by Anais Nin
When she left Gonzalo said: "Those two are inseparable, incongruous as it may seem."
How lost Gonzalo is, drinking, drifting, trapped in poverty. As soon as Helba stopped dancing because of her deafness, they fell into poverty.
Now he said as he walked me home: "You have aroused my pride. I did violence to my true self, I begged, and drank, and accomplished nothing. I was dying. Now I want to live. You give me a desire to live. Quiero vivir. All this for your face which is the face of ancient Spain. Spanish women move their heads in two ways, one the manola way, which is vulgar, which I don't like, and the other as you move it, with pride."
Later he added: "I have always pursued the unreal, the marvelous. I have a thirst for danger, heroism. I want to go to Spain and help the Republicans."
Such contradictory wishes! He talks about Marx. All this ancient Inca poetry, mysticism, and now Marx. At first I did not understand.
But I did understand that Gonzalo's fervor was the opposite of Henry's: "I never cared enough, it made life painful, just didn't care a hang," but then he also talks of how June killed his faith, gave him such a terrible shock: "When I see pain again I'm paralyzed, fatalistic. I can't act."
The world is shedding blood. With the taste of Catholic wafers, distilled bread on my lips, offered to me by Gonzalo, I lose the taste for ordinary bread which Henry handed me.
The death of the Republicans in Spain wounds me like the death of flesh I love. I am sensitive to every face I see in the street, every leaf, every cloud, every form of love, and is it the universal one waking in me? The poetry of Moricand, the girl face of Pita (to whom Gonzalo says roughly: "I will lift your skirts up and spank you if you go on").
The voyage of dispossession began when I met June and Henry. I walk dispossessed as June did, without hat, underwear, stockings, walking poor to better feel humanity's closeness, to be nearer, less enveloped, less protected, dropping falsities, forms, continuity, desiring to be poor like the others, giving all I have, the dress I love, my jewelry, money because I am given so much, enriched, fecundated, possessed by life.
I have not been unaware of the political drama going on, but I have not taken any sides because politics to me, all of them, seemed rotten at the core and all based on economics, not humanitarianism. The suffering of the world seemed to me to be without remedy, except by what we could give individually. I did not trust any movement or system. But now the drama is going on, and Spain is bleeding tragically, and I feel tempted to engage my allegiance. But I must find a leader I trust and would die for, seeing only betrayal and ugliness so far, and no ideals, no heroism, no giving of the self. If I met a revolutionary who was a great man, a man, a human being, I could serve, fight, die. But meanwhile I help in a small radius, and I wait. The "people" will destroy me anyway because of my birth ("shoot everybody with clean nails," they shouted in Spain), because of my individual and personal giving, and so I don't know if I can be useful. It was not the Kings we valued, but the symbol of a leader. Now we seem to have no leaders, no rituals, no ceremonies, no direction, only a struggle for bread. We are very poor indeed.
Gonzalo, in his childhood and youth saw the Catholics lashing themselves until they reached ecstasy. He calls for the same violent ways to reach ecstasy. Sacrifice.
He says I am a Pagan and he a Christian. He says he likes red wine like Christ's blood and I like white wine which is Bacchus' drink.
Black Spring is out, dedicated to me.
[July, 1936]
We live on top of a crumbling world. The more it crumbles the more I feel like asserting the possibility of an individually perfect world, personal loves, personal relationships, creation. I may be trying to place an opium mat on top of a volcano. The world in chaos. Panic. Hysteria.
Gonzalo has not yet left for Spain.
My mother and Joaquin arrive home safe after my struggles to get them out of Majorca.
I met Denise Clairouin, the literary agent. Small stature, beautiful face, large blue eyes and classical features.
She asked me to give her as many volumes of the diary as I had copied.
I took to Henry my favorite books, Moricand's Miroir Astrologique, Blaise Cendrar's L'Eubage and Transsibérien.
