The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  His understanding was infinite, like a sea, but Lilith was sailinon it alone. He was everywhere, immense, but not a man, because his understanding ended where the life of silence and mystery began.

  He was walking at Lilith’s side now, in full daylight. His clothes hung about him as on a cross of wood. The clothes did not dress him, make him incarnate. His small hands made brusque gestures as if made of bones. Clothes take the shape of a man’s body, of his gestures. They bear the imprint of his character, his habits, his moods. The hat reveals if he is mellow and tolerant, if he is gay or lavish. Every line, fold, wrinkle, testifies to how he sits, to his tenderness or roughness, his sensuality or asceticism. The hat is moulded by the hand and is carried either with pride or insolence, with nonchalance or rigidity.

  The Voice’s clothes did not fit him, were never a part of him. They were not moulded by his body, kneaded to his moods. Nothing that men wore seemed to be made for him. The tailors had not cut for his body, his body was not made for clothes. His hat stood stiffly detached from him. It seemed either too large or too small for him. Either his hats were formal and the face under it too lax, or the hat was humorous and nonchalant and his face tooserious and heavy. Or else he looked humiliated. In every detail his clothes were a misfit. The body was denied: it did not flow into the clothes, espouse them. There was a kind of blight upon his body; it was the idea made flesh, the idea always standing in the way of natural gestures, the idea upright and standing in the way of rhythm. His flesh was the color of death. He had died in the body and never been resurrected. It was heavy with melancholy, jealousy. The life of the mind had shrivelled the body too soon. It was a sad flesh tyrannized by the idea, drawn and quartered on a pattern, devoured by concepts. No matter how clear or divine the soul was, the flesh was dark and sad and muddied, like very ancient flesh exiled from joy and faith to the kingdom of thought.

  When they returned from the theatre or a dance and stood before the door of her room there was always a pause. The Voice would say: “Come and talk with me a while longer. I hate to surrender you to sleep.”

  If she refused she would find a note under her door the next day: “You belong to the night. I have to give you up to the night, to your mystery.” She smiled. Her mystery was so amazingly simple, but he could not understand it.

  The next day he wrote her a long letter and slipped it under her door. Tied to it was a diminutive frog. “This,” he wrote, “is my transformation, to permit my entrance through the closed door.”

  But this diminutive frog she held in the palm of her hand resembled him so much that it made her weep. Indeed the frog had come just as in the fairy tales; and just as in the fairy tales, she must keep her faith and her inner vision of him, must keep on believing in what lay hidden within this frog’s body. She must pretend not to notice that the Voice was born disguised, to test her love. If she kept her inner vision the disguise might be destroyed, the metamorphosis might occur.

  She sat on the floor with the letter in her lap and the frog in the palm of her hand, weeping over his ugliness and humility and the faith she must hold on to. She remembered Djuna’s words: if you fall in love with a mirage your body will revolt.

  She was asking him questions about his childhood. He stopped in the middle of a story to weep. “Nobody ever asked me anything about myself. I have listened to the confessions of others for twenty-five years. No one has ever turned and asked me about myself, has ever let me talk. No one has ever tried to divine my moods or needs. There are times, Lilith, when I wanted so much to confess to some one. I was filled with preoccupations. Do you know what I most fear in the world? To be loved as a father, a doctor. And it is always so I am loved. I am like a man who fears to be loved for his money.”

  She used his own formulas against him. When he complained that she left him alone she gave him mysterious explanations: that the reality of living always brought tragedy, that she preferred the dream which never culminated in tragedy. The Voice was forced to admit he preferred the dream. The explanations enchanted and deluded him, and saved her from saying: “I don’t want you near me because I don’t love you.”

  His concern with the accuracy of the psychological was so tremendous that once, after the discovery that she had lied, he said: “Let me solve this thing alone. Don’t bother about details of any kind. What do our lives matter when the whole manmade world is at stake.”

  The only joy she experienced was that of being completely understood, justified, absolved in all but her relationship to him. He always asked her what she had been doing. No matter what she told him, even about the trivial purchase of a bracelet, the Voice pounced upon it with excitement and raised the incident to a complete, dazzling symbolical act, a part of a legend. The little incident was all he needed to compose and complete this legend. The bracelet had a meaning—every thing had a meaning. Every act revealed more and more clearly this divine pattern by which she lived and of which the Voice alone knew the entire design. Now he could see. He repeated over and over again: You see? You see? Lilith had the feeling that she had been doing extraordinary things. When she stepped into a shop and bought a bracelet it was not, as she thought, because of the love of its color, or shape, or because of her love of adornment. She was carrying in herself at that moment the entire drama of woman’s slavery and dependence. In this obscure little theatre of her unconscious the denouement brought about by the purchase of the bracelet was a drama which had everlasting repercussions on her daily life. It signified the desire to be bound to some one, it expressed a yielding of some kind. She had voluntarily bound and enslaved herself. You see? You see? Not only was the bracelet or the lovely moment spent before the shop window magnified and brought into violent relief—as an act full of implications, of repercussions—but all she had done during the week seemed to open like a giant hot-house camelia whose growth had been forced by a travail of creation from the moment she first drew breath.

