A Spy in the House of Love

by Anais Nin

  These moments when she reached a humorous peak above the morass of dangers, the smothering swamps of guilt, were the ones when everyone left her alone, unabsolved; they seemed to be awaiting her hour of punishment after living like a spy in the house of many loves, for avoiding exposure, for defeating the sentinels watching definite boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another.

  Every spy’s life had ended in ignominious death.

  She stood waiting for the light to change at the crossroad of the beach town.

  What startled Sabina and made her examine the cyclist waiting beside her was the extraordinary brilliance of his large eyes. They shone with a wet, silver sparkle which was almost frightening because it highlighted the tumultuous panic close to the surface. The molten silver was disquieting, like blinding reflectors on the edge of annihilation by darkness. She was caught in the contagion of this panic, the transparent film of precious stone trembling, about to be sucked in by a hidden cyclone.

  It was only later that she noticed the delicately chiseled face, the small nose, the mouth modeled by gentleness, unrelated to the deeper disturbance of the eyes, a very young man’s mouth, a pure design on the face not yet enslaved by his feelings. These feelings not yet known to him, had not yet acid-bitten through his body. His gestures were free and nimble, the gestures of an adolescent, restless and light. The eyes alone contained all the fever.

  He had driven his bicycle like a racing car or an airplane.

  He had come down upon her as if he did not see trees, cars, people, and almost overlooked the stop signal.

  To free herself of the shock his eyes had given her she sought to diminish their power by thinking: “They are just beautiful eyes, they are just passionate eyes, young men rarely have such passionate eyes, they are just more alive than other eyes.” But no sooner had she said this to herself to exorcise his spell than a deeper instinct in her added: “He has seen something other young men have not seen.”

  The red light changed to green; he gave a wild spurt to his pedaling, so swift that she had no time to step on the curb, then just as wildly he stopped and asked her the way to the beach in a breathless voice which seemed to miss a beat. The voice matched the eyes as his tan, healthy, smooth skin did not.

  The tone in which he asked directions was as if the beach were a shelter to which he was speeding away from grave dangers.

  He was no handsomer than the other young men she had seen in the place, but his eyes left a memory and stirred in her a wild rebellion against the place. With bitter irony she remembered ruins she had seen in Guatemala, and an American visitor saying: “I hate ruins, I hate dilapidation, tombs.” But this new town at the beach was infinitely more static and more disintegrated than the ancient ruins. The clouds of monotony, uniformity, which hung over the new, neat mansions, the impeccable lawns, the dustless garden furniture. The men and women at the beach, all in one dimension, without any magnetism to bring them together, zombies of civilization, in elegant dress with dead eyes.

  Why was she here? Waiting for Alan to end his work, Alan who had promised to come. But the longing for other places kept her awake.

  She walked and collided against a sign which read: “This is the site of the most costly church on Long Island.”

  She walked. At midnight the town was deserted. Everyone was at home with bottles from which they hoped to extract a gaiety bottled elsewhere.

  “It’s the kind of drinking one does at wakes,” thought Sabina, looking into the bars, where limp figures clutched at bottles containing oblivion.

  At one o’clock she looked for a drug store to buy sleeping pills. They were closed. She walked. At two o’clock she was worn out but still tormented by a place which refused to have feasts on the street, dances, fireworks, orgies of guitars, marimbas, shouts of delight, tournaments of poetry and courtships.

  At three o’clock she swung towards the beach to ask the moon why she had allowed one of her night children to become so lost in a place long ago deprived of human life.

  A car stopped beside her, and a very tall, white-haired Irish policeman addressed her courteously.

  “Can I give you a lift home?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said Sabina. “I was looking for a drug store to buy sleeping pills, or aspirin. They’re all closed. I was trying to walk until I felt sleepy…”

  “Boy trouble?” he said, his white-haired head very gallantly held with a suave rectitude which did not come from his policeman’s training but from some deeper pride in rectitude itself as the image of man’s erotic pride.

  But the words so inadequate that they inhibited whatever she would have liked to confide in him, for fear of another adolescent stunted comment. His appearance of maturity was belied by the clumsy words. So she said vaguely: “I’m homesick for all the beach towns I have known, Capri, Mallorca, the south of France, Venice, the Italian Riviera, South America. “

  “I understand that,” he said. “I was homesick when I first came to this country from Ireland.”

  “A year ago I was dancing on the beach under palm trees. The music was wild, and the waves washed our feet while we danced.”

  “Yes, I know. I was a bodyguard for a rich man. Everybody sat in the port cafés at night. It was like the Fourth of July every night. Come along, I’ll take you to my home. The wife and kids are asleep, but I can give you some aspirin.”

  She sat beside him. He continued to recall his life as a bodyguard, when he had traveled all around the world. He controlled the car without a dissonance.

  “I hate this town,” she said vehemently.

  He had driven smoothly beside a neat white house. He said: “Wait here,” and went into the house.

  When he returned he was carrying a glass of water and two aspirin in the palm of his hand. Sabina’s nerves began to untangle. She took the water and aspirin obediently.

  He turned his powerful flashlight upon a bush in his garden and said: “Look at this!”

