The Four-Chambered Heart (9 page)

“What are you doing?” asked Rango with
amazement. “Showing you that the medicine is fresh.”

“You believe the druggist and not Zora?” he
said angrily.

“And you believe in a sick person’s whim,” she
said.

Zora was always talking about her future death.
She began all her conversations with: “When I die…” Rango was maintained in a
state of panic, fearing her death, and lived each day accordingly: “Zora is in
grave danger of death,” he would say, to excuse her demands upon his time.

At first Djuna was alarmed by Zora’s behavior,
and shared Rango’s anxieties. Her gestures were so vehement, so magnified, that
Djuna believed they might be those of a dying woman. But as these gestures
repeated themselves day after day, week after week, month after month, year
after year, Djuna lost her fear of Zora’s death.

When Zora said: “I have a burning sensation in
my stomach,” she made the gestures of a person writhing in a brasier of flames.

At the hospital, where Djuna sometimes
accompanied her, the nurses and doctors no longer listened to her. Djuna caught
glances of irony in the doctor’s eyes.

Zora’s gestures to describe her troubles became
for Djuna a special theatre of exaggeration, which at first caused terror, and
then numbed the senses.

It was like the
Grand Guignol
, where knowing every scene was overacted to create
horror finally created detachment and laughter.

But what helped Djuna to overcome her terror
was something else which happened that winter: there was an epidemic of throat
infection which swept Paris and which Djuna caught.

It was painful but came without fever, and
there was no need to stay in bed.

That same day Rango rushed to the barge,
distressed and vehement. He could not stay with Djuna because Zora was terribly
ill. “You might come back with me, if you wish. Zora has a heart attack, an
inflamed throat, and she’s suffocating.”

When they arrived, the doctor was there
examining Zora’s throat. Zora lay back pale and rigid, as if her last hour had
come. Her gestures, her hands upon her throat, her strained face were a
representation of strangulation.

The doctor straightened up and said: “Just the
same throat infection everybody has just now. You don’t have to stay in bed.
Just keep warm, and eat soups only.”

And Djuna, with the same throat trouble, was
out with Rango.

The first year Djuna had suffered from Rango’s
panic. The second year from pity; the third year detachment and wisdom came.
But Rango’s anxiety never diminished.

Djuna awakened one morning and asked herself:
“Do I love this woman who magnifies her illness a thousand times, unconcerned
with curing it, but savoring its effect on others? Why does Zora contort
herself in a more than life-size pain for all the world to see and hear?”

Many times Djuna had been baffled by the fact
that when someone said to Zora, “You look better, so much better,” Zora was not
pleased. A frown would come between her eyes, an expression of distress.

At the hospital one day, the doctor did not
linger very long at Zora’s bedside, and when he walked away Djuna laid her hand
on his arm: “Please tell me what’s the matter with my friend?”

“She’s a pathological case,” he said.

Djuna saw the second face of Zora.

It was an expression she had seen before and
could not place. And then she remembered.

It was the expression upon the face of
professional beggars.

Her enumeration of the troubles she had endured
that day was like the plaintive incantation too perfectly molded by time and
repetition.

Under the tone of sorrow there was a practice
in the tone of sorrow.

Yet Djuna felt ashamed to doubt the sincerity
of Zora’s complaints, as one is ashamed to doubt a beggar’s poverty. Yet she
felt, as one does occasionally before a beggar, that a pain too often studied
for public exposure had become a pain necessary to the beggar, his means of
livelihood, his claim to existence, to protection. If he were deprived of it,
he would be deprived of his right to compassion.

It was as if true compassion should be reserved
for troubles not exploited, but of recent occurrence and deeply felt. The
poverty of the professional lamenter was an asset rather than a tragedy.

Djuna wanted to forget her intuition, in favor of
the tradition which dictated that a beggar’s needs cannot be judged, because
there is a noblesse oblige which dictates: his cup is empty and yours is full,
therefore there is only one action possible; and even if an investigation
revealed the beggar not to be blind and to have amassed a fortune under his
pallet, even then, such hesitations before an empty cup are so distressing that
the role of the believer is easier, easier to be deceived than to doubt…

Djuna was sometimes disconcerted by the shrewd
look in Zora’s eyes while she detailed her day’s hardships; as startled to
catch this expression as to see a blind man who was crossing the street alone
and walking into danger—causing you a sharp compassion—to see him suddenly turn
upon you eyes fully aware of the impending danger.

