Ladders to Fire

by Anais Nin

  “I don’t deny Jay is a caricaturist, but only out of revengefulness. What have you done to deserve his revenge?”

  Again Sabina turned her face away.

  “I know you’re not a femme fatale,Sabina. But didn’t you want him to think you were?”

  With this peculiar flair she had for listening to the buried child in human beings, Lillian could hear the child within Sabina whining, tired of its inventions grown too cumbersome, weary of its adornments, of its disguises. Too many costumes, valances, gold, brocade, veils, to cover Sabina’s direct thrusts towards what she wanted, and meanwhile it was this audacity, this directness, this unfaltering knowledge of her wants which Lillian loved in her, wanted to learn from her.

  But a smile of immeasurable distress appeared in Sabina, and then was instantly effaced by another smile: the smile of seduction. When Lillian was about to seize upon the distress, to enter the tender, vulnerable regions of her being, then Sabina concealed herself again behind the smile of a woman of seduction.

  Pity, protection, solace, they all fell away from Lillian like gifts of trivial import, because with the smile of seduction Sabina assumed simultaneously the smile of an all-powerful enchantress.

  Lillian forgot the face of the child in distress, hungrily demanding a truthful love, and yet, in terror that this very truth might destroy the love. The child face faded before this potent smile to which Lillian succumbed.

  She no longer sought the meaning of Sabina’s words. She looked at Sabina’s blonde hair tumbling down, at her eyebrows peaked upward, at her smile slanting perfidiously, a gem-like smile which made a whirlpool of her feelings.

  A man passed by and laughed at their absorption.

  “Don’t mind, don’t mind,” said Sabina, as if she were familiar with this situation. “I won’t do you any harm.”

  “You can’t do me any harm.”

  Sabina smiled. “I destroy people without meaning to. Everywhere I go things become confused and terrifying. For you I would like to begin all over again, to go to New York and become a great actress, to become beautiful again. I won’t appear any more with clothes that are held together with safety pins! I’ve been living stupidly, blindly, doing nothing but drinking, smoking, talking. I’m afraid of disillusioning you, Lillian.”

  They walked down the streets aimlessly, unconscious of their surroundings, arm in arm with a joy that was rising every moment, and with every word they uttered. A swelling joy that mounted with each step they took together and with the occasional brushing of their hips as they walked.

  The traffic eddied around them but everything else, houses and trees were lost in a fog. Only their voices distinct, carrying such phrases as they could utter out of their female labyrinth of oblique perceptions.

  Sabina said: “I wanted to telephone you last night. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to have talked so much. I knew all the time I couldn’t say what I wanted to say.”

  “You too have fears, although you seem so strong,” said Lillian.

  “I do everything wrong. It’s good that you don’t ever ask questions about facts. Facts don’t matter. It’s the essence that matters. You never ask the kind of question I hate: what city? what man? what year? what time? Facts. I despise them.”

  Bodies close, arm in arm, hands locked together over her breast. She had taken Lillian’s hand and held it over her breast as if to warm it.

  The city had fallen away. They were walking into a world of their own for which neither could find a name.

  They entered a softly lighted place, mauve and diffuse, which enveloped them in velvet closeness.

  Sabina took off her silver bracelet and put it around Lillian’s wrist.

  “It’s like having your warm hand around my wrist. It’s still warm, like your own hand. I’m your prisoner, Sabina.”

  Lillian looked at Sabina’s face, the fevered profile taut, so taut that she shivered a little, knowing that when Sabina’s face turned towards her she could no longer see the details of it for its blazing quality. Sabina’s mouth always a little open, pouring forth that eddying voice which gave one vertigo.

  Lillian caught an expression on her face of such knowingness that she was startled. Sabina’s whole body seemed suddenly charged with experience, as if discolored from it, filled with violet shadows, bowed down by weary eyelids. In one instant she looked marked by long fevers, by an unconquerable fatigue. Lillian could see all the charred traces of the fires she had traversed. She expected her eyes and hair to turn ashen.

