Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

‘Oh,’ he cried. ‘A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my heart? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my mind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives? Yet you are screaming, and drawing your lip and putting your hand out and turning round and round! Do I wail to the mountains of the trouble I have had in the valley, or to every stone of the way it broke my bones, or of every lie, how it went down into my belly and built a nest to hatch me to my death there? Isn’t everyone in the world peculiarly swung and me the craziest of the lot?—so that I come dragging and squealing, like a heifer on the way to slaughter, knowing his cries have only half a rod to go, protesting his death—as his death has only a rod to go to protest his screaming? Do you walk high Heaven without shoes? Are you the only person with a bare foot pressed down on a rake? Oh, you poor blind cow! Keep out of my feathers; you ruffle me the wrong way and flit about, stirring my misery! What end is sweet? Are the ends of the hair sweet when you come to number them?’

‘Listen,’ Nora said. ‘You’ve got to listen! She would come back to me after a night all over the city and lie down beside me and she would say, “I want to make everyone happy,” and her mouth was drawn down. “I want everyone to be gay, gay. Only you,” she said, holding me, “only you, you mustn’t be gay or happy, not like that, it’s not for you, only for everyone else in the world.” She knew she was driving me insane with misery and fright; only’, she went on, ‘she couldn’t do anything because she was a long way off and waiting to begin. It’s for that reason she hates everyone near her. It’s why she falls into everything, like someone in a dream. It’s why she wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. A shadow was falling on her—mine—and it was driving her out of her wits.’

She began to walk again. ‘I have been loved’, she said, ‘by something strange, and it has forgotten me.’ Her eyes were fixed and she seemed to be talking to herself. ‘It was me made her hair stand on end, because I loved her. She turned bitter because I made her fate colossal. She wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night; and I, I dashed it down. We will never have it out now,’ Nora said. ‘It’s too late. There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can’t, I can’t wait for ever!’ she said frantically. ‘I can’t live without my heart!

‘In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally, in another way. Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the “forbidden", when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of a city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must go against nature to find love. I sought Robin in Marseilles, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with my terror. I said to myself, I will do what she has done, I will love what she has loved, then I will find her again. At first it seemed that all I should have to do would be to become “debauched", to find the girls that she had loved; but I found that they were only little girls that she had forgotten. I haunted the cafés where Robin had lived her night-life; I drank with the men, I danced with the women, but all I knew was that others had slept with my lover and my child. For Robin is incest too, that is one of her powers. In her, past-time records, and past time is relative to us all. Yet not being the family she is more present than the family. A relative is in the foreground only when it is born, when it suffers and when it dies, unless it becomes one’s lover, then it must be everything, as Robin was; yet not as much as she, for she was like a relative found in another generation. I thought, “I will do something that she will never be able to forgive, then we can begin again as strangers.” But the sailor got no further than the hall. He said: “ Mon dieu, il y a deux chevaux de bois dans la chambre à coucher.’’’’

‘Christ!’ muttered the doctor.

‘So’, Nora continued, ‘I left Paris. I went through the streets of Marseilles, the waterfront of Tangier, the basso porto of Naples. In the narrow streets of Naples, ivies and flowers were growing over the broken-down walls. Under enormous staircases, rising open to the streets, beggars lay sleeping beside images of St. Gennaro; girls going into the churches to pray were calling out to boys in the squares. In open door-ways night-lights were burning all day before gaudy prints of the Virgin. In one room that lay open to the alley, before a bed covered with a cheap heavy satin comforter, in the semi-darkness, a young girl sat on a chair, leaning over its back, one arm across it, the other hanging at her side, as if half of her slept; and half of her suffered. When she saw me she laughed, as children do, in embarrassment. Looking from her to the Madonna behind the candles, I knew that the image, to her, was what I had been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay, the space between the human and the holy head, the arena of the “indecent” eternal. At that moment I stood in the centre of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained, and I knew in that bed Robin should have put me down. In that bed we would have forgotten our lives in the extremity of memory, moulted our parts, as figures in the wax works are moulted down to their story, so we would have broken-down to our love.’

The doctor stood up. He staggered as he reached for his hat and coat. He stood in confused and unhappy silence—he moved toward the door. Holding the knob in his hand he turned toward her. Then he went out.

The doctor, walking with his coat-collar up, entered the Café de la Mairie du VIe. He stood at the bar and ordered a drink, looking at the people in the close, smoke-blue room, he said to himself, ‘Listen!’ Nora troubled him, the life of Nora and the lives of the people in his life. ‘The way of a man in a fog!’ he said. He hung his umbrella on the bar ledge. ‘To think is to be sick,’ he said to the barman. The barman nodded.

The people in the café waited for what the doctor would say, knowing that he was drunk and that he would talk; in great defaming sentences his betrayals came up; no one ever knew what was truth and what was not. ‘If you really want to know how hard a prize-fighter hits,’ he said, look-around, ‘you have got to walk into the circle of his fury and be carried out by the heels, not by the count.’

Someone laughed. The doctor turned slowly. ‘So safe as all that?’ he asked sarcastically; ‘so damned safe? Well, wait until you get in gaol and find yourself slapping the bottoms of your feet for misery.’

He put his hand out for his drink—muttering to himself: ‘Matthew, you have never been in time with any man’s life and you’ll never be remembered at all, God save the vacancy! The finest instrument goes wrong in time—that’s all, the instrument gets broken, and I must remember that when everyone is strange; it’s the instrument gone flat. Lapidary, engrave that on my stone when Matthew is all over and lost in a field.’ He looked around. ‘It’s the instrument, gentlemen, that has lost its G string, otherwise he’d be playing a fine tune; otherwise he’d still be passing his wind with the wind of the north—otherwise touching his billycock!’