by Anais Nin
We stood before the night which belonged to us as two women emerging out of sleep. We stood on the first step of our timidity, of our faith, before the long night which belonged to us. Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of calculation, of premeditation, or of experience.
Two women. Strangeness. All the webs of ideas blown away. New bodies, new souls, new minds, new words. We would create it all out of ourselves, fashion our own reality. Innocence. No roots dangling into other days, other nights, or other people. The potency of a new stare into the face of our desire and our fears. Johanna’s timidity and mine. Johanna’s awkwardness and mine. Our fears. A great terror slashing through the room, cutting icily through us, like a fallen sword. A new voice. Johanna’s voice hoarse, breathless, and mine like an exhalation of hers, a breath, almost a voicelessness, because we were so frightened.
Johanna sat so heavily on the edge of the bed, her earthy weight like roots sinking into the earth. Under the weight of her jungle stare I trembled.
Our bracelets tinkled.
The bracelets had given the signal. A signal like the first tinkle of beads on a savage neck. I took my bracelet off. We put them on the table, side by side.
The light. Why was the light so still, like the suspense of our blood? Still with fear. Like our eyes. Shadeless eyes that could not melt.
The dresses. My dress rolled around me like a long seaweed. I wanted to turn and drop it on the floor, but my hands lifted it like a Bayadere lifting her skirt to dance, and it rose like an umbrella slip and then fell, fell, like a leaf under a rain-shower.
Johanna’s eyes were like the forest. The darkness of the forest, the watchfulness behind an ambush. Fear. I journeyed into the darkness of it. I walked from the place where my dress had fallen, carrying my breasts like gifts in my half-opened hands; I carried them to her as if expecting to be thrust by her mortally.
Johanna loosened her hair and said: “You are so extraordinarily white.” With a strange weight, like a sadness, she spoke. It was not the white substance of me, but my significance, the whiteness of my newness to life, which Johanna seemed to sigh for. “You are so white, so white and smooth.” And there were deep shadows in her eyes, shadows of one old with life; shadows in her neck, in her arms, and on her knees, violet shadows.
I wanted to reach out for her. I saw that Johanna wanted as much to become I as I wanted to become Johanna. I saw how we both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. I saw in both of us the dark strain of wanting to be the other, to deny one’s self, one’s form, one’s reality. Johanna and I both struggling to deny our lives and our bodies: Johanna thinking she desired my newness, and I desiring Johanna’s deeply marked body.
I drank the violet shadows, drank the imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors, other caresses. How all the others clung to Johanna’s body, made her heavy, heavy with the loss of herself, lost in the maze of her gifts! How the lies and the loves, and the dreams, and the obscenities and the fevers weighed down her body, and how I wanted to become leadened with her, poisoned with her!
Johanna looked at the whiteness of my body as into a mirror. She was herself standing at the beginning of all things, unblurred, unmarked. She wanted to stand at the beginning of all things. And I wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the very bottom of the violet wells.
“Nubile, nubile,” dreamed Johanna. “I could so easily break you in two.”
Through the acrid forest of her being there was a vulnerable opening. I tread into it lightly. Caresses of down, and Johanna could do nothing against the moth invasion. Myrrh between our breasts. Incense in our mouths. Tendrils of hair raising their heads to the passing of wind in the tips of our fingers. The skin flowered under the brushing of lips and we discovered a softness like that of clouds about to burst and spill their honey. Clouds about to burst. Kisses curling into the conch-shell necks. The soft raised mounts touching as the salted pollen burned a passage-wy. Tendrils of hair bristling and between our closed lips a moan, a sigh, a sob.
Pounding of drums. Delirious sensual diffusions. Effulgence of face and breasts.
“How soft, how soft, how soft you are,” said Johanna, “how soft and treacherous.”
Cool. green-eyed fury and passion. The defence of lies. Weaving lies swiftly, like spider webs. Lies. Lies. I love no man. I love no man.
“But I see his image in your eyes. I feel him in you.”
Disguise. Infernos of doubts. Johanna, Johanna, we are not enemies. I was laughing. Peaks of faith and infernos of doubts. The taste of sacrilege. The mouths he kissed. The women whose savour he knows. Poisonous kisses. Culpable joys. Him. The one man within two women. Jealousy dormant, lying at our side, between our caresses, slipping in between our caresses.
