Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

by Anais Nin

  He feels that I pushed him into life.

  "Knowing you, everything which was an objective fact before has become alive, animated, embodied."

  Henry seeks peace and strength for his work.

  Rank seeks the presence of someone who is living out symbolism and ideas and theories, not just talking them.

  The current of life is so strong, so powerful, that I accept it and turn my back on writing.

  Rank is being pushed to go to New York. He is offered plenty of money and a job. He has debts. But he wants to stay in Paris.

  "I never wanted success or money." These conflicts which he helps others to solve, he must solve alone. I cannot help him. It is not a question of six months or a year, but of an indefinite time. Why don't I come to help him at the most difficult time, to assist him and learn from him?

  For the first time I know the joy of a solid, reciprocal friendship. I touch an absolute of friendship. I like Rank's sadness, his tenacity, his caring about people. He cares. He cares tremendously about everything, and everything that happens to others. I am growing away from Henry's nonchalance and non-caring.

  The strange, erratic designs of destiny. Rank was living a block away from our apartment in Boulevard Suchet, our second home in Paris, at the time when my life was so empty and difficult. I had made, once again, a beautiful home, but aside from Spanish dancing, I had nothing to put into it, or rather, I had friends and occupations which had no meaning for me.

  And when I went out to walk in the Bois, I passed Rank's apartment, walking under his balcony, almost, the man who possessed the knowledge I needed to enter life boldly and courageously. If I had met him then, what would have happened? Would he have precipitated me into life as Henry and June did later, but with more wisdom?

  Tuesday I saw a doctor who said I was too small to have the child without a Caesarean operation. For the moment everything is alive and normal.

  [August, 1934]

  Several months later. Began to feel heavy, and tremors inside of my womb.

  My breasts are full of milk.

  It does not belong in my life, for I have too many people to take care of. I have, already, too many children. As Lawrence said: "Do not bring any more children into the world, bring hope into the world." There are too many men without hope and faith in the world. Too much work to do, too many to serve and care for. Already I have more than I can bear.

  I sit in the studio, in the dark, talking to my child. "You should not be thrust into this black world, in which even the greatest joys are tainted with pain, in which we are slaves to material forces."

  He kicked and stirred.

  "So full of energy, my child. How much better it would be if you had stayed away from earth, in obscurity and unconsciousness, in the paradise of non-being. My little one, not born yet, you are the future. I would prefer to live with men, in the present, not with a future extension of myself into the future.

  "I feel your small feet kicking against my womb. It is very dark in the room we are sitting in, just as dark as it must be for you inside of me, but it must be sweeter for you to be lying in the warmth than it is for me to be seeking, in this dark room, the joy of not knowing, not feeling, not seeing, the joy of lying still and quiet in utter warmth and darkness. All of us forever seeking again this warmth and this darkness, this being alive without pain, this being alive without anxiety or fear or aloneness.

  "You are impatient to live, you kick with your small feet, my little one not born yet. You ought to die in warmth and darkness. You ought to die because in the world there are no real fathers, not in heaven or on earth."

  The German doctor has been here. While he examines me, we talk about the persecution of the Jews in Berlin.

  Life is full of terror and wonder.

  "You were not built for maternity."

  I sit in the dark studio and talk to the child: "You can see by what is happening in the world that there is no father taking care of us. We are all orphans. You will be a child without a father as I was a child without a father. That is why I did all the caring; I nursed the whole world. When there was war and persecution, I wept for all the wounds inflicted; and where there were injustices, I struggled to return life, to re-create hope. The woman loved and cared too much.

  "But inside of this woman there is still a child; there is still the ghost of a little girl forever wailing inside, wailing the loss of a father. Will you go about, as I did, knocking on windows, watching every caress and protective love given to other children? For as soon as you will be born, as just as soon as I was born, man the husband, lover, friend, will leave as my father did.

  "Man is a child, afraid of fatherhood; man is a child, and not a father. Man is an artist, who needs all the care, all the warmth for himself, as my father did. There is no end to his needs. He needs faith, indulgence, humor; he needs worship, good cooking, mended socks, errands, a hostess, a mistress, a mother, a sister, a secretary, a friend. He needs to be the only one in the world.

