by Anais Nin
"Were your parents strong?" asked the doctor.
"My father died insane. My mother was half-crazy too."
Poor Helba. I kissed her with sudden pity. She was frightened to have spoken. She lay on the couch, half undressed. A sick body.
"Degenerate," the doctor said. "The mixture of Spanish and Indian is bad. The Indians are degenerate. The Spanish father may have died of syphilitic madness."
In the taxi Helba was terrified. "I beg you to tell no one, Anaïs. Gonzalo will be furious if he knows I have told you that. He has begged me not to tell you. He hates disease, he says it is so ugly, he puts you always as someone in a dream, he does not want you to know about these things. Today I said the Turkish woman might come to see me at the same time as you. He was furious. He said he didn't want you to meet her, she was vulgar, and she talks about operations. He thinks you are a dream."
"Helba, don't be afraid. It will be our secret. Between women. I won't say anything. Naturally. But I am not a dreamer, I am a human being, I feel pity for you, I am not disgusted. You were a victim. I want to help you get well. I will get you well..."
"Oh, Anaïs, why do you do all this, nobody has ever done this for me. Gonzalo does nothing for me, he is a child, he dreams his time away..."
Helba's suffering touched me, and I was also touched by Gonzalo's need to dream, our need to dream while cooking, chopping wood, cleaning stoves, posing, modeling, dancing, playing the piano, dreaming while serving, healing the sick, dreaming in the middle of ugliness and a monstrous reality.
Helba's story: Her father ran away from her mother and she never saw him again. He took away her two brothers. He left Helba with her mother, who hated her. At seven years of age she was placed in a convent for orphan girls. It was housed in what was once a prison. The nuns who entered it never saw the street again. There were no windows on the street, only transoms. The girls were awakened at five in the morning by a nun shouting: "Viva Jesús." Then they went to Mass before breakfast, and breakfast consisted of a piece of pig meat Helba could not bear the fat of the meat and when the nun observed this she served it to her over and over again, even after it was covered with ants. The girls were only allowed to urinate at certain hours. Helba could not control herself and would feel the need much later during class. The nuns said she was possessed by the Devil. They punished her by braiding her hair very tight, first in many small braids and then all of them tied together in an even tighter knot. She would be left two or three days with her hair pulled this way until congestion set in and Helba would faint. The girls were not called by names but by numbers, like prisoners. Helba discovered that by putting a piece of black paper behind a window pane it made a mirror. All the girls wanted to see what they looked like. The nuns caught them and said it was a mortal sin. They were bathed once a year, wearing their long white cotton nightgowns and rubbing the soap over the nightgown. When the nuns flogged them they kept muttering: " En nombre de Jesús, en nombre de Jesús." Helba's mother did not believe in these stories, she felt that Helba must be possessed of the Devil if the nuns punished her.
The atmosphere of the houseboat now darkened by René. Because René was an orphan, I began to give him more and more, and he did less and less work and demanded more and more help.
We had an accord that if I came after dark I would throw a stone from the quay to the roof of the barge and René was to come out and meet me and walk with me back to the barge, because at first I was frightened by the hoboes sleeping under the bridge (it was not until later I realized they considered the houseboat occupants as brothers and themselves as protectors in exchange for a bottle of wine, cheese and soap). René often pretended not to hear and when I ran all the way and arrived at the houseboat I would find him asleep. The houseboat began to look like the site of a crime. René's sullen angers penetrated the walls. He grew careless about pumping the water and I could see it seeping through the floor. In the darkness and the isolation, the mood of the world and the mood of the river mingled, immense and threatening.
The Seine became swollen and angry. It inundated the quays. To reach the houseboat now I have to climb over the wall, down a rope-ladder, get into my rowboat and row to the houseboat. On rough windy days René has to do the rowing.
The people walking along the quays watch me climb down the ladder. It amuses them. Once I dropped a volume of the diary, and it fell to the bottom of the rowboat and was soaked.
Soon after that René left for a job at the market place, and I took on Albertine, a little servant girl from the country.