  But the next moment her eyes and hair gleamed more brilliantly than ever, her face became uncannily clear, completely innocent, an innocence which radiated like a gem. She could shed her whole life in one moment of forgetfulness, stand absolutely washed of it, as if she were standing at the very beginning of it.

  So many questions rushed to Lillian’s mind, but now she knew Sabina hated questions. Sabina’s essence slipped out between the facts. So Lillian smiled and was silent, listening merely to Sabina’s voice, the way its hoarseness changed from rustiness to a whisper, a faint gasp, so that the hotness of her breath touched her face.

  She watched her smoke hungrily, as if smoking, talking and moving were all desperately necessary to her, like breathing, and she did them all with such reckless intensuth afont

  When Lillian and Sabina met one night under the red light of the café they recognized in each other similar moods: they would laugh at him, the man.

  “He’s working so hard, so hard he’s in a daze,” said Lillian.

  “He talks about nothing but painting.”

  She was lonely, deep down, to think that Jay had been at his work for two weeks without noticing either of them. And her loneliness drew her close to Sabina.

  “He was glad we were going out together, he said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn’t any idea of time—he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”

  A feeling of immense loneliness invaded them both.

  They walked as if they wanted to walk away from their mood, as if they wanted to walk into another world. They walked up the hill of Montmartre with little houses lying on the hillside like heather. They heard music, music so off tune that they did not recognize it as music they heard every day. They slid into a shaft of light from where this music came—into a room which seemed built of granified smoke and crystallized human breath. A room with a painted star on the ceiling, and a wooden, pock-marked Christ nailed to the wall. Gusts of weary, petrified songs, so dusty with use. Faces like empty glasses. The musicians made of rubber like the elastic rubber-soled night.

  We hate Jay tonight. We hate man.

  The craving for caresses. Wanting and fighting the want. Both frightened by the vagueness of their desire, the indefiniteness of their craving.

  A rosary of question marks in their eyes.

  Sabina whispered: “Let’s take drugs tonight.”

  She pressed her strong knee against Lillian, she inundated her with the brilliance of her eyes, the paleness of her face.

  Lillian shook her head, but she drank, she drank. No drink equal to the state of war and hatred. No drink like bitterness.

  Lillian looked at Sabina’s fortune teller’s eyes, and at the taut profile.

  “It takes all the pain away; it wipes out reality.”

  She leaned over the table until their breaths mingled.

  “You don’t know what a relief it is. The smoke of opium like fog. It brings marvelous dreams and gaiety. Such gaiety, Lillian. And you feel so powerful, so powerful and content. You don’t feel any more frustration, you feel that you are lording it over the whole world with marvelous strength. No one can hurt you then, humiliate you, confuse you. You feel you’re soaring over the world. Everything becomes soft, large, easy. Such joys, Lillian, as you have never agined. The touch of a hand is enough…the touch of a hand is like going the whole way… And time…how time flies. The days pass like an hour. No more st
raining, just dreaming and floating. Take drugs with me, Lillian.”

  Lillian consented with her eyes. Then she saw that Sabina was looking at the Arab merchant who stood by the door with his red Fez, his kimono, his slippers, his arms loaded with Arabian rugs and pearl necklaces. Under the rugs protruded a wooden leg with which he was beating time to the jazz.

  Sabina laughed, shaking her whole body with drunken laughter. “You don’t know, Lillian… this man… with his wooden leg… you never can tell… he may have some. There was a man once, with a wooden leg like that. He was arrested and they found that his wooden leg was packed with snow. I’ll go and ask him.”

  And she got up with her heavy, animal walk, and talked to the rug merchant, looking up at him alluringly, begging, smiling up at him in the same secret way she had of smiling at Lillian. A burning pain invaded Lillian to see Sabina begging. But the merchant shook his head, smiled innocently, shook his head firmly, smiled again, offered his rugs and the necklaces.

  When she saw Sabina returning empty handed, Lillian drank again, and it was like drinking fog, long draughts of fog.

