Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  She answered me so quietly. "Jean was too masculine. I have faced my feelings. I am fully aware of them. But I have never found anyone I wanted to live them out with, so far. I am not sure what it is I want to live out."

  And then she turned away from my questions and said, gazing at me, "What a lovely way you have of dressing. This dress—its rose color, its old-fashioned fullness at the bottom, the little black velvet jacket, the lace collar, the lacing over the breasts. How perfect, how absolutely perfect. I like the way you cover yourself, too. There is very little nudity, only your neck, really. I love your turquoise ring, and the coral earrings." Her hands were shaking, she was trembling. I was ashamed of my directness. I was intensely nervous. She told me that at the restaurant she had wanted to look at my bare feet in sandals but that she could not bring herself to stare. I told her I had been afraid to stare at her body, and how much I had wanted to. We talked brokenly, chaotically. She now looked at my feet in sandals and said, "They are flawless. I have never seen such flawless feet. And I love the way you walk, like an Indian woman."

  Our nervousness was unbearable.

  I said, "Do you like these sandals?"

  "I have always loved sandals and worn them, but lately I could not afford them and I am wearing shoes someone gave me."

  I said, "Come up to my room and try another pair I have, just like these."

  She tried them on, sitting on my bed. They were too small for her. I saw she was wearing cotton stockings and it hurt me to see June in cotton stockings. I showed her my black cape, which she found beautiful. I made her try it on. Then I saw the beauty of her body I had not dared to look at, I saw its fullness, its heaviness; and the richness of it overwhelmed me.

  I could not understand why she was so ill and so timid, so frightened. I told her that I would make her a cape like mine. Once I touched her arm. She moved it away. Had I frightened her? Could there be someone more sensitive and more afraid than I? I could not believe this. I was not afraid at that moment.

  When she sat on the couch downstairs, the opening of her black, clinging dress showed the beginning of her full breasts. I was trembling. I was aware of the vagueness of our feelings and desires. She talked ramblingly, but now I knew she was talking to cover a deeper talk, talking against the things we could not express.

  I came back from walking with her to the station dazed, exhausted, elated, happy, unhappy. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for my questions. They had been so unsubtle, so unlike me.

  We met the next day at the American Express. She came in her tailored suit because I had said that I liked it.

  She had said that she wanted nothing from me but the perfume I wore and my wine-colored handkerchief. But I reminded her she had promised she would let me buy her sandals.

  First of all, I took her to the ladies' room. I opened my bag and took out a pair of sheer black stockings. "Put them on," I said, pleading and apologizing at the same time. She obeyed. Meanwhile I opened a bottle of perfume. "Put some on."

  June had a hole in her sleeve.

  I was happy, and June was exultant. We talked simultaneously. "I wanted to call you last night." "I wanted to send you a telegram last night." June said, "I wanted to tell you how unhappy I was on the train, regretting my awkwardness, my nervousness, my pointless talk. There was so much, so much I wanted to say."

  We had the same fears of displeasing each other, of disappointing each other. She had gone to the café in the evening to meet Henry. "I felt as if drugged. I was full of thoughts of you. People's voices reached me from afar. I was elated. I could not sleep all night. What have you done to me?"

  She added, "I was always poised, I could always talk well. People never overwhelmed me."

  When I realized what she was revealing to me, I was overjoyed. I overwhelm her? She loved me then? June! She sat beside me in the restaurant, small, timid, unworldly, panic-stricken, and I was moved, I was almost unbearably moved. June different, upset, changed, yielding, when she had made me so different, she had made me impulsive, strong.

  She would say something and then beg forgiveness for its stupidity. I could not bear her humility. I told her, "We have both lost ourselves, but that is when one reveals most of one's true self. You've revealed your incredible sensitiveness. I am so moved. You are like me, wishing for such perfect moments, and frightened for fear of spoiling them. Neither one of us was prepared for this, and we had imagined it too long. Let's be overwhelmed, it is so lovely. I love you, June."

  And not knowing what else to say, I spread between us on the seat the wine-colored handkerchief she wanted, my coral earrings, my turquoise ring. It was blood I wanted to lay at June's feet, before June's incredible humility.

  Then she began to talk beautifully, not hysterically, but deeply.

  We walked to the sandal shop. In the shop the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our obvious happiness. I held June's hand firmly. I commanded: "Bring this. Bring that." I was firm, willful with the woman. When she mentioned the width of June's feet I scolded her. June could not understand the Frenchwoman, but she sensed that she was disagreeable.

  We chose sandals like mine. She refused everything else, anything that was not symbolic or representative of me. Everything I wore she would wear, although she said she had never wanted to imitate anyone else ever before.

  When we walked the streets, bodies close together, arm in arm, hands locked, I was in such ecstasy I could not talk. The city disappeared, and so did the people. The acute joy of our walking together through the grey streets of Paris I shall never forget, and I shall never be able to describe it. We were walking above the world, above reality, into pure, pure ecstasy.

