by Anais Nin
He says: "The capitalistic world killed the artist in me." He sees as coming from outside all that comes from inside. I know the artist in him must have been very weak to be defeated by this obstacle at all. Limitations, restrictions, defeats, come from within. I am fully responsible for my own restrictions.
***
Hélène became really ill, choking with anxieties. She has already been described in House of Incest. It took me four hours to illumine the darkness. To chase away the evil spirits. So as the day grew dark, Hélène's eyes green and gold again, she appeared more and more like a woman in a myth. No matter how fast I run, the tail end of others' ghosts pursues me, and I am fated to hear the same words: "I never found anyone I could lean on, anyone who understood me. What strength you give me. I am well again." Hélène lying in bed, and the bed covered with the sheets of Moricand's horoscope of her. His handwriting spidery, but the letters large and clear. I saw the title he had given it (he liked to give titles to his horoscopes from lines of poetry). This one was labeled: "Du Sang, de la Volupté et de la Mort."
Blood, Sensuality and Death.
This line made her ill. She thought it was prophetic, that it applied to her.
"It is a line from a poem by Maurice Barrés," I said. "It is not meant literally. It is symbolic. Didn't you tell me that in Brazil you saw much bloodshed, much sensuality and much death?"
The dark stars were shining upon her, they dug their fatal points into her sun-colored flesh.
Hélène said she wanted to paint me as Daphne, in the act of becoming a plant.
"Anaïs, so many people say things I never hear or remember. I remember everything you say to me."
Gonzalo talks about his childhood. He talks about the beautiful Jesuit school amidst gardens and woods in a valley surrounded by volcanoes. The discipline of the Jesuits was severe. At home and in school, Gonzalo always wanted to sleep naked. He hated pajamas, kimonos, clothes. The Jesuits watched him. Gonzalo would get into bed naked. A Jesuit father would come in late at night and lift a corner of the blanket and look. The Jesuits created an idealized image of themselves by never showing themselves at the table or at work. They appeared unreal and stylized. At fourteen and fifteen Gonzalo was sexually timid while his schoolfellows were already sleeping with maids and prostitutes. At sixteen a girl sent him a note to meet her at the park. He went, but hid behind a tree and at the sight of her he ran away. He talks about the Indians and his desire to lead them into rebellion against their oppressors. Peru, in those far-off ranches, was still medieval. The Jesuits must have had a hard time civilizing him. His family found it natural to whip the Indians for trifles. The Jesuits put an end to that and made Gonzalo aware of the inhumanity of these floggings. They must have had enough strength to awaken in Gonzalo a social consciousness, so it was he who went to help a nearby village suffering from an epidemic of meningitis. He nursed the people until he himself came down with a raging case of it.
Gonzalo said: "Ecuador and Peru are nearer to the moon. And high up on Lake Titicaca, fourteen thousand feet up, we were still nearer. The moon is so immense it frightens the white man. It appears with a blood-red halo, takes half of the sky, and everything is stained red. There is a bird we hunted whose life is so powerful that even after he is shot he does not die, and the Indians have to tear out one of his feathers and plunge the hard tip into a certain part back of his neck. Then there is the long-beaked bird who only feeds on brains which he sucks through the ears of dead animals. I remember a tame eagle who stayed on the roof of our house and was fed chickens. I remember big formal dinners at our house on Sunday, and the visit of the monsignor in his sumptuous embroidered robe. Masses and prayers said in the house. My mother recited the rosary every morning for the entire household. An atmosphere of sixteenth-century Spain overlaid the Indian life. I still remember the taste of lamb cooked over hot stones while we hunted, and our Scottish father teaching his three sons to run the hacienda."
What I like most in Gonzalo are the Inca Indian contemplative moods, the twilight zones, the trances he falls into watching the river, or a tree, or a bird.
He can be silent for hours. I like his suspicion of the intellect. "Jesuitical," he says. Europe seemed shabby, diminutive, puny after the immensity of his country. A toy, a toy moon, toy gardens, little people. But the immensity of Peru caused sadness and loneliness.
