The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  My joy crumbled. He loves no one but her.

  But Hans came in then, and without looking at his desk, or at the photograph, or at the open book, he turned wholly to me, with all his ideas, his plans, his love.

  “Roll up your sleeves,” he said, “there’s work to do. This description of Johanna is giving me trouble. Read it. Tell me how it strikes you.”

  If only Johanna would die. If she would die. She does not love him as I do.

  “The worst of lies,” I said to Hans, “is that they create solitude. I know Johanna must have been lonely at times. When you treat life and men like a play, and you can never speak or be what you really are, you get lonely.”

  “You speak feelingly about it. I have no doubt you’re experienced in that pretending too. Now tell me, why do you think Johanna so often repeated that I would never know the greatest secret of her life, even when I was absolutely sure of her love for the other woman?”

  “There was another secret…”

  “You believe all that about the drugs?”

  If she would only die! But then she would only live more vividly as a legend…

  “I enjoy Johanna best when she is not here,” said Hans, “for then I can peacefully write and think about her. When she is here I feel choked and crushed. With you I shall call it the Golden Age between Wars. It is in time of peace that art is born.”

  Slipping his hands through my hair, gently, he began to talk about Johanna. I knew that he was noting things in his mind, noting and thinking of his work. I knew too that it had fallen to my destiny to nourish the creator and love him in order to give him the strength to write about her, and that it might befall another woman to nourish Hans while he would be writing about me. In a flash I saw it all in a strange cycle of life and creation, life sustaining the creation, which was always concerned with the more distant experience, with the past.

  “How is one to recognize a lie?” said Hans.

  “By its dissonant tone. It is like a false note.”

  “You have too musical an ear.”

  “I have studied my own lies, I have trained my ear. For example, I am sure that both Johanna and I invent personages… I have often thought to myself: ‘I must keep silent.’ I must let this man look at my face and allow his dream of me to take form. I must give his imagination time to invent. While he is looking at me, if I say nothing, he is forced to interpret me by the color of my skin, the wave of my hair, the color of my dress, the shape of my neck, the few rare gestures I make. I feel him building an image. I see the image take form in his eyes. It lies in his eyes like a reflection in a river. I don’t want to open my mouth and speak. If I say what I want to say he may think I am just an ordinary woman. The image of me which he has been weaving like a spider web and which is trembling on the edge of his eyes like reflections of houses in a river may suddenly sink. I may see his eyes waver for a second and then turn into the glassy brilliance of reality and disillusion. Or even if I should smile—my smile may not conform to that intensely desired image he has been carrying about. I would like to answer people’s impossible wishes. I have tired myself desiring impossible things. I have so often sat and watched a beautiful face, beautiful while impassive, because its stone-like stillness allowed my fancy to create its meaning. And I have seen so often the disintegration of my fancy at the mere appearance of a smile. I have so often sat behind a face dreaming and desiring ardently that this face should answer my craving. I have experienced so often the demolition of a whole universe by a few words. I have been so fearful of those words, of hearing the voice, of seeing the face move, so fearful that my image, my dream, should be swept away. If the man spoke first and said: ‘You seem to me like a Hindu woman, so childlike and secretive,’ I can be that also. I can be all things. Whatever you want can become a game for me. I can play the role of the child-like secretive Hindu woman. If the man says: ‘You seem perverse to me,’ then I gather together all my knowledge of perversion, all I have read or seen on the stage and I play it all with such earnestness that finally I come to believe it myself.”

  “You and Johanna…”

  “I am sure that we have both played like this. It makes life difficult. People feel a certain falseness and then they seek to discover the reality, our reality. This reality we evade with al our cunning. And all this contributed to Johanna’s tenseness and her fear of being discovered. We want to be loved without being known. We are like porcupines with silver spikes. We imagine that our true selves cannot bear the light of common every-day simplicity. I am sure that as soon as she felt that the other’s image of her was in danger through something she said or did, she rushed to destroy the effect, to deny it, saying it was a jest or a game, mystifying and eluding any final judgment.”

