by Anais Nin
Her face startlingly white as she retreated into the darkness of the garden, she posed for me as she left. I wanted to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty and say: "June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never know again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses."
Henry hurts her but he keeps her body and soul together. Her love for him is her only wholeness.
June and I have paid with our souls for taking fantasies seriously, for living life as a theatre, for loving costumes and changes of selves, for wearing masks and disguises. But I know always what is real. Does June?
I wanted to see June again. When she came out of the dark again, she seemed even more beautiful to me than the first time. Also she seemed more at ease. As she went up the stairs to my bedroom to leave her coat, she stood halfway up the stairs where the light set her off against the turquoise wall. Her blonde hair piled high and carelessly on her head, pallid face, peaked eyebrows, a sly smile, with a disarming dimple. Perfidious, I felt, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death. Downstairs, Henry's laughter and lustiness were earthy, simple, and there were no secrets, no dangers in Henry. Later she sat in the high-backed chair, against the books, and her silver earrings shimmered. She talked without tenderness or softness to Henry, mocked him, was relentless. They were telling about a quarrel they had before coming, about other quarrels. And I could see then, by the anger, violence, bitterness, that they were at war.
Joaquin, who is reticent, uneasy before intensity, who eludes ugliness and violence, prevented their violence from exploding. If he had not been there, I felt there would have been a fierce and inhuman battle.
At dinner Henry and June were famished and ate quickly and talked little. Then we went together to the Grand Guignol, which June had never seen. But these extremes of comedy and horror did not move her. It was probably tame, compared with her life. She talked to me in a low voice.
"Henry does not know what he wants, likes or dislikes. I do. I can select and discard. He has no judgment. It takes him years to reach a conclusion about people." Secretly we were mocking Henry's slowness, and she was asserting the perfidious alliance of our lucidities, our quickness, our subtleties.
"When Henry described you to me," said June, "he left out all that was important. He did not see you at all!"
So we had understood each other, every detail and every nuance.
In the theatre she sat with a pale, masklike face, but impatient. "I am always impatient in theatres, at movies. I read very little. It always seems pale and watered down, compared with..."
"With your life?"
She had not intended to finish the phrase.
"I want firsthand knowledge of everything, not fiction, intimate experience only. Whatever takes place, even a crime I read about, I can't take an interest in, because I already knew the criminal. I may have talked with him all night at a bar. He had confessed what he intended to do. When Henry wants me to go and see an actress in a play, she was a friend of mine at school. I lived at the home of the painter who suddenly became a celebrity. I am always inside where it first happens. I loved a revolutionist, I nursed his discarded mistress who later committed suicide. I don't care for films, newspapers, 'reportages,' the radio. I only want to be involved while it is being lived. Do you understand that, Anaïs?"
"Yes, I do."
"Henry is literary."
I divined her life at that moment. She only believed in intimacy and proximity, in confessions born in the darkness of a bedroom, in quarrels born of alcohol, in communions born of exhausting walks through the city. She only believed in those words which came like the confessions of criminals after long exposure to hunger, to intense lights, to cross-questioning, to violent tearing away of masks.
She would not read books on travel but she sat alert in the café to catch the appearance of an Abyssinian, a Greek, an Iranian, a Hindu, who would bear direct news from home, who would be carrying photographs from his family, and who would deliver to her personally all the flavors of his country.
"Henry is always making characters. He made one out of me."
Intermission. June and I want to smoke. Henry and Joaquin do not. We create a stir as we walk out together and stand in the little cobblestone street breathing the summer air.
We face each other.
I say to her, "You're the only woman who ever answered the fantasies I had about what a woman should be."
She answered, "It's a good thing that I'm going away. You would soon be disillusioned. You would unmask me. I am powerless before a woman. I don't know how to deal with a woman."
Is she telling the truth? I feel she is not. In the car she had been telling me about her friend Jean, the sculptress and poetess.
"Jean has the most beautiful face," and she added hastily, "I am not speaking of an ordinary woman. Jean's face, her beauty, were more like that of a man." She paused. "Jean's hands were so very lovely, so very supple because she handled clay a lot. The fingers tapered, a little like yours."
What feelings stir in me at June's praise of Jean's hands? Jealousy? And her insistence that her life is full of men, that she does not know how to act before a woman? I feel like saying, as Henry does so bluntly, "You lie."
She says, staring intently, "I thought your eyes were blue at first. They are strange and beautiful, grey and gold, with those long black lashes. You are the most graceful woman I have ever seen. You glide when you walk."
We talked about the colors we love. She always wears black and purple. I love warm colors, red and gold.
We returned to our seats. She continues to whisper to me, indifferent to the show. "I know Henry thinks I'm mad because I want only fever. I don't want objectivity, I don't want distance. I don't want to become detached."
