Children of the Albatross

by Anais Nin

  This little dance reminded her of Michael’s farewells on her doorsteps when she was sixteen.

  And suddenly she saw all their movements, hers with Michael, and Michael’s with Donald, as a ballet of unreality and unpossession.

  “Their greatest form of activity is flight!” she said to Michael.

  To the tune of Debussy’s “Ile Joyeuse,” they gracefully made all the steps which lead to no possession.

  (When will I stop loving these airy young men who move in a realm like the realm of the birds, always a little quicker than most human beings, always a little above, or beyond humanity, always in flight, out of some great fear of human beings, always seeking the open space, wary of enclosures, anxious for their freedom, vibrating with a multitude of alarms, always sensing danger all around them…)

  “Birds,” said a research scientist, “live their lives with an intensity as extreme as their brilliant colors and their vivid songs. Their body temperatures are regularly as high as 105 to 110 degrees, and anyone who has watched a bird at close range must have seen how its whole body vibrates with the furious pounding of its pulse. Such engines must operate at forced draft: and that is exactly what a bird does. The bird’s indrawn breath not only fills its lungs, but also passes on through myriads of tiny tubules into air sacs that fill every space in the bird’s body not occupied by vital organs. Furthermore the air sacs connect with many of the bird’s bones, which are not filled with marrow as animals’ bones are, but are hollow. These reserve air tanks provide fuel for the bird’s intensive life, and at the same time add to its buoyancy in flight.”

  Paul arrived as the dawn arrives, mist-laden, uncertain of his gestures. The sun was hidden until he smiled. Then the blue of his eyes, the shadows under his eyes, the sleepy eyelids, were all illuminated by the wide, brilliant e. Mist, dew, the uncertain hoverings of his gestures were dispelled by the full, firmmouth, the strong even teeth.

  Then the smile vanished again, as quickly as it had come. When he entered her room he brought with him this climate of adolescence which is neither sun nor full moon but the intermediate regions.

  Again she noticed the shadows under his eyes, which made a soft violet-tinted halo around the intense blue of the pupils.

  He was mantled in shyness, and his eyelids were heavy as if from too much dreaming. His dreaming lay like the edges of a deep slumber on the rim of his eyelids. One expected them to close in a hypnosis of interior fantasy as mysterious as a drugged state.

  This constant passing from cloudedness to brilliance took place within a few instants. His body would sit absolutely still, and then would suddenly leap into gaiety and lightness. Then once again his face would close hermetically.

  He passed in the same quick way between phrases uttered with profound maturity to sudden innocent inaccuracies.

  It was difficult to remember he was seventeen.

  He seemed more preoccupied with uncertainty as to how to carry himself through this unfamiliar experience than with absorbing or enjoying it.

  Uncertainty spoiled his pleasure in the present, but Djuna felt he was one to carry away his treasures into secret chambers of remembrance and there he would lay them all out like the contents of an opium pipe being prepared, these treasures no longer endangered by uneasiness in living, the treasures becoming the past, and there he would touch and caress every word, every image, and make them his own.

  In solitude and remembrance his real life would begin. Everything that was happening now was merely the preparation of the opium pipe that would later send volutes into space to enchant his solitude, when he would be lying down away from danger and unfamiliarity, lying down to taste of an experience washed of the dross of anxiety.

  He would lie down and nothing more would be demanded of the dreamer, no longer expected to participate, to speak, to act, to decide. He would lie down and the images would rise in chimerical visitations and from a tale more marvelous in every detail than the one taking place at this moment marred by apprehension.

  Having created a dream beforehand which he sought to preserve from destruction by reality, every movement in life became more difficult for the dreamer, for Paul, his fear of errors being like the opium dreamer’s fear of noise or daylight.

