Children of the Albatross

by Anais Nin

  Even with tenderness, even with delicate fingers, even with the greatest love, it had been too soon! She had forced time, as she had forced the flowers to change from the ordinary to the extraordinary. He was not ready!

  Now she understood her own hesitations, her impulse to run away from him. Even though he had made the first gesture, she, knowing, should have saved him from anxiety.

  (Paul was looking at the opened tulips and seeing in them something else, not himself but Djuna, the opening body of Djuna. Don’t let her open the flowers as he had opened her. In the enormous wave of silence, the hypnosis of hands, skin, delight, he had heard a small moan, yet in her face he had seen joy. Could the thrust into her have hurt her? It was like stabbing someone, this desire.)

  “I’m going to dress, now,” she said lightly. She could not close the tulips again, but she could dress. She could close herself again and allow him to close again.

  Watching her he felt a violent surge of strength again, stronger than his fears. “Don’t dress yet.”

  Again he saw on her face a smile he had never seen there in her gayest moments, and then he accepted the mystery and abandoned himself to his own joy.

  His heart beat wildly at her side, wildly in panic and joy together at the moment before taking her. This wildly beating heart at her side, beating against hers, and then the cadenced, undulating, blinding merging together, and no break between their bodies afterwards.

  After the storm he lay absoluly still over her body, dreaming, quiet, as if this were the place of haven. He lay given, lost, entranced. She bore his weight with joy, though after a while it numbed and hurt her. She made a slight movement, and then he asked her: “Am I crushing you?”

  “You’re flattening me into a thin wafer,” she said, smiling, and he smiled back, then laughed.

  “The better to eat you, my dear.”

  He kissed her again as if he would eat her with delight. Then he got up and made a somersault on the carpet, with light exultant gestures.

  She lay back watching the copper bird gyrating in the center of the room.

  His gaiety suddenly overflowed, and taking a joyous leap in the air, he came back to her and said:

  “I will call up my father!”

  She could not understand. He leaned over her body and keeping his hand over her breast he dialed his father’s telephone number.

  Then she could see on his face what he wanted to tell his father: call his father, tell him what could not be told, but which his entire new body wanted to tell him: I have taken a woman! I have a woman of my own. I am your equal, Father! I am a man!

  When his father answered Paul could only say the ordinary words a son can say to his father, but he uttered these ordinary words with exultant arrogance, as if his father could see him with his hand on Djuna’s body: “Father, I am here.”

  “Where are you?” answered the father severely. “We’re expecting you home. You can continue to see your friends but you must come home to please your mother. Your mother has dinner all ready for you!”

  Paul laughed, laughed as he had never laughed as a boy, with his hand over the mouth of the telephone.

  On such a day they are expecting him for dinner!

  They were blind to the miracle. Over the telephone his father should hear and see that he had a woman of his own: she was lying there smiling.

  How dare the father command now! Doesn’t he hear the new voice of the new man in his son?

  He hung up.

  His hair was falling over his eager eyes. Djuna pulled at it. He stopped her. “You can’t do that any more, oh no.” And he sank his teeth into the softest part of her neck.

  “You’re sharpening your teeth to become a great lover,” she said.

  When desire overtook him he always had a moment of wildly beating heart, almost of distress, before the invading tide. Before closing his eyes to kiss her, before abandoning himself, he always carefully closed the shutters, windows and doors.

  This was the secret act, and he feared the eyes of the world upon him. The world was full of eyes upon his acts, eyes watching with disapproval.

  That was the secret fear left from his childhood: dreams, wishes, acts, pleasures which aroused condemnation in the parents’ eyes. He could not remember one glance of approval, of love, of admiration, of consent. From far back he remembered being driven into secrecy because whatever he revealed seemed to arouse disapproval or punishment.

  He had read the Arabian Nights in secret, he had smoked in secret, he had dreamed in secret.

  His parents had questioned him only to accuse him later.

  And so he closed the shutters, curtains, windows, and then went to her and both of them closed their eyes upon their caresses.

  There was a knitted blanket over the couch which he particularly liked. He would sit under it as if it were a tent. Through the interstices of the knitting he could see her and the room as through an oriental trellis. With one hand out of the blanket he would seek her little finger with his little finger and hold it.

  As in an opium dream, this touching and interlacing of two little fingers became an immense gesture, the very fragile bridge of their relationship. By this little finger so gently and so lightly pulling hers he took her whole self as no one else had.

  He drew her under the blanket thus, in a dreamlike way, by a small gesture containing the greatest power, a greater power than violence.

  Once there they both felt secure from all the world, and from all threats, from the father and the detective, and all the taboos erected to separate lovers all over the world.

  Lawrence rushed over to warn them that Paul’s father had been seen driving through the neighborhood.

  Paul and Djuna were having dinner together and were going to the ballet.

  Paul had painted a feather bird for Djuna’s hair and she was pinning it on when Lawrence came with the warning.

  Paul became a little pale, then smiled and said: “Wafer, in case my father comes, could you make yourself less pretty?”

