Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

One evening, seated in his favourite café on the King, Felix on entering had seen instantly, but refused to admit it to himself, a tall man in the corner who, he was sure, was the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, cousin and brother-in-law of the late Czar Nicholas—and toward whom in the early part of the evening he steadfastly refused to look. But as the clock hands pointed twelve, Felix, (with the abandon of what a mad man knows to be his one hope of escape, disproof of his own madness) could not keep his eyes away, and as they arose to go, his cheeks now drained of colour, the points of his beard bent sharply down with the stiffening back of his chin, he turned and made a slight bow, his head in his confusion making a complete half-swing, as an animal will turn its head away from a human, as if in mortal shame.

He stumbled as he got into his carriage. ‘Come,’ he said, taking the child’s fingers in his own. ‘You are cold.’ He poured a few drops of oil, and began rubbing Guido’s hands.

‘Can’t you be quiet now?’ the doctor said. He had come in late one afternoon to find Nora writing a letter. ‘Can’t you be done now, can’t you give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it’s about nothing?’ He took his hat and coat off without being asked, placing his umbrella in a corner. He came forward into the room. ‘And me who seem curious because no one has seen me for a million years, and now I’m seen! Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty? Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven.’ He eyed the tea-tray and, seeing that the tea-pot had long since become cold, poured himself a generous port. He threw himself into a chair and added more softly, as Nora turned away from her letter, ‘In the far reaches of India there is a man being still beneath a tree. Why not rest? Why not put the pen away? Isn’t it bitter enough for Robin that she is lost somewhere without receiving mail? And Jenny, what of her now? Taken to drink and appropriating Robin’s mind with vulgar inaccuracy, like those eighty-two plaster virgins she bought because Robin had one good one; when you laugh at the eight-two standing in a row, Jenny runs to the wall, back to the picture of her mother, and stands there between two tortures—the past that she can’t share, and the present that she can’t copy. What of her now? Looking at her quarters with harrowing, indelicate cries; burying her middle at both ends, searching the world for the path back to what she wanted once and long ago! The memory past, and only by a coincidence, a wind, the flutter of a leaf, a surge of tremendous recollection goes through her, and swooning she knows it gone. Cannot a beastly thing be analogous to a fine thing, if both are apprehensions? Love of two things often makes one thing right. Think of the fish racing the sea, their love of air and water turning them like wheels, their tails and teeth biting the water, their spines curved round the air. Is that not Jenny? She who could not encompass anything whole, but only with her teeth and tail, and the spine on her sprung up. Oh, for God’s sake! Can’t you rest now?’

‘If I don’t write to her, what am I to do? I can’t sit here for ever—thinking!’

‘Terra damnata et maledicta!’ exclaimed the doctor, banging his fist down. ‘My uncle Octavius, the trout-tickler of Itchen, was better, he ate his fish when he caught it! But you, you must unspin fate, go back to find Robin! That’s what you are going to do. In your chair should have been set the Holy Stone, to say yes to your yes, no to your no; instead it’s lost in Westminster Abbey, and if I could have stopped Brech on his way with it into Ireland and have whispered in his ear I would have said, “Wait” (though it was seven hundred years B.C.); it might have been passed around. It might have stopped you, but no, you are always writing to Robin. Nothing will curb it. You’ve made her a legend and set before her head the Eternal Light, and you’ll keep to it even if it does cost her the tearing open of a million envelopes to her end. How do you know what sleep you raise her from? What words she must say to annul the postman’s whistle to another girl rising up on a wild elbow? Can’t you let any of us loose? Don’t you know your holding on is her only happiness and so her sole misery. You write and weep and think and plot, and all the time what is Robin doing? Chucking Jack Straws, or sitting on the floor playing soldiers; so don’t cry to me, who have no one to write to, and only taking in a little light laundry known as the Wash of the World. Dig a hole, drop me in! Not at all. St. Matthew’s Passion by Bach I’ll be. Everything can be used in a lifetime, I’ve discovered that.’

‘I’ve got to write to her,’ Nora said. ‘I’ve got to.’

‘No man knows it as I know it, I who am the god of darkness. Very well, but know the worst, then. What of Felix and his son Guido, that sick lamenting, fevered child? Death in the weather is a tonic to him. Like all the new young his sole provision for old age is hope of an early death. What spirits answer him who will never come to man’s estate? The poor shattered eagerness. So, I say, was Robin purposely unspun? Was Jenny a sitting bitch for fun? Who knows what knives hash her apart? Can’t you rest now, lay down the pen? Oh, papelero , have I not summed up my time! I shall rest myself some day by the brim of Saxon-les-Bains and drink it dry, or go to pieces in Hamburg at the gambling table, or end up like Madame de Staël—with an affinity for Germany. To all kinds of ends I’ll come. Ah yes, with a crupper of maiden’s hair to keep my soul in place, and in my vanguard a dove especially feathered to keep to my wind, as I ride that grim horse with ample glue in every hoof to post up my deeds when I’m dropped in and sealed with earth. In time everything is possible and in space everything forgivable; life is but the intermediary vice. There is eternity to blush in. Life laid end to end is what brings on flux in the clergy—can’t you rest now, put down the pen? Oh, the poor worms that never arrive! Some strangely connived angel pray for us! We shall not encompass it—the defunctive murmur in the cardiac nerve has given us all our gait. And Robin? I know where your mind is! She, the eternal momentary—Robin who was always the second person singular. Well,’ he said with violence, ‘lie weeping with a sword in your hand! Haven’t I eaten a book too? Like the angels and prophets? And wasn’t it a bitter book to eat? The archives of my case against the law, snatched up and out of the tale-telling files by my high important friend. And didn’t I eat a page and tear a page and stamp on others and flay some and toss some into the toilet for relief’s sake—then think of Jenny without a comma to eat, and Robin with nothing but a pet name—your pet name to sustain her; for pet names are a guard against loss, like primitive music. But does that sum her up? Is even the end of us an account? No, don’t answer, I know that even the memory has weight. Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds, and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.’

She said: ‘She is myself. What am I to do?’

‘Make birds’ nests with your teeth, that would be better,’ he said angrily, ‘like my English girl friend. The birds liked them so well that they stopped making their own (does that sound like any nest you have made for any bird, and so broken it of its fate?). In the spring they form a queue by her bedroom window and stand waiting their turn, holding on to their eggs as hard as they can until she gets around to them, strutting up and down on the ledge, the eyes in their feathers a quick shine and sting, whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet door for someone inside who had decided to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And then think of Robin who never could provide for her life except in you. Oh, well,’ he said under his breath, ‘ “happy are they whom privacy makes innocent."’