by Anais Nin
At the same time I realized that Henry loved me for these last things, too, and I was becoming accustomed to it. Henry, also, gives a smaller importance to my physical charms. I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself. I don't really need you, Allendy!
Whenever he asks me to close my eyes and relax and talk, I go on with my own analysis. I say to myself, "He is telling me little that I do not know." But this is not true, because he has made clear to me the idea of guilt. I understood suddenly why both Henry and I wrote love letters to June when we were falling in love with each other. He has also made clear the idea of punishment. I take Hugo to the rue Blondel and incite him to infidelity to punish myself for my own infidelities. I glorify June to punish myself for having betrayed her.
I elude Allendy's further questions. He fumbles. He can find nothing definite. He suggests many hypotheses. He also probes to discover my feelings about him, and I tell him about my interest in his books. I have a mischievous awareness that he expects me to become interested in him, and I don't like playing the game while knowing it is a game. Yet my interest is sincere. I also tell him I don't mind any more whether he admires me or not. And that is a victory over myself.
It humiliates me to confess my doubts to him. So today I hated him. When I stood before him, ready to leave, I thought, "At this moment I have less confidence in myself than ever. It is intolerable."
With what joy I gave myself to Henry the following day.
The house is asleep. The dogs are quiet. I feel the weight of solitude. I wish I were in Henry's apartment, if only to dry the dishes he washes. I see his vest, unbuttoned, because the discarded suit given to him is too small for him. I see the very frayed lapel under which I love to slip my hand, the tie I finger while he talks to me. I see the blond hair on his neck. I see the expression he has when he takes the garbage can away, surreptitious, half ashamed. Ashamed, too, of his orderliness, which forces him to wash the dishes, to tidy the kitchen. He says, "This is what June objected to—said it was unromantic." I remember, from Henry's notes, the royal disorder she affected. I don't know what to say. They are both in me: the woman who acts as Henry does and the woman who dreams of acting like June. Some vague tenderness draws me to Henry, so seriously washing the dishes. I cannot taunt him. I help him. But my imagination is out of the kitchen. I only love the kitchen because Henry is there. I have even wished that Hugo would stay away much longer so that I could live in Clichy. It is the first time I have ever wished such a thing.
"It is this way," says Henry. "I have overdrawn the cruelty and evil of June because I was interested in evil. That is just the trouble; there are no really evil persons in the world. June is not really evil. Fred is right. She tries desperately to be. It was one of the first things she told me the night I met her. She wanted me to think her a femme fatale. I'm inspired by evil. It preoccupies me, as it did Dostoevsky."
The sacrifices June made for Henry. Were they sacrifices, or were they things she did to heighten her personality? It is I who question this. She makes no obscure sacrifices. Flamboyant ones, yes. Dramatic ones. I have made obscure sacrifices, whether small or big. But I prefer June's prostitution, gold digging, comedies. In between, Henry can starve. She will serve him unreliably and fantastically or not at all. She urged Henry to leave his job. She wanted to work for him. (Secretly I have envisaged prostitution, and to say it is for Henry is only to find a justification.) So June has found a magnificent justification. She has made heroic sacrifices for Henry. And all of it has contributed to the personality of June.
I say to Henry, "Why are you so savage about her defects? And why do you write less about the magnificence?"
"That is what June says. She repeats, 'And you forget this, and you forget that. You only remember the wrongs.' The truth is, Anaïs, that I take goodness for granted. I expect everybody to be good. It is evil which fascinates me."
I remember a feeble effort at living out one of my own fantasies. I came back to Henry one afternoon after he had teased me, full of the devil. I told him that I was going out with a woman the next evening. In Gare St. Lazare I had seen a whore I wanted so much to talk to, and I imagined myself going out with her. Now, bursting into Henry's apartment, as June might have done, I could have brought about a curious event, which Henry would have liked to have heard about later. But instantly I became aware that he had been writing, he was in a serious mood, I had disturbed him. He had been hoping I would sit down with him and help him organize his book. My mood evaporated. I even felt contrite.
June would have interrupted the writing, precipitated Henry into more experiences, delayed the digestion of them, shone with the brilliancy of a Fate in motion, and Henry would have cursed her and then said, "June is an interesting character."
So I went home to Louveciennes and slept. And the next day when Henry asks me, "What did you do last night?" I wish I had something to tell him. I assume a strange look. He thinks he will read about it later in the journal.
I wonder how it feels to have read the whole of my red journal. Henry did not say very much while he was reading, but he shook his head occasionally or laughed. He did say that my journal was terribly frank, and that the descriptions of sensual feelings were unbelievably strong. I didn't mince my words. I had drawn him well, flatteringly but truly. What I said about June was all true. He expected something like my affair with Eduardo. He was sexually stirred by my dream of June and by other pages. "Of course," he said, "you are a narcissist. That is the raison dêtre of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. But it's all right. It's very interesting. I don't know of any journal more interesting. I don't know of any woman writing so frankly."