He talked so much about the moon being larger and nearer and more powerful in Peru that I finally confessed that when I was sixteen I took moonbaths because I thought they would influence my destiny, grant me a more mysterious life, a night life. I had heard that the effects of the moon were dangerous. This tempted me. In Richmond Hill, in my bedroom, I would lie naked where the moonlight shone through my open window, in the summer, bathing in it and dreaming of the kind of fantastic life it would create for me.
I did not think at the time that both the moon and the sea are symbols of the subconscious, and that this was the realm which would appeal to me, which I would be driven to explore, to live in, to write about.
Gonzalo, when he tells me his stories, gives me the feeling of a dream already dreamed, of a being I have already known, of one making the gestures, creating the atmosphere, images already imprinted in my blood, in the Spanish blood of my father's race which flows in me. Is it memories of Don Quixote, of romances, of novels of the Middle Ages, of books read on the Spanish conquest of Peru, or blood memories? What he awakens in me is contact with a world so far away, like the world a man may see when he watches the sun rising from a mountain and looks down at valleys, rivers, mountains he has not seen the night before. The world is so expanded I reach the jungles of South America, the deserts of Arabia, the skin colors of the Hindus, the Balinese, the Tahitians, the mysterious life of the Incas. It is not in this life that I have seen Gonzalo, because I was torn away from Spain too young, before seeing or tasting it, it is not in this life that I have seen Gonzalo on horseback. But I have seen him. It is like those obscure memories which assail one while traveling through lands to which one did not know one was bound in any way, and then one feels the roots of familiarity stirring. Some roots in me were buried in sixteenth-century Spain, with its severity, its rigid forms, the domination of the Church, the confinement of women, the sensuality of religious rites, the intensification of passion by restrictions and obstacles.
Gonzalo is always re-creating his childhood. He talks constantly about the Jesuits, their efforts to "civilize" the Indians. True, they destroyed the culture of the Indians. But these Jesuits, the teachers, were also the ones who preserved the manuscripts from destruction, who imposed humane laws on the ranchers, who took care of the sick and taught the talented children medicine and law, music and literature. They were also the ones who taught Gonzalo to play the piano and to read poetry.
His father's ranch was as big as a village, with a main house, a church, a gun room, a vast salon for parties, many Indian servants, and the Indians' huts all around.
The Jesuits could not eliminate all the Indian rituals, and to win the Indians over to the Church they allowed them to combine rituals. In church, they listened to the Mass, the organ, watched the incense spiral and the stained-glass windows shine, and also practiced flagellating each other. The Church let them use drugs which brought states of ecstasy.
Gonzalo, very young, had assisted at some of these spectacles. He had seen Indians, like Orientals, carry vivid-colored rugs, cages, and festive food and colored candles to the cemeteries on feast days. They refused to take death somberly. It was the music and the spectacle which attracted them to Catholicism. The jeweled reflections of colored windows on tile floors. The purple robes of the priests, the gold miters, the gold cup of communion wafers, the silver candelabra‹, the gardens of white lilies embroidered in gold thread on the white damask capes, the choir boys' blouses with white lace sleeves, the chalice like a symbol of the sun god, the multiple folds and veils of the nuns' robes, tissues of black night, folded for centuries into undulating waves of mystery,
the body a ciborium, a chalice in niches of shadows. The priests stiff and heraldic in their robes, pale with remoteness. The Indians enmeshed in incense, soothed by seas of silk, lace. Came the procession on feast days, moving with the sinewy contours of a long dragon tail, swaying heads of men reeling in the hammock swings of ecstasy. Came the procession of flames from giant candles and torches, the tongues of the holy ghost burning in the night on its sacrificial pyre. Men prayed with tongues of flame, and with swords and whips in hand. The procession moved like the spiral currents of men's blood, flesh chanting in the turmoils of guilt and the heads bowed as if cut by the sword of punishment. Knees on the dust of the past and the dead, knees on the doorsteps of the church, door open like a coffer of velvet exhaling incense and jewels. Came the procession like an aurora borealis spanning the church, then swallowed as by a crater by the shadows and the darkness, entombed under incantations, flowers, organ designs. The procession came to rest, the candles and torches were placed before the altar, the white eucharist was locked behind the golden door, and priests and people struck their chest three times in contrition for the God they killed and turned into a wafer, bread and wine for all to partake.
