by Anais Nin
When he was not smiling, his face was a Greek mask, his blue eyes enigmatic, the features sharp and wilful. He appeared cold and formal. I realized it was his mask which had terrorized me as a child. The softness came only in flashes, swift as lightning, like breaks. Unexpectedly, he broke when he smiled, the hardness broke, and the softness which came was so feminine, so exposed, giving and seducing with the beauty of the teeth, exposing a dimple which he said was not a dimple at all, but a scar from the time he had slid down the bannister.
As a child I had the obscure fear that this man could never be satisfied, by life, by human beings… by the world. Nothing but perfection would do. It was this sense of his exactingness which haunted me, an obscure awareness of his expectations which excited me to the great efforts I had made. But to-day I told myself that I had strained enough, that I wanted to rest, that I had waited a long time for it. I felt I did not want to appear before him until I was complete, and could satisfy him.
I wanted to enjoy. My life had been a long strain, one long effort to surpass myself, to create, to perfect, a desperate and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, creations, always shedding yesterday’s woman to pursue a new vision.
To-day I wanted to enjoy…
We were walking into a new world together, into a new planet, a world of transparency, where all that happened to us since that day I clung to him desperately was reduced to its essence, to a skeleton, to a silhouette. His vision and his talk were abstract; his rigorous selection acted like an intense searchlight which annihilated everything around us: the color oom, the smell of tabac blond, the warmth of the log fire, the spring sunlight showing its pale face on the studio window, the flash of his gold ring flashing his coat of arms, the immaculateness of his shirt cuffs. Everything vanished around us, the walls, the rug under our feet, the chair we sat on, the velvet pillow under my elbow, the satin rays of my dress, the orange rim of my sleeve, the orange reflections of the walls, the branches swinging before the windows, the bark of the dog, the clock ticking, the books leaning against each other, the soft backs of French books yielding under the stiff-backed English books, the indoor air like human breath and the awareness of the other air outside cooler and lighter than our breath, the lightness and swiftness of his Spanish voice, his Spanish words bowing and smiling between the French… I could only see the point he watched, the intense focussing upon the meaning of our lives, the clear outline of our patterns, and his questions. What are you to-day? What do you believe? What do you think? What do you read? What do you love? What is your music, your rhythm, your language, your vocabulary? What is your climate? What hour of the day do you love best? What are your whims? Your extravagances? Your antipathies? Who are your enemies? Who is your god? Who is your demon? What haunts you? What frightens you? What gives you courage? Whom do you love? What do you remember? What image have you of me? What have you been? Are we strangers, with twenty years between us? Does your blood obey me? Have I made you? Are you my daughter? Are you my father? Have we dreamed? Are we real? Is our life real? Is anything real? Are we here? Do I understand you?
“You are my daughter. We think the same. We laugh at the same things. I was twenty-five when you came into the world. You owe me nothing, you’ve created your self alone, but I gave you the seed.”
He was walking back and forth, the whole length of the studio, asking questions, and every answer I gave was the echo in his own soul. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Blood echoes. Yes, yes to everything. Exactly. I knew it. That is what I hoped. The same. Father and daughter. Unison. The same rhythm.
We were not talking. We were merely corroborating each other’s theories. Our phrases interlocked.
I was a woman, I had to live in a world built by the man I loved, live by his system. In the world I made alone I was lonely. I, being a woman, had to live in a man-made world, could not impose my own, but here was my father’s world, it fitted me. With him I could run through the world in seven-leagued boots. He thought and felt the same thing at the same time.
“Never knew anything but solitude,” said my father. “I never knew a woman I could take into my world.”
We did not speak of the harm we had done each other. The disease we carried in us we did not reveal. He did not know that the tragedy which had marked the first years of my life still colored it to-day. He did not know that the feeling of being abandoned was still as strong in me despite the fact that I knew it was not me who had been abandoned but my mother, that he had not really abandoned me but simply tried to save his own life. He did not know that this feeling was still so strong in me that anything which resembled abandon created a violent inner storm in me: a door closed on me too brusquely, a letter unanswered, a friend going away on a trip, the maid leaving to get married, the least mark of absent-dedness, two people talking and forgetting to include me, or some one sending greetings to some one and forgetting me.
The smallest incident could arouse an anguish as great as that caused by death, and could reawaken the pain of separation as keenly as I had experienced it the day my father had gone away.
In an effort to combat this anguish I had crowded my world richly with friends, loves and creations.
But beyond the moment of conquest there was again a desert. The joys given to me by friend, lover, or book just written, were endangered by the fear of loss. Just as some people are perpetually aware of death, I was perpetually aware of the pain of separation and the inevitability of it.
And beyond this, I also treated the world as if it were an ailing, abandoned child. I never put an end to a friendship of my own accord, I never abandoned anyone; I spent my life healing others of this fear wherever I saw it shadowed, pitying the whole world and giving it the illusion of faithfulness, durability, solidity. I was incapable of scolding, of pushing away, of cutting ties, of breaking relationships, of interrupting a correspondence, of throwing out a servant.
