Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

He found it, and with amiable heartiness flung a handful against her face.

A series of almost invisible shudders wrinkled her skin as the water dripped from her lashes, over her mouth and on to the bed. A spasm of waking moved upward from some deep shocked realm, and she opened her eyes. Instantly she tried to get to her feet. She said: ‘I was all right;’ and fell back into the pose of her annihilation.

Experiencing a double confusion, Felix now saw the doctor partially hidden by the screen beside the bed, make the movements common to the ‘dumbfounder’, or man of magic; the gestures of one who, in preparing the audience for a miracle, must pretend that there is nothing to hide; the whole purpose that of making the back and elbows move in a series of ‘honesties’, while in reality the most flagrant part of the hoax is being prepared.

Felix saw that this was for the purpose of snatching a few drops from a perfume bottle picked up from the night table; of dusting his darkly bristled chin with a puff, and drawing a line of rouge across his lips, his upper lip compressed on his lower, in order to have it seem that their sudden embellishment was a visitation of nature; still thinking himself unobserved, as if the whole fabric of magic had begun to decompose, as if the mechanics of machination were indeed out of control and were simplifying themselves back to their origin; the doctor’s hand reached out and covered a loose hundred franc note lying on the table.

With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unravelling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor’s pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a pearl; so he would have to cover the doctor. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own.

Engrossed in the coils of this new disquiet, Felix turned about. The girl was sitting up. She recognized the doctor. She had seen him somewhere. But, as one may trade ten years at a certain shop and be unable to place the shopkeeper if he is met in the street or in the promenoir of a theatre, the shop being a portion of his identity, she struggled to place him now that he had moved out of his frame.

‘Café de la Mairie du VIe,’ said the doctor, taking a chance in order to have a hand in her awakening.

She did not smile, though the moment he spoke she placed him. She closed her eyes and Felix, who had been looking into them intently because of their mysterious and shocking blue, found himself seeing them still faintly clear and timeless behind the lids—the long unqualified range in the iris of wild beasts who have not tamed the focus down to meet the human eye.

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a ‘picture’ forever arranged, is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.

Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and jaws ache—we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.

Something of this emotion came over Felix, but being racially incapable of abandon, he felt that he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind; as if this girl were the converging halves of a broken fate, setting face, in sleep, toward itself in time, as an image and its reflection in a lake seem parted only by the hesitation in the hour.

In the tones of this girl’s voice was the pitch of one enchanted with the gift of postponed abandon: the low drawling ‘aside’ voice of the actor who, in the soft usury of his speech, withholds a vocabulary until the profitable moment when he shall be facing his audience—in her case a guarded extempore to the body of what would be said at some later period when she would be able to ‘see’ them. What she now said was merely the longest way to a quick dismissal. She asked them to come to see her when she would be ‘able to feel better’.

Pinching the chasseur, the doctor inquired the girl’s name. ‘Mademoiselle Robin Vote,’ the chasseur answered.

Descending into the street, the doctor, desiring ‘one last before bed’ directed his steps back to the café. After a short silence he asked the Baron if he had ever thought about women and marriage. He kept his eyes fixed on the marble of the table before him, knowing that Felix had experienced something unusual.

The Baron admitted that he had, he wished a son who would feel as he felt about the ‘great past’. The doctor then inquired, with feigned indifference, of what nation he would choose the boy’s mother.

‘The American,’ the Baron answered instantly. ‘With an American anything can be done.’

The doctor laughed. He brought his soft fist down on the table—now he was sure. ‘Fate and entanglement’, he said, ‘have begun again—the dung beetle rolling his burden uphill—oh the hard climb! Nobility, very well, but what is it?’ The Baron started to answer him, the doctor held up his hand. ‘Wait a minute! I know—the few that the many have lied about well and long enough to make them deathless. So you must have a son,’ he paused. ‘A king is the peasant’s actor, who becomes so scandalous that he has to be bowed down to—scandalous in the higher sense naturally. And why must he be bowed down to? Because he has been set apart as the one dog who need not regard the rules of the house, they are so high that they can defame God and foul their rafters! But the people-—that’s different—they are church-broken, nation-broken—they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct. But to the graver permission, the king, the tsar, the emperor, who may relieve themselves on high heaven—to them they bow down—only.’ The Baron, who was always troubled by obscenity, would never, in the case of the doctor, resent it; he felt the seriousness, the melancholy hidden beneath every jest and malediction that the doctor uttered, therefore he answered him seriously. ‘To pay homage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future.’

‘And so a son?’

‘For that reason. The modern child has nothing left to hold to, or to put it better, he has nothing to hold with. We are adhering to life now with our last muscle—the heart.’

‘The last muscle of aristocracy is madness—remember that—‘ the doctor leaned forward, ‘the last child born to aristocracy is sometimes an idiot, out of respect—we go up—but we come down.’

The Baron dropped his monocle, the unarmed eye looked straight ahead. ‘It’s not necessary,’ he said, then he added, ‘But you are American, so you don’t believe.’