A Spy in the House of Love

by Anais Nin

  When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

  She watched Alan closing the windows, watched him light the lamps and fasten the lock on the door which led to the porch. All the sweet enclosures, and yet Sabina, instead of slipping languorously into the warmth and gentleness, felt a sudden restlessness like that of a ship pulling against its moorings.

  The image of the ship’s cracking, restless bones arrived on the waves of Debussy’s “Ile Joyeuse” which wove around her all the mists and dissolutions of remote islands. The notes arrived charged like a caravan of spices, gold mitres, ciboriums and chalices bearing messages of delight setting the honey flowing between the thighs, erecting sensual minarets on men’s bodies as they lay flat on the sand. Debris of stained glass wafted up by the seas, splintered by the radium shafts of the sun and the waves and tides of sensuality covered their bodies, desires folding in every lapping wave like an accordion of aurora borealis in the blood. She saw an unreachable dance at which men and women were dressed in rutilant colors, she saw their gaiety, their relations to each other as unparalleled in splendor.

  By wishing to be there where it was more marvelous she made the near, the palpable seem like an obstruction, a delay to the more luminous life awaiting her, the incandescent personages kept waiting.

  The present—Alan, with his wrists hidden in silky brown hair, his long neck always bending towards her like a very tree of faithfulness—was murdered by the insistent, whispering, interfering dream, a compass pointing to mirages flowing in the music of Debussy like an endless beckoning, alluring, its voices growing fainter if she did not listen with her whole being, its steps lighter if she did not follow, its promises, its sighs of pleasure growing clearer as they penetrated deeper regions of her body directly through the senses bearing on airy canopies all the fluttering banners of gondolas and divertissements.

  Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” shone on other cities… She wanted to be in Paris, the city propitious to lovers, where pcemen smiled absolution and taxi drivers never interrupted a kiss…

  Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” shone upon many stranger’s faces, upon many Iles Joyeuses, music festivals in the Black Forest, marimbas praying at the feet of smoking volcanoes, frenzied intoxicating dances in Haiti, and she was not there. She was lying in a room with closed windows under a lamplight.

  The music grew weary of calling her, the black notes bowed to her inertia ironically in the form of a pavanne for a defunct infanta, and dissolved. All she could hear now were the fog horns on the Hudson from ships she would never be able to board.

  Sabina emerged a week later dressed in purple and waited for one of the Fifth Avenue buses which allowed smoking. Once seated she opened an overfull handbag and brought out a Hindu ring with minuscule bells on it, and slipped it on in place of her wedding ring. The wedding ring was pushed to the bottom of the bag. Each gesture she made was now accompanied by the tinkling of bells.

  At Sixty-Fourth Street she leaped out of the bus before it had entirely stopped and her walk had changed. She now walked swiftly, directly, with a power and vigor to her hips. She walked with her whole foot flat on the ground as the Latins and the Negroes do. Whereas on her way to Alan’s her shoulders had been bowed, now they were vigorously thrown back and she was breathing deeply, feeling her breasts pushing against the purple dress.

  The ripples of her walk started from the pelvis and hips, a strong undulation like waves of muscles flowing from the feet to the knees, to the hips and back to the waist. She walked with her entire body as if to gain momentum for an event in which her entire body would participate. On her face there was no longer any bewilderment, but a vehemence which caused people to stop and glance at her face as if they had been touched by a magnet.

  The evening lights were being turned on, and at this hour Sabina felt like the city, as if all the lights were turned on at once causing a vast illumination. There were lights on her hair, in her eyes, on her nails, on the ripples of her purple dress now turning black.

  When she finally reached the apartment, she realized she still did not know whether he lived alone.

  He guided her into a room which looked like him and had been arranged for him alone. His skiing trophies hung on the walls: on a Viennese curtain of damask hung a whole army of tin soldiers in army formation. On the piano lay stacks of music in disorder, and in the center of the room, under an umbrella hung open from the ceiling, a partly constructed telescope.