  “False mysteries.”

  “Look at the pounds of notes her false mysteries have inspired. Let me read your last pages.”

  When I had read them I said: “You’re the only man I would scrub floors for!”

  “We could be very happy together. You would fall behind in your writing!”

  “Good! I fall behind in my writing. I become the wife of a genius.”

  “To-day, if there were a choice to be made between you and Johanna, I would surrender Johanna.”

  “No, no,” I laughed. “No.”

  “Johanna can be replaced, but I could have a thousand women after you and they could not efface you or replace you…”

  “You’re drunk, Hans. I’m sure you’re drunk.”

  I feared that he might say: “We will continue to find a rich interest in each other even if Johanna returns and I resume my life with her.” At the thought of this I felt the need of touching his suit, his arm, to exorcise my fear. Then I observed the mischievous twist of his mouth and I installed myself in the present, in my enjoyment of the hour.

  * * *

  We were sitting in the garden.

  “Something happened to me yesterday,” said Hans musingly. “I happened to read over Johanna’s few letters and they moved me. I was about to send her a cable. Instead I wrote about her. And when I awoke this morning it was all over.” He handed me the last pages. “What do you think of them?”

  They were among his best, I felt, after reading them carefully. Fevered and yet cohesive, strongly knitted. Spear blows. I thought how the beauty of these pages made it possible for me to subordinate my natural jealousy and possessiveness to my passionate devotion to the writer, the creator who required full latitude. I felt a separate, an immense, proud servitude to the splendor of his writing. I wanted my love to be an aliment. I wanted to augment his well-being, to feed him, to watch over him. He sat with a new compactness, a new strength in him, a new wholeness.

  I imagined many books being born out of our intimacy. And I melted p

  There were other people there, there had often been other people around us, with us, but I had only noticed and heard Hans. I was only attuned to Hans. I was conscious only of Hans. To-night I made an effort to become aware of the others, of André with fanatic blue eyes talking about astrology, of Louise with a voice like a wood-pecker, of Boris, who said the streets were worn by Hans’ wanderings.

  Boris was saying that Nichols, the caricaturist, had gone insane, and had been sent to the hospital, that Hans ought to go and see him. Hans rubbed his hands with sly glee, shook his head, and danced about, exclaiming: “Superb! Superb! Let’s have a drink to Nichols’ insanity. I want to go and hear what he has to say. I hope he really is insane. That doesn’t happen every day.”

  “Your humor is not humor, it’s demolition. You’re always breaking windows. That’s why the air around you is full of oxygen.”

  I swallowed his laughter like bread and wine, while he jubilated like a gnome.

  Encouraged by the darkness of the garden I began to talk flowingly.

  “To-night,” I said, “is a fine dark night in which an artist might well be born. He must be born at night, you know, so that no one will notice that his parets only ga
ve him seven months of human substance. The rest he must always add himself—and he does. He creates himself. He is born with a mania to complete himself, to create himself beyond the womb. His reality is sometimes questionable. One does not know if he survived the frailty of his birth conditions, whether or not he really sits at café tables and stains his fingers with nicotine. He is so multiple and detached, fluid and amorphous, that his central self is constantly falling apart into fragments and is only recomposed by a book, by his work. With his imagination he can flow into all the moulds, multiply and divide himself, and yet whatever he does, he will always be two. He will always be the Indian who worshipped his mistress but who made a flute out of her bone when she died. He will always be the man who weeps when his mistress dies, but who says: ‘A flute made out of human bones has a more haunting, a more penetrating sound’.”

  I turned to André’s fanatic Celtic eyes for confirmation.

  “Take me, for example. I am aware that when men look for the woman in me, the woman suddenly turns into fog, into night, into wind and sky. I am artist. Men run about in the fog looking for a woman. But I am not a being one can lay hold of and keep. I cannot be held and kept like a gold nugget. I am artist. I am fog, rain, tempest, sun, words. I am composed of words and fire and war. Is that clear?”

