The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  Although in reality he had not abandoned me, but simply resumed his artificial role. I felt impelled to act out the scene of abandon from beginning to end. I wept at the isolation in which my father’s superficiality left me. I told him I had surrendered all my friends and activities for him. I told him I could not live on the talks we had in his salon. Each phrase I uttered was almost automatic.

  It was the scene I knew best, the one most familiar to me even though it had become an utter lie. It was the same scene which had impressed itself on me as a child, and out of which I had made a life pattern. As I talked with tears in my eyes, I pitied myself for having loved and trusted my father again, for having given myself to him, for having expected everything from him. At the same time I knew that this was not true. My mind ran in two directions as I talked, and so did my feelings. I continued the habitual scene of pain: “I cannot live this way, I need warmth and gestures. I do not believe in love which does not express itself. I do not believe in life unless it has continuity.” And the other voice he could not hear saying: “I gave myself to you once, and you hurt me. I am glad I did not give myself to you again. Deep down I have no faith at all in you, as a human being.”

  He received all this very sadly. Said he had never been able to do two things at once: either he was a human being in love, obsessed with feeling, pouring all of himself into a relationship, or he was the pianist Paris loved who had to play the role of homme du monde.

  I wanted to laugh and say: “You know that’s all untrue, I never isolated myself at all.” But the scene which I acted best and felt the best was that of abandon. I felt impelled to act it over and over again. I knew all the phrases. I was familiar with the emotions it aroused. It came so easily to me, even though I knew all the time that, except for the moment when he left us years ago, I had never really experienced abandon except by way of my imagination, except through my fear of it, through my misinterpretation of reality.

  There seemed to be a memory deeper than the usual one, a memory in the tissues and cells of the body on which we tattoo certain scenes which give a shape to one’s soul and life habits. It was in this way I remembered most vividly that as a child a man had tortured me; still I could not help feeling tortured or interpreting the world to-day as it had appeared to me then in the light of my misunderstanding of people’s motives. I could not help telling my father that he was destroying my absolute love; yet I knew this was not true because it was not he who was my absolut love. But this statement was untrue only in time; that is, it was my father who had endangered my faith in the absolute, it was his behaviour which I did not understand as a child which destroyed my faith in life and in love.

  I knew I had deceived my father as to the extent of my love, but the thought in my mind was: what would I be feeling now if I had entrusted all my happiness to my father, if I had truly depended on him for joy and sustenance? I would be thoroughly despairing and ready to die. This thought increased my pain, and my face showed such anguish that my father was overwhelmed.

  After this scene he continued his marionette life. Life was a chain of concerts, of soirées, of hairdressers and shirtmakers, of correspondence, of newspaper clippings, of scrap books being fed, of files being fattened, of telephone calls during which he talked like a man interested in who would attend the funeral more than the fact of death itself. He liked me to visit him in my astrakhan fur, shedding perfume, so that he might introduce me as a Polish princess. The women were distressed. I seemed to have been given a privileged place which had never been offered to them. They felt uneasy and wondered if their own place was endangered, diminished, why it was that little noses, faience eyes, porcelain hands, marquise feet and lace gestures did not retain his attention as they had before.

  I began to hate him. The hatred for the being you most adore, who does not escape you in a deep way, through subterranean or tragic routes, but who evaporates into frivolity, who can disguise his soul not by going away, but by dancing, by dancing on a polished floor.

  I was filled with doubts. I saw in him a perpetually haunting shadow of something he was not. This man that he was not, or that he refused to continue to be, interfered with my knowledge of him, with my actual knowledge. These encounters where love never reached understanding, where all things ended in clash and frustration, this love which created nothing, this love twisted inside of me like a snake, this love devoured me, this love obsessed me. It was the coil of it which strangled my life. As soon as I lost him, I wanted him; as soon as he was away I began again to imagine him as he might be. I spent hours imagining my father coming to me and talking to me deeply.

  Imagining nights of talk wherein we turned over the brilliant facets of our lives as in a game, playing with all that happened, playing with all we knew, playing with new ideas, sharing, giving, discovering, pouring out, exposing the true self as it could only be exposed and given to the twin, to one’s double. I imagined tenderness and understanding.

