by Anais Nin
I am also glad you sent me that section of your diary. I enjoyed reading it even though it depicted one of your infernos, because the dramatization of our personal infernos is our only way of salvation, of separating ourselves from them.
[August, 1954]
Every time I went to visit my mother at Oakland, I felt it might be for the last time. She was over eighty and although not ill, she had one light stroke some years ago. I was always preparing myself for the separation. I would have liked to be able to sense when I should be there. I would have liked to know, but then it might have been more terrible. I would have liked to know so that I could express my love, which something in her prevented me from expressing fully. I would have liked her to die when we felt the closest (during her last illness).
But it did not happen like this. I had no premonition. It was an ordinary visit. I arrived when Joaquin had just finished his summer job. I arrived at night. Mother was already in bed, at midnight. She got up to kiss me and to drink a glass of milk. The next morning Joaquin made breakfast. The maid had not come for a week and they were looking for a new one. Mother read her newspaper sitting in her favorite chair by the window. On the sofa was her bobbin lace, on which she had been working. I worked on my rug and we talked. I teased her about the rug, saying: "Would you like to finish it? I don't work on it enough." Mother answered: "I don't like rug making."
"But you like the rug, I hope, as I am making it for you."
Then I asked her if she would tell me her life story and that I would write it in the diary. She laughed at that, made fun of the idea, and I gave it up while Joaquin said to her:"Tu n'est pas gentille."But this did not change our good-humored mood. Joaquin worked at his music copying, a page, and then asked me to play canasta. Mother did not like canasta. She preferred solitaire. She quietly played solitaire while Joaquin and I played canasta, clowning to amuse her. At times she closed her eyes as if tired.
After dinner Joaquin and I went to a movie. I wish I had stayed with her, but as she always went to bed at eight or nine, I did not feel it mattered. But before dinner, to please me, Joaquin made martinis. We became very gay and clowned for mother. I always tell Marius and Olive stories with a real southern French accent. Mother would smile but she disapproved of the cocktail. Mother's expression of anger, like my father's expression of severity, was reserved for our actions. The laughter, exuberance, was given to strangers. I missed the in-between moods: tenderness and gentleness.
Before we took the cocktail, Joaquin took us for a ride, the "long drive," as they call it, over the mountains of Oakland. Why did I not notice mother was more subdued than usual? Why can't we know those we love are about to die, so as to give them the words of love they need, the last praise or reassurance? We could not bear to know, but that is not true, for it is in the not knowing that is prepared all the sources of our suffering later. We are still like animals; we do not tell our thoughts or our feelings. Mother must have had a million thoughts that day. She may not have sensed death approaching. She did not sense it because her last words to me were: "When you come next time will you stay more than two days?"
That afternoon passed quickly. When we returned from the movie, mother was asleep. The next morning we rose early to go to Mass together. Mother wore the fur coat Joaquin gave her and her black mantilla. She and Joaquin received communion. On the way out of church we were stopped by Arthur Schnitzler's widow, a converted Jewess. Joaquin stayed to talk with her while mother sat in the car. Mother complained that Joaquin had squeezed her arm too tightly when he was leading her up to the altar. Joaquin explained he could not find her arm in the big sleeve of her coat.
We had lunch. We ate a sponge cake mother had baked. Joaquin scolded her for not eating. We should have been alarmed, but we weren't. We took another drive together, the "short drive." I saw my mother's small eyes looking at the hills and fields, which were sepia colored. I should have known she was looking at them for the last time. And I could have been tender and said: "Mother, I love you." After death, that is what you weep over, but after death the one you love is not there to place an obstacle before your tenderness. Mother inhibited my tenderness. She had a generous, valiant, rough-hewn, cheerful, combative, aggressive temperament.
After our drive Joaquin and I played cards. My mother had refused to get a hearing aid. She could hear concerts but not the voices at the movies. She did not like the detective story she was reading. I left her the one I was reading. I apologized for having leaned over her bobbin-lace cushion and bent the pins (the piece of lace she was never to finish).