  They danced together, the floor turning under them like a phonograph record. Sabina dark and potent, leading Lillian.

  A gust of jeers seemed to blow through the place. A gust of jeers. But they danced, cheeks touching, their cheeks chalice white. They danced and the jeers cut into the haze of their dizziness like a whip. The eyes of the men were insulting them. The eyes of men called them by the name the world had for them. Eyes. Green, jealous. Eyes of the world. Eyes sick with hatred and contempt. Caressing eyes, participating. Eyes ransacking their conscience. Stricken yellow eyes of envy caught in the flare of a match. Heavy torpid eyes without courage, without dreams. Mockery, frozen mockery from the frozen glass eyes of the loveless.

  Lillian and Sabina wanted to strike those eyes, break them, break the bars of green wounded eyes, condemning them. They wanted to break the walls confining them, suffocating them. They wanted to break out from the prison of their own fears, break every obstacle. But all they found to break were glasses. They took their glasses and broke them over their shoulders and made no wish, but looked at the fragments of the glasses on the floor wonderingly as if their mood of rebellion might be lying there also, in broken pieces.

  Now they danced mockingly, defiantly, as if they were sliding beyond the reach of man’s hands, running like sand between their insults. They scoffed at those eyes which brimmed with knowledge for they knew the ecstasy of mystery and fog, fire and orange fumes of a world they had seen through a slit in the dream. Spinning and reeling and falling, spinning and turning and rolling down the brume and smoke of a world seen through a slit in the dream.

  The waiter put his ham-colored hand on Sabina’s bare arm: “You’ve got to get out of here, you two!”

  They were alone.

  They were alone without daylight, without past, without any thought of the resemblance between their togetherness and the union of other women. The whole world was being pushed to one side by their faith in their own uniqueness. All comparisons proudly discarded.

  Sabina and Lillian alone, innocent of knowledge, and innocent of other experiences. They remembered nothing before this hour: they were innocent of associations. They forgot what they had read in books, what they had seen in cafés, the laughter of men and the mocking participation of other women. Their individuality washed down and effaced the world: they stood at the beginning of everything, naked and innocent of the past.

  They stood before the night which belonged to them as two women emerging out of sleep. They stood on the first steps of their timidity, of their faith, before the long night which belonged to them. Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of premeditation.

  Two women. Strangeness. All the webs of ideas blown away. New bodies, new souls, new minds, new words. They would create it all out of themselves, fashion their own reality. Innocence. No roots dangling into other days, other nights, other men or women. The potency of a new stare into the face of their desire and their fears.

  Sabina’s sudden timidity and Lillian’s sudden awkwardness. Their fears. A great terror slashing through the room, cutting icily through them like a fallen sword. A new voice. Sabina’s breathless and seeking to be lighter so as to touch the lightness of Lillian’s voice like a breath now, an exhalation, almost a voicelessness because they were so frightened.

  Sabina sat heavily on the edge of the bed, her earthly weight like roots sinking into the earth. Under the weight of her stare Lillian trembled.

  Their bracelets tinkled.

  The bracelets had given the signal. A signal like the first tinkle of beads on a savage neck when they enter a dance. They took their bracelets off and put them on the table, side by side.

  The light. Why was the light so still, like the suspense of their blood? Still with fear. Like their eyes. Shadeless eyes that dared neither open, nor close, nor melt.

  The dresses. Sabina’s dress rolled around her like long sea weed. She wanted to turn and drop it on the floor but her hands lifted it like a Bayadere lifting her skirt to dance and she lifted it over her head.

  Sabina’s eyes were like a forest; the darkness of a forest, a watchfulness behind ambushes. Fear. Lillian journeyed into the darkness of them, carrying her blue eyes into the red-brown ones. She walked from the place where her dress had fallen holding her breasts as if she expected to be mortally thrust.