  I discovered June's purity. It was June's purity I was given to possess, what she had given to no one else. To me she gave the secret of her being, the woman whose face and body have aroused instincts around her which left her untouched, which terrified her. As I had sensed, her destructiveness is unconscious. She is imprisoned in it, and detached, and bewildered. When she met me, she revealed her innocent self. She lives in fantasies, not in the world Henry lives in.

  ***

  Henry had written of a dangerous and venomous woman. To me she confided her detachment from the realities of Henry's world, her complete absorption in fantasies, her madnesses.

  So many people had sought the way into June's true nature and had not guessed the strength and fullness of her imaginative world, her isolation, the June who lives in symbols, who shrinks from crudeness. I brought June into my world. June did not take me into her violent and harsh world because it is not hers. She came to me because she likes to dream.

  All at once I knew, too, that the sensual and perverse world in which she reigns is closed to me again. Do I regret it? She came to me when I was hungry for reality. I wanted real experiences which would free me of my fantasies, my daydreaming. She turned me away from Henry, who ruled that world of earthy, lusty harsh facts. She has thrown me back into visions, dreams. But if I were made for reality, for ordinary experience, I would not have loved her. I have a greater need of illusion and dreams, then, than I have of Henry's animal world.

  She said yesterday, "There are so many things I would love to do with you. With you I would take drugs."

  June does not accept a gift which has no symbolic significance. June washes laundry to be able to buy herself a bit of perfume. June is not afraid of poverty and drabness, is untouched by it, is untouched by the drunkenness of her friends (her drunkenness is so different, it's more like an exaltation). June selects and discards people with evaluations unknown to Henry.

  When June tells her endless anecdotes now, I understand they are ways of escape, disguises for a self which lives secretly behind that smoke-screen talk.

  I think so much about her, all day, all night. As soon as I left hei yesterday, there was a painful void, and I shivered with cold. I love her extravagances, her humility, her fears of disillusion.

  The struggle for expression was not as a
cute for me before I met June. Her talk is like my secret writing. At times incoherent, at times abstract, at times blind. Let incoherence be, then. Our meeting each other has been emotionally too disturbing. Both of us had one inviolate self we never gave. It was our dreaming self. Now we have invaded this world in each other. She is too rich to be fully known in a few days. She says I am too rich for her. We want to separate and regain our lucidity.

  But I have fewer fears than she has. I would not separate from her of my own free will. I want to give myself away, to lose myself.

  Before her I repudiate all I have done, all that I am. I aspire to more. I am ashamed of my writing. I want to throw everything away and begin anew. I have a terror of disappointing her. Her idealism is so demanding. It awes me. With her I feel timelessness. Our talk is only half-talk. When she talks on the surface, it is because she is afraid of the rich silences between us. In the silence, the quietness of my gestures calms her agitation. If she had wanted to, yesterday, I would have sat on the floor at her feet and placed my head against her knees. But she would not let me. Yet at the station while we waited for the train, she begged for my hand. I turned away and ran, as if in panic. The station master stopped me to sell me some charity tickets. I bought them and gave them to him, wishing him luck with the lottery. He got the benefit of my wanting to give to June, to whom one cannot give anything.

  Yet I have given her life. She died in Paris. She died the night she read Henry's book [manuscript version of Tropic of Cancer], because of his brutality. She wept and repeated over and over again, "It is not me, it is not me he is writing about. It's a distortion. He says I live in delusions, but it is he, it is he who does not see me, or anyone, as I am, as they are. He makes everything ugly."

  What a secret language we talk. Undertones, overtones, nuances, abstractions, symbols. Then we return to Henry with an incandescence which frightens him. Henry is uneasy. What is this powerful magic we create together and indulge in? How can Henry be excluded from it when he has genius? What do June and I seek together that Henry does not believe in? Wonder wonder wonder.

  At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry's language, entering Henry's world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

  June eats and drinks symbols. Henry has no use for symbols. He eats bread, not wafers. June never liked Madeira wine before, but because I serve it at home she drinks it, and asks for it at the café. The taste of me. The tastes and smells of my house. She found a café where there was an open fire, and the burning logs smelled like my house.

  When I look up at her, she says I look like a child. When I look down, I look very sad.

  The intensity is shattering us both. She is glad to be leaving. She is always in flight. She is in flight from Henry. But I cannot bear the separation because it is physical, and I need her presence. It is Henry she is in flight from.

  When we met for half an hour today to discuss Henry's future, she asked me to take care of him, and then gave me her silver bracelet, a part of her. It has a cat's-eye stone, so symbolical of her. I refused the bracelet at first, because she has so few possessions, but then the joy of wearing her bracelet filled me. I carry it like a symbol. It is precious to me.

  June was afraid that Henry should turn me against her. "How?" I said. "By revelations." What does she fear? I said, "I have my own knowledge of you. Henry's knowledge of you is not mine."

  Then I met Henry accidentally, and I felt him hostile, and I was startled. June said that he was uneasy and restless, that she only told him what would not give him anxiety because he is more jealous of women than of men. Henry, who thought me a rare person, now doubts me. June, sower of madness.