  While the Voice tracked down each minor incident of her life to expose the relation between them, the fatality and importance of the link between them, the heavy destined power of each one, she felt like an actress who had never known how moving she had been, she felt like a creator who had prepared in some dim laboratory of her soul a life like a legend, and only to-day she was reading the legend itself out of an enormous book.

  This was part of the legend, the little man brusquely deciphering each incident, marvelling always at the miracle which had never seemed a miracle before, her walkin heng and buying a bracelet, as miraculous to the Voice as liquid turning to gold in an alchemist’s bottle. She had not only covered the earth with a multitude of little spontaneous acts but these acts accomplished so slidingly, so swiftly, could all be illumined with spiritual significance, divine intentions, loved for their human quality or feared for their monstrous uniqueness. He worshipped them for the very act of their flowering.

  He revolted now and then against her uncapturableness but she subtilized the situation. She did not want reality. She feared reality. She was really a flame. One could not possess a flame. She annulled the boundaries, confused the issues, effaced the black and whiteness. All the definite decisions, outlines, realities, she melted into a dream-like substance. She enchanted him with a sea of talk, hypnotized him with inventions and creations, so that he would cease his clutching, become cosmic again. She talked him out of the reality of her presence.

  What he did not know was that at the same time she was losing her faith in all interpretations, since she saw how they could be manipulated to conceal the truth. She began to feel the illusory quality of all man’s interpretations, and to believe only in her feelings. Every day she found in mythology a new pretext for eluding his desire for her. First she needed time. She must become entirely herself and without need of him. She was waiting for the moment when she would have no more need of him as a doctor. She was waiting for the man and the doctor to become entirely separate, and never to be again confused in her. This he accepted.

>   But when he was not being the doctor, she discovered he was not a man but a child. He wept like a child, he raged, he was filled with fears, he was possessive, he invaded her room without delicacy, he complained and lamented about himself, his own life. He was desperately hungry and awkward in life, clutching rather than enjoying. The human being hidden in the healer was stunted, youthful, hysterical. As soon as he ceased to be a teacher and a guide, he lost all his strength and deftness. He was disoriented, chaotic, blind. As soon as he stepped out of his role he collapsed. Lilith found herself confronting a child, a child lamenting, regretting, impatient, fretful, lonely. He wrote inchoate love notes with ink blots, he leaped to meet her in the street, perspiring, nervous. He was jealous of the man who washed her hair. The child that she awakened in him was like the child in all those who had come to him for care, unsatisfied, lamenting, tearful, sickly.

  * * *

  He wanted to go to the sea shore with her. Lilith and the Voice then, walking along the boardwalk. Crowds. Discord between sea and voices, between wind and flags, between shop windows and sand. Grating. Or was it Lilith grating at the touch of the Voice’s hands, like sticks of wood falling on her.

  The crowd walking, chewing, breathing, grunting. The wind slicing open dyed hair, teasing false feathers. The salt so bitter on this skirt of the sea’s dance trodden by bold houses with mangy-faced façades.

  Open-jawed shops with loud speakers selling furniture and horoscopes. The Voice slipping coin after coin in the slot machine for music. “Do you want more music? Do you want more music?qot Coins in the slot machine for music.

  Long boardwalk of monsters with walrus faces, the rictus of the ray fish, the eyes of telescope fishes, and woodpecker’s voices. Sand in everything, lips which seemed peeled of their skin. The rust, the rust in reality slowing down her rhythm to a sob.

  The sea sullen, withdrawn.

  Men dragging the enormous net thrown from the end of the pier for deep sea fishing. The net was empty. The fish were being carried away. On the ground lay the jellied star fish unwanted, unsaleable. The sailors jerked out their knives and threw them into the fishes, pinning them to the boardwalk. Laughter. Another knife. No blood stains, but stains of sea ebbing from the wounds. Entrails of gelatine breaking. Coiling and recoilings of gelatinous pain. The sailors laughing.

  The sea inside Lilith churning with revolt. The sea in her ebbing heavily back and forth away from human touch.

  He moves wooden arms around her: they fall crossed in front of her, clasping nothing. The scarecrow is agitated. Do you want to dance? Do you want waffles? What do you want?

  The sea inside of her recoiling angrily against all touch. Recoiling from the sand in his voice. He is chaining words together to establish a current. Words chained together. The chaplet of meaning might produce the semblance of a symphony. He was chaining together with meaning what need never have been separated and should have been continuous like a symphony in the blood.

