The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  Lost, as it seemed, into the universes he explored, yet deep down, always ready to retire within himself with his prey, to nourish upon the substance alone, afterwards, in the great solitary feast of the creator, the greatest and the most solitary of banquets to which those who supplied the nourishment were never invited.

  While he lay over me with his unabatable attentiveness I knew he was watching the alterations of my face, listening to the cries I uttered, and the final deeper, savage tones. I closed my eyes before this watchfulness of his and sank into a blind, moist drunkenness. I felt myself caught in the immense jaws of his desire, felt myself dissolving, ripping open to his descent. I felt myself yielding up to his dark hunger. An immense jaw closing upon my feelings, my feelings smouldering, rising from me like smoke from a black mass. Take me, take me, take my gifts and my moods and my body, take all you want.

  I am being fucked by a cannibal.

  It is all that is human in me that he devours. He eats me as if my love for him were something he wanted to possess inside his body, at the very core of his body, like fuel. He eats me as if my faith in him were a food he needed for daily sustenance.

  He is not concerned to know whether I can live or breathe within the dark cavern of his whale-like being, within the whale-belly of his ego.

  I was surprised that when this cannibal had ended his feast there was left in its place a still greater richesse. It was his devouring appetite that produced this miracle: it restored to all things their taste, their savour. It aroused an equal hunger, a feverish quest for new adventures, new foods. It set the blood and the pulse of life throbbing. His hunger was contagious; it gave birth to hunger, and with the hunger the savour of all things was restored. His appetite made things alive. It seemed to stir the activity of the earth, to call out vigorous sprouting and growth, the bursting of seeds and the flowering of the earth’s driest crust. It was like water over a desert, the moisture of his sensual mouth, the moisture of his sensual desires.

  * * *

  Each day Hans’ pages arrived in the mail, unfolding a full and human portrait of his life with Johanna. And the more Hans elaborated on the real details of his life the more I took refuge in fantasy and fairy tale, struggling to stuff my ears against his voice, struggling to blind myself to the vividness of the image.

  I was jealous of everything, even of Hans’ insults and furies against Johanna, even of his hatred, or his cruel caricatures of Johanna’s lies. I was jealous of the suffering Johanna had inflicted on Hans, of their terrors, their hysterias, their reconciliations. I suffered to see with what well-nourished splendor Hans was writing—he was writing out of the joys I had given him. It was my love which sustained him like a fuel, incited him to new efforts. Our talks had awakened in him a new preoccupation with Johanna, because I had revealed to him what Johanna had never revealed: the secret inner functioning of a woman’s mind and feelings. It was this knowledge which I had nurtured in him that was now serving him to rediscover the meaning of all he had experienced with Johanna. Hans transposed his knowledge of me and used it like a new instrument in the rediscovery of Johanna.

  Certainly no woman had ever been asked for so much courage. He was testing me to the limit, like a torturer. Yet I did not want to disrupt his work with the story of my pain. Work! Work! I incited myself. Work! Sift the petty substance of woman, crush it, write, be large, be altogether the artist. So soon! Too soon! Only a few days of bliss. I am a human being, not a goddess. I am a human being! This was an Olympian role Hans was thrusting upon me.

  Like a crab sinking into the sand, I sank into my writing. But the poison of feeling could not be dissolved. However deep I sank, and with my ears and my eyes full of the sand of my inventions and fantasies, this loud core of feminine feeling burned bitterly, burned through all my armour.

  In the morning it seemed to me that my arteries had hardened, that my blood had coagulated, that my tears had frozen, that I was made of stone; even so the pain weighed in me more heavily than stone, and I knew I would never be able to rid myself of it.

