Children of the Albatross Read Online Free PDF Page B

of insolence, a dance which said to the woman: “I dance alone, I
will not be possessed by a woman.”
    The kind of dance tradition had taught woman as
a ritual to provoke aggression! But this dance made by young men before the
women left them at a loss for it was not intended to be answered.

    Years later she sat at a cafe table in Paris
between Michael and Donald.
    Why should she be sitting between Michael and
Donald?
    Why were not all cords cut between herself and
Michael when she married and when he gave himself to a succession of Donalds?
    When they met in Paris again, he had this need
to invent a trinity: to establish a connecting link between Djuna and all the
changing, fluctuating Donalds.
    As if some element were lacking in his relation
to Donald.
    Donald had a slender body, like an Egyptian
boy. Dark hair wild like that of a child who had been running. At momentshe
extreme softness of his gestures made him appear small, at others when he stood
stylized and pure in line, erect, he seemed tall and firm.
    His eyes were large and entranced, and he
talked flowingly like a medium. His eyelids fell heavily over his eyes like a
woman’s, with a sweep of the eyelashes. He had a small straight nose, small
ears, and strong boyish hands.
    When Michael left for cigarettes they looked at
each other, and immediately Donald ceased to be a woman. He straightened his
body and looked at Djuna unflinchingly.
    With her he asserted his strength. Was it her
being a woman which challenged his strength? He was now like a grave child in
the stage of becoming a man.
    With the smile of a conspirator he said:
“Michael treats me as if I were a woman or a child. He wants me not to work and
to depend on him. He wants to go and live down south in a kind of paradise.”
    “And what do you want?”
    “I am not sure I love Michael…”
    That was exactly what she expected to hear.
Always this admission of incompleteness. Always one in flight or the three
sitting together, always one complaining or one loving less than the other.
    All this accompanied by the most complicated
harmonization of expressions Djuna had ever seen. The eyes and mouth of Donald
suggesting an excitement familiar to drug addicts, only in Donald it did not
derive from any artificial drugs but from the strange flavor he extracted from
difficulties, from the maze and detours and unfulfillments of his loves.
    In Donald’s eyes shone the fever of futile
watches in the night, intrigue, pursuits of the forbidden, all the rhythms and
moods unknown to ordinary living. There was a quest for the forbidden and it
was this flavor he sought, as well as the strange lighting which fell on all
the unknown, the unfamiliar, the tabooed, all that could remind him of those
secret moments of childhood when he sought the very experiences most forbidden
by the parents.
    But when it came to the selection of one, to
giving one’s self to one, to an open simplicity and an effort at completeness,
some mysterious impulse always intervened and destroyed the relationship. A
hatred of permanency, of anything resembling marnage.
    Donald was talking against Michael’s paradise
as it would destroy the bittersweet, intense flavor he sought.
    He bent closer to Djuna, whispering now like a
conspirator. It was his conspiracy against simplicity, against Michael’s desire
for a peaceful life together.
    “If you only knew, Djuna, the first time it
happened! I expected the whole world to change its face, be utterly
transformed, turned upside down. I expected the room to become inclined,as
after an earthquake, to find that the door no longer led to a stairway but into
space, and the windows overlooked the sea. Such excitement; such anxiety, and
such a fear of not achieving s tlment. At other times I have the feeling that I
am escaping a prison, I have a fear of being caught again and punished. When I
signal to another like myself in a cafe I have the feeling that we are two
prisoners who have found a laborious