by Anais Nin
I may be sitting in a café listening to the music, drinking coffee. The lights are vivid, the music violent. I am keenly aware of everything, from the stains on the table to the face of the man sitting farthest from my table, aware of what the waiters are discussing. I feel my body alive and warm inside of my fur coat. I am wearing a hood with a fur edge. I feel at moments I am an actress. I am a Polish countess, a Hungarian singer, an Eskimo bride, all out of novels. The men always believe in my disguises. They believe. They never step behind the stage to say: "You are lying. You were lying when you sewed the hood on your coat. You are not what you seem to be." If I answer: "What am I?" it only precipitates my departure. As soon as someone denies my existence, appearance, and I am exposed as a disguised being, as a spy from another world, this other world opens its luminous jaws and engulfs me. I am here only while someone believes in me, while some human being swears to my presence and loves me.
Someone could spy on me and detect my non-human origin. I wash too easily, too lightly. I do not wear out my clothes, I cook too lightly and too quickly. I leave no disorder behind me, no tumultuous traces of living. My bed is not wildly disturbed, disarranged.
When I am ejected from the ordinary world I must not lament. I must enter very boldly into my world, with the feelings I have, eyes open, alone. It is not a world in which one is humanly married, bound. Marriages happen on earth.
***
Strange things are happening. When I discovered the Tibetan world, the states of being so familiar to me, I thought perhaps I died long ago and I'm on my way to something else, maybe a rebirth, a state of vision.
Henry meanwhile is obsessed with Balzac's Séraphita.
When men talked at the café about being sad after sex, I asked them why I did not feel this sadness after sex. It was Henry who answered me: "Perhaps because for you it is not everything. People for whom it is the only means of connection are sad at the fleetingness of this union." It is true that for me it is only one kind of union, or expression of union, but there are others.
Another time Gonzalo joined me at the café and talked to me about the friends who died in Spain, about the treachery of the anarchists in Barcelona, about one of his friends who got his face slashed in a café, about Helba who has an abscess in her womb. "The whole room smells."
Another day I sat in the café with Henry, correcting proofs of Winter of Artifice. There was a thick fog outside. Henry is in love with Séraphita. He carries the book around and places it on the café table.
As we proofread Winter of Artifice, in spite of its bad technique and defects we see new meaning in it.
Gonzalo has flashes of intuition, as June had. But then the blindness returns. He lives in another world.
When Helba gets very ill, he comes to me like a child, lost and baffled. I decide on a plan of action. We walk to the doctor. I wait in a café. In the café later he looks at my hands. "They look transparent. My god, Anaïs, are you all right?" I can't add to his anxieties. I cannot tell him Dr. Jacobson is not pleased with my persistent anemia. He is going to have my lungs examined. On the way home I thought: "Perhaps I will die." And just then a funeral procession passed me. Perhaps I am ready to die. I cannot live in the barbarism of war. Gonzalo weeps over the loss of his friends who died in Spain. Helba's death does not seem important now. A useless life. But Gonzalo's mother was fragile, was dying for many years, just like Helba. She is still alive at eighty. I do not believe in Helba's near-death.
Gonzalo's life is in the streets, vagabonding. It is dispersed in talk. He is always starting a great motion which appears like a giant project and turns out to be the revolutions of great energy. He starts with a force which seems capable of turning the world upside down and ends in a café throwing dice with the beggars of the Rue de Beaune. He needs independence like a wild horse, he cannot harness himself even to Marxism, which he believes in.
Henry wrote about June: "I thought I had found a female Vesuvius." He was as deceived about June as I was about Gonzalo. I thought Gonzalo's volcanic nature would bring a new kind of freedom. I thought with the ñre and faith in him he would burn all the chains, start a new world. But he is bound like an animal.