But Djuna wanted to believe, because Rango
believed. She discarded this first glimpse of Zora’s second face as people
often discard first intuitions until they reach the end of a friendship, the
end of a love, and then this long-buried first impression reappears only to
prove that the animal senses in human beings warning them clearly of dangers,
of traps, may be accurate but are often discarded in favor of a blind
compulsion in the opposite direction to that of self-preservation. Proving that
huma beings have a sense of danger but that some other desire, some other
compulsion, lures and draws them precisely toward these traps, toward
self-destruction.

Djuna felt now like a puppet. She felt the need
to give Rango a perpetually healthy, perpetually spirited woman because at home
he had a perpetually sick, depressed wife. Rango’s needs set the tone, mood,
and activities of her days. She obeyed the strings blindly. She allowed Rango’s
anxieties to infect her, merely so he would not be alone with his burden. The
strings were in Zora’s hands. The hierarchy was firmly established: if Zora had
a cold, a headache, Rango must stay at home (even if this cold were caused by
Zora washing her hair in the middle of a winter day and going out with her hair
still wet). It was forbidden to rebel or question the origin of the trouble, or
to suggest that Zora might consider others, consider preventing these troubles.

Zora could not cook, could not shop, could not
clean, she could not be alone at night. If friends came to see her, Rango must
be at home to save her pride.

When Djuna had first known Rango he spent most
of his nights out at the cafe. Often he did not come home till dawn, and
oftener still he did not come home at all when he was spending a night with one
of his mistresses.

At first Zora had said: “I’m so glad to know
Rango is not drinking, that he is with you instead of at the cafe.”

But after awhile she developed new fears. Rango
said: “Poor Zora, she is so afraid at night. The other evening someone knocked
at her door for a long time and just stood there waiting. She was so frightened
that the man would come in and rape her that she piled all the furniture in
front of the door and did not sleep all night.”

Rango spent every other night at the barge, and
then only twice a week as Zora’s complaints increased, and then one night a
week.

And on that one night Zora came and knocked on
the door.

She was in pain, she said. Rango rushed out and
took her home. She was convulsed with pains. The doctor was called, and could
not find the cause. Only at dawn did she confess: she had heard that cleaning
fluid was good for the stomach, so she had drunk a glass of it.

Rango left Djuna to watch over Zora for a while
he went to buy the medicines which the doctor advised.

Djuna tended Zora, and Zora smiled at her
innocently. Could Zora be so unaware of the consequences of her acts?

Whenever they were alone together they fell
naturally into a sincere relationship. Djuna’s compassion would once more be aroused
and Zora would nestle into it securely. At these moments Djuna believed a
relationship was being constructed to which Zora would be loyal, one of mutual
giving. It was only later that Djuna would discover what Zora had achieved with
her behavior, and that would always be, in the end, something to harm and
stifle the relationship between Rango and Djuna.

But it was all so subtly done that Djuna could
never detect it. When Zora talked about Rango, it seemed at first a natural
harmless sick woman’s complaining; it seemed not as if she wanted to harm Rango
in Djuna’s eyes, but as if she wanted Djuna’s sympathy for her difficult life
with Rango. It was only later when alone that Djuna became aware of how much
dissension and doubt Zora had managed to insert in her monotonous lamentations
against Rango.

Djuna would prepare herself for these talks
which hurt her by thinking: “She is talking about another Rango, not the one I
know. The Rango I love is different. This is the Rango that was born of his
life with Zora. She is responsible for what he was with her.”

This night, calmed by Djuna’s ministrations,
Zora began to talk: “You love Rango in such a different way than I do. I never
loved Rango physically. I never loved any man physically. I don’t know what it
is to respond to a man… You know, sometimes when I get these crying spells, I
think to myself: maybe it’s because I can’t melt physically. I don’t feel
anything, and so crying is a relief, I cry instead…”

Djuna was moved by this, and then appalled.
Rango did not know about Zora’s coldness. Was this the secret of her
destructiveness toward him?

She wished she did not have to become an
intimate part of their lives together. She wished she could escape the clutch
of Zora’s dependence.

She was silent. Zora was beginning her usual
long, monotonous recital of Rango’s faults: It was Rango who had made her ill.
It was Rango who had ruined her career. Rango was to blame for everything.

Zora blamed Rango, and Rango blamed the world.
Both of them were equally blind in the knowledge of their own character and
responsibilities. Djuna did not know yet, but sensed the cause of their
downfall.

Djuna rebelled against Rango’s blind
subservience to Zora’s helplessness, and yet she found herself in the same
position: unable to avoid the slavery.

Zora never asked a favor. She demanded, and
then proceeded to criticize how the orders were carried out, with a sense of
her right to be served and no acknowledgment or lightest form of thankfulness.