Nightwood (17 page)

“Love is death, come upon with passion; I know, that is why love is wisdom. I love her as one condemned to it.”

“O Widow Lazarus! Arisen from your dead! O lunatic humour of the moon! Behold this fearful tree on which sits singing the drearful bird—
Turdus musicus
, or European singing thrush; sitting and singing the refrain—all in the tear-wet night—and it starts out
largo
, but it ends like
I Hear You Calling Me
, or
Kiss Me Again
, gone wild. And Diane, where is she? Diane of Ephesus in the Greek Gardens, singing and shaken in every bosom; and Rack and Ruin, the dogs of the Vatican, running up and down the papal esplanade and out into the Ramblar with roses in their tails to keep off care. Don’t I know it all! Do you think that I, the Old Woman who lives in the closet, do not know that every child, no matter what its day, is born prehistorically and that even the wrong thought has caused the human mind incredible effort? Bend down the tree of knowledge and you’ll unroost a strange bird. Suffering may be composed wickedly and of an inferior writhing. Rage and inaccuracy howl and blow the bone, for, contrary to all opinion, all suffering does
not
purify—begging everybody’s pardon, which is called everybody’s know. It moils and blathers some to perjury; the peritoneum boils and brings on common and cheap praying a great way sunk in pointless agony.”

“Jenny,” she said.

“It rots her sleep—Jenny is one of those who nip like a bird and void like an ox—the poor and lightly damned! That can be a torture also. None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last. Don’t I know that the only way to know evil is through truth? The evil and the good know themselves only by giving up their secret face to face. The true good who meets the true evil (Holy Mother of Mercy! are there any such?) learns for the first time how to accept neither; the face of the one tells the face of the other the half of the story that both forgot.

“To be utterly innocent,” he went on, “would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.”

“Sometimes Robin seemed to return to me,” Nora said, unheeding, “for sleep and safety, but,” she added bitterly, “she always went out again.”

The doctor lit a cigarette; lifting his chin he blew the smoke high. “To treat her lovers to the great passionate indifference. Say!” he exclaimed, bringing his chin down.

“Dawn, of course, dawn! That’s when she came back frightened. At that hour the citizen of the night balances on a thread that is running thin.”

“Only the impossible lasts forever; with time, it is made accessible. Robin’s love and mine was always impossible, and loving each other, we no longer love. Yet we love each other like death.”

“Um,” murmured the doctor, “beat life like a dinner bell, yet there is one hour that won’t ring—the hour of disentanglement. Oh, well,” he sighed, “every man dies finally of that poison known as the-heart-in-the-mouth. Yours is in your hand. Put it back. The eater of it will get a taste for you; in the end his muzzle will be heard barking among your ribs. I’m no exception, God knows; I’m the last of my line, the fine hairline of least resistance. It’s a gruesome thing that man learns only by what he has between the one leg and the other! Oh, that short dangle! We corrupt mortality by its industry. You never know which one of your ends it is that is going to be the part you can’t take your mind off.”

“If only you could take my mind off, Matthew—now, in this house that I took that Robin’s mind and mine might go together. Surprising, isn’t it, I’m happier when I’m alone now, without her, because when she was here with me, in this house, I had to watch her wanting to go and yet to stay. How much of our life do we put into a life that we may be damned? Then she was back stumbling through the house again, listening for a footstep in the court, for a way to leave and not to go, trying to absorb, with the intensity of her ear, any sound that would have made me suspicious, yet hoping I would break my heart in safety; she needed that assurance. Matthew, was it a sin that I believed her?”

“Of course, it made her life wrong.”

“But when I didn’t believe her any more, after the night I came to see you; that I have to think of all the time; I don’t dare to stop, for fear of the moment it will come back again.”

“Remorse,” said the doctor, “sitting heavy, like the arse of a bull—you had the conceit of ‘honesty’ to keep that arse from cracking your heart; but what did she have? Only your faith in her—then you took that faith away! You should have kept it always, seeing that it was a myth; no myth is safely broken. Ah, the weakness of the strong! The trouble with you is you are not just a myth-maker, you are also a destroyer, you made a beautiful fable, then put Voltaire to bed with it; ah, the
Dead March
in ‘Saul’!”

Nora said, as if she had not been interrupted, “Because after that night, I went to see Jenny. I remember the stairs. They were of brown wood, and the hall was ugly and dark, and her apartment depressing. No one would have known that she had money. The walls had mustard-coloured paper on them as far as the salon, and something hideous in red and green and black in the hall, and away at the end, a bedroom facing the hall-door, with a double-bed. Sitting up against the pillow was a doll. Robin had given me a doll. I knew then, before I asked, that this was the right house, before I said, ‘You are Robin’s mistress, aren’t you?’ That poor shuddering creature had pelvic bones I could see flying through her dress. I wanted to lean forward and laugh with terror. She was sitting there doubled up with surprise, her raven’s bill coming up saying, ‘Yes.’ Then I looked up and there on the wall was the photograph of Robin when she was a baby (the one that she had told me was lost).

“She went to pieces; she fell forward on my lap. At her next words I saw that I was not a danger to her, but someone who might understand her torture. In great agitation she said, ‘I went out this afternoon, I didn’t think she could call me because you had been away to the country, Robin said, and would be back this evening and so she would have to stay home with you because you had been so good to her always; though God knows I understand there is nothing between you any longer, that you are “just good friends”; she has explained that—still, I nearly went mad when I found that she had been here and I was out. She has told me often enough, “Don’t leave the house because I don’t know exactly when I am going to be able to get away, because I can’t hurt Nora.” ‘Nora’s voice broke. She went on.

“Then Jenny said, ‘What are you going to do? What do you want me to do?’ I knew all the time that she could do nothing but what she wanted to do, and that whatever it was, she was a liar, no matter what truth she was telling. I was dead. I felt stronger then, and I said, yes, I would have a drink. She poured out two, knocking the bottle against the glass and spilling the liquor on the dark ugly carpet. I kept thinking, what else is it that is hurting me; then I knew—the doll; the doll in there on the bed.” Nora sat down, facing the doctor. “We give death to a child when we give it a doll—it’s the effigy and the shroud; when a woman gives it to a woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane; so when I saw that other doll—” Nora could not go on. She began to cry. “What part of monstrosity am I that I am always crying at its side!

“When I got home Robin had been waiting, knowing, because I was late, that something was wrong. I said, ‘It is over—I can’t go on. You have always lied to me, and you have denied me to her. I can’t stand it any more.’

“She stood up then and went into the hall. She jerked her coat off the hook and I said, ‘Have you nothing to say to me?’ She turned her face to me. It was like something once beautiful found in a river—and flung herself out of the door.”

“And you were crying,” the doctor said, nodding. “You went about the house like someone sunken under lightness. You were ruined and you kept striking your hands together, laughing crazily and singing a little and putting your hands over your face. Stage-tricks have been taken from life, so finding yourself employing them you were confused with a sense of shame. When you went out looking for someone to go mad with, they said, ‘For God’s sake look at Nora!’ For the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine and terrifying spectacle. Why is it that you want to talk to me? Because I’m the other woman that God forgot.”

“There’s nothing to go by, Matthew,” she said. “You do not know which way to go. A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself. God laughs at me, but his laughter is my love.”

“You have died and arisen for love,” said Matthew. “But unlike the ass returning from the market you are always carrying the same load. Oh, for God’s sweet sake, didn’t she ever disgust you! Weren’t you sometimes pleased that you had the night to yourself, wishing, when she did come home, that it was never?”

“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-for-saken, 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 anyone 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?