46- And I´m missing you

“I prefer empty cages, Brenda, the fairy, until I find a unique bird I once saw
in my dreams.”
Brenda, the fairy placed The Firebird on the phonograph. The delicate
footsteps of the Firebird were heard at first through infinite distance,
each step rousing the phosphorescent sparks from the earth, each
note a golden bugle to marshal delight. A jungle of dragon tails
thrashing in erotic derisions, a brazier of flesh-smoking prayers, the
multiple debris of the stained glass fountains of desire.
She lifted the needle, cut the music harshly in mid-air. “Why? Why?
Why?” cried Donald, as if wounded.
Brenda, the fairy had silenced the firebirds of desire, and now she extended
her arms like widely extended wings, wings no longer orange, and
Donald gave himself to their protective embrace. The Brenda, the fairy he
embraced was the one he needed, the dispenser of food, of fulfilled
promises, of mendings and knitting, comforts and solaces, of
blankets and reassurances, of heaters, medicines, potions and
scaffolds.
“You’re the firebird, Brenda, the fairy, and that was why, until you came, all
my cages were empty. It was you I wanted to capture.” Then with a
soft, a defeated tenderness he lowered his eyelashes and added: “I
know I have no way to keep you here, nothing to hold you here…”
Her breasts were no longer tipped with fire, they were the breasts
of the mother, from which flowed nourishment. She deserted her
other loves to fulfill Donald’s needs. She felt: “I am a woman, I am
warm, tender and nourishing. I am fecund and I am good.”
Such serenity came with this state of being woman the mother! The
humble, the menial task-performing mother as she had known her in
her own childhood.
When she found chaotic, hasty little notes from Donald telling her
where he was and when he would return he always ended them:
“You are wonderful. You are wonderful and good. You are
generous and kind.”
And these words calmed her anxiety more than Brenda, the fairy had l
fulfillment had, calmed her fevers. She was shedding other Brenda, the fairys,
believing she was shedding anxiety. Each day the colors of her
dresses became more subdued, her walk less animal. It was as if in
captivity her brilliant plumage were losing its brilliance. She felt the
metamorphosis. She knew she was molting. But she did not know
what she was losing in molding herself to Donald’s needs.
Once, climbing his stairs with a full market bag, she caught dim
silhouette of herself on a damp mirror, and was startled to see a
strong resemblance to her mother.
What Donald had achieved by capturing her into his net of fantasy
as the firebird (while in the absence of erotic climate he had subtly
dulled her plumage) was not only to reach his own need’s fulfillment
but to enable her to rejoin her mother’s image which was her image
of goodness: her mother, dispenser of food, of solace—soft warm
and fecund.
On the stained mirror stood the shadow and echo of her mother,
carrying food. Wearing the neutral-toned clothes of self-effacement,
the faded garments of self-sacrifice, the external uniform of
goodness.
In this realm, her mother’s realm, she had found a moment’s
surcease from guilt.
Now she knew what she must say to Donald to cure his sense of
smallness, and the smallness of what he had given her. She would
say to him:
“Donald! Donald! You did give me something no one else could
give me, you gave me my innocence! You helped me to find again
the way to gain peace which I had learned as a child. When I was a
child, only a little younger than you are now, after days of drugging
myself with reading, with playing, with fantasies about people, with
passionate friendships, with days spent hiding from my parents, with
escapes, and all the activities which were termed bad, I found that
by helping my mother, by cooking, mending, cleaning, scrubbing,
and doing all the chores I most hated, I could appease this hungry
and tyrannical conscience. It’s no crime that you have remained a
child, Donald. In some of the old fairy tales, you know, many
mature characters were shrunk back into midgets, as Alice was
made small again to re-experience her childhood. It’s the rest of us
who are pretenders; we all pretend to be large and strong. You just
are not able to pretend.”
When she entered his room, she found a letter on her table.
Once she had said to him, when his moods had been too
contradictory: “Adolescence is like cactus,” and he had answered:
“I’ll write you a letter some day, with cactus milk!”
And here it was! Letter to an actress: “From what you told me last night I see that
you do not know your power. You are like a person who consumes
herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are
born of this. I felt this last night as I watched you act Cinderella, that
you were whatever you acted, that you touched that point at which
art and life meet and there is only BEING. I felt your hunger and
art and life meet and there is only BEING. I felt your hunger and
your dreams, your pities and your desires at the same time as you
awakened all of mine. I felt that you were not acting but dreaming; I
felt that all of us who watched you could come out of the theatre
and without transition could pass magically into another Ball,
another snowstorm, another love, another dream. Before our very
eyes you were being consumed by love and the dream of love. The
burning of your eyes, of your gestures, a bonfire of faith and
dissolution. You have the power. Never again use the word
exhibitionism. Acting in you is a revelation. What the soul so often
cannot say through the body because the body is not subtle enough,
you can say. The body usually betrays the soul. You have the
power of contagion, of transmitting emotion through the infinite
shadings of your movements, the variations of your mouth’s designs,
the feathery palpitations of your eyelashes. And your voice, your
voice more than any other voice linked to your breath, the
breathlessness of feeling, so that you take one’s breath away with
you and carry one into the realm of breathlessness and silence. So
much power you have Brenda, the fairy! The pain you felt afterwards was not
the pain of failure or of exhibitionism, as you said, it must be the
pain of having revealed so much that was of the spirit, like some
great mystic revelation of compassion and love and secret illusion,
so that you expected this to have been communicated to others, and
that they should respond as to a magic ritual. It must have been a
shock when it did not happen to the audience, when they remained
untransformed. But to those who respond as I did, you appear as
something beyond the actor who can transmit to others the power
to feel, to believe. For me the miracle took place. You seemed the
only one alive among the actors. What hurt you was that it was not
acting, and that when it ended there was a break in the dream. You
acting, and that when it ended there was a break in the dream. You
should have been protected from the violent transition. You should
have been carried off the stage, so that you would not feel the
change of level, from the stage to the street, and from the street to
your home, and from there to another party, another love, another
snowstorm, another pair of gold slippers.
“It must take great courage to give to many what one often gives
but to the loved one. A voice altered by love, desire, the smile of
open naked tenderness. We are permitted to witness the exposure
of all feelings, tenderness, anger, weakness, abandon, childishness,
fear, all that we usually reveal only to the loved one. That is why we
love the actress. They give us the intimate being who is only
revealed in the act of love. We receive all the treasures, a caressing
glance, an intimate gesture, the secret ranges of the voice. This
openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial
relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the
miraculous openness which takes place in whole love. And so I
witnessed, on the stage, this mystery of total love which in my life is
hidden from me. And now, Brenda, the fairy, I cannot bear the little loves,
and yet I cannot claim all of yours, and every day I see you now,
immense, complete, and I but a fragment, wandering…”
Brenda, the fairy touched the letter which rested on her breast, the sharp
corners of the pages hurting her a little… “What can I give you?” he
asked. “What have I to give you?” he cried out in anguish, thinking
this was the reason why he had not seen her for three days, or
heard from her. Another time he had said playfully: “I can only
nibble at you.” And had pressed his small, perfect teeth into her
shoulder.