  “I want to see the stars with my own handmade telescope. I’m now polishing the glass. It takes a long, long time and a great deal of patience.”

  “But the umbrella!” exclaimed Sabina laughing.

  “The children in the apartment above mine jump around and fine particles of plaster kept falling over my glass, scratching it. The finest grain of dust can spoil a whole day’s polishing.”

  She understood his desire to observe the planets through an instrument made by his own hands. She was eager to see it finished and wanted to know how long it would take. Absorbed by the telescope they behaved like friends, and for a moment abandoned the tense challenges and teasings of conquest.

  In this mood they undressed. Philip was playfully inventing endless grimaces, as children do. He loved to make himself grotesque as if he were tired of being always flawlessly handsome. He could turn himself into Frankenstein.

  Sabina laughed, but uneasily, fearful that if his handsomeness truly vanished she would no longer desire him, aware of the evanescence and fragility of this desire. If the singer of Tristan and Isolde singing in the Black Forest of the fairy tales disappeared, whom would she desire then?

  Then his cool eyes became aware of the intensity of her eyes and they stirred him. His detachment was ignited by the smoldering violence in her. He did not want fires or explosions of feeling in a woman, but he wanted to know it was there. He wanted the danger of touching it off only in the dark depths of her flesh, but without rousing a heart that would bind him. He often had fantasies of taking a woman whose arms were bound behind her back.

  Once he had seen a heavy storm cloud settle over a twin-nippled mountain, so closely knit, like an embrace and he had said: “Wonderful copulation; the mountain has no arms!”

  Now he grew tired of making faces, and having resumed the perfectly modeled features, he bent over her to pay homage to her body.

  And then it happened like a miracle, this pulsation of pleasure unequalled by the most exalted musicians, the summits of perfection in art or science or wars, unequalled by the most regal beauties of nature, this pleasure which transformed the body into a high tower of fireworks gradually exploding into fountains of delight through the senses.

  She opened her eyes to contemplate the piercing joy of her liberation: she was free, free as man was, to enjoy without love.

  Without any warmth of the heart, as a man could, she had enjoyed a stranger.

  And then she remembered what she had heard men say: “Then I wanted to leave.”

  She gazed at the stranger lying naked beside her and saw him as a statue she did not want to touch again. As a statue he lay far from her, strange to her, and there welled in her something resembling anger, regret, almost a desire to take this gift of herself back, to efface all traces of it, to banish it from her body. She wanted to become swiftly and cleanly detached from him, to disentangle and unmingle what had been fused for a moment, their breaths, skins, exhalations, and body’s essences.

  She slid very softly out of the bed, dressed with adroit soundlessness while he slept. She tiptoed to the bathroom.

  On the shelf she found face powder, comb lipstick in shell rose wrappings. She smiled at them. Wife? Mistress? How good it was to contemplate these objects without the lightest tremor of regret, envy or jealousy. That was the meaning of freedom. Free of attachment,
dependency and the capacity for pain. She breathed deeply and felt she had found this source of pleasure for good. Why had it been so difficult? So difficult that she had often simulated this pleasure?

  While combing her hair and repainting her eyelashes, she enjoyed this bathroom, this neutral zone of safety. While moving between men, lovers, she always entered with pleasure a natural safety zone (in the bus, in the taxi, on the way from one to another, at this moment the bathroom) safe from grief. If she had loved Philip, how each one of these objects—face powder, hair pins, comb—each one would have hurt her!

  (He is not to be trusted. I am only passing by. I am on my way to another place, another life, where he cannot even find me, claim me. How good not to love; I remember the eyes of the woman who met Philip at the beach. Her eyes were in a panic as she looked at me. She wondered if I were the one who would take him away. And how this panic disappeared at the tone of Philip’s voice as he introduced her: “Meet Doña Juana.” The woman had understood the tone of his voice and the fear had vanished from her eyes.)

  What new reassurance Sabina felt as she laced her sandals, swirled her cape and smoothed her long, straight hair. She was not only free from danger but free for a quick get-away. That is what she called it. (Philip had observed he had never seen a woman dress so quickly, never seen a woman gather up her belongings as quickly and never forgetting a single one!)

