Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

‘There are some people’, he went on, ‘who must get permission to live, and if the Baronin finds no one to give her that permission, she will make an innocence for herself; a fearful sort of primitive innocence. It may be considered “depraved” by our generation, but our generation does not know everything.’ He smiled. ‘For instance Guido, how many will realize his value? One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it.’

The doctor wiped his mouth. ‘In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured. What is a ruin but Time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time. It is the body and the blood of ecstasy, religion and love. Ah, yes,’ the doctor added, ‘we do not “climb” to heights, we are eaten away to them, and then conformity, neatness, ceases to entertain us. Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness; and there is its middle condition, the slovenliness that is usually an accompaniment of the “attractive” body, a sort of earth on which love feeds.’

‘That is true,’ Felix said with eagerness. ‘The Baronin had an undefinable disorder, a sort of odour of memory", like a person who has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall.’

The doctor reached out for the bread. ‘So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder. Robin did not.’

‘No,’ Felix said in a low voice. ‘She did not.’

‘The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest,’ the doctor continued. ‘It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.’

The Baron was silent a moment. Then he said: ‘Yes, something of this rigour was in the Baronin, in its first faint degree; it was in her walk, in the way she wore her clothes, in her silence, as if speech were heavy and unclarified. There was in her every movement a slight drag, as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building. There is a sensible weight in the air around a thirteenth-century edifice’, he said with a touch of pomposity, ‘that is unlike the light air about a new structure; the new building seems to repulse it, the old to gather it. So about the Baronin there was a density, not of age, but of youth. It perhaps accounts for my attraction to her.’.

‘Animals find their way about largely by the keenness of their nose,’ said the doctor. ‘We have lost ours in order not to be one of them, and what have we in its place? A tension in the spirit which is the contraction of freedom. But,’ he ended, ‘all dreadful events are of profit.’

Felix ate in silence for a moment, then point-blank he turned to the doctor with a question. ‘You know my preoccupation; is my son’s better?’

The doctor, as he grew older, in answering a question seemed, as old people do, to be speaking more and more to himself, and, when troubled, he seemed to grow smaller. He said: ‘Seek no further for calamity; you have it in your son. After all, calamity is what we are all seeking. You have found it. A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself—and what is a man’s shadow but his upright astonishment? Guido is the shadow of your anxiety, and Guido’s shadow is God’s.’

Felix said: ‘Guido also loves women of history.’

‘Mary’s shadow!’ said the doctor.

Felix turned. His monocle shone sharp and bright along its edge. ‘People say that he is not sound of mind. What do you say?’

‘I say that a mind like his may be more apt than yours and mine—he is not made secure by habit—in that there is always hope.’

Felix said under his breath: ‘He does not grow up.’

Matthew answered: ‘The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown. If I were you,’ the doctor continued, ‘I would carry that boy’s mind like a bowl picked up in the dark; you do not know what’s in it. He feeds on odd remnants that we have not priced; he eats a sleep that is not our sleep. There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary that has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching.’

Felix ordered a fine. The doctor smiled. ‘I said you would come to it,’ he said, and emptied his own glass at a gulp.

‘I know,’ Felix answered, ‘but I did not understand. I thought you meant something else.’

‘What?’

Felix paused, turning the small glass around in his trembling hand. ‘I thought’, he said, ‘that you meant that I would give up.’

The doctor lowered his eyes. ‘Perhaps that is what I meant—but sometimes I am mistaken.’ He looked at Felix from under his heavy brows. ‘Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly—as he must—on those two themes—whistles his tune.’

The Baron leaned forward. He said, in a low voice, ‘Was the Baronin damned?’

The doctor deliberated for a second, knowing what Felix had hidden in his question. ‘Guido is not damned,’ he said, and the Baron turned away quickly. ‘Guido’, the doctor went on, ‘is blessed—he is peace of mind—he is what you have always been looking for—Aristocracy’, he said smiling, ‘is a condition in the mind of the people when they try to think of something else and better—funny,’ he added sharply, ‘that a man never knows when he has found what he has always been looking for.’

‘And the Baronin,’ Felix said, ‘do you ever hear from her?’

‘She is in America now, but of course you know that. Yes, she writes, now and again, not to me—God forbid—to others.’

‘What does she say?’ the Baron said, trying not to show his emotion.

‘She says,’ the doctor answered, “Remember me.” Probably because she has difficulty in remembering herself.’

The Baron caught his monocle. ‘Altamonte, who has been in America, tells me that she seemed “estranged". Once’, he said, pinching his monocle into place, ‘I wanted, as you, who are aware of everything, know, to go behind the scenes, back-stage as it were, to our present condition, to find, if I could, the secret of time; good, perhaps that that is an impossible ambition for the sane mind. One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life—darkly seen, the condition my son lives in; it may also be the errand on which the Baronin is going.’

Taking out his handkerchief, the Baron removed his monocle, wiping it carefully.

Carrying a pocket full of medicines, and a little flask of oil for the chapping hands of his son, Felix rode into Vienna, the child beside him; Frau Mann, opulent and gay, opposite, holding a rug for the boy’s feet. Felix drank heavily now, and to hide the red that flushed his cheeks he had grown a beard ending in two forked points on his chin. In the matter of drink, Frau Mann was now no bad second. Many cafés saw this odd trio, the child in the midst wearing heavy lenses that made his eyes drift forward, sitting erect, his neck holding his head at attention, watching his father’s coins roll, as the night drew out, farther and farther across the floor and under the feet of the musicians as Felix called for military music, for Wacht am Rhein , for Morgenrot , for Wagner; his monocle dimmed by the heat of the room, perfectly correct and drunk, trying not to look for what he had always sought, the son of a once great house; his eyes either gazing at the ceiling or lowered where his hand, on the table, struck thumb and little finger against the wood in rhythm with the music, as if he were playing only the two important notes of an octave, the low and the high; or nodding his head and smiling at his child, as mechanical toys nod to the touch of an infant’s hand, Guido pressing his own hand against his stomach where, beneath his shirt, he could feel the medallion against his flesh, Frau Mann gripping her beer mug firmly, laughing and talking loudly.