A Spy in the House of Love (11 page)

She saw his charades as a child’s jealous
imitations of a maturity he could not reach.

“You’re sad, Sabina,” he said. “Come with me. I
have things to show you.” As if rising with her in his gyroscope of fantasy he
took her to visit his collection of empty cages.

Cages crowded his room, some of bamboo from the
Philippines, some in gilt, wrought with intricate designs from Persia, others
peaked like tents, others like miniature adobe houses, others like African huts
of palm leaves. To some of the cages he himself had added turrets, towers from
the Middle Ages, trapezes and baroque ladders, bathtubs made of mirrors, and a
complete miniature jungle sufficient to give these prisons the illusion of
freedom to any wild or mechanical bird imprisoned in them.

“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a
unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”

Sabina placed
The Firebird
on the
phonograph. The delicate footsteps of the Firebird were heard at first through
infinite distance, each step rousing the phosphorescent sparks from the earth,
each note a golden bugle to marshal delight. A jungle of dragon tails thrashing
in erotic derisions, a brazier of flesh-smoking prayers, the multiple debris of
the stained glass fountains of desire.

She lifted the needle, cut the music harshly in
mid-air. “Why? Why? Why?” cried Donald, as if wounded.

Sabina had silenced the firebirds of desire,
and now she extended her arms like widely extended wings, wings no longer
orange, and Donald gave himself to their protective embrace. The Sabina he
embraced was the one he needed, the dispenser of food, of fulfilled promises,
of
mendings
and knitting, comforts and solaces, of
blankets and reassurances, of heaters, medicines, potions and scaffolds.

“You’re the firebird, Sabina, and that was why,
until you came, all my cages were empty. It was you I wanted to capture.” Then
with a soft, a defeated tenderness he lowered his eyelashes and added: “I know
I have no way to keep you here, nothing to hold you here…”

Her breasts were no longer tipped with fire,
they were the breasts of the mother, from which flowed nourishment. She
deserted her other loves to fulfill Donald’s needs. She felt: “I am a woman, I
am warm, tender and nourishing. I am fecund and I am good.”

Such serenity came with this state of being
woman the mother! The humble, the menial task-performing mother as she had
known her in her own childhood.

When she found chaotic, hasty little notes from
Donald telling her where he was and when he would return he always ended them:
“You are wonderful. You are wonderful and good. You are generous and kind.”

And these words calmed her anxiety more than
sabina
had l fulfillment had, calmed her fevers. She was
shedding other
Sabinas
, believing she was shedding
anxiety. Each day the colors of her dresses became more subdued, her walk less
animal. It was as if in captivity her brilliant plumage were losing its
brilliance. She felt the metamorphosis. She knew she was molting. But she did
not know what she was losing in molding herself to Donald’s needs.

Once, climbing his stairs with a full market
bag, she caught dim silhouette of herself on a damp mirror, and was startled to
see a strong resemblance to her mother.

What Donald had achieved by capturing her into
his net of fantasy as the firebird (while in the absence of erotic climate he
had subtly dulled her plumage) was not only to reach his own need’s fulfillment
but to enable her to rejoin her mother’s image which was her image of goodness:
her mother, dispenser of food, of solace—soft warm and fecund.

On the stained mirror stood the shadow and echo
of her mother, carrying food. Wearing the neutral-toned clothes of
self-effacement, the faded garments of self-sacrifice, the external uniform of
goodness.

In this realm, her mother’s realm, she had
found a moment’s surcease from guilt.

Now she knew what she must say to Donald to
cure his sense of smallness, and the smallness of what he had given her. She
would say to him:

“Donald! Donald! You did give me something no
one else could give me, you gave me my innocence! You helped me to find again
the way to gain peace which I had learned as a child. When I was a child, only
a little younger than you are now, after days of drugging myself with reading,
with playing, with fantasies about people, with passionate friendships, with
days spent hiding from my parents, with escapes, and all the activities which
were termed bad, I found that by helping my mother, by cooking, mending,
cleaning, scrubbing, and doing all the chores I most hated, I could appease
this hungry and tyrannical conscience. It’s no crime that you have remained a
child, Donald. In some of the old fairy tales, you know, many mature characters
were shrunk back into midgets, as Alice was made small again to re-experience
her childhood. It’s the rest of us who are pretenders; we all pretend to be
large and strong. You just are not able to pretend.”

When she entered his room, she found a letter
on her table.

Once she had said to him, when his moods had
been too contradictory: “Adolescence is like cactus,” and he had answered:
“I’ll write you a letter some day, with cactus milk!”

And here it was!

Letter to an actress: “From what you told me
last night I see that you do not know your power. You are like a person who
consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are
born of this. I felt this last night as I watched you act Cinderella, that you
were whatever you acted, that you touched that point at which art and life meet
and there is only BEING. I felt your hunger and your dreams, your pities and
your desires at the same time as you awakened all of mine. I felt that you were
not acting but dreaming; I felt that all of us who watched you could come out
of the theatre and without transition could pass magically into another Ball,
another snowstorm, another love, another dream. Before our very eyes you were
being consumed by love and the dream of love. The burning of your eyes, of your
gestures, a bonfire of faith and dissolution. You have the power. Never again
use the word exhibitionism. Acting in you is a revelation. What the soul so
often cannot say through the body because the body is not subtle enough, you
can say. The body usually betrays the soul. You have the power of contagion, of
transmitting emotion through the infinite shadings of your movements, the
variations of your mouth’s designs, the feathery palpitations of your
eyelashes. And your voice, your voice more than any other voice linked to your
breath, the breathlessness of feeling, so that you take one’s breath away with
you and carry one into the realm of breathlessness and silence. So much power
you have Sabina! The pain you felt afterwards was not the pain of failure or of
exhibitionism, as you said, it must be the pain of having revealed so much that
was of the spirit, like some great mystic revelation of compassion and love and
secret illusion, so that you expected this to have been communicated to others,
and that they should respond as to a magic ritual. It must have been a shock
when it did not happen to the audience, when they remained untransformed. But
to those who respond as I did, you appear as something beyond the actor who can
transmit to others the power to feel, to believe. For me the miracle took
place. You seemed the only one alive among the actors. What hurt you was that
it was not acting, and that when it ended there was a break in the dream. You
should have been protected from the violent transition. You should have been
carried off the stage, so that you would not feel the change of level, from the
stage to the street, and from the street to your home, and from there to
another party, another love, another snowstorm, another pair of gold slippers.