I protested, because I thought a narcissist was one who only loved himself, and it seemed to me...
It was narcissism anyway, said Henry. But I feel that he admired the journal. He did tease me about Fred, saying he feared I would give myself to him as I did to Eduardo, out of sympathy, and he was jealous. He kissed me as he said this.
Hugo comes back, and he seems like a young son to me. I feel old, battered but tender and joyful. I am resting on the flesh bed of an enormous fatigue. Everything I carry away from Henry is enormous.
If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais." And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine.
Instead of cursing he is sprouting, covering all the spaces he missed in his sensational strides with June. He is at rest from torment, venomousness, drama, madness. And he says in a tone I have never heard from him before, as if to engrave it, "I love you."
I fall asleep in his arms, and we forget to finish the second fusion of ourselves. He falls asleep with his fingers dipped in the honey. To sleep this way I must have found the end of pain.
I walk the streets with a steady tread. There are only two women in the world: June and I.
Anaïs: "Today I frankly hate you. I am against you."
Allendy: "But why?"
"I feel that you have taken away from me the little confidence I had. I feel humiliated because I have confessed to you, and I so rarely confess."
"Are you afraid to be loved less?"
"Yes. Quite definitely. I keep a kind of shell around me. I want to be loved."
I tell him about my acting like a child with Henry, through my admiration. How I had feared this would de-sensualize Henry.
Allendy: "On the contrary, a man loves to feel this sense of importance you give him."
"I immediately imagined he would love me less."
Allendy was amazed at the extent of my lack of confidence. "To an analyst, of course, it is very clear, even in your appearance."
"In my appearance?"
"Yes. I saw immediately that you have seductive manners and bearing. Only people who are unsure act seductively."
We
laughed at this.
I told him I had imagined seeing my father at my dance recital in Paris, when it was proved he was in St. Jean de Luz at the time. It had given me a shock.
"You wanted him to be there. You wanted to dazzle him. At the same time you were frightened. But because you have wanted to seduce your father since you were a child and did not succeed, you have also developed a strong sense of guilt. You want to dazzle physically, but when you succeed, something makes you stop. You tell me you haven't danced since."
"No. I have even had a very strong feeling against it. It was also due to bad health."
"I have no doubt that if you should succeed in your writing you would also give that up to punish yourself."
Other women who are talented but ugly are self-satisfied, confident, magnificent, and I who am talented and attractive, so Allendy tells me, weep because I do not look like June and inspire passion.
I try to explain this to him. I have put myself in the worst position of all by loving Henry and sharing him with a June who is my greatest rival. I am exposing myself to a final death blow since I am sure that Henry will chose June (as I would choose her if I were a man). I also know that if June comes back, she would not choose me in preference to Henry. So I can only lose both ways. And I am risking this. Everything pushes me into it. (Allendy tells me it is masochism.) I again seek pain. If I should give up Henry now, of my own free will, it would only be to suffer less.
I feel two impulses: one masochistic-and resigned, the other seeking escape. I yearn to find a man who will save me from Henry and this situation. Allendy listens and broods on this.
One evening in Henry's kitchen—he and I alone—we talk ourselves empty. He takes up the subject of my red journal, tells me what faults I have to beware of, and then says, "Do you know what baffles me? When you write about Hugo, you write wonderful things, but at the same time they are unconvincing. You do not tell anything that would cause your admiration or love. It sounds strained."
I immediately become distressed, as if it were Allendy questioning me.
"It isn't for me to be asking questions, Anaïs," Henry continues, "but listen, I am not being personal now. I myself like Hugo. I think he is fine. But I am just trying to understand your life. I imagine that you married him when your character was not yet formed, or for the sake of your mother and brother."
"No, no, not for that. I loved him. For my mother and brother I should have married in Havana, in society, richly, and I couldn't do that."
"That day Hugo and I went out for a walk, I tried to grasp him. The truth is, if I had seen only him in Louveciennes, I would have come once, said here's a nice man, and forgotten all about it."
"Hugo is inarticulate," I said. "It takes time to know him." And all the while my old, secret, immense dissatisfaction wells up like a poison, and I keep saying foolish things about the bank subduing him, and how different he is on vacations.
Henry curses. "But it's so obvious that you are superior to him." Always that hateful phrase—from John, too. "Only in intelligence," I say.
"In everything," says Henry. "And listen, Anaïs, answer me. You are not just making a sacrifice. You're not really happy, are you? You want to run away from Hugo at times?"
I cannot answer. I bow my head and cry. Henry comes and stands over me.
"My life is a mess," I say. "You're trying to make me admit something I will not even admit to myself, as you could see by the journal. You sensed how much I want to love Hugo and in just what way I do. I'm all broken up with visions of what it might have been here, with you, for instance. How satisfied I have been, Henry."
