by Djuna Barnes
'She went to pieces; she fell forward on my lap. At her next words I saw that I was not a danger to her, but someone who might understand her torture. In great agitation she said, "I went out this afternoon, I didn't think she would call me, because you had been away to the country, Robin said, and would be back this evening and so she would have to stay home with you, because you had been so good to her always; though God knows I understand there is nothing between you any longer, that you are 'just good friends'; she has explained that—still, I nearly went mad when I found that she had been here and I was out. She has told me often enough, 'Don't leave the house, because I don't know exactly when I am going to be able to get away, because I can't hurt Nora.' " Nora's voice broke. She went on.
'Then Jenny said, "What are you going to do? What do you want me to do?" I knew all the time that she could do nothing but what she wanted to do, and that whatever it was, she was a liar, no matter what truth she was telling. I was dead. I felt stronger then, and I said, yes I would have a drink. She poured out two, knocking the bottle against the glass and spilling the liquor on the dark ugly carpet. I kept thinking, what else is it that is hurting me; then I knew the doll; the doll in there on the bed.' Nora sat down, facing the doctor. 'We give death to a child when we give it a doll—it's the effigy and the shroud; when a woman gives it to a woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane; so when I saw that other doll—' Nora could not go on. She began to cry. 'What part of monstrosity am I that I am always crying at its side!
'When I got home Robin had been waiting, knowing, because I was late, that something was wrong. I said, "It is over—I can't go on. You have always lied to me, and you have denied me to her. I can't stand it any more."
'She stood up then, and went into the hall. She jerked her coat off the hook and I said, "Have you nothing to say to me?" She turned her face to me. It was like something once beautiful found in a river—and flung herself out of the door.'
'And you were crying,' the doctor said, nodding. 'You went about the house like someone sunken under lightness. You were ruined and you kept striking your hands together, laughing crazily and singing a little and putting your hands over your face. Stage-tricks have been taken from life, so finding yourself employing them you were confused with a sense of shame. When you went out looking for someone to go mad with, they said, "For God's sake look at Nora!" For the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine and terrifying spectacle. Why is it that you want to talk to me? Because I'm the other woman that God forgot.'
'There's nothing to go by, Matthew,' she said. 'You do not know which way to go. A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself. God laughs at me; but his laughter is my love.'
'You have died and arisen for love,' said Matthew. 'But unlike the ass, returning from the market you are always carrying the same load. Oh, for God's sweet sake, didn't she ever disgust you! Weren't you sometimes pleased that you had the night to yourself, wishing, when she did come home, that it was never?'
'Never, and always; I was frightened she would be gentle again. That,' she said, 'that's an awful fear. Fear of the moment when she would turn her words, making them something between us that nobody else could possibly share—and she would say, "You have got to stay with me or I can't live." Yet one night she ran behind me in the Montparnasse quarter, where I had gone looking for her because someone had called me, saying, she was sick and couldn't get home (I had stopped going out with her because I couldn't bear to see the "evidence of my eyes"); running behind me for blocks saying, with a furious panting breath, "You are a devil! You make everything dirty!" (I had tried to take someone's hands off her. They always put hands on her when she was drunk.) "You make me feel dirty and tired and old!"
I turned against the wall. The policemen and the people in the street collected. I was cold and terribly ashamed. I said, "Do you mean that?" And she said she meant it. She put her head down on one of the officers' shoulders. She was drunk. He had her by her wrist, one hand on her behind. She did not say anything about that, because she did not notice, and kept spitting horrible things at me. Then I walked away very fast. My head seemed to be in a large place. She began running after me. I kept on walking. I was cold, and I was not miserable any more. She caught me by the shoulder and went against me, grinning. She stumbled and I held her, and she said, seeing a poor wretched beggar of a whore, "Give her some money, all of it!" She threw the francs into the street and bent down over the filthy baggage and began stroking her hair, gray with the dust of years, saying, "They are all God-forsaken, and you most of all, because they don't want you to have your happiness. They don't want you to drink. Well, here, drink! I give you money and permission! These women—they are all like her,' she said with fury. "They are all good—they want to save us!" She sat down beside her.
