by Anais Nin
I hear voices. I open my eyes. I hear them saying, "It was a little girl. Better not show it to her." All my strength is coming back. I sit up. The doctor shouts, "For God's sake, don't sit up, don't move!"
"Show me the child," I say.
"Don't show it," says the nurse, "it will be bad for her."
The nurses try to make me lie down. My heart is beating so loudly I can hardly hear myself repeating, "Show it to mel" The doctor holds it up. It looks dark, and small, like a diminutive man. But it is a little girl. It has long eyelashes on its closed eyes, it is perfectly made, and all glistening with the waters of the womb. It was like a doll, or like a miniature Indian, about one foot long, skin on bones, no flesh. But completely formed. The doctor told me afterwards that it had hands and feet exactly like mine. The head was bigger than average. As I looked at the dead child, for a moment I hated it for all the pain it had caused me, and it was only later that this flare of anger turned into great sadness.
Regrets, long dreams of what this little girl might have been. A dead creation, my first dead creation. The deep pain caused by any death, and any destruction. The failure of my motherhood, or at least the embodiment of it, all my hopes of real, human, simple, direct motherhood lying dead, and the only one left to me, Lawrence's symbolic motherhood, bringing more hope into the world. But the simple human flowering denied to me.
Perhaps I was designed for other forms of creation. Nature connived to keep me a man's woman, and not a mother; not a mother to children but to men. Nature shaping my body for the love of man, not of child. This child which was a primitive connection to the earth, a prolongation of myself, now denied me as if to point up my destiny in other realms.
I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father. When I wished this child to die, it was because I felt it would experience the same lack.
The doctor and the nurses were amazed by my aliveness and curiosity. They expected tears. I still had my eyelash make-up on. But afterwards, I lay back and fainted. And alone in my bed, I wept. In the mirror I saw the veins on my face cracked. I fell asleep. Sleep.
Morning toilette. Perfume and powder. The face all well. Visitors. Marguerite, Otto Rank, Henry. Immense weakness. Another day of rest. But on the third day a new anxiety appeared. The breasts began to hurt.
The little nurse from the south of France left all her other patients to comb my hair lovingly. All the nurses kissed me and fondled me. I was bathing in love, feeling languid and calm and light. And then my breasts got hard with milk, too much milk. An amazing amount of milk for such a small person. So hard and painful. That night the nightmare began again.
All the nurses were against the German doctor: because he was German, because he treated them harshly, because they thought he had made all kinds of errors. A French doctor in the hospital had threatened to intervene by force to save me from him. All the nurses began to whisper, to revolt against his orders. They did the opposite of what he asked. He tied my breasts one way and they tied them another. They said he was all wrong about everything, that what he was doing would give me ulcers of the breast. This idea terrified me. All my joy vanished. I felt again in the grip of some dark menace. I imagined my breasts spoiled forever. Ulcers. The nurses, leaning over my bed, seemed malevolent to me; they seemed to be wishing I would have ulcers to prove the German doctor in the wrong. The way they leaned over, examined me, predicted the worst, affected me, frightened me.
The woman who was dying of cancer was still moaning. I could not sleep. I began to think about religion, about pain. I had not yet come to the end of pain. I thought of the God I received with such fervor at Communion and whom I confused with my father. I thought of Catholicism. Wondering. I remembered that Saint Teresa had saved my life when I was nine years old. I thought of God, of a man with a beard from my child's picture books. No, not Catholicism, not Mass, not confession, not priests. But God, where was God? Where was the fervor I had as a child?
I tired of thinking. I fell asleep with my hands folded on my breasts as for death. And I died again, as I had died other times. My breathing was another breathing, an inner breathing. I died and was reborn again in the morning, when the sun came on the wall in front of my window.
