by Anais Nin
“Do you want a cigarette, Captain?”
“I’m no captain, Monsieur, I was a Legionnaire, as you can see by my beard. Are yousure you haven’t a butt or two? I’d rather have a butt. I like my independence, youknow, I collect butts. A cigarette is charity. I’m a hobo, youknow, not a beggar.”
His legs were wrapped in newspapers. “Because of the varicose veins. They sort of bother me in the winter. I could stay with the nuns, they would take care of me. But imagine having to get up every morning at six at the sound of a bell, of having to eat exactly at noon, and then at seven and having to sleep at nine. I’m better here. I like my independence.” He was filling his pipe with butts.
Jaysat beside him.
“The nuns are not bad to me. I collect crusts of old bread from the garbage cans and I sell them to the hospital for the soup they serve to pregnant women.”
“Why did youleave the Legion?”
“During my campaigns I received letters from an unknown godmother. You can’t imagine what those letters were, Monsieur, I haven’t got them because I wore them out reading them there, in the deserts. They were so warm I could have heated my hands over them if I had been fighting in a cold country. Those letters made me so happy that on my first furlough I looked her up. That was quite a task, believe me, she had no address! She sold bananas from a little cart, and she slept under the bridges. I spent my furlough sitting with her like this with a bottle of red wine. It was a good life; I deserted the Legion.”
He again refused a cigarette and Jaywalked on.
The name of a street upon an iron plate, Rue Dolent, Rue Dolent decomposed for him into dolorous, doliente, douleur. The plate is nailed to the prison wall, the wall of China, of our chaos and our mysteries, the wall of Jericho, of our religions and our guilts, the wall of lamentation, the wall of the prison of Paris. Wall of soot, encrusted dust. No prison breaker ever crumbled this wall, the darkest and longest of all leaning heavily upon the little Rue Dolent Doliente Douleur which,although on the free side of the wall, is the saddest street of all Paris. On one side are men whose crimes were accomplished in a moment of rage, rebellion, violence. On the other, grey figures too afraid to hate, to rebel, to kill openly. On the free side of the wall theyalk with iron bars in their hearts and stones on their feet carrying the balls and chains of their obsessions. Prisoners of their weakness, of their self-inflicted illnesses and slaveries. No need of guards and keys! They will never escape from themselves, and they only kill others with the invisible death rays of their impotence.
He did not know any longer where he was walking. The personages of the street and the personages of his paintings extended into each other, issued from one to fall into the other, fell into the work, or out of it, stood now with, now without, frames. The man on the sliding board, had he not seen him before in Coney Island when he was a very young man and walking with a woman he loved? This half-man had followed them persistently along the boardwalk, on a summer night made for caresses, until the woman had recoiled from his pursuit and left both the half-man and Jay. Again the man on wheels had appeared in his dream, but this time it was his mother in a black dress with black jet beads on it as he had seen her once about to attend a funeral. Why he should deprive his mother of the lower half of her body, he didn’t know. No fear of incest had ever barred his way to women, and he had always been able to want them all, and the more they looked like his mother the better.
He saw the seven hard benches of the pawnshop where he had spent so many hours of his life in Paris waiting to borrow a little cash on his paintings, and felt the bitterness he had tasted when they underestimated his work! The man behind the counter had eyes dilated from appraising objects. Jay laughed out loud at the memory of the man who had pawned his books and continued to read them avidly until the last minute like one condemned to future starvation. He had painted them all pawning their arms and legs, after seeing them pawn the stove that would keep them warm, the coat that would save them from pneumonia, the dress that would attract customers. A grotesque world, hissed the Dean of Critics. A distorted world. Well and good. Let them sit for three hours on one of the seven benches of the Paris pawnshop. Let them walk through the Rue Dolent. Perhaps I should not be allowed to go free, perhaps I should be jailed with the criminals. I feel in sympathy with them. My murders are committed with paint. Every act of murder might awaken people to the state of things that produced it, but soon they fall asleep again, and when the artist awakens them they are quick to take revenge. Very good that they refuse me money and honors, for thus they keep me in these streets and exposing what they do not wish me to expose. My jungle is not the innocent one of Rousseau. In my jungle everyone meets his enemy. In the underworld of nature debts must be paid in the same specie: no false money accepted. Hunger with hunger, pain with pain, destruction with destruction.
The artist is there to keep accounts.
From his explorations of the Dome, the Select, the Rotonde, Jay once brought back Sabina, though with these two people It would be difficult to say which one guided the other home or along the street, since both of them had this aspect of overflowing rivers rushing headlong to cover the city, making houses, cafés, streets and people seem small and fragile, easily swept along. The uprooting power of Jay’s impulses added to Sabina’s mobility reversed the whole order of the city.
Sabinan peot in her wake the sound and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York alarming the heart with the violent gong of catastrophe.
