Ladders to Fire

by Anais Nin

  “I do love you, Lillian.”

  “Don’t you dare say it,” shouted Lillian violently, all her being now craving wildly for complete devastation.

  They both began to tremble.

  Lillian was like a foaming sea, churning up wreckage, the debris of all her doubts and fears.

  Their room was in darkness. Then came Jay’s laughter, creamy and mould-breaking. In spite of the darkness Lillian could feel all the cells of his body alive in the night, vibrating with abundance. Every cell with a million eyes seeing in the dark.

  “A fine dark night in which an artist might well be born,” he said. “He must be born at night, you know, so that no one will notice that his parents gave him only seven months of human substance. No artist has the patience to remain nine months in the womb. He must run away from home. He is born with a mania to complete himself, to create himself. He is so multiple and amorphous that his central self is constantly falling apart and is only recomposed by his work. With his imagination he can flow into all the moulds, multiply and divide himself, and yet whatever he does, he will always be two.”

  “And require two wives?” asked Lillian.

  “I need you terribly,” he said.

  Would the body of Sabina triumph over her greater love? “There are many Sabinas in the world, but only one like you,” said Jay.

  How could he lie so close and know only what she chose to tell him, knowing nothing of her, of her secret terrors and fear of loss.

  He was only for the joyous days, the days of courage, when she could share with him all the good things he brought with his passion for novelty and change.

  But he knew nothing of her; he was no companion to her sadness. He could never imagine anyone else’s mood, only his own. His own were so immense and loud, they filled his world and deafened him to all others. He was not concerned to know whether she could live or breathe within the dark caverns of his whale-like being, within the whale belly of his ego.

  Somehow he had convinced her that this expansiveness was a sign of bigness. A big man could not belong to one person. He had merely overflowed into Sabina, out of over-richness. And they would quarrel some day. Already he was saying: “I suspect that when Sabina gives one so many lies it is because she has nothing else to give but mystery, but fiction. Perhaps behind her mysteries there is nothing.”

  But how blinded he was by false mysteries! Because Sabina made such complicated tangles of everything—mixing personalities, identities, missing engagements, being always elsewhere than where she was expected to be, chaotic in her hours, elusive about her occupations, implying mystery and suspense even when she said goodbye…calling at dawn when everyone was asleep, and asleep when everyone else was awake. Jay with his indefatigable curiosity was easily engaged in unraveling the tangle, as if every tangle had a meaning, a mystery.

  But Lillian knew, too, how quickly he could turn about and ridicule if he were cheated, as he often was, by his blind enthusiasms. How revengeful he became when the mysteries were false.

  “If only Sabina would die,” thought Lillian, “if she would only die. She does not love him as I do.”

  Anxiety oppressed her. Would he push everything into movement again, disperse her anxieties with his gaiety, carry her along in his reckless course?

  Lillian’s secret he did not detect: that of her fear. Once her secret had almost pierced through, once when Jay had stayed out all night. From her room she could see the large lights of the Boulevard Montparnasse blinking maliciously, Montparnasse which he loved and those lights, and the places where he so easily abandoned himself as he gave himself to everything that glittered—rococo women, spluttering men in bars, anyone who smiled, beckoned, had a story to tell.

  She had waited with the feeling that where her heart had been there was now a large hole; no heart or blood beating anymore but a drafty hole made by a precise and rather large bullet.

  Merely because Jay was walking up and down Montparnasse in one of his high drunken moods which had nothing to do with drink but with his insatiable thirst for new people, new smiles, new words, new stories.

  Each time the white lights blinked she saw his merry smile in his full mouth, each time the red lights blinked she saw his cold blue eyes detached and mocking, annihilating the mouth in a daze of blue, iced gaiety. The eyes always cold, the mouth warm, the eyes mocking and the mouth always repairing the damage done. His eyes that would never turn inward and look into the regions of deep events, the regions of personal explorations: his eyes intent on not seeing discords or dissolutions, not seeing the missing words, the lost treasures, the wasted hours, the shreds of the dispersed self, the blind mobilities.

