Children of the Albatross

by Anais Nin

  Woman: (still crying) I didn’t ask you. Why did you have to tell me?

  Man: I’m just mo sincere than you are.

  Woman: It isn’t sincerity, it’s revenge. You told me just to hurt me.

  Man: I told you because I thought it would drive you into being honest with me.

  Silence.

  Man: How obstinate you are. Why are you crying?

  Woman: Not over your unfaithfulness!

  Man: Over your own then?

  Woman: I’m crying over unfaithfulness in general—how people hurt each other.

  Man: Unfaithfulness in general! What a fine way to evade the particular.

  Silence.

  Man: I’d like to know how you learned all you know about love-making. Who did you learn from? You know what very few women do.

  Woman: I learned…from talking with other women. I also have a natural gift.

  Man: I suppose it was Maurice who taught you the most. It enrages me to see how much you know.

  Woman: I never asked you where you learned. Besides, it’s always personal. Each couple invents their own way.

  Man: Yes, that’s true. Sometimes I made you cry with joy, didn’t I?

  Woman: (crying) Why do you use the past tense?

  Man: Why did you go off with that singer?

  Woman: If you insist so much I will tell you something.

  Man: (in a very tense voice) About the singer?

  Woman: No, someone else. Once I tried to be unfaithful. You were neglecting me. I took rather a fancy to someone. And all might have gone well except that he had the same habit you have of starting with: you have the softest skin in the world. And when he said this, just as you do, I remembered your saying that, and I left the man, I ran away. Nothing happened.

  Man: But just the same he had time to note the quality of your skin.

  Woman: I’m telling you the truth.

  Man: You have nothing to cry about now. You have taken your revenge.

  Woman: I’m crying about unfaithfulness in general, all the betrayals.

  Man: I will never forgive you.

  Woman: Once in six years!

  Man: I’m sure it was that singer.

  Faustin, lying down, smoking as he listened, felt the urgent need to comment. He knocked angrily on the wall. The man and the woman were silent.

  “Listen,” he said, in his loudest voice, “I heard your entire conversation. I would say in this case the man is very unjust and the woman right. She was more faithful than the man. She was faithful to a personal emotion, to a personal rite.”

  “Who are you?” said the man in the other room, angrily.

  “No one in particular, just a neighbor.”

  There was a long silence. Then the sound of a door being closed violently. Faustin heard one person moving about with soft rustles. Judging from the steps, it was the man who had gone out.

  Faustin lay down again, meditating on his own anxiety.

  He felt at this moment like a puppet, but he became aware that all this had happened many times before to him, but never as clearly.

  All living had taken place for him in the other room, and he had always been the witness. He had always been the commentator.

  He felt a guilt for having listened, which was like the guilt he felt at other times for never being the one in action. He was always accompanying someone to a marriage, not his own, to a hospital, to a burial, to a celebration in which he played no part but that of the accompanist.

  He was allowing them all to live for him, and then articulating a judgment. He was allowing Jay to paint for him, and then he was the one to write ironic articles on his exhibits. He was allowing Sabina to devastate others with her passion, and smiling at those who were consumed or rejected. Now at this moment he was ashamed not to be the one consumed or rejected. He allowed Djuna to speak, Michael to face the tragic consequences of his deviations in love. He was allowing others to cry, to complain, to die.

  And all he did was to speak across a protective wall, to knock with anger and say: you are right, and you are wrong.

  Rendered uneasy by these meditations, he dressed himself and decided to go to the café.

  He was called Uncle Philip by everyone, even by those who were not related to him.

  He had the solicitous walk of an undertaker, the unctuous voice of a floorwalker.

  His hands were always gloved, his heels properly resoled, his umbrella sheathed.

  It was impossible to imagine him having been a child, or even an adolescent. It was admitted he possessed no photographs of that period, and that he had the taste never to talk about this obviously nonexistent facet of his personality. He had been born gray-haired, slender and genteel.

  Attired in the most neutral suit, with the manners of someone about to announce a bereavement, Uncle Philip nevertheless did not fulfill such threats and was merely content to register and report minutely on the activity of the large, colorful, international family to which he was related.

  No one could mention a country where Uncle Philip did not have a relative who…

  No one could mention any world, social, political, artistic, financial, political, in which Uncle Philip did not possess a relative who…

  No one ever thought of inquiring into his own vocation. One accepted him as a witness.

  By an act of polite prestidigitation and punctuality, Uncle Philip managed to attend a ceremony in India where one of the members of the family was decorated for high bravery. He could give all the details of the function with a precision of colors resembling scenes from the National Geographic Magazine.

  And a few days later he was equally present at the wedding of another member in Belgium, from which he brought back observations on the tenacious smell of Catholic incense.

  A few days later he was present as godfather of a newborn child in Hungary and then proceeded to attend in Paris the first concert of importance given by still another relative.

  Amiable and courteous as he shared in the backstage celebrations, he remained immune to the contagion of colors, gaiety and fame. His grayness took no glow from the success, flowers, and handshakes. His pride in the event was historical, and shed no light on his private life.

