Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

‘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!’