by Anais Nin
He came not to plunder, to possess, to overpower. With great gentleness he moved towards the hospitable regions of her being, towards the peaceful fields of her interior landscape, where white flowers placed themselves against green backgrounds as in Botticelli paintings of spring.
At his entrance her head remained slightly inclined towards the right, as it was when she was alone, slightly weighed down by pensiveness, whereas on other occasions, at the least approach of a stranger, her head would raise itself tautly in preparation for danger.
And so he entered into the flowered regions, behind the forts, having easily crossed all the moats of politeness.
His blond hair gave him the befitting golden tones attributed to most legendary figures.
Djuna never knew whether this light of sun he emitted came out of his own being or was thrown upon him by her dream of him, as later she had observed the withdrawal of this light from those she had ceased to love. She never knew whether two people woven together by feelings answering each other as echoes threw off a phosphorescence, the chemical sparks of marriage, or whether each one threw upon the other the spotlight of his inner dream.
Transient or everlasting, inner or outer, personal or magical, there was now this lighting falling upon both of them and they could only see each other in its spanning circle which dazzled them and separated them from the rest of the world.
Through the cocoon of her shyness her voice had been hardly audible, but he heard every shading of it, could follow its nuances even when it retreated into the furthest impasse of the ear’s labyrinth.
Secretive and silent in relation to the world, she became exalted and intense once placed inde of this inner circle of light.
This light which enclosed two was familiar and natural to her.
Because of their youth, and their moving still outside of the center of their own desires blindly, what they danced together was not a dance in which either took possession of the other, but a kind of minuet, where the aim consisted in not appropriating, not grasping, not touching, but allowing the maximum space and distance to flow between the two figures. To move in accord without collisions, without merging. To encircle, to bow in worship, to laugh at the same absurdities, to mock their own movements, to throw upon the walls twin shadows which will never become one. To dance around this danger: the danger of becoming one! To dance keeping each to his own path. To allow parallelism, but no loss of the self into the other. To play at marriage, step by step, to read the same book together, to dance a dance of elusiveness on the rim of desire, to remain within circles of heightened lighting without touching the core that would set the circle on fire.
A deft dance of unpossession.
They met once at a party, imprinted on each other forever the first physical image: she saw him tall, with an easy bearing, an easily flowing laughter. She saw all: the ivory color of the skin, the gold metal sheen of the hair, the lean body carved with meticulous economy as for racing, running, leaping; tender fingers touching objects as if all the world were fragile; tender inflections of the voice without malice or mockery; eyelashes always ready to fall over the eyes when people spoke harshly around him.
He absorbed her dark, long, swinging hair, the blue eyes never at rest, a little slanted, quick to close their curtains too, quick to laugh, but more often thirsty, absorbing like a mirror. She allowed the pupil to receive these images of others but one felt they did not vanish altogether as they would on a mirror: one felt a thirsty being absorbing reflections and drinking words and faces into herself for a deep communion with them.
She never took up the art of words, the art of talk. She remained always as Michael had first seen her: a woman who talked with her Naiad hair, her winged eyelashes, her tilted head, her fluent waist and rhetorical feet.
She never said: I have a pain. But laid her two arms over the painful area as if to quiet a rebellious child, rocking and cradling this angry nerve. She never said: I am afraid. But entered the room on tiptoes, her eyes watching for ambushes.
She was already the dancer she was to become, eloquent with her body.
They met once and then Michael began to write her letters as soon as he returned to college.
In these letters he appointed her Isis and Arethusa, Iseult and the Seven Muses.
Djuna became the woman with the face of all women.
With strange omissions: he was neither Osiris nor Tristram, nor any of the mates or pursuers.
He became uneasy when she tried to clothe him in the costume of myth figures.
When he came to see her during vacations they never touched humanly, not even by a handclasp. It was as if they had found the most intricate way of communicating with each other by way of historical personages, literary passions, and that any direct touch even of finger tips would explode this world.
With each substitution they increased the distance between their human selves.
Djuna was not alarmed. She regarded this with feminine eyes: in creating this world Michael was merely constructing a huge, superior, magnificent nest in some mythological tree, and one day he would ask her to step into it with him, carrying her over the threshold all costumed in the trappings of his fantasy, and he would say: this is our home!
All this to Djuna was an infinitely superior way of wooing her, and she never doubted its ultimate purpose, or climax, for in this the most subtle women are basically simple and do not consider mythology or symbolism as a substitute for the climaxes of nature, merely as adornments!
The mist of adolescence, prolonging and expanding the wooing, was merely an elaboration of the courtship. His imagination continued to create endless detours as if they had to live first of all through all the loves of history and fiction before they could focus on their own.
But the peace in his moss-green eyes disturbed her, for in her eyes there now glowed a fever. Her breasts hurt her at night, as if from overfullness.