  "He will hate your wailing and your slobbering, and your sickness, and my feeding you rather than his work, his creation. He might cast you aside for this love of his work, which brings him praise and power. He might run away, as my father ran away from his wife and children, and you would be abandoned as I was.

  "It would be better to die than to be abandoned, for you would spend your life haunting the world for this lost father, this fragment of your body and soul, this lost fragment of your very self.

  "There is no father on earth. We were deluded by this shadow of God the Father cast on the world, a shadow larger than man. This shadow you would worship and seek to touch, dreaming day and night of its warmth, and of its greatness, dreaming of it covering you and lulling you, larger than a hammock, as large as the sky, big enough to hold your soul and all your fears, larger than man or woman, than church or house, the shadow of a magic father who is nowhere to be found. It is the shadow of God the Father. It would be better if you died inside of me, quietly, in the warmth and in the darkness."

  The doctor does not hear the breathing of the child. He rushes me to the clinic. I feel resigned, and yet, deep down, terrified of the anaesthetic. Feeling of oppression. Remembrance of other anaesthetics. Anxiety. Like a birth trauma. The child is six months old. They might save it. Anxiety. Fear of death. Fear of yielding to eternal sleep. But I lay smiling and joking. I was wheeled to the operating room. Legs tied and raised, the pose of love in a cold white operating room, with the clatter of instruments and the smell of antiseptics, and the voice of the doctor, and I trembling with cold, blue with cold and anxiety.

  The smell of ether. The cold numbness trickling through the veins. The heaviness, the paralysis, but the mind still clear and struggling with the concept of death, against death, against sleep. The voices grow dimmer. I have no longer the capacity to answer. The desire to sigh, sob, to murmur. "Ça va madame, ça va madame? Ç a v a m a d a m e, çavamadame çavamadame çavamadameeeeeee.................."

  The heart beats desperately, loudly, as if about to burst. Then you sleep, you fall, you roll, you dream, dream, dream, you are anxious. Dream of a drilling machine drilling between your legs but into numbness. Drilling. You awaken to voices. The voices grow louder. "Ça va, madame? Faut-il lui en donner encore? Non, c'est fini." I weep. The heart, the heart is oppressed and weary. Breathing so difficult. My first thought is to reassure the doctor, so I say: "C'est très bien, très bien, très bien."

  I lie in my bed. I came back from death, from darkness, an absence from life. I ask for cologne. The doctor had expected to provoke a natural birth. But nothing happens. No natural cramps, spasms. At ten o'clock he examines me. Exhausts me. During the night, all night, I heard the groaning of a woman dying of cancer. Long, plaintive groaning, desperate howls of pain ... silence ... and groaning again.

  The next morning the doctor had to operate again. The carriage was brought in again. I joked about my need of a commuter's ticket. I tried not to fight the anaesthetic
, to surrender to it, to think of it as forgetting, not dying. Had I not always wanted a drug for forgetting? I yielded to sleep. I resigned myself to die. And the anxiety was lessened. I let myself go.

  At one moment I was anxious. When they began to operate, I could feel it, and I didn't know if I were awake enough to say, "I am not asleep yet..." But the doctor heard me, reassured me. He waited. I slept. I had comical dreams. It was shorter this time.

  Towards eight o'clock I had several spasms of pain. The doctor thought it would happen. He sent for a nurse. I combed my hair, I powdered and perfumed myself, painted my eyelashes. At eight o'clock I was taken to the operating room.

  I lay stretched on a table. I had no place on which to rest my legs. I had to keep them raised. Two nurses leaned over me. In front of me stood the German doctor, with the face of a woman and eyes protruding like those of Peter Lorre in M. For two hours I made violent efforts. The child inside of me was six months old and yet it was too big for me. I was exhausted, the veins were swelling with strain. I had pushed with my whole being, I had pushed as if I wanted this child out of my body and hurled into another world. "Push, push, with all your strength." Was I pushing with all my strength? All my strength? No, a part of me did not want to push out the child. The doctor knew it. That was why he was angry, mysteriously angry. He knew.

