by Anais Nin
He dropped her naked foot and rose stiffly. He took up where he had left off, took up the adolescent charades. His gentleness turned to limpness, the hand he extended to take the cape off her shoulders was as if severed from the rest of his body.
He took up following her, carrying her cape. He incensed her with words, he sat in the closest proximity, in her shadow, always near enough to bask in the warmth emanating from her body, always within reach of her hand, always with his shirt open at the throat in an oblique challenge to her hands, but the mouth in flight. Wearing around his waist the most unique belts so that her eyes would admire his waist, but the body in flight.
This design in space was a continuation of John’s way of caressing her, the echo of his teasings. The tantalizing night spent in seeking the sources of pleasure but avoiding all possible dangers ofwelding their bodies into any semblance of marriage. It aroused in Sabina a similar suspense, all the erotic nerves awakened, throwing off futile, wasted sparks in space.
She saw his charades as a child’s jealous imitations of a maturity he could not reach.
“You’re sad, Sabina,” he said. “Come with me. I have things to show you.” As if rising with her in his gyroscope of fantasy he took her to visit his collection of empty cages.
Cages crowded his room, some of bamboo from the Philippines, some in gilt, wrought with intricate designs from Persia, others peaked like tents, others like miniature adobe houses, others like African huts of palm leaves. To some of the cages he himself had added turrets, towers from the Middle Ages, trapezes and baroque ladders, bathtubs made of mirrors, and a complete miniature jungle sufficient to give these prisons the illusion of freedom to any wild or mechanical bird imprisoned in them.
“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”
Sabina placed The Firebird on the phonograph. The delicate footsteps of the Firebird were heard at first through infinite distance, each step rousing the phosphorescent sparks from the earth, each note a golden bugle to marshal delight. A jungle of dragon tails thrashing in erotic derisions, a brazier of flesh-smoking prayers, the multiple debris of the stained glass fountains of desire.
She lifted the needle, cut the music harshly in mid-air. “Why? Why? Why?” cried Donald, as if wounded.
Sabina had silenced the firebirds of desire, and now she extended her arms like widely extended wings, wings no longer orange, and Donald gave himself to their protective embrace. The Sabina he embraced was the one he needed, the dispenser of food, of fulfilled promises, of mendings and knitting, comforts and solaces, of blankets and reassurances, of heaters, medicines, potions and scaffolds.
“You’re the firebird, Sabina, and that was why, until you came, all my cages were empty. It was you I wanted to capture.” Then with a soft, a defeated tenderness he lowered his eyelashes and added: “I know I have no way to keep you here, nothing to hold you here…”
Her breasts were no longer tipped with fire, they were the breasts of the mother, from which flowed nourishment. She deserted her other loves to fulfill Donald’s needs. She felt: “I am a woman, I am warm, tender and nourishing. I am fecund and I am good.”
Such serenity came with this state of being woman the mother! The humble, the menial task-performing mother as she had known her in her own childhood.
When she found chaotic, hasty little notes from Donald telling her where he was and when he would return he always ended them: “You are wonderful. You are wonderful and good. You are generous and kind.”
And these words calmed her anxiety more than sabina had l fulfillment had, calmed her fevers. She was shedding other Sabinas, believing she was shedding anxiety. Each day the colors of her dresses became more subdued, her walk less animal. It was as if in captivity her brilliant plumage were losing its brilliance. She felt the metamorphosis. She knew she was molting. But she did not know what she was losing in molding herself to Donald’s needs.
Once, climbing his stairs with a full market bag, she caught dim silhouette of herself on a damp mirror, and was startled to see a strong resemblance to her mother.
What Donald had achieved by capturing her into his net of fantasy as the firebird (while in the absence of erotic climate he had subtly dulled her plumage) was not only to reach his own need’s fulfillment but to enable her to rejoin her mother’s image which was her image of goodness: her mother, dispenser of food, of solace—soft warm and fecund.
On the stained mirror stood the shadow and echo of her mother, carrying food. Wearing the neutral-toned clothes of self-effacement, the faded garments of self-sacrifice, the external uniform of goodness.
In this realm, her mother’s realm, she had found a moment’s surcease from guilt.
Now she knew what she must say to Donald to cure his sense of smallness, and the smallness of what he had given her. She would say to him:
“Donald! Donald! You did give me something no one else could give me, you gave me my innocence! You helped me to find again the way to gain peace which I had learned as a child. When I was a child, only a little younger than you are now, after days of drugging myself with reading, with playing, with fantasies about people, with passionate friendships, with days spent hiding from my parents, with escapes, and all the activities which were termed bad, I found that by helping my mother, by cooking, mending, cleaning, scrubbing, and doing all the chores I most hated, I could appease this hungry and tyrannical conscience. It’s no crime that you have remained a child, Donald. In some of the old fairy tales, you know, many mature characters were shrunk back into midgets, as Alice was made small again to re-experience her childhood. It’s the rest of us who are pretenders; we all pretend to be large and strong. You just are not able to pretend.”