* * *
My father was telling me the story of the homely little governess he had made love to because otherwise she would never know what love was. He took her out in his beautiful car and made her lie on the heather just as the sun was going down so he would not have to see too much of her face. He enjoyed her happiness at having an adventure, the only one she would ever have. When she came to his room in the hotel he covered the lamp with a handkerchief, and again he enjoyed her happiness, and taught her how to do her hair, how to rouge her lips and powder her face. The adventure made her almost beautiful.
We were talking about our escapades. Skirting the periphery of our lives, maintaining ourselves there because we knew that by dwelling on our adventures, on the gestures we made without love, we saved ourselves from talking about love. We wanted to give each other the illusion of having been faithful to each other always, and of being free to devote our whole life to each other.
My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!” I was telling him about the books I read, the explorations, the voyages, the discoveries.
My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!”
I was explaining to my father that I had been exposing myself to every danger with joy, that I love risk, I love danger. It was very comical of him to frown and to ask me to take my elbows off the table as if I were a child, because I was so much older than he was; all I was telling him was so much older than his stories of perfumed countesses waiting for him in the reception room after the concerts in Poland, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Hungary. All these perfumed women with wrinkless dresses giving him silver cigarette cases. Always the same. Bathed, perfumed, manicured women. Notes. Rendez-vous. The same words exchangeNone of them leaving a memory. He couldn’t even remember their names. So I take my elbows off the table, my father, but I am so much older than you in daring…
Suddenly I stopped and asked him laughingly: “Did you ever take them to the same room, each new woman to the same room, as if you wanted
each new adventure to efface the other? Or perhaps only to compare, or to desecrate?”
“I did! I did!” He said this in a tone of exultancy, as if he had discovered the most important point of resemblance between us. This little detail seemed to him to indicate a profound sameness of feeling.
“I wonder why…?”
He did not know, but the very memory of it gave him a colorful pleasure. His face colored with pleasure and laughter.
“I also liked giving the handkerchief given to me by one lover to another, lending the book belonging to one to another; I liked nothing more than to find them together in the same room, to feel the full flavor of my secrets and my treacheries.”
He forgot all about the elbows.
Love had not been mentioned yet. Yet it was love alone which obsessed us. Not music, not writing, not painting, not decorating, not costuming, but love, the orchestration of love, its metamorphosis. I was living in a furnace of love, a blaze all around. Obsessional loves, passionate loves, sensual loves, love in mystery, in darkness, in resistance, in contrast, love in fraternity, gratitude, imagination. Loving maternally, loving as the artist can love with all my senses. A passion for man, for woman, for change… Changing every day from woman to mother, lulling in my arms at night the men whom I fought and tantalized during the day.
“I do think,” he said, “that we should give up all this for the sake of each other. These women mean nothing to me. But the idea of devoting my whole life to you, of sacrificing adventure to something far more marvellous and deep, appeals so much to me…”
“But I have not been living out adventure only…”
He stopped me and said:
“You should give him up. That isn’t love at all. You know I’ve been your only great love…”
I did not want to say: “not my only great love,” but he seemed to have guessed my thought because he turned his eyes completely away from me and added: “Remember, I am an old man, I haven’t so many years left to enjoy you…”
With this phrase, which was actually untrue because he was only fifty-five years old and younger than most men of his age, he seemed to be asking me for my life, almost to be reaching out to take full possession of my life, just as he had taken my soul away with him when I was a child. It seemed to me that he wanted to take it away now again, when I was a full-blown woman. It seemed natural to him that I should have mourned his loss throughout my childhood. It was true that he was on the oad to death, drawing nearer and nearer to it; it was also true that I had loved him so much that perhaps a part of me might follow him and perish with him, just as the child of nine had followed him and perished with him. Would I die again with him? Would I follow him from year to year—his withering, his vanishing? Was my love a separate thing, or a part of his life? Would I leave the earth with him to-day? He was asking me to leave the earth to-day—and this time I could not. This time I felt that he did not have the power to take my life again in his hands. This time I felt that I would fight against locking myself in with him, giving myself up wholly. I would not die a second time.
Having been so faithful to his image as I bad been, having loved his image in other men, having pursued the men who played piano, the men who talked brilliantly, intellectuals, teachers, philosophers, doctors, every man with blue eyes, every man with an adventurous life, every Don Juan—was it not to give him my absolute love at the end? Why did I draw away, draw away and at the same moment decide to give him the illusion he wanted—but not the abdication, not the absolute.
* * *
Six silver grey valises, the scent of tabac blond, the gleam of polished nails, the wave of immaculate hands. My father leaped down from the train and already he was beginning a story. “There was a woman on the train. She sent me a message. Would I have dinner with her? Knew all about me… had sung my songs in Norway. I was too tired, with this damnable lumbago coming on, and besides, I can’t put my mind on women any longer. I can only think of my betrothed.”
