Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5

by Anais Nin

  My lacquered nails reminded him of his first wife. He was hostile to me because of his first wife.

  I wanted to stay in Mexico, I wanted to have a little house in Acapulco, overlooking the sea, where I could watch the dawns like Oriental spectacles, watch the whales at play, without need of books, concerts, plays, provisions of any kind.

  When I awakened I first saw a coral tree with orange flowers that seemed like tongues of flames. Between its branches rose thin wisps of smoke from Maria's brasero. Maria was patting tortillas between her hands in an even rhythm.

  I did not want to stay and Hatcher was offended. He thought our battery was too low and that we should get a new one. He tinkered with the car. I felt that now he represented slavery to an inescapable past and not the freedom of a natural, native life. He loved all this only because he had been hurt by the other. He loved Maria because she was not the American woman with painted nails who had hurt him. It would take days to get a new battery and I refused to stay.

  When the car was repaired we left. Driving back in the violent sun we did not talk. The light filled the eyes, the mind, the nerves, the bones, and it was only when we drove through the shade that we came out of this anaesthesia of sunlight.

  A truck full of Mexican workmen with guns was driving a short distance behind us. Our car stalled. They caught up with us. They offered to tow us to the nearest town for a new battery.

  But they did not know I understood Spanish, and among themselves they discussed how easy it would be to get both our money and the car. I had to think quickly.

  We explained that Mr. Hatcher was following close behind us and would soon be here with a new battery.

  It was, as I knew, a lie. But I thought it would drive them away. They all knew Mr. Hatcher, and he had guns. They hesitated. And then Hatcher arrived I He had been uneasy about us and had decided to follow. The men filed quietly into the truck. Hatcher said they would have taken our money and the car and left us there. He towed us to San Luis and left us in the hands of a very dubious Mexican garage to wait for a new battery.

  It was New Year's Eve. We had reached San Luis in time for fireworks and dancing in the street. At seven o'clock, when we arrived, the streets were silent and it began to grow dark. The owner of the café was a pale-faced Spaniard with the manners of a courtier. He fixed us a dinner. Then he told us we could not go out that night.

  "San Luis looks quiet now, but it is only because they are dressing for New Year's Eve. Pretty soon they will all be out in the streets. There will be dancing. But the men will drink heavily. The women know when it is time to leave. I advise you not to mix with them. The women go home with the children. The men continue to drink. Soon they begin to shoot at mirrors, glasses, bottles, at anything. Sometimes they shoot at each other. I entreat you, I beg you to stay right here. I have clean rooms I can let you have for the night. Stay in your rooms, I advise you strongly."

  At ten o'clock music, fireworks, shouts and shooting began.

  I lay on my plain white cot, in a whitewashed room, bare and simple, shivering with cold, imprisoned by mosquito netting, listening to the noise, and feeling lonely and lost.

  In the morning the streets were littered with confetti. The street vendors' baskets were empty and they were asleep beside them rolled in their ponchos. The scent of malabar was in the air and that of burnt firecrackers. There were three men dead and a little boy injured by the fireworks.

  In Acapulco I looked for a house I could afford. Even if I had to return to the United States, this would remain the place of joy and health.

  I found the smallest house in Acapulco at the very tip of the rock I loved, the highest one above Caleta Beach, looking out to sea and to the island where the beacon light stood.

  It was built of stucco, all open on the sea side, and the walls on the side of the street were latticed to let the breeze through. I was euphoric. The people who sold it lived below me. I startled everyone who had heard me say I never wanted to be tied down anywhere by announcing that I had chosen a place to live.

  I bought simple native things at the market, pottery, serapes, straw mats, baskets. There was a bed there already. I was deliriously happy. A walk down the hill and I was at Caleta, the Mexican beach. The tourists swam at other beaches.

  The beach is lined with thatched roof shanties where one can eat fresh clams and shrimp. The guitar players clustered around the shanties. They were treated to beer and sang all day.

  The glass-bottomed boat was tied there, and the trips on it were full of marvels: coral, sea plants, and colorful fishes. The American who ran it was also collecting animals for his zoo. They could be seen at his house—monkeys, kinkajous, birds of all kinds, parrots, iguanas, snakes. He paid the native boys to hunt for him.

  But several things happened in the little house. The tank on the roof which supplied water for the bath and for cooking would either run dry or overflow during the night. The insects I pursued with Flytox turned out to be scorpions, who liked to nest behind the straw mats. Rats came at night, ate the food, ran over my body and frightened me to death.

  When I asked advice from the Mexicans, they counseled resignation. I bought rat poison and began to fight them, but a new batch came every night through the terrace.

  The young men of the town found out I was living alone and came to call me, or serenade me behind the latticed walls. I would put out the lights and lie in the dark.

  I had to walk up the steep hill with food and ice.

  I invited Alice Rahon to stay with me. She brought her long beautiful black hair, her radiant smile, her superb swimming. Her talk was full of fascination. She was a painter and also known for her surrealist poems. We talked endlessly and formed a deep friendship.

