Ladders to Fire

by Anais Nin

  Did the child hear her? At six months she had a miscarriage and lost it.

  Lillian was giving a concert in a private home which was like a temple of treasures. Paintings and people had been collected with expert and exquisite taste. There was a concentration of beautiful women so that one was reminded of a hothouse exhibit.

  The floor was so highly polished there were two Lillians, two white pianos, two audiences.

  The piano under her strong hands became small like a child’s piano. She overwhelmed it, she tormented it, crushed it. She played with all her intensity, as if the piano must be possessed or possess her.

  The women in the audience shivered before this corps à corps.

  Lillian was pushing her vigor into the piano. Her face was full of vehemence and possessiveness. She turned her face upwards as if to direct the music upwards, but the music would not rise, volatilize itself. It was too heavily charged with passion.

  She was not playing to throw music into the blue space, but to reach some climax, some impossible union with the piano, to reach that which men and women could reach together. A moment of pleasure, a moment of fusion. The passion and the blood in her rushed against the ivory notes and overloaded them. She pounded the coffer of the piano as she wanted her own body pounded and shattered. And the pain on her face was that of one who reached neither sainthood nor pleasure. No music rose and passed out of the window, but a sensual cry, heavy with unspent forces…

  Lillian storming against her piano, using the music to tell all how she wanted to be stormed with equal strength and fervor.

  This tidal power was still in her when the women moved towards her to tell her it was wonderful. She rose from the piano as if she would engulf them, the smaller women; she embraced them with all the fervor of unspent intensity that had not reached a climax—which the music, like too delicate a vessel, the piano with too delicate a frame, had not been able to contain.

  It was while Lillian was struggling to tear from the piano what the piano could not possibly give her that Djuna’s attention was wafted towards the window.

  In the golden salon, with the crystal lamps, the tapestries and the paintings there were immense bay windows, and Djuna’s chair had been placed in one of the recesses, so that she sat on the borderline between the perfumed crowd and the silent, static garden.

  It was late in the afternoon, the music had fallen back upon the people like a heavy storm cloud which could not be dispersed to lighten and lift them, the air was growing heavy, when her eyes caught the garden as if in a secret exposure. As everyone was looking at Lillian, Djuna’s sudden glance seemed to have caught the garden unaware, in a dissolution of peace and greens. A light rain had washed the faces of the leaves, the knots in the tree trunks stared with aged eyes, the grass was drinking, there was a sensual humidity as if leaves, trees, grass and wind were all in a state of caress.

  The garden had an air of nudity.

  Djuna let her eyes melt into the garden. The garden had an air of nudity, of efflorescence, of abundance, of plenitude.

  The salon was gilded, the people were costumed for false roles, the lights and the faces were attenuated, the gestures were starched—all but Lillian whose nature had not been stylized, compressed or gilded, and whose nature was warring with a piano.

  Music did not open doors.

  Nature flowered, caressed, spilled, relaxed, slept.

  In the gilded frames, the ancestors were mummified forever, and descendants took the same poses. The women were candied in perfume, conserved in cosmetics, the men preserved in their elegance. All the violence of naked truths had evaporated, volatilized within gold frames.

  And then, as Djuna’s eyes followed the path carpeted with detached leaves, her eyes encountered for the first time three full-length mirrors placed among the bushes and flowers as casually as in a boudoir. Three mirrors.

  The eyes of the people inside could not bear the nudity of the garden, its exposure. The eyes of the people had needed the mirrors, delighted in the fragility of reflections. All the truth of the garden, the moisture, and the worms, the insects and the roots, the running sap and the rotting bark, had all to be reflected in the mirrors.

  Lillian was playing among vast mirrrs. Lillian’s violence was attenuated by her reflection in the mirrors.

  The garden in the mirror was polished with the mist of perfection. Art and artifice had breathed upon the garden and the garden had breathed upon the mirror, and all the danger of truth and revelation had been exorcised.

  Under the house and under the garden there were subterranean passages and if no one heard the premonitory rumblings before the explosion, it would all erupt in the form of war and revolution.

  The humiliated, the defeated, the oppressed, the enslaved. Woman’s misused and twisted strength…

  BREAD AND THE WAFER

  WHEN JAY WAS NOT TALKING or painting he sang. He sang under his breath or loudly according to his occupation. He dressed and ate to a rhythm, as if he were executing a primitive ritual with his big body that had not been quite chiseled off with the finish of a classical sculptor but whose outline had remained rugged as if it were not yet entirely separated from the wood or stone out of which it had been carved. One expected to feel the roughness of it as when one touched a clay figure before it had been thrust into the potter’s oven.

  He had retained so much of the animal, a graceful awkwardness in his walk, strong rhythmic gestures in full accord with the pull of the muscles, an animal love of stretching, yawning, relaxing, of sleeping anywhere, of obeying every impulse of his body. A body without nerves or tensions.

  When he stood upon his well-planted, well-separated feet it was as if like a tree he would immediately take root there. As he had taken roots lustily in Paris now, in the café, in his studio, in his life with Lillian.

