Nightwood

by Djuna Barnes

  After a long silence in which the doctor had ordered and consumed a Chambéry fraise and the Baron a coffee, the doctor remarked that the Jew and the Irish, the one moving upward and the other down, often meet, spade to spade in the same acre.

  'The Irish may be as common as whale-shit—excuse me—on the bottom of the ocean—forgive me-—but they do have imagination and', he added, 'creative misery, which comes from being smacked down by the devil, and lifted up again by the angels. Misericordioso! Save me, Mother Mary, and never mind the other fellow! But the Jew, what is he at his best? Never anything higher than a meddler —pardon my wet glove—a supreme and marvellous meddler often, but a meddler nevertheless.' He bowed slightly from the hips. 'All right, Jews meddle and we lie, that's the difference, the fine difference. We say someone is pretty for instance, whereas, if the truth were known, they are probably as ugly as Smith going backward, but by our lie we have made that very party powerful, such is the power of the charlatan, the great strong! They drop on anything at any moment, and that sort of thing makes the mystic in the end, and', he added, 'it makes the great doctor. The only people who really know anything about medical science are the nurses, and they never tell, they'd get slapped if they did. But the great doctor, he's a divine idiot and a wise man. He closes one eye, the eye that he studied with, and putting his fingers on the arteries of the body says: "God, whose roadway this is, has given me permission to travel on it also," which, heaven help the patient, is true; in this manner he comes on great cures, and sometimes upon that road is disconcerted by that Little Man.' The doctor ordered another Chambéry, and asked the Baron what he would have; being told that he wished nothing for the moment, the doctor added: 'No man needs curing of his individual sickness, his universal malady is what he should look to.'

  The Baron remarked that this sounded like dogma.

  The doctor grinned. 'Does it? Well, when you see that Little Man you know you will be shouldered from the path.'

  'I also know this,' he went on: 'One cup poured into another makes different water; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth. Rear up eternal river, here comes grief! Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! Laughing I came into Pacific Street, and laughing I'm going out of it; laughter is the pauper's money. I like paupers and bums,' he added, 'because they are impersonal with misery, but me—me, I'm taken most and chiefly for a vexatious bastard and gum on the bow, the wax that clots the gall or middle blood of man known at the heart or Bundle of Hiss. May my dilator burst and my speculum rust, may panic seize my index finger before I point out my man.'

  His hands (which he always carried like a dog who is walking on his hind legs) seemed to be holding his attention, then he said, raising his large melancholy eyes with the bright twinkle that often came into them: 'Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I'm a bride?'

  'Neurasthenia,' said Felix.

  He shook his head. 'No, I'm not neurasthenic, I haven't that much respect for people—the basis, by the way, of all neurasthenia.'

  'Impatience.'

  The doctor nodded. 'The Irish are impatient for eternity, they lie to hurry it up, and they maintain their balance by the dexterity of God, God and the Father.'

  'In 1685,' the Baron said, with dry humour, 'the Turks brought coffee into Vienna, and from that day Vienna, like a woman, had one impatience, something she liked. You know, of course, that Pitt the younger was refused alliance because he was foolish enough to proffer tea; Austria and tea could never go together. All cities have a particular and special beverage suited to them. As for God and the Father—in Austria they were the Emperor.' The doctor looked up. The chasseur of the Hotel Récamier (whom he knew far too well) was approaching them at a run.

  'Eh! ' said the doctor, who always expected anything at any hour, 'Now what?' The boy, standing before him in a red and black striped vest and flapping soiled apron, exclaimed in Midi French that a lady in twenty-nine had fainted and could not be brought out of it.

  The doctor got up slowly, sighing. 'Pay', he said to Felix, 'and follow me.' None of the doctor's methods being orthodox, Felix was not surprised at the invitation, but did as he was told.

  On the second landing of the hotel (it was one of those middle-class hostelries which can be found in almost any corner of Paris, neither good nor bad, but so typical that it might have been moved every night and not have been out of place) a door was standing open, exposing a red carpeted floor, and at the further end two narrow windows overlooking the square.

  On a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers, faintly over-sung by the notes of unseen birds, which seemed to have been forgotten—left without the usual silencing cover, which, like cloaks on funeral urns, are cast over their cages at night by good housewives)—half flung off the support of the cushions from which, in a moment of threatened consciousness she had turned her head, lay the young woman, heavy and dishevelled. Her legs, in white flannel trousers, were spread as in a dance, the thick lacquered pumps looking too lively for the arrested step. Her hands, long and beautiful, lay on either side of her face.

