Children of the Albatross

by Anais Nin

  She believed only in fire. She wanted to be at every explosion of fire, every convergence of danger. She lived like a fireman, tense for all the emergencies of conflagrations. She was a menace to peaceful homes, tranquil streets.

  She was the firebug who was never detected.

  Because she believed that fire ladders led to love. This was the motive for her incendiary habits. But Sabina, with al her fire ladders, could not find love.

  At dawn she would find herself among ashes again.

  And so she could not rest or sleep.

  As soon as the day dawned peaceful, uneventful, Sabina slipped into her black satin dress, lacquered her nails the color of her mood, pulled her black cape around her and set out for the cafés.

  At dawn Jay turned towards Lillian lying beside him and his first kiss reached her through the net of her hair.

  Her eyes were closed, her nerves asleep, but under his hand her body slipped down a dune into warm waves lapping over each other, rippling her skin.

  Jay’s sensual thrusts wakened the dormant walls of flesh, and tongues of fire flicked towards his hard lashings piercing the kernel of mercury, disrupting a current of fire through the veins. The burning fluid of ecstasy eddying madly and breaking, loosening a river of pulsations.

  The core of ecstasy bursting to the rhythmic pounding, until his hard thrusts spurted burning fluid against the walls of flesh, impulsion within the womb like a thunderbolt.

  Lillian’s panting decreased, and her body reverberated in the silence, filled with echoes…antennae which had drunk like the stems of plants.

  He awakened free, and she did not.

  His desire had reached a finality, like a clean saber cut which dealt pleasure, not death.

  She felt impregnated.

  She had greater difficulty in shifting, in separating, in turning away.

  Her body was filled with retentions, residues, sediments.

  He awakened and passed into other realms. The longer his stay in the enfolding whirls, the greater his energy to enter activity again. He awakened and he talked of painting, he awakened laughing, eyes closed with laughter, laughing on the edge of his cheeks, laughter in the corner of his mouth, the laughter of great separateness.

  She awakened unfree, as if laden with the seeds of his being, wondering at what moment he would pull his whole self away as one tears a plant out by the roots, leaving a crevice in the earth. Dreading the break because she felt him a master of this act, free to enter and free to emerge, whereas she felt dispossessed of her identity and freedom because Jay upon awakening did not turn about and contemplate her even for a moment as Lillian, a particular woman, but that when he took her, or looked at her he did so gaily, anonymously, as if any woman lying there would have been equally pleasant, natural, and not Lillian among all women.

  He was already chuckling at some idea for a painting, already hungry for breakfast, ready to open his mail and embark on multiple relationss, curious about the day’s climate, the changes in the street, the detailed news of the brawl of the night before which had taken place under their window.

  Fast fast fast moving away, his mind already pursuing the wise sayings of Lao-tse, the theories of Picasso, already like a vast wheel at the fair starting on a wide circle which at no point whatever seemed to include her, because she was there like bread for him, a non-identifiable bread which he ate of as he would eat any bread, not even troubling with the ordinary differentiations: today my bread is fresh and warm, and today it is a little dry, today it lacks salt, today it is lifeless, today it is golden and crisp.

  She did not reach out to possess Jay, as he believed, but she reached out because so much of Jay had been deposited, sown, planted within her that she felt possessed, as if she were no longer able to move, breathe, live independently of him. She felt her dependence, lost to herself, given, invaded, and at his mercy, and the anxiety of this, the defenselessness caused a clinging which was the clinging of the drowning…

  As if she were bread, she would have liked Jay at least to notice all variations in moods and flavors. She would have liked Jay to say: you are my bread, a very unique and marvelous bread, like none other. If you were not here I would die of instantaneous starvation.

  Not at all. If he painted well, it was the spring day. If he were gay, it was the Pernod. If he were wise, it was the little book of Lao-tse’s sayings. If he were elated, it was due to a worshipful letter in the mail.