  I had finally frightened away the scorpions and the rats. But now I had a new enemy. It was the neighbor's rooster. He was not only the most arrogant rooster I ever met but he crowed ahead of time. He did not wait for the dawn, he wanted to show that he could bring it on, cause it to happen by his sonorous announcements and prophecies.

  So at four in the morning I was awakened by the rooster, who did not surrender until the dawn gave in and appeared.

  When the rooster crowed that was a signal for the old man next door to start his asthmatic cough, a long, continuous, raucous cough which seemed to strangle him.

  I was told about the early Acapulco. There were no hotels, only Mexican boardinghouses. You arrived on a donkey because the train did not go that far. You ate purée of black beans and fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for a dollar a day.

  Painters had discovered it. It must have seemed like Tahiti. The women did not wear bathing suits, just a piece of cloth resembling the Tahitian pareu. The children went about naked. There was an abundance of fish. The people were poor but lived with a certain kind of beauty. Always a palm-leaf hut with a garden filled with flowers.

  Their boats were painted in soft colors. The fishermen repaired their nets on the beach. The pottery people used, the baskets, the water jugs were all beautiful and handmade. It was only later that they built tin shacks, without gardens, like the ones behind the bullring, shacks crowded together with no room at all so that they hung their laundry in the narrow alleys. Animals and children slept together.

  The beauty of Acapulco was unspoiled.

  I took delight in the market. The mere arrangement of ribbons women wore in their hair, the decorative way fruit was laid out in huge round baskets, the birdcages, the smell of melons and oranges, the playfulness of the children. I took delight in the animated and crowded square, in the jetty where the fishing boats returned with their colored pennants flying. I loved to watch the fishermen pulling in their nets at sundown.

  Every scene in Mexico is so natural that it alters the color of violence itself, of death. A stabbed Mexican staggered across the night club, his shirt all bloody, but the fatalism of the Mexicans subdued the horror, the shock. It was all made to seem a part of nature, natural, inevitable. Violence and
innocence, the two natural aspects of man.

  Everything was natural, the dirt floors in the huts, the babies in hammocks, the minimum of possessions: one shawl, one fan, one necklace, one trunk of clothes, no sheets.

  I made friends with Pablo at the post office because he was interested in my stamps from foreign countries. He collected post cards from America.

  It was he who took me dancing to the places where the people of the town went, the poor. I had to leap over an open sewer. These cafés were antechambers to the whorehouses. A young man with absolutely no hair was singing. ("Complete baldness results from a tropical disease," Dr. Hernandez solemnly informed me.) The prostitutes were modest, not arrogant or overdressed as in America, gentle and courteous.

  The music was marvelous, native dance music far better than at the hotel night clubs. People danced in bare feet. My friends were shocked when I threw off my sandals. I loved the texture of the earth, and the touch of other feet.

  Everyone knew each other. The town policeman was there, enjoying himself. He had discarded his belt and gun to dance with the prostitutes.

  A widower asked me: "If I rent a motorboat for tomorrow will you come and see the sunrise with me at La Roqueta?"

  His offer was known to the whole town. He was always looking for women who would be willing to see the sunrise with him on a desert island.

  Paul Mathiesen arrived. I was in a frivolous mood. His appearance of a Nordic mystic, far from the earth, seemed to interfere with my pursuit of joy. He was the pale dreamer, I felt; he was ill at ease dancing and swimming and I was hungry for it. His muteness, his withdrawn, mysterious self seemed like a reproach from nonsensual worlds. He seemed detached from our pleasures, lying on surfboards sunning, dancing in native shacks. Paul seemed to call me back into art, the myth, the dream.

  Once, I remember, we were all coming out of a bad film which we attended only for the sake of the crowd, the men, women, and children who went there, their gaiety and expressiveness. As we came out I found Paul eating at one of the communal tables in the market where they served fish soup to the workmen and fishermen. He sat there, silent, seemingly remote, and also reproachful. I sought forgetfulness and no personal, intimate friendships.

  The dreamer was here again, to take me away from the vivid physical world I loved.

  There was a guitar-playing Mexican doctor, quite young, who had abandoned his career to live in Acapulco. He worked at the hotel desk. The two American girls I went to the beach with fell in love with him. He fell in love with the dark-haired one. The other I found weeping on the steps of the bungalow one day. He loved the wrong one. She made him spend all his money, she wrecked his car while she was drunk, and was frightened by the intensity of his love-making. She asked me: "Why does he keep calling me 'mi vida, mi vida'? It frightens me, all that emotion."

  You are my life, my life. How could I explain to her that even one night of love-making can make one say: "You are my life, mi vida, mi vida."

  If you give toys to the children, they grab for them so desperately they scratch your hand. The mature grin of the seven-year-old boy who sat on the hood of the car to direct us through the shallowest part of the river. He straddled it as if it were a bull, and with his small hand indicated left or right in the dark; his face was illumined with pride and a feeling of superiority over the blind voyagers.

  The children barefoot, in rags, but joyous, alive. Playing with discarded tires on the beach. Small rations, little food, an orange is a luxury, but their smile and their gaiety are overwhelming. They filled the streets of Acapulco with their vivacity, their games, their mischievous begging.

