Ladders to Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

would talk about her life and her marriage and
the disintegration of her home, and then Djuna would
lean over to embrace her, overflowing with pity. Then Djuna would speak and Lillian would lean over and want to gather her in her arms with
maternal compassion.
    “I feel,” said Lillian, “that I do everything
wrong. I feel I do everything to bring about just what I fear. You will turn
away from me too.”
    Lillian’s unsatisfied hunger for life had
evoked in Djuna another hunger. This hunger still
hovered at times over the bright film of her eyes, shading them not with the
violet shadows of either illness or sensual excess, of experience or fever, but
with the pearl-grey shadow of denial, and Djuna said:
    “I was born in the most utter poverty. My
mother lying in bed with consumption, four brothers and sisters loudly claiming
food and care, and I having to be the mother and nurse of them all. We were so
hungry that we ate all the samples of food or medicines which were left at the
house. I remember once we ate a whole box of chocolate-coated constipation
pills. Father was a taxi driver but he spent the greatest part of what he made
on drink along the way. As we lived among people who were all living as we were,
without sufficient clothing, or heat or food, we knew no contrast and believed
this was natural and general. But with me it was different. I suffered from
other kinds of pangs. I was prone to the most excessive dreaming, of such
intensity and realism that when I awakened I felt I lost an entire universe of
legends, myths, figures and cities of such color that they made our room seem a
thousand times more bare, the poverty of the table more acute. The
disproportion was immense. And I’m not speaking merely of the banquets which
were so obviously compensatory! Nor of the obvious way by which I filled my
poor wardrobe. It was more than that. I saw in my dreams houses, forests,
entire cities, and such a variety of personages that even today I wonder how a
child, who had not even seen pictures, could invent such designs in textures,
such colonnades, friezes, fabulous animals, statues, colors, as I did. And the
activity! My dreams were so full of activity that at times I felt it was the
dreams which exhausted me rather than all the washing, ironing, shopping,
mending, sweeping, tending, nursing, dusting that I did. I remember I had to
break soap boxes to burn in the fireplace. I used to scratch my hands and
bruise my toes. Yet when my mother caressed me and said, you look tired, Djuna , I almost felt like confessing to her that what had
tired me was my constant dreaming of a ship which insisted on sailing through a
city, or my voyage in a chaise through the snow-covered steppes of Russia. And
by the way, there was a lot of confusion of places and methods of travel in my
dreams, as there must be in the dreams of the blind. Do you know what I think
now? I think what tired me was the intensity of the pleasures I had together
with the perfect awareness that such pleasure could not last and would be
immediately followed by its opposite. Once out of my dreams, the only certitude
I retained from these nocturnal expeditions was that pleasure could not
possibly last. This conviction was strengthened by the fact that no matter how
small a pleasure I wanted to take during the day it was followed by
catastrophe. If I relaxed for one instant the watch over my sick mother to eat an orange all by myself in some abanoned lot, she would have a turn for the worse. Or if I spent some time looking at
the pictures outside of the movie house one of my brothers or sisters would cut
himself or burn his finger or get into a fight with another child. So I felt
then that liberty must be paid for heavily. I learned a most severe accounting
which was to consider pleasure as the jewel, a kind of stolen jewel for which
one must be willing to pay vast sums in suffering and guilt. Even today,
Lillian, when something very marvelous happens to me, when I