There were times when she lay alone on the sand and sought to remember what she had tried to reach through the body of Rango, what her first sight of him, playing on his guitar and evoking his gypsy life, had awakened in her.

Through him, to extend into pure nature.

There were times when she remembered his first smile, the ironic smile of the Indian which came from afar like the echo of an ancient Indian smile at the beginning of Mayan worlds; the earthy walk issued from bare footsteps treading paths into the highest mountains of the world, into the most immune lakes and impenetrable forests.

In her dream of him she returned to the origins of the world, hearing footsteps in Rango which were echoes of primeval footsteps hunting.

She remembered, above all, stories, the one Rango had told her about sitting on a rock on top of a glacier and asserting he had felt the spinning of the earth!

She had kissed eyes filled with remembrance of splendors, eyes which had seen the Mayans bury their gold treasures at the bottom of the lakes out of reach of the plundering Spaniards.

She had kissed the Indian princes of her childhood fairytales.

She had plunged with love and desire into the depths of ancient races, and sought heights and depths and magnificence.

And found...found deserts where vultures perpetuated their encirclement, no longer distinguishing between the living and the dead.

Found a muted city resting on ruined columns, cracked cupolas, tombs, with owls screaming like women in childbirth.

In the shadows of volcanoes there were fiestas, orgies, dances, and guitars.

But Rango had not taken her there.

To love he brought only his fierce anxieties; she had embraced, kissed, possessed a mirage. She had walked and walked, not into the fiestas and the music, not into laughter, but into the heart of an Indian volcano...

THE TRAP WAS INVISIBLE BY DAY.

The trap was a web of senseless duties. No sooner were Djuna's eyes open than she saw Zora vividly, lying down, pale, with soft flabby hands touching everything with infantile awkwardness. Zora missing her aim, dropping what she held, fumbling with a door, and moving so abnormally slow and with such hazy, uncertain gestures that it took her two hours to get dressed.

Compassion was the cover with which Djuna disguised to her own eyes her revulsion for Zora's whining voice, unkempt body, and shrewd glance, for her beggar's clothes which were a costume to attract pity, for the listless hair she was too lazy to brush, for the dead skin through which the blood stagnated.

If one knew what lay in Zora's mind, one would turn away with revulsion. Djuna had heard her sometimes, half asleep, monotonously accusing doctors, the world, Rango, herself, friends, for all that befell her.