All dressed in red and silver, the tearing red and silver siren cutting a pathway through the flesh. The first time one looked at Sabina one felt: everything will burn!
Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm, to the poet who survives in a human being as the child survives in him, to this poet Sabina threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained: climb!
As she appeared, the orderly alignment of the city gave way before this ladder one was invited to climb, standing straight in space like the ladder of Baron Münchhausen which led to the sky.
Only Sabina’s ladder led to fire.
As she walked heavily towards Lillian from the darkness of the hallway into the light of the door Lillian saw for the first time the woman she had always wanted to know. She saw Sabina’s eyes burning, heard her voice so rusty and immediately felt drowned in her beauty. She wanted to say: I recognize you. I have often imagined a woman like you.
Sabina could not sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with feverish breathlessness, like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long, and when she walked she was eager to sit down again. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked; restless and keen, making jerking gestures with her hands, drinking hurriedly, speaking rapidly, smiling swiftly and listening to only half of what was said to her.
Exactly as in a fever dream, there was in her no premeditation, no continuity, no connection. It was all chaos—her erratic gestures, her unfinished sentences, her sulky silences, her sudden walks through the room, her apologizing for futile reasons (I’m sorry, I lost my gloves), her apparent desire to be elsewhere.
She carried herself like one totally unfettered who was rushing and plunging on some fiery course. She could not stop to reflect.
She unrolled the film of her life stories swiftly, like the accelerated scenes of a broken machine, her adventures, her escapes from drug addicts, her encounters with the police, parties at which indistinct incidents took place, hazy scenes of flagellations in which no one could tell whether she had been the flagellator or the victim, or whether or not it had happened it all.
A broken dream, with spaces, reversals, contradictions, galloping fantasies and sudden retractions. She would say: “he lifted my skirt,” or “we had to take care of the wounds” or “the policeman was waiting for me and I had to swallow the drug to save my friends,” and then as if she had written this on a blackboard she took a huge sponge and effac
ed it all by a phrase which was meant to convey that perhaps this story had happened to someone else, or she may have read it, or heard it at a bar, and as soon as this was erased she began another story of a beautiful girl who was employed in a night club and whom Sabina had insulted, but if Jay asked why she shifted the scene, she at once effaced it, cancelled it, to tell about something else she had heard and een at the night club at which she worked.
The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only half drawn, and when one just began to perceive them another face and figure were interposed, as in a dream, and when one thought one was looking at a woman it was a man, an old man, and when one approached the old man who used to take care of her, it turned out to be the girl she lived with who looked like a younger man she had first loved and this one was metamorphosed into a whole group of people who had cruelly humiliated her one evening. Somewhere in the middle of the scene Sabina appeared as the woman with gold hair, and then later as a woman with black hair, and it was equally impossible to keep a consistent image of whom she had loved, betrayed, escaped from, lived with, married, lied to, forgotten, deserted.
She was impelled by a great confessional fever which forced her to lift a corner of the veil, but became frightened if anyone listened or peered at the exposed scene, and then she took a giant sponge and rubbed it all out, to begin somewhere else, thinking that in confusion there was protection. So Sabina beckoned and lured one into her world, and then blurred the passageways, confused the images and ran away in fear of detection.
From the very first Jay hated her, hated her as Don Juan hates Dona Juana, as the free man hates the free woman, as man hates in woman this freedom in passion which he grants solely to himself. Hated her because he knew instinctively that she regarded him as he regarded woman: as a possible or impossible lover.
He was not for her a man endowed with particular gifts, standing apart from other men, irreplaceable as Lillian saw him, unique as his friends saw him. Sabina’s glance measured him as he measured women: endowed or not endowed as lovers.
She knew as he did, that none of the decorations or dignities conferred upon a man or woman could alter the basic talent or lack of talent as a lover. No title of architect emeritus will confer upon them the magic knowledge of the body’s structure. No prestidigitation with words will replace the knowledge of the secret places of responsiveness. No medals for courage will confer the graceful audacities, the conquering abductions, the exact knowledge of the battle of love, when the moment for seduction, when for consolidation, when for capitulation.
The trade, art and craft that cannot be learned, which requires a divination of the fingertips, the accurate reading of signals from the fluttering of an eyelid, an eye like a microscope to catch the approval of an eyelash, a seismograph to catch the vibrations of the little blue nerves under the skin, the capacity to prognosticate from the direction of the down as from the inclination of the leaves some can predict rain, tell where storms are brooding, where floods are threatening, tell which regions to leave alone, which to invade, which to lull and which to take by force.
No decorations, no diplomas for the lover, no school and no traveler’s experience will help a man who does not hear the beat, tempo and rhythms of the body, catch the ballet leaps of desire at their highest peak, perform the acrobatics of tenderness and lust, and know all the endless virtuosities of silence.
Sabina was studying his potentialities with such insolence, weighing the accuracy of his glance. For there is a black lover’s glance well known to women versed in this lore, which can strike at the very center of woman’s body, which plants its claim as in a perfect target.
