The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  I lit his cigarette. He gave me an awkward smile and said: “I feel humble, Djuna. But it is all so good, so good.” He gave to the word good a mellowness which made the whole room glow, which gave a warm color to the bare window, to the woolen shirt hung on a peg, to the single glass out of which we drank together.

  Behind the yellow curtains the sun seeped in; everything was the color of a tropical afternoon.

  “How I have wanted this!” he whispered, “I feel you, I feel your hotness right down to my toes.”

  The small room, like a deep set alcove. Warm mist, warm blood. The high drunkenness which made Hans flushed and heavy-blooded. His sensual features expanded, his heavy nose palpitated, his throat quivered.

  “As soon as you come, I’m jubilant.” And he did a somersault on the bed, two or three of them. He pinched me merrily, looking up at me with a puckish face, his eyes brimming with malice and cunning.

  Then suddenly he sat back on the bed, and the drunkenness went out of him. He became pale and sober, his eyes serious and exalted. He looked frail, and his face seemed impenetrable and Oriental.

  He opened a book and began to read to me about China. “I stole it for you,” he said, “you must read it.” And his voice was tender. He offered me a slow, almost naïve smile, and shook his head over his reading like a very gentle bear.

  I went out for wine and food, out into the soft evening. And to everybody I wanted to say: “Give me the best you have. To-day is a day like none other.”

  “This is a fine wine, Djuna. Let’s drink to my failure. There’s no doubt about it, no doubt whatever that I am a failure.”

  “But I won’t let you be a failure! I won’t let you! I don’t want you to be a failure. I want you to be published, recognized, listened to.”

  “You say ‘I want’ as if that made things happen.”

  “It does.”

  “I talked a lot of nonsense,” he said, “about your frailness. You have strength too, but of a different order. More elusive. No, you won’t break. You have a delicious sense of humor. I want always to see you laughing. You give me something rare. I don’t know if I am capable of making a woman like you happy. I’ve never fucked a woman with a mind, you know. A woman who has written books. They always scared me away. But you… well, you don’t look like a writer at all! You have the loveliest, the loveliest ass. Give me another glass. I don’t know what I expect of you. I expect miracles.”

  I was drunk with his glowingness.

  “I can’t let you go. I want to go places with you, obscure little places, just to be able to say: ‘here I came with Djuna.’ I’m insatiable. I’ll ask you forthe impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You’ll tell me, probably. You’re quicker than I am. And you’re the first woman with whom I feel I can be absolutely sincere. I’m wondering when you will come to stay overnight, when I can have you for a long spell. It torments me to see you for a few hours and then surrender you. You make me happy because I can talk with you. I feel at ease with you. This is a little drunken, but you know what I mean. You always seem to know what I mean. You know what I have not yet said and you know what I have not yet written. And you’re always so sure that it will be good, Miss Know-it-all, the well-known critic. Are you sure, as sure as all that? Or are you merely in love? Or are you playing a trick on me? Sometimes I don’t believe a word you say. When you’re gone I don’t know what to believe.”

  “I don’t know what to believe either. You change from an old, wise man to a young savage: you’re both soft and obscene, tender, timid and cruel too. You’re all things at once. Your writing is explosive, destructive, full of caricature. You’re a bomb-thrower!”

  “I believe in violence more than ever. I believe it’s the only holy, pure thing in life.” He paused a moment, reflectively. He looked up at me slyly, then mockingly, then gravely again. He seemed to grow savage inside, deep within, as if his very words were converting his blood into ideas, and the ideas into blood again.

  “You’re so full of hatred when you write.”

