The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  I knew only too well the blandness of the voice, the innocence of the eyes, the phrase tailed off with a smile which so melted the heart that one felt—well, if he is lying, I forgive him.

  While my father was talking I was chuckling to think that the very same tricks I had played on others were now being played on me. But there was this difference between us, that on certain days I could be as sincere, or more sincere, than the people who never told any lies.

  Suddenly I asked myself whether or not I wanted to be lied to. Both my father’s lies and mine were created to sustain the illusions of others. I was coming nearer and nearer to the realization that nobody had ever been grateful to me for my lies. Now they would know the truth. And yet I dreaded to hurt people. People may not appear to be injured, but they are, and fatally so, by certain truths. I had seen people crippled and broken from the knowledge of truth.

  The trouble lay not in my lying, but in the fact that we are all brought up on fairy tales. We all expect the marvellous, the miraculous. I had been more poisoned by fairy tales than anyone. I actually believed that I could work miracles. When anyone said I want, or I need, I set out then and there to fulfill this need, this desire. I decided to be the fairy tale. And to a great extent I succeeded.

  I could give each man the illusion that the world and I were exactly as he wished them to be. I wanted everyone to have what he wanted. The mistake I made was to encompass too much. I could carry one or two or three fairy tales out, but no more.

  What my father was attempting was very much the same. He was trying to create an ideal world for me in which Don Juan, for the sake of his daughter, renounced all women. But I could not be deceived by his inventions. I was too clairvoyant. That was the pity of it. I could not believe in that which I wanted others to believe in—in a world made as one wanted it, an ideal world. I no longer believe in an ideal world at all.

  And my father, what did he want and need? The illusion, which I was fostering, of a daughter who had never loved anyone but him? Or did he find it hard to believe me too? When I left him in the south, did he not doubt my reason for leaving him?

  When I went about dreaming of satisfying the world’s hunger for illusion did I not know it was the most painful, the most insatiable hunger? Did I not know too that I suffered from doubt, and that although I was able to work miracles for others I had no faith that the fairy tale would ever work out for myself? Even the gifts I received were difficult for me to love, because I knew that they would soon be taken away from me, just as my father had been taken away from me when I loved him so passionately, just as every home I had as a child had been disrupted, sold, lost, just as every country I became attached to was soon changed for another country, just as all my childhood had been loss, change, instability. Even as a child, when I was sailing to America after the loss of my grandmother, I had promised myself never to love anybody again so as not to suffer so much.

  * * *

  When I entered his house which was all in brown, brown wood on the walls, brown rugs, brown furniture, I thought of Spengler writing about brown as the color of philosophy.

  His windows were not open on the street, he had no use for the street, and so he had made the windows of stained glass. He lived within the heart of his own home as Orientals live within their citadel. Out of reach of passers-by. The house might have been anywhere—in England, Holland, Germany, America. There was no stamp of nationality upon it, no air from the outside. It was the house of the self, the house of his thoughts. The wall of the self—erected without connection with the crowd, or country or race.

  He was still taking his siesta. I sat near the long range of files, the long, beautiful, neat rows of files, with names which set me dreaming: China, Science, Photography, Ancient Instruments, Egypt, Morocco, Cancer, Radio, Inventions, The Guitar, Spain. It required hours of work every day: newspapers and magazines had to be read and clippings cut out, dated, glued. He wove a veritable spider web about himself. No man was ever more completely installed in the realm of possessions.

  He spent hours inventing new ways of filling his cigarette holder with an anti-nicotine filter. He bought drugs in whole-sale quantities. His closets were filled with photographs, with supplies of writing paper and medicines sufficient to last for years. It was as if he feared to find himself suddenly empty-handed. His house was a store-house of supplies which revealed his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the improvised, the unexpected. He was a man who had prepared a fortress against need, against war, change, loss, etc.

  Were Paris to be invaded to-morrow my father could go on living off his supply of Quaker Oats, biscuits, tonics, strichnine injections, iodine, etc. He could never use up the shirts he owned, the underwear, the hair lotions, the tooth-paste, the writing paper, the pencils…

  Objects, it is true, are a great protection against ghosts. A piece of fur, a bottle of bath salts, my satin négligée, had often consoled and comforted me against invisible sorrows and fears. To turn on the light in my room, to lie on the white fur bed, to put my hand on the telephone and call some one, anyone, to turn on the water for a bath, to throw into the bath sandalwood salts, all this had the magical power of making the world warmer, sweeter. The vague anxieties, premonitions, haunting, invisible misfortunes hanging over me thus evaporated. At night, in the dark, I could touch the telephone and say to myself: I can turn the little disk and a voice will answer. A voice I don’t know. But it will be a real voice, and I will know that I am not gone yet, that the cruelty of human beings has not killed me, that to-morrow there will be a dawn, the sun will shine, the radiators will whistle, the maid will bring hot coffee, and death will be postponed.