I sent the remaining copies of House of Incest to Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart in New York, in case we have to leave France. She wrote me a warm, welcoming letter.
Henry unable to work. All the artists quitting. I place all my diaries in the bank vault where this one will go too when I finish writing in it.
Gonzalo talked about his childhood.
"One of my first memories is of watching an anaconda devouring a cow. Another vivid memory is of walking through my father's hacienda and coming upon a condor preparing to eat a dead donkey. I looked on, petrified with horror. The condor is immense, with almost seven feet of wing span. He has a hairless head, with two white balls protruding from the back of his neck. He bows his head quickly, many times, as if he were saluting, and bowing, and chatting. Then he plants his enormous claws into the swollen belly of the animal. I grew to know about their organization. When an animal or a man died, they seemed able to telegraph this to all the condors in the neighborhood, and arrange a meeting. They would appear in groups, and sit around the carcass in a circle, bowing their heads but not touching it until the King arrived, the biggest of them all. He made as much noise as an airplane. All the shaved heads bowed and scraped their claws. The cóndor real let them sit in an orderly fashion around the carcass like guests at a banquet. They would not dare to eat until the King had eaten. Men in the mountains are afraid of the condors, because they follow caravans, watching to see if any of them show illness, weakness, and might fall down and die. There was also a tree whose shade killed whoever fell asleep under it. It had gigantic leaves which gave shadow and coolness, and the Indians would lie under it for a siesta and die. There were carnivorous flowers, and a bread tree which gave both a breadlike substance and water. I lived in an atmosphere of utmost cruelty. Fifty or more Indian families lived on my father's hacienda, in great poverty. Of the products of their farming and cattle raising, they were allowed to keep just enough to eat, but all the rest went to the master. The servants were treated like members of the family, but if they were caught stealing, or guilty of any other minor offense, there was a formal court made up of members of the family, and a judgment and punishment was meted out right then and there. The offender would be tied to a post and whipped. When I was a child I saw many flagellations, and not what you might know about a flagellation, just blows which may leave a long scar, but a very expert kind of flagellation by which it is only the tip of the whip which lashes the flesh and tears it off, a whole piece at a time. With eleven or fourteen blows a man would die. His muscles, tendons all torn out. The Jesuits were the first humanists I knew who tried to abolish such punishments. They awakened my compassion. My father was Scottish and my mother an Inca. Perhaps this gave me compassion for the Indians, or perhaps my Marxism came from this. I don't know. The Jesuits, to gain the conversion of the Indians, had to let them flagellate in church. My own violence was tamed first by the Jesuits, then by America, then even more by France."
Is the primitive in Gonzalo tamed? Is his spirit broken, his blood thinned by his life in America and his life in France? Seven years in America, seven years in France. Today, when he is angry or mutinous, he drinks.
Gonzalo said: "When I first saw Europe, I was amazed at the smallness of it. After Peru, the giant country, after the size of our mountains and rivers, France seemed like a garden and a vegetable patch. Here we are sitting amongst the gardeners. But now a war or a revolution may swallow France. In Peru we had revolutions all the time. When my mother was pregnant with me, there was a revolt of the Indians, and her nurse had to disguise her in Indian clothes so that she could run away from the hacienda and hide. I was born in a humble Indian hut, to the sound of gunfire. The first word I learned was guerrillero."
Gonzalo is torn apart.
"When I place you and Helba on one side of the balance, and the world on the other, you seem worth more to me and I cannot tear myself away. I must be a coward."
"You are not a coward, Gonzalo. It may be you do not have absolute faith, an absolute belief in the side you're on, or else no wife or friend could stop you. I think you are not sure. Sometimes it takes more courage to stand by one's personal convictions than to follow a line of action one can share with many."
Ambivalence. Duality. A part of Gonzalo cannot act.
