The Four-Chambered Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

past.
    But music pursues one with some familiar air
and no longer does the heart beat in an anonymous forest of heartbeats, no longer
is it a temple, a market, a street like a stage set, but now it is the scene of
a human crisis reenacted inexorably in all its details, as if the music had
been the score of the drama itself and not its accompaniment.
    The last scene between Rango and Djuna might
have faded into sleep, and she might have forgotten his refusal to let her cut
his hair once more, but now the organ grinder on the quay turned his handle
mischievously, and aroused in her the evocation of another scene. She would not
have been as disturbed by Rango’s evasiveness, or his defense of Zora’s rights
to the cutting of his hair, if it had not added itself to other scenes which
the organ grinder had attended with similar tunes, and which he was now
recreating for her, other scenes where she had not obtained her desire, had not
been answered.
    The organ grinder playing Carmen took her back
inexorably like an evil magician to the day of her childhood when she had asked
for an Easter egg as large as herself, and her father had said impatiently:
“What a silly wish!” Or to another time when she had asked him to let her kiss
his eyelids, and he had mocked her, or still another time when she had wept at
his leaving on a trip and he had said: “I don’t understand your giving this
such importance.”
    Now Rango was saying the same thing: “I don’t
understand why you should be sad at not being able to cut my hair any longer.”
    Why could he not have opened his big arms to
her, sheltered her for an instant and said: “It cannot be, that right belongs
to Zora, but I do understand how you feel, I do understand you are frustrated
in your wish to care for me as a wife…”
    She wanted to say: “Oh, Rango, beware. Love
never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish
its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses
and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of
natural death. Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own
love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it,
to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: ‘I
don’t understand.’”
    It was never one scene which took place between
human beings, but many scenes converging like great intersections of rivers.
Rango believed this scene contained nothing but a whim of Djuna’s to be denied.
    He failed to see that it contained at once all
of Djuna’s wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all
directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for
understanding.
    All the time that the organ grinder was
unwinding the songs Carmen in the orchestra pit of this scene, what was
conjured was not this room in a barge, and these two people, but a series of
rooms and a procession of people, accumulating to reach immense proportions,
accumulating analogies and repetitions of small defeats until it contained them
all, and the continuity of the organ grinder’s accompaniment welded, compressed
them all into a large injustice. Music expanding the compressed heart created a
tidal wave of injustice for which no Noah’s Ark had ever been provided.

    The fire sparkled high; their eyes reflected
all its dances joyously.
    Djuna looked at Rango with a premonition of
difficulties, for it so often happened that their gaiety wakened in him a
sudden impulse to destroy their pleasure together. Their joys together never a
luminous island in the present but stimulating his remembrance that she had
been alive before, that her knowledge of caresses had been taught to her by
others, that on other nights, in other rooms, she had smiled. At every peak of
contentment she would tremble slightly and wonder when they would begin to
slide into torment.
    This evening the danger came unsuspected as
they