  The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado.

  Like a painting by the douanier Rousseau, she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room (in the apprehension of which the walls have made their escape), thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the strains of an orchestra of wood-wind render a serenade which will popularize the wilderness.

  Felix, out of delicacy, stepped behind the palms. The doctor with professional roughness, brought to a pitch by his eternal fear of meeting with the Law (he was not a licensed practitioner) said: 'Slap her wrists, for Christ's sake. Where in hell is the water pitcher!'

  He found it, and with amiable heartiness flung a handful against her face.

  A series of almost invisible shudders wrinkled her skin as the water dripped from her lashes, over her mouth and on to the bed. A spasm of waking moved upward from some deep shocked realm, and she opened her eyes. Instantly she tried to get to her feet. She said: 'I was all right;' and fell back into the pose of her annihilation.

  Experiencing a double confusion, Felix now saw the doctor partially hidden by the screen beside the bed, make the movements common to the 'dumbfounder', or man of magic; the gestures of one who, in preparing the audience for a miracle, must pretend that there is nothing to hide; the whole purpose that of making the back and elbows move in a series of 'honesties', while in reality the most flagrant part of the hoax is being prepared.

  Felix saw that this was for the purpose of snatching a few drops from a perfume bottle picked up from the night table; of dusting his darkly bristled chin with a puff, and drawing a line of rouge across his lips, his upper lip compressed on his lower, in order to have it seem that their sudden embellishment was a visitation of nature; still thinking himself unobserved, as if the whole fabric of magic had begun to decompose, as if the mechanics of machination were indeed out of control and were simplifying themselves back to their origin; the doctor's hand reached out and covered a loose hundred franc note lying on the table.

  With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers
when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unravelling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor's pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a pearl; so he would have to cover the doctor. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own.

  Engrossed in the coils of this new disquiet, Felix turned about. The girl was sitting up. She recognized the doctor. She had seen him somewhere. But, as one may trade ten years at a certain shop and be unable to place the shopkeeper if he is met in the street or in the promenoir of a theatre, the shop being a portion of his identity, she struggled to place him now that he had moved out of his frame.

  'Café de la Mairie du VIe,' said the doctor, taking a chance in order to have a hand in her awakening.

  She did not smile, though the moment he spoke she placed him. She closed her eyes and Felix, who had been looking into them intently because of their mysterious and shocking blue, found himself seeing them still faintly clear and timeless behind the lids—the long unqualified range in the iris of wild beasts who have not tamed the focus down to meet the human eye.

  The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a 'picture' forever arranged, is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.

  Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and jaws ache—we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.

  Something of this emotion came over Felix, but being racially incapable of abandon, he felt that he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind; as if this girl were the converging halves of a broken fate, setting face, in sleep, toward itself in time, as an image and its reflection in a lake seem parted only by the hesitation in the hour.

  In the tones of this girl's voice was the pitch of one enchanted with the gift of postponed abandon: the low drawling 'aside' voice of the actor who, in the soft usury of his speech, withholds a vocabulary until the profitable moment when he shall be facing his audience—in her case a guarded extempore to the body of what would be said at some later period when she would be able to 'see' them. What she now said was merely the longest way to a quick dismissal. She asked them to come to see her when she would be 'able to feel better'.

  Pinching the chasseur, the doctor inquired the girl's name. 'Mademoiselle Robin Vote,' the chasseur answered.

  Descending into the street, the doctor, desiring 'one last before bed' directed his steps back to the café. After a short silence he asked the Baron if he had ever thought about women and marriage. He kept his eyes fixed on the marble of the table before him, knowing that Felix had experienced something unusual.

  The Baron admitted that he had, he wished a son who would feel as he felt about the 'great past'. The doctor then inquired, with feigned indifference, of what nation he would choose the boy's mother.

  'The American,' the Baron answered instantly. 'With an American anything can be done.'