When she says this, I feel very close to her and I hate Henry's writing, and my own, which makes us stay aware, to register. And I want to become immersed with her.
Coming out of the theatre I take her arm. Then she slips her hand over mine, and we lock hands. The chestnut trees are shedding their pollen in wispy parachutes, and the street lamps in the fog wear thin gold halos around them like the heads of saints.
Does she find with me a rest from the tensions? Does she have this need of clarity when the labyrinth becomes too dark and too narrow?
I was infinitely moved by the touch of her hand. She said, "The other night at Montparnasse I was hurt to hear your name mentioned by men like Titus. I don't want to see cheap men crawl into your life. I feel rather ... protective."
In the café her pallor turns ashen. I see ashes under the skin of her face. Henry had said she was very ill. Disintegration. Will she die? What anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. I must embrace her, I thought, she is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.
I am fascinated by her eyes, her mouth, her discolored mouth, badly rouged. Does she know that I feel lost in her, that I no longer understand what she is saying, feeling only the warmth of her words, their vividness?
She shivers with cold under her light velvet cape.
"Will you have lunch with me before you leave?"
"I am glad to be leaving. Henry loves me imperfectly, brutally. He hurts my pride. He desires ugly common women, passive women. He can't stand my strength."
"I resent men who are afraid of women's strength."
Jean loves June's st
rength. Is it strength, or is it destructiveness?
"Your strength, Anaïs, is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same."
I look at June's neck which is strong, I listen to her voice which is dark, heavy, husky. I look at her hands which are larger than most women's, and almost those of a peasant woman.
June does not reach the same sexual center of my being as man reaches. She does not touch that. What, then, does she move in me?
I resent Henry injuring her enormous and shallow pride. Henry looks with interest at my homely maid, Emilia. June's superiority arouses his hatred, even a feeling of revenge. He looks lingeringly at stupid, gentle Emilia. His offense makes me love June.
I love June for what she has dared to be, for her hardness and cruelty, her relentlessness, her egoism, her pride, her destructiveness. I am suffocated by my compassions. She is a personality expanded to the limit. I worship that courage to hurt which she has, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add me to her other admirers, she will boast about my subjection to her. She will be June plus all that I am, all that I give her. I love this magnified woman, bigger than other women.
When she talks, she has the same expression of intensity she must have while making love, that forward thrust of her whole head which gives her the appearance of a woman at the prow of a ship. The coal brown of her eyes turns to cloudy violet.
Is she drugged?
It was not only that June had the body of the women who climbed every night upon the stage of music halls and gradually undressed, but that it was impossible to situate her in any other atmosphere. The luxuriance of the flesh, its vivid tones, the fevered eyes and the weight of the voice, its huskiness, became instantly conjugated with sensual love. Other women lost this erotic phosphorescence as soon as they abandoned their role of dance-hall hostesses. But June's night life was internal, it glowed from within her and it came, in part, from her treating every encounter as either intimate, or to be forgotten. It was as if, before every man, she lighted within herself the lamp lighted by waiting mistresses or wives at the end of the day, only they were her eyes, and it was her face which became like a poem's bedchamber, tapestried with twilight and velvet. As it glowed from within her, it could appear in totally unexpected places, early in the morning, in a neglected café, on a park bench, on a rainy morning in front of a hospital or a morgue, anywhere. It was always the soft light kept through the centuries for the moment of pleasure.
We agreed to meet, June and I. I knew she would be late and I did not mind. I was there before the hour, almost ill with tension and joy. I could not imagine her advancing out of the crowd in full daylight and I thought, could it be possible? I was afraid that such a mirage could not be. I was afraid that I would stand there exactly as I had stood in other places, watching a crowd and knowing no June would ever appear, because June was a product of my imagination. As people came into the place, I shivered at their ugliness, at their drabness, their likeness to each other in my eyes. Waiting for June was the most painful expectancy, like awaiting a miracle. I could hardly believe she would arrive by those streets, cross such a boulevard, emerge out of a handful of dark, faceless people, walk into that place. What a profound joy to watch the crowd scurrying and then to see her striding, resplendent, incredible, towards me. I could not believe it. I held her warm hand. She was going to call for mail. Didn't the man see the wonder of her? Nobody like her ever called for mail at the American Express. Did any woman ever wear shabby shoes, a shabby black dress, a shabby blue cape, and an old violet hat as she wore them? I could not eat before her. But I was calm outwardly, with that Hindu placidity of bearing that is so deceptive. She drank and smoked. I was so calm before her, yet I could not eat. My nervousness gnawed me deeply, it devoured me. She is quite mad, in a sense, I thought; subject to fears and manias. Her talk was mostly unconscious. The contents of her flowering imagination are a reality to her. But what is she building so carefully? A heightened sense of her own personality, a glorifying of it? In the obvious and enveloping warmth of my admiration she expanded. She seemed at once destructive and helpless. I wanted to protect her! I, protect her whose power is infinite! At moments her power was so strong that I actually believed it when she told me her destructiveness was unintentional. I believed her. Did she try to destroy me? No, she walked into my house and I was willing to endure any pain at her hands. If there is any calculation in her whose destiny is beyond her control, it comes only afterwards, when she becomes aware of her power and wonders how she can use it. I do not think her power is directed. Even she is baffled by it.