'It took me and the garçon half an hour to get her up and into the lobby, and when I got her that far she began fighting, so that suddenly, without thinking, but out of weariness and misery I struck her; and at that she started, and smiled, and went up the stairs with me without complaint. She sat up in bed and ate eggs and called me, "Angel! Angel!" and ate my eggs too, and turned over, and went to sleep. Then I kissed her, holding her hands and feet, and I said: "Die now, so you will be quiet, so you will not be touched again by dirty hands; so you will not take my heart and your body and let them be nosed by dogs—die now, then you will be mine forever." (What right has anyone to that?)' She stopped. 'She was mine only when she was drunk, Matthew, and had passed out. That's the terrible thing, that finally she was mine only when she was dead drunk. All the time I didn't believe her life was as it was and yet, the fact that I didn't, proves something is wrong with me. I saw her always like a tall child who had grown up the length of the infant's gown, walking and needing help and safety; because she was in her own nightmare. I tried to come between and save her, but, I was like a shadow in her dream that could never reach her in time, as the cry of the sleeper has no echo, myself echo struggling to answer; she was like a new shadow walking perilously close to the outer curtain, and I was going mad because I was awake and seeing it, unable to reach it, unable to strike people down from it; and it moving, almost unwalking, with the face saintly and idiotic.
'And then that day I'll remember all my life, when I said: "It is over now," she was asleep and I struck her awake. I saw her come awake and turn befouled before me, she who had managed in that sleep to keep whole. Matthew, for God's sake, say something, you are awful enough to say it, say something! I didn't know, I didn't know that it was to be me who was to do the terrible thing! No rot had touched her until then, and there before my eyes I saw her corrupt all at once and withering, because I had struck her sleep away, and I went mad and I've been mad ever since; and there's nothing to do; nothing! You must say something, oh God, say something!'
'Stop it! Stop it!' he cried. 'Stop screaming! Put your hands down! Stop it! You were a "good woman", and so a bitch on a high plane, the only one able to kill yourself and Robin! Robin was outside the "human type"—a wild thing caught in a woman's skin, monstrously alone, monstrously vain; like the paralysed man in Coney Island—(take away a man's conformity and you take away his remedy)—who had to lie on his back in a box, but the box was lined with velvet, his fingers jewelled with stones, and suspended over him where he could never take his eyes off, a sky-blue mounted mirror, for he wanted to enjoy his own "difference". Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you'll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her "escape" again. That's why she can't "put herself in another's place", she herself is the only "position"; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can't do anything in relation to any one but herself. You almost caught hold of her, but she put
you cleverly away by making you the Madonna. What was your patience and terror worth all these years if you couldn't keep them for her sake? Did you have to learn wisdom on her knees?
'Oh, for God's sweet sake, couldn't you stand not learning your lesson? Because the lesson we learn is always by giving death and a sword to our lover. You are full to the brim with pride, but I am an empty pot going forward, saying my prayers in a dark place; because I know no one loves, I, least of all, and that no one loves me, that's what makes most people so passionate and bright, because they want to love and be loved, when there is only a bit of lying in the ear to make the ear forget what time is compiling. So I, Dr. O'Connor, say, creep by, softly, softly, and don't learn anything, because it's always learned of another person's body; take action in your heart and be careful whom you love—for a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave. Be humble like the dust, as God intended, and crawl, and finally you'll crawl to the end of the gutter and not be missed and not much remembered.'
'Sometimes', Nora said, 'she would sit at home all day, looking out of the window or playing with her toys, trains, and animals and cars to wind up, and dolls and marbles and soldiers. But all the time she was watching me, to see that no one called, that the bell did not ring, that I got no mail, nor anyone hallooing in the court, though she knew that none of these things could happen. My life was hers.
'Sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room, in boy's clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—"our child"—high above her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face. And one time, about three in the morning when she came in, she was angry because for once I had not been there all the time, waiting. She picked up the doll and hurled it to the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it; and then, as I came crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and stiff, whirling over and over across the floor, its blue bow now over, now under.'
The doctor brought his palms together. 'If you, who are blood-thirsty with love, had left her alone, what? Would a lost girl in Dante's time have been a lost girl still, and he had turned his eyes on her? She would have been remembered, and the remembered put on the dress of immunity. Do you think that Robin had no right to fight you with her only weapon? She saw in you that fearful eye that would make her a target forever. Have not girls done as much for the doll?—the doll—yes, target of things past and to come? The last doll, given to age, is the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl! The love of that last doll was foreshadowed in that love of the first. The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll, because it resembles, but does not contain life, and the third sex, because it contains life but resembles the doll. The blessed face! It should be seen only in profile, otherwise it is observed to be the conjunction of the identical cleaved halves of sexless misgiving! Their kingdom is without precedent. Why do you think I have spent near fifty years weeping over bars but because I am one of them! The uninhabited angel! That is what you have always been hunting!'