  The bullfights, which I hate, make me ill. But after staying away for four Sundays, feeling I was not sharing in a community experience and everyone looked upon me as abnormal, I went. It was torture.

  The disillusion of finding a charming Mexican reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

  ***

  Then came time to leave.

  The taxi driver who had sworn to come for me never came, and I had to drag my valise down the hill to take the bus. The day before at the beach I had witnessed cruelty toward a dog, who had fallen off a surfboard and was tottering on the beach, inflated with water, suffering, while the Mexicans laughed. I screamed at them and forced them to help the dog expel the water.

  But when I left, the beauty was uppermost in my eyes, I could only remember the softness, the gold patina over everything, the long, unthinking, memoryless days, days filled with the scent of flowers, sunrises and sunsets to eclipse all the paintings of the world.

  The return to New York was brutal. Grit, harshness, anger above all, the anger of the bus driver, the anger of the subway ticketman, the sullenness of the taxi drivers, the angry tone of newspapers, the anger on the radio, in the street, from the policeman, the doorman, the delivery boy, the shopkeepers. The mechanical service at cafeterias, unsmiling, not looking. No one looks at anyone. People are like numbers.

  It was pouring rain, to make the contrast sharper.

  But having the little house in Acapulco made me feel I would be able to return.

  I asked Dutton for an advance on Under a Glass Bell.

  My dear Anaïs:

  Nick tells me that like the rest of us you are in need of some extra pennies. One of these days when we are really scratching the bottom of the barrel I think I will write to five hundred of our authors and suggest that they send us $100 each. That will come to $50,000 and help no end. Keeping up with present-day costs is as tough for a publisher as for an author, and there does not seem to be an end towards the increase.

  At any rate, I enclose a check for $250 which is the amount of the initial advance due on November 1 1947 on Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories.

  I hope that you are well and happy. With kind regards,

  Sincerely,

  E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

  Elliott [Macrae]

  President

  [February, 1948]

  New York.

  I had many duties in New York, many unfinished tasks and responsibilities. The months in Mexico had been like one long reverie, but what a deep effect they had on me. They loosened chains, they dissolved poisons, fears, doubts, healed all the wounds. To look into the dark, bottomless eyes of the Mexicans and see warmth, humanity, emotion, to be assured of their existence, to hear the sweetness and tenderness of their voices and be reassured of their existence, to see the lovers, as in France, dissolved in ecstasy, to be reassured of love's existence, to see people who could dance, sing, swim, laugh in spite of poverty, and be reassured of the existence of life and joy. To see and hear joy.

  There was a book by Georges Bernanos I once carried around with me, not so much for its content as for its title:La Joie. Joy. There was in it the description of joy, a joy which became ecstasy. The young woman experienced it as religious ecstasy. I translated it into physical ecstasy. The cynical man who did not believe in it spied upon her and could only attribute it to madness.

  I found this joy in Mexico. And it was pagan and human. It was in the sun, in the light, in the colors, in the voices, in their smiles and in their fiestas. Poverty could not destroy it, invasions, revolutions, tyranny could not destroy it. It is a gift of dark people, those for whom the real life begins at night deep within themselves and where everything flowers.

  Joy, for many years, was the unattainable state (except intermittently). It was the unknown land.

  When I left New York in a small Model A Ford last spring I did not know it was to be a voyage not only across the United States, but ultimately to this land, this unfamiliar country of La Joie.

  I forgot to write about my visit to Black Mountain College. It was in October, 1947, and I was invited by Mary Caroline Richards.

  The place was in a wild and beautiful setting, the country of Thomas Wolfe. I knew it was the fruit of a rebellion by several teachers, and a brave experiment in education. There were only about one hundred students, and the spi
rit of it attracted special, unique teachers.

  The students had built their own studios; they shared all the work from cooking to taking care of children, from raising funds to gardening. It was ideal communal living.

  My visit began with an individual talk, one hour with each student in his own studio. It was good to see them alone, in their own atmosphere. I only had time to talk to those interested in writing.

  Among them was a young student named James Leo Herlihy. He had laughing Irish eyes, a swift tongue, and seemed outwardly in full motion in life until he showed me a chart he kept in his journal. It was designed like a fever chart, only instead of fever it recorded the ups and downs of his moods, the outline at times rising, at times plunging into the depths. Jim said, pointing to the lowest ebb of the chart: "The day it goes below that point I will commit suicide."

  He said this without the expression which would ordinarily accompany such words. He said it smiling, defiantly. It was as if he wore the mask of youth, alertness, gaiety even, and that this dark current was so far below the surface it had not yet marked his face or his voice, or invaded his eyes. Yet I believed him, and I began to talk about how I dissolved my depressions.

  "I begin to look at what happens to me as a storyteller might look at it. What a good story it makes! I take my distance. I look at the dramatic possibilities. Try that. The depression falls away, you are changed into an adventurer faced with every obstacle, every defeat, every danger, but as they increase the sense of adventure increases too."

  After my talks with the students I was exhausted. When I returned to my room I found a note of thanks from Mary Caroline Richards:

  Here is my poem. I hope to see you at breakfast. You are good and wonderful. I hope the kids have not exhausted you, but of course they have. Goodnight. M.C.