by Anais Nin
The studio is the sun room. It is pierced, saturated with sun and light. It is a bower of light. I love to work in it, typing on a huge table. The bedroom is the mystery, the bower of night. The Hindu lamp throws designs all over the walls, trellises, cactus flowers, lacefans, intricate arches, circles, iron grilles, cages, plane trees, orange leaves.
I know where I have seen such windows before: in illustrations from Grimms' fairy tales.
How prophetic my description of the labyrinth. "The spider web was broken by a foghorn, and by the chiming of hours. I found myself traversing moats, gangplanks, while still tied to the heavy straining cord of departing ships."
The old grandfather of the river, the ex-captain of sumptuous yachts, had been for a long time the captain of La Belle Aurore. He resented if anyone took care of the houseboat. Occasionally Gonzalo would repair the pump, or the electric light batteries. Or he would stir up the stove, and break up wood. The old captain would come out of his cabin and spit, and curse under his mustache, and bang his pipe loudly against the walls.
Gonzalo's dark skin frightened him, his six feet of height, and although Gonzalo wore workmen's clothes, battered corduroys, the captain was still more in awe of him than of my other, better-dressed visitors, such as the immaculate Moricand.
Every day, it seemed, the old man drank a little more. And when he was drunk at night, he banged on the walls with his pots and pans. He spat, snored, cursed.
One of his chores was to fetch drinking water from the fountain on the quays. He carried two pails, strung on a stick, Japanese style, but he was so drunk that by the time he reached the houseboat the pails would be empty. If I ran out of water at night, I was afraid to fetch any because the hoboes slept under the bridge. The walk back and forth was very dark. Prostitutes plied their trade behind the trees.
One evening Gonzalo arrived with a friend, and I asked them to get me a pail of water. The old man came out on his one leg, and watched what he considered a taking over of his duties. He stirred up the stove angrily, and muttered something about black men. Gonzalo is quick to anger. He told the old man to go back to his cabin and stay there.
While we talked he banged on the walls.
The barge, the black-tarred walls, the shadowy beams, the slapping water at the bottom, began to seem haunted by the shadow of the old man.
René said: "I have seen that old man knock a man out cold, he's tough, that old man." ("Je l'ai vu descendre un homme cammerien, il est costaud, le vieux.")
When he climbed up and down the stairs on his one leg, with his crutch, he made a loud thumping which would wake me at dawn, or late at night.
Helba always tells the story of when her mother first saw Gonzalo and said: "Aye, how black he is. Dios mío, how black his sins must bel"
When he is angry he looks like a demon. His curled black hair flies about his face, his eyes blaze.
It was eight in the evening. Gonzalo was making a sketch of René with his apache cap, his dirty yellow scarf around his neck, and his hands blue from the loading of cabbages at dawn in the market. The stove was snoring. The boat moorings were creaking, like wood about to tear, the water was lapping the sides of the barge. Shadows. The street lamps were twinkling between the tree branches on the boulevard above.
The old man began to throw pots against the walls, and to shout.
Gonzalo leaped up, furious, and banged on the old man's door. "Keep quiet," he shouted. "If you don't keep quiet you'll be thrown out of the boat."
The old man continued his songs, and insults. Gonzalo was becoming angrier. He threw himself against the old man's door, kicked it with his feet and demolished it.
The old man appeared half-naked, lying on a smelly pile of potato sacks, with his beret on, holding his crutch like a sword. Gonzalo said in his muddled French: "You're a bad old man, get out of here. Now you're going to get out or I'll fetch the police."
René had already done that, fearing a murder. The old man was hazy with drunkenness, too frightened to move. Gonzalo held up the oil lamp. René said: "Get dressed. The lady wants you out. Get dressed."
"Who broke down the door, I ask you, who? It's not me who should be taken to the police station."
He lay there. He could not find his pants. Gonalo and René talked. The policeman talked. They could not dress him. He kept muttering: "Well, what do I care. Suppose you do throw me down the river, it's all the same to me. I don't care if I die. I'm not bad. I run errands for you, don't I?"
