Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol

by Robert Levy

  She flings her cigarette into the path of a passing motorcar. “Walk with me,” she says, and juts out her elbow, offers me the crook of her arm. Another woman once offered me her arm here for the first time: June, who slipped her hand over mine as we made our way to a café in Montmartre. More than a year past, a frosty winter’s night that kept the pair of us pressed close to each other. June proved an enchantress herself, though one of an altogether different nature.

  I lock my arm in hers, and Maxa and I proceed together down the rough cobbled court, walking as one into the chiaroscuro labyrinth cast over the crisp spring night.

  Her apartment is only a few blocks from the theatre, and we walk at a brisk pace. Maxa often looks over her shoulder, or stops to peer into the faces of passing strangers, as if she is attempting to glean some hidden meaning from their features. We soon reach her building, the last of a succession of severe tenements, and climb the stairs to her top floor flat.

  Once inside, I take in the dark living space, an eerie reflection of the Guignol’s sensual morbidity: black velvet draped in heavy folds along the walls and ceiling; all the upholstery blood red, from the tattered divans to the throw pillows atop rugs in teetering piles; elaborate oversized candelabras, whose immense pillar candles Maxa lights one after the next, dried wax suspended in hardened pools across the scored wooden floorboards. She pours us two tumblers of pastis, kicks off her boots, and drops down onto one of the couches.

  “Sit, please.” She hands me a glass, and I lower myself across from her, nestling upon a pillow beside the tiled hexagonal table at the center of the room. She gulps at her drink, lights a little brass lamp, and fishes a strangely shaped pipe from among the unseemly items splayed across the table. “Would you like to smoke opium with me?”

  “I…I never have before.”

  “Then pay close attention.” I watch fascinated as she leans over the lamp and inhales the dark brown tar, sweet blue smoke emerging from her lips and floating upwards, restless spirits made visible. Her eyes close in rapt pleasure, and I feel that I have become vestigial, someone who has seen her safely home to the sheltering arms of her true lover, one capable of meeting all her needs.

  I take the pipe from her and inhale, the smoke floral and spiced as it invades my lungs. I hold it in, then exhale it in a wide arc. “And now you have smoked opium,” she says. “I did warn you that were crossing a threshold.”

  She sighs, her heavy eyelids drooping upon their beds of powder and kohl. “You asked me to tell you how I was able to access your mind, to commingle our essences on the boards at the Guignol. You asked how it was possible to see out from the eyes of another. But in doing so, you ask the wrong questions. If you really want to know how I am gifted with such talents, then you must learn how it is that I reached this twilit pass.”

  Maxa pours herself another pastis, the glass clouded the way her eyes are clouded, murky and unforthcoming. “In more than fifteen years at the Guignol, I have died thousands of deaths upon its stage. I have been stabbed, strangled, poisoned, hanged, scalped, burned alive, buried alive, and more. An impressive achievement as far as such things go, no one can deny that fact, and believe me when I say that each death has been felt deep inside me. Every one of them, from the first to the last.”

  She sets the opium alight, draws in the thin line of smoke, and hands me the pipe so that I may do the same. This time I become lightheaded, and try not to cough as I exhale.

  “These little deaths, they take their toll,” she says. “Upon my body and mind, my very soul. No part of me left untouched or uncorrupted, nothing left of me pure. So it is that in turn, I myself have killed. Murdered, as I have been murdered. For lust, for revenge, in defense of my womanhood: varying forms of rightness or injustice, meted out however the Guignol playwrights see fit. These killings do their own type of damage, and I dwell in a dual darkness of my own making, trapped in a tangled web of violence as both spider and prey. In doing so, I have become the very bride of death itself. There is no escape. Not any longer.”

  She casts her eyes about the room, as if seeing it for the first time. The mutable shadows and flickering candle flames, the dense fabrics womblike and suffocating, all of it a haze through the dense scrim of smoke. “This apartment was once my safe haven,” she whispers. “It was filled with sunlight, with laughter. With the sweet smell of fresh flowers threaded through the air, a home suffused with hope. But then a man came along, and he changed everything. He led me away from the sun, and soon all my hope was gone.” Maxa shrugs. “These days, I am a reflection of the world itself, from which hope fast departs just the same. You feel it as well, do you not? The entire globe will be drenched in blood soon enough.”

