes from goodness to anger, and could not conjure any understanding against his violent outbursts.

  Djuna feared those changes. His face at times beautiful, human, and near, at others twisted, cruel, and bitter. She wanted to know what caused the changes, to avert the havoc they caused, but he eluded all efforts at understanding.

  She wished she had never told him anything about her past.

  She remembered what incited her to talk. It was during the early part of the relationship, when one night he had leaned over and whispered: “You are an angel. I can’t believe you can be taken like a woman.” And he had hesitated for an instant to embrace her.

  She had rushed to disprove it, eagerly denying it. She had as great a fear of being told that she was an angel as other women had of their demon being exposed. She felt it was not true, that she had a demon in her as everyone had, but that she controlled it rigidly, never allowing it to cause harm.

  She also had a fear that this image of the angel would eclipse the woman in her who wanted an earthy bond. An angel to her was the least desirable of bedfellows!

  To talk about her past had been her way to say: “I am a woman, not an angel.”

  “A sensual angel,” then he conceded. But what he registered was her obedience to her impulses, her capacity for love, her gift of herself, on which to base henceforth his doubts of her fidelity.

  “And you’re Vesuvius,” she said laughing. “Whenever I talk about understanding, mastering, changing, you get as angry as an earthquake. You have no faith that destiny can be changed.”

  “The Mayan Indian is not a mystic, he is a pantheist. The earth is his mother. He has only one word for both mother and earth. When an Indian died they put real food in his tomb, and they kept feeding him.”

  “A symbolical food does not taste as good as real food!”

  (It is because he is of the earth that he is jealous and possessive. His angers are of the earth. His massive body is of the earth. His knees are of iron, so strong from pressing against the flanks of wild horses. His body has he flavors of the earth: spices, ginger, chutney, musk, pimiento, wine, opium. He has the smooth neck of a statue, a Spanish arrogance of the head, an Indian submission, too. He has the awkward grace of an animal. His hands and feet are more like paws. When he catches a fleeing cat he is swifter than the cat. He squats like an Indian and then leaps on powerful legs. I love the way his high cheekbones swell with laughter. Asleep he shows the luxuriant charcoal eyelashes of a woman. The nose so round and jovial; everything powerful and sensual except his mouth. His mouth is small and timid.)

  What Djuna believed was that like a volcano his fire and strength would erupt and bring freedom, to him and to her. She believed the fire in him would burn all the chains which bound him. But fire too must have direction. His fire was blind. But she was not blind. She would help him.

  In spite of his physical vitality, he was helpless, he was bound and tangled. He could set fire to a room and destroy, but he could not build as yet. He was bound and blind as nature is. His hands could break what he held out of strength, a strength he could not measure, but he could not build. His inner chaos was the chain around his body, his conviction that one was born a slave of one’s nature, to be led inevitably to destruction by one’s blind impulses.

  “What do you want your life to be?”

  “A revolution every day.”

  “Why, Rango?”

  “I love violence. I want to serve ideas with my body.”

  “Men die every day for ideas which betray them, for leaders who betray them, for false ideals.”

  “But love betrays, too,” said Rango. “I have no faith.”

  (Oh, god, thought Djuna, will I have the strength to win this battle against destruction, this private battle for a human love?)

  “I need independence,” said Rango, “as a wild horse needs it. I can’t harness myself to anything. I can’t accept any discipline. Discipline discourages me.”

  Even asleep his body was restless, heavy, feverish. He threw off all the blankets, lay naked, and by morning the bed seemed like a battlefield. So many combats he had waged within his dreams; so tumultuous a life even in sleep.

  Chaos all around him, his clothes always torn, his books soiled, his papers lost. His personal belongings, of which he remembered an object now and then which he missed, wanted to show Djuna, were scattered all over the world, in rooming-house cellars where they were kept as hostages for unpaid rent.

  All the little flames burning in him at once, except the wise one of the holy ghost.

  It saddened Djuna that Rango was so eager to go to war, to fight for his ideas, to die for them. It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics, science. Her feminine self was sad and smiled, too, at this game of endowing personal and emotional beliefs with the dignity of impersonal names. She smiled at this as men smile at women’s enlargement of personal tragedies to a status men do not believe applicable to personal lives.

  While Rango took the side of wars and revolutions, she took the side of Rango, she took the side of love.

  Parties changed every day, philosophies and science changed, but for Djuna human love alone continued. Great changes in the maps of the world, but none in this need of human love, this tragedy of human love swinging between illusion and human life, sometimes breaking at the dangerous passageway between illusion and human life, sometimes breaking altogether. But love itself as continuous as life.

  She smiled at man’s great need to build cities when it was so much harder to build relationships, his need to conquer countries when it was so much harder to conquer one heart, to satisfy a child, to create a perfect human life. Man’s need to invent, to circumnavigate space when it is so much harder to overcome space between human beings, man’s need to organize systems of philosophy when it was so much harder to understand one human being, and when the greatest depths of human character lay but half explored.

  “I must go to war,” he said. “I must act. I must serve a cause.”

