The Four-Chambered Heart

Readers of the diary will recognize the barge at once. In the late thirties Nin rented a houseboat moored in the heart of Paris and made it the theater of her affair with Gonzalo Moré — revolutionary, guitarist, magnificent and unemployable — while supporting, at a distance, his ailing wife. A decade later the material became the sequence's third novel, with Djuna standing where Nin stood and Rango and Zora barely transposed.

Within the continuous novel it is the necessary counterweight to Children of the Albatross: Djuna, who built a sealed room to keep large claims out, chooses the largest claim available and moves it onto a boat. Nin keeps the scale deliberately small — the cabin, the mooring, the wood to be chopped, Zora's medicines — and lets the confinement do the work a plot would do elsewhere.

Djuna and Rango take a barge on the Seine to house a love too disruptive for rooms on land — he is married, penniless, a musician who has never kept anything, and she wants a world with only two citizens. The boat delivers something else. Rango's wife Zora is chronically ill, theatrically helpless, and expert in the arithmetic of guilt; her needs arrive daily, and Rango, who cannot nurse her and cannot leave her, brings every crisis aboard. Djuna finds herself financing and managing the household of the marriage she was meant to replace.

The novel tightens by seasons rather than events: the river rises and falls, the stove smokes, Zora's illnesses bloom on schedule, and Djuna's dream of the self-contained world is worn down to its load-bearing question — how much of another person's weight can love carry before it is no longer love but servitude? Nin refuses to blame any of the three; the trap is built from each one's best quality, which is what makes it hold.