She had wanted such nebulous landscapes, such vertiginous spirals without explosions: the drug.

Listening to the symphony flowing and yet not flowing (for there was a static groove in which it remained imprisoned, so similar to the walled-in room of her house, containing a mystery of stillness), Djuna saw the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the arrow of stone placed at the center of a gracefully turbulent square, summating gardens, fountains and rivers of automobiles. One pointed dart of stone to pierce the night, the fog, the rain, the sun, aiming faultlessly into the clouds.

And there was the small, crazy woman Matilda, whom everyone knew, who came every morning and sat on one of the benches near the river, and stayed there all day, watching the passers-by, eating sparingly and lightly of some mysterious food in crumbs out of a paper bag, like the pigeons. So familiar to the policeman, to the tourists, and to the permanent inhabitants of the Place de la Concorde, that not to see her there would have been as noticeable, as disturbing, as to find the Obelisk gone, and the square left without its searchlight into the sky.

Matilda was known for her obstinacy in sitting there through winter and summer, her indifference to climate, her vague answers to those who sought her reasons for being there, her tireless watchfulness, as if she were keeping a rendezvous with eternity.

Only at sundown did she leave, sometimes gently incited by the policeman.

Since there was not total deterioration in her clothes, or in her health, everyone surmised she must have a home and no one was ever concerned about her.

Djuna had once sat beside her and Matilda at first would not speak, but addressed herself to the pigeons and to the falling autumn leaves, murmuring, whispering, muttering by turns. Then suddenly she said to Djuna very simply and clearly: "My lover left me sitting here and said he would come back."

(The policeman had said: I have seen her sitting there for twenty years.)

"How long have you been sitting here and waiting?" Djuna asked.

"I don't know."

She ate of the same bread she was feeding the pigeons. Her face was wrinkled but not aged, through the wrinkles shone an expression which was not of age, which was the expression of alert waiting, watchfulness, expectation of the young.

"He will come back," she said, for the first time a look of defiance washing her face of its spectator's pallor, the pallor of the recluse who lives without intimate relationship to stir the rhythms of the blood, this glazed expression of those who watch the crowd passing by and never recognize a face.

"Of course he will," said Djuna, unable to bear even the shadow of anxiety on the woman's face.

Matilda's face recovered its placidity, its patience. "He told me to sit here and wait."