When she entered his room, she found a letter on her table.
Once she had said to him, when his moods had been too contradictory: “Adolescence is like cactus,” and he had answered: “I’ll write you a letter some day, with cactus milk!”
And here it was!
Letter to an actress: “From what you told me last night I see that you do not know your power. You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this. I felt this last night as I watched you act Cinderella, that you were whatever you acted, that you touched that point at which art and life meet and there is only BEING. I felt your hunger and your dreams, your pities and your desires at the same time as you awakened all of mine. I felt that you were not acting but dreaming; I felt that all of us who watched you could come out of the theatre and without transition could pass magically into another Ball, another snowstorm, another love, another dream. Before our very eyes you were being consumed by love and the dream of love. The burning of your eyes, of your gestures, a bonfire of faith and dissolution. You have the power. Never again use the word exhibitionism. Acting in you is a revelation. What the soul so often cannot say through the body because the body is not subtle enough, you can say. The body usually betrays the soul. You have the power of contagion, of transmitting emotion through the infinite shadings of your movements, the variations of your mouth’s designs, the feathery palpitations of your eyelashes. And your voice, your voice more than any other voice linked to your breath, the breathlessness of feeling, so that you take one’s breath away with you and carry one into the realm of breathlessness and silence. So much power you have Sabina! The pain you felt afterwards was not the pain of failure or of exhibitionism, as you said, it must be the pain of having revealed so much that was of the spirit, like some great mystic revelation of compassion and love and secret illusion, so that you expected this to have been communicated to others, and that they should respond as to a magic ritual. It must have been a shock when it did not happen to the audience, when they remained untransformed. But to those who respond as I did, you appear as something beyond the actor who can transmit to others the power to feel, to believe. For me the miracle took place. You seemed the only one alive among the a
ctors. What hurt you was that it was not acting, and that when it ended there was a break in the dream. You should have been protected from the violent transition. You should have been carried off the stage, so that you would not feel the change of level, from the stage to the street, and from the street to your home, and from there to another party, another love, another snowstorm, another pair of gold slippers.
“It must take great courage to give to many what one often gives but to the loved one. A voice altered by love, desire, the smile of open naked tenderness. We are permitted to witness the exposure of all feelings, tenderness, anger, weakness, abandon, childishness, fear, all that we usually reveal only to the loved one. That is why we love the actress. They give us the intimate being who is only revealed in the act of love. We receive all the treasures, a caressing glance, an intimate gesture, the secret ranges of the voice. This openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the miraculous openness which takes place in whole love. And so I witnessed, on the stage, this mystery of total love which in my life is hidden from me. And now, Sabina, I cannot bear the little loves, and yet I cannot claim all of yours, and every day I see you now, immense, complete, and I but a fragment, wandering…”
Sabina touched the letter which rested on her breast, the sharp corners of the pages hurting her a little… “What can I give you?” he asked. “What have I to give you?” he cried out in anguish, thinking this was the reason why he had not seen her for three days, or heard from her. Another time he had said playfully: “I can only nibble at you.” And had pressed his small, perfect teeth into her shoulder.
The ascensions of the ballet dancers into space and their return to the ground, brought before her eyes a Japanese umbrella made of colored paper which she once wore in her hair. It was lovely to see, so delicately made. When it rained and others opened their umbrellas then it was time for her to close hers.
But a hi wind had torn it, and when she went into Chinatown to buy another the woman who ran the shop shouted violently: “It’s made in Japan, throw it in the gutter!”
Sabina had looked at the parasol, innocent and fragile, made in a moment of peace by a workman dreaming of peace, made like a flower, lighter than war and hatred. She left the shop and looked down at the gutter and could not bring herself to throw it. She folded it quietly, folded tender gardens, the fragile structure of dream, a workman’s dream of peace, innocent music, innocent workman whose hands had not made bullets. In time of war hatred confused all the values, hatred fell upon cathedrals, paintings, music, rare books, children, the innocent passersby.
She folded the letter, as she had folded the parasol, out of sight of hatred and violence. She could not keep pace with the angry pulse of the world. She was engaged in a smaller cycle, the one opposite to war. There were truths women had been given to protect while the men went to war. When everything would be blown away, a paper parasol would raise its head among the debris, and man would be reminded of peace and tenderness.
Alan always believed he was giving Sabina pleasure when he took her to the theatre, and at first her face was always illuminated with suspense and curiosity. But inevitably she would grow restive and tumultuous, chaotic and disturbed; she would even weep quietly in the dark and disappear in between acts, so as not to expose a ravaged face.
“What is it, what is it?” repeated Alan patiently, suspecting her of envy or jealousy of the roles given to others. “You could be the most marvelous actress of our period if you wanted to give your whole life to it, but you know how you feel about discipline and monotony.”
