Children of the Albatross Read Online Free PDF Page A

more often thirsty, absorbing like a mirror. She allowed
the pupil to receive these images of others but one felt they did not vanish
altogether as they would on a mirror: one felt a thirsty being absorbing
reflections and drinking words and faces into herself for a deep communion with
them.
    She never took up the art of words, the art of
talk. She remained always as Michael had first seen her: a woman who talked
with her Naiad hair, her winged eyelashes, her tilted head, her fluent waist
and rhetorical feet.
    She never said: I have a pain. But laid her two
arms over the painful area as if to quiet a rebellious child, rocking and
cradling this angry nerve. She never said: I am afraid. But entered the room on
tiptoes, her eyes watching for ambushes.
    She was already the dancer she was to become,
eloquent with her body.
    They met once and then Michael began to write
her letters as soon as he returned to college.
    In these letters he appointed her Isis and
Arethusa, Iseult and the Seven Muses.
    Djuna became the woman with the face of all
women.
    With strange omissions: he was neither Osiris
nor Tristram, nor any of the mates or pursuers.
    He became uneasy when she tried to clothe him in the costume of myth figures.
    When he came to see her during vacations they
never touched humanly, not even by a handclasp. It was as if they had found the
most intricate way of communicating with each other by way of historical
personages, literary passions, and that any direct touch even of finger tips
would explode this world.
    With each substitution they increased the
distance between their human selves.
    Djuna was not alarmed. She regarded this with
feminine eyes: in creating this world Michael was merely constructing a huge,
superior, magnificent nest in some mythological tree, and one day he would ask
her to step into it with him, carrying her over the threshold all costumed in
the trappings of his fantasy, and he would say: this is our home!
    All this to Djuna was an infinitely superior
way of wooing her, and she never doubted its ultimate purpose, or climax, for
in this the most subtle women are basically simple and do not consider
mythology or symbolism as a substitute for the climaxes of nature, merely as
adornments!
    The mist of adolescence, prolonging and
expanding the wooing, was merely an elaboration of the courtship. His
imagination continued to create endless detours as if they had to live first of
all through all the loves of history and fiction before they could focus on
their own.
    But the peace in his moss-green eyes disturbed
her, for in her eyes there now glowed a fever. Her breasts hurt her at night,
as if from overfullness.
    His eyes continued to focus on the most distant
points of all, but hers began to focus on the near, the present. She would
dwell on a detail of his face. On his ears for instance. On the movements of
his lips when he talked. She failed to hear some of his words because she was
following with her eyes and her feelings the contours of his lips moving as if
they were moving on the surface of her skin.
    She began to understand for the first time the
carnation in Carmen’s mouth. Carmen was eating the mock orange of love: the
white blossoms which she bit were like skin. Her lips had pressed around the
mock orange petals of desire.
    In Djuna all the moats were annihilated: she
stood perilously near to Michael glowing with her own natural warmth. Days of
clear visibility which Michael did not share. His compass still pointed to the
remote, the unknown.
    Djuna was a woman being dreamed.
    But Djuna had ceased to dream: she had tasted
the mock orange of desire.
    More baffling still to Djuna grown warm and
near, with her aching breasts, was that the moss-green serenity of Michael’s
eyes was going to dissolve into jealousy without pausing at desire.
    He tok her to a dance. His friends eagerly
appropriated her. From across the room full of dancers, for the first time he
saw not her eyes but her mouth, as vividly