  The doctor laughed. He brought his soft fist down on the table—now he was sure. 'Fate and entanglement', he said, 'have begun again—the dung beetle rolling his burden uphill—oh the hard climb! Nobility, very well, but what is it?' The Baron started to answer him, the doctor held up his hand. 'Wait a minute! I know—the few that the many have lied about well and long enough to make them deathless. So you must have a son,' he paused. 'A king is the peasant's actor, who becomes so scandalous that he has to be bowed down to—scandalous in the higher sense naturally. And why must he be bowed down to? Because he has been set apart as the one dog who need not regard the rules of the house, they are so high that they can defame God and foul their rafters! But the people-—that's different—they are church-broken, nation-broken—they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct. But to the graver permission, the king, the tsar, the emperor, who may relieve themselves on high heaven—to them they bow down—only.' The Baron, who was always troubled by obscenity, would never, in the case of the doctor, resent it; he felt the seriousness, the melancholy hidden beneath every jest and malediction that the doctor uttered, therefore he answered him seriously. 'To pay homage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future.'

  'And so a son?'

  'For that reason. The modern child has nothing left to hold to, or to put it better, he has nothing to hold with. We are adhering to life now with our last muscle—the heart.'

  'The last muscle of aristocracy is madness—remember that—' the doctor leaned forward, 'the last child born to aristocracy is sometimes an idiot, out of respect—we go up—but we come down.'

  The Baron dropped his monocle, the unarmed eye looked straight ahead. 'It's not necessary,' he said, then he added, 'But you are American, so you don't believe.'

  'Ho!' hooted the doctor, 'because I'm American I believe anything, so I say beware! In the king's bed is always found, just before it becomes a museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep'—he raised his glass, 'To Robin Vote.' He grinned. 'She can't be more than twenty.'

  With a roar the steel blind came down over the window of the Café de la Mairie du VIe.

  Felix, carrying two volumes on the life of the Bourbons, called the next day at the Hôtel Récamier. Miss Vote was not in. Four afternoons in succession he called, only to be told that she had just left. On the fifth, turning the corner of the rue Bonaparte, he ran into her.

  Removed from her setting—the plants that had surrounded her, the melancholy red velvet of the chairs and the curtains, the sound, weak and nocturnal, of the birds-—she yet carried the quality of the 'way back' as animals do. She suggested that they should walk together in the gardens of the Luxembourg toward which her steps had been directed when he addressed her. They walked in the bare chilly gardens and Felix was happy. He felt that he could talk to her, tell her anything, though she herself was so silent. He told her he had a post in the Crédit Lyonnais, earning two thousand five hundred francs a week; a master of seven tongues, he was useful to the bank, and, he added, he had a trifle saved up, gained in speculations.

  He walked a little short of her. Her movements were slightly headlong and sideways; slow, clumsy and yet graceful, the ample gait of the night-watch. She wore no hat, and her pale head, with its short hair growing flat on the forehead made still narrower by the hanging curls almost on a level with the finely arched eyebrows, gave her the look of cherubs in renaissance theatres; the eye-balls showing slightly rounded in profile, the temples low and square. She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man's image is a figure of doom. Because of this, Felix found her presence painful, and yet a happiness. Thinking of her, visualizing her, was an extreme act of the will; to recall her after she had gone, however, was as easy as the recollection of a sensa
tion of beauty, without its details. When she smiled the smile was only in the mouth, and a little bitter: the face of an incurable yet to be stricken with its malady.

  As the days passed they spent many hours in museums, and while this pleased Felix immeasurably, he was surprised that often her taste, turning from an appreciation of the most beautiful, would also include the cheaper and debased, with an emotion as real. When she touched a thing, her hands seemed to take the place of the eye. He thought: 'She has the touch of the blind who, because they see more with their fingers, forget more in their minds.' Her fingers would go forward, hesitate, tremble, as if they had found a face in the dark. When her hand finally came to rest, the palm closed, it was as if she had stopped a crying mouth. Her hand lay still and she would turn away. At such moments Felix experienced an unaccountable apprehension. The sensuality in her hands frightened him.

  Her clothes were of a period that he could not quite place. She wore feathers of the kind his mother had worn, flattened sharply to the face. Her skirts were moulded to her hips and fell downward and out, wider and longer than those of other women, heavy silks that made her seem newly ancient. One day he learned the secret. Pricing a small tapestry in an antique shop facing the Seine, he saw Robin reflected in a door mirror of a back room, dressed in a heavy brocaded gown which time had stained in places, in others split, yet which was so voluminous that there were yards enough to refashion.