Anaïs Nin - The Four-Chambered Heart

Rango took his head in his hands and swayed back and forth as if in pain. A dry sob came out of his chest.

“Oh, Rango, I can’t bear this anymore. I will go away. Then you’ll have peace with Zora.”

“Something else happened today, Djuna, something which reminded me of some of the things you said. Something so terrible that I did not want to see you tonight. I don’t know what instinct of danger made me come, after all. But what happened tonight is worse than Zora’s fit of madness. You know that once a month the workers of the party belonging to a certain group meet for what they call auto-criticism. It’s part of the discipline. It’s done with kindness, great objectivity, and very justly. I have been at such meetings. A man’s way of working, his character traits, are analyzed. Last night it was my turn. The men who sat in a circle, they were the ones I see every day, the butcher, the postman, the grocer, the shoemaker on my own street. The head of our particular section is the bus driver. At first, you know, they had been doubtful about signing me in. They knew I was an artist, a bohemian, an intellectual. But they liked me…and they took me in. I’ve worked for them two months now. Then last night…”

He stopped as if he would not have the courage to relive the scene. Djuna’s hand in his calmed him. But he kept his head bowed. “Last night they talked, very quietly and moderately as the French do… They analyzed me, how I work. They told me some of the things you used to tell me. They made an analysis of my character. They observed everything, the good and the bad. Not only the laziness, the disorder, the lack of discipline, the placing of personal life before the needs of the party, the nights at the cafe, the immoderate talking, irresponsibility, but they also mentioned my capabilities, which made it worse, as they showed how I sabotage myself… They analyzed my power to influence others, my eloquence, my fervor and enthusiasm, my contagious enthusiasm and energy, my gift for making an impression on a crowd, the fact that people are inclined to trust me, to elect me as their leader. Everything. They knew about my fatalism, too. They talked about character changing, as you do. They even intimated that Zora should be placed in an institution, because they knew about her behavior.”

All the time he kept his head bowed.

“When you said these things gently, it didn’t hurt me. It was our secret and I could get angry with you, or contradict you. But when they said them before all the other men I knew it was true, and worse still, I knew that if I had not been able to change with all that you gave me, years of love and devotion, I wouldn’t change for the party either… Any other man, taking what you gave, would have accomplished the greatest changes…any other man but me.”

The barge was sailing nowhere, a moored port of despair.

Rango stretched himself and said: “I’m tired out…so tired, so tired…” And fell asleep almost instantly in the pose of a big child, with his fists tightly closed, his arms over his head.

Djuna walked lightly to the front cabin, looked once through the small barred portholes like the windows of a prison, leaned over the mildewed floor, and tore up one of the bottom boards, inviting the deluge to sink this Noah’s Ark sailing nowhere.

The wood being old and half rotted had made it easy for Djuna to pull on the plank where it had once been patched, but the influx of the water had been partly blocked by the outer layer of barnacles and corrugated seaweeds which she could not reach.

She returned to the bed on the floor and lay beside Rango, to wait patiently for death.

She saw the river sinuating toward the sea and wondered if they would float unhampered toward the ocean.

Below the level of identity lay an ocean, an ocean of which human beings carry only a drop in their veins; but some sink below cognizance and the drop becomes a huge wave, the tide of memory, the undertows of sensation…

Beneath the cities of the interior flowed many rivers carrying a multitude of images… All the women she had been spread their hair in a halo on the surface of the river, extended multiple arms like the idols of India, their essence seeping in and out of the meandering dreams of men…

Djuna, lying face upward like a water lily of amniotic lakes; Djuna floating down to the organ grinder’s tune of a pavana for a defunct infanta of Spain, the infanta who never acceded to the throne of maturity, the one who remained a pretender…

As for Rango, the drums would burst and all the painted horses of the carnival would turn a polka…

She saw their lives over and over again until she caught a truth which was not simple and divisible but fluctuating and elusive; but she saw it clearly from the places under the surface where she had been accustomed to exist: all the women she had been like many rivers running out of her and with her into the ocean…

She saw, through this curtain of water, all of them as personages larger than nature, more visible to sluggish hearts being in the focus of death, a stage on which there are no blurred passages, no missed cues…

She saw, now that she was out of the fog of imprecise relationships, with the more intense light of death upon these faces which had caused her despair, she saw these same faces as pertaining to gentle clowns. Zora dressed in comical trappings, in Rango’s outsized socks, in dyed kimonos, in strangled rags and empty-armed brooches, a comedy to awaken guilt in others…

…on this stage, floating down the Seine toward death, the actors drifted along and love no longer seemed a trap… the trap was the static pause growth, the arrested self caught in its own web of obstinacy and obsession…

…you grow, as in the water the algae grow taller and heavier and are carried by their own weight into different currents…

…I was afraid to grow or move away, Rango, I was ashamed to desert you in your torment, but now I know your choice is your own, as mine was my own…

…fixation is death… death is fixation…

…on this precarious ship, devoid of upholstery and self-deception, the voyage can continue into tomorrow…

…what I see now is the vastness, and the places where I have not been and the duties I have not fulfilled, and the uses for this unusual cargo of past sorrows all ripe for transmutations…

…the messenger of death, like all adventurers, will accelerate your heart toward change and mutation…

…if one sinks deep enough and then deeper, all these women she had been flowed into one at night and lost their separate identities; she would learn from Sabina how to make love laughing, and from Stella how to die only for a little while and be born again as children die and are reborn at the slightest encouragement…

…from the end in water to the beginning in water, she would complete the journey, from origin to birth and birth to flow…

…she would abandon her body to flow into a vaster body than her own, as it was at the beginning, and return with many other lives to be unfolded…

…with her would float the broken doll of her childhood, the Easter egg which had been smaller than the one she had asked for, debris of fictions…

…she would return to the life above the waters of the unconscious and see the magnifications of sorrow which had taken place and been the true cause of the deluge…

…there were countries she had not yet seen…

…this image created a pause in her floating…

…there must also be loves she had not yet encountered…

…as the barge ran swiftly down the current of despair, she saw the people on the shore flinging their arms in desolation, those who had counted on her Noah’s Ark to save themselves…