by Anais Nin
No money from New York, although much is owed me. There is shopping to do for the new apartment on the Quai de Passy, which I want to be modern. A psychic need for new surroundings. I found a clock made of sea shells, a white wool rug from Morocco.
Outside, red flags are waving. Newspaper headlines: "C'EST DONC UNE RÉFORME? NON, SIRE. C'EST UNE RéVOLUTION."
Workmen in the streets. Strikes. Strikes ended. New strikes. Strikes in progress. A tumultuous, restless, brooding, dark season.
Fraenkel left for Spain, saying that Henry is faithless to ideas and to friendships. Henry quickly forgot him.
Charpentier praises House of Incest. "Absolutely beautiful." Stuart Gilbert says: "It is music, it is a symphony. And I love the irony. A unique use of language. Like Scriabin."
I cling to the world made by the artists because the other is full of horror, and I can see no remedy for it.
Roger Klein asked me to lunch. A friend of his, Emile Savitry, a photographer, talked all through lunch about his Peruvian friends. One was a dancer I once saw dancing in a small theatre on the Rue de la Gait£. She did strange and wild dances, like voodoo dances, and ended with the dance of the woman without arms which I wrote about in House of Incest. It was a very small theatre. She left me with an impression of a nightmare. "Her husband accompanied her. You did not notice him?" No, I had not noticed him. Henry had met the couple later at a party. He had described her dances, and his conversation with Helba's husband, Gonzalo. "He and I were drunk, we got along very well, we agreed that what neither one of us wanted was to work."
Roger added to the story: "They are dreadfully poor, unbelievably poor. She has grown deaf and can no longer dance, and he drinks. But they are extraordinary people."
He said this in a tone of awe. The contemplation of them sent him into a fit of silence, as if he could find no words with which to describe them. He aroused my curiosity. He promised we would meet.
He gave a small party in his new, small workman's apartment near the Villa Seurat. The night before I met them I had a dream of a pale, haggard woman who looked so ill, as if about to die.
And it was this very pale and haggard woman who appeared at Roger's small apartment in the crude light of naked bulbs. And right behind her, a very tall, very dark man, with long black hair. He had a round, full laughing face, and he carried a guitar. Their friend, the photographer, was not there. Gonzalo explained: "We can never both go out at the same time because we have only one good pair of pants between us. Tonight was my turn." The contrast between Helba, who had a bilious-colored skin, faded eyes, faded hair, and the fiery, alive Gonzalo was striking. He played the guitar and sang. We danced. Gonzalo had a rich, husky voice. When he laughed the high cheekbone of the Indian made his eyes close and seem Oriental. He had heavy coal-black eyelashes. A tiger who dreams, a tiger without claws.
Jonathan Cape of London rejected Winter of Artifice.
The world gets Henry's joyousness, enjoyment of food, generous talks. I get the revelation of his anxieties, fears, guilts, and discontent. I have to fight his ghosts, which haunt him whenever he is not writing. While he seems to be enjoying cafés, parties, it is then he feels emptiest and saddest. I pull him back always into himself. We had an argument one day after I had disentangled him. He accused me of not letting him be sick, but of trying by artificial means to help him, against nature. I said: "A sick animal is not nature. Analysis is not artificial because in the end it frees the animal from his sickness. You know very well you are not a man of nature, or you would not be sick occasionally with ghosts and fears."
Henry fears starvation as much as I fear losing those I love.
When I fall into a reverie among people, my voice becomes remote. Henry noticed the contrast between my warm voice and my remote voice. Some people are natural only in public. Henry breathes, lives, talks better among a lot of people. For me the most sincere and natural moment is either alone or with the one I love.
[June, 1936]
30 Quai de Passy.
A new background created without hope or joy, without feeling of permanence or with a conviction of its Tightness. But inevitably beautiful. Modern, simple, joyous, light. Orange walls, white wool rugs from Morocco, chairs of a natural pale oak and cream leather, a huge table of pine wood with a sand-blasted surface which looks like pale sand on the beach. Luminousness, lack of formality. Created during the hot days of summer and the mood of estrangement from the Villa Seurat.
