And now Rango walked toward her! (See what a pact she had with god that he granted her wishes no one else would have dared to expect him to grant!)

Rango had been ill. No, he had not signed the papers. He had overslept. Tomorrow. Mañana.

Djuna had forgotten this Latin deity: Mañana.

At the Café Martiniquaise, near the barge, Rango and Djuna sat drinking coffee.

The place was dense with smoke, voices, faces, heaving and swaying like a compact sonorous wave, washing over them at times and enswathing them, at others retreating as if subdued, only to return again louder and more suffocating to engulf their voices.

Djuna could never identify such a tide of faces dissolved by lights and shadows, slightly blurred in outlines from drink. But Rango could say immediately: "There's a pimp, there's a prizefighter. There's a drug addict."

Two friends of Rango's walked in, with their hands in their pockets, greeted them obliquely, with heavy lids half dropped over glazed eyes. They had deep purple shadows under the eyes and Rango said: "It startles me to see my friends disintegrating so fast, even dying, from drugs. I'm no longer drawn to this kind of life."

"You were drawn toward destruction before, weren't you?"

"Yes," said Rango, "but not really. When I was a young man, at home, what I liked most was health, physical energy and well-being. It was only later, here in Paris the poets taught me not to value life, that it was more romantic to be desperate, more noble to rebel, and to die, than to accept what ordinary life had to offer. I'm not drawn to that any more. I want to live. That was not the real me. Zora says you changed me, yet I can't think of anything you said or did to accomplish it. But every time we are together I want to accomplish something, something big. I don't want any more of this literary credo, about the romantic beauty of living desperately, dangerously, destructively."

Djuna thought with irony that she had not meant to give birth to a rebel. She had changed, too, because of Rango. She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness... A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there. It was the atmosphere of earth's womb, where awareness could not reach and illumine all the tragic aspects of unfulfilled desires. In the darkness, chaos, warmth, one forgot... And the silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, the senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxicating life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of the violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust, and delight.