Children of the Albatross

by Anais Nin

  It was the droit du seigneur.

  She slipped the Watchman’s bracelet around the lusterless cotton of her dress, while he said: “The poorer the dress the more wonderful your skin looks, Djuna.”

  Years later when Djuna thought the figure of the Watchman was long since lost she would hear echoes of his heavy step and she would find herself in the same mood she had experienced so many times in his presence.

  No longer a child, and yet many times she still had the feeling that she might be overpowered by a will stronger than her own, might be trapped, might be somehow unable to free herself, unable to escape the demands of man upon her.

  Her first defet at the hands of man the father had caused her such a conviction of helplessness before tyranny that although she realized that she was now in reality no longer helpless, the echo of this helplessness was so strong that she still dreaded the possessiveness and willfulness of older men. They benefited from this regression into her past, and could override her strength merely because of this conviction of unequal power.

  It was as if maturity did not develop altogether and completely, but by little compartments like the airtight sections of a ship. A part of her being would mature, such as her insight, or interpretative faculties, but another could retain a childhood conviction that events, man and authority together were stronger than one’s capacity for mastering them, and that one was doomed to become a victim of one’s pattern.

  It was only much later that Djuna discovered that this belief in the great power of others became the fate itself and caused the defeats.

  But for years, she felt harmed and defeated at the hands of men of power, and she expected the boy, the gentle one, the trusted one, to come and deliver her from tyranny.

  Ever since the day of Lillian’s concert when she had seen the garden out of the window, Djuna had wanted a garden like it.

  And now she possessed a garden and a very old house on the very edge of Paris, between the city and the Park.

  But it was not enough to possess it, to walk through it, sit in it. One still had to be able to live in it.

  And she found she could not live in it.

  The inner fever, the restlessness within her corroded her life in the garden.

  When she was sitting in a long easy chair she was not at ease.

  The grass seemed too much like a rug awaiting footsteps, to be trampled with hasty incidents. The rhythm of growth too slow, the falling of the leaves too tranquil.

  Happiness was an absence of fever. The garden was feverless and without tension to match her tensions. She could not unite or commune with the plants, the languor, the peace. It was all contrary to her inward pulse. Not one pulsation of the garden corresponded to her inner pulsation which was more like a drum beating feverish time.

  Within her the leaves did not wait for autumn, but were torn off prematurely by unexpected sorrows. Within her, leaves did not wait for spring to sprout but bloomed in sudden hothouse exaggerations. Within her there were storms contrary to the lazy moods of the garden, devastations for which nature had no equivalent.

  Peace, said the garden, peace.

  The day began always with the sound of gravel crushed by automobiles.

  The shutters werepushed open by the French servant, and the day admitted.

  With the first crushing of the gravel under wheels came the barking of the police dog and the carillon of the church bells.

  Cars entered through an enormous green iron gate, which had to be opened ceremoniously by the servant.

  Everyone else walked through the small green gate that seemed like the child of the other, half covered with ivy. The ivy did not climb over the father gate.

  When Djuna looked at the large gate through her window it took on the air of a prison gate. An unjust feeling, since she knew she could leave the place whenever she wanted, and since she knew morethan anyone that human beings placed upon an object, or a person this responsibility of being the obstacle, when the obstacle lay within one’s self.

  In spite of this knowledge, she would often stand at the window staring at the large closed iron gate as if hoping to obtain from this contemplation a reflection of herinner obstacles to a full open life.

  She mocked its importance; the big gate had a presumptuous creak! Its rusty voice was full of dissonant affectations. No amount of oil could subdue its rheumatism, forit took a historical pride in its own rust: it was a hundred years old.

  But the little gate, with its overhanging ivy like disordered hair over a running child’s forehead, had a sleepy and sly air, an air of always being half open, never entirely locked.

  Djuna had chosen the house for many reasons, because it seemed to have sprouted out of the earth like a tree, so deeply grooved it was within the old garden. It had no cellar and the rooms rested right on the ground. Below the rugs, she felt, was the earth. One could take root here, feel as one with the house and garden, take nourishment from them like the plants.

  She had chosen it too because its symmetrical façade covered by a trellis overrun by ivy showed twelve window faces. But one shutter was closed and corresponded to no room. During some transformation of the house it had been walled up.

  Djuna had taken the house because of this window which led to no room, because of this impenetrable room, thinking that someday she would discover an entrance to it.

  In front of the house there was a basin which had been filled, and a well which had been sealed up. Djuna set about restoring the basin, excavated an old fountain and unsealed the well.

  Then it seemed to her that the house came alive, the flow was re-established.

  The fountain was gay and sprightly, the well deep.

  The front half of the garden was trim and stylized like most French gardens, but the back of it some past owner had allowed to grow wild and become a miniature jungle. The stream was almost hidden by overgrown plants, and the small bridge seemed like a Japanese brige in a glass-bowl garden.

  There was a huge tree of which she did not know the name, but which she named the Ink Tree for its black and poisonous berries.

