A Spy in the House of Love

by Anais Nin

  But when they danced he changed. The direct, the inescapable way he placed his knees between hers, as if implanting the rigidity of his desire. He held her firmly, so encompassed that every movement they made was made as one body. He held her head against his, with a physical finiteness, as if for eternity. His desire became a center of gravity, a final welding. He was not much taller than she but held himself proudly, and when she raised her eyes into his, his eyes thrust into her very being, so sensually direct that she could not bear their radiance, their claim. Fever shone in his face like moonlight. At the same time a strange wave of anger appeared which she felt and could not understand.

  When the dance ended, his bow was a farewell, as finite as his desire had been.

  She waited in anguish and bewilderment.

  He went back to his singing and drumming but no longer offered them to her.

  Yet she knew he had desired her, and why was he destroying it now? Why?

  Her anxiety grew so violent she wanted to stop the drumming, stop the others from dancing. But she checked this impulse, sensing it would estrange him. There was his pride. There was this strange mixture of passivity and aggression in him. In music he had been glowing and soft and offered; in the dance, tyrannical. She must wait. She must respect the ritual.

  The music stopped, he came to her table, sat down and gave her a smile mixed with a contraction of pain.

  “I know,” he said. “I know…”

  “You know?”

  “I know, but it cannot be,” he said very gently. And then suddenly the anger overflowed: “For me, it’s everything or nothing. I’ve known this before…a woman like you. Desire. It’s desire, but not for me. You don’t know me. It’s for my race, it’s for a sensual power we have.”

  He reached for her wrists and spoke close to her face: “It destroys me. Everywhere desire, and in the ultimate giving, withdrawal. Because I am African. What do you know of me? I sing and drum and you desire me. But I’m not an entertainer. I’m a mathematician, a composer, a writer.” He looked at her severely, the fullness of his mouth difficult to compress in anger but his eyes lashing: “You wouldn’t come to Ile Joyeuse and be my wife and bear me black children and wait patiently upon my Negro grandmother!”

  Sabina answered him with equal vehemence, throwing her hair away from her face, and lowering the pitch of her voice until it sounded like an insult: “I’ll tell you one thing: if it were only what you say, I’ve had that, and it didn’t hold me, it was not enough. It was magnificent, but it didn’t hold me. You’re destroying everything, with your bitterness. You’re angry, you’ve been hurt…”

  “Yes, it’s true, I’ve been hurt, and by a woman who resembled you. When you first came in, I thought it was she…”

  “My name is Sabina.”

  “I don’t trust you, I don’t trust you at all.”

  But when she rose to dance with him, he opened his arms and as she rested her head on his shoulder he looked down at her face drained of all anger and bitterness.

  Mambo’s studio was situated in Patchen Place, a street without issue. An iron railing half blocked its entrance, like an entrance to a prison. The houses all being identical added to this impression of an institution where all variations in the human personality would be treated like eccentricities and symptoms of disintegration.

  Sabina hated this street. She always considered it a trap. She was certain that the lie detector had seen her enter and would wait at the gate to see her come out. How simple it would be for him to find out who lived there, whom she visited, which house she came out of in the morning.

  She imagined him searching every house, reading all the names on the letter boxes: E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Mambo of Mambo’s Nightclub, known to everyone.

  At dawn, the lie detector himself would see her come out of the house, holding her cape tightly around her against the morning sharpness, her hair not smoothly combed, and her eyes not fully opened.

  Any other street but this one.

  Once in the early summer, she had been awakened by a painful tension of the nerves. All the windows were open. It was near dawn. The little street was absolutely silent. She could hear the leaves shivering on the trees. Then a cat wailing. Why had she awakened? Was there any danger? Was Alan watching at the gate?

  She heard a woman’s voice call out distinctly: “Betty! Betty!” And a voice answered in the muffled tones of half-sleep: “What’s the matter?”

  “Betty! There’s a man hiding in one of the doorways. I saw him sneak in.”

  “Well…what do you want me to do about it? He’s just a drunk getting home.”

  “No, Betty. He was trying to hide when I leaned out of the window. Ask Tom to go and see. I’m frightened.”

  “Oh, don’t be childish. Go to sleep. Tom worked late last night. I can’t wake him. The man can’t get in anyhow, unless you press the button and let him in!”

  “But he’ll be there when I go to work. He’ll wait there. Call Tom.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  Sabina began to tremble. She was certain it was Alan. Alan was waiting down below, to see her come out. For her this was the end of the world. Alan was the core of her life. These other moments of fever were moments in a dream: insubstantial and vanishing as quickly as they came. But if Alan repudiated her, it was the death of Sabina. Her existence in Alan’s eyes was her only true existence. To say to herself “Alan cast me off,” was like saying: “Alan killed me.”

  The caresses of the night before were acutely marvelous, like all the multicolored flames from an artful fireworks, bursts of exploded suns and neons within the body, flying comets aimed at all the centers of delight, shooting stars of piercing joys, and yet if she said: “I will stay here and live with Mambo forever,” it was like the children she had seen trying to stand under the showers of sparks from the fireworks lasting one instant and covering them with ashes.