In the elevator he over-tipped the boy, he asked for news of the negro’s wife who had been sick, he advised a medicine, he ordered an appointment with the hairdresser for the next day, he took stock of the weather predictions, he ordered special biscuits and a strict vegetarian diet. The fruit had to be washed with sterilized water. And was the flautist still in the neighborhood, the one who used to keep him awake?
In the room he would not let me help him unpack his bags. He was cursing his lumbago. He seemed to have a fear of intimacy, almost as if he had hidden a crime in his valises.
“This old carcass must be subjugated,” he said.
He moved like a cat. Great softness. Yet when he wanted to he could show powerful muscles. He believed in concealing one’s strength.
We walked out into the sun, he looking like a Spanish grandee. He could look straight into the sun, and the tenseness of his will when he said, for instance, “I want,” made him rigid from head to foot, like silex.
As I watched him bending over so tenderly to pick up an insect from the road in order to lay it safely on a leaf, addressing this insect in a soft whimsical tone, preaching to it about its recklessness in thus crossing a road on which so many automobiles passed, I asked myself why it was that as a child I could only remember him as a cruel person. Why could I remember no tenderness or care on his part? Nothing but fits of angerand severity of annoyance when we were noisy, of beatings, of a cold, reserved face at meals.
As I watched him playing with the concierge’s dog I wondered why I could not remember him ever sitting down to play with us; I wondered whether this conception I had of my father’s cruelty was not entirely imaginary. I could not piece together his gentleness with animals and his hardness towards his children. He lived in his world like a scientist occupied with the phenomena of nature. The ways of insects aroused his curiosity; he liked to experiment, but the phenomena which the lives of his children offered, their secrets, their perplexities, had no interest for him, or rather they disturbed him.
It was really a kind of myopia of the soul.
The day after we arrived he was unable to move from his bed. He asked me to find him a pair of pyjamas with a Russian collar; they had to be pearl-grey and soft to touch, because he could not bear coarse textures.
I set out quickly to fulfill his wish. For the moment it seemed enormously important to me that the pyjamas should have a Russian collar and be made of delicate fabric. It seemed important not to offend the regal taste of the man who was lying stiffly in bed with sad, exacting, blue eyes always clouded with discontent.
Everybody in the little shops along the seashore declared that such pyjamas had never been seen.
I came back to him with the feeling that a day in which one of my father’s desires had not been fulfilled was a day wasted.
After the pyjamas a special German medicine had to be found. Samba, the elevator man, was sent out to hunt for it. The bus driver was dispatched to get a special brand of English crackers. Paris had to be phoned to make sure the musical magazines were being forwarded. Telegrams came, letters, telephone calls, Samba perspiring, the bus man covered with dust, the German medicine, the Russian pyjamas, postpone the hairdresser, order a special menu for dinner, Samba is there any mail, will you get the newspaper, no these won’t do all, telephone the doctor, he is having dinner, the spaghetti is overdone, Samba perspiring, the elevator running up and down…
There were no other guests in the hotel—the place seemed to be run expressly for us. The waiters gave us the most minute attention—our meals were brought to the room. Mosquito nettings were installed, the furniture was changed around, his own linen sheets with large initials were placed on the bed, his silver hair brushes on the dresser, the plumber ordered to subdue a noisy water pipe, the rusty shutters were oiled, the proprietor was informed that all hotel rooms should have double doors. Noise was his greatest enemy. His nerves, as vibrant as the strings of a violin, had endowed or cursed him with uncanny hearing. A fly in the room could pr
event him from sleeping. He had to put cotton in his ears in order to dull his over-sensitive hearing.
He began talking about his childhood—so vividly that I thought we were back in Spain. I could feel again the noonday heat, could hear the beaded curtains parting: footsteps on tiled floors, the cool, green shadows of shuttered rooms, women in white négligées, the smell of carnations, the holy water, the dried palms at the head of the bed, the pictures of the Vrgin in lace and satin, wicker arm chairs, the servants singing in the courtyard…
He used to read under his bed, by the light, a candle so that his father would not find him out. He had only fifty centimes a week. He had to make cigarettes out of straw. He was always hungry. He gave piano lessons to his father’s pupils, and while they played the piano with one hand, with the other hand they played… on other instruments. It went on like that—five or six lessons a day—and he never got tired. Finally he got the little girls to come without their pants, which made things easier. He cut holes in his pockets so that they could go on playing with their two free hands and nobody noticed anything amiss. He was getting more and more popular as a piano teacher.
We laughed together.
He didn’t have enough money for the Merry-go-round. His mother used to sew at night so that she could afford to rent a bicycle the next day.
He looked out of the window from his bed and saw the birds sitting on the telegraph wires—one on each wire.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll sing you the melody they make sitting up there.” And he sang it. “It’s all in the key of humor.”
“When I was a child I used to write stories in which I was always left an orphan and forced to face the world alone.”
“Did you want to get rid of me?” asked my father.
“I don’t think so. I think I only wanted to struggle with life alone. I think I suffered from pride, which prevented me from coming to you until I felt ready…”
“What happened in all those stories?”