  “You’re never clear,” said Hans brusquely.” I trust neither your ideas nor your way of putting them. You put things so clearly and beautifully, so crystal-clear—it all looks so simple and true. You’re so terribly nimble and clever. I distrust your cleverness. You always make wonderful patterns, I admit. Everything is in its place. Looks convincingly clear—too clear. And in the meanwhile where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas any longer, but submerged, sunk in some dark, obscure realm—like a submarine. One only thinks one has been given all your thoughts. One only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity—but there are layers and layers—you’re bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You’re the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubts, most disturbances.”

  He said all this with great irritation and vehemence. André added:

  “One feels that she gives you a neat pattern and then slips out of it herself and laughs at you.”

  “Furthermore,” said Hans, “you have a half serious way of saying certain things—a funny fantastic twist to your phrases, like the way you talked about yourself just now, which puts one off the track. I know there is something else behind what you are saying—I can’t put my finger on it.”

  I laughed. Three distinct feelings invaded me: one was an intellectual realization that in sum Hans’ criticism was flattering; another was a mischievous joy in having irritated, eluded and puzzled him; and finally there was a feeling of bitterness that he should suddenly fight me, attack me.

  I sat in the quiet garden rehearsing swiftly, like an ever lost paradise, our days together—confidence, openness, peace. And here was the first sign of war. War. War was to be expected. Inevitable. Hans was war.

  I endeavoured vainly to find my gaiety again. I saw that Hans no longer noticed me.

  I thought: “Now the two slow-minded ones, the ponderous Hans and André have found solidarity against my nimbleness. They think I am not profound because I am swift. Well. I shall be more and more nimble, more and more treacherous.”

  Hans said:

  “André agrees with me that you are far too quick—always too quick, that you take swift decisions, and make swift judgments, and live too quickly, and write too quickly. That your quickness is not to be trusted.”

  “That’s my natural rhythm,” I retorted.

  “Well, you ought to slow up, that’s all I say.

  Slow up. Read more slowly, listen, linger, dwell on things. Ponder them.”

  “Well, you need me to focus you. You’re always going astray, with your roundabout ways.”

  “Besides, what irritates me is your aristocratic nonchalance, that’s what it is. If I were married to you, I’d make you eat with the servants every day, I’d make you fraternize with everybody. I’d like to see you really friendly with them. Even when you’re kind you appear aloof, even when you’re full of compassion you really remain apart. If there were a revolution to-day, I would side with the people, and you, you’d have your neck cut off immediately. It’s a neck like Marie Antoinette’s, just made to be cut off. It’s too slender…”

  I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. The night, so sweet before, now seemed poisoned. “It’s good that you turn against me, it’s very good, for now I will be true only to myself. It is good because it hardens me, makes me lone and courageous. For I am soft and too easily devoured by my love. Turn against me, and I am alone with myself. I will never bat an eyelash, never weep. I cast you out, and by this new hardness in me, I will live. I have been swallowed by love. Devoured by it.”

  In the morning I awoke so heavy, weighed down by my hatred. Hard face and brittle voice. I found Hans waiting for me in the garden. He said:

  “I am upset about last night, about my insincerity. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean.”

  “Didn’t mean?” I repeated, and waited, all wrapped in my silence and watchfulness.

  “Your silences are more terrible than other women’s shoutings and sobbing. Yes. I was carried away by my desire to conceal my love. The truth is I was swept away by your tirade. I wanted to kiss you. And then I saw you looking at André with such admiration. Your looking at him bothered me.”

  “Perhaps you’re acting again,” I said.

  “No,” said Hans quietly. “I can’t lie to you.”

  “It’s simply that you enjoy difficulties. You like creating troubles. Our few days of harmony aroused your usual craving for discord, for war.”

  “No, you’re wrong. I don’t want war. But for a moment I lost confidence in you. You were so enthusiastic about the astrologer, your voice was so warm when you questioned him and talked with him. Tell me something… Oh, well, what a man wants is to believe that a woman can love him so much that no other man can possibly interest her, even if he be a magician!”