[March, 1937]
Henry is writing about surrealism. I feel most of what the surrealists write is artificially produced by the mind, not by the unconscious. To place an umbrella on an operating table is incongruous but it is not an image from the unconscious. The only fecund chaos comes from dreams, fantasies, from the unconscious. Absurdity is the reaction of the intellect to events, it is not poetry or fantasy. We talked about psychoanalysis. I said it would have to invent a system of integration for those who could not be integrated by life. But this system only heals those who have faith in it. We have not yet found a way to implant faith. What will replace the faith religion was once able to give?
Henry finished his "Via Dieppe-Newhaven" story. Does not want to go to Denmark.
Gonzalo has no confidence in his luck. When we gamble with twenty-five centimes in a slot machine in one of the caf£s, he turns his back to the machine before awaiting results: he is sure he will lose. When he wins he can hardly believe it.
Hélène's magic wears off. I do not know why. My friends call her "the vampire" and are tired of her.
A day: The light from the swollen, turbulent Seine reflected on the ceiling. It is dawn and I am half awake. It is the fourth of the month and my allowance is all gone. Rent, food, doctors, clothes, dentists for my orphans. I have seven francs in my pockets. I own two pairs of stockings, mended, two pairs of worn-out shoes. I owe money to everyone. My jewels are at the pawn shop. There is no more wine in Gonzalo's barrel. Everybody needs coal because it is cold. The light awakens me fully, and the money problem. I have lived like an ostrich.
Hélène's concierge telephones me she is concerned about her because she did not come home last night.
Gonzalo says over the telephone: "Don't worry about her, she probably slept with somebody."
"I do worry precisely because she does not have anyone to sleep with. If she did I would not worry."
I find her unbalanced after two nights of insomnia, of walking through the city, sitting in cafés. She says: "I feel that nobody loves me, that they regard me as a monster. AH but you. I feel unwanted everywhere."
"It is your guilt which makes you appear unlovely in your own eyes. There is something you can do to attract people. They feel you do not care about them. Show them that you care about them. Love attracts love. Moricand did your horoscope and he felt you did not help him in return, and he is so desperately poor."
What an ambulant diary. At times behind desks, under a mattress, in an unlit stove, in trunks, in valises, iron boxes, buses, subways, taxis, lecture-hall desks, brief cases, in doctors' offices, hospital waiting rooms, park benches, on café tables, hairdressers' salons. The pages often stained with coffee, wine, tears, lipstick. It has traveled in canoes, ships, hidden among dresses, underwear, and once lay on the window sill outside of a hotel window, once on a fire escape in New York, on top of closets, etc.
Albertine, the new maid, is a small woman with thin legs, big breasts, and frightened eyes. She moves furtively, taking care of the houseboat, sometimes silently, sometimes singing a fragment of a song from her native Brittany, a song always accompanied by the clashes of pots and pans. She wears a mouse-colored sweater, and mouse-colored felt slippers. On her night table there is a photograph of her future husband, in a soldier's uniform.
Her greatest fear is of going to the fountain after dark. During the day the hoboes helped her carry her pail of water in exchange for a bottle
of wine now and then, and she laughed and talked with them. But at night she feared them.
The days turning, the wheel turning, a burst of green foliage, the days so full they burst almost from fullness and richness. New dust in the air, gold dust.
Helba is talking as we walk: "Gonzalo loved me as I loved him. not as a man and wife, but as friends. He was not jealous. I never responded to a man really, all through my life. My first experience was too much. Married at fourteen to a sadist, who forced himself on me and beat me." Helba and Henry, both born of ignorance and poverty, of the "people," both have genius in their art but cannot live poetry in their lives; in life they are prosaic and homely. Is this art and magic in life bound to disappear from human life, killed by communism which says: "Do not dream. Attend only to the needs of food and house, concentrate only on the need for bread." No matter how deeply Gonzalo and I concerned ourselves with others' human needs, there remained a secret world closed to them, to Henry and Helba, the need of beauty, the need of a shelter from ugliness.