Gonzalo's childhood was the paradise of nature, mine came from books. But the stories he tells me I recognize. And I understand his indifference to art.
The paradise of my childhood was an invented one, because my childhood was unhappy. It was by acting, pretending, inventing, that I enjoyed myself. Reality gave me no joy. Gonzalo had no need to invent. There was a mountain of legendary magnificence, lakes of fantastic proportions and depths, extraordinary animals, tales of witchcraft of the Indians, drama, and color and excitement, and romance. He took his ecstasy from the air he breathed, his drugs from religion, his sensual pleasure from battle, danger, physical power, domination, his poetry from solitude and the Indians. He rode horseback all night to visit the girl he loved, he leaped walls to meet her, he risked her parents' fury, it was all written in the Romancero.
The paradise of my childhood was under a library table covered to its feet by a red cloth with fringes, which was my doll house, and the little piece of oil cloth I was given which I used as a doormat on which I wiped my feet ostentatiously. The paradise of my childhood was music, which filled the house, books which filled my father's bookshelves, in games drawn from books and music, such as operas sung and acted, or act-outs of history such as the "Journey of Marie Antoinette to the Guillotine" on a chariot made of chairs piled on top of each other. It was like the world I once saw through the knob of a colored-glass window through which trees, houses, skies, people, became kaleidoscopic jewels.
***
Henry says: "My letters to Emil Schnellock are as good as Gauguin's letters to his brother."
Read Carlo Suarès' La Procession Enchaînée. The maddest book I have ever read, truly schizophrenic.
Letter to Durrell:
I thank you for seeing Henry as a whole. Few people do. They nibble at him. Your letter to him and about him was the only one I liked. It was strong in its vision. All you say about House of Incest is true. Its opposite is the diary, where lie the roots, the peaty soil, the compost, the blood, the flesh, the stuttering. House of Incest is the smoke, "the neurotic fulguration," as Henry says. Yes, I want to change the title too, but it is too late. I pass from the human, soft, truthful, natural diary to the stratosphere, from the least artificial to the artificial. I use a pair of rusty scissors to keep them apart. Duality. They would hamper each other, otherwise. The immediate destroys the transformed. And you get the smoke by mail. From the first I liked your heraldic world. Behind it I sense faith, symbol, meaning. The opposite of narcissism, since each one of us must be himself plus the symbol, a greater himself.
Henry took me to visit Hans Reichel. His studio was cold and dilapidated. He is always hungry. He carries a tiger-eye stone in his pocket. His clothes are tattered.
His paintings are beautiful, delicate and full of mystery. They are also full of eyes staring at you, sometimes more than one eye in a painting. There are eyes in the fishes, in the eggs, bulbs, snails, on the planets. Floating eyes sunk in houses at bottom of the sea, eyes on the moon. There is a bell which laughs, a flower petal with an ear. The boats, the fishermen's nets, and houses are sunk by a revengeful fish who comes to look at the silence. In this silence and communion all things are in a state of metamorphosis. Plants are turning to flesh and flesh into plants. Fishes are becoming fans, and leaves water. Inside of a snail there is a treble clef, the moon is resting on sand, and the sea coral grows in the sky. A man looks out fixedly, out of fluidity, but he is a man only for an instant and he is soon decomposed into a medusa, a swordfish or a tower. A man with eyes which can only see in the water, bulging left and right to displace the water. The nearly full moon rotates on a sky of lava, the stars are like a spiderweb, without fulguration but piercing and evanescent. Fixed are the eyes inside of roots, hanging from branches. The snail that romped through Spain in a cloud of blood carries an accordion. Hans Reichel says with great gentleness: "This is the Poisson Furieux and that is me." His self sits with a tiny bird like the bird of Saint Francis, a frightened tenderness sustains the bird immobile, asking for no food and singing no song. He is at the. center of a flux of communion, all the elements intermingling and marrying in deep silence. The branches bear little eyes and the fish grow little branches. The stained-glass window is webbed like a beehive and inside of the beehive there is music. The fish nets swell like mountains and the electric storm has eyes too. One eye like a frozen teardrop hangs at the top of a quaking tower, a tower without a window but a tower that is looking at me with fear of dissolution. A great terror paralyzes the clouds, despair pursues the fishes at a trembling pace, the branches are heavy with the intensity of this growth. The eyes of fish are like the eyes of man and the eyes of man like those of fish. The eyes, all of them, see too much. They cannot close because here there is neither night nor day. The light they see is filtered through the tissues of an unbroken womb, through the slabs of nameless tombs, through the eyes of fish, plant, and man confounded and confused in communion and metamorphosis.*
Walking back from Reichel's, Henry said to me: "Now you will quietly write the whole thing in your diary. Then you must read it to me so I can get inspired. Give me some of those finite phrases!"