(Johanna, Johanna, if you arouse hatred between us, you break the magic alliance and thrust us both into a world which is not as aware of us as we are of each other! All that he has failed to notice! All that he has failed to love in both of us, how delicately we have culled it, nourished each other, assuaged that famine for love, for minuteness in love! Assuaged with a woman-knowledge. Must we awake to the great pain of rivalry, the bleak war, when this hour contains all that slips between his fingers! The jewels in your voice which fall on my fantastic registering, the filigrane of my gestures which your eyes alone can follow, the words fallen which I alone can hear, the arrows of humiliations which I cover with velours and fur and brocade, the velours and incense of our words for each other, our power to lift every ordinary hour to a level of wonder— is it all to be lost, Johanna? It must not be lost. Stay in my arms. Let us keep our perfidious alliance. Together, we are queens, and we triumph. At war with each other, nourishing the hatred, we cripple each other.)
But jealousy had stirred in our flesh. We lay together, hair almost braided together, while the dawn entered the room.
(Johanna, you are afraid? You are doubting? Everything you fear is true. But you should be rejoicing that it is I and none other, I who am half of you! You don’t understand me. There is no treachery, only intermarriage, a trilogy, and passion running triangularly. But you look upon me as upon an enemy. I only completed you. But I am not complete without you. You crush the possibility of a miracle. You and I destroying solitude and fear and pain in one kiss, in one night—all the pain and rancor between women, centuries of war, buried in our twinsoft flesh, Johanna. You and I revolving around him. Your vulnerability and mine. I would always find a way to heal his thrusts.)
The grey dawn entered the room, a grey, gelatinous dawn, which showed the dirt on the window, the crack in the table, the stains on the wallpaper. Johanna and I sat up on the bed as if the dawn had opened our eyes. Slowly we seemed to descend from some dangerous height, with the weight of our fatigue and the appearance of the daylight. I saw on Johanna’s mouth the rouge spread by our kisses so that the shape of her mouth seemed lost. It was as if the colors had run.
Every cell of our dream seemed to burst all at once, with the doubt which had entered Johanna’s mind. Johanna’s face was changed. Her eyes seemed glazed, and her profile shrewd. Her serpent back stiffened, and I saw her gathering herself together as if to pounce. I felt the danger and I struggled to open my eyes, to prepare myself.
Doubt. Doubt was hardening and crystallizing in Johanna. It crystallized her features, her eyes, it tightened her mouth, it stiffened her body. I shivered with cold, with the icy incision of this new day which was laying everything bare.
Bare eyes looking at each other, with bare, knife-pointed questions.
Johanna leaped from the bed and stood before me, tense, ominous, and her words burned and rent the air like summer lightning.
“I’m not duped by your love of me,” she hissed. “I know you’re playing a foul trick on me. But you didn’t fool me. I knew about it long ago. I’ve been acting all the time. I pulled off a Lesbian act on you. You thought I loved you! I hate you! I could murder you. You sicken me with your lies.
Say something! Don’t lie there with round, innocent eyes. I know that you and Hans…”
“I love you, Johanna,” I said quietly, “I love you.”
“And I loathe you!” screamed Johanna. “You’re shrewd and you’re devilish. I’ll say this much for you—at last he’s found his mate! Clever you are! Far more clever than him! You’ll devour him… Funny, he always said I would devour him. But wait! When he gets you he’ll get a real spider. Wait till he finds out that he’s got a Lesbian on his hands. He used to call me a Lesbian! Me! Me!”
She strode back and forth like a panther, she jerked her head spasmodically, and then turned on me tempestuously with a shriek in her voice:
“Say something! Say something, will you! I’d like to walk over your damned face, I’d like to crush it out, your damned innocent face, you little viper!”
She took the bracelets and flung them out of the window. Then she walked over to me, and with that hard, gem-like smile of the whore, and that low, begging voice, that obscene, begging voice of the whore, she said:
“Give me the money to go away! You can do that for me at least! I want to go back to the man I really love. Don’t worry—I won’t kill you!”