  And me, and me, said a small, anxious voice in Lillian’s being, where am I?

  She was not even the woman in his paintings.

  He was painting Sabina. He painted her as a mandrake with fleshy roots, bearing a solitary purple flower in a purple bell-shaped corolla of narcotic flesh. He painted her born with red-gold eyes always burning as from caverns, from holes in the earth, from behind trees. Painted her 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 was content with her intermittent, parabolic appearances.

  So, if she was not in his paintings, Lillian thought, where was she? When he finished painting he drank. When he drank he exulted in his powers and palmed it all on the holy ghost inside of him, each time calling the spirit animating him by a different name that was not Lillian. Today it was the holy ghost, and the spring light and a dash of Pernod.

  He did not say what Lillian wanted to hear: “You are the holy ghost inside of me. You make my spring.”

  She was not even sure of that—of being his holy ghost. At times it seemed to her that he was painting with Djuna’s eyes. When Djuna was there he painted better. He did not paint her. He only felt strong and capable when he tackled huge masses, strong features, heavy bodies. Djuna’s image was too tenuous for him.

  But when she was there he painted better.

  Silently she seemed to be participating, silently she seemed to be transmitting forces.

  Where did her force come from? No one knew.

  She merely sat there and the colors began to organize themselves, to deepen, as if he took the violet from her eyes when she was angry, the blue when she was at peace, the gray when she was detached, the gold when she was melted and warm, and painted with them. Using her eyes as a color chart.

  In this way he passed from the eyes of Lillian which said: “I am here to warm you.” Eyes of devotion.

  To the eyes of Sabina which said: “I am here to consume you.”

  To the eyes of Djuna which said: “I am here to reflect your painter’s dream, like a crystal ball.”

  Bread and fire and light, he needed them all. He could be nourished on Lillian’s faith but it did not illumine his work. There were places into which Lillian could not follow him. When he was tormented by a half-formed image he went to Djuna, just as once walking through the streets with her he had seen a child bring her a tangled skein of string to unravel.

  He would have liked the three women to love each other. It seemed to him that then he would be at peace. When they pulled against each other for supremacy itwas as if different parts of his own body pulled against each other.

  On days when Lillian accepted understanding through the eyes of Djuna, when each one was connected with her role and did not seek to usurp the other’s place he was at peace and slept profoundly.

  (If only, thought Lillian, lying in the disordered bed, when he moved away I could be quiet and complete and free. He seems bound to me and then so completely unbound. He changes. One day I look at him and there is warmth in him, and the next a kind of ruthlessness. There are times when he kisses me and I feel he is not kissing me but any woman, or all the women he has known. There are times when he seems made of wax, and I can see on him the imprint of all those he has seen during the day. I can hear their words. Last night he even fraternized with the man who was courting me. What does this mean? Even with Edgar who was trying to take me away from him. He was in one of his moods of effusive display,
when he loved everybody. He is promiscuous. I can’t bear how near they come, they talk in his face, they breathe his breath. Anyone at all has this privilege. Anyone can talk to him, share his house, and even me. He gives away everything. Djuna says I lack faith… Is that what it is? But how can I heal myself? I thought one could get healed by just living and loving.)

  Lying in bed and listening to Jay whistling while he shaved in the bathroom, Lillian wondered why she felt simultaneously in bondage and yet unmarried, unappeased, and all her conversations with Djuna with whom she was able to talk even better than to monologue with herself once more recurred to her before she allowed herself to face the dominant impulse ruling her: to run away from Jay.

  Passion gathered its mometum, its frenzy, from the effort to possess what was unpossessable in reality, because it sprang from an illusion, because it gained impetus from a secret knowledge of its unfulfillable quality, because it attacked romantic organisms, and incited to fever in place of a natural union by feelings. Passion between two people came from a feverish desire to fuse elements which were unfusable. The extreme heat to which human beings subjected themselves in this experiment, as if by intensity the unfusable elements could be melted into one—water with fire, fire with earth, rock and water. An effort doomed to defeat.

