Ladders to Fire

by Anais Nin

  As he told this story it was clear to Lillian that he still felt the shock of the deception and had never forgiven his father. The intensity of the wish had been made even greater by the poverty of his childhood which made the visit to the battleship a unique pleasure discussed by his playmates for a whole year and not easily forgotten.

  “One very cold, snowy night my mother and I were walking towards the river. I was very small, five years old maybe. My mother was walking too fast for me, and I felt terribly cold, especially my hands. My mother carried a muff. Every now and then she took her right hand out of the muff to gb mine when we crossed the streets. The warmth of her hand warmed me all through. Then she would drop my hand again and nestle hers back in her muff. I began to weep: I wanted to put my hand inside of her muff but she wouldn’t let me. I wept and raged as if it were a matter of life and death—probably was, for me. I wanted the warmth and her naked hands. The more I wept and pulled at the muff the harsher my mother got. Finally she slapped my hand so I would let the muff go.”

  As he told this his blue eyes became the eyes of an irrevocably angry child. Lillian could see clear through his open eyes as through the wrong end of a telescope, a diminutive Jay raging, cold and thwarted, with his blue frozen hands reaching for his mother’s muff.

  This image was not being transmitted to Lillian the woman, but to the responsive child in herself understanding and sharing his anger and disillusion. It was the child in herself who received it as it sank through and beyond the outer layer of the woman who sat there listening with a woman’s full body, a woman’s face. But of this response there was no outer sign showing for Jay to see: the child in her lay so deeply locked within her, so deeply buried, that no sign of its existence or of its response was apparent. It did not beckon through her eyes which showed only a woman’s compassion, nor alter her gestures nor the pose of her body which was the pose of a woman listening to a child and looking at his smallness without herself changing stature. At this moment, like Jay, she could have slipped out of her maturity, of her woman’s body, and exposed her child’s face, eyes, movements, and then Jay would have seen it, known that he had communicated with it, touched it by way of his own childhood, and the child might have met the child and become aware of its similar needs.

  By her attitude she did not become one with him in this return to his past self. What she overtly extended to him was one who seemed done with her child self and who would replace the harsh mother, extend the muff and the warm naked hands.

  She became, at that instant, indelibly fixed in his eyes not as another child with possibly equal needs, but as the stronger one in possession of the power to dispense to all hisneeds.

  From now on was established an inequality in power: he was the cold and hungry one, she the muff and the warm naked hands.

  From now on her needs, concealed and buried as mere interferences with the accomplishment of this role, were condemned to permanent muteness. Strong direction was given to her activity as the muff, as the provider of innumerable battleships in compensation for the one he had been cheated of. Giving to him on all levels, from book to blanket to phonograph to fountain pen to food, was always and forever the battleship he had dreamed and not seen. It was the paying off of a debt to the cheated child.

  Lillian did not know then that the one who believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate. Present in every child and criminal is this conviction that no retribution will repair the injury done. The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which i the lost faith.

  This diminutive Jay who appeared in the darkness when he evoked his childhood was also a personage who could come nearer to her own frightened self without hurting her than the assertive, rather ruthless Jay who appeared in the daytime when he resumed his man’s life. When he described his smallness and how he could entersaloons to call for his father without having to swing the doors open, it seemed to Lillian that she could encompass this small figure better in the range of her vision than the reckless, amorphous, protean Jay whose personality flowed into so many channels like swift mercury.

  When Jay described the vehemence, the wildness, the hunger with which he went out into the streets to play, it seemed to her that he was simultaneously describing and explaining the vehemence, the hunger, the wildness with which he went out at night now and left her alone, so that the present became strangely innocent in her mind.

  When he talked about his impulses towards other women he took on the expression not of a man who had enjoyed another woman sensually, but of a gay, irrepressible child whose acts were absolutely uncontrollable; it became no longer infidelity but a childish, desperate eagerness to “go to the street and play.”