  Not to see the dark night of the self his eyes rose frenziedly to the surface seeking in fast-moving panoramas merely the semblance of riches…

  “Instead of love there is appetite,” thought Lillian. “He does not say: ‘I love you,’ but ‘I need you.’ Our life is crowded like a railroad station, like a circus. He does not feel things where I feel them: the heart is definitely absent. That’s why mine is dying, it has ceased to pound tonight, it is being slowly killed by his hardness.”

  Away from him she could always say: he does not feel. But as soon as he appeared she was baffled. His presence carried such a physical glow that it passed for warmth. His voice was warm like the voice of feeling. His gestures were warm, his hands liked touch. He laid his hands often on human beings, and one might think it was love. But it was just a physical warmth, like the summer. It gave off heat like a chemical, but no more.

  “He will die of hardness, and I from feeling too much. Even when people knock on the door I have a feeling they are not knocking on wood but on my heart. All the blows fall directly on my heart.”

  Even pleasure had its little stabs upon the heart. The perpetual heart-murmur of the sensibilities.

  “I wish I could learn his secret. I would love to be able to go out for a whole night without feeling all the threads that bind me to him, feeling my love for him all around me like a chastity belt.”

  And now he was lying still on the breast of her immutable love, and she had no immutable love upon which to lay her head, no one to return to at dawn.

  He sat up lightly saying: “Oh, Sabina has no roots!”

  “And I’m strangling in my roots,” thought Lillian.

  He had turned on the light to read now, and she saw his coat hugging the back of the chair, revealing in the shape of its shoulders the roguish spirit that had played in it. If she could only take the joys he gave her, his soft swagger, the rough touch of his coat, the effervescence of his voice when he said: that’s good. Even his coat seemed to be stirring with his easy flowing life, even to his clothes he gave the imprint of his liveliness.

  To stem his outflowing would be like stemming a river of life. She would not be the one to do it. When a man had decided within himself to live out every whim, every fancy, every impulse, it was a flood for which no Noah’s Ark had ever been provided.

  Lillian and Djuna were walking together over dead autumn leaves that crackled like paper. Lillian was weeping and Djuna was weeping with her and for her.

  They were walking through the city as it sank into twilight and it was as if they were both going blind together with the bitterness of their tears. Through this blurred city they walked hazily and half lost, the light of a street lamp striking them now and then like a spotlight throwing into relief Lillian’s distorted mouth and the broken line of her neck where her head fell forward heavily.

  The buses came upon them out of the dark, violently with a deafening clatter, and they had to leap out of their way, only to continue stumbling through dark streets, crossing bridges, passing under heavy arcades, their feet unsteady on the uneven cobblestones as if they had both lost their sense of gravity.

  Lillian’s voice was plaintive and monotonous, like a lamentation. Her blue eyes wavered but always fixed on the ground as if the whole structure of her life lay there and she were watchi
ng its consummation.

  Djuna was looking straight before her through and beyond the dark, the lights, the traffic, beyond all the buildings. Eyes fixed, immobile like glass eyes, as if the curtain of tears had opened a new realm.

  Lillian’s phrases surged and heaved like a turgid sea. Unformed, unfinished, dense, heavy with repetitions, with recapitulations, with a baffled, confused bitterness and anger.

  Djuna found nothing to answer, because Lillian was talking about God, the God she had sought in Jay.

  “Because he had the genius,” she said, “I wanted to serve him, I wanted to make him great. But he is treacherous, Djuna. I am more confused and lost now than before I knew him. It isn’t only his betrayals with women, Djuna, it’s that he sees no one as they are. He only adds to everyone’s confusions. I put myself wholly in his hands. I wanted to serve someone who would create something wonderful, and I also thought he would help me to create myself. But he is destructive, and he is destroying me.”