  “It isn’t just hatred. It’s beyond that. I don’t hate and I don’t love. I have no illusions. I feel as if I were the last man on earth. I’ve told you that before. I feel as if I were a scourge, an avenger. A Tamerlane. You want to know why I’m not published? Yon think it’s just because I use obscene language, dirty little four-letter words which the Post Office objects to? Nonsense! It isn’t the obscene words, as they say. It’s the obscene feeling. It’s the violence; it’s what’s raging inside me, that bomb in there that goes off whenever I sit down to write—that’s what they fear. But people are going to listen to me in spite of themselves, because I’m a force. I’m not going to shock them, I’m going to destroy them. I’m going to deal death and dynamite, not drugs and sleeping potions. Violence is pure, violence is holy. I’m savage, moral, earnest, deadly. I want to consume the whole world, devour it, chew it to pieces, and spit it out again—fresh, terrible, beautiful, alive in all its parts, alive and singing. “

  His voice reached an ample, assertive tone. The small room seemed too small to contain him. There was cruelty and mischief in his eyes, yet his mouth was still tender.

  “You’re going? That hurts. That’s not right. I have lots more to say to you. Come back here. Button your coat properly. It’s raining. I don’t want you to get wet. I’ve got to stay here until the concierge goes to sleep, or she’ll ask me for the rent again.”

  * * *

  The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna. I have infinite possibilities for delicate perversions. I have the capacity to burn like a torch, the love of suffering, the love of terror and death and of descending. Evil is life; I want to live out the evil in me. I want to surrender to Johanna. I want the life she led, desecration, humiliation, poisons, savagery. The demon in me is like the demon in Johanna. It is a demon of frenzy.

  I feel such exaltation at the thought of burning and dying quickly. I want to live out my caprices, my fantasies, my erotic desires.

  In Johanna I love the darkness, and the abyss.

  * * *

  “If Johanna returns she will poison us against each other. I fear that.”

  “There is something between us, a tie which it is not possible for Johanna to understand or to break…”

  “For that she will hate us, yes, and she will fight that with all her strength, and all her weapons.”

  “And her weapons are… lies…”

  He sat down with shoulders bowed, and his head bowed. I saw the grey-blond hair glistening.

  How divided his love was at that moment I would never know. My love was so immense at that moment that I felt I could make Hans the ultimate gift… I could give Hans whatever he wanted, give him Johanna.

  I smiled, a mask smile. “Her lies, her unnecessary complications make novels. Novels are made out of complications…”

  “She never trusted me as you do.”

  “I trust you because I understand you.”

  I felt mowed down, anchorless with feeling, with terror and pain. But I smiled. “If I had the means to help Johanna come back—would you want me to do it?”

  Hans winced and suddenly lurched towards me.

  “Don’t ask me such a question. Don’t ask me!” He was suffering. I was asking myself if the full body of Johanna would triumph over all else, over understanding, over the ecstasies of our working together, over the double climaxes always of body and mind burning in unison, over this double flame of creation and love.

  I hated my own gaiety which was not only a challenge to life, to pain, but to a tormented self. I challenged and mocked myself for that tightening of the flesh and the ebbing of secret tears. I loved him with a knowledge of him which Johanna never had. It would have been a relief for once to have been unjust and to hate. I could not. I could only hate myself and my own understanding which made me say: “The destroyers do not always destroy. Johanna has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer. And the writer is ali
ve.”

  “You give me smething rare. When I am with you I don’t understand how I can love two women…”

  “You’re a big man, Hans, a very big man. There’s so much room in you, so much love. There are no limits to you, no boundaries. For that I love you. For being a big man.” And I laughed. “Maybe I’m just the biggest of the idiots.”

  “No, you see more, you just see more, and what you see is there all right. You get at the core of everything…”

  * * *

  I imagined myself writing to Johanna: “Johanna, have pity on me. Do not take him away from me too soon. It is easier for you to find a match. I can find the man who will make the woman submit many times, yes, many times, but I cannot find a man who can make my head bow, this full, ripe world inside ofmy head. It is so rare, Johanna, when I can bow altogether, from head to foot, and woman wants secretly to be able to bow and love altogether. I can never be taken whole into a man’s arms, Johanna, take pity on my great hunger. You ask only to be worshipped. I ask that my lover should create beyond me… Take pity on my torment. You don’t carry in yourself the power to stand silently behind a chair, watching with breathless stillness the pages added to his work. You can only love his books for what they contain of you. You can’t love the miracle of the seed sprouting. You only love his work as an offering to you; you don’t love the labor of the creator. You don’t love the source of creation. You only want some one to make your portrait.”

