Both might have died of the contest, for neither one would yield. Each little red chili like a concentrate of fire which burned them both.

Now and then they opened their mouths wide and breathed quickly in and out, as if to cool their insides.

As in the old myths, they sat like fire eaters partaking of a fire banquet. Tears came to Sabina's intense dark eyes. A sepia flush came to Rango's laughing cheeks, but neither would yield, though they might scar their entrails.

Fortunately the restaurant was closing, and the waiters maliciously washed the floor under their feet with ammonia, piled chairs on the table, and finally put an end to the marathon by turning out the lights.

Not one but many Djunas descended the staircase of the barge, one layer formed by the parents, the childhood, another molded by her profession and her friends, still another born of history, geology, climate, race, economics, and all the backgrounds and backdrops, the sky and nature of the earth, the pure sources of birth, the influence of a tree, a word dropped carelessly, an image seen, and all the corrupted sources: books, art, dogmas, tainted friendships, and all the places where a human being is wounded, defeated, crippled, and which fester...

People add up their physical mishaps, the stubbed toes, the cut finger, the burn scar, the fever, the cancer, the microbe, the infection, the wounds and broken bones. They never add up the accumulated bruises and scars of the inner lining, forming a complete universe of reactions, a reflected world through which no event could take place without being subjected to a personal and private interpretation, through this kaleidoscope of memory, through the peculiar formation of the psyche's sensitive photographic plates, to this assemblage of emotional chemicals through which every word, every event, every experience is filtered, digested, deformed, before it is projected again upon people and relationships.

The movement of the many layers of the self described by Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," the multiple selves grown in various proportions, not singly, not evenly developed, not moving in one direction, but composed of multiple juxtapositions revealing endless spirals of character as the earth revealed its strata, an infinite constellation of feelings expanding as mysteriously as space and light in the realm of the planets.

Man turned his telescope outward and far, not seeing character emerging at the opposite end of the telescope by subtle accumulations, fragments, accretions, and encrustations.

Woman turned her telescope to the near, and the warm.

Djuna felt at this moment a crisis, a mutation, a need to leap from the self born of her relationship to Rango and Zora, a need to resuscitate in another form. She was unable to follow Rango in his faith, unable either to live in the dream in peace, or to sail the barge accurately through a stormy Seine.

She found herself defending Sabina against Rango's ruthless mockery. She defended Sabina's philosophy of the many loves against the One.