by Anais Nin
My father wanted to look at his house for the last time. When we stood in front of it he looked first at the window of his room. "I will never see that room again. It's incredible. My books are still there, my music, my piano ... but I..." Tears rolled down his cheeks. "What has happened to Maruca? Such a meek, resigned, patient, angelical woman. A little girl, full of innocence and indulgence. And then this madness ... I was unconscious of what I did. I didn't know she minded..."
It was at this very moment that a mild earthquake was registered in Paris. At the very moment when my father's life was shaken by the earthquake of a woman's revolt, and revenge, when he was losing love, protection, faithfulness, luxury, faith. His whole life disrupted in one instant of feminine revolution. Earth, and the woman, and their sudden explosions. On the insensitive instrument of my father's egoism no sign had been registered of this coming disruption. As he stood there looking at his house for the last time, the bowels of the earth trembled. Maruca was quietly eating her breakfast in bed, while my father's life cracked open and all the lovingly collected treasures fell into an abyss. The earth opened under his perpetually dancing feet, his waltzes of courtship, his contrapuntal love scenes. In one instant it swallowed the colorful ballet of his lies, his pointed-feet evasions, his vaporous escapes, the stage lights and halos with which he surrounded his conquests and his appetites. Everything was destroyed in the tumult. The earth and the woman's anger at his lightness, his audacities, his leaping over reality, his escapes. His house opened and through the fissures fell his rare books, his rare musical scores, his press notices, gifts from his admirers.
One day a Spanish priest turned up at Maruca's house. He had escaped from Spain carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary. He was a musical priest and had come for shelter. Maruca wanted to please him and took him to dinner at the Bois and asked me to come along. But she had forgotten that it was. the day of the races, and the restaurant was full of extraordinary women dressed in the most fantastic fashions. It was the fashion of hair powdered in strange colors, green or gold or blue, and gold and silver cream over the eyelids.
The glittering spectacle all around us was in painful contrast to the talk of the priest. His stories of Spain, agony, hunger, fear, torture, in this setting of utmost frivolity. I begged Maruca to leave. But instead she launched into a full history of her life with my father, with all details, to the great shock of the priest, for what he might have listened to in a dark confession booth he could not face in public, and the violent contrast between history's tragedies, personal tragedies, and the fashion parade was unbearable.
The complaints, lamentations, accusations of the wife were natural enough, he had heard those before, but he had never heard a daughter interpret her father's behavior so lucidly and openly. "Respect for the husband," he murmured, "respect for the father."
"And what about respect for the woman," said Maruca. "You risked your life to carry away the Virgin Mary on your back, you might have been shot for that, and yet you do not think that man should also have respect for woman?"
I was analyzing my father's unawareness. For at moments in Caux he understood he had been monstrously selfish, he understood he had lived out his Don Juanism without caution or delicacy, but the next moment he could not bear to believe this and he launched into excuses, alibis, lies, he put all the blame on Maruca, on the women who tempted him.
He was unconscious of what he had done.
"And if I get sick now," said my father, "who will take care of me?"
[Summer, 1938]
The last two weeks we lived under the threat of war. Collective anxiety, panic, rebellion, fear. People packing and running away. People faced with the threat of concentration camps, imprisonment, or bombing. Henry stopped revising Capricorn. He became ill at the disruption of his individual life. Black days for the world. Crowds awaiting news in front of newspaper buildings. Unrest. Hysteria. This little world I created, out of protectiveness, love, humanity, work, may be destroyed by war, by Hitler.
All of us shattered by tension. We are all packing. Henry leaves for the Dordogne region after giving me instructions about his manuscripts.