  How she had learned to flush love letters down the toilet, to leave no hairs on the borrowed comb, to gather up hair pins, to erase traces of lipstick anywhere, to brush off clouds of face powder.

  Her eyes like the eyes of a spy.

  Her habits like the habits of a spy. How she lay all her clothes on one chair, as if she might be called away suddenly and must not leave any traces of her presence.

  She knew all the trickeries in this war of love.

  And her neutral zone, the moment when she belonged to none, when she gathered her dispersed self together again. The moment of non-loving, non-desiring. The moment when she took flight, if the man had admired another woman passing by, or talked too long about an old love, the little offenses, the small stabs, a mood of indifference, a small unfaithfulness, a small treachery, all of them were warnings of possibly larger ones, to be counter-acted by an equal or larger or total unfaithfulness, her own, the most magnificent of counter-poisons, prepared in advance for the ultimate emergencies. She was accumulating a supply of treacheries, so that when the shock came, she would be prepared: “I was not taken unaware, the trap was not sprung on my naïveté, on my foolish trustingness. I had already betrayed. To be always ahead, a little ahead of the expected betrayals by life. To be there first and therefore prepared…”

  When she returned to the room Philip was still asleep. It was the end of the afternoon and the rain sent cooler winds over the bed, but she felt no desire to cover or nestle him, or to give him warmth.

  She had only been away five days but because of all the emotions and experiences which had take place, all the inner expansions and explorations, Sabina felt that she had been away for many years. Alan’s image had receded far into the past, and a great fear of complete loss of him assailed her. Five days containing so many changes within her body and feelings lengthened the period of absence, added immeasurable mileage to her separation from Alan.

  Certain roads one took emotionally also appeared on the map of the heart as traveling away from the center, and ultimately leading to exile.

  Driven by this mood, she appeared at his home.

  “Sabina! I’m so happy. I didn’t expect you for another week. What happened? Nothing went wrong?”

  He was there. Five days had not altered his voice, the all-enveloping expression of his eyes. The apartment had not changed. The same book was still open by his bed, the same magazines had not yet been thrown away. He had not finished some fruit she had bought the last time she had been there. Her hands caressed the overfull ash trays, her fingers designed rivers of meditation on the coats of dust on the table. Here living was gradual, organic, without vertiginous descents or ascents.

  As she stood there the rest of her life appeared like a fantasy. She sought Alan’s hand and searched for the familiar freckle on his wrist. She felt a great need to take a bath before he touched her, to wash herself rigorously of other places, other hands, other odors.

  Alan had obtained for her, as a surprise, some records of drumming and singing from the Ile Joyeuse. They listened to the drumming which began at first remotely as if playing in a distant village smothered in jungle vines. At first like small children’s steps running through dry rushes, and then heavier steps on hollow wood, and then sharp powerful fingers on the drum skins, and suddenly a mass of crackling stumpings, animal skins slapped, and knuckled, stirred and pecked so swiftly there was no time for echoes. Sabina saw the ebony and cinnamon bodies through which the structure of the bones never showed, glistening with the sea’s wild baths, leaping and dancing as quick as the necklaces of drum beats, in emerald greens, indigo blue, tangerines in all the colors of fruits and flowers, flaming eucalyptus of flesh.

  There were places where only the beat of the blood guided the body, where there was no separation from the speed of wind, the tumult of waves, and the sun’s orgies. The voices rich with sap sang joyously… cascabel… guyabana… chinchinegrites…

  “I wish we could go there together,” said Sabina.

  Alan looked at her reproachfully as if it hurt him to be obliged to remind her: “I can’t leave my work. Later this year perhaps…”

  Sabina’s eyes grew fixed. Alan interpreted it as disappointment and added: “Please be patient, Sabina.”