  And then I felt guilty before Johanna: I felt myself flushed and burnt with guilt and shame. Johanna was the weaker one, the one who was not there to defend her life. I felt the strength ofmy love to be a crime against Johanna. My whole being shrivelled with a feeling of guilt. I imagined myself restituting to Johanna the love I was sharing with her. I would be Johanna’s genius. I would tie him to her more absolutely than before. When Hans and I would lean over each other’s work, to fill out her portrait, I would engrave the wonder of her everywhere, reveal it, so that he could never free himself of her. I would melt into Johanna so that he could not detect any more flaws in her; I would explain her lies and ennoble and embellish them. I would create a Johanna with Johanna’s beauty and my own imagination and colors. I would be everywhere at once, defending each fragment of her, blinding him, infusing his work with the legend of Johanna. While he caressed me I would poison him with the inextricable mixture of Johanna and myself. The deepest treachery to man ever played. I was a creator of images, of characters and masks. I would recreate Johanna in Hans’ mind. It was I who would tell Hans what dreams, what desires, what impulses Johanna had. And I would give Johanna these gifts which Hans made me of his passionate rages, his curses, his secrets, his mind’s fertility.

  I would not become absolutely mad until the end, until I had written the last phrase of the portrait of Johanna which was to change Hans’ image. I would be the witch of words. a silent swift shadow darkened by uncanny knowledge, forgetting myself, my human needs, in the unfolding of the tale, renouncing human joys, with only the pale beauty of a watcher—a watcher who never let life flow into herecause this life belonged to another.

  * * *

  He was wearing bedroom slippers and he was writing, with a bottle of red wine as a paper weight on his pages. Circles of red wine on the pages. Stains. The stains of living. The edge of the table was burnt by cigarette stubs.

  He didn’t care. He said that what he had written was not as good as yesterday but he didn’t care, he was enjoying it just the same, he wasn’t worrying about art, everything was good, because if he was an artist as I had said he was, then whatever he said was right, and to hang with perfection, that was for old maids, and he was out of cigarettes and if I would give him one he might finish that page. I had come at the wrong moment, I was interrupting him, but that was good too, that was life, life always getting in the way of writing, but that was good, he believed in that, let the interruptions come, let people walk in, he was glad to be stopped, because everything was good, to write was good, andnot to write was good, and eating was good, and sleeping and fucking, and now he had finished the page and he was hungry, and he wished we might go to the movies, good or bad, it was restful, good or bad he enjoyed it, everything was good…

  He seemed constantly in communication with the world, as if he were forever sitting at the head of a gigantic banquet. With two agitated hands he commanded the cymbals. “I want to show you the whore with the wooden stump who waits for clients near the Gaumont cinema. I want to show you the café where the nigger jazz players go after work. I want to show you a restaurant where prize fighters and chorus girls have dinner.”

  I felt my wrist watch pulsing against my pulse, fast, fast, fast. The hours pulsing against my life, pulsing too quickly.

  “I don’t want to leave you.”

  The room was black. Hans was asleep in my arms, heavily asleep now. I heard the accordeon. It was Sunday night in Billancourt. The music made my veins swell, as if it were hot liquid passing through me. He lay asleep in my arms. And all this would vanish at Johanna’s coming. No duration. Like a Sunday holiday. It was like a holiday, with the accordeon playing, and the Sunday crowd laughing and shouting. I must not be sad because it was only a holiday. To-day I was welded to him, and to-morrow Johanna would be back.

  What baffled me was that it should be possible for Hans to lie so close, knowing only what I wished to tell him. That there should be no traces on my body of the lapses in my courage.

