The Four-Chambered Heart by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online

sadness, could produce all
the symptoms of rebirth…
    He was like nature, good, wild, and sometimes
cruel. He had all the moods of nature: beauty, timidity, violence, and
tenderness.
    Nature was chaos.
    “Way up into the mountains,” Rango would begin
again, as if he were continuing to tell her stories of the past which he loved,
never of the past of which he was ashamed, “on a mountain twice as high as Mont
Blanc, there is a small lake inside of a bower of black volcanic rocks polished
like black marble, in the middle of eternal snow peaks. The Indians went up to
visit it, to see the mirages. What I saw in the lake was a tropical scene,
richly tropical, palms and fruits and flowers. You are that to me, an oasis.
You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.”
    (The drug of love was no escape, for in its
coils lie latent dreams of greatness which awaken when men and women fecundate
each oter deeply. Something is always born of man and woman lying together and
exchanging the essences of their lives. Some seed is always carried and opened
in the soil of passion. The fumes of desire are the womb of man’s birth and
often in the drunkenness of caresses history is made, and science, and
philosophy. For a woman, as she sews, cooks, embraces, covers, warms, also
dreams that the man taking her will be more than a man, will be the
mythological figure of her dreams, the hero, the discoverer, the builder…
Unless she is the anonymous whore, no man enters woman with impunity, for where
the seed of man and woman mingle, within the drops of blood exchanged, the
changes that take place are the same as those of great flowing rivers of
inheritance, which carry traits of character from father to son to grandson,
traits of character as well as physical traits. Memories of experience are
transmitted by the same cells which repeated the design of a nose, a hand, the
tone of a voice, the color of an eye. These great flowing rivers of inheritance
transmitted traits and carried dreams from port to port until fulfillment, and
gave birth to selves never born before… No man or woman knows what will be born
in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many
invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown
selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies…)
    There was this difference between them: that
when these thoughts floated up to the surface of Djuna’s consciousness, she
could not communicate them to Rango. He laughed at her. “Mystic nonsense,” he
said.
    As Rango chopped wood, lighted the fire,
fetched water from the fountain one day with energy and ebullience, smiling a
smile of absolute faith and pleasure, then Djuna felt: wonderful things will be
born.
    But the next day he sat in the cafe and laughed
like a rogue, and when Djuna passed she was confronted with another Rango, a
Rango who stood at the bar with the bravado of the drunk, laughing with his
head thrown back and his eyes closed, forgetting her, forgetting Zora, forgetting
politics and history, forgetting rent, marketing, obligations, appointments,
friends, doctors, medicines, pleasures, the city, his past, his future, his
present self, in a temporary amnesia, which left him the next day depressed,
inert, poisoned with his own angers at himself, angry with the world, angry
with the sky, the barge, the books, angry with everything.
    And the third day another Rango, turbulent,
erratic, dark, like Heathcliff, said Djuna, destroying everything. That was the
day that followed the bouts of drinking: a quarrel with Zora, a fight with the
watchman. Sometimes he came back with his face hurt by a brawl at the cafe. His
hands shook. His eyes glazed, with a yellow tinge. Djuna would turn her face
away from his breath, but his warm, his deep voice would bring her face back
saying: “I’m in trouble, bad trouble…”

    On windy nights the shutters beat against the
walls like the bony wings of a giant albatross.
    The