by Anais Nin
There was a long silence.
“Let me sit on the floor and put my head over your knees,” I said.
“No, no,” said Johanna in a low, frightened voice.
“I will make you a cape like mine. I want you to wear my cape draped around your body.”
“Johanna, Johanna,” I thought, “I want to touch you. Why are you afraid? I want to kiss you.”
When Johanna talked again volubly, recklessly, I did not try to silence her. Now I knew we were talking against a deeper, inner talk, against the things we could not say.
* * *
I waited at the corner of the Rue Auber. I would see Johanna in full daylight advancing out of the crowd. I would make certain that such a thing could be, that Johanna was not a mirage which could melt as dreams melt in the morning.
I was secretly afraid that I might stand there at the corner of the Rue Auber exactly as I had stood in other places watching the crowd and knowing no Johanna would ever appear, because Johanna was an invention. As people passed by I shivered at their ugliness, at their drabness, at their likeness to each other. Waiting for Johanna I experienced the most painful expectancy, as if for a miracle. I could not believe Johanna would arrive by these streets, cross such a Boulevard, emerge from a handful of dark, faceless people. What a profound joy to watch the crowd scurrying and then to see her striding forward wearing her shabby shoes, her shabby black dress, her shabby cape and an old violet hat with a royal indifference.
“I hate the daylight,” said Johanna, and under the brim of her hat her eyes darkened with anger. The dark blue rings under her eyes were so deep they marked her flesh. It was as if the flesh around her eyes had been burned away by the white beat and fever of her glance.
In the café her pallor turned ashen. I saw ashes under the skin of her face. Hans had said she was very ill. Would she die? I trembled with fear. Would Johanna die before I had put m arms around her? Then I would follow her there too, I would follow her anywhere to tell her I loved her. I would keep Johanna’s sombre beauty from death.
“There are so many things I would love to do with you,” said Johanna. “With you I would take drugs. I would not be afraid!”
“With you I would do anything, go anywhere.”
I looked at Johanna’s hair, the blond strands tumbling out of the hat, wind-blown; at her eyebrows peaked like a demon’s, at her smile slanting perfidiously, a gem-like smile which made a whirlpool of my life, of my feelings.
“You’re strong, although you look so frail,” said Johanna, taking my hand…
I did not seek the meaning of Johanna’s words. I was suspended to her feverish mouth, to her discolored lips badly rouged. I felt in myself a new, man-like strength, a desire to protect her. I felt dizzy and feverish, and ready to abandon everything for her.
A man passed by and laughed at our absorption.
“Don’t mind, don’t mind,” I said softly, without taking her hand away. I enveloped and disguised my own tremblings and timidities in an Oriental calm. Johanna drank and smoked feverishly.
“I don’t want to do you any harm,” said Johanna.
“You can’t do me any harm.”
“I destroy people without wanting to. Everywhere I go everything gets confused and terrifying. I wish you had known Hildred. She made masks. She had supple and slender hands like yours. She made the Count for me. Oh, you don’t know the Count. Let’s go and get him, please. Let’s go there before we go for the sandals.”
We rushed to her hotel in a taxi. Johanna brought out the Count, a marionette with a depraved face, criminal’s hands, purple hair, violet eyelids, consumptive cheeks. She sat him in front of us in the taxi and laughed. “He was on the stage with me.” When the taxi started, he fell over, bowing to us with the lamentable weeping willowiness of his purple hair.
“I would like to go back to New York now and become beautiful for you. I will go away and make a new start. I’ll become a great actress. I won’t appear any more with clothes that are held together with safety pins! I’ve been living stupidly, blindly, doing nothing but drinking and smoking and talking. I’m afraid of disappointing you, Djuna.”
“I’m ashamed of all I have written. I want to throw away everything and begin anew for you, in a new language,” I said.
We walked down the street aimlessly, unconscious of our surroundings, arm in arm, with a joy that was rising every moment and with every word we uttered. A swelling joy that mounted with each step we took together and with the movement of our legs brushing against each other.
