A Spy in the House of Love

by Anais Nin

  How right he had been to paint Sabina always as a mandrake with fleshly roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple-bell-shaped corolla of narcotic flesh. How right he had been to paint her born with red-gold eyes always burning as from caverns, from behind trees, as one of the luxuriant women, a tropical growth, excommunicated from the bread line as too rich a substance for everyday living, placing her there merely as a denizen of the world of fire, and content with her intermittent, parabolic appearances.

  “Sabina, do you remember our elevator ride in Paris?”

  “Yes, I do remember.”

  “We had no place to go. We wandered through the streets. I remember it was your idea to take an elevator.”

  (We were ravenous for e other, I remember, Sabina. We got into an elevator and I began to kiss her. First floor. Second floor. I couldn’t let go of her. Third floor, and when the elevator came to a standstill it was too late…I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t let go of her if all Paris had been watching us. She pressed the button wildly, and we went on kissing as the elevator came down. When we got to the bottom it was worse, so she pressed the button again, and we went up and down, up and down, while people kept trying to stop it and get on…)

  Jay laughed uncontrollably at the memory, at Sabina’s audacity. At that moment Sabina had been stripped of all mystery and Jay had tasted what the mystery contained: the most ardent frenzy of desire.

  The dawn appearing weakly at the door silenced them. The music had ceased long ago and they had not noticed. They had continued their own drumming in talk.

  Sabina tightened her cape around her shoulders as if daylight were the greatest enemy of all. To the dawn she would not even address a feverish speech. She stared at it angrily, and left the bar.

  There is no bleaker moment in the life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are going to work. It was for Sabina as if two races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people, never meeting face to face except at this moment. Whatever Sabina had worn which seemed to glitter during the night, lost its colors in the dawn. The determined expressions of those going to work appeared to her like a reproach. Her fatigue was not like theirs. Hers marked her face like a long fever, left purple shadows under her eyes. She wanted to conceal her face from them. She hung her head so that her hair would partly cover it.

  The mood of lostness persisted. For the first time she felt she could not go to Alan. She carried too great a weight of untold stories, too heavy a weight of memories, she was followed by too many ghosts of personages unsolved, of experiences not yet understood, of blows and humiliations not yet dissolved. She might return and plead extreme tiredness, and fall asleep, but her sleep would be restive, and she might talk in her dreams.

  This time Alan would not have the power to exorcise her mood. Nor could she tell him about the event which most tormented her: the man she had first seen some months ago from the window of her hotel room, standing under her very window reading a newspaper, as if waiting for her to come out. Once more she had seen him on her way to visit Philip. She had encountered him in the subway station, and he had let several subway cars pass by in order to take the one she was taking.

  It was not a flirtation. He made no effort to speak to her. He seemed engaged in an impersonal observation of her. In Mambo’s Night Club he had sat a few tables away and he was writing in a notebook.

  This was the way criminals were shadowed, just before being caught. Was he a detective? What did he suspect her of? Would he report to Alan? Or to her parents? Or would he take his notes downtown to all the awesome buildings in which they carried on investigations of one kind or another, and would she receive one day a notice asking her to leave the United States and return to her pla of birth, Hungary, because the life of Ninon de l’Enclos, or Madame Bovary was not permitted by the law?

  If she told Alan that she had been followed by a man, Alan would smile and say: “Why, of course, this isn’t the first time, is it? That’s the penalty you pay for being a beautiful woman. You wouldn’t want it not to happen, would you?”

  For the first time, on this bleak early morning walk through New York streets not yet cleaned of the night people’s cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles, she understood Duchamp’s painting of a “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Eight or ten outlines of the same woman, like many multiple exposures of a woman’s personality, neatly divided into many layers, walking down the stairs in unison.

  If she went to Alan now it would be like detaching one of these cut-outs of a woman, and forcing it to walk separately from the rest, but once detached from the unison, it would reveal that it was a mere outline of a woman, the figure design as the eye could see it, but empty of substance, this substance having evaporated through the spaces between each layer of the personality. A divided woman indeed, a woman divided into numberless silhouettes, and she could see this apparent form of Sabina leaving a desperate and a lonely one walking the streets in quest of hot coffee, being greeted by Alan as a transparently innocent young girl he had married ten years before and sworn to cherish, as he had, only he had continued to cherish the same young girl he had married, the first exposure of Sabina, the first image delivered into his hands, the first dimension, of this elaborated, complex and extended series of Sabinas which had been born later and which she had not been able to give him. Each year, just as a tree puts forth a new ring of growth, she should have been able to say: “Alan, here is a new version of Sabina. Add it to the rest, fuse them well, hold on to them when you embrace her, hold them all at once in your arms, or else, divided, separated, each image will live a life of its own, and it will not be one but six, or seven, or eight Sabinas who will walk sometimes in unison, by a great effort of synthesis, sometimes separately, one of them following a deep drumming into forests of black hair and luxurious mouths, another visiting Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war, and still another lying beside an insane young man, and still another opening maternal arms to a trembling frightened Donald.” Was this the crime to have sought to marry each Sabina to another mate, to match each one in turn by a different life?