  Djuna went and washed her face of all make-up, and then she unpinned the airy feather bird from her hair, and they sat down together to wait for the father.

  Djuna said: “I’m going to tell you the story of Caspar Hauser, which is said to have happened many years ago in Austria. Caspar Hauser was about seventeen years old when he appeared in the city, a wanderer, lost and bewildered. He had been imprisoned in a dark room since childd. His real origin was unknown, and the cause for the imprisonment. It was believed to be a court intrigue, that he might have been put away to substitute another ruler, or that he might have been an illegitimate son of the Queen. His jailer died and the boy found himself free. In solitude he had grown into manhood with the spirit of a child. He had only one dream in his possession, which he looked upon as a memory. He had once lived in a castle. He had been led to a room to see his mother. His mother stood behind a door. But he had never reached her. Was it a dream or a memory? He wanted to find this castle again, and his mother. The people of the city adopted him as a curiosity. His honesty, his immediate, childlike instinct about people, both infuriated and interested them. They tampered with him. They wanted to impose their beliefs on him, teach him, possess him. But the boy could sense their falsities, their treacheries, their self-interest. He belonged to his dream. He gave his whole faith only to the man who promised to take him back to his home and to his mother. And this man betrayed him, delivered him to his enemies. Just before his death he had met a woman, who had not dared to love him because he was so young, who had stifled her feeling. If she had dared he might have escaped his fate.”

  “Why didn’t she dare?” asked Paul.

  “She saw only the obstacle,” said Djuna. “Most people see only the obstacle, and are stopped by it.”

  (No harm can befall you now, Paul, no harm can befall you. You have been set free. You made a good beginning. You were loved by the first object of your desire. Your first desire was answered. I made such a bad begi
nning! I began with a closed door. This harmed me, but you at least began with fulfillment. You were not hurt. You were not denied. I am the only one in danger. For that is all I am allowed to give you, a good beginning, and then I must surrender you.)

  They sat and waited for the father.

  Lawrence left them. The suspense made him uneasy.

  Paul was teaching Djuna how to eat rice with chopsticks.

  Then he carefully cleaned them and was holding them now as they talked as if they were puppets representing a Balinese shadow theater of the thoughts neither one dared to formulate. They sat and waited for the father.

  Paul was holding the chopsticks like impudent puppets, gesticulating, then he playfully unfastened the first button of her blouse with them, deftly, and they laughed together.

  “It’s time for the ballet,” said Djuna. “Your father is evidently not coming, or he would be here already.”

  She saw the illumination of desire light his face.

  “Wait, Djuna.” He unfastened the second button, and the third.

  Then he laid his head on her breast and said: “Let’s not go anywhere tonight. Let’s stay here.”

  Paul despised small and shallow waves. He was drawn to a vastness whic corresponded to his boundless dreams. He must possess the world in some big way, rule a large kingdom, expand in some absolute leadership.

  He felt himself king as a child feels king, over kingdoms uncharted by ordinary men. He would not have the ordinary, the known. Only the vast, the unknown could satisfy him.

  Djuna was a woman with echoes plunging into an endless past he could never explore completely. When he tasted her he tasted a suffering which had borne a fragrance, a fragrance which made deeper grooves. It was enough that he sensed the dark forests of experience, the unnamed rivers, the enigmatic mountains, the rich mines under the ground, the overflowing caves of secret knowledges. A vast ground for an intrepid adventurer.

  Above all she was his “ocean,” as he wrote her. “When a man takes a woman to himself he possesses the sea.”

  The waves, the enormous waves of a woman’s love!

  She was a sea whose passions could rise sometimes into larger waves than he felt capable of facing!

  Much as he loved danger, the unknown, the vast, he felt too the need of taking flight, to put distance and space between himself and the ocean for fear of being submerged!

  Flight: into silence, into a kind of invisibility by which he could be sitting there on the floor while yet creating an impression of absence, able to disappear into a book, a drawing, into the music he listened to.

  She was gazing at his little finger and the extreme fragility and sensitiveness of it astonished her.

  (He is the transparent child.)

  Before this transparent finger so artfully carved, sensitively wrought, boned, which alighted on objects with a touch of air and magic, at the marvel of it, the ephemeral quality of it, a wave of passion would mount within her and exactly like the wave of the ocean intending merely to roll over, cover the swimmer with an explosion of foam, in a rhythm of encompassing, and withdrawing, without intent to drag him to the bottom.

  But Paul, with the instinct of the new swimmer, felt that there were times when he could securely hurl himself into the concave heart of the wave and be lifted into ecstasy and be delivered back again on the shore safe and whole; but that there were other times when this great inward curve disguised an undertow, times when he measured his strength and found it insufficient to return to shore.

  Then he took up again the lighter games of his recently surrendered childhood.

  Djuna found him gravely bending over a drawing and it was not what he did which conveyed his remoteness, but his way of sitting hermetically closed like some secret Chinese box whose surface showed no possibility of opening.

  He sat then as children do, immured in his particular lonely world then, having built a magnetic wall of detachment.

