by Anais Nin
“Yes, yes,” said Sabina, her distress melting. “Yes,” she said, with gratitude not for the gesture of protectiveness, but because if he considered her bad in his own vision, he would not have tucked her in. One does not tuck in a bad woman. And surely this gesture meant that perhaps he would see her again.
He tucked her in gently and with all the neatness of a flyer’s training, using the deftness of long experience with camping. She lay back accepting this, but what he tucked in so gently was not a night of pleasure, a body satiated, but a body in which he had injected the poison which was killing him, the madness of hunger, guilt and death by proxy which tormented him. He had injected into her body his own venomous guilt for living and desiring. He had mingled poison with every drop of pleasure, a drop of poison in every kiss, every thrust of sensual pleasure the thrust of a knife killing what he desired, killing with guilt.
The following day Alan arrived, his equable smile and equable temper unchanged. His vision of Sabina unchanged. Sabina had hoped he would exorcise the obsession which had enslaved her the night before, but he was too removed from her chaotic despair, and his extended hand, his extended love was unequal to the power of what was dragging her down.
The sharp, the intense moment of pleasure which had taken possession of her body, and the sharp intense poison amalgamated with it.
She wanted to rescue John from a distortion she knew led to madness. She wanted to prove to him that his guilt was a distortion, that his vision of her and desire as bad, and of his hunger as bad, was a sickness.
The panic, the hunger and terror of his eyes had passed into her. She wished she had never looked into his eyes. She felt a desperate need to abolish his guilt, the need of rescuing him because for a reason she could not fathom, she had sunk with him into the guilt; she had to rescue him and herself. He had poisoned her, transmitted his doom to her. She would go mad with him if she did not rescue him and alter his vision.
If he had not tucked her in she might have rebelled against him, hated him, hated his blindness. But this act of tenderness had abolished all defenses: he was blind in error, frightened and tender, cruel and lost, and she was all these with him, by him, through himt>
She could not even mock at his obsession with flying. His airplanes were not different from her relationships, by which she sought other lands, strange faces, forgetfulness, the unfamiliar, the fantasy and the fairy tale.
She could not mock his rebellion against being grounded. She understood it, experienced it each time that, wounded, she flew back to Alan. If only he had not tucked her in, not as a bad woman, but as the child, the child he was in a terrifying, confusing world. If only he had left brutally, projecting his shame on her as so often woman bore the brunt of man’s shame, shame thrown at her in place of stones, for seducing and tempting. Then she could have hated him, and forgotten him, but because he had tucked her in, he would come back. He had not thrown his shame at her, he had not said: “You’re bad.” One does not tuck in a bad woman.
But when they met accidentally, and he saw her walking beside Alan, at this moment, in the glance he threw at her, Sabina saw that he had succeeded in shifting the shame and that now what he felt was: “You’re a bad woman,” and that he would never come back to her. Only the poison remained, without hope of the counter-poison.
Alan left, and Sabina stayed with the hope of seeing John again. She sought him vainly at bars, restaurants, movie houses and at the beach. She inquired at the place where he rented his bicycle: they had not seen him but he still had his bicycle.
In desperation she inquired at the house where he rented a room. The room was paid for the next week, but he had not been there for three days and the woman was concerned because John’s father had been telephoning every day.
The last time he had been seen was at the bar, with a group of strangers who had driven away with him.
Sabina felt she should return to New York and forget him, but his eager face and the distress in his eyes made this act seem one of desertion.
At other moments the pleasure he had given her ignited her body like flowing warm mercury darting through the veins. The memory of it flowed through the waves when she swam, and the waves seemed like his hands, or the form of his body in her hands.
She fled from the waves and his hands. But when she lay on the warm sand, it was his body again on which she lay; it was his dry skin and his swift elusive movements slipping through her fingers, shifting beneath her breasts. She fled from the sand of his caresses.
But when she bicycled home, she was racing him, she heard his merry challenges, faster—faster—faster in the wind, his face pursued her in flight or she pursued his face.
That night she raised her face to the moon, and the gesture awakened the pain, because to receive his kiss she had had to raise her face this way, but with the support of his two hands. Her mouth opened to receive his kiss once more but closed on emptiness. She almost shouted out with pain, shouted at the moon,the deaf, impassible goddess of desire shining down mockingly at an empty night, an empty bed.
She decided to pass once more by his house, although it was late, although she dreaded to see once more the empty dead face of his window.
His window was alight and open!
Sabina stood under it and whispered his name. She was hidden by a bush. She dreaded that anyone else in the house should hear her. She dreaded the eyes of the world upon a woman standing under a young man’s window.
“John! John!”
He leaned out of the window, his hair tousled, and even in the moonlight she could see his face was burning and his eyes hazy.
“Who’s there?” he said, always with the tone of a man at war, fearing ambush.
“Sabina. I just wanted to know… Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. I was in the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“A bout of malaria, that’s all.”
“Malaria?”
“I get it, when I drink too much…”
“Will I see you tomorrow?”