  One summer night she stood in the courtyard. All the windows of the house were lighted.

  Then the image of the house with all its windows lighted—all but one—she saw as the image of the self, of the being divided into many cells. Action taking place in one room, now in another, was the replica of experience taking place in one part of the being, now in another.

  The room of the heart in Chinese lacquer red, the room of the mind in pale green or the brown of philosophy, the room of the body in shell rose, the attic of memory with closets full of the musk of the past.

  She saw the whole house on fire in the summer night and it was like those moments of great passion and deep experience when every cell of the self lighted simultaneously, a dream of fullness, and she hungered for this that would set aflame every room of the house and of herself at once!

  In herself there was one shuttered window.

  She did not sleep soundly in the old and beautiful house.

  She was disturbed.

  She could hear voices in the dark, for it is true that on days of clear audibility there are voices which come from within and speak in multiple tongues contradicting each other. They speak out of the past, out of the present, the voices of awareness—in dialogues with the self which mark each step of living.

  There was the voice of the child in herself, unburied, who had long ago insisted: I want only the marvelous.

  There was the low-toned and simple voice of the human being Djuna saying: I want love.

  There was the voice of the artist in Djuna saying: I will create the marvelous.

  Why should such wishes conflict with each other, or annihilate each other?

  In the morning the human being Djuna sat on the carpet before the fireplace and mended and folded her stockings into little partitioned boxes, keeping the one perfect unmended pair for a day of high living, partitioning at the same time events into l
ittle separate boxes in her head, dividing (that was one of the great secrets against shattering sorrows), allotting and rearranging under the heading of one word a constantly fluid, mobile and protean universe whose multiple aspects were like quicksands.

  This exaggerated sense, for instance, of a preparation for the love to come, like the extension of canopies, the unrolling of ceremonial carpets, the belief in the state of grace, of a perfection necessary to the advent of love.

  As if she must first of all create a marvelous world in which to house it, thinking it befell her adequately to recee this guest of honor.

  Wasn’t it too oriental, said a voice protesting with mockery—such elaborate receptions, such costuming, as if love were such an exigent guest?

  She was like a perpetual bride preparing a trousseau. As other women sew and embroider, or curl their hair, she embellished her cities of the interior, painted, decorated, prepared a great mise en scène for a great love.

  It was in this mood of preparation that she passed through her kingdom the house, painting here a wall through which the stains of dampness showed, hanging a lamp where it would throw Balinese theater shadows, draping a bed, placing logs in the fireplaces, wiping the dull-surfaced furniture that it might shine. Every room in a different tone like the varied pipes of an organ, to emit a wide range of moods—lacquer red for vehemence, gray for confidences, a whole house of moods with many doors, passageways, and changes of level.

  She was not satisfied until it emitted a glow which was not only that of the Dutch interiors in Dutch paintings, a glow of immaculateness, but an effulgence which had caused Jay to discourse on the gold dust of Florentine paintings.

  Djuna would stand very still and mute and feel: my house will speak for me. My house will tell them I am warm and rich. The house will tell them inside of me there are these rooms of flesh and Chinese lacquer, sea greens to walk through, inside of me there are lighted candles, live fires, shadows, spaces, open doors, shelters and air currents. Inside of me there is color and warmth.

  The house will speak for me.

  People came and submitted to her spell, but like all spells it was wonderful and remote. Not warm and near. No human being, they thought, made this house, no human being lived here. It was too fragile and too unfamiliar. There was no dust on her hands, no broken nails, no sign of wear and tear.

  It was the house of the myth.

  It was the ritual they sensed, tasted, smelled. Too different from the taste and smell of their own houses. It took them out of the present. They took on an air of temporary guests. No familiar landscape, no signpost to say: this is your home as well.

  All of them felt they were passing, could not remain. They were tourists visiting foreign lands. It was a voyage and not a port.

  Even in the bathroom there were no medicine bottles on the shelves proclaiming: soda, castor oil, cold cream. She had transferred all of them to alchemist bottles, and the homeliest drug assumed an air of philter.

  This was a dream and she was merely a guide.

  None came near enough.

  There were houses, dresses, which created one’s isolation as surely as those tunnels created by ferrets to elude pursuit by the male.

  There were rooms and costumes which appeared to be made to lure but which were actually effective means to create distance.

  Djuna had not yet decided what her true wishes were, or how near she wanted them to come. She was apparently calling to them but at the same time, by a great ambivalence and fear of their coming too near, of invading her, of dominating or possessing her, she was charming them in such a manner that the human being in her, the warm and simple human being, remained secure from invasion. She constructed a subtle obstacle to invasion at the same time as she constructed an appealing scene.

  None came near enough. After they left she sat alone, and deserted, as lonely as if they had not come.

  She was alone as everyone is every morning after a dream.

  What was this that was weeping inside of her costume and house, something smaller and simpler than the edifice of spells?

  She did not know why she was left hungry.

