A Spy in the House of Love

by Anais Nin

  As she entered Mambo’s Night Club she noticed new paintings on the walls and for a moment imagined herself back in Paris, seven years back, when she had first met Jay in Montparnasse.

  She recognized his paintings instantly.

  It was now as before in Paris exhibits, all the methods of scientific splitting of the atom applied to the body and to the emotions. His figures exploded and constellated into fragments, like spilled puzzles, each piece having flown far enough away to seem irretrievable and yet not far enough to be dissociated. One could, with an effort of the imagination, reconstruct a human figure completely from these fragments kept from total annihilation in space by an invisible tension.

  By one effort of contraction at the core they might still amalgamate to form the body of a woman.

  No change in Jay’s painting, but a change in Sabina who understood for the first time what they meant. She could see at this moment on the wall an exact portrait of herself as she felt inside.

  Had he painted Sabina, or something happening to all of them as it was happening in chemistry, in science? They had found all the corrosive acids, all the disintegrations, all the alchemies of separateness.

  But when the painter exposed what took place inside the body and emotions of man, they starved him, or gave him Fifth Avenue shop windows to do, where Paris La Nuit in the background allowed fashions to display hats and shoes and handbags and waists floating in mid-air, and waiting to be assembled on one complete woman.

  She stood before the paintings and she now could see the very minute fragments of her acts, which she had believed unimportant, causing minute incisions, erosions of the personality. A small act, a kiss given at a party to a young man who benefited from his resemblance to a lost John, a hand abandoned in a taxi to a man not desired but because the other woman’s hand had been claimed and Sabina could not bear to have her hand lie unclaimed on her lap: it seemed an affront to her powers of seduction. A word of praise about a painting she had not liked but uttered out of fear that the painter would say: “Oh, Sabina… Sabina doesn’t understand painting.”

  All the small insincerities had seeped like invisible rivulets of acid and caused profound damages. The erosions had sent each fragment of Sabina rotating like separate pieces of colliding planets into other spheres, yet not powerful enough to fly into space like a bird, not organic enough to become another life, to rotate on its own core.

  Jay’s painting was a dance of fragments to the rhythm of debris. It was also a portrait of the present Sabina.

  And all her seeking of fire to weld these fragments together, seeking in the furnace of delight a welding of fragments into one total love, one total woman, had failed!

  When she turned away from the paintings she saw Jay sitting at one of the tables, his face more than ever before resembling Lao Tze. His half-bald head rimmed now with frosty white hair, his half-closed, narrow, small eyes laughing.

  Someone standing between Sabina and Jay leaned over to compliment him on his Fifth Avenue windows. Jay laughed merrily and said: “I have the power to stun them, and while they are stunned by modern art the advertisers can do their poisonous jobs.”

  He waved at Sabina to sit down with him.

  “You’ve been watching my atomic pile in which men and women are bombarded to find the mysterious source of power in them, a new source of strength.” He talked to her as if no years had intervened between their last meeting at a café in Paris. He was always continuing the same conversation begun no one knew when, perhaps in Brooklyn where he had been born, everywhere and anywhere until he had reached the country of cafés where he found an audience, so that he could paint and talk perpetually in one long chain of dissertations.

  “Have you found your power, your new strength?” asked Sabina. “I haven’t.”

  “I haven’t either,” said Jay, with mock contrition. “I’ve just come home, because of the war. They asked us to leave. Whoever couldn’t be drafted was only one more mouth to feed for France. The consulate sent us a messenger: ‘Let all the useless ones leave Paris.’ In one day all the artists deserted, as if the plague had come. I never knew the artists occupied so much space! We, the international artists, were faced with either hunger or concentration camps. Do you remember Hans, Sabina? They wanted to send him back to Germany. A minor Paul Klee, that’s true, but still deserving a better fate. And Suzanne was sent back to Spain; she had no papers. Her Hungarian husband with the polio was put in a camp. Remember the corner of Montparnasse and Raspail where we all stood for hours saying good night? Because of the blackouts you’d have no time to say good night, you’d be lost as soon as you were out of the café, you’d vanish in the black night. Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime. Djuna’s house boat was drafted for the transportation of coal. Everything could undergo conversion except the artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of mind out of continuous upheavals?”

  As he looked at Sabina his eyes seemed to say that she had not changed, that she was still, for him, the very symbol of this fever and restlessness and upheaval and anarchy in life which he had applauded in Paris seven years ago.

  At this moment another personage sat down next to Jay. “Meet Cold Cuts, Sabina. Cold Cuts is our best friend here. When people get transplanted, it’s exactly like plants; at first there’s a wilting, a withering; some die of it. We’re all at the critical stage, suffering from a change of soil. Cold Cuts works at the morgue. His constant familiarity with suicides and terrifying description of them keeps us from committing it. He speaks sixteen languages and thus he’s the only one who can talk to all the artists, at least early in the evening. Later he’ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors.”