  Imagined! Like a contagious disease withering my actual life, this imaginary meeting, imaginary talk, on which I spent hours and hours of inventiveness. As soon as he came I was frustrated, silenced. His talk would be empty, and above all, marginal. His whole ingenuity was spent making circles, in walking on the margin of everything vital, in eluding it. The more direct I grew, the more marginal he became, dancing on the edge of everything I said. Remaining there so adroitly by an accumulation of descriptions of nothing, by a swift chain of puerile events, by long speeches about trivialities, by lengthy expansions of empty facts.

  This ghost of my potential father tormented me like a hunger for something which I knew had been invented or created solely by myself, but which I feared might never take human shape. Where was the man I really loved? The windows he had opened in the south had been windows on the past. The present or the future seemed to terrify him. Nothing was essential but to retain avenues of escape.

  This constant yearning for the man beyond the mask, this disregard of the mask was also a disregard of the harm which the wearing of a mask inevitably produced. It was difficult for me to believe, as others did, that the mask tainted the blood, that the colors of the mask could run into the colors of nature and poison it. I could not believe that, like the woman who was painted in gold and who died of the poison, the mask and the flesh could melt into each other and bring on infection.

  My love was based on faith in the purity of one’s own nature. It made me oblivious of the deformities which could be produced in the soul by the wearing of a mask. It caused me to disregard the deterioration that might affect the real face, the habits which the mask could form if worn for too long a time. I could not believe that if one pretended indifference long enough, the germ of indifference could finally grow, that the soul could be discolored by long pretense, that there could come a moment when the mask and the man melted into one another, that confusion between them corroded the vital core, destroyed the core…

  This deterioration in my father I could not yet believe in. I expected the miracle to happen. So many times it had happened to me to see the hardness of a face fall, the curtain over the eyes draw away, the false voice change, and to be allowed to enter by my vision into the true self of others… It was exactly as if the person confronted had been the monster of the fairy tales, and that the hair, the horns, the leather skin had fallen away to disclose a new man, miraculously handsome.

  I always knew why and where the man had become the monster. I loved that moment when the mask fell away.

  * * *

  When I was sixteen I could feel his visitations very much as the mystics experienced the presence of their god. He would descend on me oftener when I was dancing or laughing. He came like a blight, because when I felt his presence, I felt a curtain of criticism covering all things. I looked through his eyes instead of my own. My mother always said laugh and dance, but my father in me was contemptuous. When his seriousness fell on me I knew I was seeing the world with his cold, blue eyes. That was not me. I was si
xteen and my mother had made me an Alice blue dress. “Oh, leave your books alone and go to the dance!” she said. I was pleased with the delicate frills on my dress, with the high heels on my slippers, the curls on my head. I wanted to dance.

  I did not know then that my father could not dance.

  At twenty-five I was a dancer. I was dancing on the stage. I had just begun the first number, no longer intimidated by the public. The Spanish music carried me away, whirled me into a state of delirium. I was dancing. I could feel the audience surrendering to me. I was dancing, carrying away their eyes, their senses, into my spinning and whirling.

  My eyes fell on the front row. I saw my father there. I saw his pale face half-hidden behind a program. He was holding a program in front of his face in order not to be recognized. But I knew his hair, his brow, his eyes. It was my father. My steps faltered. I lost my rhythm. I grew dizzy. For a moment only. Then I swung around and began again, stamping my feet, stamping. I never looked at him again. I danced madly, wildly. I knew he was there.

  Flowers. Hands to shake. Music. Pleasure. Interviews. Photographs. Carnation perfume. Jewelry. Dresses scattered in the dressing room like enormous bell flowers. swollen like sails. Petticoats still dancing. Castanets still echoing. Hands to shake. Flowers. Words. Beautiful. Marvellous. Beautiful. Marvellous. Come with my ballet to Cairo. Something new in dancing. The hands said so much. When you came out front, close to the audience, with eyes laughing, and looked at the audience fully, directly, that was electrical. Flowers. Words. Something new in dancing.