A blue sky and the sun on the wall. The nurse had raised me to see the new day. I lay there, feeling the sky, and myself one with the sky, feeling the sun and myself one with the sun, and abandoning myself to the immensity and to God. God penetrated my whole body. I trembled and shivered with an immense joy. Cold, and fever and light, an illumination, a visitation, through the whole body, the shiver of a presence. The light and the sky in the body, God in the body and I melting into God. I melted into God. No image, I felt space, gold, purity, ecstasy, immensity, a profound ineluctable communion. I wept with joy. I knew everything I had done was right. I knew that I needed no dogmas to communicate with Him, but to live, to love, and to suffer. I needed no man, no priest to communicate with Him. By living my life, my passions, my creations to the limit I communed with the sky, the light, and with God. I believed in the transfusion of blood and flesh. I had come upon the infinite, through the flesh and through the blood. Through flesh and blood and love, I was made whole. I cannot say more. There is nothing more to say. The greatest communions come so simply.
But from that moment on, I felt my connection with God, an isolated, wordless, individual, full connection which gives me an immense joy and a sense of the greatness of life, eternity. I was born. I was born woman. To love God and to love man, supremely and separately. Not to confuse them. I was born to great quietude, a super-human joy, above and beyond all human sorrows, transcending pain and tragedy. This joy which I found in the love of man, in creation, was completed by communion with God.
The doctor came, examined me, could not believe his eyes. I was intact, as if nothing had ever happened to me. I could leave the clinic. I was so well, I walked out of it, with everybody looking on. It was a soft summer day. I walked with joy at having escaped the great mouth of death. I wept with joy and gratitude.
Fruit. Flowers. Visitors. I went to sleep that night thinking of God, feeling that I was falling asleep in the bower of heaven. Feeling taken up in huge arms, yielding to a mysterious protection. The moonlight shone in the room. Heaven was a bower, a hammock. I swung in infinite spaces, beyond the world. Slept inside of God.
At five o'clock I left for Louveciennes. The day was soft and lulling. I sat on a deck chair in the garden. Marguerite took care of me. I dreamed and rested. We had dinner out in the garden.
My rhythm is slow. I am resisting entering life again, pain, activity, conflicts. Everything is beginning anew; the day is soft but perishable, like a sigh, the last sigh of summer, heat and foliage. Soft and sad, the end of summer, and leaves falling.
[September, 1934]
Henry and I are walking down the Rue de la Tombe Issoire, on the way to see the plumber and the pillow-cleaner. Henry is moving into the studio of the Villa Seurat. We are all helping to paint, to hammer, to hang up pictures, to clean. The studio room is large, with its skylight window giving it space and height. A small closet kitchen is built in under the balcony, where some people like to store away paintings, etc. A ladder leads up to it. The window opens on a roof terrace, which connects with the terrace of the studio next door. The bedroom is on the right-hand side of the entrance, with a bathroom. It has a balcony which gives on the Villa Seurat. One can see trees, and the small façades of the pink, green, yellow, ochre villas across the way.
While cleaning the closet, I found a photograph of Antonin Artaud who had once stayed therel It was a beautiful photograph of him as the monk in Dreyer's "Joan of Arc." His cheeks looked hollow, his eyes visionary and fanatical. Antonin Artaud had always refused to give photographs of himself because he feared voodoo curses (envoûtements, as he said) and believed that harm could come to him if some demonic person stuck pins into the portrai
t. And here was the beautiful monk at my mercy. I would not even put a thumbtack through it. I stored it away.
Henry was sad because he had insulted Jack Kahane. "I destroy all your work," he said to me. The sun poured into the studio. Several friends were helping to move Henry into it.
Tropic of Cancer is at the printer's. Henry feels this is a new cycle. Fred is hurt not to be invited to live at the Villa Seurat. Henry wants to be alone.
We are hanging up water colors, and the charts of characters he will write about.
I wonder, who are the other artists living in the Villa Seurat?
Having lunch with Bone and listening to his talk about Dr. Rank's ideas made me realize I knew Rank more as a human being now than as a man of ideas.