  Sabina loosened her hair and said: “You’re so extraordinarily white.” With a strange sadness, like a weight, she spoke, as if it were not the white substance of Lillian but the whiteness of her newness to life which Sabina seemed to sigh for. t;You’re so white, so white and smooth.” And there were deep shadows in her eyes, shadows of one old with living: shadows in the neck, in her arms, on her knees, violet shadows.

  Lillian wanted to reach out to her, into these violet shadows. She saw that Sabina wanted to be she as much as she wanted to be Sabina. They both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. There was in both of them the dark strain of wanting to become the other, to deny what they were, to transcend their actual selves. Sabina desiring Lillian’s newness, and Lillian desiring Sabina’s deeply marked body.

  Lillian drank the violet shadows, drank the imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors, other caresses. How all the other loves clung to Sabina’s body, even though her face denied this and her eyes repeated: I have forgotten all. How they made her heavy with the loss of herself, lost in the maze of her gifts. How the lies, the loves, the dreams, the obscenities, the fevers weighed down her body, and how Lillian wanted to become leadened with her, poisoned with her.

  Sabina looked at the whiteness of Lillian’s body as into a mirror and saw herself as a girl, standing at the beginning of her life unblurred, unmarked. She wanted to return to this early self. And Lillian wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the very bottom of the violet wells.

  Through the acrid forest of her being there was a vulnerable opening. Lillian trod into it lightly. Caresses of down, moth invasions, myrrh between the breasts, incense in their mouths. Tendrils of hair raising their heads to the wind in the finger tips, kisses curling within the conch-shell necks. Tendrils of hair bristling and between their closed lips a sigh.

  “How soft you are, how soft you are,” said Sabina.

  They separated and saw it was not this they wanted, sought, dreamed. Not this the possession they imagined. No bodies touching would answer this mysterious craving in them to become each other. Not to possess each other but to become each other. Not to take, but to imbibe, absorb, change themselves. Sabina carried a part of Lillian’s being, Lillian a part of Sabina, but they could not be exchanged through an embrace. It was not that.

  Their bodies touched and then fell away, as if both of them had touched a mirror, their own image upon a mirror. They had felt the cold wall, they had felt the mirror that never appeared when they were taken by man. Sabina ha
d merely touched her own youth, and Lillian her free passions.

  As they lay there the dawn entered the room, a grey dawn which showed the dirt on the window panes, the crack in the table, the stains on the walls. Lillian and Sabina sat up as if the dawn had opened their eyes. Slowly they descended from dangerous heights, with the appearance of daylight and the weight of their fatigue.

  With the dawn it was as if Jay had entered the room and were now lying between them. Every cell of their dream seemed to burst at once, with the doubt which had entered Lillian’s mind.

  If she had wanted so much to be Sabina so that Jay might love in her what he admired in Sabina, could it be that Sabina wanted of Lillian this that madeJay love her?

  “I feel Jay in you,” she said.

  The taste of sacrilege came to both their mouths. The mouths he kissed. The women whose flavor he knew. The one man within two women. Jealousy, dormant all night; now lying lit their side, between their caresses, slipping in between them like an enemy.

  (Lillian, Lillian, if you arouse hatred between us, you break a magic alliance! He is not as aware of us as we are of each other. We have loved in each other all he has failed to love and see. Must we awake to the great destructiveness of rivalry, of war, when this night contained all that slipped between his fingers! )

  But jealousy had stirred in Lillian’s flesh. Doubt was hardening and crystallizing in Lillian, crystallizing her features, her eyes, tightening her mouth, stiffening her body. She shivered with cold, with the icy incision of this new day which was laying everything bare.

  Bare eyes looking at each other with naked, knife-pointed questions.

  To stare at each other they had to disentangle their hair, Sabina’s long hair having curled around Lillian’s neck.

  Lillian left the bed. She took the bracelets and flung them out of the window.

  “I know, I know,” she said violently, “you wanted to blind me. If you won’t confess, he will. It’s Jay you love, not me. Get up. I don’t want him to find us here together. And he thought we loved each other!”