  In proportion to my father’s capacity for becoming invisible, untouchable, unattainable, in proportion to his capacity for metamorphosis, for disappearance even, he had made the most solid house, the strongest walls, the heaviest furniture, the most heavily loaded bookcases, the most heavily covered walls, the most heavily filled linen closets, the most completely filled and catalogued universe. Everything to testify to his presence, his duration, his signature to a contract to remain on earth, visible at moments. All this he promised, with his house, his possessions, his servants, his luxurious car. It was a lease, a lease on life. He lives in his own house, the neighbors could say, it may be he will stay a while. It took so much to persuade him to stay. At bottom life had offended him, failed him, like a shallow mistress. He didn’t have much use for it, but he would not spit on it. He was an aristocrat. His body continued to be courteous. But no one could tame his wandering spirit. There were consolations. Out of contempt for life, he seemed to be saying, for big sorrows there are consolations, things like bath salts and fur bed-covers. No more.

  In my mind I saw him asleep upstairs, with his elbow under his chin, in the most uncomfortable position, one he had finally trained himself to hold so that he would never sleep with his mouth open, because that was ugly. I saw him asleep without a pillow, because a pillow under the head brought wrinkles. I pictured the bottle of alcohol which my mother had laughingly said, when I was a child, my father bottled himself in at night in order to keep young…

  Now he was before me, and he was doing a stunt which used to make me laugh wildly when we were living in Brussels. He used to come in and imitate the cackles of a hen about to lay an egg. His cries were comical. He would produce one egg after another, which made the three of us laugh wildly. To-day he was doing it just as of old, but I was no longer able to laugh. Suddenly it occurred to me that his gaiety had never been genuine. It was simulated. It was for others. He did not feel it himself. It was a pretense, and realizing it, I felt sad.

  After this prank he left me to wash his hands. He washed his hands after everything he did. He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself.

  The fear of microbes played a very important part in his life. The fear of microbes was his rational explanation. The fruit had to be washed with filtered water. The water had to be fil
tered for drinking. His mouth must be disinfected. The silverware had to be passed over an alcohol lamp before using it. He washed his hands continuously. He bathed meticulously. He never ate the part of the bread which his fingers had touched.

  Thus it seemed to me had people washed in the baptismal waters of rivers all through the ages, hut they had always known that it was to wash away the traces of sin.

  My father had never imagined that he was trying to cleanse his soul in the waters of his bathroom, to wash it of his lies, his deceptions, his callousness. The microbe for him was a danger to the body. He did not study the microbe of conscience which we carry within us.

  When I saw him washing his hands, as I watched the soap foaming, I could see him again arriving behind stage at the concert hall in Berlin, with his fur-lined coat and white silk scarf, and being immediately surrounded by women. I seven years old, sitting in the front row with my mother and brothers, in a starched dress and white gloves, trembling a little because my father had said: “And above all, don’t make a cheap family show of your enthusiasm. Clap discreetly. Don’t have people notice that the pianist’s children are clapping away like a bh of jolly, noisy peasants.” This enthusiasm which was to be held in check was a great burden for child’s soul. I had never been able to curb a joy a sorrow; to restrain oneself meant to kill, to bury. This cemetery of strangled emotions—was it this my father was trying to wash away? And the day I told him I was pregnant and he said: “Now you’re worth less on the market as a woman…”—was this being washed away? No thought or insight into the feelings of others. Incapable of reading into others’ feelings, passing from extremes of hardness to weakness; no intermediate stage of human feelings, but extreme poles of emotions which never made the human equation… too hot or too cold, blood cold and heart weak, blood hot and heart cold…

  While he was washing his hands with that expression I had seen on the faces of people in India thrust into the Ganges, of Egyptians plunged into the Nile, of Negroes dipped into the Mississippi, I saw the fruit being washed for his lunch and mineral water poured into his glass. Sterilized water to wash away the microbes, but his soul unwashed, unwashable, yearning to be free of the microbe of conscience… All the water running from the modern tap, running, floating in this modern bathroom, all the rivers of Egypt, of India, of America… and he unwashed… All the taps open in the modern world, and every man standing before it washing his modern body, washing… washing… washing… A drop ofholy water with which to exorcise the guilt.

  Hands washed over and over again in the hope of a miracle, and no miracle comes from the taps of modern washstands, no holy water flows through leaden pipes, no holy water flows under the bridges of Paris because the man standing at the tap has no faith and no awareness of his soul: he believes he is merely washing the stain of microbes from his hands…

  * * *

  My father came in unexpectedly and saw that the outline of rouge on my lips was slightly blurred by kisses just received. My father talked rapidly, breathlessly, and left very hurriedly. I wanted to stop him and ask him to give me back my soul. I hated him for the way he descended the stairs as if he had been cast out, wounded by jealousy. I hated him because I could not remain detached, could not remain standing at the top of the stairs watching him depart. I felt myself going down with him, within him, because his pain and flight were so familiar to me. I descended with him, and lost myself, passed into him, became one with him like his shadow. I felt my self growing empty, and dissolving, and passing into him. I knew that when he reached the street he would hail a taxi even though it was a forbidden luxury. I knew that once in the taxi he would feel a certain relief in having again escaped from the place, the person who had inflicted the wound. There was always a possibility of removing one’s self physically. I knew he would sit in the taxi entranced with the speed of it, and abandon himself to rebellion: “I won’t see her again. I don’t want to be hurt any more.”

