Free The Four-Chambered Heart by Anaïs Nin Page A

directing their time together, dictating the hours of separation.
    Rango had placed Zora under Djuna’s protection
and her love for Rango had to extend in magnitude to include Zora.

    Zora talked to Djuna. If it was Djuna who had
planned to come to Zora and show the most exemplary devotion, she found herself
merely passive before the friendliness of Zora.
    It was Zora who talked, with her eyes upon her
sewing and unsewing. “Rango is a changed man, and I’m so happy, Djuna. He is
kinder to me. He was very unhappy before and he took it out on me. A man cannot
live without love and Rango was not easy to satisfy. All the women wanted him,
but he would see them once perhaps and come back dejected, and refuse to see
them again. He always found something wrong with them. With you he is content.
And I am happy because I knew this had to happen sometime, but I’m happy it’s
you because I trust you. I used to fear some woman coming and taking him where
I would never see him again. And I know you wouldn’t do that.”
    Djuna thought: “I love Rango so much that I want
to share his burdens, love and serve what he loves and serves, share his
conviction that Zora is an innocent victim of life, worthy of all sacrifices.”
    This was for both Rango and Djuna the atonement
for the marvelous hours in the barge. All great flights away from life land one
in such places of atonement as this room, with Zora sewing rags and talking
about dandruff, about ovarian insufficiency, about gastritis, about thyroid and
neuritis.
    Djuna had brought her a colorful Indian-print
dress and Zora had dyed it black. And now she was reshaping it and it looked
worn and dismal already. She wore a shawl pinned with a brooch which had once
held stones in its clasps and was now empty, thrusting bare silver branches out
like the very symbol of denudation. She wore two overcoats sewn together, the
inner one showing at the edges.
    While they sat sewing together, Zora lamented
over Rango: “Why must he always live with so many people around him?”
    Knowing that Rango liked to spend hours and
hours alone with her, Djuna feared to say: “Perhaps he is just seeking warmth
and forgetfulness, running away from illness and darkness.”
    When Rango was with her he seemed dominating,
full of dignity and pride. When he entered Zora’s room he seemed to shrink.
When he first entered there was a copper glow in his face; after a moment the
glow vanished.
    “Why do men live in shoals?” persisted Zora.
    Djuna looked at Rango lighting the fire,
warming water, starting to cook. There was something so discouraged in the pose
of his body, expressing agreement with Zora’s enumeration of his faults, so
diminished, which Djuna could not bear to witness.

    Zora was in the hospital.
    Djuna was cooking for Rango now, edges.
    As Djuna passed through the various rooms to
find Zora she saw a woman sitting up in bed combing her hair and tying a blue
ribbon around it. Her face was utterly wasted, and yet she had powdered it, and
rouged her lips, and there was on it not only the smile of a woman dying but
also the smile of a woman who wanted to die with grace, deploying her last
flare of feminine coquetry for her interview with death.
    Djuna was moved by this courage, the courage to
meet death with one’s hair combed, and this gentle smile issuing from centuries
of conviction that a woman must be pleasing to all eyes, even to the eyes of
death.
    When she reached Zora’s bed she was faced with
the very opposite, an utter absence of courage, although Zora was less ill than
the other woman.
    “The soup is not thin enough,” said Zora. “It
should have been strained longer.” And she laid it aside and shook her head
while Djuna and Rango pleaded that she should eat it anyway for the sake of
gaining strength.
    Her refusal to eat caused Rango anxiety, and
Zora watched this anxiety on his face and savored it.
    He had brought her a special bread, but it was
not the one she wanted.
    Djuna