  And not only his dream of Djuna was he seeking to preserve like some fragile essence easily dispelled but even more dangerous, his own image of what was expected of him by Djuna, what he imagined Djuna expected of him—a heavy demand upon a youthful Paul, his own ideal exigencies which he did not know to be invented by himself creating a difficulty in every act or word in which he was merely re-enacting scenes rehearsed in childhood in whiche child’s naturalness was always defeated by the severity of the parents giving him the perpetual feeling that no word and no act came up to this impossible standard set for him. A more terrible compression than when the Chinese bound the feet of their infants, bound them with yards of cloth to stunt the natural growth. Such tyrannical cloth worn too long, unbroken, uncut, would in the end turn one into a mummy…

  Djuna could see the image of the mother binding Paul in the story he told her: He had a pet guinea pig, once, which he loved. And his mother had forced him to kill it.

  She could see all the bindings when he added: “I destroyed a diary I kept in school.”

  “Why?”

  “Now that I was home for a month, my parents might have read it.”

  Were the punishments so great that he was willing rather to annihilate living parts of himself, a loved pet, a diary reflecting his inner self?

  “There are many sides of yourself you cannot show your parents.”

  “Yes.” An expression of anxiety came to his face. The effect of their severity was apparent in the way he sat, stood—even in the tone of resignation in which he said: “I have to leave soon.”

  Djuna looked at him and saw him as the prisoner he was—a prisoner of school, of parents.

  “But you have a whole month of freedom now.”

  “Yes,” said Paul, but the word freedom had no echo in his being.

  “What will you do with it?”

  He smiled then. “I can’t do much with it. My parents don’t want me to visit dancers.”

  “Did you tell them you were coming to visit me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they know you want to be a dancer yourself?”

  “Oh, no.” He smiled again, a distressed smile, and then his eyes lost their direct, open frankness. They wavered, as if he had suddenly lost his way.

  This was his most familiar expression: a nebulous glance, sliding off people and objects.

  He had the fears of a child in the external world, yet he gave at the same time the impression of living in a larger world. This boy, thought Djuna tenderly, is lost. But he is lost in a large world. His dreams are vague, infinite, formless. He loses himself in them. No one knows what he is imagining and thinking. He does not know, he cannot say, but it is not a simple world. It expands beyond his grasp, he senses more than he knows, a bigger world which frightens him. He cannot confide or give himself. He must have beyes o often harshly condemned.

  Waves of tenderness flowed out to him from her eyes as they sat without talking. The cloud vanished from his face. It was as if he sensed what she was thinking.

  Just as he was leaving Lawrence arrived breathlessly, embraced Djuna effusively, pranced into the studio and turned on the radio.

  He was Paul’s age, but unlike Paul he did not appear to carry a little snail house around his personality, a place into which to retreat and vanish. He came out openly, eyes aware, smiling, expectant, in readiness for anything that might happen, He moved propelled by sheer impulse, and was never still.

  He was carrying a cage which he laid in the middle of the room. He lifted its covering shaped like a miniature striped awning.

  Djuna knelt on the rug to examine the contents of the cage and laughed to see a blue mouse nibbling at a cracker.

  “Where did you find a turquoise mouse?�
� asked Djuna.

  “I bathed her in dye,” said Lawrence. “Only she licks it all away in a few days and turns white again, so I had to bring her this time right after her bath.”

  The blue mouse was nibbling eagerly. The music was playing. They were sitting on the rug. The room began to glitter and sparkle.

  Paul looked on with amazement.

  (This pet, his eyes said, need not be killed. Nothing is forbidden here.)

  Lawrence was painting the cage with phosphorescent paint so that it would shine in the dark.

  “That way she won’t be afraid when I leave her alone at night!”

  While the paint dried Lawrence began to dance.

  Djuna was laughing behind her veil of long hair.

  Paul looked at them yearningly and then said in a toneless voice: “I have to leave now.” And he left precipitately. “Who is the beautiful boy?” asked Lawrence.

  “The son of tyrannical parents who are very worried he should visit a dancer.”

  “Will he come again?”

  “He made no promise. Only if he can get away.”

  “We’ll go and visit him.”