I cannot remember what I saw in the mirror as a child. Perhaps a child never looks at a mirror. Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror. He sees a child. The child does not remember what he looks like. Later I remembered what I looked like. But when I look at photographs of myself one, two, three, four, five years old, I do not recognize myself. The child is one. At one with himself. Never outside of himself. I can remember what I did but not the reflection of what I did. No reflections. Six years old. Seven years old. Eight years old. Nine. Ten. Eleven. No images. No reflections. Feelings. I can feel what I felt about my father's white mice, the horror they inspired in me, the revolting odor, the taste of a burnt omelette my father made for us while my mother was sick and expecting Joaquin in Berlin. The feel of the beach in Barcelona, the feel of the balcony there, the fear of death and the writing of a testament, the feelings in church, in the street. Sounds in the Spanish courtyard, singing, a memory of a gaiety which was to haunt me all my life, totally absent from America. The face of the maid Ramona, the music in the streets, children dancing on the sidewalks. Voices. The appearance of others, the long black mustache of Granados, the embrace of the nuns, drowning me in veils as they leaned over. No picture in the mind's eye of what I wore. The long black stockings of Spanish children I saw in a photograph. I do remember my passion for penny "surprise" packages, the passion for surprise. Yet at the age of six the perfection of the blue bow on my hair, shaped like a butterfly, preoccupied me, since I insisted that my godmother tie it because she tied it better than anyone else. I must have seen this bow in the mirror then. I do not remember whether I saw this bow, the little girl in the very short white-lace-edged dress, or again a photograph taken in Havana where all my cousins and I stood in a row according to our heights, all wearing enormous ribbons and short white dresses. In the mirror there never was a child. The first mirror had a frame of white wood. In it there is no Anaïs Nin, but Marie Antoinette with a white lace cap, a long black dress, standing on a pile of chairs, the chariot, riding to her beheading. No Anaïs Nin. An actress playing all the parts of characters in French history. I am Charlotte Corday plunging a knife into the tyrant Marat. I am, of course, Joan of Arc. At fourteen, the portrayal of a Joan burning at the stake was my brother's favorite horror story.
The first mirror in which the self appears is very large, it is inlaid inside of a brown wood wall in the room of a brownstone house. Next to it the window pours down so strong a light that the rest of the room is not reflected in the mirror. The image of the girl who approaches it is brought into luminous relief. Against a foggy darkness, the girl of fifteen stands with frightened eyes. She is looking at her dress, a dress of shiny worn blue serge, which was fixed up for her out of an old one belonging to a cousin. It does not fit her. It is meager. It looks poor. The girl is looking at the worn shiny dark-blue serge dress with shame. It is the day she has been told in school that she is gifted for writing. They had come purposely into the class to tell her. In spite of being a foreigner, in spite of having to use the dictionary, she had written the best essay in the class. She who was always quiet and who did not wish to be noticed, was told to come up the aisle and speak to the English teacher before everyone, to hear the compliment. And the joy, the dazzling joy which had first struck her was instantly killed by the awareness of the dress. I did not want to get up, to be noticed. I was ashamed of this meager dress with a shine on it, its worn air, its orphan air, its hand-me-down air.
There is another mirror framed in brown wood. The girl is looking at the new dress which transfigures her. What an extraordinary change. She leans over very close to look at the humid eyes, the humid mouth, the moisture and luminousness brought about by the change of dress. She walks up very slowly to the mirror, very slowly, as if she did not want to frighten reflections away. Several times, at fifteen, she walks very slowly towards the mirror. Every girl of fifteen has put the same question to a mirror: "Am I beautiful?" The face is masklike. It does not smile. It does not want to charm the mirror, or deceive the mirror, or flirt with it and gain a false answer. The girl is in a trance. She does not want to frighten the reflection away herself. Someone has said she is very pale. She approaches the mirror and stands very still like a statue. Immobile. Waxy. She never makes a gesture. Surprised. Somnambulistic? She only moves to become someone else, impersonating Sarah Bernhardt, Mélisande, La Dame aux Camélias, Madame Bovary, Thaïs. She is never Anaïs Nin who goes to school, and grows vegetables and flowers in her backyard. She is immobile, haunting, like a figure moving in a dream. She is decomposed before the mirror into a hundred personages, recomposed into paleness and immobility. Silence. She is watching for an expression which will betray the spirit. You can never catch the face alive, laughing, or loving. At sixteen she is looking at the mirror with her hair up for the first time. There is always the question. The mirror is not going to answer it. She will have to look for the answer in the eyes and faces of the boys who dance with her, men later, and above all the painters.
