Children of the Albatross

by Anais Nin

  It was not her clarity either, which he called honesty. Her clarity he distrusted. She always made wonderful patterns—he admitted that. There was a kind of Grecian symmetry to her movements, her life, and her words. They looked convincingly harmonious, clear—too clear. And in the meanwhile where was she? Not on the clear orderly surface of her ideas any longer, but submerged, sunk in some obscure realm like a submarine. She had only appeared to give you all her thoughts. She had only seemed to empty herself in this clarity. She gave you a neat pattern and then slipped out of it herself and laughed at you. Or else she gave you a neat pattern and then slipped out of it herself and then the utterly tragic expression of her face testified to some other realm she had entered and not allowed one to follow her into, a realm of despair even, a realm of anguish, which was only betrayed by her eyes.

  What was the mystery of woman? Only this obstinacy in concealing themselves—merely this persistence in creating mysteries, as if the exposure of her thoughts and feelings were gifts reserved for love and intimacy.

  He suspected that some day an honest woman would clear all this away. He never suspected for a moment that this mystery was a part of themselves they did not know, could not see.

  Djuna, he ruminated, was a more ornamented woman, but an honest one.

  He had long ago found a way to neutralize the potencies of woman by a simplification all his own, which was to consider all women as sharing but one kind of hunger, a hunger situated between the two pale columns of the legs. Even the angels, said Jay, even the angels, and the mothers, and the sisters, were all made the same way, and he retained this focus upon them from the time when he was a very little boy playing on the floor of his mother’s kitchen and an enormous German woman had come straight to them from the immigration landing, still wearing her voluminous peasant skirts, her native costume, and she had stood in the kitchen asking his mother to help her find work, using some broken jargon impossible to understand—everyone in the house dismayed by her foreignness, her braids, her speech. As if to prove her capabilities through some universal gesture, she had started to knead the dough expertly, kneading with fervor, while Jay’s mother watched her with increasing interest.

  Jay was playing on the floor with matches, unnoticed, and he found himself covered as by a huge and colorful tent by the perfoliate skirt of the German woman, his glance lost where two pale columns converged in a revelation which had given him forever this perspective of woman’s be, this vantage point of insight, this observatory and infallible focus, which prevented him from losing his orientation in the vastest maze of costumes, classes, races, nationalities—no external variations able to deprive him of this intimate knowledge of woman’s most secret architecture…

  Chuckling, he thought of Djuna’s expression whenever she opened the door to receive him.

  The dreamer wears fur and velvet blinkers.

  Chuckling, Jay thought of himself entering the house, and of her face shining between these blinkers of her vision of him as a great painter, shutting out with royal indifference all other elements which might disturb this vision.

  He could see on her face this little shrine built by the dreamer in which she placed him as a great painter. Won by her fervor, he would enter with her into her dream of him, and begin to listen raptly to her way of transmuting into gold everything he told her!

  If he had stolen from the Zombie’s pocketbook she said it was because the Zombie was provocatively miserly. If he complained that he was oversleeping when he should be working Djuna translated it that he was catching up on sleep lost during the period when he had only a moving-picture hall to sleep in.

  She only heard and saw what she wanted to hear and see. (Damn women!) Her expression of expectancy, of faith, her perpetual absolution of his acts disconcerted him at times.

  The more intently he believed all she believed while he was with her, the more precipitately he fell out of grace when he left her, because he felt she was the depository of his own dream, and that she would keep it while he turned his back on it.

  One of the few women, chuckled Jay, who understood the artificial paradise of art, the language of man.

  As he walked, the city took on the languid beauty of a woman, which was the beauty of Paris, especially at five o’clock, at twilight, when the fountains, the parks, the soft lighting, the humid streets like blue mirrors, all dissolved into a haze of pearl, extending their fripperies and coquetries.

  At the same hour New York took on its masculine and aggressive beauty, with its brash lighting, its steel arrows and giant obelisks piercing the sky, an electric erectness, a rigid city pitiless to lovers, sending detectives to hotel rooms to track them down, at the same hour that the French waiter said to the couples: do you wish a cabinet particulier—atthe same hour that in New York all the energies were poured into steel structures, digging oil wells, harnessing electricity, for power.

  Jay walked leisurely, like a ragpicker of good moments, walked through streets of joy, throwing off whatever disturbed him, gathering only what pleased him, noticing with delight that the washed and faded blue of the café awning matched the washed faded blue face of the clock in the church spire.

  Then he saw the café table where Lillian sat talking with Sabina, and knowing his dream of becoming a great painter securely stored in the eyes of Djuna (damn women!) he decided to sin against it by sinking into the more shallow fantasies born of absinthe.

  Djuna awakened from so deep a dream that opening her eyes was like pushing aside a heavy shroud of veils, a thousand layers of veils, and with a sensation similar to that of the trapezist who has been swinging in vast spaces, and suddenly feels again in his two hands the coarse touch of the swing cord.