  Wherever he found himself he was well, as if the living roots of his body could sprout in any ground, at any time, under any sky. His preference went, however, to artificial lights, crowds, and he grew, talked, and laughed best in the center of a stream of people.

  If he were waiting he would fill the waiting with explosions of song, or fall into enthusiastic observations. The spectacle of the street was enough for him; whatever was there was enough for him, for his boundless satisfaction.

  Placed before a simple meal he would begin his prestidigitations: this steak is wonderful…how good it is. How awfully good! And the onions… He made sounds of delight. He poured his enthusiasm over the meal like a new condiment. The steak began to glow, to expand, to multiply under the warmth of his fervor. Every dish was wrapped in amorous appreciation, as if it had been brought to the table with a fire burning under it and was flaming in rum like a Christmas pudding.

  “Good, good, good,” said his palate, said his roseate cheeks, said his bowed assenting head, said his voice, all expanding in prodigious additions, as if he were pushing multiple buttons of delight, and colors burst from the vegetables, meat, salad, cheese and wine. Even the parsley assumed a festive air like a birthday candle on a cake. “Ah, ah, ah, the salad!” he said, pouring over it a voice like an unguent along with the olive oil.

  His pleasure donned the white cap of the proud chef playing gay scales of flavors, festooning the bread and wine with the high taste of banquets.

  The talk, too, burst its boundaries. He started a discussion, let it take fire and spread, but the moment it took too rigid a form he began to laugh, spraying it, liquefying it in a current of gaiety.

  To laugh. To laugh. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m not laughing at anyone, at anybody. I just can’t help myself. I don’t care a bit, not a bit, who’s right.”

  “But you must care,” said Faustin, speaking through a rigid mask of sadness which made his face completely static, and one was surprised that the words could come through the closed mouth. “You must care, you must hold on to something.”

  “I never hold on,” said Jay. “Why hold on? Whatever you hold on to dies. There co
mes Colette. Sit here, Colette. How was the trade today? Colette, these people are talking about holding on. You must hold on, you must care, they say. Do you hold on, Colette? They pass like a stream, don’t they, and you’d be surprised if the same ones bobbed up continuously, surprised and maybe bored. It’s a good stream, isn’t it, just a stream that does not nestle into you to become an ulcer, a good washing stream that cleanses as it flows, and flows clean through.”

  With this he drank fully from his Pernod, drank indeed as if the stream of absinthe, of ideas, feelings, talk, should pass and change every day guided only by thirst.

  “You’redrunk,” said Colette. “You don’t make sense.”

  “Only the drunks and the insane make sense, Colette, that’s where you’re wrong. Only the drunks and the insane have discarded the unessential for chaos, and only in chaos there is richness.”

  “If you go on this way,” said Faustin, his finger pointing upward like a teacher of Sanskrit, “someone will have to take care of you while you spill in all directions recklessly. You’ll need taking care of, for yours is no real freedom but an illusion of freedom, or perhaps just rebellion. Chaos always turns out to be the greatest trap of all in which you’ll find yourself more securely imprisoned than anyone.”

  At the words “taking care” Jay had turned automatically towards Lillian and read in her eyes that fixed, immutable love which was his compass.

  When Faustin was there at the café conversation would always start at the top of a pyramid without any gradual ascension. It would start with the problems of form, being and becoming, physiognomics, destiny versus incident, the coming of the fungoid era, the middle brain and the tertiary moon!

  Faustin talked to build. He insisted that each talk should be a complete brick to add to a careful construction. He always started to draw on the marble-top table or othe tablecloth: this is our first premise, this is our second premise, and now we will reach the third. No sooner had he made on the table the semblance of a construction than there would come into Jay’s eyes an absinthe glint which was not really the drink but some layer of his being which the drink had peeled away, which was hard, cruel, mischievous. His phrases would begin to break and scatter, to run wild like a machine without springs, gushing forth from the contradictory core of him which refused all crystallizations.

  It happened every time the talk approached a definite conclusion, every time some meaning was about to be extracted from confusion. It was as if he felt that any attempt at understanding were a threat to the flow of life, to his enjoyment. As if understanding would threaten the tumultuous current or arrest it.

  They were eating in a small café opposite the Gare St. Lazare, a restaurant wide open on the street. They were eating on the street and it was as if the street were full of people who were eating and drinking with them.

  With each mouthful Lillian swallowed, she devoured the noises of the street, the voices and the echoes they dropped, the swift glances which fell on her like pieces of lighted wick from guttering candles. She was only the finger of a whole bigger body, a body hungry, thirsty, avid.

  The wine running down her throat was passing through the throat of the world. The warmth of the day was like a man’s hand on her breast, the smell of the street like a man’s breath on her neck. Wide open to the street like a field washed by a river.

  Shouts and laughter exploded near them from the art students on their way to the Quatz’ ArtsBall. Egyptians and Africans in feather and jewelry, with the sweat shining on their brown painted bodies. They ran to catch the bus and it was like a heaving sea of glistening flesh shining between colored feathers and barbaric jewelry, with the muscles swelling when they laughed.

  A few of them entered the restaurant, shouting and laughing. They circled around their table, like savages dancing around a stake.

  The street organ was unwinding Carmen from its roll of tinfoil voices.