  She saw two scenes before her eyes: Alan sobbing as he had sobbed at the death of his father, and this image caused her an intolerable pain. And the second image was Alan angry, as he had never shown himself to her but to others, and this was equally intolerable; both equally annihilating.

  It was not dawn yet. What could she do? Her anxiety was so great she could not continue to lie there in silence. How would she explain to Mambo her leaving so early in the morning? Nevertheless she rose quietly after sliding gradually out of bed, and dressed. She was trembling and her clothes slipped awkwardly between her fingers.

  She must go and see who was the man hiding in the doorway. She could not bear the suspense.

  She left the apartment slowly, noiselessly. She walked barefoot down the stairs, carrying her sandals. When one step creaked, she stopped. Perspiration showed on her eyebrows. A feeling of utter weakness kept her hands trembling. She finally o others, ed the door and saw a man’s outline behind the frosted glass of the door. He stood there smoking a pipe as Alan smoked it. Sabina’s heart was paralyzed. She knew why she had always hated this street without issue. She stood there fully ten minutes, paralyzed by terror and guilt, by regrets for what she was losing.

  “It’s the end of the world,” she whispered.

  As if she were about to die, she summarized her existence: the heightened moments of passion dissolved as unimportant in the face of the loss of Alan as if this love were the core of her existence.

  Formulating this, the anguish increased to the point where she could no longer stand still. She pushed the door open violently.

  A stranger stood there, with red, blood-shot eyes and unsteady legs. He was frightened by her sudden appearance and muttered, leaning backwards: “Can’t find my name on the doorbell, lady, can you help me?”

  Sabina looked at him with a wild fury and ran past him, the corner of her cape slapping his face.

  Mambo reproached her constantly: “You don’t love me.” He felt that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the legends, the trees, the drums of the island he came f
rom, that she sought to possess ardently both his body and his island, that she offered her body to his hands as much as to tropical winds, and that the undulations of pleasure resembled those of swimmers in tropical seas. She savored on his lips his island spices, and it was from his island too that he had learned his particular way of caressing her, a silken voluptuousness without harshness or violence, like the form of his island body on which no bone showed.

  Sabina did not feel guilty for drinking of the tropics through Mambo’s body: she felt a more subtle shame, that of bringing him a fabricated Sabina, feigning a single love.

  Tonight when the drug of caresses whirled them into space, free—free for an instant of all the interferences to complete union created by human beings themselves, she would give him an undisguised Sabina.

  When their still throbbing bodies lay side by side, there was always silence, and in this silence each one began to weave the separating threads, to disunite what had been united, to return to each what had been for a moment equally shared.

  There were essences of caresses which could penetrate the heaviest insulations, filtering through the heaviest defenses, but these, so soon after the exchange of desires, could be destroyed like the seeds of birth.

  Mambo proceeded to this careful labor by renewing his secret accusation against Sabina, that she sought only pleasure, that she loved in him only the island man, the swimmer and the drummer, that she never touched in him, or ardently desired, or took into her body, the artist that he most valued in himself, the composer of music which was a distillation of the barbaric themes of his origin.

  He was a run-away from his own island, seeking awareness, seeking shadi and delicate balances as in the music ofDebussy, and at his side lay Sabina, feverishly dispersing all the delicacies as she demanded: “Drum! Mambo, drum! Drum for me.”

  Sabina too was slipping out of the burning moment which had almost welded their differences. Her secret self unveiled and naked in his arms must be costumed once more for what she felt in the silence were his withdrawal and silent accusations.

  Before he could speak and harm her with words while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabina he struck down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: “That was not me.”

  Any devastating words addressed to the Sabina he had possessed, the primitive one, could not reach her then; she was already halfway out of the forest of their desire, the core already far away, invulnerable, protected by flight. What remained was a costume: it was piled on the floor of his room, and empty of her.

  Once in an ancient city in South America, Sabina had seen streets which had been ravaged by an earthquake. Nothing was left but façades, as in Chirico paintings; the façades of granite had remained with doors and windows half unhinged, opening unexpectedly, not upon a household nestled around a hearth, but whole families camping under the sky, protected from strangers only by one wall and door, but otherwise completely free of walls or roofs from the other three sides.

  She realized that it was this illimitable space she had expected to find in every lover’s room, the sea, the mountains visible all around, the world shut off on one side. A hearth without roof or walls, growing between trees, a floor through which wild flowers pushed to show smiling faces, a column housing stray birds, temples and pyramids and baroque churches in the distance.

  But when she saw four walls and a bed pushed against the corner as if it had been flying and had collided against an obstacle, she did not feel as other voyagers: “I have arrived at my destination and can now remove my traveling costume,” but: “I have been captured and from here, sooner or later, I must escape.”

  No place, no human being could bear to be gazed at with the critical eye of the absolute, as if they were obstacles to the reaching of a place or person of greater value created by the imagination. This was the blight she inflicted upon each room when she asked herself: “Am I to live here forever?” This was the blight, the application of the irrevocable, the endless fixation upon a place or relationship. It aged it prematurely, it accelerated the process of decay by staleness. A chemical death ray, this concentrate of time, inflicting the fear of stasis like a consuming ray, deteriorating at the high speed of a hundred years per minute.