  She saw him in the present as the same child needing to boast of his conquests out of a feeling of helplessness, needing to be admired, to win many friends, and thus she attenuated in herself the anxiety she experienced at his many far-flung departures from her.

  When she rebelled at times he looked completely baffled by her rebellions, as if there were nothing in his acts which could harm her. She always ended by feeling guilty: he had given her his entire self to love, including the child, and now, out of noblesse oblige, she could not possibly act…like his harsh mother!

  He looked at the sulphur-colored Pernod and drank it.

  He was in the mood to paint his self-portrait for anyone who wanted to listen: this always happened after someonehad attacked his painting, or claimed some overdue debt.

  So Jay drank Pernod and explained: “I’m like Buddha who chose to live in poverty. I abandoned my first wife and child for a religious life. I now depend on the bowl of rice given to me by my followers.”

  “What do you teach?” asked a young man who was not susceptible to the contagion of Jay’s gaiety.

  “A life from which all suffering is absent.”

  But to the onlooker who saw them together, Lillian, ever alert to deflect the blows which might strike at him, it seemed much more as if Jay had merely unburdened all sadnesses upon her rather than as if he had found a secret for eliminating them altogether. His disciples inevitably discovered they, too, must find themselves a Lillian to achieve his way of life.

  “I’m no teacher,” said Jay. “I’m just a happy man. I can’t explain how I arr his entirt such a state.” He pounded his chest with delight. “Give me a bowl of rice and I will make you as joyous as I am.”

  This always brought an invitation to dinner.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he always said to Lillian. “Someone will always invite me to dinner.”

  In return for the dinner Jay took them on a guided tour of his way of life. Whoever did not catch his mood could go overboard. He was no initiator. Let others learn by osmosis!

  But this was only one of his self-portraits. There were other days when he did not like to present himself as a laughing man who communicated irresponsibility and guiltlessness, but as the great barbarian. In this mood he exulted the warrior, the invaders, the pillagers, the rapers. He believed in violence. He saw himself as Attila avenging the impurities of the world by bloodshed. He saw his paintings then as a kind of bomb.

  As he talked he became irritated with the young man who had asked him what he taught, for Jay noticed that he walked back and forth constantly but not the whole length of the studio. He would take five long steps, stop mechanically, and turn back like an automaton. The nervous compulsion disturbed Jay and he stopped him: “I wish you’d sit down.”

  “Excuse me, I’m really sorry,” he said, stopping dead. A look of anxiety came to his face. “You see, I’ve just come out of jail. In jail I could only walk five steps, no more. Now when I’m in a large room, it disturbs me. I want to explore it, familiarize myself with it, at the same time I
feel compelled to walk no further.”