  My thoughts, like elastics, were stretched to their thinnest meaning. I was waiting for him to awake. He would push everything into movement again. He was all movement. He lived by gusts.

  It was the gusts I enjoyed. I might sit for a whole day afterwards and sail my lingering mind like a slow river boat down the feelings he had dispersed with prodigality. In my mind, like a sanctuary, I gathered his passions, his drunkenness, his speeches, his honesty, his jubilance, his pranks, his contrariness, his naturalness…

  Johanna and I were not so honest… never so honest…

  “Hans, wake up,” I said softly, “wake up! I have something to say for your book. Johanna and I are hypocrites, hypocrites. We always want to embellish ourselves, to make our motives appear sublime.”

  “Why did she lie so much?”

  “For many reasons. Because she loved you and could not bear to hurt you. Or because she loved herself and could not bear to spoil her own image of herself. Or because she feared not to be loved as she was. Or because she wanted to improve on life, because she had read too many books and they went to her head. (I too was once top heavy. When I was asked where I came from I could only answer: books!) Or because you wrote certain things about her and she wanted to live up to them. (The other day when you called me a chameleon, I immediately thought of ways to become more so, because the idea interested me). She did deprive you of so much, by her lies. Everything she gave you was false. I want to give you back Johanna washed of all pretenses. I can do it. Ask me questions. Ask me…”

  “Why don’t you lie to me?”

  “Because we have other things to do together. We don’t have much time to play games—to invent. I sometimes regret the fact that we don’t have time to play, that you will never see me mysterious, provoking, elusive. In a way, I have been cheated of something, by coming just when you needed peace in which to work. Johanna could lie, could be noisy, dramatic, could run away, could come back, could torture you, make you laugh, deceive or make you drunk, I am only allowed to sit still, but I don’t mind. Look at to-day, we have your new pages to read, and the next ones to dream over. I have to give you a different kind of mystery. There’s nothing to throw at each other, for the moment, but questions and answers. What was the meaning of this or that event? Do you think I have done justice to it?”

  “I always suspected that when Johanna gave me so many lies it was because she had nothing else to give but mystery, but fiction. Behind the mystery there was nothing.”

  “That we must find out together. Let�
��s begin now.”

  “There’s plenty of time, plenty of time for everything,” said Hans. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go out and have a juicy steak, with plenty of onions on it, and red wine. And let’s send Johanna a cable and tell her I don’t want her any more. I know now I don’t want her to come back, that I need you terribly. If when she comes back I act exactly as she wants me to act you must not feel that I disappoint you or fail you. Her rages terrify me. What I feel with you which I don’t feel with Johanna is that beyond love we are friends. Johanna and I are not friends. You are the only woman I can be faithful to in my way. Let’s not go out. There’s some stuff in the kitchen. I feel like getting to work right now. I want to show you some notes I made.”

  “Sit down then. Let me cook the dinner. Let me play at being the wife of a genius.”

  He smiled. “It’s funny to see you going to the kitchen in your stately rose dress.”

  As I sat there looking intently at the cups and saucers which did not match, at the liqueur glass made out of an egg holder, at the chipped plates, at the stains on the tablecloth and the mend in the corner of it, I felt that I loved this meal more than all those I ate elsewhere because it showed the traces of living. Hans made no effort to disguise the imprints of living; each object was a proof of life’s using, wearing, breaking and staining of things. Everywhere else there had been an effort made to erase the damage made by life, as there had been an effort made to escape its stains, its destruction, and I saw in him and at this table, the bare, naked life, the debris of it, the ravages small or large, like the greyness of his hair, his fatigue, his heavy note books, all as rich in the acceptance of nature as the rich soup steaming hotly in the pan it was cooked in; everything without the disguise which diluted its colors.

  * * *

  The ancient garden slumbered like an old man in the sun. The trees swayed and the breezes sang. The books lay about on the grass.