  The organ grinder would play and the pain would gnaw deeper, hotter, bitterer, because even tuneless music could dissolve the crust we build around our feelings. Coming out of the taxi he would curse the leaden day which engraves its color on our mood, and from which we can never escape because we are born inextricably woven into the texture, color and temperature of nature. p align=”JUSTIFY” height=”0” width=”24” He would curse the mood which dispossessed him of his own soul, and the tragic sense of life which distorted trees, faces, events, like one long, continuous nightmare. He would overtip the taxi driver because he imagined he might be suffering too, and that perhaps a gift and a smile might prevent him from committing suicide. He would have the feeling in so doing that he had relieved the sufferings of mankind. Then he would breathe a little more lightly. Giving to the taxi driver’s wife and crippled children was to give to his suffering self the gift he wished some one would make him—of a smile and of thoughtfulness.

  I wanted to beg my father to tell me that he had done something else, something different from what I would have done. I wanted to beg him to assure me I had stayed at the top of the stairs.

  But I was not there. We were standing in the street, looking at our empty pocketbooks and wondering wistfully why we were not given, as we gave others, at least the illusion of perfection. We lamented our isolation, yet we were the ones who had run away. The next time we would meet we would show false, high-pitched gaiety and our sensitive ears would catch the sound of the effort. This gaiety which was false, which made him smile with only half of his mouth, was the same gaiety I used on dark days as my last gift.

  I wanted to reach out to my father and warn him. I wanted to reassure him and caress him. But everything about him was fluttering like a bird that had flown into a room by mistake, flying recklessly and blindly in utter terror. A bird bruising itself against wall and furniture while one stands there mute and compassionate. A terror so great that it did not sense one’s pity, and when one opened the window to allow it to escape it interpreted the gesture as a menace. To run away from its own terror it flew wildly against the window and crushed its feathers.

  Don’t flutter so blindly, my father!

  Or perhaps during that taxi ride he had arranged to sever himself from the situation which caused him pain. I knew how he would plan his escape. He was planning a long trip, he was writing letters, addressing the flowers, waving good-byes, enacting the departure. He was cutting all the cords as if he were a ship being launched, slipping down the ways… He would sever the tie, that was simple. A big sabre cut, once and for all, and he would be free. That would be a fancy too, as fanciful as the idea that music, this music which filled the air we breathed, was silenced when the radio was turned off. Life could not be sliced to separate the regions of pain from those of joy. Everything that happened to us happened deep down, where it could not be hacked away.

  * * *

  I grew suddenly tired of seeing my father always in profile, of seeing him always walking on the edge of circles, of seeing him always elusive, always covering essentials with long, dizzy phrases about nothing. The fluidity, the evasiveness, the deviations made his life a shadow picture. He never met life full face. His eyes never rested on anything, they were always in flight. His face was in flight. His hands were in flight. I never saw them lying still, but always curving like autumn leaves over a fire, curlind uncurling. Thinking of him I could picture him only in motion, either about to leave, or about to arrive; I could see better than anything else, as he was leaving, his back, the way his hair came to a point on his neck, the birth mark on his neck. I had a three-quarter picture of him taking leave, his face partly turned towards the door, his hand stretched to say good-bye. In his own home the sound of his steps was unreal—he could arrive without being heard.

  When I got into the taxi I had a feeling that I was going to bring the tiger in my father out into the open. I was tired of his secret muscles, his feline mysteries, his ballet dancing. I told myself I would begin by telling him the whole truth, and demand the
same of him. I would struggle to build up a new relationship.

  He was leaving for a concert with a young violinist. He had asked me to rent a private compartment in which he said he wanted to prepare some notes for a conference. When I brought the ticket to him I said I knew that the compartment would be put to other uses. He leaped up in great anger and said: “You suspect me, you suspect me?”

  But he refused to admit that he had been lying. He was pale with anger. No one ever doubted him before—so he said. To be doubted blinded him with anger. He was not concerned with the truth or falsity of the situation. He was concerned with the injury and insult I was guilty of, by doubting him.

  “You’re demolishing everything,” he said.

  “What I’m demolishing was not solid,” I answered. “Let’s make a new beginning. We created nothing together except a sand pile into which both of us sink now and then with doubts. I am not a child. I cannot believe your stories.”

  He grew still more pale and angry. What shone out of his angry eye was pride in his stories, pride in his ideal self, pride in his delusions. And he was offended. He did not stop to ask himself if I were right. I could not be right. I could see, that for the moment at any rate, he believed implicitly in the stories he had told me. If he had not believed in them so firmly he would have been humiliated to see himself as a poor comedian, a man who could not deceive even his own daughter.

  “You shouldn’t be offended,” I said. “Not to be able to deceive your own daughter is no disgrace. It’s precisely because I have told you so many lies myself that I can’t be lied to.”

  “Now,” he said, “you’re accusing me of being a Don Juan.”

  “I accuse you of nothing. I am only asking for the truth.”

  “What truth?” he said. “I am a moral being, far more moral than you.”