I see her as someone to be pitied and protected. She is involved in tragedies and perversities she cannot understand or control. I know her weakness. She is weak before reality. Her life is full of fantasies. I do not believe her relationship to Jean is sexual. I believe it is a fantasy in which she escapes from Henry's relentless inquisitions.
June's elusiveness, her retreat into fantasy, suddenly enrage me, because they are mine. A new anger and a new strength are aroused by her unwillingness to face her acts and feelings. I want to force her into reality (as Henry does). I, who am sunk in dreams, in half-lived acts, I want to do violence to her. What do I want? I want to grasp June's hands, find out whether this love of woman is real or not. Why do I want that? Am I driving obscure, mysterious emotions out into the open (as Henry wants to do and does constantly)? Do I get angry with her self-deceptions, which are like mine? Her subtlety makes me desire frankness; the quicksands of her evasions make me, for the first time, demand clarity. At times I feel as she does, like taking flight from selves I do not know, and at other times I feel like Henry, like pursuing and exposing these selves to crude daylight.
Yet, in the taxi, I could hardly think clearly when she pressed my hand to her breast, and I kept her hand and I was not ashamed of my adoration, my humility, for she is older, she knows more, she should be leading me, initiating me, taking me out of smoky fantasies into experience.
She said she wanted to keep the rose dress I wore the first night she saw me. I told her I wanted to give her a going-away present and she said she wanted some of the perfume she smelled in my house, to evoke memories. And she needs shoes, stockings, gloves, a warm coat. Sentimentality? Romanticism? If she means this ... Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is very sensitive, and hypersensitive people become false when others doubt them. They vacillate. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time, it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. At the same time I feel that I am dying. She says of me, "You are at once so decadent and so alive." She is so decadent and so alive. Our love would be death.
Henry was jealous and intolerant. June is the stronger, harder me. He takes all he wants, but he reviles her for doing the same. He makes love to a woman almost in front of her at a party. June takes drugs. She loves Jean. She talks underworld language when she tells stories. And yet she has kept that incredible, out-of-date, uncallous sentimentalism. "Give me the perfume I smelled in your house. Walking up the hill to your house the other night, in the dark, I was in ecstasy. I have never liked a woman Henry has liked. Yet, in this case, I felt, he had not said enough."
When I talk now, I feel June's voice in me. I feel my voice growing heavier, and my face less smiling. I feel altered facially. I feel a strange presence making me walk differently.
In my dream last night I was at the top of a skyscraper and expected to walk down the façade of it on a very narrow fire ladder. I was terrified. I could not do it.
June's character seems to have no definable form, no boundaries, no core. This frightens Henry. He does not know all she is.
Do I feel my own self definite, encompassable? I know its boundary lines. There are experiences I shy away from. But my curiosity, creativeness, urge me beyond these boundaries, to transcend my character. My imagination pushes me into unknown, unexplored, dangerous realms. Y
et there is always my fundamental nature, and I am never deceived by my "intellectual" adventures, or my literary exploits. I enlarge and expand my self; I do not like to be just one Anaïs, whole, familiar, contained. As soon as someone defines me, I do as June does; I seek escape from the confinements of definition. Am I good? Kind? Then I seek to see how far I can go into unkindness (not very far), into hardness. But I do feel I can always come back to my true nature. Can June come back to her true nature?
And what is my true nature? What is June's? Is mine idealism, spirituality, poetry, imagination, sense of beauty, a need of beauty, a fundamental Rimbaud innocence, a certain purity? I need to create, I hate cruelty. But when I have wanted to go deep into evil, this evil changes as I approach it. Henry and June change as I come near to them. I destroy the worlds I want to enter. I arouse creativeness in Henry, romanticism in June.
June, by her voluptuous body, her sensual face, her erotic voice, arouses perversity and sensuality. What is it that makes this a destructive experience? She has the power to destroy. I have the power to create. We are two contrasting forces. What will be our effect on each other? I thought June would destroy me.
The day we had lunch together, I was ready to follow her into any perversity, any destruction. I had not counted on my effect on her. I was so filled with my love for her I did not notice my effect on her.
June came to my house on Monday. I wanted an end to the mysteries, a climax to the suspense. I asked her cruelly and brutally, as Henry might have asked, "Do you love women? Have you faced your impulses towards women?"