He laughed softly: “My father is coming to stay with me.”
“We won’t be able to see each other then. I’d better return to New York.”
“I’ll call you when I get back.”
“Will you come down and kiss me goodnight?”
He hesitated: “They will hear me. They will tell my father.”
“Goodbye, goodnight…”
“Goodbye,” he said, detached, cheerful.
But she could not leave Long Island. It was as if he had thrown a net around her by the pleasure she wanted again, by his creation of a Sabina she wanted to erase, by a poison he alone had the cure for, of a mutual guilt which only an act of love could transmute into something else than a one-night encounter with a stranger.
The moon mocked her as she walked back to her empty bed. The moon’s wide grin which Sabina had never noticed before, never before its mockery of this quest of love which she influenced. I understand his madness, why does he run away from me? I feel close to him, why does he not feel close to me, why doesn’t he see the resemblance between us, between our madness. I want the impossible, I want to fly all the t, I destroy ordinary life, I run towards all the dangers of love as he ran towards all the dangers of war. He runs away, war is less terrifying to him than life…
John and the moon left this madness unexorcised. No trace of it was revealed except when she was taunted:
“Aren’t you interested in war news, don’t you read the papers?”
“I know war, I know all about war.”
“You never seem very close to it.”
(I slept with war, all night I slept with war once. I received deep war wounds into my body, as you never did, a feat of arms for which I will never be decorated!)
In the multiple peregrinations of love, Sabina was quick to recognize the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones, particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died complete
ly and left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller echoes.
A vague physical resemblance, an almost similar mouth, a slightly similar voice, some particle of the character of Philip, or John, would emigrate to another, to whom she recognized immediately in a crowd, at a party, by the erotic resonance it reawakened.
The echoes struck at first through the mysterious instrumentation of the senses which retained sensations as instruments retain a sound after being touched. The body remained vulnerable to certain repetitions long after the mind believed it had made a clear, a final severance.
A similar design of a mouth was sufficient to retransmit the interrupted current of sensations, to recreate a contact by way of the past receptivity, like a channel conducting perfectly only a part of the former ecstasy through the channel of the senses arousing vibrations and sensibilities formerly awakened by a total love or total desire for the entire personality.
The senses created river beds of responses formed in part from the sediments, the waste, the overflow from the original experience. A partial resemblance could stir what remained of the imperfectly rooted-out love which had not died a natural death.
Whatever was torn out of the body, as out of the earth, cut, violently uprooted, left such deceptive, such lively roots below the surface, all ready to bloom again under an artificial association, by a grafting of sensation, given new life through this graft of memory.
Out of the loss of John, Sabina retained such musical vibration below visibility which made her insensitive to men totally different from John and prepared her for a continuation of her interrupted desire for John.
When she saw the slender body of Donald, the same small nose, the head carried on a long-stemmed neck, the echo of the old violent emotions was strong enough to appear like a new desre.
She did not observe the differences, that Donald’s skin was even more transparent, his hair silkier, that he did not spring, but glided, dragging his feet a little, that his voice was passive, indolent, slightly whining.
At first Sabina thought he was gently clowning by his parodies of women’s feathery gestures, by a smile so deliberately seductive imitating the corolla’s involutionary attractions.
She smiled indulgently when he lay down on the couch preparing such a floral arrangement of limbs, head, hands as to suggest a carnal banquet.
She laughed when he trailed his phrases like southern vines, or practiced sudden exaggerated severities as children do when they play charades of the father’s absurd arrogances, of the mother’s hot-house exudations of charm.
When Sabina crossed the street, she nourished herself upon the gallant smile of the policeman who stopped the traffic for her, she culled the desire of the man who pushed the revolving door for her, she gathered the flash of adoration from the drug clerk: “Are you an actress?” She picked the bouquet of the shoe salesman trying on her shoes: “Are you a dancer?” As she sat in the bus she received the shafts of the sun as a personal, intimate visit. She felt a humorous connivance with the truck driver who had to pull the brakes violently before her impulsive passages, and who did so smiling because it was Sabina and they were glad to see her crossing their vision.
But she considered this feminine sustenance like pollen. To her amazement, Donald, walking beside her, assumed these offerings were intended for him.
He passed what she believed to be from one mimicry to another: the pompous policeman, for which he filled his lungs with air, the sinuosities of the woman walking in front of them, for which he tangoed his hips.
Sabina was still laughing, wondering when the charades would end and the true Donald appear.
At this moment, in front of her at the restaurant table he was ordering with the exaggerated tyranny of the business executive, or he became prim with the salesgirl like a statesman with little time for charm. He ridiculed women in their cycles of periodic irrationality with an exact reproduction of whims, contrariness, and commented on the foibles of fashion with a minute expertness Sabina lacked. He made her doubt her femininity by the greater miniature precision of his miniature interests. His love of small roses, of delicate jewelry seemed more feminine than her barbaric heavy necklaces and her dislike of small flowers and nursery pastel blues.