The traf eddied about us. Everything lost in a fog. Only the voices distinct, carrying such half-phrases as we could utter out of the drunkenness that our walking in rhythm caused in us.
Johanna said:
“I wanted to telephone you last night. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to have talked so much. I didn’t say at all what I wanted to say. I went to a café in the evening as if drugged, full of thoughts of you. People’s voices reached me from afar. I couldn’t sleep at night. What have you done to me?”
I felt dazed with joy.
“I didn’t say what I wanted to say either. I feel overwhelmed. I can’t think any more.”
We went to the shoe shop. There the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our visible joy. I held Johanna’s hand firmly and commanded. I was firm, wilful with the shopkeeper. Give me this, the best—don’t you see, it’s for Johanna? The best then, the very best you have. When the woman said she did not have broad enough sandals for Johanna’s foot, I scolded her. And then to Johanna: “When people are nasty to you I feel like getting down on my knees before you. I love you, Johanna.”
We walked down the street looking down at our sandalled feet. People stared at us and said: “Look at the actresses.”
“I’d like to get drunk,” said Johanna, “youreyes frighten me. You seem to know so much and yet you’ve never come out of your peaceful house.”
“Drunk! I’ve never once been drunk,” I said.
Johanna laughed.
“But I don’t want you to begin now. It would be like watching a child learning to walk. You don’t need to get drunk—but I would like to because then I could say anything I chose… and I’d want you to think it was because I was drunk, because then you’d forgive me.”
“You too have fears, although you look so strong.”
“It’s good that you never ask questions about facts. Facts don’t matter. It’s the essence that matters. You are all essence… I’d like to have some of the perfume I smelled in your house.”
I thought: “And she needs shoes, stockings, everything!”
Bodies close, arm in arm, hands locked. The city fallen away. We were walking into a world of our own for which neither could find a name. We entered a softly lighted place—mauve, diffuse which surrounded us with velvety closeness. We took off our hats and drank champagne. The Russian singers stared at us. Russian voices and Johanna. The violet rug, the green windows, the dusty lights, the swelling of guitars. Johanna was their essence.
Johanna talked about the effects of hasheesh. I had known such a state without hasheesh. When everything is so clear and transparent, when you know all there is to be known on earth, and you tchild learlike a visionary with a dancing irony and a cool brilliance.
“Let’s take drugs together, Djuna. Let’s take drugs together.”
“Not to-night, Johanna.”
Johanna took off her silver bracelet and put it around my wrist.
“It’s like having your own hand around my wrist. It is still warm, like your own hand. I’m your prisoner, Johanna.”
We walked out again. We crossed the street. We asked a policemen for the Rue de Rome. He laid his white stick on the Count and smiled at us. I said: “Are you going to arrest him?” And we laughed and walked on.
“Do you know,” I said, “there was an old Roumanian woman who had predicted I would love a woman. She lived in a very small house, with small doorways. She had cut off t
he legs of the chairs and tables so that everything seemed diminutive, like a house in a fairy tale.”
Johanna took my hand against her warm breast and we walked thus, my hand warmed by her breast.
We passed an old doorman we knew. He greeted us. I said to him: “The Count was almost arrested a while ago.” We all laughed.
“You give me life,” said Johanna. “I almost died when I read Hans’ last book. He is so cruelly unjust to me.”
Her eyes twitched now and then as if the light hurt her.
“I don’t want to die now. But he hates me. I don’t know why, but he hates me.”
Her nostrils quivered with furious pride. Her whole body, eyes, mouth, all shriveled with fury as if she had been whipped.
“It isn’t me, Djuna, it isn’t me!”
Even at this moment when Johanna’s vehemence rang so true I feared to ask her: “Did you love Hildred… did you love Hildred more than Hans?”
