The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  * * *

  nbsp;

  Mischa came to the Voice limping, but be only talked about his hand. He can no longer play the ‘cello. His hand is stiff. He is mute about his leg. His mother was a Cossack woman, who rode horseback. His father was obsessed with hunting. He himself had never wanted woman, except when they wore red dresses. Then he felt like biting them. Woman seemed to him something soft and blind, something to hide into. When he saw a woman he wanted to become small and hide in her. He used to call his mother, in Russian, his Holy Secret. His hand had been twisted, cramped for many years. He holds it out to show the Voice. He talks constantly about his hand, how it feels, if it is stiffer to-day than yesterday. He played the ‘cello when he was very young. He was a child prodigy. He remembers early concerts, and his mother afterwards taking him between her large, strong horse-woman’s knees and caressing him with pleasure because he had played well. His mother was like no woman he had ever seen. She had long, black hair which she liked to wear down when she was at home, a sort of forest of black hair in which he would hide his face. His good-night kiss was never anywhere but inside this black hair. Absolute blackness then, the hair tickling his eyelashes and getting inside his mouth. Hair so violent and strong, with a smell that made him dizzy, hair that entwined itself around him. His mother looked like a Medusa. Her hair must have been made of snakes. Her face, somehow, fixed into one expression. The eyes never blinked, he believes. She kept them open on one. And the voice of a man, and a bass laughter. A laughter that lasted longer than any he had ever heard. He could hear it from his bed at night. He dreamed of climbing with the help of his mother’s long, heavy hair to a place where his father could not reach him. His father, all in leather, armed with guns, carrying wounded blood-dripping animals, surrounded with dogs. It seemed to Mischa that he had found his mother’s voice in the ‘cello. There were deep notes in the ‘cello which sounded and resounded in him like his mother’s voice.

  For days after this Mischa does not talk. He cannot play the ‘cello, he cannot move his hand freely, and there are things he doesn’t want the Voice to know. But he feels that the Voice is watching, feeling his way deftly into his secrets. He feels that the Voice is not convinced at all that it is the hand which causes Mischa’s suffering. He feels slowly surrounded with intricate questions, pressed closer with unexpected associations. He feels like a criminal, but he cannot remember the crime. The Voice envelops him in questions. The Voice has become a digger. Mischa feels a great anguish, as if he had committed a crime and were now concealing it. And he cannot remember what it is. He feels the place where it is buried. What is buried? There, under the flesh, as it were, at the very bottom of a murky smouldering mud well, there is something buried. Something which the Voice pushes him towards. An image. What? An image of his mother, his magnificent Medusa mother standing in her room. He is a little boy of eight or so. He had not been able to sleep. He had limped quietly to her room and knocked very faintly at her door. She had not heard his knock. He had opened the door very slowly. He knew his father was not there, that he was out hunting. His mother was standing before him, very tall, and in a long white robe, her nightgown. And on this white robe there was a blood stain. He had seen the stain. He had smelled the blood on her. He had cried out hysterically. He ran out of her room to look for the father. He picked up a riding whip. His father was returning from the hunt. He was standing at the door, taking off his leather coat, laying down his gun. There was a blood stain on his sleeve. The animals he had killed were lying in the hall. The dogs were still barking, outside. Mischa went up to his father and struck him, struck at the man who had stained his mother’s white robe with blood, who had hunted her as he hunted the animals.

  As he told this he held up before him the stiffened hand.

  He thought the Voice would speak about the hand, but the Voice asked him: “And the lameness?”

  Mischa winced and turned his face away. Behind this that he told lay his secret. Behind the façade of the image, the scene which he saw so clearly, lay a terrain of broken, pointed, cutting fragments, and on this a dead leg. A heavy dead leg, like some discarded object. But not buried. It had always lain there, unburied. Dead. He was more aware of it than of anything about his life. The dead leg rested right across the whole body. Wooden. He had nailed his hand on it. The life, the present, the colors, the music, women, were all hung around this dead leg, like furniture, pictures. Not alive. There had never been any Mischa. Mischa was in that leg, imprisoned, bound in it, lying on an abandoned plot, and the intense presence of it turned everything else into a transparent film: behind every form of transparency lay the leg which carried him. A casket in which he had enclosed his faith, his impulses, his desires. The pain of lameness, of knowing, even as a child, that one carries a fragment of the death in one. To live with a dead fragment of oneself, as if carrying a tomb around with one. The fierce graspingness of death already setting in. To be crippled, humiliated, left out of games, not to be able to ride horseback. The lameness concealed at concerts, but not before woman. The wounded look in the fixed glance of the mother when she watched him walk. Her love for him not joyous, heavy with compassion. When she kissed others she radiated an animal pride, her nostrils quivered. When she kissed Mischa it was as if part of her died at the very touch of him, in answer to the part in him that was dead. Mischa trembled when he had to walk across a room. He hated women because of his lameness, because they too closed a fierce part of themselves when they approached him, made themselves more tender, more attenuated, and looked at him as his mother had looked at him. He was ashamed. So terribly ashamed. The Voice said very gently: “You preferred to offer your hurt hand to people’s eyes. You offered the whole world your hurt hand. You talked about your hand. You showed your hand so no one would notice the lameness. The hand did not shame you. The hand that struck your father was rightfully, humanly punished by immobility.”