  He was the witness.

  He felt neither honored nor disgraced (he also attended death by electric chair of a lesser member).

  He appeared almost out of nowhere, as a family spirit must, and immediately after the ceremony, after he partook of the wine, food, rice, sermon or verdict, he vanished as he had come and no one remembered him.

  He who had traveled a thousand miles to sustain this family tree, to solder the spreading and dissipated family unity, was instantly forgotten.

  Of course it was simple enough to follow the caeers of the more official members of the family, those who practiced orthodox marriages and divorces, or such classical habits as first nights, presentations at the Court of England, decorations from the Académie Française. All this was announced in the papers and all Uncle Philip had to do was to read the columns carefully every morning.

  But his devotion to the family did not limit itself to obvious attendance upon the obvious incidents of the family tree. He was not content with appearing at cemeteries, churches, private homes, sanatoriums, hospitals.

  He pursued with equal flair and accuracy the more mysterious developments. When one relative entered upon an irregular union Uncle Philip was the first to call, assuming that all was perfectly in order and insisting on all the amenities.

  The true mystery lay in the contradiction that the brilliance of these happenings (for even the performance at the electric chair was not without its uniqueness, the electric power failing to achieve its duty) never imparted any radiation to Uncle Philip; that while he moved in a profusion of family-tree blossoms, yet each year he became a little more faded, a little more automatic, a little more starched—like a wooden figure representing irreparable ennui.

  His face remained unvaryingly gray, his suits frayed
evenly, his soles thinned smoothly, his gloves wore out not finger by finger but all at once, as they should.

  He remained alert to his duties, however. His genius for detecting step by step the most wayward activities led him to his most brilliant feat of all.

  One relative having wanted to travel across the Atlantic with a companion who was not her husband, deceived all her friends as to the date of her sailing and boarded a ship leaving a day earlier.

  As she walked up and down the deck with her compromising escort, thinking regretfully of the flowers, fruit and books which would be delivered elsewhere and lost to her, she encountered Uncle Philip holding a small bouquet and saying in an appropriate voice: “Bon voyage! Give my regards to the family when you get to America!”

  The only surprising fact was that Uncle Philip failed to greet them at their arrival on the other side.

  “Am I aging?” asked Uncle Philip of himself as he awakened, picked up the newspaper at his door, the breakfast tray, and went back to his bed.

  He was losing his interest in genealogical trees.

  He thought of the café and of all the people he had seen there, watched, listened to. From their talk they seemed to have been born without parents, without relatives. They will all run away, forgotten, or separated from the past. None of them acknowledged parents, or even nationalities.

  When he questioned them they were irritated with him, or fled from him.

  He thought they were rootless, and yet he felt they were bound to each other, and relat himselfach other as if they had founded new ties, a new kind of family, a new country.

  He was the lonely one, he the esprit de famille.

  The sap that ran through the family tree had not bloomed in him as the sap that ran through these people as they sat together.

  He wanted to get up and dress and sit with them. He remembered a painting he had seen in a book of mythology. All in coral and gold, a vast tree, and sitting at each tip of a branch, a mythological personage, man, woman, child, priest or poet, scribe, lyre player, dancer, goddess, god, all sitting in the same tree with a mysterious complacency of unity.

  When Donald had been ejected from his apartment because he had not been able to pay his rent, all of them had come in the night and formed a chain and helped him to move his belongings out of the window, and the only danger had been one of discovery due to their irrepressible laughter.

  When Jay sold a painting he came to the café to celebrate and that night everyone ate abundantly.

  When Lillian gave a concert they all went together forming a compact block of sympathy with effusive applause.

  When Stella was invited by some titled person or other to stay at a mansion in the south of France, she invited them all.

  When the ballet master fell ill with asthma and could no longer teach dancing, he was fed by all of them.

  There was another kind of family, and Uncle Philip wished he could discover the secret of their genealogy.

  With this curiosity he dressed and went off to the café.

  Michael liked to awaken first and look upon the face of Donald asleep on the pillows, as if he could extract from the reality of Donald’s face asleep on a pillow within reach of his hand, a certitude which might quiet his anxiety, a certitude which, once awake, Donald would proceed to destroy gradually all through the day and evening.

  At no time when he was awake could Donald dispense the word Michael needed, dispense the glance, the smallest act to prove his love.

  Michael’s feelings at that moment exactly resembled Lillian’s feelings in regard to Jay.

  Like Lillian he longed for some trivial gift that would prove Donald had wanted to make him a gift. Like Lillian he longed for a word he could enclose within his being that would place him at the center. Like Lillian he longed for some moment of passionate intensity that would be like those vast fires in the iron factory from which the iron emerged incandescent, welded, complete.

  He had to be content with Donald asleep upon his pillow.

  With Donald’s presence.

  But no sooner would his eyes open than Donald would proceed to weave a world as inaccessible to Michael as the protean, fluid world of Jay became inaccessible to Lillian.