  Oh, she was tired, but it was not from loss of sleep, or from talking too much in a smoke-filled room, or from eluding Jay’s caricatures, or Mambo’s reproaches, or Philip’s distrust of her, or because Donald by his behavior so much like a child had made her feel that her thirty years were a grandmother’s age. She was tired of pulling these disparate fragments together. She understood Jay’s paintings too. It was perhaps at such a moment of isolation that Madame Bovary had taken the poison. It was the moment when the hidden life is in danger of being exposed, and no woman could bear the condemnation.

  But why should she fear exposure? At this moment Alan was deeply asleep, or quietly reading if he were not asleep.

  Was it merely this figure of a lie detector dogging her steps which caused her so acute an anxiety?

  Guilt is the one burden human beings cannot bear alone.

  After taking a cup of coffee, she went to the hotel where they knew her already, took a sleeping pill, and took refuge in sleep.

  When she awakened at ten o’clock that night she could hear from her hotel room the music from Mambo’s Night Club across the street.

  She needed a confessor! Would she find it there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their chiefs, their secret channels of communication. They established common beliefs in certain painters, certain musicians, certain writers. They were the misplaced persons too, unwanted at home usually, or repudiated by their families. But they established new families, their own religions, their own doctors, their own communities.

  She remembered someone asking Jay: “Can I be admitted if I show proofs of excellent taste?”

  “That is not enough,” said Jay. “Are you also willing to become an exile? Or a scapegoat? We are the
notorious scapegoats, for living as others live only in their dreams at night, for confessing openly what others only confess to doctors under guarantee of professional secret. We are also underpaid: people feel that we are in love with our work, and that one should not be paid for doing what you most love to do.”

  In this world they had criminals too. Gangsters in the world of art, who produced corrosive works born of hatred, who killed and poisoned with their art. You can kill with a painting or a book too.

  Was Sabina one of them? What had she destroyed?

  She entered Mambo’s Night Club. The artificial palm trees seemed less green, the drums less violent. The floor, doors, walls were slightly askew with age.

  Djuna arrived at the same moment, her black rehearsal tights showing under her raincoat, her hair bound in a ribbon like a school-girl’s.

  When such magical entrances and exits take place in a ballet, when the dancers vanish behind columns or dense hills of shadows, no one asks them for passports or identifications. Djuna arrived as a true dancer does, walking as naturally from her ballet bar work a few floors above the night club as she had in Paris when she studied with the Opera ballet dancers. Sabina was not surprised to see her. But what she remembered of her was not so much her skill in dancing, her smooth dancer’s legs, tense, but the skill of her compassion, as if she exercised every day on an invisible bar of pain, her understanding as well as her body.

  Djuna would know who had stolen, who had betrayed, and what had been stolen, what had been betrayed. And Sabina might cease falling—falling from all her incandescent trapezes, from all her ladders to fire.

  They were all brothers and sisters, moving on the revolving stages of the unconscious, never intentionally mystifying others as much as themselves, caught in a ballet of errors and impersonations, but Djuna could distinguish between illusion and living and loving. She could detect the s hil of a crime which others could not bring to trial. She would know the identity of the criminal.

  Sabina had only to wait now.

  The drums ceased to play as if they were muffled by several forests of intricate impenetrable vegetation. Sabina’s anxiety had ceased to beat against her temples and deafen her to outer sounds. Rhythm was restored to her blood and her hands lay still on her lap.

  While she waited for Djuna to be free she thought about the lie detector who had been watching her actions. He was there in the café again, sitting alone, and writing in a notebook. She prepared herself mentally for the interview.

  She leaned over and called him: “How do you do? Have you come to arrest me?”