  A part of me lay passive, did not want to push out anyone, not even this dead fragment of myself, out in the cold, outside of me. All of me which chose to keep, to lull, to embrace, to love; all of me which carried, preserved, protected; all of me which wanted to imprison the whole world in its passionate tenderness; this part of me would not thrust out the child, nor this past which had died in me. Even though it threatened my life, I could not break, tear out, separate, surrender, open and dilate and yield up this fragment of life, like a fragment of the past, this part of me rebelled against pushing the child, or anyone, out in the cold, to be picked up by strange hands, to be buried in strange places, to be lost, lost, lost.

  The doctor knew. A few hours before, he adored me, was devoted and worshipful, and now he was angry. And I was angry, with a black anger, at this part of me which refused to push, to kill, to separate, to lose. "Push! Push! Push with all your strength!" I pushed with anger, with despair, with frenzy, with the feeling that I would die pushing, as one exhales a last breath, that I would push out everything inside of me, and my soul with all the blood around it, and the sinews with my heart inside of them, choked, and that my body itself would open, and smoke would rise, and I would feel the ultimate incision of death.

  The nurses leaned over me and they talked to each other while I rested. Then I pushed until I heard the bones cracking, until my veins swelled. I closed my eyes so hard I saw lightning and waves of red and purple.

  There was a stir in my ear, a beating as if my eardrum had burst. I closed my lips so tightly the blood was trickling. I must have bitten my tongue. My legs felt enormously heavy, like marble columns, like immense marble columns crushing my body. I was pleading for someone to hold them. The nurse laid her knee on my stomach and shouted: "Push! Push! Push! Push!" Her perspiration fell on me. The doctor paced up and down, angrily and impatiently. "We will be here all night. Three hours now." The head was showing, but I had fainted. Everything was blue, then black. The instruments seemed to be gleaming before my closed eyes. Knives were sharpened in my ears. Ice and silence.

  Then I heard voices, first talking too fast for me to understand. A curtain was parted, the voices still tripped over each other, falling fast like a waterfall, with sparks, and they hurt my ears. The table was rolling gently, rolling. The women were lying in the air. Heads. Heads hung where the enormous white bulbs of the lamps were hung. The doctor was still walking, the lamps moved, the heads came near, very near, and the words came more slowly.

  They were laughing. One nurse was saying, "When I had my first child I was all ripped to pieces. I had to be sewed up again, and then I had another, and had to be sewn up, and then I had another." The other nurse said, "Mine passed like an envelope through a letter box. Then afterwards the bag would not come out. The bag would not come out. Out. Out. Out." Why did they keep repeating themselves? And why did the lamps turn? And why were the steps of the doctor so very fast, fast, fast?

  "She can't labor any more; at six months nature does not help. She should have another injection." I felt the needle thrust. The lamps were still. The ice and the blue which was around the lamps came into my veins. My heart was beating wildly.

  The nurses talked: "Now that baby of Mrs. L's last week, who would have thought she was too small, a big woman like that." The words kept turning as on a phonograph record. They kept saying, over and over again, that the bag would not come out, that the child slipped out like a letter in a letter box, that they were so tired with so many hours of work. They laughed at what the doctor said. They said that there was no more of that bandage; it was too late to get any. They washed instruments, and they talked, talked, talked.

  Please hold my legs! Please hold my legs! PLEASE HOLD MY LEGS! I am ready again. By throwing my head back I can see the clock. I have been struggling four hours. It would be better to die. Why am I alive and struggling so desperately? I could not remember why I should want to live. Why live? I could not remember anything. I saw eyes bulging out, and I heard women talk, and blood. Everything was blood and pain. What was it to live? How could one feel to live?

