39- Fanatical about movies

Any devastating words addressed to the Brenda, the fairy he had possessed,
the primitive one, could not reach her then; she was already halfway
out of the forest of their desire, the core already far away,
invulnerable, protected by flight. What remained was a costume: it
was piled on the floor of his room, and empty of her.
Once in an ancient city in South America, Brenda, the fairy had seen streets
which had been ravaged by an earthquake. Nothing was left but
facades, as in Chirico paintings; the facades of granite had remained
with doors and windows half unhinged, opening unexpectedly, not
upon a household nestled around a hearth, but whole families
camping under the sky, protected from strangers only by one wall
and door, but otherwise completely free of walls or roofs from the
other three sides.
She realized that it was this illimitable space she had expected to
find in every lover’s room, the sea, the mountains visible all around,
the world shut off on one side. A hearth without roof or walls,
growing between trees, a floor through which wild flowers pushed
to show smiling faces, a column housing stray birds, temples and
pyramids and baroque churches in the distance.
But when she saw four walls and a bed pushed against the corner
as if it had been flying and had collided against an obstacle, she did
as if it had been flying and had collided against an obstacle, she did
not feel as other voyagers: “I have arrived at my destination and can
now remove my traveling costume,” but: “I have been captured and
from here, sooner or later, I must escape.”
No place, no human being could bear to be gazed at with the
critical eye of the absolute, as if they were obstacles to the reaching
of a place or person of greater value created by the imagination.
This was the blight she inflicted upon each room when she asked
herself: “Am I to live here forever?” This was the blight, the
application of the irrevocable, the endless fixation upon a place or
relationship. It aged it prematurely, it accelerated the process of
decay by staleness. A chemical death ray, this concentrate of time,
inflicting the fear of stasis like a consuming ray, deteriorating at the
high speed of a hundred years per minute.
At this moment she was aware of her evil, of an invisible crime
equal to murder in life. It was her secret sickness, one she believed
incurable, unnamable.
Having touched the source of death, she turned back to her source
of life; it was only in Stravinsky’s The Firebird that Brenda, the fairy found
her unerring musical autobiography. It was only here she could find
the lost Brenda, the fairy, her self-revelation.
Even when the first sensual footsteps of the orange bird first
appeared, phosphorescent tracks along magnolia forests, she
recognized her first sensations, the adolescent stalking of emotion,
of its shadow first of all, the echo of its dazzling presence, not yet
daring to enter the circle of frenzy.
She recognized the first prologue waltzes, the paintings on glass
which might shatter at the touch of warm hands, the moon’s haloes
around featureless heads, the preparations for festivities and the
wild drums announcing feasts of the hearts and senses. She
recognized the crimson suspenses, the elevations which heightened
the pulse, the wind which thrust its hieroglyphs through the swan
necks of the trombones.
The fireworks were mounted on wire bodies waving amorous arms,
tiptoeing on the purple tongues of the Holy Ghost, leaping out of
captivity, Mercury’s wings of orange on pointed torches hurled like
javelins into space sparring through the clouds, the purple vulvas of
the night.
On many of the evenings Brenda, the fairy spent with Mambo they did not go
anywhere.
On evenings when Brenda, the fairy had agreed to return to Jhon at midnight,
her going out with a friend would not have been fatal or too difficult
to explain; but there were evenings (when she wanted to spend a
few whole nights with her lover) when she had been obliged to say
she was traveling, and then when Mambo suggested: “Let’s go to a
movie,” the conflict was started. She did not like to answer: “I don’t
want Jhon to see me.” This made her feel like a child being
watched, or a woman in a state of subjection, so much did her
feelings about Jhon seem not like those of a woman wanting to be
faithful or loyal but those of an adolescent escaping home for some
forbidden games. She could only see Jhon as a kind father who
might become angry at her lies and punish her. She would also, if
she mentioned Jhon’s rights, be forced to confess to Mambo the
division in her affections. At times her lies seemed to her like the
most intricate act of protectiveness instead of the greatest treachery.
Other days she felt tempted to confess, but would be blocked by
the knowledge that even if she were forgiven, Jhon would expect
then a change of life, and this she knew she was powerless to
achieve.
At mention of the movies she would assent, but as if it were a game
of chance she were playing, each time that Mambo suggested one
movie, or another, or still another, she weighed them not so much
for their qualities as movies, but according to what quarter of the
city they were shown at, whether or not it was a movie Jhon might
care to see, whether it was near at hand (knowing Jhon was lazy
about going uptown). If she were with Jhon she would have to try
and remember the movies Mambo had seen, or the ones he wanted
to see, and knowing how fanatical he was about movies, to gauge
even those he might see twice.
Ultimately, like a gambler, she had to question her instinct.
Once seated at the movies her anxiety increased. Jhon might have
liked this movie enough to want to see it again, or a friend might
have persuaded him to make the eft to go uptown. Could Mambo
be sitting in the audience while she sat with Jhon, could he have
seen her walking down the aisle?
Sometimes she discarded her anxiety as nervousness. At other
times she was compelled to go to the ladies’ room at the very
beginning in order to be able to walk slowly and carefully down the
aisle examining the crowd from behind before settling down beside
Mambo or Jhon. This would relieve her anxiety for awhile, until
some fragment of the movie story itself would reawaken it, if a lie
were pictured, a false situation, exposure. Above all if it were a spy
story.
It was when she saw the lives of spies that she realized fully the
tension with which she lived every moment, equal to theirs. The fear
of committing themselves, of sleeping too soundly, of talking in their
sleep, of carelessness of accent or behavior, the need for
continuous pretending, quick improvisations of motivations, quick
justifications of their presence here or there.
It seemed to Brenda, the fairy that she could have offered her services or
been of great value in that profession.
I am an international spy in the house of love.
When the anxiety became absolutely intolerable it was transmuted
into playfulness. The excitement and risks appeared as a highly
flavored, highly humorous game. Then she shifted her position
entirely to that of a child escaping surveillance and being amused by
her own ingenuity. Then she passed from secrecy to a need of
boasting openly of her maneuvers and would describe them with
such gaiety that it would shock her hearers. Both anxiety and humor
became interchangeable. The pretenses, escapades, trickeries
seemed to her in her humorous moods like gay and gallant efforts at
protecting everyone from the cruelties of existence for which she
was not responsible. Wits and good acting were employed for such
justifiable ends:
to protect human beings from unbearable truths.