  In the night she saw flowers of velvet with black hearts and gold eyes.

  “What kind of a flower is that?” she asked, to please him.

  “Roses of Sharon,” he said reverently and with the purest of Irish accents. “They only grow in Ireland and on Long Island.”

  Sabina’s rebellion was subsiding. She felt a tenderness for the roses of Sharon, for the policeman’s protectiveness, for his effort to find a substitute for tropical flowers, a little beauty in the present night.

  “I’ll sleep now,” she said. “You can drop me off at the Penny Cottage.”

  “Oh no,” he said, sitting at the wheel. “We’ll drive around by the sea until you’re so sleepy you can’t bear it anymore. You can’t sleep, you know, until you find something to be grateful for, you can never sleep when you’re angry.”

  She could not hear very distinctly his long and rambling stories about his life as a bodyguard, except when he said: “There’s two of you giving me trouble with homesickness today. The other was a young fellow in the English Air Corps. Aviator all through the war, seventeen when he volunteered. He’s grounded now, and he can’t take it. He’s restless and keeps speeding and breaking traffic laws. The red lights drive him crazy. When I saw what it was, I stopped giving him tickets. He’s used to airplanes. Being grounded is tough. I know how he feels.”

  She felt the mists of sleep rising from the ground, bearing the perfume of roses of Sharon; in the sky shone the eyes of the grounded aviator not yet accustomed to small scales, to shrunken spaces. There were other human beings attempting vast flights, with a kind policeman as tall as the crusaders watching over them with a glass of water and two aspirins; she could sleep now, she could sleep, she could find her bed with his flashlight shining on the keyhole, his car so smoothly so gently rolling away, his white hair saying sleep…

  Sabina in the telephone booth. Alan had just said that he was unable to come that day. Sabina felt like sliding down on the floor and sobbing out the loneliness. She
wanted to return to New York but he begged her to wait.

  There were places which were like ancient tombs in which a day was a century of non-existence. He had said: “Surely you can wait another day. I’ll be there tomorrow. Don’t be unreasonable. “

  She could not explain that perfect lawns, costly churches, new cement and fresh paint can make a vast tomb without stone gods to admire, without jewels, or urns full of food for the dead, without hieroglyphs to decipher.

  Telephone wires only carried literal messages, never the subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams they delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and deaths, but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb, and one more day in it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish policemen, and roses of Sharon were too gentle a cure for suffocation.

  Grounded. Just before she slid down to the floor, the bottom of the telephone cabin, the bottom of her loneliness, she saw the grounded aviator waiting to use the telephone. When she came out of the booth he looked distressed again as he seemed to be by everything that happened in time of peace. But he smiled when he recognized her, saying: “You told me the way to the beach.”

  “You found it? You liked it?”

  “A little flat for my taste. I like rocks and palm trees. Got used to them in India, during the war.”

  War as an abstraction had not yet penetrated Sabina’s consciousness. She was like the communion seekers who received religion only in the form of a wafer on the tongue. War as a wafer placed on her tongue directly by the young aviator came suddenly very close to her, and she saw that if he shared with her his contempt for the placidities of peace it was only to take her straight into the infernal core of war. That was his world. When he said: “Get your bicycle then, and I’ll show you a better beach further on…” it was not only to escape from fashionable reclining figures on the beach, from golf players and human barnacles glued to damp bar flanks, it was to bicycle into his inferno. As soon as they started to walk along the beach, he began to talk:

  “I’ve had five years of war as a rear gunner. Been to India a couple of years, been to North Africa, slept in the desert, crashed several times, made about one hundred missions, saw all kinds of things… Men dying, men yelling when they’re trapped in burning planes. Their arms charred, their hands like claws of animals. The first time I was sent to the field after a crash…the smell of burning flesh. It’s sweet and sickening, and it sticks to you for days. You can’t wash it off. You can’t get rid of it. It haunts you. We had good laughs, though, laughs all the time. We laughed plenty. We would steal prostitutes and push them into the beds of the men who didn’t like women. We had drunks that lasted several days. I liked that life. India. I’d like to go back. This life here, what people talk about, what they do, think, bores me. I liked sleeping in the desert. I saw a black woman giving birth… She worked on the fields carrying dirt for a new airfield. She stopped carrying dirt to give birth under the wing of the plane, just like that, and then bound the kid in some rags and went back to work. Funny to see the big plane, so modern, and this half naked black woman giving birth and then continuing to carry dirt in pails for an airfield. You know, only two of us came back alive of the bunch I started with. We played pranks, though. My buddies always warned me: ‘Don’t get grounded; once you’re grounded you’re done for.’ Well, they grounded me too. Too many rear gunners in the service. I didn’t want to come home. What’s civilian life? Good for old maids. It’s a rut. It’s drab. Look at this: the young girls giggle, giggle at nothing. The boys are after me. Nothing ever happens. They don’t laugh hard, and they don’t yell. They don’t get hurt, and they don’t die, and they don’t laugh either.”

  Always something in his eyes which she could not read, something he had seen but would not talk about.