Talking with Rank unloosed a flood of curious facts. He had been thinking that, in Paris, it was the Doctor Rank who had taken control, and that he had not lived his life as a man. He began to think of New York as a liberation from the past, the hope of a new life. "I don't want to come back here, to my past ever again." For the first time, he saw New York as a liberating factor. But I was necessary to this liberation. He wanted to begin anew but was not sure he could do it without my help. I was the only one who had taken an interest in the man behind Dr. Rank. He had many plans. He told me about a humorous book he wanted to write on Mark Twain. The suicide of the Twin.
Henry's Tropic of Cancer appeared the same day he took possession of his first real home, the book which had been begun in that same house four years ago in Fraenkel's studio. A complete circle.
We all sat down and wrapped and addressed copies of his book to be mailed.
Went with Rank to see a first edition of Mark Twain he wanted at the Nixons. Met Rank's daughter. Later we went to his apartment and met Mrs. Rank, and had drinks with Chana Orloff, Dr. Endler, and other people.
So now I am divided into three selves. One self lives at Louveciennes, has a Spanish maid, eats breakfast in bed, eats pheasants killed by Lani and Louis Andard, listens to the radio, gives orders to the gardener, pays her bills with checks, sits by an open fire, copies the diaries, and translates the second diary volumes from French into English, dreams by the window, gets restless for heightened living.
In Villa Seurat with Henry and Fred and a constant stream of people walking in and out. I peel potatoes, grind coffee French style, wrap books, drink out of chipped cups and glasses discarded in Louveciennes, wipe my hands with old towels left over from Louveciennes, walk down the cobblestone streets to market, repair the phonograph (because Henry is absolutely helpless in practical matters), take the bus, sit at cafés, talk a great deal about books and films, writing and writers, smoke a great deal and watch the invasion of people walking in and out of the place. Henry has made friends with the neighbors: De Maigret, who can come in by walking out of his bedroom, onto his terrace, and into Henry's balcony; and down the ladder, with a woman on the floor below who has lived in Greece; and with a photographer who lives on the ground floor.
The third self wants to learn a profession so that she may always write as she believes, wants to help Rank make a new life because he helped her make a new life, and wants the unknown, the unfamiliar. I finally promised to go to New York for two months. I feel two months are short in the span of eternity.
All the flowers I received during my illness are withering. I often look at them and secretly desire to be back in the days of my convalescence, the moment of quietude, beatitude, before the stronger, more vivid life presented its conflicts and dramas again. I resisted entering real life again, then drove myself into it. Now I feel the exhilaration of perpetual struggles. But for days I enjoyed the indifference, the detachment, and I wondered if this detachment and non-caring was what Henry felt all the time. I watched everything from afar: my father's moralistic letters; Henry's joys over the publication of Tropic of Cancer, Rank saying that Henry had learned stability from me, and I mobility from him, that friends often exchanged values. It is Henry who talks about a life of dignity, responsibility, etc.
Rank telephones me that he has good news for me. He is exultant because the sculptured head of me by Chana Orloff will be exhibited. He has purchased it for his library.
She wants me to go on posing for her. She wants to make many drawings.
Telephoned the plumber to fix a leak in the furnace, ordered coal, wrote in the diary, talked with Marguerite. Moved to small salon with the Persian fireplace because I gave Henry the big studio rug and curtains.
***
The voyante lived in a dark and shabby apartment in a workman's quarter, near Clichy. Poor people waiting in the brown living room with the artificial palm trees, the aquariums, and astrological charts on the walls. Femme de ménage, doormen, workmen, pregnant women, storekeepers. How they needed hope, needed to know. I felt ashamed to be there, questioning anyone about my destiny. I thought of Freud's explanation of seers. They are able to read what is in your mind.
Perhaps I did not know what the loss of Rank meant to me, whether it would be as serious a loss as the loss of my father. Perhaps I was just as fearful of the future as the poor, the working people waiting there.