"You make too much noise, all night, singing and knocking your pots and pans on the wall."
"I was sound asleep," said the old man, "and you knocked the door down. Then you come for me. I'll not get out. I'm too old. I can't find my pants." For an hour, thus, innocence, haziness, drunken logic, until finally the humor overwhelmed us all, and we all began to laugh; everyone laughed, including the old man.
"Je ferais la mart" he said, and lay down and closed his eyes, docile, bewildered, and frightened. The policeman left, laughing. René went to bed, laughing.
At the café one day, Gonzalo began to ask me questions about psychoanalysis, the great enemy of Marxism. I talked about Rank's ideas, in relation to Helba's neurosis. He said after a while: "I want to read those books."
Then suddenly he banged his forehead with his closed fist: "Curse all intellectual worlds. Literary worlds. Burn those books. Nobody would be neurotic if the economic problem were solved. Neurosis is for the rich. It's a luxury. The poor need bread. Did those books of yours solve the problems of the world?"
"Not all problems are economic," I said gently.
Gonzalo commented on the mellow ending to the old hobo in the boat. He said a Spanish hobo under the same circumstances would have set fire to the boat, or poisoned the water he brought for drinking, or murdered Gonzalo in the dark.
Gonzalo said: "I could easily kill a man in a moment of anger."
It is only alone that I find my head again, cooler philosophical regions, where I seek explanations of what baffles and wounds me, where I question all the wisdoms, oracles, interpretations in order to achieve balance again.
But it is only a pause. The rest of the time I am living as fully as anyone ever did, on many levels, in many languages, with many people, in many worlds, with a poignancy and freshness as if each day were new, each human being new, and ultimately faithful only to life, always to life.
A somber day. Everyone weighed down, oppressed.
Gonzalo receives letters from his mother, old and sick, calling him home, promising him that if he comes he will get his inheritance, which would solve his poverty.
Helba confesses that she never loved Gonzalo with passion, that they are like brother and sister, that his fatalism destroyed her.
All the time I feel that I am fighting a dark, engulfing force. I feel that within a thousand walls I managed to create an illusory paradise for all of us by selecting only the high moments.
The dark, cavelike dwelling where Gonzalo, Helba, and their friends sit like defeated, passive, tragic figures in a Chekhov play. Helba in her rags, wearing Gonzalo's discarded shirt, his socks, and several coats. Elsa, after her goiter operation, sitting in a brown dress touching her scar constantly, as a pianist touches his keyboard, and the violinist, stealer of Dostoevsky's complete works, who looks like the young man in Doctor Caligari. There the food is served on a bare table, stained with wine, covered with cigarette ashes and bread crumbs.
Was my rag-pickers' story a humorous, fantastic acceptance of futility?
Is my life dangerously balanced over a precipice? The further I soar into fantasy and live by my selections, the tighter does the cord of reality press my neck. The more I move, the more I feel the suffocating hand of a nameless anxiety.
Seeking the absolute only in multiplicity. An absolute in abstractions, dispersed elements, many lives. An absolute in fragments. An absolute which does not flow serenely but which I have to grasp by sheer wakefulness, and as elusive as the ecstasies of the poets, t
he marvelous sought by the surrealists. An absolute in flight always.
This absolute is like dynamite which has not exploded, but the cord is lit, the little flame runs up and down the cord, with a kind of Dionysian joyousness, keeping me breathless, nerves bristling with their tips awakened like eyes, necks stretched, eager, hungry, eyes open, ears peaked, all the little nerves waiting for the climax that will send the blood running through them and make them sleep.
Ecstasy and anxiety are twins. Anxiety is a sentinel which sees in a yellow face at the café the face of a criminal, a drug addict, a premonition of disaster. A knife? Poison? A pause of some kind. But the taxi did not smash against another. The walls did not fall, the past did not crumble, and I wait for an absolute which does not shoot through the sky, a fugitive absolute, uncapturable.