  I have to push. I have to push. That is a black point, a fixed point in eternity. At the end of a dark tunnel. I have to push Am I pushing or dying? A voice saying: "Push! Push! Push!" A knee on my stomach, and the marble of the legs, and the head too large and I have to push. The light up there, the immense, round, blazing white light is drinking me. It drinks me. It drinks me slowly, sucks me into space. If I do not close my eyes, it will drink all of me. I seep upward, in a long icy thread, too light; and yet inside of me there is a fire too, the nerves are twisted, there is no repose from this long tunnel dragging me; or am I pushing myself out of the tunnel; or is the child being pushed out of me while the light is drinking me? If I do not close my eyes the light will drink my whole being and I will no longer be able to push myself out of the tunnel.

  Am I dying? The ice in the veins, the cracking of the bones, this pushing in blackness, with a small shaft of light in the eyes like the edge of a knife, the feeling of a knife cutting the flesh, the flesh somewhere tearing as if it were burned through by a flame: somewhere my flesh is tearing and the blood is spilling out. I am pushing in the darkness, in utter darkness, I am pushing, pushing, until I open my eyes and I see the doctor who is holding a-long instrument which he swiftly thrusts into me and the pain makes me howl. A long animal howl.

  "That will make her push," he says to the nurse. But it does not. It paralyzes me with pain. He wants to do it again. I sit up with fury and shout at him, "Don't you dare do that again, don't you dare!" The heat of my anger warms me, all the ice and pain are melted in fury. I have an instinct that what he has done is unnecessary, that he has done it because he is in a rage, because the needles on the clock keep turning. The dawn is coming and the child does not come out and I am losing strength and the injections do not produce the spasm. The body—neither the nerves nor the muscles do anything to eject the child. Only my will and strength. My fury frightened him and he stands away and waits.

  These legs I opened to joy, this honey that flowed out in the joy—now these legs are twisted in pain and the honey flows with the blood. The same pose and the same wetness of passion but this is dying and not loving.

  I look at the doctor pacing up and down, or bending to look at the head of the child, which is barely showing. The legs like scissors, and the head barely showing. He looks baffled, as before a savage mystery, baffled by this struggle. He wants to interfere with his instruments, while I struggle with nature, with myself, with my child, and with the meaning I put into all, with my desire to give and to hold, to keep and to lose, to live and to die. No instru
ments can help me. His eyes are furious. He would like to take a knife. He has to watch and wait.

  I want to remember all the time why I should want to live. I am all pain and no memory. The lamp has ceased drinking me. I am too weary to move, even towards the light, or to turn my head and look at the clock. Inside of my body there are fires, there are bruises, the flesh is in pain. The child is not a child, it is a demon lying halfchoked between my legs, keeping me from living, strangling me, showing only its head, until I die in its grasp. The demon lies inert at the door of the womb, blocking life, and I cannot rid myself of it.

  The nurses begin to talk again. I say, "Let me alone." I place my two hands on my stomach and very slowly, very softly, with the tips of my fingers I drum, drum, drum on my stomach, in circles. Round and round, softly, with eyes open in great serenity. The doctor comes near and looks with amazement. The nurses are silent. Drum drum drum drum drum in soft circles, in soft quiet circles. "Like a savage," they whisper. The mystery.

  Eyes open, nerves quiet, I drum gently on my stomach for a long while. The nerves begin to quiver. A mysterious agitation runs through them. I hear the ticking of the clock. It ticks inexorably, separately. The little nerves awaken, stir. I say, "I can push now!" and I push violently. They are shouting, "A little morel Just a little morel"

  Will the ice come, and the darkness, before I am through? At the end of the dark tunnel, a knife gleams. I hear the clock and my heart. I say, "Stop!" The doctor holds the instrument, and he is leaning over. I sit up and shout at him. He is afraid again. "Let me alone, all of you!"

  I lie back so quietly. I hear the ticking. Softly I drum, drum, drum. I feel my womb stirring, dilating. My hands are so weary, they will fall off. They will fall off, and I will lie there in darkness. The womb is stirring and dilating. Drum drum drum drum drum. "I am ready!" The nurse puts her knee on my stomach. There is blood in my eyes. A tunnel. I push into this tunnel. I bite my lips and push. There is fire, flesh ripping and no air. Out of the tunnel! All my blood is spilling out. "Push! Push! It is coming! It is coming!" I feel the slipperiness, the sudden deliverance, the weight is gone. Darkness.