  He closed his notebook, walked over to her table, sat down beside her. She said: I knew it would happen, but not quite so soon. Sit down. I know exactly what you think of me. You are saying to yourself: here is the notorious imposter, the international spy in the house of love. (Or should I specify: in the house of many loves?) I must warn you, you must handle me delicately: I am covered with a mantle of iridescence as easily destroyed as a dust flower, and although I am quite willing to be arrested, if you handle me roughly you will lose much of the evidence. I don’t want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce. Strange, isn’t it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them? Give me your hat. You look so formal and uncomfortable! And so you finally tracked down my impersonations! But are you aware of the courage, the audacity which my profession requires? Very few people are gifted for it. I had the vocation. It showed very early in my capacity for deluding myself. I was one who could call a backyard a garden, a tenement apartment a house, and if I were late when I came home, to avoid a scolding I could imagine and recreate instantly such interesting obstacles, adventures, that it would take my parents several minutes before they could shake off the spell and return to reality. I could step out of my ordinary self or my ordinary life into multiple selves and lives without attracting attention. I mean that my first crime, as you may be surprised to hear, was committed against myself. I was then a corrupter of minors, and this minor was myself. What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favor of a more marvelous world. I could always improve on the facts. I was never arrested for this: it concerned only myself. My parents were not wise enough to see that such prestigitation of facts might produce a great artist, or at least a great actress. They beat me, to shake out the dust of delusions. But strangely enough, the more my father beat me, the more abundantly did this dust gather again, and it was not gray or brown dust as you find it in its daily form, but what is known to adventurers as fool’s gold. Give me your coat. As an investigator you may be more interested to know that in self-defense, I accuse the writers of fairy tales. Not hunger, not cruelty, not my parents, but these tales which promised that sleeping in the snow never caused pneumonia, that bread never turned stale, that trees blossomed out of season, that dragons could be killed with courage, that intense wishing would be followed immediately by fulfillment of the wish. Intrepid wishing, said the fairytales, was more effective than labor. The smoke issuing from Aladdin’s lamp was my first smokescreen, and the lies learned from fairy tales were my first perjuries. Let us say I had perverted tendencies: I believed everything I read.

  Sabina laughed at her own words. Djuna thought she was drinking too much and looked at her.

  “What made you laugh, Sabina?”

  “Meet the lie detector, Djuna. He may arrest me.”

  “Oh, Sabina. You’ve never done anything to be arrested for!”

  Djuna gazed at Sabina’s face. The intentness of it, the feverishness she had always seen on it was no longer that of burning aliveness. There was a tightness to the features, and fear in the eyes.

  “I have to talk to you, Djuna… I can’t sleep…”

  “I tried to find you when I came from Paris. You change your address so often, and even your name.”

  “You know I’ve always wanted to break the molds which life forms around one if one lets them.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to trespass boundaries, erase all identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mold, one place, without hope of change.”

  “This is the opposite of what everyone usually wants, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I used to say that I had housing problems: mine was that I didn’t want a house. I wanted a boat, a trailer, anything that moved freely. I feel safest of all when no one knows where I am, when for instance, I’m in a hotel room where even the number is scratched off the door.”

  “But safe from what?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saving from detection, except perhaps that I’m guilty of several loves, of many loves instead of one.”

  “That’s no crime. Merely a case of divided loves!”

  “But the lies, the lies I have to tell… You know, just as some criminals tell you: ‘I never found a way to get what I wanted except by robbery,’ I often feel like saying: ‘I have never found a way to get what I wanted except by lies.’”

  “Are you ashamed of it?”

  Sabina grew frightened again. “There comes a moment with each man, in each relationship, when I feel lonely.”

  “Because of the lies?”

  “But if I told the truth I would be not only lonely but also alone, and I would cause each one great harm. How can I tell A that for me he is like a father.”

  “That’s why you deserted him over and over again as one must desert the parent, it’s a law of maturity.”

  “You seem to exonerate me.”

  “I’m only exonerating you in relationship to Alan, toward whom you acted like a child.”

  “He is the only one I trust, the only one whose love is infinite, tireless, all-forgiving.”

  “That’s not a man’s love you are describing, and not even a father’s love. It’s a fantasy-father, an idealized father once invented by a needy child. This love you need, Alan has given you. In this form of love you are right to trust
him. But you will lose him one day, for there are other Alans exactly as there are other Sabinas, and they too demand to live and to be matched. The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.”

  Sabina’s head had fallen on her chest in a pose of contrition. “You don’t believe that this man is here to arrest me?”

  “No, Sabina, that is what you imagine. It is your own guilt which you have endowed this man with. You probably see this guilt mirrored in every policeman, every judge, every parent, every personage with authority. You see it with others’ eyes. It’s a reflection of what you feel. It’s your interpretation: the eyes of the world on your acts.”

  Sabina raised her head. Such a flood of memories submerged her and hurt her so deeply she was left without breath. She felt such pain. It was like the pain of the “bends” felt by deep sea divers when they come to the surface too quickly.

  “In your fabricated world, Sabina, men were either crusaders who would fight your battles for you, or judges continuing your parents’ duties, or princes who had not yet come of age, and therefore could not be husbands.”

  “Free me,” said Sabina to the lie detector. “Set me free. I’ve said that to so many men: ‘Are you going to set me free?’” She laughed. “I was all ready to say it to you.”

  “You have to set yourself free. That will come with love…” said the lie detector.

  “Oh, I’ve loved enough, if that could save one. I’ve loved plenty. Look at your notebook. I’m sure it is full of addresses.”

  “You haven’t loved yet,” he said. “You’ve only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way. Could you go out now and find the other faces of Alan, which you never struggled to see, or accept? Would you find the other face of Mambo which he so delicately hid from you? Would you struggle to find the other face of Philip?”