  I so hot. I all wet, under the dress, the paint, the lace, the flowers, so hot and broken. My father was out there in the front row, without a smile, like an angry statue. Angry? Why angry? I had danced well. The words still poured over me. “Do you know what you are? You are ART. Your name could be used as a definition of art.” My father was sitting in the front row. I was hot and tired. I wanted to close my eyes so heavy with paint. The Hindu dancer had said it was not necessary to paint the eyelashes forthe stage. I must remember that. Out into the cold. Covered with fur and Spanish shawls, but the cold slipped inside them insidiously. Home. I awoke the next day paralyzed. Dancing died. I never danced again.

  When I saw my father later I found out he had never been there. I asked him if we could spend ourChristmas dancing. Then I saw him, as I had divined him, sitting cold and formal, and I was angry at the prison walls of his severity. I danced in defiance of his mood, but bitterly, to assert my own self distinct from his. He did not dance, nor drink, nor smile.

  As soon as I left him everything began to sing again. Everybody I passed in the street seemed like a music box. I heard the street organ, the singing of the wheels rolling. Motion was music. My father was the musician, but in life he arrested music. Music melts all the separate partsof our bodies together. Every rusty fragment, every scattered piece could be melted into one by rhythm. A note was a whole, and it was in motion, ascending or descending, swelling in fullness or thrown away, thrown out in the air, but always moving.

  As soon as I left my father I heard music again. It was falling from the trees, pouring from throats, twinkling from the street lamps, sliding down the gutter. It was my faith in the world which danced again. It was the expectation of miracles which made every misery sound to me like part of a symphony.

  Not separateness but oneness was music. Let me walk alone into the music of my faith. When I am with you the world is still and silent.

  You give the command for stillness, and life stops like a clock that has fallen. You draw geometric lines around liquid forms, and that which you extract from the chaos is already crystallized.

  As soon as I leave youeverything fixed falls again into waves, tides, is transformed into water and flows. I hear my heart beating again with great disorder. I hear the music of my gestures, and my feet begin to run as music runs and leaps. Music does not climb stairways. Music runs and I run with it. Faith makes music come out of the trees, out of wood, out of ivory.

  I could never dance around you, my father, I could never dance around you!

  You held the conductor’s stick, but no music could come from the orchestra because of your severity. As soon as you left my heart beat in great disorder. Everything melted into music, and I could dance through the streets singing, without an orchestra leader. I could dance and sing.

  Walking down the Rue Saturne I heard the students of the Conservatory playing the Sonate en Ré Mineur of Bach. I also heard my mother’s beautiful voice singing Schumann’s J’ai pardonné, which aroused me so deeply that it would make me sob. Did I sense the whole tragedy then? J’ai pardonné… Strange how my mother, who had never forgiven my father, could sing that song more movingly than anything else she sang.

  Walking down the Rue Saturne I was singing J’ai pardonné under my breath and thinking at the same time how I hated this street because it was the one I always walked through on my way to my father’s house. So often on winter evenings I came out of his luxurious house, heated like a hot-house, where I had seen him pale and tense, at work upon some trifling matter which he took very seriously. Very neat, in his silk dressing gown, with brilliantine in his hair, polished nails, delicate beads of perspiration on his brow—from rehearsing a sonata with a violinist. Or else just coming down from his siesta.

  This siesta he took with religious care, as if the preservation of his life depended on it. At bottom he felt life to be a danger, a process not of growth but of deterioration. To love too wildly, he said, to talk too much, to laugh too much, was a wasting of one’s energy. Life was an enemy to him, and every sign of its wear and tear gave him anxiety. He could not bear a crack in the ceiling, a bit of paint worn away, a stairway worn threadbare, a nail hole in the wall, a faded spot on the wall paper. Since he never lived wholly in the moment a part of him was already preparing for the morrow. To economize his strength he would bring himself to a stop—for the sake of to-morrow.

