Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

‘Speaking of children—and thanks for the compliment—take for instance the case of Don Anticolo, the young tenor from Beirut—he dipped down into his pelvis for his Wagner, and plunged to his breast pit for his Verdi—he’d sung himself once and a half round the world, a widower with a small son, scarcely ten by the clock when, presto—the boy was bitten by a rat while swimming in Venezia and this brought on a fever. His father would come in and take hold of him every ten minutes (or was it every half-hour?) to see if he was less hot, or hotter. His daddy was demented with grief and fear, but did he leave his bedside for a moment? He did, because, though the son was sick, the fleet was in. But being a father, he prayed as he drank the champagne; and he wished his son alive as he chucked over the compass and invited the crew home, bow and sprit. But when he got home the little son lay dead. The young tenor burst into tears and burned him and had the ashes put into a zinc box no bigger than a doll’s crate and held ceremony over him, twelve sailors all in blue standing about the deal table, a glass in their hands, sorrow in their sea-turned eye slanting under lids thinned by the horizon, as the distracted father and singer tossed the little zinc box down upon the table crying: “This, gentlemen, is my babe, this, lads, my son, my sailors, my boy!” and at that, running to the box and catching it up and dashing it down again, repeating, and weeping, “My son, my baby, my boy!” with trembling fingers nudging the box now here now there about the table, until it went up and down its length a dozen times; the father behind it, following it, touching it, weeping and crying like a dog who noses a bird that has, for some strange reason, no more movement.’

The doctor stood up, then sat down again. ‘Yes, oh God, Robin was beautiful. I don’t like her, but I have to admit that much: sort of fluid blue under her skin, as if the hide of time had been stripped from her, and with it, all transactions with knowledge. A sort of first position in attention; a face that will age only under the blows of perpetual childhood. The temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes. And that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire. Sorcerers know the power of horns; meet a horn where you like and you know you have been identified. You could fall over a thousand human skulls without the same trepidation. And do old duchesses know it also! Have you ever seen them go into a large assembly of any sort, be it opera or bezique, without feathers, flowers, sprigs of oat, or some other gadget nodding above their temples!’

She had not heard him. ‘Every hour is my last, and,’ she said desperately, ‘one can’t live one’s last hour all one’s life!’

He grinned. ‘Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out. Ah,’ he added, ‘to be an animal, born at the opening of the eye, going only forward, and, at the end of day, shutting out memory with the dropping of the lid.’

‘Time isn’t long enough,’ she said, striking the table. ‘It isn’t long enough to live down her nights. God,’ she cried, ‘what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn’t tell me the truth, because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once. A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same. Some natures cannot appreciate, only regret. Will Robin only regret?’ She stopped abruptly, gripping the back of the chair. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said, ‘for even her memory wearied her.’ Then she said with the violence of misery, ‘There’s something evil in me, that loves evil and degradation—purity’s black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar’s door?’

‘Look here,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you know what has made me the greatest liar this side of the moon, telling my stories to people like you, to take the mortal agony out of their guts, and to stop them from rolling about, and drawing up their feet, and screaming, with their eyes staring over their knuckles with misery which they are trying to keep off, saying, “Say something, doctor, for the love of God!” And me talking away like mad. Well that, and nothing else, has made me the liar I am.

‘Suppose your heart were five feet across in any place, would you break it for a heart no bigger than a mouse’s mute? Would you hurl yourself into any body of water, in the size you now are, for any woman that you had to look for with a magnifying glass, or any boy if he was as high as the Eiffel Tower or did droppings like a fly? No, we all love in sizes, yet we all cry out in tiny voices to the great booming God, the older we get. Growing old is just a matter of throwing life away back; so you finally forgive even those that you have not begun to forget. It is that indifference which gives you your courage, which to tell the truth is no courage at all. There is no truth, and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known.’

‘Man,’ she said, her eyelids quivering, ‘conditioning himself to fear, made God; as the prehistoric, conditioning itself to hope, made man—the cooling of the earth, the receding of the sea. And I, who want power, chose a girl who resembles a boy.’

‘Exactly,’ said the doctor. ‘You never loved anyone before, and you’ll never love anyone again, as you love Robin. Very well—what is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking. And the pretty lad who is a girl, what but the prince-princess in point lace—neither one and half the other, the painting on the fan! We love them for that reason. We were impaled in our childhood upon them as they rode through our primers, the sweetest lie of all, now come to be in boy or girl, for in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes a prince a prince—and not a man. They go far back in our lost distance where what we never had stands waiting; it was inevitable that we should come upon them, for our miscalculated longing has created them. They are our answer to what our grandmothers were told love was, and what it never came to be; they, the living lie of our centuries. When a long lie comes up, sometimes it is a beauty; when it drops into dissolution, into drugs and drink, into disease and death, it has at once a singular and terrible attraction. A man can resent and avoid evil on his own plane, but when it is the thin blown edge of his reverie, he takes it to his heart, as one takes to one’s heart the dark misery of the close nightmare, born and slain of the particular mind; so that if one of them were dying of the pox, one would will to die of it too, with two feelings, terror and joy, welded somewhere back again into a formless sea where a swan (would it be ourselves, or her or him, or a mystery of all) sinks crying.

‘Love is death, come upon with passion; I know that is why love is wisdom. I love her as one condemned to it.’

‘Oh, Widow Lazarus! Arisen from your dead! Oh lunatic humour of the moon! Behold this fearful tree, on which sits singing the drearful bird— Turdus musicus , or European singing thrush; sitting and singing the refrain—all in the tear-wet night—and it starts out largo , but it ends like I Hear You Calling Me, or Kiss Me Again , gone wild. And Diane, where is she? Diane of Ephesus in the Greek Gardens, singing and shaken in every bosom; and Rack and Ruin, the dogs of the Vatican, running up and down the papal esplanade and out into the Ramblar with roses in their tails to keep off care. Don’t I know it all! Do you think that I, the Old Woman who lives in the closet, do not know that every child, no matter what its day, is born prehistorically and that even the wrong thought has caused the human mind incredible effort? Bend down the tree of knowledge and you’ll unroost a strange bird. Suffering may be composed wickedly and of an inferior writhing. Rage and inaccuracy howl and blow the bone, for, contrary to all opinion, all suffering does not purify—begging everybody’s pardon, which is called everybody’s know. It moils and blathers some to perjury; the peritoneum boils and brings on common and cheap praying a great way sunk in pointless agony.’