Do all burning fires have a hundred flames pointing in all directions, was there ever a round flame with one tongue? Why does anxiety rush like quicksilver through the veins, take typhoon shapes, round up each monster walking through the streets to question its intuitions, to imagine its perversities, to slide between the lovers. This man with his little girl on his arm, why are his eyes so wet, his mouth so wet, why are her eyes so tired, why is her dress so short, his glance so oblique, why this malaise I feel as I pass them; why is this young man so white, his eyes so haggard, is there scum on his lips, the scum of veronal I first saw on Artaud's lips; why does that woman wait under the lamplight with a hand in her muff—a revolver? Why did the two sisters murder their crazy brother, living many years with him alone in a big house?
Ivan's wife sits absolutely still, with a wrinkle between her eyes as if she could not understand anything we say. Elsa traces the line of her scar as if discovering it for the first time. Helba puts on her two coats sewn together, she pins on a brooch without stones, all the stones in it lost, torn off.
And I am still seeking the fairy tale, while the man who sold us stockings and cigarettes at the café, at half-price, carried cocaine in his wooden leg, Gonzalo tells me. I did not guess it, I never guess at these things, that is my brand of innocence. I do not foresee evil or danger, but even while I am dreaming my life, I see the dead leaves floating down the gutter, I see the old drunken hobo waiting for Gonzalo at the bottom of the stairs to stab him, I see the rust on the coffee pot Helba is holding, the leak in the roof, the rain falling on Gonzalo's drawings, the fire that has gone out, the sour wine dried up at the bottom of the cup, and continue to descend trap doors without falling into a trap, passing through as if invisible, so that I can dash across the street and the car does not knock me down, I am still listening to those who are weeping. The fairy tale wears a gown that makes a breeze, makes a space between the feet and earth, wood, and rust.
What I call heaven is when none are suffering. If one suffers, my joy is spoiled.
The night we had dinner at Helba's, Gonzalo was counting the people to set the table and did not count himself.
Evreinoff from the Moscow Art Theatre, with his hair combed like a page, a page with a bald top, the face of an old woman, the mobile eyes of an actor, interchangeable, amorphous, his clothes hanging loosely on him, as if they had been borrowed, not espousing his body, like a man in an old-fashioned lithograph, exactly as if his hard collar reached to his ears and his tie was flowing, saying: "There is this man of today, the self of today, the modern man, but then there is the archaic self, the archetype in terms of psychology, and it is this self which remembers millions of years, which requires art to nourish this self. Dramatization, theatricality, is necessary to bring out the meaning."
Conrad Moricand, who is an "homme de salon," but who stands like a young virgin shy of her body, dropping his hand in front of what requires protection, who has the face of a white Indian, a very diluted one, is saying: "The real condemnation to death will come the day I am forced to sell all my belongings to pay my back rent. I shall have to take a job, know all the ignominious cruelties. I am about to take veronal."
Ivan's eyes dance like the eyes of those Bali dancers, of the possessed. The first thing the spirits do when they enter a body is to unhook the eyes, as one might do to bad pictures.
***
Those who cannot follow all my swift rotations, who see me vanish at strange hours, reappear at strange hours, should see me sitting on the floor working on a rug, actually knotting the white wool at each opening of the tapestry backing, snipping the wool at the right length, making sure the knot is secure and the cut even, as the Moroccans do. And although this rug has taken me years to make, I do not undo what I have already done each night. The rug shows signs of having been worked, of time, and dust, and fatigue.
Helba makes drawings of houses which have no point of gravitation, like Chagall's flying horses; she buys a dog collar to wear as a Peruvian headgear and tries it out before an indignant merchant who angrily reminds her it is a dog collar.
In Havana, when Helba danced there, the public advised her to drink olive oil and gain weight. She chased them out of the theatre with a broom. It was a broom made of twigs, used for the stage, and it made her look even more like a witch.
Gonzalo draws Goyaesque figures, three old women sitting on a bench, weighed down, as if magnetized by the earth, towards its fiery center, as are all those who are not gravitating upward towards magnetization from the stars, the dreamers, the artists, who seek to elude the earth's downward pull.