  And then Hans came. A serious, tired Hans. I looked at him as from behind an ambush, waiting to divine his mood. He said he had absolutely needed to come, that he had not slept for several nights, that he was worn-out. I was silent. I forgot my sorrows. Hans was tired. The book and he must be nurtured. What do you want, Hans? Lie down. Have some wine. Yes, I have been working. Don’t kiss me yet. We’ll have lunch in the garden. Yes, I have a lot to tell you—but it can all wait. I am deliberately postponing everything which might disturb the breathing of your book. Everything can wait.

  Hans’ pale, intense, eyes were blue, so very blue.

  “Djuna, I came to tell you that as I was working on the book I realized everything between Johanna and myself had died three or four years ago. That what we lived out together the last time she was here was only an automatic prolongation, like a habit. No impetus ever comes to a dead stop. It was a tremendous experience, an upheaval. That is why I can write so frenziedly about it—but it is the swan song I am writing now. You must be able to differentiate between my dramatizations, my evocations, and my true, present feelings. I tell you I love you. I want you to come away with me. I dream of our working together. I want you close to me.”

  I sat dazed, silent, opening my eyes wide, wide. He added:

  “Certainly I had to live all that through, but precisely because I have lived it through I am finished with it, and capable of experiencing a new kind of love. I feel stronger than Johanna, I won’t be humiliated, destroyed by Johanna again. I know now that I want to break with her. I dread her return, the possible destruction of my work. All these days I have been thinking of you, how I have worried you, hurt you. And meanwhile there is your writing and no one gives a damn about it, and no one tries to help you.”

  At this I laughed:

  “But you give a damn! Besides I can wait. It is you who are behind time, you who must be given a chance to catch up.”

  I watched the full mouth, and the pale blue eyes, that odd mixture of delicacy and bestiality, of toughness and sensibility. He became again weird and bright. His talk about his work seemed to throw off sparks, so high it bounced, so elastic, and so full, full to the bursting point always.

  I felt that just as a woman carries an embryo in her womb, so I was carrying inside me the image of a fulfilled genius and that every day he became this image more and more exactly, every day he added to his stature, to the stature of this image, as if he used it for a model. And every day my love seemed more justified. Every day my vision of him melted into reality.

  Everything became sparkling and vibrant. The warmth with which I surrounded him glowed like a magic ambiance in which he moved and expanded to greater dimensions.

  The great joy, the greatest joy, is not to discover one’s greatness but to find on earth a match.

  The table was too full and so the manuscripts and books lay on the floor. He made me lie on the black rug. My head touched the carbon paper. He pushed it away, saying: “We don’t want any carbon copies stat!”

  * * *

  He showed me some more of his notes, made in cafés, in the train, in the subway.

  “For your collection,” he said. “I often imagine myself in another man’s boots a hundred years from now. I can see him enjoying my notes as I have enjoyed Balzac’s in the museum. It’s a hellish thing to say, perhaps.”

  “Not so hellish as that. Looking at the photographs of Lawrence’s home, I often have the feeling that I should like to go and see that dismal house where you were born. I have the feeling that you are a personage, that I love the most remarkable man of our age!”

  “That’s inverted megalomania,” said Hans.

  He pulled out from under the pile of folders a thick manuscript.

  “Here are my dreams for the month, all kinds of dreams. I’m going to do something with them some day—make something of them. Did you ever notice how feeble dreams usually are, in books? Writers are jus
t as crippled when it comes to giving their dreams as they are inhibited in revealing their experiences. I’m going to record every detail—and especially the unfinished things, the shreds, the fragments.”