One morning I found in my letter box an order from the river police to move out of Paris. All the houseboats had been asked to move out. I had to rent a tugboat to pull my houseboat further up the Seine. What we all feared was that the houseboats were not sturdy enough for any voyage. So I asked Gonzalo to be there, to help me navigate. He was late. The tugboat would not wait. And I had to sail alone. It was raining. I stayed on deck to watch the operations. I remembered my dream, of sailing for twenty years and all my friends standing on the shore asking me where I was going and when would I be back. Here I was in reality sailing past the sections of Paris so familiar to me, past apartment houses where I had lived, and streets I had so often explored. But I was not allowed to meditate on how dreams materialize, for the houseboat was taking in water and I had to man the pump. The tugboat had to slow down, or it would have Hooded.
We were out of Paris. We passed under a bridge and reached a factory section. We passed another bridge and reached a boatyard, filled with skeletons of old barges, rusty anchors. A cemetery for boats. They advised me as I passed to continue up to Neuilly. There was room to anchor there. Neuilly! I had circumnavigated only to return to my birthplace. An omen? And my father, too, moved to Neuilly, near where he had lived when I was born.
***
The apartment Maruca had selected for my father was a comfortable modern place for retired couples. It had a restaurant on the ground floor and maid service. But when my father saw it he had a moment of despair. It had been selected unconsciously by an angry wife placing him in Dante's Inferno, for he was living with old people and he had never recognized his own aging, he lived in an illusion of perpetual youth, and then his own apartment overlooked a cemetery, which to a Spaniard is a fatal omen.
I visited him faithfully, took walks with him in the same park he took me walking in when I was two or three years old. But I felt almost as Maruca did, detached from him, free of him.
Once I came to see him after seeing Henry off. He was sitting at the piano revising a composition. It was dedicated to the Spanish orphans, but I felt he considered himself one of them. His apartment was meticulously arranged, clinically clean and orderly.
When we took our walk through the Bois he was gently reminiscing about the days when he took my brother and me to play in the same park.
And for the first time, as a consequence of our struggle, he pours out real confidences, utterly sincere. That was what I had sought to obtain because I knew it was the only cure for loneliness. He wept over the lost Maruca, lost to sexual games of no account. "I cannot even remember their names!" Just a collection of trophies. He now believes that there is a god who has punished him, he who did not believe in God. He expresses remorse and guilt. "In this very park I took you walking when you were a child. I could have been happy as a father, a husband, a musician, if I had not been obsessed with winning more and more women." I console him. Now he understands the great strain of constantly playing roles, and he says he wishes he had had this relief from play-acting, this genuine exchange of feelings and thoughts he found with me. "If only I had found a woman who could have broken through the façade as you did, this is what a true relationship could have been."
From there I go to visit my mother and Joaquin. They are preparing to go to America. Joaquin has been invited to teach at Middlebury College. He is working on his quintet, and rehearsing for a concert. Mother looks older, sweeter, more easily tired.
From there to old Lantelme, who makes me promise if he dies I will take care of his wife.
Then Helba and I meet for a talk about Gonzalo, who is torn by a great conflict. There is not only the conflict between his nursing of Helba as against political activities, but a deeper one, because his comrades have told him that he is unfit to work at the revolution. He is undisciplined, negligent, and would blunder into his own destru
ction. He cannot organize, he loses important papers, forgets appointments. His comrades told him he was a romantic revolutionist.
Helba says: "I lifted him up, I carried him until I became ill. You're the only one who can save him now."
"But how, Helba? He is tied in knots."
We were sitting in the Café Flore, and I had to raise my voice so Helba could hear me. A man sitting behind us, on the other side of the potted plants, accused us of disturbing his newspaper-reading. So we had to go out and walk.
Helba said: "Gonzalo has so damaged his body with excesses that he has weakened his health. One day out in the rain and he is shaking and trembling. If he had gone to Spain he would have been the first one out of the trenches and into a hospital.
"He would also be the one to walk bare-chested and unarmed into the mouth of cannons. He wants to die for some cause, die for an idea, and if we don't encourage him, he will be ashamed later."