In Helba's studio, there is the presence of dampness, the breath of the buried seeps through the walls and the floors. The breath of the buried always seeps in, sensing the approach of death in the living, those who are already of their fraternity. No need of art to remind man of the past, a soiled greasy wallpaper sweating will render centuries of melancholia better than a face on a painting. But the painter teaches us to see it. Their walls give off the sweat and grease of the earth we come from, the dampness of roots and of cemeteries, the moisture of birth, agony and death. There are walls which impede breathing, flying, escape from the earth. The thickness of such walls upon which bodies have left grease, breath, and dampness, is something no destroyers can pull down. When the house is pulled down, it is this stain which will remain, like the stain of blood, and when this stain is removed, stone by stone, layer by layer, there is still the odor in the air, an odor of death. Helba has just washed her walls with a solution of ammonia and her hands have swollen. She was trying to erase the presence of death, she said. Ivan helped her, half-naked, while all the while he explained Einstein and geometry to her, shouting with the hope she would hear him. Gonzalo shakes his head like a lion, impatient under a harness of knowledge, closes his eyes as if he were meditating, charging into the delicate framework of logic and science, snorting fire. He looks for the wine to forget how happy he was in the jungle, on his horse, and what a blight it was the day he was taught to read. He curses the aunt who played the piano all night in the hacienda, a maiden aunt whose loved one had deserted her, was dying of love and committed suicide by playing the piano day and night and not eating. She left Gonzalo a treasure of music, and the haunting sound of the piano, so that when she died, with her hand on the keyboard, he felt compelled to continue, to study the piano. At that time, no man ever studied the piano. It was an art for women, like embroidery. When he arrived at the music school, fresh off his horse, still in white boots and leather coat and vicuña fur, all the little girls laughed at him. He seeks a state of being, a state of consciousness which is far from the intellectual conversations held around him. He sought it in opium, in cocaine, in chewing coca as the Indians did, and taking the mysterious beverages given to him by his Indian nurse, the concoctions they took at church to achieve an ecstasy not known to the Catholic priests.
I would like to take care of them all, to break into my father's unused, silent house and let them live there, because they have the courage to be, to act what others only dare to dream of at night.
Gonzalo passed by a bookshop on the Boulevard Montparnasse and saw House of Incest open
in the window. Underneath it was a reproduction of Cranach. He said he did not know if it was intentional on the part of the bookshop, but that there was a resemblance between the Cranach figure and me. I came home and opened a copy of the Minotaure Gonzalo had just given me. It had a full reproduction of Cranach's woman. I opened the New York Times the next day and found the reproduction again.
***
Henry is a celebrity now, due greatly to his own efforts, his sociability, gregariousness, correspondence, his boundless energy and ambition.
Dream: Sitting on the roof of a house in China waiting for the darkness. Sitting among the roof tiles made of broken Chinese cups and saucers, with the last of the tea leaves still at the bottom of the cups. Sitting among the cups and saucers and waiting for the darkness when I could slip down and enter the city secretly. Sliding down the sandalwood beams, finding that the walls were made of sliding panels. A Chinese woman, with a porcelain face, slid open the panel and showed me the way in. I was kneeling before a meal, an immense round plate on my knees, filled with pearl-studded slippers, angel-hair, filigrane, icicles, melted gold. I looked intently and lovingly because I knew that I would be only once in each room, and that all I saw I would see only once, so I looked lingeringly at the carved panels, at the dish, I smelled the incense odor of the room, I saw the light filtered through parchment paper. Each panel I moved led me through the Chinese house but also out of it, and once I would be out of it for good, and so I pushed the panels slowly, passing through each room with regrets, meditating in the soft filtered light, and on the carving on the wood, which was so precise I thought, given time, I could read it like a book. I began to decipher the carving but its meaning eluded me, it reminded me of many things, none of which I could remember entirely, and the last panel which I pushed gently found me out in the street of China with doorless houses, windowless, with lanterns swinging, all alike, and dolls sitting on the sidewalk.