Children of the Albatross coti-2

by Anais Nin

  The tears of his mother, the more restrained severity of his father, brought him home again.

  His eighteenth birthday came and this was the one they could not spend together, this being his birthday in reality, the one visible to his parents. Whereas with Djuna he had spent so many birthdays which his parents could not have observed, with their limited knowledge of him.

  They had not attended the birthday of his manhood, the birthday of his roguish humorous self, of his first drunkenness, his first success at a party; or the birthday of his eloquent self on the theme of poetry, painting or music. Or the birthday of his imagination, his fantasy, of his new knowledge of people, of his new assertions and his discoveries of unknown powers in himself.

  This succession of birthdays that had taken place since he left home was the highest fiesta ever attended by Djuna, the spectacle of unpredictable blooms, of the shells breaking around his personality, the emergence of the man.

  But his real birthday they could not spend together.

  His mother made dinner for him, and he played chess with his father—they who loved him less and who had bound and stifled him with prohibitions, who had delayed his manhood.

  His mother made a birthday cake iced and sprinkled with warnings against expansion, cautions against new friends, designed a border like those of formal gardens as if to outline all the proprieties with which to defeat adventure.

  His father played chess with him silently, indicating in the carefully measured moves a judgment upon all the wayward dances of the heart, the caprices of the body, above all a judgment upon such impulses as had contributed to Paul’s very presence there, the act of conjunction from which had been formed the luminous boy eating at their table.

  The cake they fed him was the cake of caution: to fear all human beings and doubt the motivations of all men and women not listed in the Social Directory.

  The candles were not lit to celebrate his future freedom, but to say: only within the radius lighted by these birthday candles, only within the radius of father and mother are you truly safe.

  A small circle. And outside of this circle, evil.

  And so he ate of this birthday cake baked by his mother, containing all the philters against love, expansion and freedom known to white voodoo.

  A cake to prevent and preserve the child from becoming man!

  No more nights together, when to meet the dawn together was the only marriage ceremony accorded to lovers.

  But he returned to her one day carrying the valise with his laundry. On his return home he had packed his laundry to have it washed at home. And his mother had said: “Take it back. I won’t take care of laundry you soiled while living with strangers.”

  So quietly he brought it back to Djuna, to the greater love that would gladly take care of his belongings as long as they were the clothes he soiled in his experience with freedom.

  The smallness of his shirts hurt her, like a sign of dangers for him which she could not avert. He was still slender enough, young enough to be subjected to tyranny.

  They were both listening to Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor.

  And then the conflicting selves in Djuna fused into one mood as they do at such musical crossroads.

  The theme of the symphony was gentleness.

  She had first heard it at the age of sixteen one rainy afternoon and associated it with her first experience of love, of a love without climax which she had known with Michael. She had interwoven this music with her first concept of the nature of love as one of ultimate, infinite gentleness.

  In Cesar Franck’s symphony there was immediate exaltation, dissolution in feeling and the evasion of violence. Over and over again in this musical ascension of emotion, the stairway of fever was climbed and deserted before one reached explosion.

  An obsessional return to minor themes, creating an endless tranquility, and at sixteen she had believed that the experience of love was utterly contained in this gently flowing drug, in the delicate spirals, cadences, and undulations of this music.

  Cesar Franck came bringing messages of softness and trust, accompanying Paul’s gestures and attitudes, and for this she trusted him, a passion without the storms of destruction.

  She had wanted such nebulous landscapes, such vertiginous spirals without explosions: the drug.

  Listening to the symphony flowing and yet not flowing (for there was a static groove in which it remained imprisoned, so similar to the walled-in room of her house, containing a mystery of stillness), Djuna saw the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the arrow of stone placed at the center of a gracefully turbulent square, summating gardens, fountains and rivers of automobiles. One pointed dart of stone to pierce the night, the fog, the rain, the sun, aiming faultlessly into the clouds.

  And there was the small, crazy woman Matilda, whom everyone knew, who came every morning and sat on one of the benches near the river, and stayed there all day, watching the passers-by, eating sparingly and lightly of some mysterious food in crumbs out of a paper bag, like the pigeons. So familiar to the policeman, to the tourists, and to the permanent inhabitants of the Place de la Concorde, that not to see her there would have been as noticeable, as disturbing, as to find the Obelisk gone, and the square left without its searchlight into the sky.

  Matilda was known for her obstinacy in sitting there through winter and summer, her indifference to climate, her vague answers to those who sought her reasons for being there, her tireless watchfulness, as if she were keeping a rendezvous with eternity.

  Only at sundown did she leave, sometimes gently incited by the policeman.

  Since there was not total deterioration in her clothes, or in her health, everyone surmised she must have a home and no one was ever concerned about her.

  Djuna had once sat beside her and Matilda at first would not speak, but addressed herself to the pigeons and to the falling autumn leaves, murmuring, whispering, muttering by turns. Then suddenly she said to Djuna very simply and clearly: “My lover left me sitting here and said he would come back.”

