"But Rango, he arrived after me, he merely placed his bicycle next to mine. Everyone has breakfast at the same café. It doesn't mean anything."

At times Djuna felt that Rango had caught Zora's madness. Then she felt compassion for him, and would answer with patience, as you would a sick person.

She knew that we love in others some repressed self. In consoling Rango, reassuring him, was she consoling some secret Djuna who had once been jealous and not dared to reveal it?

(We love shadows of our hidden selves in others. Once I must have been as jealous as Rango, but I did not reveal it, even to myself. I must have experienced such jealousy in so hidden a realm of my own nature that I was not even aware of it. Or else I would not be so patient with Rango. I would not feel compassion. He is destroying us both by this jealousy. I want to protect him from the consequences... He is driving me away from him. I should run away now, yet I feel responsible. When we see another daring to be what we did not dare, we feel responsible for him...)

But once she awakened so exhausted by Rango's demon that she decided to frighten him, to run away, hoping it might cure him.

She packed and went to the station. But there was no train until evening. She sat disconsolately to wait.

And Rango arrived. He looked distracted. "Djuna! Djuna, forgive me. I must have been mad. I didn't tell you the truth. A friend of mine has been making absinthe in his cellar and every day at noon we have been sampling it. I must have taken a good deal of it all these days."

She forgave him. She also thought, in an effort always to absolve him: "His slavery to Zora's needs is so tremendous and he does not dare to rebel. She has a gift for making him feel that he never does enough, and to burden him with guilt, and that may be why, when he comes to me, he has to rebel and be angry about something, he has to explode. I am his scapegoat."

And she was tied to Rango through this breathing tube, tied to his explosions. She might one day come to believe, as he did, that violence was necessary to dive to the depths of experience.

On these revolving stages of the unconscious, the last hidden jungles of our nature which we have controlled and harnessed almost to extermination, sealing all the wells, it is no wonder when we seek to open these sealed wells again to find a flow of life we find instead a flow of anger.

Thus in anger Rango threw like a geyser this nature's poison, and then refused to admit responsibility for the storms. His angers came like lightning, and each time Djuna was delivered of her own.

But the black sun of his jealousy eclipsed the Mediterranean sun, churned the sea's turquoise gentleness.