Then at seven thirty I left.
At the airport I did not let Joaquin stay until I left. Noise, crowds make intimate talk impossible and the separation begins really as soon as one arrives at the airport, so it is better not to delay it, to hang on, to talk like the deaf and mute in the deafening roar of the propellers. "Go home," I said, and Joaquin agreed. Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death.
In the plane I took a martini and a sleeping pill. Anxiety awakened me at midnight. I did not know that when Joaquin returned home Mother was ill with what she thought was stomach trouble. She had vomited and felt pain. She had a heart attack.
Joaquin called me. Mother was rallying under oxygen and drugs, and had talked with Joaquin. In the afternoon she talked with a young priest she asked for. But the next day she was semiconscious, and did not recognize Joaquin, answered feebly when she was called. That evening she died, unconscious, painlessly. Joaquin called me at midnight.
The pain of irrevocable loss. A greater and deeper pain because there was no sense of unity, of fusion, of closeness and I had hoped to achieve this. The loss is greater and more terrible when closeness is not attained. All my life I had struggled to come closer to her, and now she was lost to me. It eluded me. Pain of remembrance. The lace unfinished. Her game of solitaire unfinished. That ordinary family last day, nothing to lift it from an ordinary family day, with family disharmonies stemming from childhood. Pain, her shrunken body in part dying, withering, but when she was very ill and I rubbed her body with alcohol her back was white, smooth, unwrinkled, shockingly smooth and not ready to die. Pain. I could not look at my bathing suit she sewed a few stitches on, without a pain as great as the stab of a knife. Pain not to have been there, to see her, to help her and Joaquin. Joaquin having to live alone through all the horrors, the loss itself, and all the details attending death. Once I called him. He had been fixing her room. I heard him weep.
"Joaquin, remember, you made Mother's life very happy for many years. She had a happy life. You were the best of sons."
But I tormented myself with regrets and guilts. Why did it happen the night I left? Why did Joaquin and I drink a martini? It displeased her. Not only my mother had died, but my hope of fulfillment, of union with her, of an understanding, penetrating love.
I rebelled against death. I wept quietly. Every now and then the sorrow pierced me again, in the street, in a movie, at dawn, any time. The guilt came from my rebellions against her. The anguishing compassion for her life.
She started at fifteen to be a mother to her six brothers and sisters (because her own mother ran away with a lover, to a life with many lovers), and to give them the same fierce protectiveness, fierce courage she gave us. Her brothers and sisters speak of her as children do: "A tyrant with a heart of gold." Perhaps, then, marrying my father when he was only twenty-two years old and she thirty, another motherhood, and sacrificing her life to her three children may have been what gave her so much anger. She loved to sing. She had a very beautiful voice, she was sociable, natural, very cheerful.
But for the last ten years I had no discord with my mother. Her buoyancy and gaiety made her beloved. Her frankness was total, her honesty absolute, as was her generosity and her spontaneity.
I am now awaiting Joaquin, who took her body to Cuba where she wanted to be buried beside her father.
Why do people carry away with them so great a part of
our knowledge of them, of their thoughts and feelings which would make us love them better.
We are still like animals. We think we understand intuitively. We do not. My mother closed the door on me the day I sought an independent life from her, and after that I spent endless effort and time returning to her, being a good daughter.
What a burden of guilt when a mother serves you, does all the menial tasks, feeds you, works for you, but then does not approve what you become. Do we all withhold our feelings and our thoughts because of this fear of condemnation?
A confession Mother made to me once, but she made it with pride. Her father, whom she adored, was dying of cancer of the liver. He was suffering agony. His death was long, drawn out. The doctor consulted the family. Grandfather was asking for an end to his misery. Mother, as head of the family, had to decide if the doctor should continue with injections of morphine in an increased dose because the present dose no longer relieved him. In increasing the dose there was danger of hastening the death. It was my mother who had to take the responsibility of consenting to the increased dose.
Caring for their children physically but not approving their final development, is this an epitaph for all mothers?