  (The policeman had said: I have seen her sitting there for twenty years.)

  “How long have you been sitting here and waiting?” Djuna asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  She ate of the same bread she was feeding the pigeons. Her face was wrinkled but not aged, through the wrinkles shone an expression which was not of age, which was the expression of alert waiting, watchfulness, expectation of the young.

  “He will come back,” she said, for the first time a look of defiance washing her face of its spectator’s pallor, the pallor of the recluse who lives without intimate relationship to stir the rhythms of the blood, this glazed expression of those who watch the crowd passing by and never recognize a face.

  “Of course he will,” said Djuna, unable to bear even the shadow of anxiety on the woman’s face.

  Matilda’s face recovered its placidity, its patience. “He told me to sit here and wait.”

  A mortal blow had stopped the current of her life, but had not shattered her. It had merely paralyzed her sense oftime, she would sit and wait for the lost lover and the years were obliterated by the anesthesia of the deadened cell of time: five minutes stretched to infinity and kept her alive, alive and ghostly, with the cell of time, the little clock of reality inside the brain forever damaged. A faceless clock pointing to anguish. And with time was linked pain, lodged in the same cell (neighbors and twins), time and pain in more or less intimate relationship.

  And what was left was this shell of a woman immune to cold and heat, anesthetized by a great loss into immobility and timelessness.

  Sitting there beside Matilda Djuna heard the echoes of the broken cell within the little psychic stage of her own heart, so well enacted, so neat, so clear, and wondered whether when her father left the house for good in one of his moods of violence as much damage had been done to her, and whether some part of her being had not been atrophied, preventing complete openness and complete development in
living.

  By his act of desertion he had destroyed a cell in Djuna’s being, an act of treachery from a cruel world setting her against all fathers, while retaining the perilous hope of a father returning under the guise of t men who resembled him, to re-enact again the act of violence.

  It was enough for a man to possess certain attributes of the father—any man possessed of power—and then her being came alive with fear as if the entire situation would be reenacted inevitably: possession, love and desertion, replacing her on a bench like Matilda, awaiting a denouement.

  Looking back, there had been a momentous break in the flow, a change of activity.

  Every authoritarian step announced the return of the father and danger. For the father’s last words had been: “I will come back.”

  Matilda had been more seriously injured: the life flow had stopped. She had retained the first image, the consciousness that she must wait, and the last words spoken by the lover had been a command for eternity: wait until I come back.

  As if these words had been uttered by a proficient hypnotist who had then cut off all her communications with the living, so that she was not permitted even this consolation allowed to other deserted human beings: the capacity to transfer this love to another, to cheat the order given, to resume life with others, to forget the first one.

  Matilda had been mercifully arrested and suspended in time, and rendered unconscious of pain.

  But not Djuna.

  In Djuna the wound had remained alive, and whenever life touched upon this wound she mistook the pain she felt for being alive, and her pain warning her and guiding her to deflect from man the father to man the son.

  She could see clearly all the cells of her being, like the rooms of her house which had blossomed, enriched, developed and stretched far and beyond all experiences, but she could see also the cell of her being like the walled-in room of her house in which was lodged violence as having been shut and condemned within her out of fear of disaster.

  There was a little cell of her being in which she still existed as a child, which only activated with a subtle anger in the presence of the father, for in relation to him she lost her acquired power, her assurance, she was rendered small again and returned to her former state of helplessness and dependence.

  And knowing the tragic outcome of this dependence she felt hostility and her route towards the man of power bristled with this hostility—an immediate need to shut out violence.

  Paul and Djuna sat listening to Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, in this little room of gentleness and trust, barring violence from the world of love, seeking an opiate against destruction and treachery.

  So she had allied herself with the son against the father. He had been there to forbid and thus to strengthen the desire. He had been there, large and severe, to threaten the delicate, precarious bond, and thus to render it desperate and make each encounter a reprieve from death and loss.

  The movements of the symphony and her movements had been always like Paul’s, a ballet of oscillations, peripheral entrances and exits, figures designed to become invisible in moments of danger, pirouetting with all the winged knowledge of birds to avoid collision with violence and severity.

  Together they had taken leaps into the air to avoid obstacles.

  THE CAFE

  THE CAFES WERE THE WELLS of treasures, the caves of Ali Baba.

  The cafes were richer even than the oriental cities where all living was plied openly under your eyes so that you were offered all the activities of the world to touch and smell. You saw your shoes being made from the skinning of the animal to the polishing of the leather. You saw the weaving of cloth and the dyeing in pails of multicolored liquids. You saw the scribes writing letters for the illiterate, the philosopher meditating, the religious man chanting as he squatted and the lepers disintegrating under your eyes, within the touch of your hand.