  Mischa was weeping, his face turned to the wall. Now that he looked at the lameness, the leg seemed to become less dead, less separate from him. The leg was not so heavy, not so gruesome, as this secret of the pain he had enclosed in it, his fear and pain before the leg. Every nerve and cell in him tense with the fear of discovery, tense with rigid pretending, dissolved in new tears before the fact which appeared smaller, less dark, less oppressive. The crime and the secret did not seem so great as when he watched over its tomb. The pain was not so much like a monster now, but a simple, human sorrow. With the tears the great tension all through the body softened. He was a cripple. But he had committed no crime. He had struck his father, but his father had laughed at the scene—and his mother too. They had hurt him more than he had hurt them. The tears were like a river carrying away the rigid tension. The walls he had erected, the nightmares he had buried over and over again in his being, the tightness of fear, the knots in his nerves, all dissolving. Everything was washed away. And the big knot in his hand, that was loosen teno. It was the same knot. The muted hand that could no longer draw his mother’s voice out of the ‘cello. The static hand that could no longer strike. The crippled hand for the world to look at, while the real shamed Mischa walked surreptitiously before them hoping to conceal his dead leg from the world.

  Exaltation lifted him from the couch, out of the room. He was running out of this room filled with knowing eyes, through the softly carpeted hall, passing all the rooms filled with revelations, to the red lights that bore him down to the street.

  In the street he did not feel the sea of ice, slush and sleet. The warmth in him was like a fire that would never go out. He was singing.

  * * *

  Under his feet, in the underground drug store, Djuna sat eating at the counter. The young man was mixing his sallies with the drinks: “Are you a show girl too?” he asked her. The sea elephant, owner of the place, swam heavily toward her with a box: “I kept this box for you, I thought you would like it. It smells good.” The sea elephant sank behind the counter, behind waves of perfume bottles
, talcum powder, candy packages, cigar boxes. She was left with the sandal wood box in her arms.

  She carried it through the lobby. The lobby was full of waiting people, lumped there, waiting without impatience, reading, muttering, meditating, sleeping.

  Every time she passed through the lobby her throat tightened. Behind every chair, every palm tree, every sofa, every face half-seen in the dim light of the lobby, she feared to recognize some one she knew. Some one out of the past. She could repeat to herself as she passed that they were all lost, that in the enormous city they had lost her tracks. She had crossed the ocean, destroyed their addresses. Stretches of long years and of sea lay between that first half of her life. The city had swallowed them. Yet each time she crossed the lobby she felt the same apprehension. She feared the return of the past. They sat in the lobby waiting, waiting for a crevice, a passage-way back into her life. Waiting to introduce themselves again. They had left their names at the desk. So many of them.

  They were waiting to be admitted. They wanted to come upstairs and enter her present life. Djuna herself did not understand why this should be such an intolerable idea. Perhaps not so much their coming back, if they came for a visit and sat in a chair and talked. But they might act like a sea rushing forward and sweeping her back again into the undertows of early darkness. Surely she had thrown them out with the broken toys, but they sat there, threatening to sweep her back. Stuffed, with glass eyes, from a slower world, they look at her on this other level of swifter rhythms, and they reach with dead arms around her. She wanted to escape them in elevators which flew up and down like great, swift birds of variety and change. Moving among many rooms, many people, among great secrets and feverish happenings. Their tentacles like the tentacles of earth waiting for the return to where she came from. Could all escape be an illusion? That was her fear, seeing duplicates of the people who had filled her early world.

  She would go and have her hair washed, which was as good as weeping. The water runs softly through the roots of the being, like warm rain, and washes away everything. One falls into rhythm again. She would have her hair washed and feel this simple flow of life through the hair. She passed into the hair-washer’s cubicle, out of the lobby of the waiting past.