  When I saw my father coming out of his room after his siesta I always had the feeling that here was a man who had preserved himself, who was making artificial efforts to delay the process of growth, fruition, decay, disintegration, which is organic and inevitable. He was delaying death by preserving himself from life; it was the fear of life and the effort made to avoid life which used his strength. Living never wore one out as much as the effort not to live. If one lived fully and freely one also could rest fully and deeply. Not trusting himself to life, not abandoning himself, he could not sink into sleep without fear of death…

  I always left his house with a feeling of having come near to death, because everything there was clearly a fight against death.

  I left the neatest, the most spotless street of Paris where the gardeners were occupied in clipping and trimming a few rare potted bushes in smv

  The light was very strong on the new street sign. I walked up to it. Yes, there was a sign which said: Anciennement Rue Saturne now changed to…

  Now changed. Something effaced, something lost. I wished I were a street. I wished my name could be changed and that I might change with the city, that certain houses standing eternally inside of me might be finally torn down, that certain streets forever marked in me might have their names changed, that the whole city of the past might disappear, the whole topography change as after an earthquake or a war—that the map of my life be lost. To change as Paris changed. Streets could die out. New houses could be erected. But always what I had heard, seen, experienced would continue to walk with me down streets with changed names in the labyrinth of loss and change where nothing could be forgotten…

  To be able to catch all that walked with me to my father’s house could be done only in one great flash, in one instant of absolute understanding. Each step along the Rue Saturne corresponded to a million steps I had taken during my life, the thousands of steps which had taken me from France to Germany, from Belgium to Spain, from Spain to America, from our apartment in New York, where my mother sang J’ai pardonné to the Americ
an school where I told the children I had been all around the world, from there to White Plains where I spent all my time going and coming from the Public Library, from all the studios of American artists, where I once posed, to the dismal shops on Sixth Avenue where I worked as a dress model, back to White Plains where I wrote my first novel. from Paris where I blossomed into womanhood to Italy, to Switzerland. A thousand steps into cafés, night clubs, movies, and above all, away from my father who lived in the same city. Away from him by living in a different quarter, by living a life so different from his that I knew I would never meet him there. I finally lost track of him, my memory of him.

  In the same city in which he lived a thousand steps took me further away from him than a trip to India. No trip to Egypt, but a different milieu, different ideas, different people—the people and places he did not like, the ideas he did not like.

  Walking in the rain to pass before my father’s house, looking up at the stained-glass window, thinking: I have at last eluded you. I am a woman you do not know. Where it is I take my pleasure, where it is I laugh, you don’t know. Part of my life you never entered. Parts of my life were poisoned by your presence, your will, your ideals. I who stand here am not your daughter, nor my mother’s daughter. It is the me who escaped the stigmata of parental love.

  Standing there asserting the self that was not sunk in my love of him. Standing in the rain with tired eyes.

  To escape him I had run away to the other end of the world. To be free of his memory I had run away to places where he never went. I had lost him, finally, by living in the opposite direction from him. I sought out the failures because he didn’t like those who stuttered, those who stumbled; I sought out the ugly because he tureight=”s face away; I sought out the weak because they irritated him. I sought out chaos because he insisted on logic. I travelled away from him to the whore Bijoux on the Rue Fontaine, an enormous coal-eyed whore with black painted eyelids and thickly powdered face, who was the quintessence of all whores. So far from my father’s marquises in porcelain to the animal glow of Bijoux’s eyes, the passivity of her body, the nerveless, passive whore flesh. Because my love of him was so great, my frustrated, defeated love, I travelled to the other end of life, to the drab, the loose, the weak, the wine-stained, wine-soggy men in whom I was sure not to find the least trace of him. No trace of him anywhere along the Boulevard de Clichy where the market people passed with their vegetable carts; no trace of him at two in the morning in the little café opposite the Trinité; no trace of him in the sordid neighborhood of the Boulevard Jean-Jaures; no trace of him in the cinema du quartier, in the bals musette, in the burlesque theatre. Never anyone who had heard of him. Never anyone who smelled like him. Never a voice like his. To lose him I almost had to lose myself. Sometimes, sitting at a stained and dirty table, I would ask myself: “Why am I here? How did I get here? How is it I am marketing in this street, next to a woman with a wart-covered face, next to a femme de ménage with a stump for fingers, next to drunkards and beggars?”