  I told him my dream of God’s hand appearing behind a mountain, fingers pointing accusingly and how I said to whoever was standing beside me: “Can’t you see it’s made of cardboard, that it’s manipulated by strings? You can tell it’s a fake, like the marionnettes at the Javanese theatre, by the way it trembles and shakes… And after that I had another dream. It was about the birth of Johanna. Wait—I’ll read you the notes I made… I dreamed that like the Alraune of the legend, she was conceived in the poisonous womb of a whore from the seed of a man who was hanged. That she was a mandrake with fleshy roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple bell-shaped corolla. Narcotic flesh. A stemless plant with thick roots and pale purple flowers that shrieked when it was touched. And those who heard it shriek went mad. I dreamed that she was born with gold-red jungle eyes, eyes always burning, glowing as from a cavern, from holes in the earth, from behind trees… snake, lizard basking with solitary, motionless eyes, all fire and cold, snake cold and slippery, coiling on its alert tongue of fire. The last film of fire was like the transparent curtain of death, the glaze of the idol that worships itself. Her smile, her lapidary smile, the liquid, blood-red light of sard behind which the flesh crumbled away, revealing the sepultures of love. Earth-laden, her heavy flesh was projected out into the night. Earth-laden and studded with a thousand eyes. The dead cold of a meteor which had been warmed to all degrees of incandescence. The heavy molten drag of flesh torn from its chromosphere.”

  Hans said:

  “Let’s cultivate our insanities like precious flowers. Water and nurture them, as the Jews nurtured hysteria to obtain prophecies from the possessed… Do you know what I dreamed? I leaned out of a window and shouted in a voice I had never herd before: ‘Help! Help!’ The hare-lipped market woman’s voice when the vegetables are stolen, the chicken being guillotined, the dog under a taxi… to the sound of these things in my voice the people ran. They stood gasping at my door. I was trembling. I pointed to the bluish green mirror where I had seen that I was murdered. The blood was coagulating. The skin was green like that of a drowned map. There was a gash, a gash across the face. ‘Help! Help!’ Why are you so inert? I have been killed! I was asleep here on this bed which smells of bestiality. I was dreaming of Venetian alchemist bottles. I was discovering a mixture. I had succeeded in fusing the sparse elements of myself into a long-necked bottle of jade-green transparency. At last I had been able to look at myself bottled. And then I was murdered. Envy, I tell you, envy of the one who has dreams. The people stood there breathless. A woman’s toe stuck out of a hole in her bedroom slipper. When I first began to talk it seemed like a mouse that wanted to run away from the light. It was turning in upon itself. Then it ceased moving as if I had stepped on it. It lay flat. Inert. I danced furiously before them. I poked them with the coal shovel. I saw in the mirror a murdered man agonizing. A woman came forward. She opened her handbag. ‘Look,’ she said. I saw in her pocket mirror an unblemished face—my own. I was alive. Whole.”

  There was tacked on Hans’ door a paper with his name and address carefully printed. I asked him:

  “Are you afraid to forget your name and who you are and where you live? Have you ever feared amnesia, or wanted it? I have desired it because it is like an atrophy of the ideal self. The conscience goes to sleep, and therefore the critical self. You can then walk the streets and act as you please without qualms. It is only our name, our address and our relations which bind us, like so many memoranda, to the role which is expected of us. The important thing is not to perpetually resemble that fixed image of ourselves, but to create and believe in transformations.”

  “In my case,” said Hans, “what’s difficult is to keep any image of myself clear. I have never thought about myself much. The first time I saw myself full length, as it were, was in you. I have grown used to considering your image of me as the correct one. Probably because it makes me feel good. I was like a gigantic wheel, very heavy, surcharged with ideas and plans and inventions, but without a hub.”

  “And I’m the hub now, eh?” I said laughing.

  “Yes, you’re the hub, and no matter how far I wander off, no matter how enormous the circles I make, you’re always at the centre.”

  “No, the hub is really yourself. A knowledge of yourself which you obtained from my love. My love was the catalyzer! It reintegrated you… Unwind that last page in your machine so that I can read it. I like to read it as it comes out of the oven, so hot and fresh.”

  “Your tenacity amuses me,” said Hans.

  “And your letting things happen amuses me. I love your not holding on to anything. You have declined all the responsibilities of life except that of creating books. You’re one of the authentic artists. You never let anything fall into a mould. I like the way your mind spills out so recklessly, spilling confusion, chaos and wealth. How you flow, spread, expand, enlarge. While I weave, gather and remember. “

  “And laugh secretly at my pompous speeches.”