  This seeking of man the guide in a dark city, this aimless wandering through the streets touching men and seeking the guide—this was a fear all women had known…seeking the guide in men, not in the past, or in mythology, but a guide with a living breath who might create one, help one to be born as a woman, a guide they wished to possess for themselves alone, in their own isolated woman’s soul. The guide for woman was still inextricably woven with man and with man’s creation.

  Lillian had thought that Jay would create her because he was the artist, that he would be able to see her as clearly as she had seen in him the great painter, but Jay’s inconsistencies bewildered her. She had placed her own image in his hands for him to fashion: make of me a big woman, someone of value.

  His own chaos had made this impossible.

  “Lillian, no one should be entrusted with one’s image to fashion, with one’s self-creation. Women are moving from one circle to another, rising towards independence and self-creation. What you’re really suffering from is from the pain of parting with your faith, with your old love when you wish to renew this faith and preserve the passion. You’re being thrust out of one circle into another and it is this which causes you so much fear. You know you cannot lean on Jay, but you don’t know what awaits you, and you don’t trust your own awareness.”

  Lillian thought that she was weeping because Jay had said: Leave me alone, or let me work, or let me sleep.

  “Oh, Lillian, it’s such a struggle to emerge from the past clean of regrets and memories and of the desire to regress. No one can accept failure.”

  She wanted to take Lillian’s hand and make her raise her head and lead her into a new circle, raise her above the pain and confusion, above the darkness of the present.

  These sudden shafts of light upon them could not illumine where the circle of pain closed and ended and woman was raised into another circle. She could not help Lillian emerge out of the immediacy of her pain, leap beyond the stranglehold of the present.

  And so they continued to walk unsteadily over what Lillian saw merely as the dead leaves of his indifference.

  Jay and Lillian lived in the top floor studio of a house on the Rue Montsouris, on the edge of Montparnasse—a small street without issue lined with white cubistic villas.

  When they gave a party the entire house opened its doors from the ground floor to the roof, since all the artists knew each other. The party would branch off into all the little street with its quiet gardens watched by flowered balconies.

  The guests could also walk down the street to the Park Montsouris lake, climb on a boat and fancy themselves attending a Venetian feast.

  First came the Chess Player, as lean, brown, polished, and wooden in his gestures as a chess piece; his features sharply carved and his mind set upon a perpetual game.

  For him the floors of the rooms were large squares in which the problem was to move the people about by the right word. To control the temptation to point such a person to another he kept his hands in his pockets and used merely his eyes. If he were talking to someone his eyes would design a path in the air which his listener could not help but follow. His glance having caught the person he had selected made the invisible alliance in space and soon the three would find themselves on the one square until he chose to move away and leave them together.

  What his game was no one knew, for he was content with the displacements and did not share in the developments. He would then stand in the corner of the room again and survey the movements with a semitone smile.

  No one ever thought of displacing him, of introducing him to strangersight w

  But he thought it imperative to bring about an encounter between the bearded Irish architect and Djuna, because he had conceived a house for many moods, a house whose sliding panels made it one day very large for grandiose states of being, one day very small for intimate relationships. He had topped it with a removable ceiling which allowed the sky to play roof, and designed both a small spiral staircase for secret escapades and a vast one for exhibitionism. Besides, it turned on a pivot to follow the changing whims of the sun, and who but Djuna should know this house which corresponded to her many moods, to her smiling masks and refusal to show her night face, her shadows and her darkness, she who turned on artificial pivots always towards the light, who was adept at sliding panels to make womb enclosures suitable to intimate confessions, and equally capable ofopening them all at once to admit the entire world.

  Djuna smiled at the Chess Player’s accuracy, and he left them standing on the square while the Irish architect began with silken mouthfuls of words to design this house around Djuna as if he were spewing a cocoon and she would leave the party like a snail with a house built around her to the image ofher needs. On her black dress he was drawing a blue print.