She moved away, heavily, as she spoke, almost stumbling, and with that crazy, peaked, demonic smile of hers she cried:
“Do you hear me? Now—now you have the final chapter for your book!”
At this I leaped up with a sob: “Cheap! Cheap!” I shouted. “Don’t be cheap! I’ll forgive you anything, Johanna, but for God’s sake don’t cheapen yourself.” Hysterically, my voice thin and desperate, I repeated again: “It’s so cheap! So cheap! Don’t you say that! Not you, Johanna!”
Then suddenly all my anger seemed to be washed away. All my resentment. I seemed to be falling into darkness. Fog. The weight, the tremendous weight ofmy head pulled up by the clouds and swung in space, the body like a wisp of straw—clouds dragging my head, body loose and dangling—dragging me over the world. I could not stop, descend, rest. I could hear the movements of the planets and stars, the rushing, the shifting and shuffling of circles. I could hear the passing of mysteries and the breathing of monsters. I lived within a mystery. In the dark I always stretched my hand and touched Hans. My eyes were closed. The eyes of reality. To feel and to flow without destroying the dewiness of events by dissection… The dew… The night. The moisture of things and of human beings. The aureole of our breath…
But it was not the night. It was day. It was a lead-colored day and Johanna was shaking me violently.
“Put your dress on quickly. I’ve an idea Hans has been listening behind the door all night.”
She seemed electrified. We were both trembling.
“If you won’t admit anything, I’ll make him confess. But I don’t want him to find us in bed together…”
When I was dressed Johanna went stealthily to the door, and then opened it brusquely. There was no one there. I followed her out of the room and watched her open the door of the other bedroom. I looked over Johanna’s shoulder.
Hans was lying there, asleep. His face roseate, his mouth joyous. Even when his eyes were closed they seemed to be laughing.
HE WAS PROFOUNDLY ASLEEP AND SNORING.
LILITH
I am waiting for him. I have waited for him for twenty years. He is coming to-day.
I have almost grown old waiting. Will he be old?
This glass bowl with the glass fish and the glass ship—it has been the sea for me and the ship which carried me away from him after he abandoned me. Why have I loved ships so deeply, why have I always wanted to sail away from this world? Why have I always dreamed of flight, of departure?
To-day this past from which I have struggled to escape strikes me like a whip. But to-day I can bear the lash of it because he is coming and I know that the circle of empty waiting will close.
How well I remember our home near the sea, the villa which was in ruins. I am nine years old. I arrive there with my mother and two brothers. My father is standing behind a window, watching. His face is pale, he does not seem to be happy to see us. I feel that he does not want us, that he does not want me. His anger seems to be directed against all of us, but it touches me more acutely, as if it were directed entirely against me. We are not wanted, why I do not understand. My mother says to him: “It will good for Lilith here.” There is no smile on his face. He does not seem to notice that I am wasted by fever, that I am hungry for a smile.
There is never a smile on his face except when there are visitors, except when there is music and talk. When we are alone in the house there is always war: great explosions of anger, hatred, revolt. War. War at meals, war over our heads when my brothers and I are left in bed at night, war in the room under our feet when we are playing. War. War…
In the closed study, or in the parlor, there was always a mysterious activity. Music, rehearsals, visitors, laughter. I saw my father always in movement, always alert, tense, either passionately gay or passionately angry. When the door opened my father appeared—luminous. incandescent. A vital passage, even when he passed from one room to another. A gust of wind. A mystery. Not a reality like my mother with her healthy red cheeks, her appetite, her frank, natural laughter.
Never any serenity, never any time for caresses, for softness. Tension always. A life ripped by dissension. Even while we were playing the dark fury of their perpetual warring hung over us like a shadow. A constant uneasiness, a continual mystery, blows and threats and curses and recriminations. Never a moment of complete joy. Aware always of the battles that were about to explode.
One day there was a scene of such violence that I was terrified. An immense, irrational terror overwhelmed me. My mother was goading my father to such anger that I thought he would kill her. My father’s face was blue-white. I began to scream. I screamed until they became alarmed. For a few days there was an interval of quiet. A truce. A pretense of peace.