  “Surely you can find your way out of this,” I say, taken aback by the unending depths of her despair. “Surely there are other theatres who would consider themselves lucky to have an actress of your obvious abilities. Or there are other lines of work to pursue. You needn’t be tied to the Guignol and its perverse charms. It is not as if you are some kind of indentured servant.”

  “But that is exactly what I am.” She smiles, though there is no joy in it. “Only it is not to the Guignol that I am enslaved.”

  Maxa lights a cigarette before her eyes settle on mine once more. “There is a man who walks these streets, the one who stole me away from the light and brought me into darkness. A most dangerous man, cruel and unyielding. He wears black from head to toe, so that he may go unnoticed, until it is time for him to reveal his true face. He goes by many names, and also by no name at all. To some, he is the Dark Angel of Music, whereas to others he is known as Crocell, Lord of the Great Deep. But I know him as Monsieur Guillard.”

  She glances behind me, into the heavy velvet folds draping the walls, as if expecting to see someone there. “I called upon him once, when I was younger and reckless, and he came to me, as a midnight lover arrives. With a snap of his fingers, he made all my troubles vanish. My profound pain, my loneliness, my hunger? All of it was lifted from me, in a whirlwind of lightning and rain. I never felt so happy, not in all my life. I became Maxa, High Priestess of Sin and Horror, the Crown Princess of Blood.

  “I’d found my purpose at last, and my ascent at the Guignol soon followed. As my talents blossomed, I grew capable of casting glamours and charms, like the fairies of legend. I learned to make my face beautiful one instant, and hideous the next. I could even cast a spell to cause a crowd to feel what I felt in that very moment, to look out from behind my eyes. Draw on the audience’s hidden fantasies and perversions, to make each role a revelation both personal and profound.”

  “That is how I witnessed my friend in you the other night.”

  She nods. “Another gift, from the Dark Angel.”

  “That is how tonight, during La Famille du Péché, that I saw my own...” I do not say more. Though she must already know what dark thoughts stir inside me, what forbidden passions loom behind my mask of propriety. She must know me, now.

  “At first, it felt as if they were gifts given freely,” Maxa says. “It was a golden time. One in which I made my own name, and was freed at last from the shackles of my childhood and the rest of my unhappy past. Then one gloomy spring night not so very long ago, a night very much like this, Godfather Death finally showed me his true face. I had almost forgotten about him, which made it all the worse when he darkened my door once more. He came to collect his payment, and I could not refuse. Now, I fear I do not have very much time left at all. That is the nature of such bargains, I’m afraid.”

  “What is it you owe this man? Perhaps I can secure you the necessary funds to help ease your debt.”

  “Money.” She chuckles, her eyes receding into her skull as she slides further into the opium’s poppy embrace. “You do not understand. He has no interest in such concerns.” She holds her cigarette to her lips, the smoke bisecting her face. “He only desires flesh, in all its many forms. He is the demon lover, and what isn’t given to him freely will be taken by f
orce. I attempt to appease him. To sate him, the very best that I can.” She glances at the pipe upon the table. “Still, it is never enough.”

  A firm rap jolts the apartment door. Once, twice, three times, and her face goes ashen pale. “No,” she whispers. “Jesus in heaven, no.”

  “What is it? Is it him?”

  “Not tonight, please, not tonight.” She rises from the couch and stumbles over the corner of the table as she falls moaning to the carpet. “Please, no, not now. Not now.”

  “I will protect you.” I help her back to her feet, my mind soupy and swimming with the drug. “I will not let him bring you any harm.”

  “There’s no protecting me from him. Not now, and not ever.”

  Another three knocks, louder this time, more insistent, with the fraught menace heralding the arrival of a villain from the wings. And how we seem to have found ourselves cast in just such a scenario, as if written for the Guignol stage itself! Whether I prove heroine or victim, it is still too soon to tell.

