by Anais Nin
At the Café Viking, Henry talks about discovering my real nature one evening when I danced the rumba for a few minutes alone. He still remembers a passage in my novel, wants to have the manuscript, to be able to read it over He says it is the most beautiful writing he has read lately. Talks about the fantastic possibilities in me: his first impression of me standing on the doorstep—"so lovely"— and then sitting in the big black armchair "like a queen." He wants to destroy the "illusion" of my great honesty.
I read him what I wrote on the effect of his notes. He said I could only write like that, with imaginative intensity, because I had not lived out what I was writing about, that the living-out kills the imagination and the intensity, as happens to him.
Note to Henry in purple ink on silver paper: "The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have. Excessive living weighs down the imagination. We will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails."
Writers make love to whatever they need. Henry conforms to my image and tries to be more subtle, becomes poetic. He said he could very well imagine June saying to him, "I would not mind your loving Anaïs because it is Anaïs."
I affect their imaginations. It is the strongest power.
I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they never could have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them. I see the tenacious yearning in Eduardo. Hugo will never be healed of me. Henry can never really love again after loving June.
When I talk about her, Henry says, "What a lovely way you have of putting things."
"Perhaps it is an evasion of facts."
He says to me exactly what I wrote some time ago: I submit to life and then I find beautiful explanations for my act. I make the piece fit into the creative weaving.
"You and June wanted to embalm me," I say.
"Because you seem so utterly fragile."
I dream of a new faithfulness, with stimulation from others, imaginative living, and my body only for Hugo.
I lie. That day in the café, sitting with Henry, seeing his hand tremble, hearing his words, I was moved. It was madness to read him my notes, but he incited me; it was madness to drink and to answer his questions while staring into his face, as I have never dared to look at any man. We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.
He spoke of "Hugo's great kindness, but he is a boy, a boy." Henry's older mind, of course. I, too, am always waiting for Hugo, but leaping ahead, sometimes perfidiously, with the older mind. I try to leave my body out of it. But I have been caught. And so when I come home I extricate myself and write him that note.
And meanwhile I read his love letter over ten or fifteen times, and even if I do not believe in his love, or in mine, the nightmare of the other night holds me. I am possessed.
"Beware," said Hugo, "of being trapped in your own imaginings. You instill sparks in others, you charge them with your illusions, and when they burst forth into illuminations, you are taken in."
We walk in the forest. He plays with Banquo. He reads by my side. His intuition tells him: be kind, be sweet, be blind. With me, it is the craftiest and cleverest method. It is the way to torture me, to win me. And I think of Henry every moment, chaotically, fearing his second letter.
I meet Henry in the dim, cavernous Viking. He has not received my note. He has brought me another love letter. He almost cries out, "You are veiled now. Be real! Your words, your writing, the other day. You were real." I deny it. Then he says humbly, "Oh, I knew it, I knew I was too presumptuous to aspire to you. I'm a peasant, Anaïs. Only whores can appreciate me." That brings out the words he wants to hear. Feebly, we argue. We recall the beginning: we began with the mind. "Did we, but did we?" says Henry, trembling. And suddenly he leans over and engulfs me in an endless kiss. I do not want the kiss to end. He says, "Come to my room."
How stifling the veil about me, which Henry struggles to tear, my fear of reality. We are walking to his room, and I do not feel the ground, but I feel his body against mine. He says, "Look at the carpet on the stairs, it is worn," and I do not see, I only feel the ascension. My note is in his hands. "Read it," I say, at the bottom of the stairs, "and I'll leave you." But I follow him. His room, I do not see. When he takes me in his arms, my body melts. The tenderness of his hands, the unexpected penetration, to the core of me but without violence. What strange, gentle power.
He, too, cries out, "It is all so unreal, so swift."
And I see another Henry, or perhaps the same Henry who walked that day into my house. We talk as I wished we would talk, so easily, so truly. I lie on his bed covered by his coat. He watches me.
"You expected—more brutality?"
His mountains of words, of notes, of quotations are sundered. I am surprised. I did not know this man. We were not in love with each other's writing. But what are we in love with now? I cannot bear the picture of June's face on the mantelpiece. Even in the photograph, it is uncanny, she possesses us both.
I write crazy notes to Henry. We cannot meet today. The day is empty. I am caught. And he? What does he feel? I am invaded, I lose everything, my mind vacillates, I am only aware of sensations.
There are moments in the day when I do not believe in Henry's love, when I feel June dominating both of us, when I say to myself, "This morning he will awake and realize he loves no one but June." Moments when I believe, madly, that we are going to live something new, Henry and I, outside of June's world.
How has he imposed truth on me? I was about to take flight from the prison of my imaginings, but he takes me to his room and there we live a dream, not a reality. He places me where he wants to place me. Incense. Worship. Illusion. And all the rest of his life is effaced. He comes with a new soul to this hour. It is the sleeping potion of fairy tales. I lie with a burning womb and he scarcely notices it. Our gestures are human, but there is a curse on the room. It is June's face. I remember, with great pain, one of his notes: "life's wildest moment—June, kneeling on the street." Is it June or Henry I am jealous of?
