The Four-Chambered Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

buy the cigarettes he craved, but later
when about to reach the house of a friend for lunch he would make a long detour
for cigarettes and arrive too late for lunch, to find his angry friend gone,
and thus once more the rhythm and pattern of the city were destroyed, the order
broken, and Rango with it, Rango left without lunch.
    He might try to reach the friend by going to the
cafe, would find someone else and fall into talk about bookbinding and
meanwhile another friend was waiting for Rango at the Guatemalan Embassy,
waiting for his help, his introduction, and Rango never appeared, while Zora
waited for him at the hospital, and Djuna waited for him in the barge, while
the dinner she had made spoiled on the fire.
    At this moment Rango was standing looking at a
print on the bookstalls, or throwing dice over a cafe counter to gamble for a
drink, and now that the city’s pattern had been destroyed, lay in shambles, he
returned and said to Djuna: “I am tired.” And laid a despondent, a heavy head
on her breasts, his heavy body on her bed, and all his unfulfilled desires, his
aborted moments, lay downwith him like stones in his pockets, weighing him
down, so that the bed creaked with the inertia of his words: “I wanted to do
this, I wanted to do that, I want to change the world, I want to go and fight,
I want…”
    But it is night already, the day has fallen
apart, disintegrated in his hands. Rango is tired, he will take another drink
from the little barrel, eat a banana, and start to talk about his childhood,
about the bread tree, the tree of the meadows that kill, the death of the
little Negro boy his father had given him for his birthday, a little Negro boy
who had been born the same day as Rango, but in the jungle, and who would be
his companion on hunting trips, but who died almost immediately from the cold
up in the mountains.
    Thus at twilight when Rango had destroyed all
order of the city because the city destroyed his body, and the day lay like a
cemetery of negations, of rebellions and abortions, lay like a giant network in
which he had tangled himself as a child tangles himself in an order he cannot
understand, and is in danger of strangling himself…then Djuna, fearing he might
suffocate, or be crushed, would tenderly seek to unwind him, just as she picked
up the pieces of his broken glasses to have them made again…

    They had reached a perfect moment of human
love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This
highest moment would now remain as a point of comparison to torment them later
on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it.
    The dislocations were at first subtle and held
no warning of future destruction. At first the vision was clear, like a perfect
crystal. Each act, each word would be imprinted on it to shed light and warmth
on the growing roots of love, or to distort it slowly and corrode its
expansion.
    Rango lighting the lantern for her arrival, for
her to see the red light from afar, to be reassured, incited to walk faster,
elated by this symbol of his presence and his fervor. His preparing the fire to
warm her… These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the
effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite
habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every
commitment, every promise, every crystallization.
    The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the
loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the
magic power of meeting exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of
one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking
other bonds—all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of
missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a
state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions,
broken promises, and aborted wishes.
    The importance of rhythm in Djuna was so