She reopened her eyes and began her recitation where she had left off: "In New York I stopped the show. The agent came to see me with a long contract. I could make as much money as I wanted to. I had fur coats and beautiful evening dresses, I could travel..."

"And then?"

"Then I left everything and went home to Guatemala."

"Home to Guatemala?"

Zora laughed, irrepressibly, hysterically, for such a long time that Djuna was frightened. A spasm of cough stopped her. "You should have seen the face of the agent, when I didn't sign the contract. Everybody's face. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed their faces more than I enjoyed the money. I left them all just like that and went home. I wanted to see Guatemala again. I laughed all the way, thinking of their faces when I quit."

"Were you sick then?"

"I was always sick, from childhood. But it wasn't that. I'm independent. "

Djuna remembered Rango telling her the story of a friend who had worked to obtain an engagement for Zora in Paris, a contract to dance at a private house. He had promised to meet this friend at the café. "I came five hours late, and she was in a state." Whenever he told this story he laughed. The idea of this friend waiting, foaming and furious, sitting at the café, aroused his humor.

"I stayed six months in Guatemala. When the money was gone I returned to New York. But nobody would sign me up. They told each other about the broken contract..."

Rango arrived with the medicine. Zora refused to take it. Bismuth would calm her pain and the burn, but she refused to take it. She turned her face to the wall and fell asleep, holding Djuna and Rango's hand, both enchained to her caprices.

Djuna's head was bowed. Rango said: "You must be exhausted. You'd better go home. Sometimes I think..." Djuna raised imploring eyes to his face, wildly hoping that they would be united by the common knowledge that Zora was a sick, unstable child who needed care but who could not be allowed to direct, to infect their lives with her destructiveness.

Rango looked at her, his eyes not seeing what she saw. "Sometimes I think you're right about Zora. She does foolish things..." And that was all.

He walked to the door with her... She looked into the bleak and empty street. It was just before dawn. She needed warmth, sleep. She needed to be as blind as Rango was, to continue living this way. The knowledge she had was useless. It only added to her burden, the knowing that so much effort, care, devotion were being utterly wasted, that Zora would never be well, that it was wrong to devote two lives to one twisted human being... This knowledge estranged her from Rango, whose blind faith she could not share. It burdened her, isolated her. Tonight, through fatigue, she wanted so much to lay her head on Rango's shoulder, to fall asleep in his arms, but there was already another head on his shoulder, a heavy burden.