  “You make me think of a friend I had,” said Jay, “who was very poor and a damned good painter and of the way he escaped from his narrow life. He was living at the Impasse Rouet, and as you know probably, that’s the last step before you land at the Hospital, the Insane Asylum or the Cemetery. He lived in one of those houses set far back into a courtyard, full of studios as bare as cells. There was no heat in the house and most of the windows were cracked and let the wind blow through. Those who owned stoves, for the most part, didn’t own any coal. Peter’s studio had an additional anomaly: it had no windows, only a transom. The door opened directly on the courtyard. He had no stove, a cot whose springs showed through the gored mattress. No sheets, and only one old blanket. No doorbell, of course. No electricity, as he couldn’t pay the bill. He used candles, and when he had no money for candles he got fat from the butcher and burnt it. The concierge was like an old octopus, reaching everywhere at once with her man’s voice and inquisitive whiskers. Peter was threatened with eviction when he hit upon an idea. Every year, as you know, foreign governments issued prizes for the best painting, the best sculpture. Peter got one of the descriptive pamphlets from the Dutch embassy where he had a friend. He brought it to the concierge and read it to her, then explained: Fact one: he was the only Dutch painter in Paris. Fact two: a prize would be given to the best painting produced by a Dutchman, amounting to half a million francs. The concierge was smart enough to see the point. She agreed to let the rent slide for a month, to lend him money for paints and a little extra change for cigarettes while he painted something as big as the wall of his cell. In return, with the prize money, he promised to buy her a little house in the country for her old age—with garden. Now he could paint all day. It was spring; he left his door open and the concierge settled in the courtyard with her heavy red hands at rest on her lap and thought that each brush stroke added to her house and garden. After two months she got impatient. He was still painting, but he was also eating, smoking cigarettes, drinking aperitifs and even sleeping at times more than eight hours. Peter rushed to the embassy and asked his friend to pay him an official call. The friend managed to borrow the official car with the Dutch coat of arms and paid the painter a respectful visit. This reassured her for another month. Every evening they read the booklet together: ‘the prize will be handed over in cash one week after the jury decides upon its value…’ The concierge’s beatitude was contagious. The entire house benefited from her mellowness. Until one morning when the newspapers published the name and photograph of the genuine Dutch painter who had actually won the prize and then without warning she turned into a cyclone. Peter’s door was locked. She climbed on a chair to look through the transom to make sure he was not asleep or drunk. To her great horror she saw a body hanging from the ceiling. He had hanged himself! She called for help. The police forced the door open. What they cut down was a mannequin of wax and old rags, carefully painted by Peter.

  “The funny thing,” added Jay after a pause, “is that after this his luck turned. When he hanged his effigy he seemed to have killed the self who had been a failure.”

  The visitors left.

  Then all the laughter in him subsided into a pool of serenity. His voice became soft. Just as he loved the falsities of his roles, he loved also to rest from these pranks and attitudes and crystallize in the white heat of Lillian’s faith.

  And when all the gestures and talk seemed lulled, suddenly he sprang up again with a new mood, a fanatic philosopher who walked up and down the studio punctuating the torrent of his ideas with fist blows on the tables. A nervous lithe walk, while he churned ideas like leaves on a pyre which never turned to ash.

  Then all the words, the ideas, the memories, were drawn together like the cords of a hundred kites and he said:

  “I’d like to work now.”

  Lillian watched the transformation in him. She watched the half open mouth close musingly, the scattered talk crystallizing. This man so easily swayed, caught, moved, now collecting his strength again. At that moment she saw the big man in him, the man who appeared to be merely enjoying recklessly, idling, roaming, but deep down set upon a terribly earnest goal: to hand back to life all the wealth of material he had collected, intent on making restitution to the world for what he had absorbed with his enormous creator’s appetite.

  There remained in the air only the echoes of his resonant voice, the hot breath of his words, the vibration of his pounding gestures.

  She rose to lock the door of the studio upon the world. She drew in long invisible bolts. She pulled in rustless shutters. Silence. She imprisoned within herself that mood and texture of Jay which would never go into his work, or be given or exposed to the world, that which she alone could see and know./font

  While Lillian slept Jay reassembled his dispersed selves. At this moment the flow in him became purposeful.

  In his very manner of pressing the paint tube there was intensity; often it spurted like a geyser, was wasted, stained his clothes and the floor. The paint, having appeared in a minor explosion, proceeded to cause a major one on the canvas.

  The explosion caused not a whole world to appear, but a shattered world of fragments. Bodies, objects, cities, trees, animals were all splintered, pierced, impaled.

  It was actually a spectacle of carnage.

  The bodies were dismembered and every part of them misplaced. In the vast dislocation eyes were placed where they had never visited a body, the hands and feet were substituted for the face, the faces bore four simultaneous facets with one empty void between. Gravity was lost, all relation between the figures were like those of acrobats. Flesh became rubber, trees flesh, bones became plumage, and all the life of the interior, cells, nerves, sinew lay exposed as by a merely curious surgeon not concerned with closing the incisions. All his painter’s thrusts opening, exposing, dismembering in the violent colors of reality.