  She awakened fully to the painful knowledge that this was a day when she would be possessed by a mood which cut her off from fraternity.

  It was also at those moments that she would have the clearest intuitions, sudden contacts with the deepest selves of others, divine the most hidden sorrow.

  But if she spoke from this source, others would feel uneasy, not recognizing the truth of what she said. They always felt exposed and were quick to revenge themselves. They rushed to defend this exposure of the self they did not know, they were not familiar with, or did not like. They blamed her for excess of imagination, for exaggeration.

  They persisted in living on familiar terms only with the surface of their personalities, and what she reached lay deeper where they could not see it. They feltat ease among their falsities, and the nakedness of her insight seemed like forcing open underworlds whose entrance was tacitly barred in everyday intercourse.

  They would accuse her of living in a world of illusion while they lived in reality.

  Their falsities had such an air of solidity, entirely supported by the palpable.

  But she felt that on the contrary, she had contact with their secret desires, secret fears, secret intents. And she had faith in what she saw.

  She attributed all her difficulties merely to the over quickness of her rhythm. Proofs would always follow later, too late to be of value to her human life, but not too late to be added to this city of the interior she was constructing, to which none had access.

  Yet she was never surprised when people betrayed the self she saw, which was the maximum rendition of themselves. This maximum she knew to be a torment, this knowledge of all one might achieve, become, was a threat to human joy and life. She felt in sympathy with those who turned their back on it. Yet she also knew that if they did, another torment awaited them: that of having fallen short of their own dream.

  She would have liked to escape from her own demands upon herself.

  But even if at times she was taken with a desire to become blind, to drift, to abandon her dreams, to slip into negation, destruction, she carried in herself something which altered the atmosphere she sought and which proved stronger than the place or people she had permitted to infect her with their disintegration, their betrayal of their original dream
of themselves.

  Even when she let herself be poisoned with all that was human, defeat, jealousy, sickness, surrender, blindness, she carried an essence which was like a counter-poison and which reversed despair into hope, bitterness into faith, abortions into births, weight into lightness.

  Everything in her hands changed substance, quality, form, intent.

  Djuna could see it happen against her will, and did not know why it happened.

  Was it because she began every day anew as children do, without memory of defeat, rancor, without memory of disaster? No matter what happened the day before, she always awakened with an expectation of a miracle. Her hands always appeared first from out of the sheets, hands without memories, wounds, weights, and these hands danced.

  That was her awakening. A new day was a new life. Every morning was a beginning.

  No sediments of pain, sadness yes, but no stagnating pools of accumulated bitterness.

  Djuna believed one could begin anew as often as one dared.

  The only acid she contained was one which dissolved the calluses formed by life around the sensibilities.

  Every day she looked at people with the eyes of faith. Placing an unlimited supply of faith at their disposal. Since she did not accept the actual self as final, seeing only the possibilities of expansion, she established a climate of infinite possibilities.

  She did not mind that by this expectation of a miracle, she exposed herself to immense disappointments. What she suffered as a human being when others betrayed themselves and her she counted as nothing—like the pains of childbirth.

  She believed that the dream which human beings carry in themselves was man’s greatest hunger. If statistics were taken there would be found more deaths by aborted dreams than from physical calamities, more deaths by dream abortions than child abortions, more deaths by infection from despair than from physical illness.

  Carrying this ultimate knowledge she was often the victim of strange revenges: people’s revenge against the image of their unfulfilled dream. If they could annihilate her they might annihilate this haunting image of their completed selves and be done with it!

  She only knew one person who might rescue her from this world, from this city of the interior lying below the level of identity.

  She might learn from Jay to walk into a well-peopled world and abandon the intense selectivity of the dream (this personage fits into my dream and this one does not).

  The dreamer rejects the ordinary.

  Jay invited the ordinary. He was content with unformed fragments of people, incomplete ones: a minor doctor, a feeble painter, a h unfoocre writer, an average of any kind.

  For Djuna it must always be: an extraordinary doctor, a unique writer, a summation of some kind, which could become a symbol by its completeness, by its greatness in its own realm.

  Jay was the living proof that it was in this acceptance of the ordinary that pleasure lay. She would learn from him. She would learn to like daily bread. He gave her everything in its untransformed state: food, houses, streets, cafés, people. A way back to the simplicities.

  Somewhere, in the labyrinth of her life, bread had been transformed on her tongue into a wafer, with the imponderability of symbols. Communion had been the actual way she experienced life—as communion, not as bread and wine. In place of bread, the wafer, in place of blood, the wine.

  Jay would give her back a crowded world untransmuted. He had mocked her once saying he had found her portrait in one page of the dictionary under Trans:transmutations, transformation, transmitting, etc.

  In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

  What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream?