His eyes continued to focus on the most distant points of all, but hers began to focus on the near, the present. She would dwell on a detail of his face. On his ears for instance. On the movements of his lips when he talked. She failed to hear some of his words because she was following with her eyes and her feelings the contours of his lips moving as if they were moving on the surface of her skin.
She began to understand for the first time the carnation in Carmen’s mouth. Carmen was eating the mock orange of love: the white blossoms which she bit were like skin. Her lips had pressed around the mock orange petals of desire.
In Djuna all the moats were annihilated: she stood perilously near to Michael glowing with her own natural warmth. Days of clear visibility which Michael did not share. His compass still pointed to the remote, the unknown.
Djuna was a woman being dreamed.
But Djuna had ceased to dream: she had tasted the mock orange of desire.
More baffling still to Djuna grown warm and near, with her aching breasts, was that the moss-green serenity of Michael’s eyes was going to dissolve into jealousy without pausing at desire.
He tok her to a dance. His friends eagerly appropriated her. From across the room full of dancers, for the first time he saw not her eyes but her mouth, as vividly as she had seen him. Very clear and very near, and he felt the taste of it upon his lips.
For the first time, as she danced away from him, encircled by young men’s arms, he measured the great space they had been swimming through, measured it exactly as others measure the distance between planets.
The mileage of space he had put between himself and Djuna. The lighthouse of the eyes alone could traverse such immensity!
And now, after such elaborations in space, so many figures interposed between them, the white face of Iseult, the burning face of Catherine, all of which he had interpreted as mere elaborations of his enjoyment of her, now suddenly appeared not as ornaments but as obstructions to his possession of her.
She was lost to him now. She was carried away by other young men, turning with them. They
had taken her waist as he never had, they bent her, plied her to the movements of the dance, and she answered and responded: they were mated by the dance.
As she passed him he called out her name severely, reproachfully, and Djuna saw the green of his eyes turned to violet with jealousy.
“Djuna! I’m taking you home.”
For the first time he was willful, and she liked it.
“Djuna!” He called again, angrily, his eyes darkening with anger.
She had to stop dancing. She came gently towards him, thinking: “He wants me all to himself,” and she was happy to yield to him.
He was only a little taller than she was, but he held himself very erect and commanding.
On the way home he was silent.
The design of her mouth had vanished again, his journey towards her mouth had ceased the moment it came so near in reality to his own. It was as if he dared to experience a possibility of communion only while the obstacle to it was insurmountable, but as the obstacle was removed and she walked clinging to his arm, then he could only commune with her eyes, and the distance was again reinstated.
He left her at her door without a sign of tenderness, with only the last violet shadows of jealousy lurking reproachfully in his eyes. That was all.
Djuna sobbed all night before the mystery of his jealousy, his anger, his remoteness.
She would not question him. He confided nothing. They barred all means of communication with each other. He would not tell her that at this very dance he had discovered an intermediate world from which all the figures of women were absent. A world of boys like himself in flight away from woman, mother, sister, wife or mistress.
Iher ignorance and innocence then, she could not have pierced with the greatest divination where Michael, in his flight from her, gave his desire.
In their youthful blindness they wounded each other. He excused his coldness towards her: “You’re too slender. I like plump women.” Or again: “You’re too intelligent. I feel better with stupid women.” Or another time he said: “You’re too impulsive, and that frightens me.”
Being innocent, she readily accepted the blame.
Strange scenes took place between them. She subdued her intelligence and became passive to please him. But it was a game, and they both knew it. Her ebullience broke through all her pretenses at quietism.
She swallowed countless fattening pills, but could only gain a pound or two. When she proudly asked him to note the improvements, his eyes turned away.
One day he said: “I feel your clever head watching me, and you would look down on me if I failed.”
Failed?
She could not understand.
With time, her marriage to another, her dancing which took her to many countries, the image of Michael was effaced.
But she continued to relate to other Michaels in the world. Some part of her being continued to recognize the same gentleness, the same elusiveness, the same mystery.
Michael reappeared under different bodies, guises, and each time she responded to him, discovering each time a little more until she pierced the entire mystery open.
But the same little dance took place each time, a little dance of insolence, a dance which said to the woman: “I dance alone, I will not be possessed by a woman.”
The kind of dance tradition had taught woman as a ritual to provoke aggression! But this dance made by young men before the women left them at a loss for it was not intended to be answered.
Years later she sat at a cafe table in Paris between Michael and Donald.
Why should she be sitting between Michael and Donald?
Why were not all cords cut between herself and Michael when she married and when he gave himself to a succession of Donalds?
When they met in Paris again, he had this need to invent a trinity: to establish a connecting link between Djuna and all the changing, fluctuating Donalds.
As if some element were lacking in his relation to Donald.
Donald had a slender body, like an Egyptian boy. Dark hair wild like that of a child who had been running. At momentshe extreme softness of his gestures made him appear small, at others when he stood stylized and pure in line, erect, he seemed tall and firm.
