Free The Four-Chambered Heart by Anaïs Nin Page B

had brought her some liver concentrate in
glass containers. Zora looked at them and said: “They are not good. They’re too
dark. I’m sure they’re not fresh and they will poison me.”
    “But Zora, the date is printed on the box, the
drugstore can’t sell them when they’re old.”
    “They’re very old, I can see it. Rango, I want
you to get me some others at La Muette drugstore.”
    La Muette was one hour away. Rango left on his
errand and Djuna took the medicine away.
    When they met in the evening Rango said: “Give
me the liver medicine. I’ll take it back to the drugstore.”
    They walked to the drugstore together. The
druggist was incensed and pointed to the recent date on the box.
    What amazed Djuna was not that Zora should give
way to a sick woman’s whims, but that Rango should be so utterly convinced of
their rationality.
    The druggist would not take it back.
    Rango was angry and tumultuous, but Djuna was
rebelling against Rango’s blindness and when they returned to the houseboat she
opened one of the containers and before Rango’s eyes she swallowed it.

“What are you doing?” asked Rango with
amazement. “Showing you that the medicine is fresh.”
    “You believe the druggist and not Zora?” he
said angrily.
    “And you believe in a sick person’s whim,” she
said.

    Zora was always talking about her future death.
She began all her conversations with: “When I die…” Rango was maintained in a
state of panic, fearing her death, and lived each day accordingly: “Zora is in
grave danger of death,” he would say, to excuse her demands upon his time.
    At first Djuna was alarmed by Zora’s behavior,
and shared Rango’s anxieties. Her gestures were so vehement, so magnified, that
Djuna believed they might be those of a dying woman. But as these gestures
repeated themselves day after day, week after week, month after month, year
after year, Djuna lost her fear of Zora’s death.
    When Zora said: “I have a burning sensation in
my stomach,” she made the gestures of a person writhing in a brasier of flames.
    At the hospital, where Djuna sometimes
accompanied her, the nurses and doctors no longer listened to her. Djuna caught
glances of irony in the doctor’s eyes.
    Zora’s gestures to describe her troubles became
for Djuna a special theatre of exaggeration, which at first caused terror, and
then numbed the senses.
    It was like the Grand Guignol , where knowing every scene was overacted to create
horror finally created detachment and laughter.
    But what helped Djuna to overcome her terror
was something else which happened that winter: there was an epidemic of throat
infection which swept Paris and which Djuna caught.
    It was painful but came without fever, and
there was no need to stay in bed.
    That same day Rango rushed to the barge,
distressed and vehement. He could not stay with Djuna because Zora was terribly
ill. “You might come back with me, if you wish. Zora has a heart attack, an
inflamed throat, and she’s suffocating.”
    When they arrived, the doctor was there
examining Zora’s throat. Zora lay back pale and rigid, as if her last hour had
come. Her gestures, her hands upon her throat, her strained face were a
representation of strangulation.
    The doctor straightened up and said: “Just the
same throat infection everybody has just now. You don’t have to stay in bed.
Just keep warm, and eat soups only.”
    And Djuna, with the same throat trouble, was
out with Rango.
    The first year Djuna had suffered from Rango’s
panic. The second year from pity; the third year detachment and wisdom came.
But Rango’s anxiety never diminished.
    Djuna awakened one morning and asked herself:
“Do I love this woman who magnifies her illness a thousand times, unconcerned
with curing it, but savoring its effect on others? Why does Zora contort
herself in a more than life-size pain for all the world to see and hear?”
    Many times Djuna had been baffled by the fact
that when someone said to