...if one sinks deep enough and then deeper, all these women she had been flowed into one at night and lost their separate identities; she would learn from Sabina how to make love laughing, and from Stella how to die only for a little while and be born again as children die and are reborn at the slightest encouragement...

...from the end in water to the beginning in water, she would complete the journey, from origin to birth and birth to flow...

…she would abandon her body to flow into a vaster body than her own, as it was at the beginning, and return with many other lives to be unfolded...

...with her would float the broken doll of her childhood, the Easter egg which had been smaller than the one she had asked for, debris of fictions...

...she would return to the life above the waters of the unconscious and see the magnifications of sorrow which had taken place and been the true cause of the deluge...

...there were countries she had not yet seen...

…this image created a pause in her floating...

...there must also be loves she had not yet encountered...

…as the barge ran swiftly down the current of despair, she saw the people on the shore flinging their arms in desolation, those who had counted on her Noah's Ark to save themselves...

...she was making a selfish journey...

...she had intended the barge for other purposes than for a mortuary...

...war was coming...

...the greater the turmoil, the confusion, the greater had been her effort to maintain an individually perfect world, a cocoon of faith, which would be a symbol and a refuge...

...the curtain of dawn would rise on a deserted river...

…on two deserters...

...in the imminence of death she seized this intermediary region of our being in which we rehearse our future sorrows and relive the past ones...

...in this heightened theatre their lives appeared in their true color because there was no witness to distort the private admissions, the most absurd pretensions...

...in the last role Djuna became immune from the passageway of pretense, from a suspended existence in reflection, from impostures...

...and she saw what had appeared immensely real to her as charades...

...in the theatre of death, exaggeration is the cause of despair...

...the red Easter egg I had wanted to be so enormous when I was a child, if it floats by today in its natural size, so much smaller than my invention, I will be able to laugh at its shrinking...

...I had chosen death because I was ashamed of this shrinking and fading, of what time would do to our fiction of magnificence, time like the river would wear away the pain of defeats and broken promises, time and the river would blur the face of Zora as a giant incubus, time and the river would mute the vibrations of Rango's voice upon my heart...