Her courage and her generosity were immense.
It hurt me to remember that even when we gave her new dresses, she still wore her rich sister's castoff clothes. Until the end she hated perfume and gave me whatever perfume or cologne was given to her. Whenever anyone admired an object in her home she would say: "Do you want it?"
Once she stayed with me in New York. An Irish carpenter was building bookcases and singing Irish songs. My mother sang with him, laughed and talked with him. I want to remember always the image of her at that moment, carefree, happy that her voice at seventy was clear and beautiful, happy to be singing. I asked myself then whether she would always have been happy and carefree if she had followed her first passion, singing. Music brought her and father together. She had dreams of concert life. At the beginning he tutored her to sing the most difficult songs, and she was praised by Gabriele d'Annunzio for her rendering of old Italian songs. When she sang O Cessate di Piagarmi I wept. I do not remember her singing very often until she went to Spain and there Enrique Granados made her a singing teacher at the Granados Academy. She was happy then.
In New York she tried to make a career again. She gave a concert at Aeolian Hall. She sang old Italian songs, Catalan folk songs, and Granados'tonadillas. But nothing came of it.
Was this a secret wound? When I was a girl of sixteen, she sang for the young men who came courting me and I was wistful to be so thoroughly outshone.
Her singing moved me. What would her life have been without children, concertizing, traveling, as pampered by the public as my father was?
This is the image I want to preserve, of my mother at seventy with the crystal-clear voice of a young girl, singing for and with the Irish carpenter.
On the way to New York I stopped at San Francisco to see Joaquin. He had been at the opera and stood far away at the end of the gleaming airport terminal. Small, in black and white, with, even at that distance, a tragic way of standing. It is the way of standing of those pierced by an arrow. I felt I was right to have come. The basic, fundamental Nin sadness, or is it the Spanish tragic sense of life? We are doomed. But gallant. Gallantly creative, active, even gay.
He talked more than usual on the drive to his home, about his plans, his desire to go to Europe for a year, his musical projects, his practical problems at the University, his tiredness after fifteen years of teaching. It is strange, when my mother died, the contact between Joaquin and me was re-established. It had been interrupted. When? I do not remember. Perhaps in Paris, when my mother felt I might be a bad influence on Joaquin. As children we were very close. Now this contact was open again. He talked. This new intimacy began when he came to New York after Mother's death.
When we arrived at the house, I was silent. I missed my mother's face at the window, or her standing at the door, or, what was more often true lately, she would be asleep when I arrived and would turn on her light to greet me. Perhaps even rise to have a glass of milk with us. Her bedspread was of crochet, made by her own hands. The room was bare and simple. There was a crucifix over her bed.
When I entered the bedroom I broke down. I slipped to the floor and sobbed. Joaquin wept. I kept saying: "I am sorry, I am sorry" to Joaquin, because I had come to cheer him, not to heighten his sorrow.
I was to sleep in my mother's bed. It was utterly painful. But my concern over Joaquin was so strong I forgot what I felt. He was in bed and weeping. I sat on the edge of his bed and said: "Mother is resting. She would not want you to hurt yourself. Don't hurt yourself." He went to sleep, and I too.
I awakened resigned to the ordeal of helping Joaquin dispose of her belongings. She owned so little! A box of holy medals, rosaries, and a prayer book for the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. A box of lace remnants, those we carried all through our lives and travels, from Europe to America, my mother always saying: "Someday we will make a whole tablecloth out of all those pieces of real lace." Some came from the dresses she wore as a debutante in Cuba. A box of sewing threads and needles which I wanted, as well as her gold thimble, in hope of inheriting my mother's ability to sew. I accepted mending and sewing now, and asked for the sewing machine, the knitting needles.
My mother's jewelry were gifts from me, gold earrings from Mexico, trinkets from Italy, pins and a few rings from her sisters. I wanted her unfinished bobbin lace, the pale-blue pillow with a pattern pinned to it, and the white thread on bobbins which her hands wove in and out, changing the pins. There was an unfinished piece of lace on it, and Joaquin preferred to give it to a nun who makes bobbin lace and would finish it. The unfinished bit of lace would have caused me sadness.