“It must take great courage to give to many
what one often gives but to the loved one. A voice altered by love, desire, the
smile of open naked tenderness. We are permitted to witness the exposure of all
feelings, tenderness, anger, weakness, abandon, childishness, fear, all that we
usually reveal only to the loved one. That is why we love the actress. They
give us the intimate being who is only revealed in the act of love. We receive
all the treasures, a caressing glance, an intimate gesture, the secret ranges
of the voice. This openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial
relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the miraculous
openness which takes place in whole love. And so I witnessed, on the stage,
this mystery of total love which in my life is hidden from me. And now, Sabina,
I cannot bear the little loves, and yet I cannot claim all of yours, and every day
I see you now, immense, complete, and I but a fragment, wandering…”

Sabina touched the letter which rested on her
breast, the sharp corners of the pages hurting her a little… “What can I give
you?” he asked. “What have I to give you?” he cried out in anguish, thinking
this was the reason why he had not seen her for three days, or heard from her.
Another time he had said playfully: “I can only nibble at you.” And had pressed
his small, perfect teeth into her shoulder.

The ascensions of the ballet dancers into space
and their return to the ground, brought before her eyes a Japanese umbrella
made of colored paper which she once wore in her hair. It was lovely to see, so
delicately made. When it rained and others opened their umbrellas then it was
time for her to close hers.

But a hi wind had torn it, and when she went
into Chinatown to buy another the woman who ran the shop shouted violently:
“It’s made in Japan, throw it in the gutter!”

Sabina had looked at the parasol, innocent and
fragile, made in a moment of peace by a workman dreaming of peace, made like a
flower, lighter than war and hatred. She left the shop and looked down at the
gutter and could not bring herself to throw it. She folded it quietly, folded
tender gardens, the fragile structure of dream, a workman’s dream of peace,
innocent music, innocent workman whose hands had not made bullets. In time of
war hatred confused all the values, hatred fell upon cathedrals, paintings,
music, rare books, children, the innocent passersby.

She folded the letter, as she had folded the
parasol, out of sight of hatred and violence. She could not keep pace with the
angry pulse of the world. She was engaged in a smaller cycle, the one opposite
to war. There were truths women had been given to protect while the men went to
war. When everything would be blown away, a paper parasol would raise its head
among the debris, and man would be reminded of peace and tenderness.

Alan always believed he was giving Sabina
pleasure when he took her to the theatre, and at first her face was always
illuminated with suspense and curiosity. But inevitably she would grow restive
and tumultuous, chaotic and disturbed; she would even weep quietly in the dark
and disappear in between acts, so as not to expose a ravaged face.

“What is it, what is it?” repeated Alan
patiently, suspecting her of envy or jealousy of the roles given to others.
“You could be the most marvelous actress of our period if you wanted to give
your whole life to it, but you know how you feel about discipline and monotony.”

“It isn’t that, no, it isn’t that,” and Sabina
would say no more.

To whom could she explain that what she envied
in them was the ease with which they would step out of their roles, wash
themselves of it after the play and return to their true selves. She would have
wanted these metamorphoses of her personality to take place on the stage so
that at a given signal she would know for certain they were ended and she might
return to a permanent immutable Sabina.

But when she wished to end a role, to become
herself again, the other felt immensely betrayed, and not only fought the
alteration but became angered at her. Once a role was established in a
relationship, it was almost impossible to alter. And even if she succeeded,
when the time came to return to the original Sabina, where was she? If she
rebelled against her role towards Donald, if she turned on the “Firebird”
record again, the drumming of the senses, the tongues of fire, and denied her
mother within her, was she then returning to the true Sabina?

When she replaced the needle on the record and
set off on her first assignation with desire was it not her father then walking
within her, directing her steps? Her father who, having fed on her mother’s
artful cooking, having dressed in the shirt she had ironed, having kissed her
unbeautiful forehead damp from ironing, having allowed her marred hands to tie
his tie, proceeded to leave her mother and Sabina for his vainglorious walk
down the streets of the neighborhood who knew him for his handsomeness and his
wanderings?

How many times had a perfumed, a painted, a
handsome woman stopped her on the street to kiss her, caress her long hair and
say: “You’re Sabina! You’re his daughter! I know your father
so
well.”
It was not the words, it was the intimate glance, the boudoir tone of the voice
which alarmed her. This knowledge of her father always brought to women’s eyes
a sparkle not there before, an intimation of secret pleasures. Even as a child
Sabina could read their messages. Sabina was the daughter of delight born of
his amorous genius and they caressed her as another manifestation of a ritual
she sensed and from which her mother had been estranged forever.