Villa Seurat seems like sand, a sponge, dissolution.
I gave a big housewarming party and invited a group of Tahitian singers and dancers. I hung orange paper lanterns, and filled the place with pots of tropical plants. The doors to the balcony were open. The Seine was flowing and shining below, while the Tahitians danced and sang (the men play music, the women dance). It was a truly tropical-night fiesta, with sensual dancing and voices, the lanterns, the exotic plants and the river sparkling below.
Stuart Gilbert was reminded of his life in the Gold Coast. A friend had told me about a remarkable poet-astrologer, Conrad Moricand, who had known and written about Picasso, Louis Jouvet, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars. I had invited him and he came, a pale, aristocratic figure. He told me: "When I heard your voice over the telephone I thought it was a voice from another planet."
Gonzalo towered above everyone, le tigre qui rêve, the Inca with his coal-black eyes, his black hair wild. A shock at his dark intensity, through which a radiant, childlike smile flashed now and then. Mystic, dreamer, full of nobility and depth, a mysterious quality. And with all that, earthy. He whispered while we danced: "You are so strong, so strong and so fragile. What an influence you have on me. I fear you. Your voice, it is so strange. You're all sensitiveness, you're the flower of everything, you're stylization, the perfume and essence of all things."
His voice was low and husky. He spoke in Spanish. In Spanish I hear things with my body, my senses, my blood, not with my mind. It reaches me through subterranean channels of atavistic memories. It touches a different Anaïs, one I scarcely know.
"Anaïs," he continued, "you have bruised your head against the world's reality, you don't see the city, houses, men, as such, you see beyond. Anaïs, I have seen thousands of women but never one like you."
His eyes like the night, a night without moon. I fear him as much as he fears me, because I fear the dream.
The Seine glitters outside as we step on the balcony to cool. Couples come to kiss in the darkness of the balcony. Dr. René Allendy fascinated by the Tahitian girls, De Maigret dancing, Henry Leigh Hunt scandalized, because this is becoming a Bohemian party, and yet he cannot walk away. "Aloha, Aloha Tahiti"; soft and sensual faces; sensual ambiance, one of those evenings when everyone comes out of his shell, expands, lives fully.
The Spanish Civil War is in the air. It is as if Gonzalo had come in answer to my question: "What does it mean, what can I do, as an artist?" Perhaps he can answer, for he knows what it means, and what to do.
Gonzalo went to sleep with House of Incest under his pillow, reading it over and over "like a drug."
I went to Fez without the diary. I wanted to lie in a hotel bed, in a strange place without the diary, to break the flow of self-examination, of the diary as mirror, as assurance, diary in place of talk. I wanted nothing to ruminate over, nothing to chew over. Life passed in Fez as I passed, leaving no trace or shreds. The sun was on the water of the Seine, I breathe and love without need to say: "I am breathing, I am loving." When I was caught in the dark cellars of the cathedral as a child I was afraid of being shut in within the walls of my own terrors. Later I was bound and bandaged by my traumas like a mummy, by a twenty-year calvary of doubts and fears. A long circle of struggle with a crippled self. And now, I am free.
***
Gonzalo took me to a big party at Alejo Carpentier's, the Cuban novelist. His vast studio also overlooks the Seine. The Tahitians are dancing and singing. Helba is sitting on one of the couches looking at an art book, withdrawn. That she
is deaf is not the reason, for there are things she does hear. Gonzalo is taller than anyone, his golden-brown arms are bare, and he is still talking in my ear: "Anaïs, what a force you are, spiritual and vital, though you are all wrapped in myths and legends, you are like a whip on me. When I first saw you I felt a shock, you aroused my pride, for the first time I am shedding the fumes of alcohol; I want to be, Anaïs."