Her bookbinding press and bookbinding material Joaquin sent to a pupil of hers in Williamstown. The pain was deeper which came from the handling of small objects, her bobby pins, her comb, her face powder. I never saw anyone who possessed so little. A few dresses her sisters gave her, a fur coat from my brother, a half-empty closet. The stark simplicity of her taste, her stripping away of possessions. She took nothing, possessed nothing but what was given to her by her children. But she kept all mementos, our childhood teeth, our first locks of hair, my first piece of embroidery, our first notes to her, all our letters. Three enormous boxes of my letters to her.I had expressed my devotion.
It was a comfort to give her clothes to the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul for the poor, because that is what she would have wanted; it seemed a more sacred way of dispersing them.
Then came the sharing of photographs in three piles: two for the sons and one for me. Still we felt like criminals dispersing parts of her, the coat which had warmed her, her modest handbag. I can now understand those who lock the door upon everything and never enter again. And yet, was it not better that those objects should continue to live. The final casting off of objects which belong to the dead is full of taboos and full of the pains of the ritual of separation.
The final dispersion. Separating from my mother, separating from my mother. As you disperse these objects which hold a terrifying life, you feel the separation is now final.
But each one has his way of remembering. Mine is to enclose her in the diary. And for days after her death I felt possessed by the spirit of my mother. I wanted to express love by cooking, sewing, mending, lacemaking, bookbinding.
We worked all afternoon. Some of our decisions were dictated by an austere mourning. We cast off Christmas-tree ornaments as if Christmas were no longer possible to celebrate without her, we cast off the playing cards with which she played solitaire, as if we would never play cards again. We cast off the detective stories she liked to read in those days when I had the feeling that she was waiting for death. But we kept the black lace fan, the one she waved with a Latin rhythm in church, which seemed irreverent to the American priest.
Joaquin looks mortally wounded.
When he cooked he talked about his discovery of the monotony of woman's work and the endless rounds and repetition.
I hide myself to throw away my mother's toothbrush because I know the sight of it will hurt him, yet he won't be able to throw it away. I did it for him, and hurt myself.
The black lace mantilla I brought her from Spain she was buried in.
I knew that Joaquin wanted me to go to church with him, and that he was embarrassed to ask me, knowing my estrangement from formal religion. He was happy when I suggested it. I waited for him, but refused to pray as I had as a child. I watched the little blue lights wavering in their glasses, some freshly lit by penitents, some already burned out, and I could not bear it, my mother's life burning out, so I went and lit a new one, and Joaquin thought I was offering a renewal of my faith.
Every Saturday evening Joaquin and my mother went to church. When he left me to go to confession, he said with one of his half smiles: "It won't take long," alluding to the brevity of the list of his sins.
Joaquin's sadness, the austerity of his life, which I spent a lifetime running away from, rebelling against austerity, and my mother's humble, sacrificed life.
But some bonds are never broken. I inherited from my mother not only her gold thimble, a sewing machine, but the maternal passion and care for others.
The pain deeper than at my father's death.
I didn't love her well enough.
Except from the age of eleven until twenty, when I was completely and utterly devoted to her, thinking only of helping her.
But later when I began to grow in a different direction, when I left her house, became independent, then conceding my love and admiration of her would have meant an acceptance of beliefs and attitudes which I considered a threat to my existence. Her belief in motherhood, so strong that in Paris when my life was in danger, she felt the child should have been saved even at the cost of my life, and would not listen to medical explanations that a child would always be strangled by old adhesions. My mother wanted me to be someone other than the woman I was. She was shocked when I defended D. H. Lawrence. She disliked my artist friends. She wanted me to be as she had been, essentially maternal. While she was alive, she threatened my aspiration to escape the servitudes of women. Very early I was determined not to be like her but like the women who had enchanted and seduced my father, the mistresses who lured him away from us.