I am still wearing the chiffon scarf over my burnt eyelids. The Abbé Lancelin rang the bell. He is collecting for his poor. He stands amazed when I open the door. A nun? No. A woman veiled with a long chiffon scarf. He has a grey beard. We talk. I tell him immediately that I no longer believe in Catholicism, because there is too much cruelty in the world, but I will help his poor. We talk. He wants so much to see the face behind the veil. It must be an association. Nuns. Veiled women, whose faces he cannot see behind confessional windows. But here it is permitted to have curiosity, to wonder at the face. He began to come every day, to convert me. To convert this mysterious veiled woman. He was hypnotized by the mystery, the nun that is not a nun, a rebel.
Pierre Bresson says that symbolical writing, stylized language impedes human participation. People admire House of Incest but they explode over the birth story.
Lawrence Durrell writes me:
I feel a pig if I don't write you and tell you what a splendid writer you are—though of course you know. It was that last thing you sent, the Dionysiac little birth scene. That rang the bell and returned the penny: as you know, only a real strength will do that. I tell you what really thrilled me. I have always dreamed of a sort of hypothetical goal which the woman writer would reach one day in her art. It would be something so positive in its quality that one would immediately stop criticizing it according to male standards. Rather, it would set up a new standard, a sort of man-woman fusion, an unalterable furlong to the present standard of miles. What or how or when this positivity would be, I could never imagine. But in this thing of yours I feel that foretaste which tells me that you are the woman to do this thing. I have always felt resentful of women writing up to now. I felt that their footrule was a male footrule: and by male comparison they suffered. What I think you are doing (possibly have done) is creating a new Art: if you like, a new sensibility which a man can accept totally: as a man; and not qualify by his
own standards. A new experience, where the only bond again—as between the true artist and his age—is faith. This is the shadow your birth story throws before it—and I am happy because it is a real novelty. You are the novelty and your work through you achieves a status, a totality, which no longer concerns me as a man meeting a woman—but as a man meeting his maker. This is very good because it spells an emotional freedom we have all got waiting for us: a new IS. Salute!! If I have expressed this badly I'm sorry—though again an apology is stupid. You will get the meaning—which lies universes beyond mere ink. So salute! A salute of 400 guns.
Post Script:
DEAR ANAïS NIN:
I am speaking for myself, for Nancy, for Patrick Evans, Leslie my brother, for the two dogs Roger and Puke: MARVELOUS, ABSOLUTELY MARVELOUS. CORUSCATING. Worth a million "Carols" and "Zeros" and Black Books. We groaned with the pain of it, a physical pain. A birth reading it. Marvelous. All my most violent congratulations and admiration. All my jealousy in fact.
Writing as a woman. I am becoming more and more aware of this. All that happens in the real womb, not in the womb fabricated by man as a substitute. Strange that I should explore this womb of real flesh when, of all women, I seem the most idealized, the most legendary, a myth, a dream. And it is this descending into the real womb, luring men into it, struggling to keep men there, and struggling to free him of woman to help him create another womb, which fascinates me. The diary ended in Fez, in a city, in a street, in a labyrinth for me, because that was the city which looked most deeply like the womb, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. My self, woman, womb, with grilled windows, veiled eyes. Tortuous streets, secret cells, labyrinths and more labyrinths.