Free The Four-Chambered Heart by Anaïs Nin

together to occupy a small space. It
was the arch of fear.
    Even before her illness, Djuna felt, she could
never have been handsome but had a strength of character which must have been
arresting. Yet her hands were childish and clasped things without firmness. And
in the mouth there was the same lack of control. Her voice, too, was childish.
    The studio was now half in darkness, and the
oil lamp which Rango brought cast long shadows.
    The mist of dampness in the room seemed like
the breath of the buried, making the walls weep, detaching the wallpaper in
long wilted strips. The sweat of centuries of melancholic living, the dampness
of roots and cemeteries, the moisture of agony and death seeping through the
walls seemed appropriate to Zora’s skin from which all glow and life had
withdrawn.
    Djuna was moved by Zora’s smile and plaintive
voice. Zora was saying: “The other day I went to church and prayed desperately
that someone should save us, and now you are here. Rango is always bewildered,
and does nothing.” Then she turned tango: “Bring me my sewing box.”
    Rango brought her a tin cracker box which
contained needles, threads, and buttons in boxes labeled with medicine names:
injections, drops, pills.
    The material Zora took up to sew looked like a
rag. Her small hands smoothed it down mechanically, yet the more she smoothed
it down the more it wilted in her hands, as if her touch were too anxious, too
compressing, as if she transmitted to objects some obnoxious withering breath
from her sick flesh.
    And when she began to sew she sewed with small
stitches, closely overlapping, so closely that it was as if she were strangling
the last breath of color and life in the rag, as if she were sewing it to the
point of suffocation.
    As they talked she completed the square she had
already begun, and then Djuna watched her rip apart her labor and quietly begin
again.
    “Djuna, I don’t know if Rango told you, but
Rango and I are like brother and sister. Our physical life…was over years ago.
It was never very important. I knew that sooner or later he would love another
woman, and I am glad it’s you because you’re kind, and you will not take him
away from me. I need him.”
    “I hope we can be…kind to each other, Zora.
It’s a difficult situation.”
    “Rango told me that you never tried, or even
mentioned, his leaving me. How could I not like you? You saved my life. When
you came I was about to die for lack of care and food. I don’t love Rango as a
man. To me he is a child. He has done me so much harm. He just likes to drink,
and talk, and be with friends. If you love him, I am glad, because of the kind
of woman you are, because you are full of quality.”
    “You’re very generous, Zora.”
    Zora leaned over to whisper now: “Rango is mad,
you know. He may not seem so to you because he is leaning on you. But if it
were not for you I would be out in the street, homeless. We’ve often been
homeless, and I’d be sitting on my valises, out on the sidewalk, and Rango just
waving his arms and helpless, never knowing what to do. He lets everything
terrible happen, and then he says: ‘It’s destiny.’ With his cigarette he set
fire to our apartment. He was nearly burnt to death.”
    There was a book lying at the foot of her bed,
and Djuna opened it while Zora was carefully unstitching all she had sewed
before.
    “It’s a book about illness,” said Zora. “I love
to read about illness. I go to the library and look up descriptions of the symptoms
I have. I’ve marked all the pages which apply to me. Just look at all these
markings. Sometimes I think I have all the sicknesses one can have!” She
laughed. Then looking at Djuna plaintively, almost pleadingly, she said: “All
my hair is falling out.”
    When Djuna left that evening, Rango and she
were no longer man and woman in a chamber of isolated love for each other. They
were suddenly a trinity, with Zora’s inexorable needs conducting all their
movements,