  And so in the cafe, with one franc for a glass of wine and even less for coffee, you could hear stories from the Pampas, share in African voodoo secrets, read the pages of a book being written, listen to a poem, to the death rattles of an aristocrat, the life story of a revolutionary. You could hear the hummed theme of a symphony, watch the fingers of a jazz drummer drumming on the table, accept an invitation from a painter who would take you to the zoo to watch the serpents eat their daily ration of white mice, consult a secretive Hindu on his explorations of occult streets, or meet an explorer who would take you on his sailboat around the world.

  The chill of autumn was tempered by little coal stoves and glass partitions.

  A soft rain covered the city with a muted lid, making it intimate like a room, shutting out sky and sun as if drawing curtains, lighting lamps early, kindling fires in the fireplaces, pushing human beings gently to live under the surface, inciting them to sprout words, sparkling colors out of their own flesh, to become light, fire, flowers and tropical fiestas.

  The cafe was the hothouse, densely perfumed with all the banned oils, the censured musks, the richest blooms accelerated by enclosure, warmth, and crossgraftings from all races.

  No sunsets, no dawns, but exhibits of paintings rivaling all in luxuriance. Rivers of words, forests of sculptures, huge pyramids of personalities. No need of gardens.

  City and cafes became intimate like a room that was carpeted, quilted for the easy intermingling of man’s inner landscapes, his multiple secret wishes vibrating from table to table as elbows and the garcon not only carried brimming glasses but endless messages and signals as the servants did in the old Arabian tales.

  Day and night were colliding gently at twilight, throwing off erotic sparks.

  Day and night met on the boulevards.eight=”0”>

  Sabina was always breaking the molds which life formed around her.

  She was always trespassing boundaries, erasing identifications.

  She could not bear to have a permanent address or to give her telephone number.

  Her greatest pleasure consisted in being where no one knew she was, in an out-of-the-way cafe, a little-known hotel, if possible a room from which the number had been scratched off.

  She changed her name as criminals efface their tracks. She herself did not know what she was preserving from detection, what mystery she was defending.

  She hated factual questions as to her activities. Above all she hated to be registered in any of the official books. She hated to give her birth hour, her genealogy, and all her dealings with passport authorities were blurred and complicated.

  She lived entirely by a kind of opportunism, all her acts dictated by the demands of the present situation. She eluded tabulations only to place herself more completely at the disposal of anyone’s fantasy about her.

  She kept herself free of all identifications the better to obey some stranger’s invention about her.

  As soon as a man appeared the game began.

  She must keep silent. She must let him look at her face and let his dream take form. She must allow time and silence for his invention to develop.

  She let him build an image. She saw the image take form in his eyes. If she said what she wanted to say he might think her an ordinary woman!

  This image of herself as a not ordinary woman, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams. Nothing more tenuous, elusive to fulfill than men’s dreams.

  She might say the wrong phrase, make the wrong gesture, smile the wrong smile, and then see his eyes waver vulnerably for one instant before turning to the glassy brilliance of disillusion.

  She wanted desperately to answer man’s most impossible wishes. If the man said: you seem perverse to me, then she would set about gathering together all her knowledge of perversity to become what he had called her.

  It made life difficult. She lived the tense, strained life of an international spy. She moved among enemies set on exposing her pretenses. People felt the falseness at times and sought to uncover her.
/>   She had such a fear of being discovered!

  She could not bear the light of common, everyday simplicities! As other women blink at the sunlight, she blinked at the light of common everyday simplicities.

  And so this race which must never stop. To run from the slanting eyes of one to the caressing hands of another to the sadness of the third.

  As she collided with people they lost their identities also: they became objects of desire, objects to be consumed, fuel for the bonfire. Their quality was summarized as either inflammable or noninflammable. That was all that counted. She never distinguished age, nationality, class, fortune, status, occupation or vocation.

  Her desire rushed instantaneously, without past or future. A point of fire in the present to which she attached no contracts, no continuity.

  Her breasts were always heavy and full. She was like a messenger carrying off all she received from one to carry it to the other, carrying in her breasts the words said to her, the book given her, the land visited, the experience acquired, in the form of stories to be spun continuously.

  Everything lived one hour before was a story to tell the following hour to the second companion. From room to room what was perpetuated was her pollen-carrying body.

  When someone asked her: where are you going now? whom are you going to meet? she lied. She lied because this current sweeping her onward seemed to cause others pain.

  Crossing the street she nourished herself upon the gallant smile of the policeman who stopped the traffic for her. She culled the desire of the man who pushed the revolving door for her. She gathered the flash of adoration from the drugstore clerk: are you an actress? She picked the bouquet of the shoe salesman trying on her shoes: are you a dancer? As she sat in the bus she received the shafts of the sun as a personal intimate visit. She felt a humorous connivance with the truck driver who had to pull the brakes violently before her impulsive passages and who did so smiling.