by Anais Nin
Why then, does he not go and fight in Spain?
Jean reminds me of my role: "Your role," he said, "is to keep your head above water, to save others from drowning. You must always remain pure, alone, and thus able to guide. You cannot get confused or identified with collective action. Your influence is not in action, but in awareness."
So I had to struggle to make Gonzalo see that taking a gun and killing us all would not help either Spain or the revolution. His mad outburst left me shaking. All this that is happening is monstrous. But how does one fight such a monster?
I talked Gonzalo out of his impotent, futile rage. No more drunken despair and will to die. He went back to work at Paix et Démocratie.
Jean said: "Your role is to express what cannot be expressed. You are imprisoned in reality, always, and seeking expansion in transcendent realms."
First Henry laughed at Moricand's learning, at his "coincidences poétiques" but then he found his imagery fecundating, the symbolism a new food for him. Moricand wanted disciples. Moricand thinks he found in Henry the brother of Blaise Cendrars. Henry has found a new way of looking at experience.
Gonzalo cannot create a world as he wants it. I have created individually, personally, a world as I want it which serves as a refuge for others, as an example of creativity. If one does not believe the world can be reformed, one seeks an individually perfect world. The houseboat is now like Noah's Ark. The deluge is politics. An undertow of wholesale treachery, division, collective hysteria, and will to die. They are not dying for an ideal.
By keeping the dream alive one keeps everything alive.
Gonzalo does not understand what I call the spiritual psychological disease of the world, which no revolution can cure, no violence. No change of system. It is this distortion and illness I work at. There is no system that will control man's cruelty.
Before, Gonzalo escaped into drunkenness. Now he needs action, he is in rebellion against reality. He wants reforms and change.
I have created such a powerful dream against death and horror. Gonzalo came from seeing a friend who is dying. "This place makes me forget everything. It is like a drug. Forgetting is a treachery."
"This forgetting for a moment is a source of strength. You will go back to your activities with awareness, and not with blind anger."
He reads César Vallejo's poems with great fervor.
"All I can do, Gonzalo, is balance the destructiveness of the world against creation."
Albertine, the mousy maid with a gift for silence, gives me breakfast. I work in the studio as long as I can.
When I was a child I took the suffering of the world into myself, suffered with the world, and that did nobody any good. Added suffering to suffering.
The river offers its changing moods. I lose myself, my pain, my anguish at what is happening in the world in the beauty of the river and its shimmering.
Gonzalo talking about his friend, a revolutionary leader in Moscow. "He's writing me desperate letters about his wife, for me to try and get her out of Barcelona. This is no time to be obsessed with one's wife. He has greater things to do than to worry about saving his wife.... They are all too sensitive and too emotional. I wrote back a hard letter. This is no time for softness. That is what is called bourgeois individualism."
And I see the falsity of this, for it is he who does not leave for Spain because of Helba's helplessness.
Helba knows it too. She came talking about Gonzalo's new hardness. "It's all talk. It's all because he is so sensitive and emotional. He is trying to pretend to be hard. It is not real. It is all talk. Gonzalo is too soft. Gonzalo was born mistaken [equivocado], in error. Born to blunder. He is blind. He is like an animal, or a child. He is not intelligent or philosophical. His friends from the left have given him what they call autocriticism. They told him all this. That he was a romantic, undisciplined. If I talk about the fanaticism of his comrades he calls me a fascist and says he will shoot me with his own hands. He's a little crazy."
And then, bowing her head, like a woman praying: "Don't let anything happen to Gonzalo. I would die of sorrow if he were shot."
Henry, Fred and I went to see Luise Rainer in a film. When we sat at a café afterwards, Henry, who likes her so much, began to talk about her. "She has wonderful gestures and bearing, such a gracious way of carrying her head, such delicacy. She is very much like you. Her gestures are so light, like wind almost, and she moves so gracefully. You and she have a great deal of affinity. There is at times on her face a deep sadness not called for by the part. A tremendous sadness. That is what you have. It's queer. You are all light and gaiety, but if one catches you unaware, one sees a tragic face. That has so much greater charm, this acquired gaiety, than a gaiety one is born with. It's something you fought for. One feels the luminousness, and at the same time this tragic feeling, a mysterious dual character."
Henry never understood me as well as at this moment.
Gonzalo lost a friend he loved for twenty years. The poet Vallejo. Gonzalo's friend is dead and he grieves. I went to see Helba at the charity hospital. Came back filled with the horrors I had seen. Sat down and wrote the pages on the dream in the second part of Winter of Artifice, the pages on dreams and nightmares. The book is growing.
***
I playfully discourage Jean from falling in love with me. He already complains, even as a friend, that I am not concentrating on him. "I want a woman smaller than I am, you love too many people, you have your work, and a crowded life. I am afraid of you. Falling in love with you would be fatal to me."
The two of us, with our need of great proofs of love, who need to be solidly loved, who fear airiness and fluidity. We can charm each other but we do not trust each other.
I work on Winter of Artifice, plunging into part two because I am surrounded by the needs of others, by constant problems, Helba's sickness, never enough money for all of them. Reality traps me every day, heavily, constricts and limits me.