  June may destroy me and my faith in her. Today I shivered when she said that when she talked to Henry about me, she tried to be very natural and direct so as not to imply anything unusual. So she said to Henry, "Anaïs was just bored with her life, so she took us up." That seemed false to me. It was the only ugly thing I have ever heard her say. I have seen a beautiful June. Henry's portrait is of an ugly June.

  I do not think that, in spite of the passion so often described by Henry, June and Henry have really ever fused, yielded to each other, possessed each other. Their individualities are too strong. They are at war with each other, love is a conflict, they lie to each other, they mistrust each other.

  June wants to go back to New York to accomplish something, be lovely for me, become an actress, have clothes. But I don't care about all this. I say, "I love you as you are."

  Hell is a different place for each man, or each man has his own particular hell. My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational level of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose, where one lives by pure impulse, pure fantasy, and therefore pure madness. No, that is not the inferno. While I am there, I am as unconscious of misery as a man who is drunk; or, rather, my misery is a great joy. It is when I become conscious again that I feel unutterable pain.

  I began to awaken from my dream yesterday.

  June and I had lunch together in a softly lighted, mauve, diffused place which surrounded us with velvety closeness. We took off our hats. We drank champagne. We ate oysters. We talked in half-tones, quarter-tones, clear to us alone. She made me aware of how she eludes all Henry's efforts to grasp her logically, to reach a knowledge of her. She revealed a fluidity, a will to elude, as persistent and as shrewd as other people's frankness and self-revelations. She admires Eleonora Duse because she was great. "D'Annunzio," June said, "was only Duse's mediocre penman. Even some of his plays were born of Duse and would never have been written if she had not existed." What did she mean? That Henry was D'Annunzio and she Duse?

  "But," I agreed bitterly, "Duse is dead, and D'Annunzio has done the writing, and he is famous and not Duse."

  Did she want me, the writer, to make her famous? To write about her? To make her portrait so people would not believe Henry's portrait?

  I am the poet who sees her. I am the poet who will write things which would never have been written if June had not existed. Yet I exist too, independently of my writing.

  June sat filled with champagne. I have no need of it. She talked about the effects of hashish. I said, "I have known such states without hashish. I do not need drugs. I carry all that in myself." At this she was irritated. She does not realize that, being an artist, I want to be in those states of ecstasy or vision while keeping my awareness intact. I am the poet and I must feel and see. I do not want to be anaesthetized. I am drunk on June's beauty, but I am also aware of it.

  But I am also aware that there are quite a few obvious discrepancies in her stories. Her carelessness leaves many loopholes, and when I put the stories together, they do not fit. I formed a judgment, a judgment which she fears always, which she is in flight from. She lives without pattern, without continuity. As soon as one seeks to coordinate June, she is lost. She must have seen it happen many times. She is like a man who gets drunk and gives himself away. Was that why she wanted to drug me, intoxicate me, blind me, confuse me?

  At lunch we were talking about perfumes, their substance, their mixtures, their meaning. She said casually, "Saturday when I left you, I bought some perfume for Jean." (Jean, the masculine girl she had told me about.) She told me that she had been as affected by my eyes as I was by her face. I told her I felt her bracelet clutched my wrist like her very own fingers, holding me in slavery. She wanted my cape around her body. Then we went out and walked.

  She had to buy her ticket for New York.

  We walked into several steamship agencies. June did not have enough money for even a third-class passage to New York and she was trying to get a
reduction. Then I watched her as in a dream. I was smoking constantly because June does. I saw her lean over the counter, her face in her hands, appealing, so very close to the man's face that his eyes devoured her boldly. And she so soft, persuasive, alluring, smiling up in a secret way at him, for him. I saw her.

  An intolerable pain. I watched her begging. I realized my jealousy but not her humiliation.

  We walked out again. We crossed the street. We asked the policeman for the Rue de Rome.

  I told her I would give her the money she needed, all of my month's allowance.

  We walked into the steamship agency, with June barely finishing some story or other. I saw the man stunned by her face and her soft, yielding way of asking him, of paying and signing and receiving instructions. I stood by and watched her. My dream had been like down around me, my dream of June's inviolateness, aloofness, nobility. I stood by and watched the Frenchman ask her, "Will you have a cocktail with me tomorrow?" June was shaking hands with him. "Three o'clock?" "No, at six," she answered. She smiled at him cajolingly, intimately, seductively. Then as we walked out, she explained hurriedly, "He was very useful to me, very helpful. He is going to do a lot for me. He may slip me into first class at the last minute. I couldn't say no. I don't intend to go, but I couldn't say no."

  "You must go, now that you said yes," I said absurdly, and the absurdity of my anger nauseated me. I almost wept. I took June's arm and said, "I can't bear it, I can't bear it." I did not know what it was I could not bear. I was blind and angry. At what? Not at June. It was her beauty. She could not prevent its effect on others. But I was angry at an undefinable thing. Was it at her begging? I thought of the prostitute, honest because in exchange for money she gives her body. June gave only promises, false promises. She teased.