He talks about Peru, his hacienda, his Scottish father who married an Indian woman, the Inca culture, legends, the great distances between haciendas, the crushing immensity of nature, his hunting, the Jesuits who brought him up, the smell of his father's cigar boxes, and the smell of the furniture made of cedarwood. Days spent on horseback, riding along narrow paths, beside huge gorges and waterfalls which put the Incas to sleep and often caused their death. Chewing coca, necessary at that altitude, his Inca nurse, and his first love, the statue of a fourteenth-century Madonna, and the day he swore to find a face which resembled it, and now it was my face.
He talks like a chanting Indian, poetry, myth, tales.
"With cruelty, with cruelty, you can whip me into action, we are so old we Incas, we cannot reach for the food. Did you know about the seven mystical circles? Seven circles had to be broken through to reach the core."
The curled black hair has a few strands of white in it. His eyes are more brilliant than those of the Arabs, the brow high. He has grandeur, nobility.
He has pride and intransigence. When he is thirsty he places a glass of water in front of him and does not drink it. (The Jesuit's theory of self-chastisement?)
He talks disconnectedly and feverishly, as June did.
He says he is too old to live in an ordinary way, too old, too subtle, to reach directly for things.
By his talk he leads me back into the medieval life of Peru, and at the same time he gives me Karl Marx to read, and explains the meaning of the strikes.
He tells me that he came merely to rescue me from what was going to happen. The whole world was going to erupt. There would be a revolution in France.
He wanted to see Louveciennes because I talked about it. So we took the train and I showed it to him. Louveciennes dying, the wood rotting, the rain falling, the ghosts creaking, the odor of ancient houses, the threadbare velvet cover. We visited the garden, all tangled and filled with weeds. We walked along the river and sat at the workmen's café.
Here he talked about the revolution again. He accused me of living only in the world of art and artists, of not knowing the political life. "When the changes come I will be able to rescue you."
Now we are in Notre-Dame. He seems to live in several worlds, one the Catholic, another the Inca world of his childhood, pagan, violent, and a third, the Marxist world of today.
The organ is playing. Purple light falls from the stained-glass windows.
Into the past, and then into the future.
The world of politics, until now, had seemed one of corruption and ugliness. Nothing for me to do there. Of what use could I be? Gonzalo talks to the workmen. After visiting Notre-Dame, we went to Rue de la Gaité and I bought a ten-dollar tailored suit in grey, I took the polish off my nails and I went with him to a political meeting where Pablo Neruda was speaking. Neruda was fat and very pale, and he recited poetry in a rather colorless voice, but the speeches afterwards, in Spanish, were vehement and I did not know what they were about. With the workmen, Gonzalo is familiar, cheerful, fraternal. They love him although they do not understand his bad French. He drinks with them. They trust him. His big hands are rough, his body is rough and he is dressed as they are. He is so much taller than they are, and as black as a Negro.
Letter to my mother:
I was in Notre-Dame yesterday afternoon and I heard Vespers, and I wept and found my old soul again, I don't know where it was. I had found it once at the Hospital, remember? I found it again yesterday. I stood there in the Church and cried and today I am happy, it is all so good, the house is sweet, the cat is funny, and I have a bicycle and will go to the country soon, but there is no sun at all, no heat, and I was not able to rent Louveciennes because of that. I will pay your rent tomorrow, and let Joaquin read this too, it is for him, it is what they call the modern style in writing, with all the phrases running close together, I am doing it to make you laugh, because you like surrealism so much. I hope Alida liked my book, you will like it too someday, I don't know when, when you realize ta vida es sueño, and that dreams are necessary to life; and you know not all our dreams are holy, are they, you had some which were not so holy, our dreams are not holy but that does not hurt or change the fundamental soul, maybe some day you will believe so firmly in my fundamental soul you won't mind my fantasies, you won't frown, you will just listen and smile as I imagine you smiling and listening when you are far away, I never imagine you cross or displeased with me, or disillusioned, when you are far everything is sweet and as it was before and always when I was wholly devoted to you as you were to your children, and this devotion has remained even though my life split up, only you did not believe it as much and you drove me away a bit, scolding me for being different than I was as a girl, but fundamentally, little mother, nothing has changed, if one is good, nothing ever really changes, I love you as much.
