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

wall against which the bed lay was wildly
licked by the small river waves and they could hear the lap lap lap against the
mildewed flanks.
    In the darkness of the barge, with the wood
beams groaning, the rain falling in the room through the unrepaired roof, the
steps sounded louder and more ominous. The river seemed reckless and angry.
    Against the smoke and brume of their caresses,
these brusque changes of mood, when the barge ceased to be the cell of a
mysterious new life, an enchanted refuge; when it became the site of compressed
angers, like a load of dynamite boxes awaiting explosion.
    For Rango’s angers and battles with the world
turned to poison. The world was to blame for everything. The world was to blame
for Zora having been born very poor, of an insane mother, of a father who ran
away. The world was to blame for her undernourishment, her ill health, her
precocious marriage, her troubles. The doctors were to blame for her not
getting well. The public was to blame for not understanding her dances. The
house owner should have let them off without paying rent. The grocer had no
right to claim his due. They were poor and had a right to mercy.
    The noise of the chain tying and untying the
rowboat, the fury of the winter Seine, the suicides from the bridge, the old
watchman banging his pails together as he leaped over the gangplank and down
the stairs, the water seeping too fast into the hold of the barge not pumped,
the dampness gathering and painting shoes and clothes with mildew. Holes in the
floor, unrepaired, through which the water gleamed like the eyes of the river,
and through which the legs of the chairs kept falling like an animal’s leg
caught in a trap.
    Rango said: “My mother told me once: how can
you hope to play the piano, you have the hands of a savage.”
    “No,” said Djuna, “your hands are just like
you. Three of the fingers are strong and savage, but these last two, the
smallest, are sensitive and delicate. Your hand is just like you; the core is
tender within a dark and violent nature. When you trust, you are tender and
delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive.”
    “I always took the side of the rebel. Once I
was appointed chief of police in my home town, and sent with a posse to capture
a bandit who had been terrorizing the Indian villages. When I got there I made
friends with the bandit and we played cards and drank all night.”
    “What killed your faith in love, Rango? You
were never betrayed.”
    “I don’t accept your having loved anyone before
you knew me.”
    Djuna was silent, thinking that jealousy of the
past was unfounded, thinking that the deepest possessions and caresses were
stored away in the attics of the heart but had no power to revive and enter the
present lighted rooms. They lay wrapped in twilight and dust, and if an old
association caused an old sensation to revive it was but for an instant, like
an echo, intermittent and transitory. Life carries away, dims, and mutes the
most indelible experiences down the River Styx of vanished worlds. The body has
its cores and its peripheries and such a mysterious way of maintaining
intruders on the outer rim. A million cells protect the coreof a deep love from
ghostly invasions, from any recurrences of past loves.
    An intense, a vivid present was the best
exorcist of the past.
    So that whenever Rango began his inquisitorial
searchings into her memory, hoping to find an intruder, to battle Paul, Djuna
laughed: “But your jealousy is necrophilic! You’re opening tombs!”
    “But what a love you have for the dead! I’m
sure you visit them every day with flowers.”
    “Today I have not been to the cemetery, Rango!”
    “When you are here I know you are mine. But
when you go up those little stairs, out of the barge, walking in your quick
quick way, you enter another world, and you are no longer mine.”
    “But you, too, Rango, when you climb those
stairs, you enter another world, and you are no longer