Then Johanna’s eyes, Johanna’s voice, Johanna’s talk appeared to wither in panic before this question. I could see and feel the flight, the evasion, the tortuousness. Johanna’s glance deviated, her voice became tremulous, uncertain.
“Hildred was a little mad. She used to write poetry for me. I wish you could have read it, you would have loved it.”
“What became of her?”
“I don’t know,” said Johanna. She opened her eyes wide into space, her face became clear, transparent, and I saw it illumined by a halo of innocence. An innocence which permeated her whole being for a moment. An innocence which radiated from her like a gem. So still and crystal pure.
So many questions now rushed to my mind. I wanted to ask: “Is it true what you tell me about the drugs? Is it true you have never taken any?” But I knew already how Johanna’s face darkened when any questions were put to her, and how humiliated she was by any attempt made to clarify her statements. And I knew that was not the way to reach Johanna, that Johanna’s essence slipped out between facts. So I smiled and was silent, and listened to Johanna’s voice, the way its hoarseness changed from rustiness to a whisper, a faint gasp, so that the hotness of her breath touched my face.
I watched her smoke hungrily, as if smoking, talking and moving were all desperately necessary to her, like breathing, and she did them all with such anguish and intensity.
Johanna and I looked at each other, and this look was like a long, long drink which made us shiver with pleasure.
“Did you ever do this,”I asked. “Did you ever walk in rhythm to a word, sing this word to yourself, with each step you take, until you get drunk on it, until it goes to your head. I came towards you repeating the word: ‘danger, danger, danger.’ I love you because you are danger…”
We were standing close together in a dark corner of the station. Standing unsteadily, our feelings spinning, spinning around us, in a maddening turmoil. Our faces drawn violently closer and closer, until the lips almost touched, until we saw each other in each other’s eyes, until our breaths mingled, until we could not speak for the gasp of joy which surged in us. Fever mounting, mounting, the magnet which soldered our mouths together into a blinding, earth-rocking kiss.
* * *
“Your eyes are full of pity, Djuna.”
“Do you need pity, Johanna?”
“I need a refuge from Hans, yes. Always. As soon as I see him again I realize he is my greatest enemy. And you don’t know. Before I came I suspected… As soon as I saw you my doubts were over. Hans has portrayed me as the everlasting liar. Do you trust him, Djuna?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you shouldn’t. I trusted him at the beginning. He not only betrayed me with women, but he betrayed my personality. He invented a cruel personage who caused him suffering in order to whip himself into writing. I don’t believe in him as a writer. I don’t believe in him as a man either. He is all that he accuses me of being. He is a comedian, a buffoon. He is false. He is neither fantastic enough nor simple enough. He doesn’t want simplicity or honesty. He’s an intellectual. He’s false, false, false.”
Her resentment rose as she talked, like a fever. It burned her eyes, her face. There was such a deep-reaching misunderstanding between them, like a wide chasm. Impossible to render any justice, yet justice was what Johanna demanded. She was begging to be judged, absolved.
She was pleading:
“You don’t know, when we first married, what an interest Hans had in evil. It was then I began to invent for him, to create situations, or at least to exaggerate them. I felt that he wanted that.”
I wanted to ask: “Did you never lie before you met Hans?” I knew that no one begins to lie at a certain hour of one’s life. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because I had also lied when I was a child—about the games I played which I insisted were real and should be believed by my parents and my brothers. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because it had always seemed to me that life must be embroidered on, colored and invented. I knew that when I lied about myself it was not so much because it was expected of me, but because I fancied that my inventions might be more interesting than the truth. From the beginning Johanna too must have taken her fancies seriously. That was the origin of her pretenses. And then some one had come who expected lies, who delighted in unreality, and Johanna had answered this demand. And within her, as within all, there wept and whined a child who was tired of inventions, and who wanted to be loved for her true self, for an unadorned, undramatized self.