  At this moment she was aware of her evil, of an invisible crime equal to murder in life. It was her secret sickness, one she believed incurable, unnamable.

  Having touched the source of death, she turned back to her source of life; it was only in Stravinsky’s The Firebird that Sabina found her unerring musical autobiography. It was only here she could find the lost Sabina, her self-revelation.

  Even when the first sensual footsteps of the orange bird first appeared, phosphorescent tracks along magnolia forests, she recognized her first sensations, the adolescent stalking of emotion, of its shadow first of all, the echo of its dazzling presence, not yet daring to enter the circle of frenzy.

  She recognized the first prologue waltzes, the paintings on glass which might shatter at the touch of warm hands, the moon’s haloes around featureless heads, the preparations for festivities and the wild drums announcing feasts of the hearts and senses. She recognized the crimson suspenses, the elevations which heightened the pulse, the wind which thrust its hieroglyphs through the swan necks of the trombones.

  The fireworks were mounted on wire bodies waving amorous arms, tiptoeing on the purple tongues of the Holy Ghost, leaping out of captivity, Mercury’s wings of orange on pointed torches hurled like javelins into space sparring through the clouds, the purple vulvas of the night.

  On many of the evenings Sabina spent with Mambo they did not go anywhere.

  On evenings when Sabina had agreed to return to Alan at midnight, her going out with a friend would not have been fatal or too difficult to explain; but there were evenings (when she wanted to spend a few whole nights with her lover) when she had been obliged to say she was traveling, and then when Mambo suggested: “Let’s go to a movie,” the conflict was started. She did not like to answer: “I don’t want Alan to see me.” This made her feel like a child being watched, or a woman in a state of subjection, so much did her feelings about Alan seem not like those of a woman wanting to be faithful or loyal but those of an adolescent escaping home for some forbidden games. She could only see Alan as a kind father who might become angry at her lies and punish her. She would also, if she mentioned Alan’s rights, be forced to confess to Mambo the division in her affections. At times her lies seemed to her like the most intricate act of protectiveness instead of the greatest treachery. Other days she felt tempted to confess, but would be blocked by the knowledge that even if she were forgiven, Alan would expect then a change of life, and this she knew she was powerless to achieve.

  At mention of the movies she would assent, but as if it were a game of chance she were playing, each time that Mambo suggested one movie, or another, or still another, she weighed them not so much for their qualities as movies, but according to what quarter of the city they were shown at, whether or not it was a movie Alan might care to see, whether it was near at hand (knowing Alan was lazy about going uptown). If she were with Alan she would have to try and remember the movies Mambo had seen, or the ones he wanted to see, and knowing how fanatical he was about movies, to gauge even those he might see twice.

  Ultimately, like a gambler, she had to question her instinct.

  Once seated at the movies her anxiety increased. Alan might have liked this movie enough to want to see it again, or a friend might have persuaded him to make the eft to go uptown. Could Mambo be sitting in the audience while she sat with Alan, could he have seen her walking down the aisle?

  Sometimes she discarded her anxiety as nervousness. At other times she was compelled to go to the ladies’ room at the very beginning in order to be able to walk slowly and carefully down the aisle examining the crowd from behind before settling down beside Mambo or Alan. This
would relieve her anxiety for awhile, until some fragment of the movie story itself would reawaken it, if a lie were pictured, a false situation, exposure. Above all if it were a spy story.

  It was when she saw the lives of spies that she realized fully the tension with which she lived every moment, equal to theirs. The fear of committing themselves, of sleeping too soundly, of talking in their sleep, of carelessness of accent or behavior, the need for continuous pretending, quick improvisations of motivations, quick justifications of their presence here or there.

  It seemed to Sabina that she could have offered her services or been of great value in that profession.

  I am an international spy in the house of love.

  When the anxiety became absolutely intolerable it was transmuted into playfulness. The excitement and risks appeared as a highly flavored, highly humorous game. Then she shifted her position entirely to that of a child escaping surveillance and being amused by her own ingenuity. Then she passed from secrecy to a need of boasting openly of her maneuvers and would describe them with such gaiety that it would shock her hearers. Both anxiety and humor became interchangeable. The pretenses, escapades, trickeries seemed to her in her humorous moods like gay and gallant efforts at protecting everyone from the cruelties of existence for which she was not responsible. Wits and good acting were employed for such justifiable ends: to protect human beings from unbearable truths.

  But no one who listened ever shared her sudden gaiety: in their glances she read condemnations. Her laughter seemed a desecration, a mockery of what should be considered tragic. She could see in their eyes the wish that she should fall from this incandescent trapeze on which she walked with the aid of delicate Japanese paper umbrellas, for no guilty party has a right to such adroitness and to live only by its power to balance over the rigidities of life which dictated a choice, according to its taboos against multiple lives. No one would share with her this irony and playfulness against the rigidities of life itself; no one would applaud when she succeeded by her ingenuity in defeating life’s limitations.