  It was then that he practiced as deftly as older men the great objectivity, the long-range view by which men eluded all personal difficulties: he removed himself from the present and the personal by entering into the most abstruse intricacies of a chess game, by explaining to her what Darwin had written when comparing the eye to a microscope, by dissertating on the pleuronectidae or flat fish, so remarkable for their asymmetrical bodies.

  And Djuna followed this safari into the worlds of science, chemistry, geology with an awkwardness which was not due to any laziness of mind, but to the fact that the large wave of passion which had been roused in her at the prolonged sight of Paul’s little finger was so difficult to dam, because the feeling of wonder before this spectacle was to her as great as that of the explorers before a new mountain peak, of the scientists before a new discovery.

  She knew what excitement enfevered men at such moments of their lives, but she did not see any difference between the beauty of a high flight above the clouds and the subtly colored and changing landscape of adolescence she traversed through the contemplation of Paul’s little finger.

  A study of anthropological excavations made in Peru was no more wonderful to her than the half-formed dreams unearthed with patience from Paul’s vague words, dreams of which they were only catching the prologue; and no forest of precious woods could be more varied than the oscillations of his extreme vulnerability which forced him to take cover, to disguise his feelings, to swing so movingly between great courage and a secret fear of pain.

  The birth of his awareness was to her no lesser miracle than the discoveries of chemistry, the variations in his temperature, the mysterious angers, the sudden serenities, no less valuable than the studies of remote climates.

  But when in the face of too large a wave, whose dome seemed more than a mere ecstasy of foam raining over the marvelous shape of his hands, a wave whose concaveness seemed more than a temporary womb in which he could lie for the fraction of an instant, the duration of an orgasm, he sat like a Chinese secret box with a surface revealing no possible opening to the infiltrations of tenderness or the flood of passion, then her larger impulse fractured with a strange pain into a multitude of little waves capped with frivolous sunspangles, secretly ashamed of its wild disproportion to the young man who sat there offering whatever he possessed—his intermittent manliness, his vastest dreams and his fear of his own expansions, his maturity as well as his fear of this maturity which was leading him out of the gardens of childhood.

  And when the larger wave had dispersed into smaller ones, and when Paul felt free of any danger of being dragged to the bottom, free of that fear of possession which is the secret of all adolescence, when he had gained strength within his retreat, then he returned to tease and stir her warmth into activity again, when he felt equal to plunging into it, to lose himself in it, feeling the intoxication of the man who had conquered the sea…

  Then he would write to her exultantly: you are the sea…

  But she could see the little waves in himself gathering power for the future, preparing for the moment when he would be the engulfing onee inf>

  Then he seemed no longer the slender adolescent with dreamy gestures but a passionate young man rehearsing his future scenes of domination.

  He wore a white scarf through the gray streets of the city, a white scarf of immunity. His head resting on the folds was the head of the dreamer walking through the city selecting by a white magic to see and hear and gather only according to his inner needs, slowly and gradually building as each one does ultimately, his own world out of the material at hand from which he was allowed at least a freedom of selection.

  The white scarf asserted the innumerable things which did not touch him: choked trees, broken windows, cripples, obscenities penciled on the walls, the lascivious speeches of the drunks, the miasmas and corrosions of the city.

  He did not see or hear them.

  After traversing deserted streets, immured in his inner dream, he would suddenly open his eyes upon an organ grinder and his monkey.

&
nbsp; What he brought home again was always some object by which men sought to overcome mediocrity: a book, a painting, a piece of music to transform his vision of the world, to expand and deepen it.

  The white scarf did not lie.

  It was the appropriate flag of his voyages.

  His head resting fittingly on its white folds was immune to stains. He could traverse sewers, hospitals, prisons, and none left their odor upon him. His coat, his breath, his hair, when he returned, still exhaled the odor of his dream.

  This was the only virgin forest known to man: this purity of selection.

  When Paul returned with his white scarf gleaming it was all that he rejected which shone in its folds.

  He was always a little surprised at older people’s interest in him.

  He did not know himself to be the possessor of anything they might want, not knowing that in his presence they were violently carried back to their first dream.

  Because he stood at the beginning of the labyrinth and not in the heart of it, he made everyone aware of the turn where they had lost themselves. With Paul standing at the entrance of the maze, they recaptured the beginning of their voyage, they remembered their first intent, their first image, their first desires.

  They would don his white scarf and begin anew.

  And yet today she felt there was another purity, a greater purity which lay in the giving of one’s self. She felt pure when she gave herself, and Paul felt pure when he withdrew himself.

  The tears of his mother, the more restrained severity of his father, brought him home again.

  His eighteenth birthday came and this was the one they could not spend together, this being his birthday in reality, the one visible to his parents. Whereas with Djuna he had spent so many birthdays which his parents could not have observed, with their limited knowledge of him.

  They had not attended the birthday of his manhood, the birthday of his roguish humorous self, of his first drunkenness, his first success at a party; or the birthday of his eloquent self on the theme of poetry, painting or music. Or the birthday of his imagination, his fantasy, of his new knowledge of people, of his new assertions and his discoveries of unknown powers in himself.