Henry is the only joyous one among us, the "Happy Rock" he calls himself. He does not care what happens to the rest of the world.
Gonzalo thinks about death. "And suddenly the heart stops beating." He tells me how Vallejo never showed his poetry, that he had tons and tons of it all over his room that nobody had ever read. And that he told in one poem, how he would die on All Saints' Day, and then that day came and he did die.
Jean comes and he dramatizes his neurosis, wallows in it. He spends all his energy describing his states of anxiety, the venomous flowers born of distortion. He complacently elaborates, adorns, develops, expands. He confused Allendy in a maze of talks and richness of material, to overwhelm him. He creates this labyrinth so that no one will ever really know him, or cure him, to elude the simple roots of his malady, the simple conflict between instinct and fear of life. He destroys the very loves he courts. He arrests women's primitive response to him, directed at the sensual Jean, out of fear, and then laments he is not loved. He wants to play the young magician and seduce others and then complains no one knows him. He can't write because he aims too high, and can never be simple. How he shatters every spontaneous act with analysis, and exerts a moral tyranny over his desires.
I said: "Your anxiety is not only doubt of others' love, but doubt of reality. It is a peculiar form of anxiety which requires to be incarnated by the other's love. You are fluid, a dreamer, and all your life is a constant mirage. You need to live through the body of the one you love. You have a gift for making everything elusive, abstract. You have fallen in love with a woman's human love for you. Stop analyzing and dissolving what you need. You need the reassurance of being loved steadfastly because you are so easily cut off, you so easily float away into space." This interested him and he was off again with delectation: "You see, other people are sewn naturally, loosely, with a space between the stitches to breathe. I am sewn so tightly, with so many stitches overlapping, that I suffocate. I think of not one but a million things at once."
I said: "Jean, please stop. The ar
tist in you is enjoying the description of your state of mind, but that is the way you have continued to elude the core of what ails you. You involve, enmesh everyone in your complex involutions. But that is how you elude their resolution. You are creating a neurosis, and have become incapable of a simple act of deliverance. You don't permit the simple diagnosis to take effect. You immediately rush into volatile descriptions, inflations, expansions."
Women want to bring him down to earth. They are frustrated by his mobility. They feel he escapes from them.
Henry, Jean, and Moricand discussed colors. Henry's favorite color is yellow, and that is the color of philosophy. "Yours," said Henry, "is a vanishing color. You have no determinate color. You only come out when the atmosphere is propitious." It is true.
I do understand Jean's anxieties. He sees love as a rainbow, created by the atmosphere, and vanishing. He has no strong earth-roots as I have. Every day the life of the instinct, blood and flesh, has to dissipate mirages. Every day the real caress must destroy the ghostly lover.
Henry and I differed radically in our opinion of Pierre-Jean Jouve. I am doing something closer to Pierre-Jean Jouve's novels than any other writer. Am I simply taking a different route from Henry's?
I wrote ten more pages of Winter of Artifice today.
***
Moricand said once while he stood on the gangplank: "How I would like to know something about your earthy life. Even looking at your horoscope I suspect many things. You're the most real and the most unreal woman I've ever known. Alas, to me you only show your angel side."
I was lying in bed, in die houseboat. It was four o'clock. A dark cold day. I was working on Winter of Artifice, one hundred pages of lyrical sensual stream of consciousness. Henry was satisfied. My life on the boat was a dream. The sun was shining every day, it seemed, many visitors came. Waldo Frank, sighing and pouting, Renata Bugatti, feverish, aggressive, Henghes, Moricand. And then a telegram from Maruca: "Come and see me immediately. I am divorcing your father."
Maruca was having breakfast in bed. A changed Maruca. No longer the believing child he had married. A woman with her eyes opened, rebelling, filled with hatred, and talking about how completely he had killed her love.
She wanted me to go immediately to Caux, Switzerland, because my father was threatening to commit suicide. She wanted me to tell him that she would never forgive him, would never live with him again, and for me to force him to plan a new life. She offered him a modest income while he solved his problems.
I went to Caux. I found him dressed in a golf suit, and monologuing. He could not understand what had happened to Maruca. "She was once so sweet, so submissive." He was lamenting her hardness. He was worried about missing the Grand Prix for the handsomest automobile at Montreux. He had bought a lottery ticket because now he would be penniless. What Maruca offered him was absolutely inadequate. He was worried about taking one of the maids with him, but which one, because one of them was the only one who knew how to iron his shirts properly, and the other was a good cook. He lamented his fate. And all this lost for a woman he did not even love. But a woman who had been the first to say no to him, and this no had made him persist, had driven him into a frenzy of pursuit, because he felt if he did not change this no into submission, it meant he was growing old, was losing his charm, his power over women.
But this had deeper roots. It is true he had not stayed with Maruca very much during her bout with tuberculosis in Spain (Maruca complained he came to visit her for ten minutes), but I must understand he could never bear illness. He had obtained the best medical care for her. It is true the maid had told Maruca that when she showed my father a nightgown she had embroidered for her mistress, he said: "I know someone on whom this nightgown would look far more beautiful."