  What a man wants! (Then we could have again that openness if I were truthful?)

  “What a man wants,” I said, “is what I have given you up to now with a wholeness you can never imagine.”

  He looked tender and dazed.

  “I feel so battered,” I said. “Our first duel has come to an end.”

  “It was all very interesting,” said Hans. “I like launching into a role, into a part which baffles those who believe they know me. When you are angry your eyes turn violet. I would like to write that up in the style you used for the story of the opium fiend.”

  His unaccountableness will eventually make me lose faith in him. Whenever he or Alraune steps in, the water boils, the lids explode, poison runs through one’s veins.

  “You stole a phrase from me only the other day, do you know? You take what you need like a beast feeding. I feel like a human pudding,” I said.

  Perhaps, I thought, my desire to preserve the bliss and the peace is a futile effort to resist the flow of life. War is inevitable. It is like snow or rain. Let the avalanche come then: snow, rain, volcanoes, torrents, floods. And with them a gigantic humor. Like an everlasting moon, I want to fix ecstasy in its niche. Hans knows better. It’s good. He forces me back again into isolation. I have no more devotions. I am hungry and I am going to eat; I am going to steal, to sell myself, to wander. I am going to love my own books better than I love Hans’. No more sacrifices for him. If he acts ridiculously, insanely or sentimentally enough for me to hate him I will be able to attend to my own growth and become a magnificent woman. Until now I have been a woman in whose womb men could rest in utter security.

  Defeat this tragedy concealed within each hour, which chokes one unexpectedly and treacherously, springing from a melody, an old letter, a line in a book, the color of a dress, the walk of a stranger. How? Make literature! Seek new words in the dictionary, chisel new
phrases, pour the tears into a mould. Style, form, discipline. Whip yourself and others into a frenzy. Lie. Exhaust yourself and your capacity for emotion. Cut out the newspaper clippings carefully. Have your photograph taken. Tell everyone what you owe them. Tell your lover he has made you a woman, tell your editor he has discovered a genius, and then turn around again into your solitude. Like a dog biting his tail, or like a scorpion caught in a circle of fire devouring himself, so that when you gaze at your own image you say to yourself: “If the Chinese had not discovered that wisdom is the absenf ideals, I would have discovered it myself to-night.”

  * * *

  He made me lie down on the black rug. But I did not believe in his feelings. I felt I was being possessed by a cannibal.

  Hans’ appetite. The gifts I had made him of my feelings. His appetite for my ideas, for my moods, for the books I gave him. How he devoured the vibrancy of my flesh, my thoughts of him, my awareness of him! How he devoured new people, new impressions. His gigantic, devouring spirit, in quest of substance, in quest of inspiration, in quest of exoticism. My fullness, which I knew to be inexhaustible, was soon absorbed by him. My continuous dissolutions and recreations and rebirths, all the changes in me, the opening up of new realms, all this could be thrown into the current of his life and work and be absorbed by it like twigs by a river. He could read the fattest books, tackle the most cumbersome tasks, make the most immense plans, attack the most solemn systems and ideas, produce the greatest quantity of writing. He had the appetite of the age of giants. He excluded nothing. Everything was food: the trivial and the puerile, the ephemeral and the gross, the details, the scratchings on a wall, the phrase of a passerby, the defects of a book, the pale sonata, the snoring of a beggar on a bench, the flowers on the wallpaper of a hotel room, the odor of cabbage on the stairway, the color of an electric bulb in a toilet, the fragment of a voice trailing in the night, the walk of a whore, the haunches of a bare-back rider in the circus. His analytical blue eyes devoured details, his mouth seemed open and ready to taste, his tongue flicked and the saliva came to his lips, his hands seemed ready to leap and to grasp, hands like the feathers of a bird all set to beat out into the air, a body all ready to leap, always alert, the whole substance of his body a sensitized sponge. Drinking, eating, absorbing, with a million cells of spongy substance. Every pore of his body sensitized, pregnable, saturated.