  “Everything was unreal before you came, Lilith. No woman loved me for myself. I created and invented them. I did not have to create you.”

  All that he said vanished faster than music and was without echo in her.

  Only the flow of words, dying quickly because underneath her is this sea, her nature which will not flow into him; underneath was her lie and his blindness to the lie.

  The Voice talked to create the semblance of a symphony, seeking to conjure up life by interpretation. This rhythm was illusion; it was only the rhythm of thought. He could not touch her. The sea was angry. People were walking without rhythm, caressing without rhythm. People were talking and weeping and dancing without rhythm. The miracle did not take place. It did not happen in the body. The miracle did not happen, the simple miracle of love.

  According to the pattern written with indelible philosophical ink, this is the moment when life should glow. But the sea in her heaves with discontent and has no answer, no yielding either.

  She no longer heard the music from the boardwalk, the angry snoring of the sea. Before her stood a tall man in armour. She was kneeling before him. She was caressing the polished armour, seeking the sex with her mouth. The man in the armour did not move. She struck at it with a hammer. As the pieces of armour fell off, the body fell apart. All the pieces lay on the floor—the heart, the hands, the head, the feet, but no sex. The woman was still seeking it with her mouth. Another man was walking towards her. There were noeyes in his face. He turned around. The eyes were placed in the back of his head. He saw her. He walked away from her with arms outstretched. She followed him. He saw her but he walked away faster and faster. Finally he sat down and sobbed. Enormous tears came out of his eyes, but they were like soap bubbles, they rose in the air. He sat there weeping from the back of his head.

  A kitten was biting her toes. She sat down and covered her feet with her dress. A man took the kitten and opened its paws with a knife, as if they were oysters. A man who was pursued came into her room through an attic window over her head and threatened to choke her. Hearing a noise he tried to hide. The door opened and four men were there to catch him. But Lilith loved the man and felt pity for him.

  She was sitting in front of the Voice, their knees were touching. He was saying that she was not ill, she did not need any more care, but she must wear this dress of which he showed her a picture. It was a flowing white dress. Lilith said: “But it’s a wedding dress!” He said: “You were never really married.” She saw that they had been living together in a completely padded apartment, sound-proof. Satin-lined. But she was not a woman. She was a lamp-light, five-pointed, standing in the fog. She felt the black-rusted iron casing around her, and the glass chapel head. Inside the glass chapel there was a tongue of light, and on her shoulder was a sparrow. She was awake and twinkling without eyelids. She felt yellow, wet, and multiplied hundreds of times along the street; she felt dust in her eyes which she could not shake off because of the iron frame.

  In the Castle there were twelve guest rooms. The rooms were richly furnished but with beds only. Each room had a different kind of bed. In the first one there was a luxurious four-postered bed with a silken canopy. In the second twin beds of rose-wood. In the third an immense crib of carved wood. In the fourth a small Russian crib lined with horse fur. In the fifth an Empire style bed with gold ornaments. A copper bed, and a bed of white fur. On the white fur bed she saw a beautiful fig split open with the red pulp looking like flesh. She touched it and it felt like the inside of a woman. A crime was committed in one of the rooms. Everyone was looking for the body. She knew where it was, but she would not tell. Some one spotted a line of blood along the wall. There was a violently bad odor, the smell of a cadaver.

  Looking out of the window she saw a lake. There was a woman in an automobile riding over it, trying to land. But she drove into the wing of the wharf and could not free herself. Lilith reached out with her hand, took up the automobile, and laid it on the narrow sidewalk before the hotel. The woman was old and haggard. Lilith said to her: “Do you want some coffee?” She began to make coffee and the coffee pot grew immense—it boiled and sputtered and danced beyond her control. It was a huge factory grinding and smoking and boiling. The woman before Lilith is monstrous, paralyzed in a posture of agony. Hands contorted as if cut off at the wrist. Her legs are covered with blood-suckers. Everybody turns away from her, fainting with horror. Lilith did not want to hurt her feelings: she continued to look at her as if she were beautiful. The monster sprawled on the floor and stretched her swollen legs, saying: “I have six toes on each foot.” As Lilith looked at her she was aware that the monster’s eyes were piercing and divinatory. Lilith looked at her more fixedly, disregarding her ugliness. Then slowly the monster’s body straightened, her hands grasped Lilith softly, and she looked almost beautifulered wi

  It was not a woman, but the Voice. And the Voice was knocking at her door. He stood there with his pulpy hat in his hand, entangled in his valises.

  Neither her powers of ill
usion, nor her dreams, nor even the night itself had worked the miracle. He remained nothing but the Voice with a death-like breath.

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