  This weaving began always with Donald’s little songs of nonsense with which he established the mood of the day on a pitch too light for Michael to seize, and which he sang not to please himself, but with a note of defiance, of provocation to Michael:

  Nothing is lost but it changes

  into the new string old string

  into the new bag old bag…

  “Michael,” said Donald, “today I would like to go to the zoo and see the new weasel who cried so desperately when she was left alone.”

  Michael thought: “How human of him to feel sympathy for the weasel crying in solitude in its cage.” And Donald’s sympathy for the weasel encouraged him to say tenderly: “Would you cry like that if you were left alone?”

  “Not at all,” said Donald, “I wouldn’t mind at all. I like to be alone.”

  “You wouldn’t mind if I left you?”

  Donald shrugged his shoulders and sang:

  in the new pan old tin

  in the new shoe old leather

  in the new silk old hair

  in the new hat old straw…

  “Anyhow,” said Donald, “what I like best in the zoo is not the weasel, it’s the rhinoceros with his wonderful tough hide.”

  Michael felt inexplicably angry that Donald should like the rhinoceros and not the weasel. That he should admire the toughness of the rhinoceros skin, as if he were betraying him, expressing the wish that Michael should be less vulnerable.

  How how how could Michael achieve invulnerability when every gesture Donald made was in a different rhythm from his own, when he remained uncapturable even at the moments when he gave himself.

  Donald was singing:

  in the new man the child

  and the new not new

  im, exprot new

  the new not new

  Then he sat down to write a letter, and the way he wrote his letter was so much in the manner of a schoolboy, with the attentiveness born of awkwardness, an unfamiliarity with concentration, an impatience to have the task over and done with that the little phrase in his song which Michael had not allowed to become audible to his heart now became louder and more ominous: in the new man the child.

  As Donald sat biting the tip of his pen, Michael could see him preparing to trip, skip, prance, laugh, but always within a circle in which he admitted no partner.

  To avoid the assertion of a difference which would be emphasized in a visit to the zoo, Michael tempted Donald with a visit to the Flea Market, knowing this to be one of Donald’s favorite rambles.

  There, exposed in the street, on the sidewalk, lay all the objects the imagination could produce and summon.

  All the objects of the world with the added patina of having been possessed already, loved and hated, worn and discarded.

  But there, as Michael moved and searched deliberately he discovered a rare book on astronomy, and Donald found the mechanism of a music box without the box, just a skeleton of fine wires that played delicately in the palm of his hand. Donald placed it to his ear to listen and then said: “Michael, buy me this music box. I love it.”

  In the open air it was scarcely audible, but Donald did not offer it to Michael’s ear, as if he were listening to a music not made for him.

  Michael bought it for him as one buys a toy for a child, a toy one is not expected to share. And for himself he bought the book on astronomy which Donald did not even glance at.

  Donald walked with the music box playing inside of his pocket, and then he wanted reindeer horns, and he wanted a Louis Fifteenth costume, and he wanted an opium pipe.

  Michael studied old prints, and all his gestures were slow and lagging with a kind of sadness which Donald refused to see, which was meant to say: “Take me by the hand and let me share your games.” />
  Could he not see, in Michael’s bearing, a child imprisoned wishing to keep pace with Donald, wishing to keep pace with his prancing, wishing to hear the music of the music box?

  Finally they came upon the balloon woman, holding a floating bouquet of emerald-green balloons, and Donald wanted them all.

  “All?” said Michael in dismay.

  “Maybe they will carry me up in the air. I’m so much lighter than the old woman,” said Donald.

  But when he had taken the entire bunch from the woman, and held them and was not lifted off the ground as he expected, he let them fly off and watched their ascension with delight, as if part of himself wereattached to them and werenow swinging in space.

  Now it seemed to Michael that this divorce which happened every day would stretch intolerably during the rest of their time together, and he was wishing for the night, for darkness.

  A blind couple passed them, leaning on each other. Michael envied them. (How I envy the blind who can love in the dark. Never to see the eye of the lover without reflection or remembrance. Black moment of desire knowing nothing of the being one is holding but the fiery point in darkness at which they could touch and spark. Blind lovers throwing themselves in the void of desire lying together for a night without dawn. Never to see the day upon the body that was taken. Could love go further in the darkness? Further and deeper without awakening to the sorrows of lucidity? Touch only warm flesh and listen only to the warmth of a voice!)

  There was no darkness dark enough to prevent Michael from seeing the eyes of the lover turning away, empty of remembrance, never dark enough not to see the death of a love, the defectof a love, the end of the night of desire.

  No love blind enough for him to escape the sorrows of lucidity.

  “And now,” said Donald, his arms full of presents, “let’s go to the café.”

  Elbows touching, toes overlapping, breaths mingling, they sat in circles in the café while the passers-by flowed down the boulevard, the flower vendors plied their bouquets, the newsboys sang their street songs, and the evening achieved the marriage of day and night called twilight.

  An organ grinder was playing at the corner like a fountain of mechanical birds singing wildly Carmen’s provocations in this artificial paradise of etiolated trees, while the monkey rattled his chains and the pennies fell in the tin cup.