Up early the next day to go to die Villa Seurat to arrange to have it cleaned, to take Henry's typewriter to be oiled, to pick up his mail. He writes desolate letters: "Everything looks dead and dull. I feel like a ghost."
Where will he rest to regain his strength? He is worn and nervous.
From there to visit the owners of the small white boat which was tied next to my houseboat, and which I always admired. It was owned by a German painter and he was constantly improving it, rebuilding it, lovingly repainting it. He had asked to see me. Then he told me that he and his wife were Jews and that they were afraid of the turn of events, and wanted to leave for Africa or South America. Would I buy their boat and help them to escape? He did not want to be drafted into the German army, or put in a concentration camp. Their plight moved me deeply, but I am unable to buy the boat. But I found someone who did, and we parted emotionally, like very old friends.
Winter of Artifice lies unfinished. Moricand wants to set me afloat again in the world of dreams and makes me read Séraphita, and talks all evening about mythology.
I am living out through others what I cannot live out myself directly: chaos, disorder, tumult, obscure instincts, caprices, fears, fevers, violence. They live it out for me. They destroy what I create. They blunder, they get lost, they fall, they shock me, they hurt themselves, and some part of me is dragged into their destructiveness, and another part of me fights their destructiveness, and another part of me, which is wise, which has passed beyond this, suffers deeply with them, for them, through them. It is my karma, to pass through darkness, confusion, violence and destruction not of my own making, which I have controlled, transmuted, tamed in myself. My deep friendships are like the selves I tried to transcend, the lives I skipped, escaped, by magical ascensions into other realms: philosophy, psychology, art. So the earthy, the demons, the instincts, grasped me in the form of Henry, June, Gonzalo, as if to say you must experience everything, even the Dostoevskian hells, because they cannot be transmuted, they remain all instinct, all nature and chaos.
Tomorrow I place this diary volume in the vault. I must be ready and unburdened for the uprooting to come.
War looms again.
Mobilization.
Women weep openly in the streets. Crowds stand in line at the savings banks to withdraw their meager savings. There is fear in the air. And Gonzalo thrives on this anguish and feels alive. At last the world and he are synchronized, his personal agonies are matched by the universal one.
Everyone turns to me for help, and I do not have enough for all. I must help Mother and Joaquin to get off to America. I must get Helba to a safe place. The same day I finally get Gonzalo much-needed eyeglasses, he drops and breaks them. I must send money to Henry, give Moricand enough to eat once a day. He begs me to take him to America, as he will starve if I leave him in Paris. Fred asks me to get his typewriter out of the pawnshop.
Gonzalo asks me to teach him organization. I buy him a small loose-leaf notebook and show him how I note down all I have to do, and as soon as it is done I tear the leaf off and throw it away. How light I feel when all the leaves are gone! But this has no appeal for Gonzalo. I said I could not bear the weight of things left undone. He admitted they weighed on him.
I am silent when Gonzalo blames everything on the established order because "capitalism is to blame for everything, even Helba's illness." I cannot explain to him that there is an individual responsibility and that not all tragedies are pressures from the outside, some come from within us.
Gonzalo tells me: "I think Hitler is backing down."
Henry returned.
We all expect a revolution in Germany which would put an end to the war.
Jean says: "You must permit the work of destiny and not interfere with others' completion of themselves, with their self-punishments or other ways to sainthood or human life." I have never learned this for others, yet I let no one save me from necessary suffering and error.
Moricand came to fetch me one day. Henry had had an accident. It was not very serious, but he had fallen down the ladder leading to the terrace of the studio, he had cut himself against the shattered glass door, had wounds on his back, on the soles of his feet. He could not walk. So all of us were to take turns at running errands, cooking for him, attending to his needs.
Henry needed me, my father needed me, Maruca needed me.
My only pleasure this month was Henry's writing in Capricorn. Extremes of sensuality and lyricism, spirituality and the demon. After he wrote the pages on the black star we talked sadly because anciently all literature was symbolical, and everyone understood the symbol, but today we can no longer write in terms of symbol or myth.