He asks to see me again. When I wait in the armchair in his room, and he kneels to kiss me, he is stranger than all my thoughts. With his experience he dominates me. He dominates with his mind, too, and I am silenced. He whispers to me what my body must do. I obey, and new instincts rise in me. He has seized me. A man so human; and I, suddenly brazenly natural. I am amazed at my lying there in his iron bed, with my black underwear vanquished and trampled. And the tight secrecy of me broken for a moment, by a man who calls himself "the last man on earth."
Writing is not, for us, an art, but breathing. After our first encounter I breathed some notes, accents of recognition, human admissions. Henry was still stunned, and I was breathing off the unbearable, willing joy. But the second time, there were no words. My joy was impalpable and terrifying. It swelled within me as I walked the streets.
It transpires, it blazes. I cannot conceal it. I am woman. A man has made me submit. Oh, the joy when a woman finds a man she can submit to, the joy of her femaleness expanding in strong arms.
Hugo looks at me as we sit by the fire. I am talking drunkenly, brilliantly. He says, "I've never seen you look so beautiful. I have never felt your power so strongly. What is the new confidence in you?"
He desires me, just as he did that other time, after John's visit. My conscience dies at that moment. Hugo bears down on me, and I instinctively obey Henry's whispered words. I close my legs about Hugo, and he exclaims in ecstasy, "Darling, darling, what are you doing? You're driving me wild. I've never felt such joy before!"
I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.
After a concert, Hugo and I left together, like lovers, he said. That was the day after Henry and I acknowledged certain feelin
gs at the Viking. Hugo was so attentive, so tender. It was a holiday for him. We were having dinner in a restaurant in Montparnasse. I had invented a pretext to call at a friend's for Henry's first love letter. It was in my pocketbook. I was thinking of it while Hugo asked me, "Do you want oysters? Take oysters tonight. It's a special night. Every time I go out with you I feel as if I were taking my mistress out. You are my mistress. I love you more than ever.
I want to read Henry's letter. I excuse myself. I go to the washroom. I read the letter there. It is not very eloquent, and I am touched by the fact. I don't know what else I feel. I return to the table, dizzy. This was where we met Henry when he returned from Dijon and where I realized I was happy he had returned.
On another occasion Hugo and I go to the theatre. I am thinking of Henry. Hugo knows, and he shows the same old tender uneasiness, the desire to believe, and I reassure him. He himself had given me a message that I should call Henry at eight-thirty.
So before the play we go to a cafe, and Hugo helps me to find the number of Henry's office. I joke about what he is going to hear. Henry and I do not say very much: "Did you get my letter?" "Yes." "Did you get my note?" "No."
I have a bad night after the play. Hugo gets up in the early morning to bring me medicine, a sleeping pill. "What is the matter?" he asks. "What do you feel?" He offers the refuge of his arms.
The first time I come back from Henry's room, stunned, I find difficulty in talking in my usual lively way.
Hugo sits down, takes up his diary book and writes wildly about me and "art" and how everything I do is right. While he reads this to me, I bleed to death. Before the end he begins to sob. He doesn't know why. I get on my knees before him. "What is it, darling, what is it?" And I say this terrible thing: "Do you have an intuition?"—which, because of his faith and his slow senses, he cannot understand. He believes Henry only stimulates me imaginatively, as a writer. And it is because he believes this that he sits down to write also, to woo me with writing.
I want to cry out, "That is so young of you; it's like the faith of a child." God, I'm old, I'm the last woman on earth. I am aware of a monstrous paradox: By giving myself I learn to love Hugo more. By living as I do I am preserving our love from bitterness and death.
The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with a deep contentment, as if this were the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all "possessed" fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one.
Henry makes notes on me. He registers all I say. We are both registering, each with different sensors. The life of writers is another life.
I sit on his bed, with my rose dress spread around me, smoking, and as he observes me, he says he will never take me into his life, to the places he has told me about, that for me all the trappings of Louveciennes are right and fitting, that I must have them. "You couldn't live otherwise." I contemplate his sordid room and exclaim, "I think it is true. If you put me in this room, poor, I would start all over again."
The next day I write him one of the most human notes he has ever received: no intellect, just words about his voice, his laughter, his hands.
And he writes me: "Anaïs, I was stunned when I got your note this evening. Nothing I can ever say will match these words. To you the victory—you have silenced me—I mean so far as expressing these things in writing goes. You don't know how I marvel at your ability to absorb quickly and then turn about, rain down the spears, nail it, penetrate it, envelop it with your intellect. The experience dumbed me; I felt a singular exaltation, a surge of vitality, then of lassitude, of blankness, of wonder, of incredulity, everything, everything. Coming home I kept remarking about the Spring wind—everything had grown soft and balmy, the air licked my face, I couldn't gulp down enough of it. And until I got your note I was in a panic. I was afraid you would disavow everything. But as I read—I read very slowly because each word was a revelation to me—I thought back to your smiling face, to your sort of innocent gayety, something I had always sought for in you but never quite realized. There were times when you began this way, at Louveciennes, and then the mind crashed through and I would see the grave, round eyes and the set purse of your lips, which used almost to frighten me, or at any rate, always intimidated me.