“It isn’t that, no, it isn’t that,” and Sabina would say no more.
To whom could she explain that what she envied in them was the ease with which they would step out of their roles, wash themselves of it after the play and return to their true selves. She would have wanted these metamorphoses of her personality to take place on the stage so that at a given signal she would know for certain they were ended and she might return to a permanent immutable Sabina.
But when she wished to end a role, to become herself again, the other felt immensely betrayed, and not only fought the alteration but became angered at her. Once a role was established in a relationship, it was almost impossible to alter. And even if she succeeded, when the time came to return to the original Sabina, where was she? If she rebelled against her role towards Donald, if she turned on the “Firebird” record again, the drumming of the senses, the tongues of fire, and denied her mother within her, was she then returning to the true Sabina?
When she replaced the needle on the record and set off on her first assignation with desire was it not her father then walking within her, directing her steps? Her father who, having fed on her mother’s artful cooking, having dressed in the shirt she had ironed, having kissed her unbeautiful forehead damp from ironing, having allowed her marred hands to tie his tie, proceeded to leave her mother and Sabina for his vainglorious walk down the streets of the neighborhood who knew him for his handsomeness and his wanderings?
How many times had a perfumed, a painted, a handsome woman stopped her on the street to kiss her, caress her long hair and say: “You’re Sabina! You’re his daughter! I know your father so well.” It was not the words, it was the intimate glance, the boudoir tone of the voice which alarmed her. This knowledge of her father always brought to women’s eyes a sparkle not there before, an intimation of secret pleasures. Even as a child Sabina could read their messages. Sabina was the daughter of delight born of his amorous genius and they caressed her as another manifestation of a ritual she sensed and from which her mother had been estranged forever.
“I knew your father so well!” Always the handsome women bending over her, hateful with perfume one could not resist smelling, with starched petticoats and provocative ankles. For all these humiliations she would have wanted to punish her father, for all his desecrations of multiple summer evenings of wanderings which gave these women the right to admire her as another of his women. She was also angry at her mother for not being angry, for preparing and dressing him for these intruders.
Was it Sabina now rushing into her own rituals of pleasure, or was it her father within her, his blood guiding her into amorousness, dictating her intrigues, he who was inexorably woven with her by threads of inheritance she could never separate again to know which one was Sabina, which one her father whose role she had assumed by alchemy of mimetic love.
Where was Sabina?
She looked at the sky and she saw the face of John speeding in the pursued clouds, his charm fading like smoke from celestial pyres; she saw the soft night glow of Mambo’s eyes saying: “You don’t love me,” while bearing down on her; and Philip laughing a conqueror’s laugh, bearing down on her and his charm vanishing too before the thoughtful, withdrawn face of Alan. The entire sky a warm blanket of eyes and mouths shining down on her, the air full of voices now mucous from the sensual spasm, now gentle with gratitude, now doubtful, and she was afraid because there was no Sabina, not ONE, but a multitude of Sabinas lying down yielding and being dismembered, constellating in all directions and breaking. A small Sabina who felt weak at the center carried on a giant wave of dispersion. She looked at the sky arched overhead but it was not a protective sky, not a cathedral vault, not a haven; it was a limitless vastness to which she could not cling, and she was weeping: “Someone hold me—hold me, so I will not continue to race from one love to another, dispersing me, disrupting me… Hold me to one…”
Leaning out of the window at dawn, pressing her breasts upon the window sill, she still looked out of the window hoping to see what she had failed to possess. She looked at the ending nights and the passersby with the keen alertness of the voyager who can never reach termination as ordinary people reach peaceful terminals at the end of each day, accepting pauses, deserts, havens, as she could not accept them.
Sabina felt lost.
The wild compass whose fluctuations she ha
d always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in place of direction, was suddenly fractured so that she no longer knew even the relief of ebbs and flows and dispersions.
She felt lost. The dispersion had become too vast, too extended. A shaft of pain cut through the nebulous pattern. Sabina had always moved so fast that all pain had passed swiftly, as through a sieve, leaving a sorrow like children’s sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by another interest. She had never known a pause.
Her cape, which was more than a cape, which was a sail, which was the feelings she threw to the four winds to be swelled and swept by the wind in motion, lay becalmed.
Her dress was becalmed.
It was as if now she were nothing that the wind could catch, swell and propel.
For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.
Anxiety had entered her body and refused to run through it. The silvery holes of her sieve against sorrow granted her at birth, had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her, inescapable.
She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A papier-mâché horse.
She had lost her sails, her cape, her horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once. She was stranded in the semidarkness of a winter evening.
Then, as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the external body, blurring the eyes, dulling the ears, thickening the palate and tongue, slowing the movements of the body, she felt intensely cold and shivered with the same tremor as leaves, feeling for the first time some withered leaves of her being detaching themselves from her body.