'Perhaps, Matthew, there are devils? Who knows if there are devils? Perhaps they have set foot in the uninhabited. Was I her devil trying to bring her comfort? I enter my dead and bring no comfort, not even in my dreams. There in my sleep was my grandmother, who I loved more than anyone, tangled in the grave grass, and flowers blowing about and between her; lying there in the grave, in the forest, in a coffin of glass, and flying low, my father who is still living; low going and into the grave beside her, his head thrown back and his curls lying out, struggling with her death terribly, and me, stepping about its edges, walking and wailing without a sound; round and round, seeing them struggling with that death as if they were struggling with the sea and my life; I was weeping and unable to do anything or take myself out of it. There they were, in the grave glass, and the grave water and the grave flowers and the grave time, one living and one dead and one asleep. It went on forever, though it had stopped, my father stopped beating and just lay there floating beside her, immovable, yet drifting in a tight place. And I woke up and still it was going on; it went down into the dark earth of my waking as if I were burying them with the earth of my lost sleep. This I have done to my father's mother, dreaming through my father, and have tormented them with my tears and with my dreams: for all of us die over again in somebody's sleep. And this, I have done to Robin: it is only through me that she will die over and over, and it is only through me, of all my family, that my grandfather dies, over and over. I woke and got up out of bed and putting my hands between my knees I said, "What was that dream saying, for God's sake, what was that dream?" For it was for me also.'
Suddenly, Dr. Matthew O'Connor said: 'It's my mother without argument I want!' And then, in his loudest voice he roared: 'Mother of God! I wanted to be your son—the unknown beloved second would have done!'
'Oh, Matthew. I don't know how to go. I don't know which way to turn! Tell her, if you ever see her, that it is always with her in my arms—forever it will be that way until we die. Tell her to do what she must, but not to forget.'
'Tell her yourself,' said the doctor, 'or sit in your own trouble silently, if you like, it's the same with ermines—those fine yellow ermines that women pay such a great price for—how did they get that valuable colour? By sitting in bed all their lives and pissing the sheets, or weeping in their own way. It's the same with persons; they are only of value when they have laid themselves open to "nuisance"—their own, and the world's. Ritual itself constitutes an instruction. So we come back to the place from which I set out; pray to the good God, she will keep you. Personally I call her "she" because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake.' He got up and crossed to the window. 'That priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind, harnessed to that stupendous and threadbare glomerate compulsion called the soul, ambling down the almost obliterated bridle path of Well and Ill, fortuitously planned—is the holy Habeas-Corpus, the manner in which the body is brought before the judge—still—in the end Robin will wish you in a nunnery where what she loved is, by surroundings, made safe, because as you are you keep "bringing her up", as cannons bring up the dead from deep water.'
'In the end', Nora said, 'they came to me, the girls Robin had driven frantic—to me, for comfort!' She began to laugh. 'My God,' she said, 'the women I've held upon my knees!'
'Women', the doctor said, 'were born on the knees, that's why I've never been able to do anything about them, I'm on my own so much of the time.'
'Suddenly, I knew what all my life had been, Matthew, what I hoped Robin was—the secure torment. We can hope for nothing greater, except hope. If I asked her, crying, not to go out, she would go just the same, richer in her heart because I had touched it, as she was going down the stairs.'
'Lions grow their manes and foxes their teeth on that bread,' interpolated the doctor.
'In the beginning, when I tried to stop her from drinking and staying out all night, and from being defiled, she would say—"Ah, I feel so pure and gay!" as if the ceasing of that abuse was her only happiness and peace of mind; and so I struggled with her as with the coils of my own most obvious heart, holding her by the hair, striking her against my knees, as some people in trouble strike their hands too softly; and as if it were a game, she raised and dropped her head against my lap, as a child bounces in a crib to enter excitement, even if it were someone gutted on a dagger. I thought I loved her for her sake, and I found it was for my own.'
'I know,' said the doctor, 'there you were sitting up high and fine, with a rose-bush up your arse.'
She looked at him, then she smiled. 'How should you know?'
'I'm a lady in no need of insults,' said the doctor. 'I know.'
'Yes,' she said. 'You know what none of us know until we have died. You were dead in the beginning,'
The twilight was falling. About the street lamps there w
as a heavy mist. 'Why don't you rest now?' asked the doctor. 'Your body is coming to it, you are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit mew once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own.'
'I know,' she said, 'now.' Suddenly, she began to cry, holding her hands. 'Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?'
For a moment he did not answer. Taking up the decanter, he held it to the light.
'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere, because I remember.' She came towards him. Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love—it goes everywhere, there is no place for it to stop—it rots me away. How could she tell me when she had nothing to tell that wasn't evidence against herself?'
The doctor said, 'You know as well as I do that we were born twelve, and brought up thirteen, and that some of us lived. My brother, whom I had not seen in four years, and loved the most of all, died, and who was it but me my mother wanted to talk to? Not those who had seen him last, but me who had seen him best, as if my memory of him were himself; and because you forget Robin the best, it's to you she turns. She comes trembling, and defiant, and belligerent, all right —that you may give her back to herself again as you have forgotten her—you are the only one strong enough to have listened to the prosecution, your life; and to have built back the amazing defence, your heart!