But she had made an important discovery.

This bond with Rango, this patience with his violent temper, this tacit fraternity of her gentleness and his roughness, this collaboration of light and shadow, this responsibility for Rango which she felt, her compulsion to rescue him from the consequences of his blind rages, were because Rango lived out for her this self she had buried in her childhood. All that she had denied and repressed: chaos, disorder, caprice, destruction.

The reason for her indulgence; everyone marveled (how could you bear his jealousy, his angers?) at the way he destroyed what she created so that each day she must begin anew: to understand, to order, to reconstruct, to mend; the reason for her acceptance of the troubles caused by his blindness was that Rango was nature, uncontrolled, and that the day she had buried her own laziness, her own jealousy, her own chaos, these atrophied selves awaited liberation and began to breathe through Rango's acts. For this complicity in the dark she must share the consequences with him.

The realm she had tried to skip: darkness, confusion, violence, destruction, erupted secretly through relationship with Rango. The burden was placed on his shoulders. She must therefore share the torments, too. She had not annihilated her natural self; it reasserted itself in Rango. And she was his accomplice.

The dark-faced Rango who opened the door of his studio below street level was not the joyous carefree guitarist Djuna had first seen at the party, nor was it the fervent Rango of the nights at the barge, nor was it the oscillating Rango of the café, the ironic raconteur, the reckless adventurer. It was another Rango she did not know.

In the dark hallway his body appeared silhouetted, his high forehead, the fall of his hair, his bow, full of nobility, grandeur. He bowed gravely in the narrow hallway as if this cavernous dwelling were his castle, he the seigneur and she a visitor of distinction. He emerged prouder, taller, more silent, too, out of poverty and barrenness, since they were of his own choice. If he had not been a rebel, he would be greeting her at the vast entrance of his ranch.

Down the stairs into darkness. Her hand touched the walls hesitantly to guide herself, but the walls had such a rough surface and seemed to be sticky to the touch so that she withdrew it and Rango explained: "We had a fire here once. I set fire to the apartment when I fell asleep while smoking. The landlord never repaired the damage as we haven't paid rent for six months."

A faint odor of dampness rose from the studio below, which was the familiar odor of poor studios in Paris. It was compounded of fog, of the ancient city breathing its fetid breath through cellar floors; it was the odor of stagnation, of clothes not often washed, of curtains gathering mildew.