  Satisfied with this introduction, Cold Cuts left the table and busied himself with the microphone. But Jay was wrong. Although it was only nine o’clock, Cold Cuts was already in difficulties with the microphone. He was struggling to maintain an upright relationship, but the microphone would yield, bend, sway under his embrace like a flexible young reed. In his desperate embraces, it seemed as if the instrument and Cold Cuts would finally lie on the floor entangled like uncontrollable lovers.

  When a momentary equilibrium was established, Cold Cuts became voluble and sang in sixteen various languages (including alcoholic esperanto), becoming in quick succession a French street singer, a German opera singer, a Viennese organ grinder singer, etc.

  Then he returned to sit with Jay and Sabina.

  “Tonight Mambo cut off my food supply earlier than usual. Why, do you think? I shouldn’t be so loyal to him. But he doesn’t want me to lose my job. At midnight I must be fit to receive the dead politely. I mustn’t stutter or bungle anything. The dead are sensitive. Oh, I have a perfect suicide to rept to the exiles: a European singer who was spoiled and pampered in her own country. She strangled herself with all her colored scarves tied together. Do you think she wanted to imitate the death of Isadora Duncan?”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Jay. “I can reconstruct the scene. She was a failure as a singer here. Her present life was gray, she was forgotten and not young enough to conquer a second time perhaps… She opened her trunk full of programs of past triumphs, full of newspaper clippings praising her voice and her beauty, full of dried flowers which had been given to her, full of love letters grown yellow, full of colored scarves which brought back the perfumes and the colors of her past successes, and by contrast her life today became unbearable.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Cold Cuts. “I’m sure that’s the way it happened. She hung herself on the umbilical cord of the past.” He sputtered as if all the alcohol he contained had begun to bubble
within him, and he said to Sabina: “Do you know why I’m so loyal to Mambo? I’ll tell you. In my profession people would rather forget me. No one wants to be reminded of death. Maybe they don’t want to ignore me, but the company I keep. Now I don’t mind this the rest of the year, but I do mind it at Christmas. Christmas comes and I’m the only one who never gets a Christmas card. And that’s the one thing about my work at the morgue which I can’t stand. So a few days before Christmas I said to Mambo: ‘Be sure and send me a Christmas card. I’ve got to receive at least one Christmas card. I’ve got to feel one person at least thinks of me at Christmas time, as if I were a human being like any other.’ But you know Mambo… He promised, he smiled, and then once he starts drumming it’s like a jag of some kind, and you can’t sober him up. I couldn’t sleep for a week thinking he might forget and how I would feel on Christmas day to be forgotten as if I were dead… Well, he didn’t forget.”

  Then with unexpected swiftness, he pulled an automobile horn out of his pocket, affixed it to his buttonhole and pressed it with the exuberance of a woman squeezing perfume from an atomizer and said: “Listen to the language of the future. The word will disappear altogether and that is how human beings will talk to each other!”

  And bowing with infinite control of the raging waters of alcohol which were pressing against the dam of his politeness, Cold Cuts prepared to leave for his duties at the morgue.

  Mambo began his drumming and Sabina began to look feverish and trapped as she had looked the first time Jay had seen her.

  Dressed in red and silver, she evoked the sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York, alarming the heart with the violent accelerations of catastrophes.

  All dressed in red and silver, she evoked the tearing red and silver siren cutting a pathway through the flesh.

  The first time he had looked at her he had felt: “Everything will burn!”

  Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives (even if secretly and invisibly) in every human being as the child survives in him (denied and disguised), to this poet she threw an unexpected challenge, a ladder in the middle of the city and ordained: “Climb!”

  As she appeared, all orderly alignment of the city gave way before this ladder one was invited to climb, standing straight in space like the ladder of Baron Münchhausen which led to the sky.

  Only her ladders led to fire.

  Jay laughed and shook his head from side to side at the persistence of the image he had of Sabina. After seven years she still had not learned to sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with a feverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long and when she rose to buy cigarettes she was equally eager to return to her seat. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked, restless and keen. She drank hurriedly, she smiled so swiftly that he was never certain it had been a smile, she listened only partially to what was being said to her, and even when someone in the bar leaned over and shouted out her name in her direction she did not respond at first, as if it were not her own.

  Her way of looking at the door of the bar as if expecting the proper moment to make her escape, her erratic and sudden gestures, her sudden sulky silences. She behaved like someone who had all the symptoms of guilt.

  Above the iridescence of the candles, above the mists of cigarette smoke and the echoes of the cajoling blues, Sabina was aware that Jay was meditating on her. But it would be too dangerous to question him; he was a satirist, and all she would obtain from him at this moment was a caricature which she could not take lightly or dismiss, and which would, in her present mood, add heavily to the weights pulling her downward.

  Whenever Jay shook his head kindly, with the slow heavy playfulness of a bear, he was about to say something devastating, which he called his brutal honesty. And Sabina would not challenge this. So she began a swift, spiraling, circuitous story about a party at which indistinct incidents had taken place, hazy scenes from which no one could distinguish the heroine or the victim. By the time Jay felt he recognized the place (Montparnasse, seven years ago, a party at which Sabina had actually been jealous of the strong bond between Jay and Lillian which she was seeking to break), Sabina was already gone from there, and talking as in a broken dream, with spaces, reversals, retractions and galloping fantasies.