"Perhaps I am an artist after all." As if to prove this, he spent all afternoon drawing at the Académie Julien. He is slowly breaking with Montparnasse and drinking. He wants his strength back. In the café he talks on. "I cannot sleep on a Western bed. I like to sleep on a mattress on the floor, or on a bench out of doors. Sleeping on the floor reminds me of the opium dens in Lima, where I lay on straw mats with the Chinese, behind curtains, in dim lights."
After so many years of Bohemian life, he still has modesty and pride. His pride is intact. I have to find all kinds of circuitous ways of helping him and Helba, through other friends, complicated ways.
"Anaïs, you have the same passion I have for creating human beings. I created Helba. I would like to have known you when you were ten years old, before you went to America. At ten years of age I am sure you were more Spanish."
Last night I had dinner at Henry's. We talked over his last pages. They are the most terrible descriptions ever written of dissolution and void. I talked about his Gargantuan appetite, his seeking of quantity, his drama and conflict against the loss of the self, of the core. Quantity and the impersonal are symbolical of the American drama of the spirit unable to master so much matter. I said the personal experience with June overshadowed the crowd experience, proved that everything else was worthless. Have I helped Henry to transform his material? Have I breathed meaning into his crowded streets? I have tried to put the core back inside of him. Even today. Now in this book, Henry's disease lies revealed, terrifying, his dispersions, his atrophied emotions, the loss of his self in the city ("shattered by the city," he writes). But it is the crowd, the gigantism, the shiftless wandering which produces emptiness, the void, the split, the schizophrenia.
But what an interesting world, his world. How ever-changing, disquieting. I was walking through it, rediscovering its monstrosities, its perversities.
Henry says: "You're not just a woman—you're more than a woman." I laugh, because I am both. I can live sometimes in a larger, impersonal world, and at other times I find all that cold, and I return to the personal, initimate world. The big world, in which woman sometimes swims with a bit of human apprehension, human loneliness, a stellar world of magnitude and mutation by which woman is fascinated and wounded at the same time. Up there, I swim in planetary deserts where I find no trace of Henry at all, but a kind of fevered monster spilling out legends, myths, anathemas, or the plain story of a Brooklyn boy, Max the Jew, Claude the whore, a strange Henry who made love impersonally, all women and woman rolled into a universal orgasm, a schizophrenic maniac, absent altogether, removed from daily life, butting his Capricornian horns into the same turning windmills like Don Quixote, or a rag-picker sticking his forked cane into all the debris, junk and excrement of the world, philosophically, a man skating on icy drolleries, a man with long-sightedness who can see much better the sleeping princess he read about in the newspaper, lying asleep in some Chicago suburb, than anyone standing next to him.
Henry distended, expanded, multiform, boundless, transformable, transmutable, dissolving.
Gonzalo says: "I am not a creator." That is why he is in life, why he has acted in the world, risked everything, experienced everything. He throws his whole self into the present. Like a child, he has no memory of yesterday, no thought of tomorrow.
The artist, like Henry, is a gambler who saves his biggest throw for his writing.
In my own life there is a perpetual struggle to unite life and art. When I go out into the world, to the cafés, to parties, I am looking for deep experiences, friendships. When I find them, I pause. I stop to taste, to deepen by reflection, to give my whole attention to it. Henry goes on, more cafés, more people, more movement, no selection, no deepening, no evaluations.
The world of man in flames and blood. The world of man disintegrating in war. The world of woman alive as it is in this book, as it shall be forever, woman giving life, and man destroying life. Death and carnage all around me, death and hatred and division. I continue to make an individually human world for Joaquin, my mother, Helba and Gonzalo, Henry and other friends.
Gonzalo seeking drunkenness and the dream. Gonzalo with a bottle of red wine in his torn pocket, rushing into political meetings, and I weeping before the film of the sailors of Kronstadt. Heroism, the heroism to die, but never the heroism to live, to defend the personal world, the soul. My personal world unshattered, but it becomes harder to keep it alive. We are all going to lose each other as people lost each other in the Russian Revolution.