  But Sabina’s gaze was not transfixed by disappointment. It was the fixation of the visionary. She was watching a mirage take form, birds were being born with new names: “cuchuchito,” “Pita real.” They perched on trees called “liquid-ambar,” and over her head stretched a roof made of palm leaves tied with reeds. Later was always too late; later did not exist. There was only great distance to overcome to reach the inaccessible. The drums had come bearing the smell of cinnamon skins in a dance of heartbeats. They would soon bring an invitation which she would not refuse.

  When Alan looked at her face again, her eyelashes had dropped in a simulacrum of obedience. He felt the imminence of departure had been averted by a sudden docility. He did not observe that her quiescence was already in itself a form of absence. She was already inhabiting the Ile Joyeuse.

  Perhaps because of this, when she heard drumming, as she walked along McDougall Street she found it natural to stop, to climb down the steps into a cellar room of orange walls and sit on one of the fur-covered drums.

  The drummers were playing in complete self-absorption intended for a ritual, seeking their own trances. A smell of spices came from the kitchen and gold earrings danced over the steaming dishes.

  The voices started an incantation to Alalle, became the call of birds, the call of animals, rapids falling over rocks, reeds dipping their fingered roots into the lagoon waters. The drums beat so fast the room turned into a forest of tap-dancing foliage, wind chimes cajoling Alalle, the dispenser of pleasure.

  Among the dark faces there was one pale one. A grandfather from France or Spain, and a stream of shell-white had been added to the cauldron of ebony, leaving his hair as black but with a reflector depth like that of a black mirror. His head was round, his brow wide, his cheeks full, his eyes soft and brilliant. His fingers on the drum nimble yet fluid, playing with a vehemence which rippled from his hips and shoulders.

  Sabina could see him swimming, squatting over a fire by the beach, leaping, climbing trees. No bones showing, only the smoothness of the South Sea islander, muscles strong but invisible as in cats.

  The diffusion of color on his face also gave his gestures a nerveless firmness, quite different from the nervous staccato of the other drummers. He came from the island of softness, of soft wind and warm sea, where violence lay in abeyance and exploded only in cycles.
The life too sweet, too lulling, too drugging for continuous anger.

  When they stopped playing they sat at a table near hers, and talked in an elaborate, formal, sixteenth century colonial Spanish, in the stilted language of old ballads. They practiced an elaborate politeness which made Sabina smile. The stylization imposed by the conquerors upon African depths was like a baroque ornamentation on a thatched palm leaf hut. One of them, the darkest one, wore a stiff white collar and had a long-stemmed umbrella by his chair. He held his hat with great care on his knees, and in order not to disturb the well-ironed lines of his suit he drummed almost entirely from the wrists and moved his head from left to right of the starched collar, separate from his shoulders like that of a Balinese dancer.

  She was tempted to disrupt their politeness, to break the polished surface of their placidity with her extravagance. As she shook her cigarette on her vanity case, the Hindu ring given to her by Philip tinkled, and the pale-faced drummer turned his face towards her and smiled, as if this fragile sound were an inadequate response to his drumming.

  When he returned to his singing an invisible web had already been spun between their eyes. She no longer watched his hands on the drumskin but his mouth. His lips were full, evenly so, rich but firmly designed, but the way he held them was like an offer of fruit. They never closed tightly or withdrew by the slightest contraction, but remained offered.

  His singing was offered to her in this cup of his mouth, and she drank it intently, without spilling a drop of this incantation of desire. Each note was the brush of his mouth upon her. His singing grew exalted and the drumming deeper and sharper and it showered upon her heart and body. Drum - drum - drum - drum - drum - upon her heart, she was the drum, her skin was taut under his hands, and the drumming vibrated through the rest of her body. Wherever he rested his eyes, she felt the drumming of his fingers upon her stomach, her breasts, her hips. His eyes rested on her naked feet in sandals and they beat an answering rhythm. His eyes rested on the indented waist where the hips began to swell out, and she felt possessed by his song. When he stopped drumming he left his hands spread on the drumskin, as if he did not want to remove his hands from her body, and they continued to look at each other and then away as if fearing everyone had seen the desire flowing between them.