Children of the Albatross Read Free Page A

that one was doomed to become a victim of one’s pattern.
    It was only much later that Djuna discovered
that this belief in the great power of others became the fate itself and caused
the defeats.
    But for years, she felt harmed and defeated at
the hands of men of power, and she expected the boy, the gentle one, the
trusted one, to come and deliver her from tyranny.
    Ever since the day of Lillian’s concert when
she had seen the garden out of the window, Djuna had wanted a garden like it.
    And now she possessed a garden and a very old
house on the very edge of Paris, between the city and the Park.
    But it was not enough to possess it, to walk
through it, sit in it. One still had to be able to live in it.
    And she found she could not live in it.
    The inner fever, the restlessness within her
corroded her life in the garden.
    When she was sitting in a long easy chair she
was not at ease.
    The grass seemed too much like a rug awaiting
footsteps, to be trampled with hasty incidents. The rhythm of growth too slow,
the falling of the leaves too tranquil.
    Happiness was an absence of fever. The garden
was feverless and without tension to match her tensions. She could not unite or
commune with the plants, the languor, the peace. It was all contrary to her
inward pulse. Not one pulsation of the garden corresponded to her inner
pulsation which was more like a drum beating feverish time.
    Within her the leaves did not wait for autumn,
but were torn off prematurely by unexpected sorrows. Within her, leaves did not
wait for spring to sprout but bloomed in sudden hothouse exaggerations. Within
her there were storms contrary to the lazy moods of the garden, devastations
for which nature had no equivalent.
    Peace, said the garden, peace.
    The day began always with the sound of gravel
crushed by automobiles.
    The shutters werepushed open by the French
servant, and the day admitted.
    With the first crushing of the gravel under
wheels came the barking of the police dog and the carillon of the church bells.
    Cars entered through an enormous green iron
gate, which had to be opened ceremoniously by the servant.
    Everyone else walked through the small green
gate that seemed like the child of the other, half covered with ivy. The ivy
did not climb over the father gate.
    When Djuna looked at the large gate through her
window it took on the air of a prison gate. An unjust feeling, since she knew
she could leave the place whenever she wanted, and since she knew morethan
anyone that human beings placed upon an object, or a person this responsibility
of being the obstacle, when the obstacle lay within one’s self.
    In spite of this knowledge, she would often
stand at the window staring at the large closed iron gate as if hoping to
obtain from this contemplation a reflection of herinner obstacles to a full
open life.
    She mocked its importance; the big gate had a
presumptuous creak! Its rusty voice was full of dissonant affectations. No
amount of oil could subdue its rheumatism, forit took a historical pride in its
own rust: it was a hundred years old.
    But the little gate, with its overhanging ivy
like disordered hair over a running child’s forehead, had a sleepy and sly air,
an air of always being half open, never entirely locked.
    Djuna had chosen the house for many reasons,
because it seemed to have sprouted out of the earth like a tree, so deeply
grooved it was within the old garden. It had no cellar and the rooms rested
right on the ground. Below the rugs, she felt, was the earth. One could take
root here, feel as one with the house and garden, take nourishment from them
like the plants.
    She had chosen it too because its symmetrical
facade covered by a trellis overrun by ivy showed twelve window faces. But one
shutter was closed and corresponded to no room. During some transformation of
the house it had been walled up.
    Djuna had taken the house because of this
window which led to no room, because of this impenetrable room, thinking that
someday