  “Quick,” Maxa says, and hands me my bag. She shoves me toward the wall, inside a parting in the dense black curtains. “Hide behind here. Once I lead him to the bedroom, you must depart immediately, and hurry straight home. Whatever you do, do not look behind you. Do not see him for what he truly is. Promise me that.”

  “I promise.” I slip between the dark folds. “Do not worry. I will go straight to the police.”

  “The police can do nothing to help.” Her haunted eyes fix me in place. “If he finds out you are here, that will be the last of me on this earth. And it won’t end there. It never does.” She closes the drapes, and I am left entombed inside the black walls.

  The stutter of Maxa’s footsteps as she makes her way across the room. The clatter of the latch as it is undone. The creak of the door as it opens. After an excruciating silence, footfall as the threshold is crossed, one deliberate thump, followed by a second. The door groans closed, and I hold my breath, the velvet lapping against me in black liquid waves.

  “Maxa?” The unfamiliar voice is a nighttime invocation, a multilayered harmony that is both young and old, masculine and feminine, and my skin prickles with gooseflesh. “Is there someone here with you?”

  “No,” she answers quickly, too quickly. Heavy footsteps proceed into the room, steady and precise, a soldier amidst his marching drills as the stranger opens and closes a door somewhere across the room. This is followed by a second door, and a cabinet or wardrobe door. As he navigates the room, it becomes apparent he is searching out a potential interloper, searching for me, and I am sure my pounding heart will give me away. All this I hear from the cocoon of lush darkness in which I have found myself, so close to detection and stiff with fright, and utterly unable to act.

  I smell him on the other side of the curtain. A man’s scent, musky and ripe, but also the smell of the sea, salt and semen and sweat, the aroma brutal and intoxicating in equal measure. I list, and I am flooded, returned to Allendy’s strange box and the conjured man that walked from the waves, the ocean rushing over me in a relentless tide.

  The black material flutters, and though frozen with fear I force myself to one side as the curtains are parted. A sliver of light against the wall, and the cracked plaster is illumined in a gash of bright yellow. His breath is hungry and rasping and wet, that of a ferocious animal on the prowl. Gloved hands hold open the velvet folds, fingers startlingly long and thin and deathly black. I am unable to breathe.

  “There’s no one here,” Maxa says from the other side, her voice tremulous, so much so that I am sure she has given me away. Yet the hands withdraw, the curtains fall back into place, and the firm thudding of his feet reverberates as he retreats, followed by Maxa’s own reluctant steps.

  A door opens deeper inside the apartment, and I wait for some time before I dare to peer from my hiding place. The living space is abandoned, and I clench my bag to my chest and tiptoe across the room to the front door. I take hold of tarnished brass knob, an array of photographs and clippings pinned to the wood: a prayer card of a female saint on her knees, a pamphlet for a perfumery advertising various discounted scents, a portrait of a voluptuous young woman seductively posed on her back, this last image affixed to a ragged shred of wallpaper, the pattern a field of blood-red anemones.

  From down the hall, the primal cadences of great abandon issue forth: grunting and slapping and whinnying, the moist sounds of lips and hips and coaxed flesh. I remove my hand from the knob, and turn to face the corridor and the gaping darkness beyond. Down the passageway, the animalistic noises surge in strength and severity, uneven walls panting and undulating in their own heaving breath, in, out, in. I start down the passage in a somnambulant daze, my mind fogged as I look up to find I have reached the end of the hall, the door here ajar. I peer through the breach, a narrow seam of light slashing across the rumpled bed. I should never have come here in the first place. I know this, and still I cannot obey.

  It lies atop her, the thing I mistook for a man. Naked and bestial, its shoulders are impossibly broad, tapering down to a narrow waist and meaty buttocks. The whole of its oil-slick skin is coated in a wet down, almost milky in the diffuse light from the tapestry-covered window. Its crown carries a faint suggestion of a ridged skull, hanks of long black hair strewn from its head across the stained silk pillows in a cascade of seaweed-like strands.