The voyante asked me to come into the dining room. She was a tired-looking woman, rather thin, with her hair uncombed and her nails dirty. There was a bowl of artificial flowers on the table. On the sideboard, very neatly arranged, a carefully polished glass ball. This she picked up and placed in the center of the dining table on a piece of red cloth. Then she told me, with a slight lisp which came from a missing tooth, that she saw a man on the sea, on his way to America, who is thinking of me (Rank?). She sees my trip to America and success in a new occupation, sees others close to me, indistinct but in distress, sees a man who devours himself and a man who wishes to help me, sees my father returning, a man of about fifty who does me harm, with whom I am not compatible, on whom I have wasted emotion and strength. She sees me signing a paper.
Is that all, is that all, is that all she can tell to the patient, re-signed, tired people sitting in her waiting room?
I ran away, to forget her, and went to visit Manuela Del Rio to arrange for a rehearsal of my old dances. Rank had insisted I take up my dancing again. I loved the gaudy colors, the smell of the stage again. I loved her soiled shoes, her worn castanets, her bright red and purple costumes, and even her one-eyed mother who looked like a procuress, and the poodle, and the trunk being packed for a dance number in London.
Then much work to leave all those I love in comfort, to protect them from Teresa's nebulous housekeeping, to foresee their needs.
I stick a fork in my hair in lieu of a Spanish comb and talk about the smell of the stage when I haven't really smelled it yet. But just to hear Manuela say, "Monday at eleven at the Place Pigalle, studio Pigalle," is enough. I sew black lace on my maja dress. I give Henry all my typing paper because I do not intend to write books for the present. I start slowly to pack my trunk for New York, taking my photographs out of their frames.
The little details which make joy. They are not important in the world of ideas, they only count in life, for pleasure. The beauty and the ugliness of life's details, the homely and the warm cabbage smells of the world! After the vertigoes of dreams and ideas, the palpable, the warm, and even the homely.
At first, as a girl, I loved blue, and now orange; but I find orange is the complement of blue. I only completed blue then, I made blue more forcible.
I packed the manuscript of House of Incest, the diary, the manuscript of Winter of Artifice.
I went to Rank to solve my conflict with my father, and only added another father to my life, and another loss.
My real father returned from Cannes, sick, very sweet, and we had quiet mellow talks. He showed me his hands covered with eczema, and I felt the depth of my illusionless love for him. He laments my trip to New York.
It hurt me to rent Louveciennes to strangers. I had to empty it and put everything in storage. And the last night we spent there the windows were without c
urtains. The moon blazed at the windows like snow-light, impossible, dramatic, behind the bare black branches. And we saw the dawn too, a Pélleas and Mélisande moon and dawn. And I knew I was ejecting myself from my fairy-tale world, surrendering my shell, my nest, my hammock, my refuge. Lying in the Persian bed, watching the garden, feverish with memories. And having to watch the orange pillows and the Chinese red coffer and the Persian cabinet carried out. And the furniture on the street, the wide green gate open, the house emptied, opened, like a skeleton. And the moving men covering the lovely pieces with old tattered blankets.
How to live in the present when no one else is there at the same time, nobody catches up with you, is there to answer? The present is made by the pleasure of collisions of two uncelestial bodies in uncelestial fusions.
I am distributing Sloan's Liniment, radios, free analysis, and the assurance that I will return in two months, a full-fledged analyst, Doctor Nin, thinking I might as well make a profession of a hobby.
No, I have not started a hospital in collaboration with Dr. Endler, but everyone's reaction to my leaving is to get sick.
When I told Joaquin of my experience in the hospital, he thought it was a return to religion, and he took me to Mass on Sunday; but it all seemed drab and literal and did not seem like a continuation of my mystical trance. I thought perhaps that experience meant that, by reverting to dogma and ritual, I could rediscover religious ecstasy, and I tried, but it did not return. To please Joaquin I went to visit the Abbé Alterman.