Never having lived a truly chaotic, capricious life, I had to imitate it first to gain my freedom. I imitated Henry's erratic whims, Héléne's sudden changes of plans, Gonzalo's irrational behavior, their unaccountableness, unexpected reactions. So they all lost track of me as I lost track of them. It is really a camouflage. Finally, by imitating this, which I had never been able to do out of considerateness for others (I could not even fail to appear at a café when I promised I would), I began to live genuinely what I tolerated in others. Allowing myself the same freedom they took.
Jean Carteret, who cannot read English, listened to my translation of Winter of Artifice and said: "You walk over water. Others will be afraid. If they follow you they might drown."
That day on the houseboat talking with my father was like talking to a madman. One moment he was utterly lucid and he would confess he had behaved monstrously, had lived out his Don Juanism obsessionally without protectiveness or delicacy towards Maruca. He recognized his guilt. "I was like a drugged man, unable to realize what I was doing." But the next moment he would plunge into self-justification, and he would give a distorted version of what happened. He would put the blame on Maruca, on the other women who pursued and seduced him. He would end by putting himself back on his saint's niche, back on the pedestal, innocent, a victim. He was so possessed by his subjective reality that he did foolish, reckless things which even a stupid man would not have dared. What drove him to take such chances of being discovered, exposed?
[October, 1938]
When I look back at the week of the threat of war, when I stopped writing in the diary, I see a cemetery. That the war in reality did not take place does not matter. A great many people died psychically, a great many faiths died. The veil of illusion which makes human life bearable was violently torn.
I saw the precariousness of the individually created world, swept by collective madness.
I saw Henry trembling and groaning, although he was the only one who left Paris and had no one to worry about except himself. Henry in an agony of egoistic concern, raging because peace and security were torn from him by greater, exterior forces. Henry without strength. Cabling right and left for money to sail back to America. Henry a primitive.
I saw Gonzalo ready to sacrifice all individual devotions to war, to death, gloating because the war would make revolution possible. Gonzalo physically courageous, but with
a courage for death and not for life. Gonzalo, for whom Nanankepichu was merely a warrior's pause between fits of upheavals and a Utopian faith in a new world.
Henry's Chinese talk of wisdom had not stood the test of reality. We faced each other like ghosts. Suddenly Villa Seurat looked dilapidated. One noticed the stains on the walls, the fissures, the peeling paint.
Peace was like a cemetery.
Fiction, falsities, fears, prejudices.
How can I believe in any system which incites spying on friends and relatives, which practices cruelty as powerful as the oppressors', how can I believe in anything achieved by bloodshed and torture?
Gonzalo has the necessary blindness to take sides and die for an idea, but I see the inhumanity of all ideas, their falseness. I want to live transcending laws, prejudices, morals. Every system is too narrow for me. 1 always respected a man of quality when I saw one, a character, a human or creative value. Yet now I became convinced that what was wrong for me might be good for others, to deliver the poor, the slaves, the workers.
Gonzalo convinced me.
The only world I know without walls, injustices, monstrosities, is that of illusion and poetry. For me that is the only liberation. I don't believe man can be changed by outer systems. It has to come from within.
It was the night of peace euphoria. A reprieve. We had escaped a nightmare, a monstrous holocaust, a gigantic tragedy, for a few days.
When I read Gonzalo's books, I see the error and the limitations. But perhaps not for the world. The world is earthy, and needs outward changes, earthy solutions. It cannot liberate itself in space and time. It needs concrete, external changes. It can only deal with outer transformations. Gonzalo does not understand that no economic liberation will free him of his guilt towards Helba, nor me from my inability to cause pain. The weakness and the vices are in us, and therefore they will reappear under any system like Lady Macbeth's bloodstains. Gonzalo and Helba never recognized the weakness in themselves. They blamed society, the doctors.