"You are too modest. You know no one can write as well as you do."
But I do see my role as the eye, the third eye, the eye of vision. For Henry was talking wildly about Reichel, and then he took me there and it was I who saw all that Reichel wanted people to see: I saw the importance of the eyes in his work, the emphasis on communion, metamorphosis.
Henry wrote a big, sonorous, rich description of Reichel. I wrote my own.
"You give me ideas," said Henry, chuckling.
In Henry's own water colors there is a childlike quality. I am adept at catching the presence of this child in adults. Its fleeting appearance in a too open, surprised look in the eyes, surprise at the harshness of the world. I could see it in Henry's water colors, in Gonzalo's round-cheeked, closed-eyed laughter, in Helba's sonate pathétique and constant plea for devotion and compassion. In Henry's water colors there is levitation. He is not tied to the earth as he is in his work. It is a game, a world without monsters.
Depression.
Meeting to help Republican Spain with Gonzalo. Alberti's poems were read. All these words I hear, lyric speeches, romantic flourishes, wreaths, prayers, poetic lamentations, irritate me. I see in revolution a vital life-and-death matter, a struggle one must enter directly and violently, by action. Why do they talk so much, recite poetry?
And Gonzalo who hunted, fought, boxed, and killed in his wild land of Peru, is shocked by the realism of the birth story.* He tells me horrors about Spain, describes tortures, and he winces at my description of a stillbirth!
[February, 1937]
Began a sketch of Moricand. Was perplexed by the fact that he does not arouse compassion.
Why? Is it that by stylization and formality he has effaced from his life all human traits? In spite of poverty, tragedy, he has maintained a façade which repels intimacy and therefore compassion. He conceals the human being. He acts like a prophet or a clairvoyant. His speech is so poetized, and he talks so much about the past that one does not situate him in the present at all, it is difficult to believe he is cold or hungry.
When I found him a rich patron he looked mysteriously satanic, but he never confessed what happened. He conveys that he has many secrets but he never shares them. He intimates and suggests but never confides.
Henry said: "If things go bad in France I will go away. I will go to Holland. Escape. Above all, I do not believe in struggle."
Talking about friends he made this statement: "The truth is that I have a lot of friends who love me, but I love no one. If only they knew how little I care."
He appears to care. He becomes soft, sentimental. Everybody is taken in. He creates an illusion of warmth. But if any of them came with a real need, they would find out.
I appear not to care. I create an impression of remoteness, but if anyone has a real need, they discover I love.
He said: "Like a mollusk. I want to live like a mollusk."
Met Jean Carteret. He is tall, thin, with pale-blue eyes, long straight light-brown hair. Upper half of his face that of a poet, high brow, an air of spiritual illumination, the lower half marked with pock marks, heavier and sensual, almost gross. His eyes, though pale in color, throw off sparks. When I opened the door he saw me instantly. I felt instantly unveiled. His vision was even quicker than mine. A few moments later he was saying: "You are a personage out of a myth, you live in the myth. I see you as a fine, flawless mirror. A pure mirror in which others can see themselves. The mirror is important for you. The day a large mirror is delivered to you, given to you, will be a fortunate day. If a mirror breaks you will be unfortunate. You wear your bracelet on your left arm: you are dependent on your affections. But doors and walls do not exist for you. You are ultimately independent."