The walls of my father’s library were covered with books. Often I stole into the library and I read the books which I found there, books which I did not understand. Within me there was a well of secret thoughts which I could not express, which perhaps I might have formulated if some one had leaned over them with tenderness. The one person who might have aided me terrified me. My father’s eyes were always cold, critical, unbelieving. He would not believe the drawings I showed him were mine. He thought I had traced them. He did not believe that I had written the poems which were handed to him. He thought I had copied them. He flew into a rage because he could not find the books from which he imagined I had copied my poems and drawings.
He doubted everything about me, even my illnesses. In the train once, going to Berlin where he was to give a concert, I had such an ear ache that I began to weep… “If you don’t stop crying and go to sleep,” he said, “I’ll beat you.” I stuffed my ear under the pillow so that he wouldn’t hear my sobs. I sobbed all the way to Berlin. When we got there they discovered that I had an abscess in my ear.
Another time he was taken down with an attack of appendicitis. My mother was tending him, fussing over him, running about anxiously. He lay there very pale in the big bed. I came from the street where I had been playing and I told my mother that I was in pain. Immediately my father said: “Don’t pay any attention to her, she’s just acting. She’s just imitating me.” But I did have an attack of appendicitis. I had to be taken to the hospital and operated on. My father, on the other hand, had recovered. He was in bed only three days.
Such cruelty! I ask myself—was he really cruel, or was it mere selfishness? Was he just a big child who could not bear to have a rival, even in the person of his own daughter? I do not know. I am waiting for him now. I want to tell him everything. I want to hear what he has to say. I want to hear him say that he loves me. I don’t know why I should love him so much. I can’t believe that he meant to be so cruel. I love him.
Because he was so critical, so severe, so suspicious of me, I became secretive and lying. I would
never say what I really thought. I was afraid of him. I lied like an Arab. I lied to elude his stern glances, his cold, menacing blue eyes. I invented another world, a world of make-believe, of illusion, of games, of comedies. I tyrannized over my two brothers. I taught them games, I amused them, acted for them, enchanted them, tortured them. I was a spitfire and they loved me. They never deserted me, even for a moment. They were simple, honest, frank. I complicated everything, even the games we played.
In Berlin, when I was five years old, I ran away from home. I packed a croissant and a dress and I ran away. There was a seven year old boy waiting for me round the corner. His name was Heinrich.
I was a pale, sickly child. The doctor in Berlin had said: “She must live in her native climate. Take her back.” But there was no money for that. My youngest brother had just been born. There was no money in the house—except for books and music, for a fur-lined coat, for the cologne water which my father had to sprinkle over his handkerchiefs, for the silk shirts which he demanded when he went on his concert tours.
At the villa near the sea I lie in bed and weep all night without knowing why. But there is a garden attached to the villa. A beautiful garden in which one can get lost. I sit by the big Gothic window studded with colored stones and I look out through a prismatic-colored stone in the centre of the window; I sit there for hours at a stretch gazing upon this mysterious other world. Colors. Deformations. Trees that are ruby-colored. Orange skies. I get the feeling that there are other worlds, that one might escape from this one which is so full of misery. I think a great deal about this other world.
About my father there is an aureole of fragrance, of immaculateness, of elegance. His clothes are never wrinkled, he wears clean linen every day and the fur collar on his coat is wonderful to caress. Mother is dowdy, busy, bustling, maternal. Mother is never elegant.
Since he often leaves us to go on concert tours we have become so used to father’s departures that we barely cease playing to embrace him. I remember now the day he was leaving to go on tour. He was standing at the door, elegant, aristocratic. He looked the same as always. Suddenly, moved by an acute premonition, I threw myself on him and clung to him passionately. “Don’t go, father! Don’t leave me!” I begged. I had to be torn away. I wept so violently that my father was startled. Even now I can feel again the effort my mother made to loosen my clutch. I can still see the hesitancy in my father’s face. I begged and implored him to stay. I clung to him desperately, my fingers knotted in his clothes. I remember the effort he made to wrench himself loose and how he walked swiftly off without once looking back. I remember too that my mother was surprised by my despair. She couldn’t understand what had possessed me to behave as I did.