At any moment, she believed, this playfulness would cease, he would stand more erect and laugh with her at his own absurdities of dress, a shirt the color of her dress, a baroque watch, a woman’s billfold, or a strand of hair dyed silver gray on his young luxuriant gold head.
But he continued to assume mock professions, to mock all of them. Above all, he possessed a most elaborate encyclopedia of women’s flaws. In this gallery he had most carefully avoided Joan of Arc and other women heroines, Madame Curie and other women o science, the Florence Nightingales, the Amelia Earharts, the women surgeons, the therapists, the artists, the collaborative wives. His wax figures of women were an endless concentrate of puerilities and treacheries.
“Where did you find all these repulsive women?” she asked one day, and then suddenly she could no longer laugh: caricature was a form of hatred.
In his gentleness lay his greatest treachery. His submission and gentleness lulled one while he collected material for future satires. His glance always came from below as if he were still looking up at the monumental figures of the parents from a child’s vantage point. These immense tyrants could only be undermined with the subtlest parody: the mother, his mother, with her flurry of feathers and furs, always preoccupied with people of no importance, while he wept with loneliness and fought the incubus of nightmares alone.
She danced, she flirted, she whined, she whirled without devotion to his sorrows. Her caressing voice contained all the tormenting contradictions: the voice read him fairy tales, and when he believed them and proceeded to pattern his life after them, this same voice gave an acid bath to all his wishes, longings, desires, and distributed words worse than a slap, a closed door or dessertless dinner.
And so today, with Sabina walking at his side believing she could destroy the corrosive mother by enacting her opposite, by full attentiveness to his secret wishes, not dancing with others, not flirting, never whining, focusing the full searchlight of her heart upon him, his eyes did not see her alone, but Sabina and a third woman forever present in a perpetual triangle, a ménage à trois,in which the mother’s figure often stood between them, intercepting the love Sabina desired, translating her messages to Donald in terms of repetitions of early disappointments, early treacheries, all the mother’s sins against him.
He kneeled at her feet to re-lace the sandal which was undone, an act he performed with the delicacy not of an enamored man, but of a child at a statue’s feet, of a child intent on dressing woman, adorning her, but not for himself to claim. In performing these adulations he fulfilled a secret love for satin, for feathers, for trinkets, for adornment, and it was a caress not to Sabina’s feet but to the periphery of all that he could caress without breaking the ultimate taboo: touching his mother’s body.
To touch the silk which enwrapped her, the hair which stemmed from her, the flowers she wore.
Suddenly his face, which had been bent over the task, lifted to her with the expression of a blind man suddenly struck with vision. He explained: “Sabina! I felt a shock all through my body while I tied your sandals. It was like an electric shock.”
And then as quickly, his face clouded with the subdued light of filtered emotions, and he returned to his neutral zone: some early, pre-man fin-knowledge of woman, indirect, enveloping, but without any trace of a passageway for erotic penetration. Brushings, silken radiations, homage of eyes alone, possession of a little finger, of a sleeve, never a full hand on a bare shoulder but a flight from touch, wavelets and rivulets of delicate incense, that was all that flowed from hi her.
The electric shock sank beneath his consciousness.
By touching her naked foot he had felt a unity
resembling the first unity of the world, unity with nature, unity with the mother, early memories of an existence within the silk, warmth and effortlessness of a vast love. By touching her foot this empty desert which lay between him and other human beings, bristling with all the plants of defenses, the cactus varieties of emotional repellents, grown impenetrable between himself and other young men, even when they lay body to body, was annihilated. There were sensual acts in which he had not felt this sudden flowing together which had happened between her naked foot and his hands, between the heart of her and the core of himself. This heart of Sabina’s, which he imagined panoplied for refuge, and the core of himself, which he had never felt before except as the crystal structure of his young man’s body which he knew, in her presence, he discovered to be soft and vulnerable.
He became aware of all his fragilities at once, his dependence, his need. Nearer she came, her face growing larger as she bent over him, her eyes brighter and warmer, nearer and nearer, melting his hostilities.
It was terribly sweet to be so naked in her presence. As in all the tropical climates of love, his skin softened, his hair felt silkier on his skin, his nerves untangled from their sharp wiry contortions. All the tensions of pretenses ceased. He felt himself growing smaller, back to his natural size, as in tales of magic, shrinking painlessly in order to enter this refuge of her heart, relinquishing the straining for maturity. But with this came all the corresponding moods of childhood: the agonized helplessness, the early defenselessness, the anguish at being at others’ complete mercy.
It was necessary to arrest this invasion of her warmth which drugged his will, his uprightness in anger, to arrest this dissolution and flowing of one being into another which had already taken place once between his mother and then been violently shattered with the greatest shock and pain by her fickleness and frivolities. It was necessary to destroy this fluid warmth in which he felt himself absorbed, drowning as within the sea itself, her body a chalice, a ciborium, a niche of shadows. Her gray cotton dress folded like an accordion around her feet, with the gold dust of secrecy between each rivulet of tissue, a journey of infinite detours in which his manhood would be trapped, captured.