Strange that, like Henry, I was always awaiting the one who would represent evil, and lead me into dark experiences, a life like Richard Burton's. Because this part of me was always submerged by the need to protect or care for others. June could have done it. Gonzalo and June were really alike. But what happens is that two people create a new alchemy. They interact upon each other and what takes place is not the leadership of one over the other, but the consequence of this interaction. There was no great evil in either Gonzalo or June, just great adventurousness, but both change in relation to me. It is like the children born of a couple, who are exactly like neither one, but something else again.
Even for love of Spain or Marxism, Gonzalo cannot give up staying up all night and sleeping all morning. An apéritif can make him keep Helba waiting two or three hours for her food when she is ill.
There are people who cannot change from the inner to the outer, who must be pushed from the outside. They are the ones who need revolutions. There are those who can rise above life, transform it, free themselves, and for these the revolution is not necessary. I can see how necessary it is for those who cannot escape into creation, create an illusory world, those who cannot dream or create an individually perfect world.
Gonzalo said: "Way up in the mountains of Peru, a mountain twice as high as Mont Blanc, there is a lake set deep inside of a bower of black volcanic rocks. An immensely deep lake in the middle of eternal snows. The Indians go there to see the mirages. What I saw in the lake was a tropical scene, richly tropical, with colored birds, lush vegetation, flowers. The Indians call these mirages Fata Morgana. You should take that as a pen name for your diary."
"So you think all of my world is illusory, like Don Quixote's," I said, "yet why do you come and rest in it when the world outside becomes monstrously horrible? Are you resting on a mirage?"
Gonzalo has not led me out of my world into a better one. I thought my father would lead me into a vaster world of experience, but he could not do it because he was bound in guilt, and this guilt took the form of idealizing his actions, and camouflaging them. Henry was never a leader, he was always letting things happen. Somehow or other, the man who could take me out of my own world never crossed my path, or if he did he disguised himself in my presence.
When I helped Henry with his own proofreading I was amazed by his pages on June in Capricorn. No longer June and Henry but something born of Henry's imagination. Henry describes himself as a puppet sitting on June's knees. And while he writes of her power, at the same time he crucifies her. It is frightening, his ruthless vision exposing a woman as nature, as a mirror, as a soulless void.
When Larry made a vivid description of Anna Wickham, her enormous body, mustache, hair in her nose, heavy pawlike hands, her heavy voice, I said: "She must have hair in her womb too, like a sea urchin." This set Larry laughing and gave birth to the "Paper Womb" printed in the Booster, December 1938, later known as "The Labyrinth."
Larry put it: "My god, Anaïs, you're always opening new trap doors. Trap doors on the infinite."
[February, 1939]
My father was giving his thousandth concert in Paris. I was sitting in the front row. While he was playing, in the middle of a composition, he suddenly let his arms fall to his sides, sat absolutely still, and then fell over, his head hitting the keyboard. For the public it was a stroke, but for me it was an overwhelming, crushing realization of his solitude, anguish, the death of a life he loved. I rushed to the reception room. They had laid him on a bench, and a doctor was attending him. They had opened his shirt at the neck. He was unconscious. The doctor said: "It is not the heart." I took him to his apartment in Neuilly in a car some admirer offered. He regained consciousness. Several friends were there. He lay on the bed. When his glasses are off he opens the vague eyes of the very near
sighted. He did not seem to recognize anyone. But he pressed my hand. I felt a heartrending pity, terrifying, but passive. I could not weep for my father, for all links with him were broken, but for a man, any man, who was losing a world, who had been the darling of women and of fate for so many years. White hair. Elegance. Loneliness. All the women around him, tonight too, four or five, fluttering, sighing, exclaiming, worshiping him, all of them around him but not near enough. I did not want to go too near to him, although someone cried out impatiently: "Make room for his daughter." It is his daughter. They seemed to want to keep me out as if I were another rival for his affection. I could not come any nearer, one cannot come any nearer to my father than this adoring circle around him now. He barred the way with his masks and his self-love. His self-worship isolated him. I could not console him. This was one of his deaths. He died because he could not yet envisage another life. With the end of protection, luxury, of love affairs, of his marriage, his life ended. There was something broken. His ghost was going to Cuba, for him that was a kind of exile, a country without culture, without music, without all the richness of Paris. He died at his thousandth concert in Paris, of the burden of regrets, of memory, of a life so rich and glamorous and brilliant which was coming to an end. 1 did not hurt him. I never said to him, as Maraca said: "My love is dead." I fulfilled my belief in illusion which gives life. I gave understanding and compassion. But I did not give him my life as I once did as a child, when his departure killed some part of my being. I did not let him cling to me. Very gently and quietly I made him understand he could not expect a total love from me, I let him see the difference between our two lives. I offered to share with him the simplicity of my life on the houseboat. He knew I had many ties, bonds, and loved ones to protect. But what he demands always is one's total life, slavery. That night, in his room, pity crushed me but no guilt. He was fulfilling his destiny. The punishment was great. For him Cuba meant exile from all he had loved. But he had sought only his own pleasure, and made no sacrifices for anyone. It was a kind of death, on that stage, alone with his piano, and today he was weeping over himself, and I was weeping over him.
