The Four-Chambered Heart Read Free Page B

Rango.
    “If you’re not quiet,” said the policeman,
“I’ll come back and fetch you and throw you in jail.”
    “ Je ferais le mort ,”said the old man.
“You’ll never know I’m here.”
    He was now thoroughly bewildered and docile.
“But no one has a right to knock a door down. What manners, I tell you! I’ve
knocked men down often enough, but never knocked a door down. No privacy left. No
manners.”
    When Rango returned to the bedroom, he found
Djuna still laughing. He opened his arms. She hid her face against his coat and
said: “You know, I love the way you broke that door.” She felt relieved of some
secret accumulation of violence, as one does watching a storm of nature,
thunder and lightning discharging anger for us.
    “I loved your breaking down that door,”
repeated Djuna.
    Through Rango she had breathed some other realm
she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of
violence she had never known before.

    The Seine River began to swell from the rains
and to rise high above the watermark painted on the stones in the Middle Ages.
It covered the quays at first with a thin layer of water, and the hobos quartered
under the bridge had to move to their country homes under the trees. Then it
lapped the foot of the stairway, ascended one step, and then another, and at
last settled at the eighth, deep enough to drown a man.
    The barges stationed there rose with it; the
barge dwellers had to lower their rowboats and row to shore, climb up a rope
ladder to the wall, climb over the wall to the firm ground. Strollers loved to
watch this ritual, like a gentle invasion of the city by the barges’
population.
    At night the ceremony was perilous, and rowing
back and forth from the barges was not without difficulties. As the river
swelled, the currents became violent. The smiling Seine showed a more ominous
aspect of its character.
    The rope ladder was ancient, and some of its
solidity undermined by time.
    Rango’s chivalrous behavior was suited to the
circumstances; he helped Djuna climb over the wall without showing too much of
the scalloped sea-shell edge of her petticoat to the curious bystanders; he
then carried her into the rowboat, and rowed with vigor. He stood up at first
and with a pole pushed the boat away from the shore, as it had a tendency to be
pushed by the current against the stairway, then another current would absorb
it in the opposite direction, and he had to fight to avoid sailing down the
Seine.
    His pants rolled up, his strong dark legs bare,
his hair wild in the wind, his muscular arms taut, he smiled with enjoyment of
his power, and Djuna lay back and allowed herself to be rescued each time anew,
or to be rowed like a great lady of Venice.
    Rango would not let the watchman row them
across. He wanted to be the one to row his lady to the barge. He wanted to
master the tumultuous current for her, to land her safely in their home, to
feel that he abducted her from the land, from the city of Paris, to shelter and
conceal her in his own tower of love.
    At the hour of midnight, when others are
dreaming of firesides and bedroom slippers, of finding a taxi to reach home
from the theatre, or pursuing false gaieties in the bars, Rango and Djuna lived
an epic rescue, a battle with an angry river, a journey into difficulties, wet
feet, wet clothes, an adventure in which the love, the test of the love, and
the reward telescoped into one moment of wholeness. For Djuna felt that if
Rango fell and were drowned she would die also, and Rango felt that if Djuna
fell into the icy river he would die to save her. In this instant of danger
they realized they were each other’s reason for living, and into this instant
they threw their whole beings.
    Rango rowed as if they were lost at sea,ot in
the heart of a city; and Djuna sat and watched him with admiration, as if this
were a medieval tournament and his mastering of the Seine a supreme votive
offering to her feminine power.
    Out