  The dream took place. Everything had contributed to its perfection, even her silence, for she would not speak when she had nothing meaningful to say (like the silence in dreams between fateful events and fateful phrases, never a trivial word spoken in dreams!).

  The next day, unknowing, she began anew.

  She poured medicines from ugly bottles into alchemist bottles, creating minor mysteries, minor transmutations. Insomnia. The nights were long.

  Who would come and say: that is my dream, and take up the thread and make all the answers?

  Or are all dreams made alone?

  Lying in the fevered sheets of insomnia, there was a human being cheated by the dream.

  Insomnia came when one must be on the watch, when one awaited an important visitor.

  Everyone, Djuna felt, saw the dancer on light feet but no one seized the moment when she vacillated, fell. No one perceived or shared her difficulties, the mere technical difficulties of loving, dancing, believing.

  When she fell, she fell alone, as she had in adolescence.

  She remembered feeling this mood as a girl, that all her adolescence had proceeded by oscillations between weakness and strength. She remembered, too, that whenever she became entangled in too great a difficulty she had these swift regressions into her adolescent state. Almost as if in the large world of maturity, when the obstacle loomed too large, she shrank again into the body of a young girl for whom the world had first appeared as a violent and dangerous place, forcing her to retreat, and when she retreated she fell back into smallness.

  She returned to the adolescent deserts of mistrust of love.

  Walking through snow, carrying her muff like an obsolete wand no longer possessed of the power to create the personage she needed, she felt herself walking through a desert of snow.

  Her body muffled in furs, her heart muffled like her steps, and the pain of living muffled as by the deepest rich carpets, while the thread of Ariadne which led everywhere, right and left, like scattered footsteps in the snow, tugged and pulled within her memory and she began to pull upon this thread (silk for the days of marvel and cotton for the bread of everyday living which was always a little stale) as one pulls upon a spool, and she heard the empty wooden spool knock against the floor of different houses.

  Holding the silk or cotton began to cut her fingers which bled from so much unwinding, or was it that the thread of Ariadne had led into a wound?

  The thread slipped through her fingers now, with blood on it, and the snow was no longer white.

  Too much snow on the spool she was unwinding from the tightly wound memories. Unwinding snow as it lay thick and hard around the edges of her adolescence because the desire of men did not find a magical way to open her being.

  The only words which opened her being were the muffled words of poets so rarely uttered by human beings. They alone penetrated her without awakening the bristling guards on watch at the gateways, costumed like silver porcupines armed with mistrust, barring the way to the secret recesses of her thoughts and feelings.

  Before most people, most places, most situations, most words, Djuna’s being, at sixteen, closed hermetically into muteness. The sentinels bristled: someone is approaching! And all the passages to her inner self would close.

  Today as a mature woman she could see how these sentinels had not been content with defending her, but they had constructed a veritable fort under this mask of gentle shyness, forts with masked holes concealing weapons built by fear.

  The snow accumulated every night all around the rim of her young body.

  Blue and crackling snowbound adolescence.

  The young men who sought to approach her then, drawn by her warm eyes, were startled to meet with such harsh resistance.

  This was no mere flight of coquetry inviting pursuit. It was a fort of snow (for the snowbound, dream-swallo
wer of the frozen fairs). An unmeltable fort of timidity.

  Yet each time she walked, muffled, protected, she was aware of two young women walking: one intent on creating trap doors of evasion, the other wishing someone might find the entrance that she might not be so alone.

  With Michael it was as if she had not heard him coming, so gentle were his steps, his words. Not the walk or words of the hunter, of the man of war, the determined entrance of older men, not the dominant walk of the father, the familiak of the brother, not like any other man she knew.

  Only a year older than herself, he walked into her blue and white climate with so light a tread that the guards did not hear him!

  He came into the room with a walk of vulnerability, treading softly as upon a carpet of delicacies. He would not crush the moss, no gravel would complain under his feet, no plant would bow its head or break.

  It was a walk like a dance in which the gentleness of the steps carried him through air, space and silence in a sentient minuet in accord with his partner’s mood, his leaf-green eyes obeying every rhythm, attentive to harmony, fearful of discord, with an excessive care for the other’s intent.

  The path his steps took, his velvet words, miraculously slipped between the bristles of her mistrust, and before she had been fully aware of his coming, by his softness he had entered fully into the blue and white climate.

  The mists of adolescence were not torn open, not even disturbed by his entrance.

  He came with poems, with worship, with flowers not ordered from the florist but picked in the forest near his school.

  He came not to plunder, to possess, to overpower. With great gentleness he moved towards the hospitable regions of her being, towards the peaceful fields of her interior landscape, where white flowers placed themselves against green backgrounds as in Botticelli paintings of spring.

  At his entrance her head remained slightly inclined towards the right, as it was when she was alone, slightly weighed down by pensiveness, whereas on other occasions, at the least approach of a stranger, her head would raise itself tautly in preparation for danger.