"And now, only with me," says Henry, "you would blossom so quickly that you would soon exhaust all I can give and pass on to another. There are no limits to what your life could be. I have seen how you can swim in a passion, in a large life. Listen, if anybody else did the things you have done, I would call them foolish, but somehow or other you make them seem so terribly right. This journal, for instance, is so rich, so terribly rich. You say my life is rich but it is only full of events, incidents, experiences, people. What is really rich are these pages on so little material."
"But think what I would make of more material," I say. "Think of what you said about my novel, that the theme [faithfulness] was an anachronism. That stung me. It was like a criticism of my own life. Yet I cannot commit a crime, and to hurt Hugo would be a crime. Besides, he loves me as nobody has ever loved me."
"You haven't given anybody else a real chance."
I am remembering this while Hugo is gardening. And to be with him now seems as if I were living in the state of being I was in at twenty. Is it his fault, this youthfulness of our life together? My God, can I ask about Hugo what Henry asks about June? He has filled her. Have I filled Hugo? People have said there is nothing in him but me. His great capacity for losing himself, for love. That touches me. Even last night he talked about his inability to mix with other people, saying that I was the only one he was close to, happy with. This morning in the garden he was in bliss. He wanted me there, near him. He has given me love. And what else?
I love the past in him. But all the rest has seeped away.
After what I revealed to Henry about my life, I was in despair. It was as if I were a criminal, had been in jail, and were at last free and willing to work honestly and hard. But as soon as people discover your past they will not give you work and expect you to act like a criminal again.
I am finished with myself, with my sacrifices and my pity, with what chains me. I am going to make a new beginning. I want passion and pleasure and noise and drunkenness and all evil. But my past reveals itself inexorably, like a tattoo mark. I must build a new shell, wear new costumes.
While I wait for Hugo in the car I write on a cigarette box (on the back of the Sultanes there is a good bit of rosy space).
Hugo has found out that: I have not seen the gardener about the garden, the mason about the cracked pool, have not done my accounts, have missed my fitting for an evening dress, have broken all routine.
One evening Natasha calls up. I am supposed to have spent the nights in her studio. And she asks me, "What have you been doing these last ten days?" I cannot answer her or Hugo will hear me. "Why does Natasha call you up?" he asks.
Later, in bed. Hugo is reading. As I write, almost under his eyes, he cannot suppose that what I am writing is so treacherous. I am thinking the worst about him I have ever thought.
Today while we worked in the garden I felt as if I were in Richmond Hill again, wrapped up in books and in trances, with Hugo passing by, hoping for a glimpse of me. Mon Dieu, for a moment today, I was in love with him, with the soul and the virgin body of those earlier days. A part of me has grown immeasurably, while I have clung to my young love, to a memory. And now the woman lying naked in the vast bed watches her young love bending over her and does not want him.
Since that talk with Henry, when I admitted more than I had ever admitted to myself, my life has altered and become deformed. The restlessness which was vague and nameless has become intolerably clear. Here is where it stabs me, at the center of the most perfect, the most steadfast structure, marriage. When this shakes, then my whole life crumbles. My love for Hugo has become fraternal. I look almost with horror on this change, which is not sudden, but slow in appearing on the surface. I had closed my eyes to all the signs. Above all, I dreaded admitting that I didn't want Hugo's passion. I had counted on the ease with which I would distribute my body. But it is not true. It was never true. When I rushed towards Henry, it was all Henry. I am frightened because I have realized the full extent of my imprisonment. Hugo has sequestered me, fostered my love of solitude. I regret now all those years when he gave me nothing but his love and I turned into myself for the rest. Starved, dangerous years.
I should break up my whole life, and I cannot do it. My life is not as important as Hugo's, and Henry doesn't need me because he has June. But whatever in me has grown outside and beyond Hugo will go
on.
MAY
I never have seen as clearly as tonight that my journal writing is a vice, a disease. I came home at seven-thirty worn out by a magnificent night with Henry and three hours with Eduardo. I didn't have the strength to go to Henry again. I had dinner, smoked dreamily. I glided into my bedroom, felt a sense of being enclosed, of falling into myself. I got my journal from its last hiding place under my dressing table and threw it on the bed. And I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepared his pipe. The journal, like a fragment of myself, shares my duplicities. Where has my tremendous fatigue gone? Occasionally I stop writing and feel a profound lethargy. And then some demoniac feeling urges me on.
I confide in Allendy. I talk profusely about my childhood, quote from my early journals obvious phrases about Father—so intelligible now, my passion for him. Also my sense of guilt; I felt I did not deserve anything.
We discuss finances and I tell him the cost of the visits prevents me from seeing him more often. He not only reduces his fee by half but offers to let me pay in part by working for him. I am flattered.