  Lillian could not see all this, but felt it happening, and knew that this was why she had wept so bitterly at their first quarrel: not weeping over a trivial difference but because her instinct warned her senses that this small difference indicated a wider one, a difference of elements, by which the relationship would ultimately be destroyed.

  In one of his cheerful human moods Jay had said: “If my friends bother you so much, we shall put them all against a wall and shoot them.”

  But Lillian knew that if today Jay surrendered today’s set of friends, he would renew the same kind of relationships with a new set, for they reflected the part of him she did not feel close to, the part in fact she was at war with.

  Lillian’s disproportionate weeping had seemed childish to Jay who saw only the immediate difference, but Lillian was weeping blindly with a fear of death of the relationship, with her loss of faith sensing the first fissure as the first symbol of future dissolution, and knowing from that moment on that the passion between them would no longer be an affirmation of marriage but a struggle against death and separation.

  (Djuna said: You can’t bear to let this relationship die. But why must it die, Djuna? Do you believe all passion must die? Is there nothing I can do to avoid failure? Passion doesn’t die of natural death. Everyone says passion dies, love dies, but it’s we who kill it. Djuna believes this. Djuna said: You can fight all the symptoms of divorce when they first appear, you can be on your guard against distortions, against the way people wound each other and instill doubt, you can fight for the life and continuity of this passion, there is a knowledge which postpones the death of a relationship, death is not natural, but, Lillian, you cannot do it alone, there are seeds of death in his character. One cannot fight alone for a living relationship. It takes the effort of two. Effort, effort. The word most foreign to Jay. Jay would never make an effort. Djuna, Djuna, couldn’t you talk to him? Djuna, will you talk to him? No, it’s useless, he does not want anything that is difficult to reach. He does not like effort or struggles. He wants only his pleasure. It isn’t possessiveness, Djuna, but I want to feel at the center so that I can allow him the maximum freedom without feeling each time that he betrays everything, destroys everything. )

  She would run away.

  When Jay saw her dressing, powdering her face, pulling up her stockings, combing her hair, he noticed no change in her gestures to alarm him, for did she not always comb her hair and powder and dress with the flurry of a runaway. Wasn’t she always so uneasy and overquick, as if she had been frightened?

  He went to his studio and Lillian locked the door of the bedroom and sat at her piano, to seek in music that wholeness which she could not find in love…

  Just as the sea often carries bodies, wrecks, shells, lost objects carved by the sea itself in its own private studio of sculpture to unexpected places, led by irrational currents, just so did the current of music eject fragments of the self believed drowned and deposited them on the shore altered, recarved, rendered anonymous in shape. Each backwash, each cross-current, throwing up new material formed out of the old, from the ocean of memories.

  Driftwood figures that had been patiently recarved by the sea with rhythms broken by anger, patiently remolding forms to the contours of knotted nightmares, woods stunted and distorted by torments of doubts.

  She played until this flood of debris rose from the music to choke her, closed the piano with anger, and rose to plan her escape.

  Escape. Escape.

  Her first instinctive, blind gesture of escape was to don the black cape copied from Sabina’s at the time of their relationship.

  She wrapped Sabina’s cape around her, and put two heavy bracelets around her wrist (one for each wrist, not wanting any more to be in bondage to one, never to one; she would split the desire in two, to rescue one half of herself from destruction).

  And for the first time since her marriage to Jay, she climbed the worn stairs of a very old hotel in Montparnasse, experiencing the exaltation familiar to runaways.

  The more she could see of the worn carpet and its bare skeleton, the more acrid the smell of poverty, the more bare the room, this which might have lowered the diapason of another’s mood only increased the elation of hers, becoming transfigured by her conviction that she was making a voyage which would forever take her away from the prison of anxiety, the pain of dependence on a human being she could not trust. Her mood of liberation spangled and dappled shabbiness with fight like an impressionist painting.