  Let Jay lead her out of the cities of the interior.

  She would work as usual, hours of dancing, then she would take her shoes to be repaired, then she would go to the café.

  The shoemaker was working with his window open on the street. As often as Djuna passed there he would be sitting in his low chair, his head bowed over his work, a nail between his lips, a hammer in his hand.

  She took all her shoes to him for repairing, because he had as great a love of unique shoes as she did. She brought him slippers from Montenegro whose tips were raised like the prows of galleys, slippers from Morocco embroidered in gold thread, sandals from Tibet.

  His eyes traveled up from his work towards the package she carried as if she were bringing him a gift.

  He took the fur boots from Lapland he had not seen before, and was moved by the simplicity of their sewing, the reindeer guts sewn by hand. He asked for their history.

  Djuna did not have to explain to him that as she could not travel enough to satisfy the restlessness of her feet, she could at least wear shoes which came from the place she might never visit. She did not have to explain to him that when she looked at her feet in Lapland boots she felt herself walking through deserts of snow.

  The shoes carried her everywhere, tireless shoes walking forever all over the world.

  This shoemaker repaired them with all the curiosity of a great traveler. He respected the signs of wear and tear as if she were returning from all the voyages she had wanted to make. It was not alone the dust or mud of Paris he brushed off but of Egypt, Greece, India. Every shoe she brought him was his voyage too. He respected wear as a sign of distance, broken straps as an indication of discoveries, torn heels as an accident happening only to explorers.

  He was always sitting down. From his cellar room he looked up at the window where he could see only the feet of the passers-by.

  “I love a foot that has elegance,” he said. “Sometimes for days I see only ugly feet. And then perhaps one pair of beautiful feet. And that makes me happy.”

  As Djuna was leaving, for the first time he left his low working chair and moved forward to open the door for her, limping.

  He had a club foot.

  Once she had been found in the corner of a room by her very angry parents, all covered by a shawl. Their anxiety in not finding her for a long time turned to great anger.

  “What are you doing there hiding, covered by a shawl?”

  She answered: “Traveling. I am traveling.”

  The Rue de la Santé, the Rue Dolent, the Rue des Saint Pères became Bombay, Ladoma, Budapest, Lavinia.

  The cities of the interior were like the city of Fez, intricate, endless, secret and unchartable.

  Then she saw Jay sitting at the café table with Lillian, Donald, Michael, Sabina and Rango, and she joined them.

  Faustin the Zombie, as everyone called him, awakened in a room he thought he had selected blindly but which gave the outward image of his inner self as accurately as if he had turned every element of himself into a carpet or a piece of furniture.

  First of all it was not accessible to the door when it opened, but had to be reached by a dark and twisted corridor. Then he had contrived to cover the windows in such a manner with a glazed material that the objects, books and furniture appeared to be conserved in a storage room, to be at once dormant and veiled. The odor they emitted was the odor of hibernation.

  One expected vast hoods to fall over the chairs and couch. Certain chairs were dismally isolated and had to be forcibly dragged to enter into relation with other chairs. There was an inertia in the pillows, an indifference in the wilted texture of the couch cover. The table in the center of the room blocked all passageways, the lamp shed a tired light. The walls absorbed the light without throwing it back.

  His detachment affected the whole room. Objects need human warmth like human beings to bloom. A lamp sheds a meager or a p
rodigal light according to one’s interior lighting. Even specks of dust are inhabited by the spirit of the master. There are rooms in which the dust is brilliant. There are rooms in which even carelessness is alive, as the disorder of someone rushing to more important matters. But here in Faustin’s room there was not even the disorder caused by emotional draughts!

  The walls of the rooming house were very thin, and he could hear all that took place in the other rooms.

  This morning he awakened to a clear duet between a man and a woman.

  Man: It’s unbelievable, we’ve been together six years now, and I still have an illusion about you! I’ve never had this as long with any woman.

  Woman: Six years!

  Man: I’d like to know how often you have been unfaithful.

  Woman: Well, I don’t want to know how many times you were.

  Man: Oh, me, only a few times. Whenever you went away and I’d get lonely and angry that you had left me. One summer at the beach…do you remember the model Colette?

  Woman: I didn’t ask you. I don’t want to know.

  Man: But I do. I know you went off with that singer. Why did you? A singer. I couldn’t make love to a singer!

  Woman: But you made love to a model.

  Man: That’s different. You know it’s not important. You know you’re the only one.

  Woman: You’d think it was important if I had.

  Man: It’s different for a woman. Why? Why did you, what made you go with that singer, why, when I love you so much and desire you so often?

  Silence.

  Woman: I don’t believe we should talk about this. I don’t want to know about you. (Crying.) I never wanted to think about it and now you made me.

  Man: You’re crying! But it’s nothing. I forgot it immediately. And in six years only a few times. Whereas you, I’m sure it was many times.