  Djuna smiled. She could imagine Lawrence arriving at Paul’s formal home with a cage with a blue mouse in it and Paul’s mother saying: “You get rid of that pet!”

  Or Lawrence taking a ballet leap to th the tip of a chandelier, or singing some delicate obscenity.

  “C’est une jeune fille en fleur,” he said now, clairvoyantly divining Djuna’s fear of never escaping from the echoes and descendants of Michael.

  Lawrence shrugged his shoulders. Then he looked at her with his red-gold eyes, under his red-gold hair. Whenever he looked at her it was contagious: that eager, ardent glance falling amorously on everyone and everything, dissolving the darkest moods.

  No sadness could resist this frenzied carnival of affection he dispensed every day, beginning with his enthusiasm for his first cup of coffee, joy at the day’s beginning, an immediate fancy for the first person he saw, a passion at the least provocation for man, woman, child or animal. A warmth even in his collisions with misfortunes, troubles and difficulties.

  He received them smiling. Without money in his pocket he rushed to help. With generous excess he rushed to love, to desire, to possess, to lose, to suffer, to die the multiple little deaths everyone dies each day. He would even die and weep and suffer and lose with enthusiasm, with ardor. He was prodigal in poverty, rich and abundant in some invisible chemical equivalent to gold and sun.

  Any event would send him leaping and prancing with gusto: a concert, a play, a ballet, a person. Yes, yes, yes, cried his young firm body every morning. No retractions, no hesitations, no fears, no caution, no economy. He accepted every invitation.

  His joy was in movement, in assenting, in consenting, in expansion.

  Whenever he came he lured Djuna into a swirl. Even in sadness they smiled at each other, expanding in sadness with dilated eyes and dilated hearts.

  “Drop every sorrow and dance!”

  Thus they healed each other by dancing, perfectly mated in enthusiasm and fire.

  The waves which carried him forward never dropped him on the rocks. He would always come back smiling: “Oh, Djuna, you remember Hilda? I was so crazy about her. Do you know what she did? She tried to palm off some false money on me. Yes, with all her lovely eyes, manners, sensitiveness, she came to me and said so tenderly: let me have change for this ten-dollar bill. And it was a bad one. And then she tried to hide some drugs in my room, and to say I was the culprit. I nearly went to jail. She pawned my typewriter, my box of paints. She finally took over my room and I had to sleep for the night on a park bench.”

  But the next morning he was again full of faith, love, trust, impulses.

  Dancing and believing.

  In his presence she was again ready to believe.

  To believe in Paul’s eyes, the mystery and the depth in them, the sense of some vast dream lying coiled there, undeciphered.

  Lawrence had finished the phosphorescent painting. He closed the curtains and the cage shone in the dark. Now he decided to paint with phosphorescence everything paintable in the room.

  The next day Lawrence appeared with a large pot of paint and he was stirring it with a stick when Paul telephoned: “I can get away for a while. May I come?”

  “Oh, come, come,” said Djuna.

  “I can’t stay very late…” His voice was muffled, like that of a sick person. There was a plaintiveness in it so plainly audible to Djuna’s heart.

  “The prisoner is allowed an hour’s freedom,” she said.

  When Paul came Lawrence handed him a paintbrush and in silence the two of them worked at touching up everything paintable in the room. They turned off the lights. A new room appeared.

  Luminous faces appeared on the walls, new flowers, new jewels, new castles, new jungles, new animals, all in filaments of light.

  Mysterious translucence like their unmeasured words, their impulsive acts, wishes, enthusiasms. Darkness was excluded from their world, the darkness of loss of faith. It was now the room with a perpetual sparkle, even in darkness.