And now everything was lost. He contemplated the extent of the loss, the house in Paris, the car, the luxury, the glamorous life. He did not contemplate the sorrow of Maruca, who had for so many years deliberately closed her eyes to his behavior. He almost seemed to have gone out of his way to practice his love affairs as dangerously, as near to the possibility of discovery, as he could. It seemed almost as if he wanted to be discovered, or else had grown so careless, so confident, so thoughtless, that he never expected Maruca to protest. "And to protest just when I am growing old and ready to settle down, now when I could stay home and give her all my attention."
I persuaded him to return with me and to see Maruca, to plead with her. Maruca would not see him. He spent the night in my houseboat. I consoled him. He said: "Throw out all your protegés and take care of your father."
He opened his luxurious valise, placed his silver hair brush, silver comb, silver bottles on my dressing table. The sight of this exquisite Hermès-fitted valise in the bedroom of the houseboat was so incongruous. And his expression as he surveyed my kingdom. "This is how you live!" I could not make him see the beauty of the river, of the lights on the river, of the lulling cadences of the boat. He asked me to warm up a bath and then would not take it because the water was not filtered. I had to fetch mineral water. He overlooked the fairy tale aspect of the houseboat. He bemoaned the loss of luxury, of a wife he had formed to serve him like a slave. "She was so good at filing my papers, answering my letters, organizing my concerts." Not a moment of human sorrow for Maruca her self. " I always thought that if Maruca died I would have you to take care of me. But you would have to change your life, take a decent apartment, and throw out your protegés."
When the night came, the shadows frightened him, each motion of the houseboat made him uneasy. The creaking of the wood, and the wild garden of designs on the wall from the Indian lamp. My bedroom looked like the bedroom of Hans Christian Andersen tales, with its small wood-trellised windows. I made him as comfortable as I could and went to sleep on the studio couch upstairs.
Had the phantom lover come upon, the father asleep to haunt his soul, to defend his daughter from his weight, to defend the houseboat, the poem, the freedom? Who haunted the houseboat that night, protesting against the intrusion of the father, rattling the nightmare to frighten him away? The next day he left for Switzerland to attend to the moving of his belongings. The houseboat sailed on without the father.
When my father came back from Caux I became ambassador between Maruca and my father. I had to carry messages back and forth, lists, objects too delicate to entrust to the moving men, a glass from Venice, a Japanese statuette, a painting. I lived in a maze of petty details, division of property, scenes. I had to mitigate both my father's selfishness and Maruca's anger. I was living their nightmare. Maruca talked to me. It helped her. I tried to tell her my father was selfish and unconscious of his acts like a child, immature, thoughtless, spoiled, but her answer to this was: "Yes, children are selfish, but they are also tender and loving, and your father was not even tender with me."
This childlike woman, who had worshiped her husband as a teacher, god, musician, was now as firmly unyielding as she had been indulgent. She believed nothing he said, not even in his contrition. She even returned to the past to rummage, to add up all the facets of his behavior, his every word, attitudes, expressions, and decided he had never loved her.
I said all this depended on her definition of love.
But she had accumulated too many reckless remarks, selfish exclamations, thoughtless gestures, the expression on his face when she was ill, when he told his impossible stories, and was utterly convinced he had never loved her at all, by any kind of definition of love. Until now her own love had covered all the fissures, and her own faith healed all the breaks. But this small, secret, gentle life which had nurtured grievances for fifteen years now erupted like a volcano and nothing could stop its devastation. I knew that nothing could stop it, but I tried. I knew the kind of unfaithfulness my father had practiced was not the kind women could forgive, for it did not come from a natural, a primitive, warm-blooded impulse but from a neurotic vanity, obsession, a need of conquest, not a love need, not a real hunger, but a collect
or's need to prove his power and his charm. What Maruca could not forgive was his idealizing of himself, this self-indulgence covered by hypocrisy. My father was always acting the ideal being. His utter selfishness was disguised. He presented his acts as altruism. He pretended to be teaching, helping, saving women when he was sleeping with them. It was this Maruca could not forgive: the disguise.
"But perhaps he did this to protect you from pain."
"Oh, not at all. When we were in Caux, not content with having his mistress staying at Caux while we were there, he still wanted me to invite her to be our guest, he even taunted me for not liking her. Let him cry now, I cried for many years. Let him talk about suicide. I know he won't do it. He loves his precious body too much. Let him now measure the strength of my love which made life so soft for him, and let him realize what he destroyed. I feel nothing. He has killed my love so completely that I do not even suffer. I never knew a man who could kill a love so completely."
I knew she would never waver, but I still tried to appeal to her. I kept saying there were men who always behaved like children, and she and I had accepted the role of young mothers, for thus are so many acts of men transfigured. The woman accepts a maternal role, and then she can forgive anything. The child does not know when he is hurting the mother. A child does not notice weariness, pain. He gives nothing and demands everything. If the mother weeps he will throw his arms around her, then he will go on doing what hurt her before. The child never thinks of the mother except as the all-giving, the all-forgiving, the inexhaustible, eternal love. The child devours the mother.