The houseboat so far away from Paris, so isolated, became a dangerous place. I no longer had the protection of the hoboes sleeping under the bridge. I had to give it up. I took an apartment on the Rue Cassini, next door to the building where Balzac wrote Séraphita. I have one big room and an alcove for the bed. The bathroom and kitchen are combined, the bathroom being an afterthought. So I can watch my cooking while I am taking a bath. It has one large long window, placed at such a height that I can see the heads of passers-by. Just the heads passing by. I am again near to all my friends, within walking distance of cafés, bookshops, etc.
Henry is going through a mystic stage, he looks fragile, luminous almost. He sees few people, goes rarely to cafés, prefers meditation, reading, returns to his studio filled with ideas, plans, is writting about Séraphita, about his past and June as a great crucifixion. He gives me full due for what I am, and says, talking about the great liberation he feels, "Of course, for this you had to be crucified," and by this makes my sacrifices a joy. He wrote a whole small book by hand for my birthday, he fixes up his notes, he paints beautiful water colors, listens to music, is content with his explorations. We can talk laughingly about his "errors." I had opposed the Booster, the letter about Alf, the Gold pamphlet, the letters from the messenger boys, all because they took so much of his energy, they were mere jokes, and they cost all the money which could have been applied to a book. He had to give them away, and very few people liked them. I felt they were mere practical jokes. All of these are now piled up in his closet, wasted. He admitted I was right, laughing too, yes, he knew, he confessed they were childish, and then he added: "But I would do it all over again."
Now he wants to print Séraphita, involve Durrell in a loss of money and give the world something it cannot assimilate, just at this moment. Séraphita is a tribute to the past. However, he has dropped the Booster, which was bleeding all of us.
When proofreading Winter of Artifice he picked out the phrase: "The poet is the one who calls death an aurora borealis," which was a phrase I dreamed. Or: "Sparked the great birds of divinity, the eternal moments."
Gonzalo is drinking all night. I waited in the café and he did not come. I went for a walk, passed by the Coupole, and saw him at the bar where the women never go, standing among friends, in a state of beatitude, completely drunk.
My father came to see me. I lit all the small lamps and perfumed the place. He thought this might be our last talk together because he had planned to leave on a certain ship to Cuba.
The date of departure was not fixed. There was much confusion. He had reduced his belongings to thirteen cases of books and music. We talked gently about other things. I had no forebodings. But when he left me, he fainted in the courtyard, and a stranger helped him home. I never knew this till he wrote me later. "I knew it was the last time I would see you."
Gonzalo was in a desperate state because he had been subjected to another seance of autocriticism practiced by the Marxists. They had told him all of his virtues and faults, scolded him for drinking, disorder and weakness, but with kindness. They had praised his capacities, too, all the gifts he wasted by chaos. They had told him he had a great gift for fraternizing with workmen, for talking to them, for convincing them.