  Djuna was soon poised again on the threshold, suspended, faced with the same fear of traversing the lobby. There was a moment of extraordinary silence in the enormous hotel; she could not tell if it was in her. A moment of extraordinary slowness of motion. Then came a dull, powerful sound outside. A heavy sound but dull, without echo. Djuna felt the shock in her body. The shock traversed the entire hotel, the silence and the panic was communicated, transmitted with miraculous speed. All at once, it seemed, without words, everyone knew what had happened. A woman had thrown herself from a window and fallen on the garage roof. Thrown herself from the twenty fifth floor. She was dead, of course, dead, and with a five month child inside her. She had taken a room in the hotel in the morning, given a false name. Had stayed five hours without moving from the room. And then thrown herself out with this child in her. The sound, the dead heavy body sound, resonant still in the structure of the hotel, in the bodies of the people communicating this image one to another. Djuna could see her bleeding and open. The impact. Fallen, fallen so quickly back to the bottom. Birds fell this way when they died in the air. Had she died in the air? When had she died? Ascension high, to fall from greater heights and be sure of death. Loneliness, for five hours in a room with this child who could not answer her if she talked, if she questioned, if she doubted, if she feared…

  The radios were turned on again. People moved fast again, normally. The silence had been in every one, for one second. Then everyone had closed his eyes and moved faster, up and down. One must get dizzy. Move. Move.

  Djuna sat in the room of the Voice. The little man no one ever saw, he was standing by the window.

  “Look,” he said, “they are skating in the Park. It is Sunday. The band is playing. I could be walking in the snow with the band playing. That is happiness. When I had happiness I did not recognize it, or feel it. It was too simple. I did not know I had it. I only know it when I am sitting here strapped to this armchair and listening to confessions and obsessions. My body is cramped. I want to do the things they do. At most I am allowed to watch. I am condemned to see through a perpetual keyhole every intimate scene of their life. But I am left out. Sometimes I want to be taken in. I want to be desired, possessed, tortured too.”

  Djuna said: “You can’t stop confessing them, you can’t stop. A woman killed herself, right there, under your window; that noise you heard was the fall of her body. She was pregnant. And she was alone. That is why she killed herself.”

  “I listen to them all. They keep coming and coming. I thought at first that only a few of them were sick. I did not know that they were all sick and bursting with secrets. I didn’t know there was no end to their coming. Did you ever walk through the lobby? I have a feeling down there that they are all waiting to be confessed. They all have more to say than I have time to hear. I could sit here until I die and even then there will be women throwing themselves out of the window on the same floor on which I live.mes ;

  * * *

  White lights! Going up! Hans opening his door, laughing: “I was just lying in bed and thinking of you, and wanting you.”

  It was always different. Sometimes it was like a little tongue of fire inside her that flicked out towards his thrusts, enveloped him like a little tongue of fire circling the thrust that touched the kernel of sweet acid in her, disrupting a current of silver fire passing through the veins. The nerves slept as under an enchantment, the eyes closed, slipping down sand dunes of warm waves lapping over each other. Great pulsations, like the very heart of ecstasy, breaking open a river of pulsations, the body resonant with the heavy horsehoofing gongs against the walls of feeling. Pleasure curling inside of her like leaves burned. In this tumult of blood, wine, incense, the kernel in her quietly opening like a fruit. A gasp in the veins, when the white blood spurts against the soft wall of fruit flesh in which it rolls, the womb breathing it in, flicking its tongue of flame, panting around each turn and flicker, reaching for the hardness with an infinite thirst, like a mouth opening and closing.

  She remained full of echoes. Reverberations in the flesh, prolongations. The body still resounding. He, his desire being like a thrust into the woman, reached a finality. He could rise free, and alone again. In her the blood remained. She was impregnated. She awakened filled. She could not detach herself. He could awaken lighter, having passed the weight of his desire into her, without webs or threads around him. His desire a knife, a thrust that had reached its end. Her desire like a casket. She loved with necklaces, with bracelets, with chains, with sediments, with residues. Her spongy antennae had not only drunk like the stems of plants, but the branches had folded themselves around the miracle to perpetuate it. She loved as woman, with echoes, with infinite layers of repetitions, with caves of mysterious deposits, with scars, with mirrors, with a labyrinthian retention. She was, as all women, the perpetually abandoned one. She had a greater difficulty in shifting, in turning away. Every morning, it was the mandragore pulled out of the earth, it was the seed torn out of its fur pockets, it was a return to the void, a tear in the spider web of unity. Her continuity was born of echoes: she was a mirror and an ocean in which he bathed and which she could not reject on the shore of daylight; she was the night enfolding, enwrapping, lulling, encompassing, and she could not thrust out, as he did, into the daylight.