  Rango gave her the feeling of one who reproduced in life gestures and scenes and atmosphere already imprinted on her memory. Where had she already seen Rango on horseback, wearing white fur boots, furs and corduroys, Rango with his burning eyes, somber face, and wild black hair?

  Where had she already seen Rango’s face in passion worshipful like a man receiving communion, the profane wafer on the tongue?

  Seeing him lying at her side was like one of those memories which assail one while traveling through foreign lands to which one was not bound in any conscious way, and yet at each step recognizing its familiarity, with an exact prescience of the scene awaiting one around the corner of the street.

  Memory, or race memories, or the influence of tales, fairy tales, legends, and ballads heard in childhood?

  Rango came from sixteenth-century Spain, the Spain of the troubadours, with its severity, its rigid form, the domination of the church, the claustration of women, the splendor of Catholic ceremonies, and a vast, secret tumultuous river of sensuality running below the surface, uncontrollable, and detectable only through those persistent displays of guilt and atonement common to all races.

  Rango recreated for Djuna a natural blood-and-flesh paradise so different from the artificial paradises created in art by city children. In her childhood spent in cities, and not in forests, she had created paradises of her own inventions, with a language of her own, outside and beyond life, as certain birds create a nest in some inaccessible branch of a tree, inaccessible to disaster but also difficult to preserve.

  But Rango’s paradise was an artless paradise of life in a forest, in mountains, lakes, mirages, with strange animals and strange flowers and trees, all of it warm and accessible.

  Bec
ause she had been a child of the cities, the paradise of her childhood had been born of fairy tales, legends, and mythology, obscuring ugliness, cramped rooms, miserly backyards.

  Rango had had no need to invent. He had possessed mountains of legendary magnificence, lakes of fantastic proportions, extraordinary animals, a house of great beauty. He had known fiestas which lasted for a week, carnivals, orgies. He had taken his ecstasies from the rarefied air of heights, his drugs from religious ceremonies, his physical pleasures from battles, his poetry from solitude, his music from Indian dances, and been nourished on tales told by his Indian nurse.

  To visit the first girl he had loved he had had to travel all night on horseback, he had leaped walls, and risked her mother’s fury and possible death at the hands of her father. It was all written in the Romancero!

  The paradise of her childhood was under a library table covered to the ground by a red cloth with fringes, which was her house, in which she read forbidden books from her father’s vast library. She had been given a little piece of oilcloth on which she wiped her feet ostentatiously before entering this tent, this Eskimo hut, this African mud house, this realm of the myth.

  The paradise of her childhood had been in books.

  The house in which she had lived as a child was the house of the spirit which does not live blindly but is ever, out of passionate experience, building and adorning its four-chambered heart—an extension and expansion of the body, with many delicate affinities establishing themselves between her and the doors and passageways, the lights and shadows of her outward abode, until she was incorporated into it in the entire expressiveness of what is outward as related to the inner significance, until there was no more distinction between outward and inward at all.

  (I’m fighting a dark force in Rango, loving nature in him, through him, and yet fighting the destructions of nature. When my life culminates in a heaven of passion, it is most dangerously balanced over a precipice. The further I seek to soar into the dream, the essence, touching the vaults of the sky, the tighter does the cord of reality press my neck. Will I break seeking to rescue Rango? Fatigue of the heart and body…

  Intermittently I see and feel the dampness, poverty, a sick Zora, food on the table with wine stains, cigarette ashes, and bread crumbs of past meals. Only now and then do I notice the rust in the stove, the leak in the roof, the rain on the rug, the fire that has gone out, the sour wine in a cup. And thus I descend through trap doors without falling into a trap but knowing there is another Rango I cannot see, the one who lives with Zora, who awaits to appear in the proper lighting. And I am afraid, afraid of pain… Now I understand why I loved Paul…because he was afraid. When we lay down and caressed each other we caressed this self-same fear and understood it, under the blanket, fear of violence. We recognized it in the dark, with our hands and our mouths. We touched it and were moved by it, because it was our secret which we shared through the body. Everyone says: you must take sides, choose a political party, choose a philosophy, choose a dogma… I chose the dream of human love. Whatever I ally myself to is to be close to my love. With it I hope to defeat tragedy, to defeat violence. I dance, I sew, I mend, I cook for the sake of this dream. In this dream nobody dies, nobody is sick, nobody separates. I love and dance with my dream unfurled, trusting darkness, trusting the labyrinth, into the furnaces of love. Some say: the dream is escape. Some say: the dream is madness. Some say: the dream is sickness. It will betray you. The Rango I see is not the one Zora sees, or the world sees. This is the witchcraft of love. You can take sides in religion, you can take sides in history, and there are others with you, you are not alone. But when you take the side of love, the opium of love, you are alone. For the doctors call the dream a symptom, the historians escape, the philosophers a drug, and even your lover will not make the perilous journey with you… Hang your dream of love on the mast of this barge of caresses…a flag of fire…)

  The enemy was not outside as Rango believed.

  What he most wanted to avoid, which was that Djuna should remember her days with Paul, or desire Paul’s return, or yearn for his presence, was the very feeling he caused by his violence.