  (They are making a new world for me, felt Djuna, a world of greater lightness. It is perhaps a dream and I may not be allowed to stay. They treat me as one of their own, because I believe what they believe, I feel as they do. I hate the father, authority, men of power, men of wealth, all tyranny, all authority, all crystallizations. I feel as Lawrence and Paul: outside there lies a bigger world full of cruelties, dangers and corruptions, where one sells out one’s charms, one’s playfulness, and enters a rigid world of discipline, duty, contracts, accountings. A thick opaque world without phosphorescence. I want to stay in this room forever not with man the father but with man the son, carving, painting, dancing, dreaming, and always beginning, born anew every day, never aging; full of faith and impulse, turning and changing to every wind like the mobiles. I do not love those who have ceased to flow, to believe, to feel. Those who can no longer melt, exult, who cannot let themselves be cheated, laugh at loss, those who are bound and frozen. )

  She laid her head on Lawrence’s shoulder with a kind of gratitude.

  (Nowhere else as here with Lawrence and with Paul was there such an iridescence in the air; nowhere else so far from the threat of hardening and crystallizing. Everything flowing…)

  Djuna was brushing her hair with her fingers, in long pensive strokes, and Lawrence was talking about the recurrent big problem of a job. He had tried so many. How to work without losing one’s color, one’s ardor, personal possessions and freedom. He was very much like a delicate Egyptian scarab who dreaded to lose his iridescence in routine, in duty, in monotony. The job could kill one, or maim one, make one a robot, an opaque personage, a future undertaker, a man of power with gouty limbs and a hardening of the arteries of faith!

  Lawrence lived and breathed color and there was no danger of his dying of drabness, for even accidents took on a most vivid shade and a spilled pot of gouache was still a delight to the eyes.

  He brought Djuna gifts of chokers, headdresses, earrings made of painted clay which crumbled quickly like the trappings for a costume play.

  She had always liked objects without solidity. The solid ones bound her to permanency. She had never wanted a solid house, enduring furniture. All these were traps. Then you belonged to them forever. She preferred stage trappings which she could move into and out of easily, without regret. Soon after they fell apart and nothing was lost. The vividness alone survived.

  She remembered once hearing a woman complain that armchairs no longer lasted twenty years, and Djuna answered: “But I couldn’t love an armchair for twenty years!”

  And so change, mutations like the rainbow, and she preferred Lawrence’s gifts from which the colored powder and crystals fell like the colors on the wings of butterflies after yielding their maximum of charm.

  Paul was carving a piece of copper, making such fine incisions with the scissors that the bi
rd which finally appeared between his slender fingers bristled with filament feathers.

  He stood on the table and hung it by a thread to the ceiling. The slightest breath caused it to turn slowly.

  Paul had the skin of a child that had never been touched by anything of this earth: no soap, no wash rag, no brush, no human kiss could have touched his skin! Never scrubbed, rubbed, scratched, or wrinkled by a pillow. The transparency of the child skin, of the adolescent later to turn opaque. What do children nourish themselves with that their skin has this transparency, and what do they eat of later which brings on opaqueness?

  The mothers who kiss them are eating light.

  There is a phosphorescence which comes from the magic world of childhood.

  Where does this illumination go later? Is it the substance of faith which shines from their bodies like phosphorescence from the albatross, and what kills it?

  Now Lawrence had discovered a coiled measuring tape of steel in Djuna’s closet while delving for objects useful for charades.

  When entirely pulled out of its snail covering it stretched like a long snake of steel which under certain manipulations could stand rigid like a sword or undulate like silver-tped waves, or flash like lightning.

  Lawrence and Paul stood like expert swordsmen facing each other for a duel of light and steel.

  The steel band flexed, then hardened between them like a bridge, and at each forward movement by one it seemed as if the sword had pierced the body of the other.

  At other moments it wilted, wavered like a frightened snake, and then it looked bedraggled and absurd and they both laughed.

  But soon they learned never to let it break or waver and it became like a thunderbolt in their hands. Paul attacked with audacity and Lawrence parried with swiftness.

  At midnight Paul began to look anxious. His luminosity clouded, he resumed his hesitant manner. He ceased to occupy the center of the room and moved out of the focus of light and laughter. Like a sleepwalker, he moved away from gaiety.