  She was now in Morocco, visiting the Arabian baths with the native women, sharing their pumice stone, and learning from the prostitutes how to paint her eyes with kohl from the market place.

  “It’s coal dust,”explained Sabina, “and you place it right inside of the eyes. It smarts at first, and it makes you cry, but that spreads it out on the edge of the eyelids and that is how they get that shiny, coal black rim around the eyes.”

  “Didn’t you get an infection?”asked Jay.

  “Oh, no, the prostitutes are very careful to have the kohl blessed at the mosque.”

  Everyone laughed at this—Mambo who had been standing near, Jay, and two indistinct personages who had been sitting at the next table but who had been sliding their chairs to listen to Sabina. Sabina did not laugh; she was invaded by another memory of Morocco. Jay could see the images passing through her eyes like a film being censored. He knew she was busy eliminating other stories she was about to tell; she might even be regretting the story about the bath, and now it was as if all she had said had been written on a huge blackboard and she took a sponge and effaced it all by adding: “Actually, this did not happen to me. It was told to me by someone who went to Morocco,” and before anyone could ask: “Do you mean that you never went to Morocco at all” she continued to confuse the threads by adding that this was a story she had read somewhere or heard at a bar, and as soon as she had erased in the minds of her listeners any face which could be directly attributed to her own responsibility, she began another story…

  The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only half-drawn, and when Jay had barely begun to reconstruct the missing fragment (when she told about the man who was polishing his own telescope glass she did not want to say too much for fear Jay would recognize Philip whom he had known in Vienna and whom they all called playfully in Paris: “Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war”), when Sabina would interpose another face and figure as one does in dreams, and when Jay had laboriously decided she was talking about Philip (with whom he was sure now she had had an affair), it turned out that she was no longer talking about a man polishing a telescope glass with the umbrella hung up in the middle of the room above his work, but about a woman who continued to play the harp at a concert in Mexico City during the revolution when someone had shot at the lights of the concert hall, and she had felt that if she continued to play she would prevent a panic; and as Jay knew this story had been told of Lillian, and that it was not as a harpist but as a pianist that Lillian had continued to play, Sabina became aware that she did not want to remind Jay about Lillian as the memory would be painful to him, for Sabina’s seduction of Jay in Paris had been in part responsible for Lillian’s desertion of him, and so she quickly reversed her story, and it was Jay who wondered whether he was not hearing right, whether perhaps he had been drinking too much and had imagined she was talking about Lillian, because actually at this very moment she was talking about a young man, an aviator, who had been told not to look into the eyes of the dead.

  Jay could not retain any sequence of the people she had loved, hated, escaped from, any more than he could keep track of her very personal appearance as she herself would say: “At that time I was a blond, and I wore my hair very short,” or “This was before I was married when I was only nineteen” (and once she had told him she had been married at the age of eighteen). Impossible to know who she had betrayed, forgotten, married, deserted, or clung to. It was like her profession. The first time he had questioned her, she had answered immediately: “I am an actress.” But when he pressed her, he could not find in what play she had acted, whether she had been a succe
ss or a failure, whether, perhaps, (as he decided later) she had merely wished to be an actress but had never worked persistently enough, seriously enough except in the way she was working now, changing personalities with such rapidity that Jay was reminded of a kaleidoscope.

  He sought to capture the recurrence of certain words in her talk, thinking they might be used as keys, but if the word “actress,” “miraculous,” “travel,” “wandering,” “relationship” did occur frequently, it remained impossible to know whether or not she used them in their literal sense or symbolically, for they were the same to her. He had heard her say once: “When you are hurt, you travel as far as you can from the place of the hurt,” and when he examined her meaning found she was referring to a change of quarters within fifty blocks in the city of New York.

  She was compelled by a confessional fever which forced her into lifting the veil slightly, only a corner of it, and then frightened when anyone listened too attentively, especially Jay whom she did not trust, whom she knew found the truth only in the sense of exposure of the flaws, the weaknesses, the foibles.

  As soon as Jay listened too attentively, she took a giant sponge and erased all she had said by an absolute denial as if this confusion were in itself a mantle of protection.

  At first she beckoned and lured one into her world, then she blurred the passageways, confused all the images as if to elude detection.

  “False mysteries,” said Jay savagely, baffled and irritated by her elusiveness. “But what is she hiding behind these false mysteries?”

  Her behavior always aroused in him (in the kind of mind he had with an obsession for truth, for revelation, for openness, brutal exposure) a desire which resembled the desire of a man to violate a woman who resists him, to violate a virginity which creates a barrier to his possession. Sabina always incited him to a violent desire to rip all her pretenses, her veils, and to discover the core of her self which, by this perpetual change of face and mobility, escaped all detection.