  Her sense of familiarity with this scene did not touch her at first: a lover was waiting for her in one of the rooms of this hotel.

  Could anyone help her to forget Jay for a moment? Could Edgar help her, Edgar with his astonished eyes saying to her: You are wonderful, you are wonderful! Drunkenly repeating you are wonderful! as they danced under Jay’s very eyes not seeing, not seeing her dancing with Edgar in the luminous spotlight of a night club, but when her dress opened a little at the throat she could smell the mixed odor of herself and Jay.

  She was taking revenge now for his effusive confessions as to the pleasures he had taken with other women.

  She had been made woman by Jay, he alone held in his hands all the roots of her being, and when he had pulled them, in his own limitless motions outward and far, he had inflicted such torture that he had destroyed the roots all at once and sent her into space, sent her listening to Edgar’s words gratefully, grateful for wo hands on her pulling her away from Jay, grateful for his foolish gift of flowers in silver paper (because Jay gave her no gifts at all), and she would imagine Jay watching this scene, watching her go up the stairs to Edgar’s room, wearing flowers in a silver paper, and she enjoyed imagining his pain, as he witnessed the shedding of her clothes, witnessed her lying down beside Edgar. (You are the man of the crowd, Jay, and so I lie here beside a stranger. What makes me lonely, Jay, are the cheap and gaudy people you are friendly with, and I lie here with a stranger who is only caressing you inside of me. He is complaining like a woman: you are not thinking of me, you are not filled with me.)

  But no sooner had she shed her cape copied from Sabina’s than she recognized the room, the man, the scene, and the feelings as not belonging to her, not having been selected by her, but as having been borrowed from Sabina’s repertoire of stories of adventures.

  Lillian was not free of Jay since she had invited him to witness the scene enacted solely to punish his unfaithfulness. She was not free, she was being Sabina, with the kind of man Sabina would have chosen. All the words and gestures prescribed by Sabina in her feverish descriptions, for thus was much experience transmitted by contagion, and Lillian, not yet free, had been more than others predisposed to the contagion by low
ered resistance!

  She was ashamed, not of the sensual meeting, but for having acted in disguise, and eluded responsibility.

  When the stranger asked her for her name she did not say Lillian, but Sabina.

  She returned home to shed her cape and her acts, pretending not to know this woman who had spent hours with a stranger.

  To put the responsibility on Sabina.

  Escape escape escape—into what? Into borrowing the self of Sabina for an hour. She had donned the recklessness of Sabina, borrowed her cape for a shy masquerade, pretending freedom.

  The clothes had not fitted very well.

  But after a while, would this cease to be a role and did the borrowing reveal Lillian’s true desires?

  The possibility of being this that she borrowed.

  Blindly ashamed of what she termed unfaithfulness (when actually she was still so tied to Jay it was merely within the precincts of their relationship that she could act, with his presence, and therefore unsevered from him), she discarded all the elements of this charade, cape, bracelets, then bathed and dressed in her own Lillian costume and went to the café where she sat beside Sabina who had already accumulated several plates by which the waiter was able to add the number of drinks.

  When Jay felt exhausted after hours of painting he went to see Djuna.

  He always softened as he thought of Djuna. She was to him more than a woman. It had been difficult at first to see her simply as a woman. His first impression had been an association with Florentine painting, his feeling that no matter what hr origin, her experiences, her resemblances to other women, she was for him like a canvas which had been covered first of all with a coating of gold paint, so that whatever one painted over it, this gold on which he had dissertated during one of his early visits to her, was present as it remained present in the Florentine paintings.

  But even though his obsession for dispelling illusions, which made him pull at her eyelashes to see if they were real, which made him open jars and bottles in the bathroom to see what they contained, even though he always had the feeling that women resorted to tricks and contrived spells which man must watch out for, he still felt that she was more than a woman, and that given the right moment, she was willing to shed the veils, the elusiveness, and to be completely honest.