"You make me tremendously happy to hold me undivided—to let me be the artist, as it were, and yet not forego the man, the animal, the hungry, insatiable lover. No woman has ever granted me all the privileges I need— and you, why you sing out so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even—yes, you invite me to go ahead, be myself, venture anything. I adore you for that. That is where you are truly regal, a woman extraordinary. What a woman you are! I laugh to myself now when I think of you—I have no fear of your femaleness. And that you burned. Then I remember vividly your dress, the color and texture of it, the voluptuous, airy spaciousness of it—precisely what I would have begged you to wear had I been able to anticipate the moment.
"Note how you were anticipating what I wrote today—I refer to your words about caricature, hate, etc.
"I could stay here all night writing you. I see you before me constantly, with your head down and your long lashes lying on your cheeks. And I feel very humble. I don't know why you should single me out—it puzzles me. It seems to me that from the very moment when you opened the door and held out your hand, smiling, I was taken in, I was yours. June felt it, too. She said immediately that you were in love with me, or else I with you. But I didn't know myself that it was love. I spoke about you glowingly, without reserve. And then June met you and she fell in love with you."
Henry is playing with the idea of saintliness. I am thinking of the organ tones of voice and the expressions and admissions I get from him. And I am thinking of his capacity to be awed, which means to sense divinity. When I have been most natural, most womanly, rising from bed to get him a cigarette, to serve him champagne, to comb my hair, to dress, he still says, "I do not feel natural with you yet."
He lives rather quietly, almost coldly at moments. He is absent from the present. Afterwards, when he is writing, he warms up, begins to dramatize and to burn.
Our bouts: he in his language, I in mine. I never use his words. I think my registering is more unconscious, more instinctive. It does not appear on the surface, and yet, I don't know, for he was aware of it, of the weight of my eyes. The slipperiness of my mind against his relentless dissection. My belief in wonder against his heavy, realistic notes. The joy, when he does seize upon wonder: "Your eyes seem to be expecting miracles." Will he perform them?
Does he make such notes as: "Anaïs: green comb with black hair on it. Indelible rouge. Barbaric necklace. Breakable. Fragile."
That second afternoon, he waited for me in the café and I waited for him in his room, through a misunderstanding. The garçon was cleaning his room. He asked me to wait in the other room across the hall, a very small drab one. I sat on a plain, homely chair. The garçon came with another chair covered in red plush velvet. "It will be better for you," he said. I was touched. It seemed to me that Henry was offering me velvet-covered chairs. I was happy as I waited. Then I got a little tired and went to sit in Henry's room. I opened a folder entitled "Notes from Dijon." The first page was a copy of a letter to me which I had not yet received. Then he came in, and when I said, "I do not believe in our love," he silenced me.
I felt humble that day, before his strength. Flesh as strong or stronger than the mind. His victory. He held me with a kind of fear. "You seem so breakable. I am afraid I'll kill you." And I did feel small in his bed, naked, with my barb
aric jewelry tinkling. But he felt the strength of the core of me, which burns at his touch.
Think of that, Henry, when you hold my too-fragile body in your arms, a body you scarcely feel because you are so used to billowing flesh, but you feel the movements of its joy like the undulations of a symphony, not the static clay heaviness, but the dancing of it in your arms. You will not break me. You are molding me like a sculptor. The faun is to be made woman.
"Henry, I swear to you, I find joy in telling you the truth. Someday, after another one of your victories, I'll answer any question you put to me."
"Yes, I know that," said Henry, "I am sure of it. I wait quite patiently. I can wait."
What I could have found ridiculous only touched me with its humanness: Henry crawling to find my black silk garters, which had fallen behind the bed. His awe on seeing my twelve-franc necklace: "It is such a fine, rare thing you wear."
When I saw him naked, he appeared defenseless to me, and my tenderness welled up.
Afterwards he was languid, and I was gay. We even talked about our craft: "I like," said Henry, "to have my desk in order before I begin, only notes around me, a great many notes."
"Do you do that?" I said excitedly, as if it were a most interesting statement. Our craft. Delight in talk of techniques.
I guess, Henry, that you are suffering from the effort at complete revelations about yourself and June, inexorable frankness but painfully obtained. You have moments of reserve, of feeling you are violating sacred intimacies, the secret life of your own being as well as of others.
At moments I am willing to help you because of our common objective passion for truth. But it hurts, Henry, it hurts. I am trying to be honest in my journal, day to day.