I knew that if I asked Johanna to-day: “What were you before you met Hans? What were you when you were ten years old?” Johanna would not answer that she had been an “extra” in a dance hall, nor that her mother had kept a boarding house. Johanna would pause before answering and consider what might come closest to my image of her. I knew that Johanna would not say what she was, or what she thought, but whatever conformed to what she fancied I expected her to be and to think. I knew that to unravel the twistedness of Johanna’s life would take years of gentle and sharp detection. The whole pattern of Johanna’s life would have to be turned inside out. I would have to take Johanna like a fruit and peel the rind of flesh to find the core. Everything which composed the external Johanna was a concealment of her, not an expression. I would have to divest her of her costumes, of her talk, of her facial masks—and then what would I find? Probably a child, a child whining because it was lost and lonely, for lies have that power that they create solitude more effectively than anything else. They disguise the soul. They disguise and conceal and deform, and create enormous distances between the self and the appearance. And everyone is deluded by the appearance. Even love is offered to a reflection, to the appearance.
If I were to unmask you, Johanna, I should only be revealing myself! You are the face of my unmasked self. A thousand times I will unmask you, Johanna, because it is only you and I who know the inexhaustibility of women’s masks. And the last will fall only when we are dust. We see the face beneath the mask, you mine, I yours, because it is the same face. I am your words, Johanna, and you are my acts. You have acted for me. And you have my face, the face of my feelings. I am the bitterness in your words, the softness you are forbidden to betray. The need of mystery you bear like a curse; men have cursed you by enslaving you to your own mystery. I am free because I am able to dispense with mystery.
Johanna was begging to be seen as a martyr to Hans’ work, as the woman who acted always sublimely, as the woman who loved only beauty. See only the beauty in me, only the beauty.
“But I see you all, I e your lies too, I see you exactly as you are, and I love you,” I said.
“You have swallowed Hans’ stories,” said Johanna bitterly. “You also think me a liar.”
“I’ve spent this whole year trying to make Hans understand you, through me. I have trusted him.”
“Well, then you have failed as much as he has. He only pretends to understand in order afterwards to turn round and destroy. He is like a spy who enters your secret life only to report on it late
r, to expose it.”
“You should not fear exposure,” I said gently.
“Yes, because he only exposes the ugly, the ridiculous.”
I could not deny that Hans was a caricaturist, but only when he was angry, out of revenge.
“But I never did anything to deserve his vengefulness!”
“You betrayed him, Johanna.”
Johanna denied this swiftly, denied it vigorously. She intimated that she could skirt all life, all situations and remain unscathed and faithful. This statement made me angry.
“Don’t say that to me,” I said. “Don’t you dare say that to me. I am a woman, Johanna. I know it is not true. I know that women like us, even when we don’t want to give anything, cannot let a man go without some gift. You can call it pity, if you wish to embellish it. We are not women who take without giving back something. We forget it is ourselves they want. And you know this want touches us, all want touches us, because we are so hungry ourselves, because we are so voracious for love.”
Again all of Johanna’s being seemed to escape before my directness in a panic. Behind the mask a thousand smiles, behind the eyelids ageless deceptions. A deception so ingrained that I knew she would never transcend it.
And I knew that if I wanted Johanna to tell me the truth it was only to answer one question, one vital question which was life and death to me. I knew that Johanna sensed this question lurking behind our talk and our confidences, that she was on her guard against it, that it lay between us like a dagger, which neither of us wanted to pick up. I knew that what I wanted to ask was: “Do you love Hans? Have you returned to stay with Hans? Who is it you abandoned Hans for, and will you hurt him again?”
Johanna knew I wanted toknow this. And so our phrases, even when begun with impulsiveness, would end abruptly and unexpectedly whenever we felt ourselves approaching the core of our anxiety. To elude the ultimate question we crowded the atmosphere with smaller ones. We unearthed the past to evade the present and the future. We watched each other with love and fear. I knew that if I urged Johanna to openness Johanna could say: “It is you who are the liar, the deceiver. It is not for me that you helped Hans, that you served him as I once served him. Such things are only doneched each for love.”