Henry states in seventy-eight pages of his book the most tragic of all truths: "Life does not interest me, what interests me is what I am doing now (this book) which is parallel to it, of it, and yet beyond it."
The river of Henry's life is anonymous, amorphous, and whoever wanted to make it personal or intimate drowned in it. He denies the life of feeling which he corrodes by angers, contrariness, denials and role-playing, by fragmentation, dispersion.
Henry's definition of human is the one who drinks, forgets, is irresponsible, unfaithful, fallible. Mine is the one who is aware of the feelings of other human beings.
When I left the Villa Seurat I went to visit Gonzalo's home, which I had never seen. He met me at the door of an old apartment house, and we walked down some dark staircase which seemed to be leading to a cellar. There had been a fire once, the walls were charred, and I felt them crumbling under my fingers as I leaned against them because it was so dark. The staircase opened into a studio with a big window so dirty that one could not see out. The light was diffuse as if coming through frosted glass. I could not see well at first. And then I saw Helba lying on the couch, covered with old blankets and coats. Her black uncombed hair fell around her face. She smiled with her lips but not with her eyes. On the chair next to her lay many bottles of medicines, boxes of pills. She had two expressions, which followed each other almost without transition: One was dolorous, pleading, like that of a beggar. Pleading for pity. In pain perhaps. Almost a grimace of agony. But it was followed by, or almost alternated with, a shrewd, foxy, uncanny suspicion and mockery. I responded to the plea for pity. I sat on the edge of her bed, there was no other place to sit on, and took her hand. I told her how I had seen her dance once, years ago. Behind her I could see the greasy walls of the studio, shining with dampness.
Gonzalo had come back with wood and was lighting a fire in the fireplace. After a while he placed a deep iron pot over the fire and started to boil potatoes.
It was growing darker. Then Gonzalo began to place on dishes little pieces of fat, which he had melted beforehand, and planted with a wick, and this was their candlelight. Later a young girl came in, who resembled Helba and Gonzalo introduced her as Elsa, Helba's niece. She was pale and wore a handkerchief tied around her neck. She was suffering from goiter and was soon to be operated on for it.
Then Gonzalo led me into another dark passage to a darker room, a real cellar room with two small windows which might have appeared in any of Dostoevsky's darkest poverty stories. I had Dostoevsky in my mind, the mood of his life, of Siberia. And it startled me when Gonzalo said as if he had known what I was thinking: "I want to introduce you to Ivan. He is just out of jail for stealing a set of Dostoevsky's works. The French judge was sympathetic. He had good taste in
literature. He said: 'If you had stolen a bad writer's books I would have given you sixty days. Now I will give you only a week.' And the day he left jail he received from the judge a set of Dostoevsky wrapped in brown paper."
We were standing in front of an opaque glass door, and Gonzalo was knocking gently. But we had to wait. "He is always afraid to open the door. He has to make sure it is me. He was so often in jail for revolutionary activity. Finally it unbalanced his reason, that and starvation. In the madhouse he met his wife. They are making a new start together."
The door opened. Ivan was standing before us, staring at me. He was unshaved, emaciated. He looked as if he no longer understood what was happening around him. His eyes had no life in them. We entered. In a corner of the room, his wife was sewing by candlelight.
The walls were damp too, perspiring. There was hardly any furniture. The bed had no sheets. It was like a prison, and it was as if Ivan could no longer live in the daylight, but had to cower away in a dark, humid place. I shivered. Neither one of them smiled. Ivan was studying. He asked Gonzalo if he had any fat left, as the candles were about to peter out.
I could not talk. But when we returned to Helba there were visitors. There was Désirée, a voluptuous-looking Russian woman, with magnificent blond hair piled on top of her head, magnificent ice-blue eyes, a sensual heavy voice. She was the mistress of Balthus, the painter. And there was Pita, a Cuban adolescent with the eyes and skin of a young girl, who was gay and talkative. He took my arm and made me dance all around the room, and Gonzalo looked darkly at us like Othello, Helba was laughing at Pita's antics, and then Désirée, taller than Pita, suddenly stopped his dancing and clowning and led him away.