  Because his violence drove her away from him. The sense of devastation left by his angry words, or his distorted interpretations of her acts, his doubts, caused such an anxious climate that at times to escape from the tension, like a child seeking peace and gentleness, she did remember Paul…

  Then Rango committed a second error: he wanted Djuna and Zora to be friends.

  Djuna never knew whether he believed this would achieve a unity in his torn and divided life, whether he was thinking only of himself, or of sharing his burden with Djuna, or whether he had such faith in Djuna’s creation of human beings that he hoped she could heal Zora and perhaps win Zora’s affection and put an end tothe tension he felt whenever he returned home.

  The obscurities and labyrinths of Rango’s mind remained always mysterious to her. There were twists and deformities in his nature which she could not clarify. Not only because he never knew himself what took place within him, not only because he was full of contradictions and confusions, but because he resented and rebelled against any examination, probing, or questioning of his motives.

  Socame the day when he said: “I wish you would visit Zora. She is very ill and you might help her,”

  Until now there had been very little mention of Zora. Certain words ofRango’s had accumulated in Djuna’s mind: Rango had married Zora when he was seventeen. Six years before he met Djuna they had begun to live together without a physical bond, “as brother and sister.” She was constantly ill and Rango had a great compassion for her helplessness. Djuna did not know whether more than compassion bound them together, more than the past.

  She knew that this appeal was made to her goodself, and that she must, to answer it, subdue her own wishes not to be entangled in Rango’s life with Zora, and to avoid a relationship which could only cause her pain. She was being asked to bring a certain aspect of herself among her other aspects as others are asked to wear a certain costume out of their multiple wardrobe.

  She was invited to bring her good self only, in which Rango believed utterly, and yet she felt a rebellion against this good self which was too often called upon, was too often invited, to the detriment of other selves who were now like numerous wallflowers! The Djuna who wanted to laugh, to be carefree, to have a love all of her own, an integrated life, a rest from troubles.

  Secretly she had often dreamed of her other selves, the wild, the free, the natural, the capricious, the whimsical, the mischievous ones. But the constant demand upon the good one was atrophying the others.

  But there are invitations which are like commands.

  There are heraldic worlds of spiritual and emotional aristocracy which have nothing to do with conventional morality, which give to certain acts a quality of noblesse oblige, a faithfulness to the highest capacities of a personality, a sort of life on the altitudes, a devotion to the idealized self. The artists who had overthrown conventions submitted to this code and knew the sadness and guilt which came from any failing in this voluntary standard. All of them suffered at times from a guilt resembling the guilt of the religious, the moralists, the bourgeois, while apparently living in opposition to them. It was the incurable guilt of the idealist seeking to reach an image of one’s self one could be proud of.

  They had merely created fraternities, duties, communal taboos of another sort, but to which they adhered at the cost of great personal sacrifices.

  Djuna did not know how this good self had attained such prominence. She did not know how it had come to be born at all, for she considered it thrust upon her, not adopted by her. She felt much less good than she was expected to be. It gave her a feeling of treachery, of deception.

  She did not have the courage to say: I would rather not see Zora, not know your other life. I would rather retain my illusion of a single love.

  In childhood she remembered she played dangerous gam
es. She sought adventures and difficulties. She fabricated paper wings and threw herself out of a second-story window, escaping injury by a miracle. She did not want to be the sweet and gentle heroine in charades and games, but the dark queen of intrigue. She preferred Catherine de’ Medici to the flavorless and innocent princesses.

  She was often tangled in her own high rebellions, in her devastating bad tempers, and in lies.

  But her parents repeated obsessionally: You must be good. You must keep your dress clean. You must be kind, thank the lady, hide your pain if you fall, do not reach for anything you want, do not attract attention to yourself, do not be vain about the ribbon in your hair, efface yourself, be silent and modest, give up to your brothers the games they want, curb your temper, do not talk too much, do not invent stories about things which never happened, be good or else you will not be loved. And when she was accused of any of these offenses, both parents turned away from her and she was denied the good-night or good-morning kiss which was essential to her happiness. Her mother carried out her threats of loss into games which seemed like tragedies to Djuna the child: once swimming in a lake before Djuna’s anxious eyes, she had pretended to disappear and be drowned. When she reappeared on the surface Djuna was already hysterical. Another time, in a vast railroad station, when Djuna was six years old, the mother hid behind a column and Djuna found herself alone in the crowd, lost, and again she wept hysterically.

  The good self was formed by these threats: an artificial bloom. In this incubator of fear, her goodness bloomed merely as the only known way to hold and attract love.

  There were other selves which interested her more but which she learned to conceal or to stifle: her inventive, fantasy-weaving self who loved tales, her high-tempered self who flared like heat lightning, her stormy self, the lies which were not lies but an improvement on reality.

  She had loved strong language like ginger upon the lips. But her parents had said: “From you we don’t expect this, not from you.” And appointed her as a guard upon her brothers, asking her to enforce their laws, just as Rango had appointed her now a guard against his disintegrations.