  The vitality with which he exploded, painted dissolution and disintegration, with which his energy broke familiar objects into unfamiliar components, was such that people who walked into a room full of his painting were struck only with the power and force of these brilliant fragments as by an act of birth. That they were struck only by broken pieces of an exploded world, they did not see. The force of the explosion, the weight, density and brilliance was compelling.

  To each lost, straying piece of body or animal was often added the growth and excrescences of illness, choking moss on southern trees, cocoons of the unborn, barnacles and parasites.

  It was Jay’s own particular jungle in which the blind warfare of insects and animals was carried on by human beings. The violence of the conflicts distorted the human body. Fear became muscular twistings like the tangled roots of trees, dualities sundered them in two separate pieces seeking separate lives. The entire drama took place at times in stagnant marshes, in petrified forests where every human being was a threat to the other.

  The substance that could weld them together again was absent. Through the bodies irretrievable holes had been drilled and in place of a heart there was a rubber pump or a watch.

  The mild, smiling Jay who stepped out of these infernos always experienced a slight tremor of uneasiness when he passed from the world of his painting to Lillian’s room. If she was awake she would want to see what he had been doing. And she was always inevitably shocked. To see the image of her inner nightmares exposed affected her as the sight of a mirror affects a cat or a child. There was always a moment of strained silence.

  This underground of hostility she carried in her being, of which her body felt only the blind impacts, the shocks, was now clearly projected./font

  Jay was always surprised at her recoil, for he could see how Lillian was a prolongation of this warfare on canvas, how at the point where he left violence and became a simple, anonymous, mild-mannered man, it was she who took up the thread and enacted the violence directly upon people.

  But Lillian had never seen herself doing it.
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br />   Jay would say: “I wish you wouldn’t quarrel with everyone, Lillian.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t paint such horrors. Why did you paint Faustin without a head? That’s what he’s proudest of—his head.”

  “Because that’s what he should lose, to come alive. You hate him too. Why did you hand him his coat the other night in such a way that he was forced to leave?”

  In the daylight they repudiated each other. At night their bodies recognized a familiar substance: gunpowder, and they made their peace together.

  In the morning it was he who went out for bread, butter and milk for breakfast, while she made the coffee.

  When she locked the studio for the night, she locked out anxiety. But when Jay got into his slack morning working clothes and stepped out jauntily, whistling, he had a habit of locking the door again—and in between, anxiety slipped in again.

  He locks the door, he has forgotten that I am here.

  Thus she interpreted it, because of her feeling that once he had taken her, he deserted her each time anew. No contact was ever continuous with him. So he locked the door, forgot she was there, deserted her.

  When she confessed this to Djuna, Djuna who had continued to write for Lillian the Chinese dictionary of counter-interpretations, she laughed: “Lillian, have you ever thought that he might be locking you in to keep you for himself?”

  Lillian was accurate in her feeling that when Jay left the studio he was disassociated from her, and not from her alone, but from himself.

  He walked out in the street and became one with the street. His mood became the mood of the street. He dissolved and became eye, ear, smile.

  There are days when the city exposes only its cripples, days when the bus must stop close to the curb to permit a one-legged man to board it, days when a man without legs rests his torso on a rolling stand and propels himself with his hands; days when a head is held up by a pink metal truss, days when blind men ask to be guided, and Jay knew as he looked, absorbing every detail, that he would paint them, even though had he been consulted all the cripples of the world would be destroyed excepting the smiling old men who sat on benches beatifically drunk, because they were his father. He had so many fathers, for he was one to see the many. I believe we have a hundred fathers and mothers and loversll interchangeable, and that’s the flaw in Lillian, for her there is only one mother, one father, one husband, one lover, one son, one daughter, irreplaceable, unique—her world is too small. The young girl who just passed me with lightning in her eyes is my daughter. I could take her home as my daughter in place of the one I lost. The world is full of fathers, whenever I need one I only need to stop and talk to one…this one sitting there with a white beard and a captain’s cap…