  On this square something was being constructed and so the Chess Player moved on, his eyes made of the glass one could look through without being seen and now he seized upon Faustin, the Zombie, the one who had died under the first blow struck at him byexperience. Most ofthose who die like this in the middle of their life await a resuscitation, but Faustin awaited nothing: every line of his body sagged with acceptance, the growing weight of his flesh cushioned inertia, submission. The blood no longer circulated and one could see the crystal formations of fear and stagnation as in those species of fish living in the deepest waters without eyes, ears, fins, motion, shaped like loaves of bread, nourishing themselves through static cells of the skin. His one obsession was not to free himself of his death but to stand like a black sentinel at the gate and prevent others escaping from their traps. He lived among the artists, the rebels, never acquiescing in their rebellions, but waiting for the moment of Jay’s fullest sunburst of enthusiasm to puncture it with irony, waiting for Lillian’s wildest explosions to shame her as an exhibitionist, watching for Djuna’s blurred absences from reality to point out her delinquencies from the present. His very expression set the stage for the murder; he had a way of bearing himself which was like the summation of all the prohibitions: do not trespass, do not smoke, do not spit, do not lean out of the window, no thoroughfare, do not speed.

  With his black eyes and pale face set for homicide he waited in a corner. Wherever he was, a black moth would enter the room and begin its flights of mourning, black-gloved, black-creped, black-soled, inseminating the white walls with future sadnesses. The silence which followed his words clearly marked the withering effect of them and the time it took for the soil to bloom again. Always at midnight he left, following a rigid compulsion, and the Chess Player knew he must act hastily if he were going to exploit the Zombie’s death rays and test their effect upon the living.

  He walked the Zombie towards the fullest bloom of all, towards the camellia face of Sabina which opened at a party like the crowned prize-winner of the flower shows and gave every man the sensation he held the tip of a breast in his teeth. Would Sabina’s face close when the shadow of Faustin fell across it, when the black moth words and the monotonous voice fell upon he
r ears curtained intricately by her anarchic hair?

  She merely turned her face away: she was too richly nourished with pollen, seeds and sap to wither before any man, even a dead one. Too much love and desire had flown through the curves of her body, too many sighs, whispers, lay folded in the cells of her skin. Through the many rivers of her veins too much pleasure had coursed; she was immune.

  Faustin the Zombie felt bitterly defeated, for he loved to walk in the traces of Jay’s large patterns and collect his discarded mistresses. He loved to live Jay’s discarded lives, like a man accepting a second-hand coat. There was always a little warmth left in them.

  From the moment of his defeat, he ceased to attend the Party, even in his role of zombie, and the Chess Player whose role it was to see that the Party was attended at all cost, even at the cost of pretending, was disturbed to see this shadowy figure walking now always between the squares, carefully setting his foot on that rim of Saturn, the rim of nowhere which surrounds all definite places. One fallen piece.

  The Chess Player’s eyes fell on Djuna but she had escaped all seizure by dissolving into the music. This was a game he could not play: giving yourself. Djuna gave herself in the most unexpected ways. She lived in the cities of the interior, she had no permanent abode. She was always arriving and leaving undetected, as through a series of trap doors. The life she led there no one knew anything about. It never reached the ears of reporters. The statisticians of facts could never interview her. Then unexpectedly, in a public place, in a concert hall, a dance hall, at a lecture, at a party, she gave the immodest spectacle of her abandon to Stravinsky, her body’s tense identification with the dancer, or revealed a passionate interest in the study of phosphenes.

  And now she sat very neatly shaped in the very outline of the guitar played by Rango, her body tuned by the keys of her fingers as if Rango were playing on the strands of her hair, of her nerves, and the black notes were issuing from the black pupils of her eyes.

  At least she could be considered as attending the party: her eyes were not closed, as they had been a half hour earlier when she was telling the Chess Player about phosphenes: phosphenes are the luminous impressions and circles seen with the eyelids closed, after the sudden compression of the eyeball. “Try it!”