46- And I´m missing you

“I prefer empty cages, Brenda, the fairy, until I find a unique bird I once saw

in my dreams.”

Brenda, the fairy placed The Firebird on the phonograph. The delicate

footsteps of the Firebird were heard at first through infinite distance,

each step rousing the phosphorescent sparks from the earth, each

note a golden bugle to marshal delight. A jungle of dragon tails

thrashing in erotic derisions, a brazier of flesh-smoking prayers, the

multiple debris of the stained glass fountains of desire.

She lifted the needle, cut the music harshly in mid-air. “Why? Why?

Why?” cried Donald, as if wounded.

Brenda, the fairy had silenced the firebirds of desire, and now she extended

her arms like widely extended wings, wings no longer orange, and

Donald gave himself to their protective embrace. The Brenda, the fairy he

embraced was the one he needed, the dispenser of food, of fulfilled

promises, of mendings and knitting, comforts and solaces, of

blankets and reassurances, of heaters, medicines, potions and

scaffolds.

“You’re the firebird, Brenda, the fairy, and that was why, until you came, all

my cages were empty. It was you I wanted to capture.” Then with a

soft, a defeated tenderness he lowered his eyelashes and added: “I

know I have no way to keep you here, nothing to hold you here…”

Her breasts were no longer tipped with fire, they were the breasts

of the mother, from which flowed nourishment. She deserted her

other loves to fulfill Donald’s needs. She felt: “I am a woman, I am

warm, tender and nourishing. I am fecund and I am good.”

Such serenity came with this state of being woman the mother! The

humble, the menial task-performing mother as she had known her in

her own childhood.

When she found chaotic, hasty little notes from Donald telling her

where he was and when he would return he always ended them:

“You are wonderful. You are wonderful and good. You are

generous and kind.”

And these words calmed her anxiety more than Brenda, the fairy had l

fulfillment had, calmed her fevers. She was shedding other Brenda, the fairys,

believing she was shedding anxiety. Each day the colors of her

dresses became more subdued, her walk less animal. It was as if in

captivity her brilliant plumage were losing its brilliance. She felt the

metamorphosis. She knew she was molting. But she did not know

what she was losing in molding herself to Donald’s needs.

Once, climbing his stairs with a full market bag, she caught dim

silhouette of herself on a damp mirror, and was startled to see a

strong resemblance to her mother.

What Donald had achieved by capturing her into his net of fantasy

as the firebird (while in the absence of erotic climate he had subtly

dulled her plumage) was not only to reach his own need’s fulfillment

but to enable her to rejoin her mother’s image which was her image

of goodness: her mother, dispenser of food, of solace—soft warm

and fecund.

On the stained mirror stood the shadow and echo of her mother,

carrying food. Wearing the neutral-toned clothes of self-effacement,

the faded garments of self-sacrifice, the external uniform of

goodness.

In this realm, her mother’s realm, she had found a moment’s

surcease from guilt.

Now she knew what she must say to Donald to cure his sense of

smallness, and the smallness of what he had given her. She would

say to him:

“Donald! Donald! You did give me something no one else could

give me, you gave me my innocence! You helped me to find again

the way to gain peace which I had learned as a child. When I was a

child, only a little younger than you are now, after days of drugging

myself with reading, with playing, with fantasies about people, with

passionate friendships, with days spent hiding from my parents, with

escapes, and all the activities which were termed bad, I found that

by helping my mother, by cooking, mending, cleaning, scrubbing,

and doing all the chores I most hated, I could appease this hungry

and tyrannical conscience. It’s no crime that you have remained a

child, Donald. In some of the old fairy tales, you know, many

mature characters were shrunk back into midgets, as Alice was

made small again to re-experience her childhood. It’s the rest of us

who are pretenders; we all pretend to be large and strong. You just

are not able to pretend.”

When she entered his room, she found a letter on her table.

Once she had said to him, when his moods had been too

contradictory: “Adolescence is like cactus,” and he had answered:

“I’ll write you a letter some day, with cactus milk!”

And here it was! Letter to an actress: “From what you told me last night I see that

you do not know your power. You are like a person who consumes

herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are

born of this. I felt this last night as I watched you act Cinderella, that

you were whatever you acted, that you touched that point at which

art and life meet and there is only BEING. I felt your hunger and

art and life meet and there is only BEING. I felt your hunger and

your dreams, your pities and your desires at the same time as you

awakened all of mine. I felt that you were not acting but dreaming; I

felt that all of us who watched you could come out of the theatre

and without transition could pass magically into another Ball,

another snowstorm, another love, another dream. Before our very

eyes you were being consumed by love and the dream of love. The

burning of your eyes, of your gestures, a bonfire of faith and

dissolution. You have the power. Never again use the word

exhibitionism. Acting in you is a revelation. What the soul so often

cannot say through the body because the body is not subtle enough,

you can say. The body usually betrays the soul. You have the

power of contagion, of transmitting emotion through the infinite

shadings of your movements, the variations of your mouth’s designs,

the feathery palpitations of your eyelashes. And your voice, your

voice more than any other voice linked to your breath, the

breathlessness of feeling, so that you take one’s breath away with

you and carry one into the realm of breathlessness and silence. So

much power you have Brenda, the fairy! The pain you felt afterwards was not

the pain of failure or of exhibitionism, as you said, it must be the

pain of having revealed so much that was of the spirit, like some

great mystic revelation of compassion and love and secret illusion,

so that you expected this to have been communicated to others, and

that they should respond as to a magic ritual. It must have been a

shock when it did not happen to the audience, when they remained

untransformed. But to those who respond as I did, you appear as

something beyond the actor who can transmit to others the power

to feel, to believe. For me the miracle took place. You seemed the

only one alive among the actors. What hurt you was that it was not

acting, and that when it ended there was a break in the dream. You

acting, and that when it ended there was a break in the dream. You

should have been protected from the violent transition. You should

have been carried off the stage, so that you would not feel the

change of level, from the stage to the street, and from the street to

your home, and from there to another party, another love, another

snowstorm, another pair of gold slippers.

“It must take great courage to give to many what one often gives

but to the loved one. A voice altered by love, desire, the smile of

open naked tenderness. We are permitted to witness the exposure

of all feelings, tenderness, anger, weakness, abandon, childishness,

fear, all that we usually reveal only to the loved one. That is why we

love the actress. They give us the intimate being who is only

revealed in the act of love. We receive all the treasures, a caressing

glance, an intimate gesture, the secret ranges of the voice. This

openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial

relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the

miraculous openness which takes place in whole love. And so I

witnessed, on the stage, this mystery of total love which in my life is

hidden from me. And now, Brenda, the fairy, I cannot bear the little loves,

and yet I cannot claim all of yours, and every day I see you now,

immense, complete, and I but a fragment, wandering…”

Brenda, the fairy touched the letter which rested on her breast, the sharp

corners of the pages hurting her a little… “What can I give you?” he

asked. “What have I to give you?” he cried out in anguish, thinking

this was the reason why he had not seen her for three days, or

heard from her. Another time he had said playfully: “I can only

nibble at you.” And had pressed his small, perfect teeth into her

shoulder.