Helba was in the hospital again. I cooked special things and took them to her. Once I cooked a chicken. When Gonzalo and I went to visit her she took delight in pulling it out from under her pillow and saying: "See, I am so ill I could not eat." It had been there a week. I said: "Why didn't you give it to someone who could eat it, you are surrounded by hungry people." The need of a stage prop to dramatize her lack of appetite was stronger than the need to help or give.
Gonzalo aspires to order and asks me to impose on him. I tried to explain it could not be imposed by others. It had to come from him.
In three years Gonzalo has changed. But he has no will. He is easily discouraged, easily influenced, easily thrown off his course, easily depressed and distracted, unbalanced too. He says himself: "I'm crazy. I'm a Russian. Only Dostoevsky would have understood me." Or: "I would prefer to be given a machine gun. That's what I'm good for, just to shoot off a machine gun." He hates to read or write. He prefers to talk. The Jesuits tried to discipline him in school and they failed. All I can do is keep him from destroying himself. He serves no one and no cause well. Spain, Marxism, his wife, his friends only get spasmodic devotion. He sticks to nothing, finishes nothing.
I reached a point of such physical weakness I had to be given a transfusion. I felt I was carrying the burden of Gonzalo's terrible moods, Helba's operation.
When he drinks Gonzalo never talks about the present, about Montparnasse, his present life. He reverts always to the beautiful early years.
He has talked all night with Antonin Artaud, with Breton, with Tristan Tzara, with Paul Lafargue, Picasso, Miró, but of this he tells me nothing.
While he talks a friend is waiting for Gonzalo's help at the Peruvian Embassy, Helba is waiting for him at the hospital, and on other days I am waiting with food for Helba spoiling on the fire, and meanwhile Gonzalo may be looking at books on the bookstalls, or throwing dice over a counter to gamble for an apéritif, and when I finally do see him he says: "I'm tired out." The day has fallen apart, he is discouraged, he is defeated by his own abortions. He wants to fight in Spain. He wants to go to Russia. He wants to see China. He wants to change the world. But it is night, he's tired, he will take another drink, eat a banana, and begin talking about his childhood. About the condors, the bread trees, the tree of the shadow that kills. "My father once gave me a little Negro boy for a servant, who had been born the same day as I had. A little Negro from the jungle. We were inseparable. But he died from the bitter cold up on Lake Titicaca."
Gonzalo wants to write about Artaud, who is in the insane asylum, he wants to tell all he knows about Artaud, born of wor
king with him on his play. But this intimate knowledge will die with him because of his laziness. He never wrote about his beloved friend Vallejo, the Peruvian poet. He never wrote what he wanted to write about House of Incest, and how it breathed, he said, like the mouth in Cocteau's film, the mouth in the palm of the hand. His day is a cemetery of negations. All this weighs heavily on me because I love creation so much. Now and then he can do a printing job, always too late, and then he has to work all night. All would be well if he accepted this. But it gives him despair. As soon as he wakes up he starts weaving a web which will choke him, as if he were a human spider who had woven a web to catch itself rather than its food. His terrific vitality at this construction exceeds my power to cut him free. We start our days inversely: he to break a glass, spill the wine, burn the table, drink the alcohol which will dissolve him, talk away his plans, drop the line he has set for the press, forget to telephone. And I to dominate every detail, to leap over obstacles, to reach my aim, to write my several pages a day, to fulfill all my obligations. All that I create, a page of writing, or an elated mood, or a solution to a problem, if I bring them to him he carefully, skillfully tears apart. If by extreme adroitness, swiftness, I manage to prepare the food for Helba, he is sure to destroy its effectiveness by arriving so late that visitors' hours are over, Helba complains bitterly, and the whole day is wasted. At other times his tangles cause me such pity that I wonder why I have engaged in this struggle against destruction. I don't know whether this stumbling, helpless, blind giant child is a curse put upon me for my desire for freedom and supreme lightness, liberation, desire to master life. Avalanches fall upon my attempts to turn destruction into creation. But why do I engage in this game? I feel unequal to the struggle, yet I feel if I abandon it, Helba and Gonzalo will drown.