"The Mayan Indian is not a mystic, he is a pantheist. The earth is his mother. He has only one word for both mother and earth. When an Indian died they put real food in his tomb, and they kept feeding him."

"A symbolical food does not taste as good as real food!"

(It is because he is of the earth that he is jealous and possessive. His angers are of the earth. His massive body is of the earth. His knees are of iron, so strong from pressing against the flanks of wild horses. His body has all the flavors of the earth: spices, ginger, chutney, musk, pimiento, wine, opium. He has the smooth neck of a statue, a Spanish arrogance of the head, an Indian submission, too. He has the awkward grace of an animal. His hands and feet are more like paws. When he catches a fleeing cat he is swifter than the cat. He squats like an Indian and then leaps on powerful legs. I love the way his high cheekbones swell with laughter. Asleep he shows the luxuriant charcoal eyelashes of a woman. The nose so round and jovial; everything powerful and sensual except his mouth. His mouth is small and timid.)

What Djuna believed was that like a volcano his fire and strength would erupt and bring freedom, to him and to her. She believed the fire in him would burn all the chains which bound him. But fire too must have direction. His fire was blind. But she was not blind. She would help him.

In spite of his physical vitality, he was helpless, he was bound and tangled. He could set fire to a room and destroy, but he could not build as yet. He was bound and blind as nature is. His hands could break what he held out of strength, a strength he could not measure, but he could not build. His inner chaos was the chain around his body, his conviction that one was born a slave of one's nature, to be led inevitably to destruction by one's blind impulses.

"What do you want your life to be?"

"A revolution every day."

"Why, Rango?"

"I love violence. I want to serve ideas with my body."

"Men die every day for ideas which betray them, for leaders who betray them, for false ideals."

"But love betrays, too," said Rango. "I have no faith."

(Oh, god, thought Djuna, will I have the strength to win this battle against destruction, this private battle for a human love?)

"I need independence," said Rango, "as a wild horse needs it. I can't harness myself to anything. I can't accept any discipline. Discipline discourages me."

Even asleep his body was restless, heavy, feverish. He threw off all the blankets, lay naked, and by morning the bed seemed like a battlefield. So many combats he had waged within his dreams; so tumultuous a life even in sleep.