Jay saw in her immediately the woman without fidelity, capable of all desecrations. That a woman should do this, wear no wedding ring, love according to her caprice and not be in bondage to the one. (A week before he was angry with Lillian for considering him as the unique and irreplaceable one, because it conferred on him a responsibility he did not wish to assume, and he was wishing she might consider an understudy who would occasionally relieve him of his duties!)
For one sparkling moment Jay and Sabina faced each other in the center of the studio, noting each other’s defiance, absorbing this great mistrustfulness which instantly assails the man and women who recognize in each other the law-breaking lovers; erecting on this basic mutual mistrust the future violent attempts to establish certitude.
Sabina’s dress at first like fire now appeared, in the more tangible light of Lillian’s presence, as made of black satin, the texture most similar to skin. Then Lillian noticed a hole in Sabina’s sleeve, and suddenly she felt ashamed not to have a hole in her sleeve too, for somehow, Sabina’s poverty, Sabina’s worn sandals, seemed like the most courageous defiance of all, the choice of a being who had no need of flawless sleeves or new sandals to feel complete.
Lillian’s glance which usually remained fixed upon Jay, grazing lightly over others, for the first time absorbed another human being as intently.
Jay looked uneasily at them. This fixed attention of Lillian revolving around him had demanded of him, the mutable one, something he could not return, thus making him feel like a man accumulating a vast debt in terms he could never meet.
In Sabina’s fluctuating fervors he met a challenge: she gave him a feeling of equality. She was well able to take care of herself and to answer treachery with treachery.
Lillian waited at the corner of the Rue Auber. She would see Sabina in full daylight advancing out of a crowd. She would make certain that such an image could materialize, that Sabina was not a mirage which would melt in the daylight.
She was secretly afraid that she might stand there at the corner of the Rue Auber exactly as she had stood in other places watching the crowd, knowing no figure would come out of it which would resemble the figures in her dreams. Waiting for Sabina she experienced the most painful expectancy: she could not believe Sabina would arrive by these streets, cross such a boulevard, emerge from a mass of faceless people. What a profound joy to see her striding forward, wearing her shabby sandals and her shabby black dress with royal indifference.
“I hate daylight,” said Sabina, and her eyes darkened with anger. The dark blue rings under her eyes were so deep they marked her flesh. It was as if the flesh around her eyes had been burned away by the white heat and fever of her glance.
They found the place she wanted, a place below the level of the street.
Her talk like a turbulent river, like a broken necklace spilled around Lillian.
“It’s a good thing I’m going away. You would soon unmask me.”
At this Lillian looked at Sabina and her eyes said so clearly: “I want to become blind with you,” that Sabina was moved and turned her face away, ashamed of her doubts.
“There are so many things I would love to do with you, Lillian. With you I would take drugs. I would not be afraid.”
“You afraid?” said Lillian, incredulously. But one word rose persistently to the surface of her being, one word which was like a rhythm more than a word, which beat its tempo as soon as Sabina appeared. Each step she took with Sabina was marked as by a drum beat with the word: danger danger danger danger.
“I have a feeling that I want to be you, Sabina. I never wanted to be anyone but myself before.”
“How can you live with Jay, Lillian? I hate Jay. I feel he is like a spy. He enters your life only to turn around afterwards and caricature. He exposes only the ugly.”
“Only when something hurts him. It’s when he gets hurt that he destroys. Has he caricatured you?”
“He painted me as a whore. And you know that isn’t me. He has such an interest in evil that I told him stories… I hate him.”
“I thought you loved him,” said Lillian simply.
All Sabina’s being sought to escape Lillian’s directness in a panic. Behind the mask a thousand smiles appeared, behind the eyelids ageless deceptions.
This was the moment. If only Sabina could bring herself
to say what she felt: Lillian, do not trust me. I want Jay. Do not love me, Lillian, for I am like him. I take what I want no matter who is hurt.
“You want to unmask me, Lillian.”
“If I were to unmask you, Sabina, I would only be revealing myself: you act as I would act if I had the courage. I see you exactly as you are, and I love you. You should not fear exposure, not from me.”
This was the moment to turn away from Jay who was bringing her not love, but another false role of play, to turn towards Lillian with the truth, that a real love might take place.
Sabina’s face appeared to Lillian as that of a child drowning behind a window. She saw Sabina as a child struggling with her terror of the truth, considering before answering what might come closest to the best image of herself she might give Lillian. Sabina would not say the truth but whatever conformed to what she imagined Lillian expected of her, which was in reality not at all what Lillian wanted of her, but what she, Sabina, thought necessary to her idealized image of herself. What Sabina was feverishly creating always was the reverse of what she acted out: a woman of loyalty and faithfulness. To maintain this image at all costs she ceased responding to Lillian’s soft appeal to the child in need of a rest from pretenses.