  I step further into the room. Beneath the beast, Maxa squeezes her eyes shut, her hands grasped tight to its sweat-slicked hide, clinging fast for dear life. Her mouth is slit open the way the door is slit open, her upper lip bloodied at its corner as if chewed at or otherwise bitten. I creep toward the bed on a wave of devouring intensity and hover above their wild and rutting forms. I reach for them, fingers extended to take hold of the beast’s heaving back. To what, intercede? To free Maxa from its brutal embrace? To join them? I cannot say for sure.

  Before I make contact, Maxa startles to attention. Her eyes go wide as they settle on me, her expression animating with surprise but also with a savage fury. At once, she propels naked from beneath her possessor and cries out in a banshee wail. “Get out!” she screams at me, manic as she beats at my face with her fists. “Get out, get out, get out!”

  I sink against the wall, attempt to shield myself as she batters about my head with a series of kicks and punches, until I manage to stand once more. I thrust her to the floor and scramble over her prone form and back toward the door. As I move past the bed, the beast atop it raises its head, snout to the air as if searching out a scent. Though its features are obscured by its damp sweep of hair, I glimpse two small knots of coiled bone upon its scalp, and my blood turns to ice.

  With a languid and elegant gesture, the creature extends a long arm in my direction. It is as if it means to beckon me closer, or perhaps impede my escape. I force my way to the door, staggering out into the dim light of the hallway. In my opium haze, I am left to wonder what it is I have truly seen, whether the drug has made falsehoods of the observable world.

  The harsh squeal of bedsprings, and I race to the front door and fumble with the knob, my hands no longer functioning as they should. A blur of movement down the hall casts violent shadows at the edge of my vision, and I finally manage to fling the door wide. I slam it fast behind me, and stumble down the stairs and across the landing as the door creaks open above. I don’t look back, and descend the next flight and the next, spiraling down into the dark pool of night. When I reach the bottom, I pause to glance back toward the stairwell, into the constricted throat that winds upwards like the contours of an ammonite shell, like the corkscrewed horns growing from the heavy crown of the beast’s skull, savage and impossible.

  From the very top of the twisting stairs, someone or something stares down from above. I cannot see well in the dim, only a silver-yellow glint from two gleaming eyes as the figure retreats further into the shadows. I stifle a cry and hurry through the vestibule and out of the building, and rush into the street to hail a taxi. Soon, I am on my way b
ack home. To Louveciennes, and my husband, my garden, my life of safety and comfort, and even my own quiet kind of happiness I seem so determined to destroy. I sink my heavy head in my hands, and breathe in, out, in, willing myself into logic and reasonableness. But logic and reasonableness never helped anyone before. They certainly never helped me.

  Though the effect of the opium has already started to fade, my perception of the world around me has altered nevertheless. As I write in this diary and dawn breaks on the other side of the drawn shutters, these once-smooth pages have coarsened and become less pure. Even my handwriting is unrecognizable to me, as if penned by a different hand, this skin worn by a different person altogether. Now, as it begins to rain over Paris and its outskirts, I watch Hugo as he shifts and turns in bed beside me, his sleep troubled. Who is to say what has become of him in my absence? Maybe he has suddenly changed forever, and is no longer the man I once knew. Who, indeed, have I become to him? Or even to myself?

  I am haunted by Maxa. Her wild cries as she battered me, yes, but also her frozen face as she lay beneath the beast, eyes shut tight and unseeing. I am desperate to free her of her burdens. To endure them as my own, no matter her refusals or refutations. If only I was innocent enough to bear them, noble enough to claim I only want to save Maxa from herself, the way I once tried and failed to save June.

  In truth, I must admit there is more to my desire to take on the weight of her debt. For my dark and shameful secret is this:

  I want to be the one beneath the savage beast.

  A few days later, a letter from Maxa arrives at Louveciennes:

  Anaïs,

  I am writing to thank you for the kind note you sent to the theatre asking after me and inquiring about my wellbeing. I also wish to extend my deepest apologies to you, in the hope that you will forgive me for what transpired the other night. I was not in my right mind, and never should have exposed you to such illicit matters. It was never my intention to corrupt you, and for that I am most sorry. Allow me to explain myself just a little further, after which we must cease all communication, despite (or perhaps because of) your obvious and heartfelt concern.