His eyes were large and entranced, and he talked flowingly like a medium. His eyelids fell heavily over his eyes like a woman’s, with a sweep of the eyelashes. He had a small straight nose, small ears, and strong boyish hands.
When Michael left for cigarettes they looked at each other, and immediately Donald ceased to be a woman. He straightened his body and looked at Djuna unflinchingly.
With her he asserted his strength. Was it her being a woman which challenged his strength? He was now like a grave child in the stage of becoming a man.
With the smile of a conspirator he said: “Michael treats me as if I were a woman or a child. He wants me not to work and to depend on him. He wants to go and live down south in a kind of paradise.”
“And what do you want?”
“I am not sure I love Michael…”
That was exactly what she expected to hear. Always this admission of incompleteness. Always one in flight or the three sitting together, always one complaining or one loving less than the other.
All this accompanied by the most complicated harmonization of expressions Djuna had ever seen. The eyes and mouth of Donald suggesting an excitement familiar to drug addicts, only in Donald it did not derive from any artificial drugs but from the strange flavor he extracted from difficulties, from the maze and detours and unfulfillments of his loves.
In Donald’s eyes shone the fever of futile watches in the night, intrigue, pursuits of the forbidden, all the rhythms and moods unknown to ordinary living. There was a quest for the forbidden and it was this flavor he sought, as well as the strange lighting which fell on all the unknown, the unfamiliar, the tabooed, all that could remind him of those secret moments of childhood when he sought the very experiences most forbidden by the parents.
But when it came to the selection of one, to giving one’s self to one, to an open simplicity and an effort at completeness, some mysterious impulse always intervened and destroyed the relationship. A hatred of permanency, of anything resembling marnage.
Donald was talking against Michael’s paradise as it would destroy the bittersweet, intense flavor he sought.
He bent closer to Djuna, whispering now like a conspirator. It was his conspiracy against simplicity, against Michael’s desire for a peaceful life together.
“If you only knew, Djuna, the first time it happened! I expected the whole world to change its face, be utterly transformed, turned upside down. I expected the room to become inclined,as after an earthquake, to find that the door no longer led to a stairway but into space, and the windows overlooked the sea. Such excitement; such anxiety, and such a fear of not achieving s tlment. At other times I have the feeling that I am escaping a prison, I have a fear of being caught again and punished. When I signal to another like myself in a cafe I have the feeling that we are two prisoners who have found a laborious way to communicate by a secret code. All our messages are colored with the violent colors of danger. What I find in this devious way has a taste like no other object overtly obtained. Like the taste of those dim and secret afternoons of our childhood when we performed forbidden acts with great anxiety and terror of punishment. The exaltation of danger, I’m used to it now, the fever of remorse. This society which condemns me…do you know how I am revenging myself? I am seducing each one of its members slowly, one by one…”
He talked softly and exultantly, choosing the silkiest words, not disguising his dream of triumphing over all those who had dared to forbid certain acts, and certain forms of love.
At the same time when he talked about Michael there came to his face the same expression women have when they have seduced a man, an expression of vain glee, a triumphant, uncontrollable celebration of her power. And so Donald was celebrating the feminine wiles and ruses and charms by which he ha
d made Michael fall so deeply in love with him.
In his flight from woman, it seemed to Djuna, Michael had merely fled to one containing all the minor flaws of women.
Donald stopped talking and there remained in the air the feminine intonations of his voice, chanting and never falling into deeper tones.
Michael was back and sat between them offering cigarettes.
As soon as Michael returned Djuna saw Donald change, become woman again, tantalizing and provocative. She saw Donald’s body dilating into feminine undulations, his face open in all nakedness. His face expressed a dissolution like that of a woman being taken. Everything revealed, glee, the malice, the vanity, the childishness. His gestures like those of a second-rate actress receiving flowers with a batting of the eyelashes, with an oblique glance like the upturned cover of a bedspread, the edge of a petticoat.
He had the stage bird’s turns of the head, the little dance of alertness, the petulance of the mouth pursed for small kisses that do not shatter the being, the flutter and perk of prize birds, all adornment and change, a mockery of the evanescent darts of invitation, the small gestures of alarm and promise made by minor women.
Michael said: “You two resemble each other. I am sure Donald’s suits would fit you, Djuna.”
“But Donald is more truthful,” said Djuna, thinking how openly Donald betrayed that he did not love Michael, whereas she might have sought a hundred oblique routes to soften this truth.
“Donald is more truthful because he loves less,” said Michael.
Warmth in the air. The spring foliage shivering out of pure coquetry, not out of discomfort. Love flowing now between the three, shared, transmitted, contagious, as if Michael were at last free to love Djuna in the form of a boy, through the body of Donald to reach Djuna whom he could never touch directly, and Djuna through the body of Donald reached Michael—and the missing dimension of their love accomplished in space like an algebra of imperfection, an abstract drama of incompleteness at last resolved for one moment by this trinity of woman sitting between two incomplete men.