  “I like you because you hate this place, and because you don’t giggle,” he said taking her hand with gentleness.

  They walked endlessly, tirelessly, along the beach, until there were no more houses, no more cared-for gardens, no more people, until the beach became wild and showed no footsteps, until the debris from the sea lay “like a bombed museum,” he said.

  I’m glad I found a woman who walks my stride as you do,” he said. “And who hates what I hate.”

  As they bicycled homeward he looked elated, his smooth skin flushed with sun and pleasure. The slight trembling of his gestures had vanished.

  The fireflies were so numerous they flew into their faces.

  “In South America,” said Sabina, “the women wear fireflies in their hair, but fireflies stop shining when they go to sleep so now and then the women have to rub the fireflies to keep them awake.”

  John laughed.

  At the door of the cottage where she stayed, he hesitated.

  He could see it was a rooming house in a private family’s jurisdiction. She made no movement but fixed her enlarged, velvet-pupiled eyes on his and held them, as if to subdue the panic in them.

  He said in a very low voice: “I wish I could stay with you.” And then bent over to kiss her with a fraternal kiss, missing her mouth.

  “You can if you wish.”

  “They will hear me.”

  “You know a great deal about war,” said Sabina, “but I know a great deal about peace. There’s a way you can come in and they will never hear you.”

  “Is that true?” But he was not reassured and she saw that he had merely shifted his mistrust of the critical family to mistrust of her knowledge of intrigue which made her a redoubtable opponent.

  She was silent and made a gesture of abdication, starting to run towards the house. It was then he grasped her and kissed her almost desperately, digging his nervous, lithe fingers into her shoulders, into her hair, grasping her hair as if he were drowning, to hold her head against his as if she might escape his grasp.

  “Let me come in with you.”

  “Then take off your shoes,” she whispered.

  He followed her.

  “My room is on the first floor. Keep in step with me as we go up the stairs; they creak. But it will sound like one person.” He smiled.

  When they reached her room, and she closed the door, he examined his surroundings as if to assure himself he had not fallen into an enemy trap.

  His caresses were so delicate that they were almost like a teasing, an evanescent challenge which she feared to respond to as it might vanish. His fingers teased her, and withdrew when they had aroused her, his mouth teased her and then eluded hers, his face and body came so near, espoused her every limb and then slid away into the darkness. He would seek every curve and nook he could exert the pressure of his warm slender body against and suddenly lie still, leaving her in suspense. When he took her mouth he moved away from her hands, when she answered the pressure of his thighs, he ceased to exert it. Nowhere would he allow a long enough fusion, but tasting every embrace, every area of her body and then deserting it, as if to ignite only and then elude the final welding. A teasing, warm, trembling, elusive short circuit of the senses as mobile and restless as he had been all day, and here at night, with the street lamp revealing their nudity but not his eyes, she was aroused to an almost unbearable expectation of pleasure. He had made of her body a bush of roses of Sharon, exfoliating pollen, each prepared for delight.

  So long delayed, so long teased that when possession came it avenged the waiting by a long, prolonged, deep thrusting ecstasy.

  The trembling passed into her body. She had amalgamated his anxieties, she had absorbed his delicate skin, his dazzling eyes.

  The moment of ecstasy had barely ended when he moved away and he murmured: Life is flying, flying.

  “This is flying,” said Sabina. But she saw his body lying there no longer throbbing, and knew she was alone in her feeling, that this moment contained all the speed, all the altitude, all the space she wanted.

  Almost immediately he began to talk in the dark, about burning planes, about going out to find the f
ragments of the living ones, to check on the dead.

  “Some die silent,” he said. “You know by the look in their eyes that they are going to die. Some die yelling, and you have to turn your face away and not look into their eyes. When I was being trained, you know, the first thing they told me: ‘Never look into a dying man’s eyes.’”

  “But you did,” said Sabina.

  “No, I didn’t, I didn’t.”

  “But I know you did. I can see it in your eyes; you did look into dying men’s eyes, the first time perhaps…”

  She could see him so clearly, at seventeen, not yet a man, with the delicate skin of a girl, the finely carved features, the small straight nose, the mouth of a woman, a shy laugh, something very tender about the whole face and body, looking into the eyes of the dying.

  “The man who trained me said: ‘Never look into the eyes of the dying or you’ll go mad.’ Do you think I’m mad? Is that what you mean?”

  “You’re not mad. You’re very hurt, and very frightened, and very desperate, and you feel you have no right to live, to enjoy, because your friends are dead or dying, or flying still. Isn’t that it?”

  “I wish I were there now, drinking with them, flying, seeing new countries, new faces, sleeping in the desert, feeling you may die any moment and so you must drink fast, and fight hard, and laugh hard. I wish I were there now, instead of here, being bad.”

  “Being bad?”

  “This is being bad, isn’t it? You can’t say it isn’t, can you?” He slipped out of bed and dressed. His words had destroyed her elation. She covered herself up to her chin with the sheet and lay silent.

  When he was ready, before he gathered up his shoes, he bent over her, and in the voice of a tender young man playing at being a father he said: “Would you like me to tuck you in before I leave?”