Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

‘A child,’ he pondered. ‘Yes, a child!’ and then he said to himself, ‘Why has it not come about?’ The thought took him abruptly in the middle of his accounting. He hurried home in a flurry of anxiety, as a boy who has heard a regiment on parade, toward which he cannot run because he has no one from whom to seek permission, and yet runs haltingly nevertheless. Coming face to face with her, all that he could stammer out was: ‘Why is there no child? Wo ist das Kind? Warum? Warum?’

Robin prepared herself for her child with her only power: a stubborn cataleptic calm, conceiving herself pregnant before she was; and, strangely aware of some lost land in herself, she took to going out; wandering the countryside; to train travel, to other cities, alone and engrossed. Once, not having returned for three days, and Felix nearly beside himself with terror, she walked in late at night and said that she had been half-way to Berlin.

Suddenly she took the Catholic vow. She came into the church silently. The prayers of the suppliants had not ceased nor had anyone been broken of their meditation. Then, as if some inscrutable wish for salvation, something yet more monstrously unfulfilled than they had suffered, had thrown a shadow, they regarded her, to see her going softly forward and down, a tall girl with the body of a boy.

Many churches saw her: St. Julien le Pauvre, the church of St. Germain des Prés, Ste. Clothilde. Even on the cold tiles of the Russian church, in which there is no pew, she knelt alone, lost and conspicuous, her broad shoulders above her neighbours, her feet large and as earthly as the feet of a monk.

She strayed into the rue Picpus, into the gardens of the convent of L’Adoration Perpétuelle. She talked to the nuns and they, feeling that they were looking at someone who would never be able to ask for, or receive, mercy, blessed her in their hearts and gave her a sprig of rose from the bush. They showed her where Jean Valjean had kept his rakes, and where the bright little ladies of the pension came to quilt their covers; and Robin smiled, taking the spray, and looked down at the tomb of Lafayette and thought her unpeopled thoughts. Kneeling in the chapel, which was never without a nun going over her beads, Robin, trying to bring her mind to this abrupt necessity, found herself worrying about her height. Was she still growing?

She tried to think of the consequence to which her son was to be born and dedicated. She thought of the Emperor Francis Joseph. There was something commensurate in the heavy body with the weight in her mind, where reason was inexact with lack of necessity. She wandered to thoughts of women, women that she had come to connect with women. Strangely enough these were women in history, Louise de la Vallière, Catherine of Russia, Madame de Maintenon, Catherine de Medici, and two women out of literature, Anna Karenina and Catherine Heathcliff; and now there was this woman Austria. She prayed, and her prayer was monstrous, because in it there was no margin left for damnation or forgiveness, for praise or for blame—those who cannot conceive a bargain cannot be saved or damned. She could not offer herself up; she only told of herself, in a preoccupation that was its own predicament.

Leaning her childish face and full chin on the shelf of the prie-Dieu , her eyes fixed, she laughed, out of some hidden capacity, some lost subterranean humour; as it ceased, she leaned still further forward in a swoon, waking and yet heavy, like one in sleep.

When Felix returned that evening Robin was dozing in a chair, one hand under her cheek and one arm fallen. A book was lying on the floor beneath her hand. The book was the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade; a line was underscored: Et lui rendit pendant sa captivité les milles services qu’un amour dévoué est seul capable de rendre , and suddenly into his mind came the question: ‘What is wrong?’

She awoke but did not move. He came and took her by the arm and lifted her toward him. She put her hand against his chest and pushed him, she looked frightened, she opened her mouth but no words came. He stepped back, he tried to speak but they moved aside from each other saying nothing.

That night she was taken with pains. She began to curse loudly, a thing that Felix was totally unprepared for; with the most foolish gestures he tried to make her comfortable.

‘Go to hell!’ she cried. She moved slowly, bent away from him, chair by chair; she was drunk—her hair was swinging in her eyes.

Amid loud and frantic cries of affirmation and despair Robin was delivered. Shuddering in the double pains of birth and fury, cursing like a sailor, she rose up on her elbow in her bloody gown, looking about her in the bed as if she had lost something. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake!’ she kept crying like a child who has walked into the commencement of a horror.

A week out of bed she was lost, as if she had done something irreparable, as if this act had caught her attention for the first time.

One night, Felix, having come in unheard, found her standing in the centre of the floor holding the child high in her hand as if she were about to dash it down; but she brought it down gently.

The child was small, a boy, and sad. It slept too much in a quivering palsy of nerves, it made few voluntary movements; it whimpered.

Robin took to wandering again, to intermittent travel from which she came back hours, days later, disinterested. People were uneasy when she spoke to them; confronted with a catastrophe that had yet no beginning.

Felix had each day the sorrow born with him; for the rest, he pretended that he noticed nothing. Robin was almost never home; he did not know how to inquire for her. Sometimes coming into a café he would creep out again, because she stood before the bar—sometimes laughing, but more often silent, her head bent over her glass, her hair swinging; and about her people of every sort.

One night, coming home about three, he found her in the darkness, standing, back against the window, in the pod of the curtain, her chin so thrust forward that the muscles in her neck stood out. As he came toward her she said in a fury, ‘I didn’t want him!’ Raising her hand she struck him across the face.

He stepped away, he dropped his monocle and caught at it swinging, he took his breath backward. He waited a whole second, trying to appear casual. ‘You didn’t want him,’ he said. He bent down pretending to disentangle his ribbon, ‘It seems I could not accomplish that.’

‘Why not be secret about him?’ she said. ‘Why talk?’

Felix turned his body without moving his feet. ‘What shall we do?’

She grinned, but it was not a smile. ‘I’ll get out,’ she said. She took up her cloak, she always carried it dragging. She looked about her, about the room, as if she were seeing it for the first time.

For three or four months the people of the quarter asked for her in vain. Where she had gone no one knew. When she was seen again in the quarter, it was with Nora Flood. She did not explain where she had been, she was unable or unwilling to give an account of herself. The doctor said: ‘In America, that’s where Nora lives. I brought her into the world and I should know.’

The strangest ‘salon’ in America was Nora’s. Her house was couched in the centre of a mass of tangled grass and weeds. Before it fell into Nora’s hands the property had been in the same family two hundred years. It had its own burial ground, and a decaying chapel in which stood in tens and tens mouldering psalm books, laid down some fifty years gone in a flurry of forgiveness and absolution.

It was the ‘paupers’ salon, for poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love: for Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and medicine; all these could be seen sitting about her oak table before the huge fire, Nora listening, her hand on her hound, the firelight throwing her shadow and his high against the wall. Of all that ranting roaring crew, she alone stood out. The equilibrium of her nature, savage and refined, gave her bridled skull a look of compassion. She was broad and tall, and though her skin was the skin of a child, there could be seen coming, early in her life, the design that was to be the weather-beaten grain of her face, that wood in the work; the tree coming forward in her, an undocumented record of time.