  The same restaurant, another summer evening; but Jayis not there. The wine has ceased passing down Lillian’s throat. It has no taste. The food does not seem rich. The street is separated from the restaurant by little green bushes she had not noticed before; the noises seem far from her, and the faces remote. Everything now happens outside, and not within her own body. Everything is distant and separated. It does not flow inside of her and carry her away.

  Because Jay is not there? Does it mean it was not she who had drunk the wine, eaten the food, but that she had eaten and drunk through the pores of his pleasure and his appetite? Did she receive her pleasure, her appetite, through his gusto, his lust, his throat?

  That night she had a dream: Jaynthad become her iron lung. She was lying inside of him and breathing through him. She felt a great anxiety, and thought: if he leaves me then I will die. When Jay laughed she laughed; when he enjoyed she enjoyed. But all the time there was this fear that if he left her she would no longer eat, laugh or breathe.

  When he welcomed friends, was at ease in groups, accepted and included all of life, she experienced this openness, this total absence of retraction through him. When alone, she still carried some constriction which interfered with deep intakes of life and people. She had thought that by yielding to him, they would be removed.

  She felt at times that she had fallen in love with Jay’s freedom, that she had dreamed he would set her free, but that somehow or other he had been unable to accomplish this.

  At night she had the feeling that she was being possessed by a cannibal.

  His appetite. The gifts she made him of her feelings. How he devoured the response of her flesh, her thoughts about him, her awareness of him. As he devoured new places, new people, new impressions. His gigantic devouring spirit in quest of substance.

  Her fullness constantly absorbed by him, all the changes in her, her dissolutions and rebirths, all this could be thrown into the current of his life, his work, and be absorbed like twigs by a river.

  He had the appetite of the age of giants.

  He could read the fattest books, tackle the most immense paintings, cover the vastest territories in his wanderings, attack the most solemn system of ideas, produce the greatest quantity of work. He excluded nothing: everything was food. He could eat the trivial and the puerile, the ephemeral and the gross, the scratchings on a wall, the phrase of a passerby, the defect on a face, the pale sonata streaming from a window, the snoring of a beggar on a bench, flowers on the wallpaper of a hotel room, the odor of cabbage on a stairway, the haunches of a bareback rider in the circus. His eyes devoured details, his hands leaped to grasp.

  His whole body was like a sensitive sponge, drinking, eating, absorbing with a million cells of curiosity.

  She felt caught in the immense jaws of his desire, felt herself dissolving, ripping open to his descent. She felt herself yielding up to his dark hunger, her feelings smoldering, rising from her like smoke from a black mass.

  Take me, take me, take my gifts and my moods and my body and my cries and my joys and my submissions and my yielding and my terror and my abandon, take all you want.

  He ate her as if she were something he wanted to possess inside of his body like a fuel. He ate her as if she were a food he needed for daily sustenance.

  She threw everything into the jaws of his desire and hunger. Threw all she had known, experienced and given before. She gathered all to feed his ravenousness; she went into the past and brought back her past selves, she took the present self and the future self and threw them into the is curiosity, flung them before the greed of his questions.

  The red lights from a hotel sign shone into the studio. A red well. A charging, a hoofing, a clanging, a rushing through the body. Thumping. The torrent pressure of a machine, panting, sliding back and forth, back and forth.

  Swing. Swing. The bed-like stillness and downiness of summer foliage. Roll. Roll. Clutch and fold. Steam. Steam. The machine on giant oiled gongs yielding honey, rivers of honey on a bed of summer foliage. The boat slicing open the lake waters, ripples extending to the tips
of the hair and the roots of the toes.

  No stronger sea than this sea of feelings she swam into with him, was rolled by, no waves like the waves of desire, no foam like the foam of pleasure. No sand warmer than skin, the sand and quicksands of caresses. No sun more powerful than the sun of desire, no snow like the snow of her resistance melting in blue joys, no earth anywhere as rich as flesh.

  She slept, she fell into trances, she was lost, she was renewed, she was blessed, pierced by joy, lulled, burned, consumed, purified, born and reborn within the whale belly of the night.

  At the beginning of their life together he had constantly reverted to his childhood as if to deposit in her hands all the mementos of his early voyages.

  In all love’s beginnings this journey backwards takes place: the desire of every lover to give his loved one all of his different selves, from the beginning.

  What was most vivid in Jay’s memory was the treachery of his parents.

  “I was about six years old when a brand-new battleship docked at the Brooklyn Navy yard. All the boys in the neighborhood had been taken to see it but me. They kept describing it in every detail until I could dream of it as if I had seen it myself. I wanted desperately for my father to take me to it. He kept postponing the visit. Then one day he told me to wash my hands and ears carefully, to put on my best suit and said he was taking me to see the battleship. I washed myself as never before. I walked beside my father neat, and proud and drunk with gaiety. I kept telling him the number of guns we would see, the number of portholes. My father listened with apparent interest. He walked me into a doctor’s office instead, where I had my tonsils taken out. The pain was a million times multiplied by the shock of disillusion, of betrayal, by the violent contrast between my dream, my expectations, and the brutal reality of the operation.”