  “Our styles too have married, you know. My writing is the wife of yours.”

  * * *

  This is my Seventh Day. After so much straining and waiting, after so many empty years, after so much isolation and so much striving, I have arrived at my Seventh Day, and I am enjoying it. I rest now, I rest from my straining for perfection. I rest in this rich ambiance created by Hans, this warm climate I have always sought. He has created a world for me. I rest in the present with an Oriental enjoyment. I rest in the perfection of the moment. I have arrived at the end of my hard work to a long lasting holiday, a holiday with Hans. I say this even to-day when it happens that I am lying in bed and that I cannot move because of the pain.

  For hours I amused myself with my own thoughts and memories. I played with the hours and with scenes. I labored like a chiseller, with minute care, wondering if I had given some lasting form to the hours most precious to me. I remembered the afternoon when Hans was lying on the couch in my bedroom while I was dressing foran evening party, standing before my long mirror perfuming myself. The window was open on the garden, and he had said: “This is like a setting for Pelléas and Melisande. It is all a dream.” The perfume made a silky sound as I squirted it with the atomizer, touching my ear lobes, my breasts, my neck. “Your dress is green like a Princess’,” he had said. “I could swear it is a green I have never seen before and will never see again. I could swear the garden is made of cardboard, that the trembling of the light comes from the footlights, that the sounds are music, even that noise of wood being sawed. You are almost transparent there, like that mist of perfume you are throwing on yourself. Throw more perfume on yourself, like a ‘fixatif’ on a water color. Let me have the atomizer. Let me put perfume all over you so that you won’t disappear and fade like a water color.”

  I moved towards him and sat on the edge of the couch. “You don’t quite believe in me as a woman,” I said with an immense distress quite out of proportion to his fancy, “yet it happened that while I was perfuming myself I was thinking how I might get you a new suit. Your suit is frayed at the sleeves. The skin of your wrists is so white and fine, as if it could easily be burnt or scratched.”

  “This is a setting forPelléas and Melisande, ” he said, “and I know that when you leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more.”

  It was as if he too had taken the essence of the hour like a blood-colored ink and were tattooing it on my memory. The color of the day, the color of Byzantine paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust held together only bytoms were ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold so
thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous space lying behind the illusion, the absence of color and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder. This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees, which was flowering inside the room, on my black hair, on the skin of his wrists, on the frayed suit sleeve, on the black carpet, on the green dress, on the bottle of perfume, on the sienna-colored nails, on his voice, on my anxiety—the very breath of living, the very breath he and I took in to live and breathed out to live—that very breath could blow it all down, mow it all down.

  The essence, the human essence always evaporating.

  The air of that day, when the wind itself had suspended its breathing, hung between window and garden; the air itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word, and a displaced leaf or word might change the whole aspect of the day.

  The essence, the human essence always evaporating.

  The temperature of the day, the temperature in which the blood flowered and the skin unfurled its minuscule pores like the petals of the most secretly folded flower. The temperature of that day which could be repeated in time, perhaps a hundred times in my life: the temperature would be reproduced but never the hour with Hans lying on the couch watching me dressing, never his words or my response to his words, which were a dark wish to enclose the whole day in a strangling hand, to snuff out its color and temperature, so that no fragment of it would ever repeat itself, a fragment which might recall the whole, a fragment which might come upon me ten years later perhaps while I would be sitting in Asturias. The gold, the breathlessness of the air, the temperature, without his presence, his words and my response. The tantalizing incompleteness and uniqueness of an event, repeating only the setting perhaps, under a variance of moods, of feelings and of personages. And for that future day when I might again stand before my mirror perfuming myself, doing only a fraction of what I did on that other day, for the pain that unfinished, unreproduceable hour aroused in me, I would kill it, or I would sit for many hours juggling with words in order to imprison it.