[August, 1936]
Gonzalo still has not gone to Spain. Out of a thirst for greatness, for the holocaust, he would die. Exaltation leading to dissolution.
Joys pierced with melancholy. I look tired, nervous, struggling to love in a world full of destruction. Where is my joy?
I am walking home with Gonzalo and he is talking about the need to sacrifice and to die for the world.
"I will die shot, Anaïs."
Out of the world of art and creation into a world of death. I can only see it as death. What will his death give birth to? I cannot pull Gonzalo out of his world of action, of political action. He believes in it.
Art has been my only religion. I do not believe in politics.
Meanwhile, Henry's book grows immense, written with sperm and blood, and Henry grows each day more delicate, more frail.
The weather is grey. No summer. No sun. Tragedy and death. Black Spring is out and Henry is saying: "I am getting old."
At twelve o'clock I am bicycling through the Bois. Wondering whether war is coming here, and who will die, and who will be saved, and where will we go?
Conrad Moricand.* He is about forty years old, and looks like a white Indian. He has narrow Oriental eyes. He believes himself to be the last of the Mohicans, a faded, high-cheeked Indian transplanted from lost continents, whitened by long research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he studied esoteric writings. He has a slow walk like a somnambulist enmeshed in the past and unable to walk into the present. He is so loaded with memories, cast down by them. Out of his researches, his calculations, he extracts nothing but the poison of fatality. He sees only the madness of the world, the approach of a great world-engulfing catastrophe. For Moricand all life is a minor crystal phenomenon on the surface of a planet. As a result people appear to him without their density. He sees their phosphorescence. He speaks of the intensity or the feebleness of the light in them. He offers the world first of all an appearance of legendary elegance. His coat is handed to you with the care of a man who refuses to be weighed down by a speck of dust. This coat must be hung up with care, he asks, so that no wrinkles would form on it. His white collar is incredibly starchy, his cuffs dazzlingly white, his buff gloves have never been worn. His clothes show no trace of being lived in. Somnambulists make so few gestures, never knock against objects, never fall. The trance carries him through all obstacles with an economy of gestures and the dream interposes itself between him and all he wants to touch and feel. He himself passes invisible, untouched, unattainable, giving at no time any proof of reality: no stain, tear, sign of wear and death coming. It seems rather as if death has already passed, that he has died already to all the friction and usage of life, been pompously buried with all his possessions, dressed in his finest clothes, and is now walking through the city of Paris merely to warn us of the disruption of Europe.
He has the armature of the aristocrat, this strong armature which not only upholds his clothes, but which forbids him to compla
in, to beg, to loosen or slacken either physically or spiritually, that extraordinary armature which is the only redeeming characteristic of nobility, the very last of the erect and stylized attitudes vanishing out of this world. Now he lives at the top of a hill overlooking Paris, near the white Sacré-Cœur. He lives under the slanting roof of a very small hotel room, where the ceiling touches the floor behind his bed. He gives to his room the order and barrenness of a monastic cell. He covers his books with cellophane, the blotter on his desk is white and spotless. On the walls hang horoscopes designed with geometric finesse. The planets in finely drawn lines of blue and red and black, traversing the "houses." The opposition between them outlined in red ink, the squares in black, the conjunctions in blue.
Moricand sits in his little room under the roof, hot in summer and cold in winter, and from there he watches over all our lives and makes predictions. All he needs is the hour, date, and place of birth. Then he vanishes for several days into his laboratory of the soul, and we only see him again when the horoscope is, as he says, properly infused. Does he really know when disease and madness will strike? Does he know when we are going to love, unite, separate? Moricand believes that he knows.
Now he sits reading Henry his horoscope. He talks at times like a child, at times like a homosexual, at times like a drug addict, at other times like a schizophrenic. But he is more than an astrologer, he is a poet. His horoscopes are poems. He has a natural access to invisible, subtle worlds. What he describes as the Neptunian world is all that I cannot find words for, states of consciousness, metamorphoses, intuitions, illusions.