by Anais Nin
“According to the Chinese,” said Hans, “there was a realm between heaven and earth… this is it.”
I cooked for him. Suddenly I loved cooking because it was for Hans. I cooked richly and the odors of pungent flavors seeped through the house. I loved to see him eat, and to eat with him. I could see the food turning to rich blood in him. Red meat, buttered and peppered food, and red wine. The alchemy of his joy giving a high flavor to every moment. The miracle of his fieriness converting food and sleep and rest into joy.
Desire coursing. Dreams of semen. Earth. Semen. Incandescence. A furnace of caresses and of talk. I felt heavy and burnt. Not bodies but flames, and added to the fuel the flame of our talk, our moods. I was crying and laughing with joy. Solitude. Summer heat. Tornadoes and exquisite calms.
The night. Books. “Djuna. I want to keep you under lock and key. To hide you. You are too rare. When I lie here with you I am no longer restless. You have a gift for illusion. It’s always a fairy tale with you. Even when you are cooking, even when you sewed my curtains, even when you cure my stomach aches, you are the Princess. With you I feel whole and ecstatic.”
And he lay still, lulled by my softness, resting on my love, the core of bitterness and fury in him lulled.
Suddenly, he leaped up with a whip-like alacrity and a smashing, overwhelming vigor and exuberance, like a man who had suddenly been electrified. He began to talk about his childhood, about Johanna, about his life in the streets, about the women he had loved and ditched, and the women who had ditched and “bitched” him, as he put it. He seemed to remember everything at once, as though it were a ball inside him which unravelled of itself, and as it unravelled made new balls which he would unravel again another day. Truth, lies, humor, fantasy, dreams, a hodge-podge which however fantastic, however wild or inaccurate, rang out with a fierce sincerity, with a gong-like reality that shattered the feeble realities of fact or dream even. Had he actually done all these things he was relating to me with such kaleidoscopic fury and passion? Had he really killed a boy with a snow ball? Had he really struck his first wife down brutally, with his bare fist, when she was with child? Had he really butted his head against a wall in sudden anger and knocked himself unconscious, as he said—because the woman he loved had rejected him? Had he really taken abortions and thrown them off the ferry-boat in order “to pick up a little extra change”? Whether he had or not really didn’t matter. I knew that he was capable of doing the thousand and one mad, rash, crazy, contradictory things he talked about.
All the layers of his vinous past he laid and unravelled before me, all his masks, his assumed attitudes, his mimicries, his buffooneries. I saw him pretending, driven by obscure revenges, by fears, by weaknesses. I saw him in the world another man from the one I knew. Before me he shed all his poses, all his defences. He was not on his guard to fight for his independence; he was not impelled to lie in order to startle or amuse; he was not urged to cover his timidities with a carapace of callousness.
The legend of hardness, violence and callousness. Like a tale to me, distant and unreal, in contrast to the softness I knew. And I knew which was the rind and which the core of the man.
Just as he loved the falsities and the legends he created around himself, he loved also to rest from these pranks and trickeries and attitudes. He loved to stand there so whole and so certain of what he was deep down, crystallizing in the white heat of my faith.
“You always know,” he said, “what is to be disregarded in me, what must be laughed away, what is unimportant, like the changes of leaves on a tree. You are never deceived about the core.”
Then all the laughter, the shouts, the clownishness and nonsense and reminiscence subsided into a pool of serenity and reflectiveness. His voice became a soft murmur, trailing off in dreamy introspection.
“Why, that sounds as if it might be the beginning of my book, of my Self-Portrait!” he exclaimed.
And when all the gestures and vociferousness and restlessness seemed lulled, suddenly then he sprang up again with a new mood—a fanatic philosopher who walked up and down the room punctuating the torrent of his ideas with fist blows. A nervous, lithe walk, body light and airy, head heavy, the brow ponderous, the glance compact, riveting the phrases. And the voice incandescent. Ideas like leaves on a pyre which never turned to ash—on an everlasting fire. Suddenly the words, the ideas, the memories were all drawn together like the cords of a hundred kites, and he said:
“I’d like to work now.”
In a few moments I heard the crackling of his typewriter.
There remained in the air the echoes of his resonant voice, the hot breath of his words, the vibrations of his pounding gestures, the disturbance created by the gusts of his enthusiasm.
“What would Johanna think,” said Hans, “if she were to blow in now and find us talking about her like two sober craftsmen?”
I had sunk myself into my enjoyment as into a hammock.
“Maybe you’re the woman who will write the truth some day,” he said, “maybe you’ll be the one honest female of our time. Keep that head of yours clear when Johanna comes. Don’t let her delude you.”
“I could say the same to you.”
“You’ll see,” he responded quickly, “I’m another man. I know now what I am. I won’t let her override me. I don’t like what she does to me: she humiliates me. I won’t stand for it any more. I won’t!”
“Maybe you’ll forget all that—with the warmth of her.”
“Huh! Johanna’s warm only when she’s in your arms. Afterwards she’s cold, cold as steel. It’s you that’s truly warm, constantly warm. All you say is warm, all you think is warm, all you write is warm.”
He fell asleep. He rolled over and fell asleep. No noise, no care, no work undone, no imperfection unmastered, no word unsaid ever kept him awake. He could roll over and forget. He could roll over with such a grand indifference and let everything wait. When he rolled over the day ended. Nothing would be carried over into the next day. The next day would be absolutely new and clean. He just rolled over and extinguished everything—work, books, talk, love, laughter, people, himself, the whole world. Just rolling over.
* * *
He sat before his third glass of pernod. I looked at the hole in his coat and the stains on his hat.
“In my book,” I said, “all the men will wear glasses and have monumental brows! The women are not thrown on beds but on piles of manuscripts and open books. The dawn is reached and grasped with talk, hunger is stimulated by long discourses. Money is used to supply more paper, more carbons, to rent stronger typewriters.”
“Too realistic,” muttered Hans.
“It’s like the stains on your hat. I’m a woman and you must let me write about human things, trivial things maybe. I leave the problem of form and language to you, together with being and becoming, and physiognomies, and destiny versus incident, and the collapse of reality, and the coming fungoid era, and the middle brain and the tertiary moon… I want to put in all that you leave out. The shape of your hat, for instance. I can tell it from a thousand hats when I see it hanging on a peg. Your hat is like a Rembrandt. It belongs with your Self-Portrait. It’s human and battered, and it’s really not a trivial thing at all—it’s deeply significant. It’s your hat. It’s unique.”
Then I saw the glint in his eyes—the pernod glint, which was really npewritehe pernod but some gem-like layer ofhis being that the drink had peeled away, a glint that was hard, cruel, mischievous. His phrases seemed to break and scatter, to run wild like a machine without springs. They gushed forth from this contradictory core of him.
He was gloating over the childlike pranks he had played on his friends. “There was a guy I used to write pathetic letters to—in New York. Never failed to touch him. And then, as soon as I had gotten the dough, I’d send him a long cable thanking him. I liked to spend his money recklessly. I despised him for being so soft.” He bowed his head in a humble, yet sly way, and laughed softly to himself. “If
I had money I would be as hard as nails. I’d never lend a penny to a starving artist. Never! You might as well throw your money down a sewer… You should have seen the two bums I picked up last night—two trollops, I mean. Whew! Were they hideous! I like them that way—the uglier the better. I like beautiful women and I like monstrous women. I don’t know which I like more. André was with me. He was peeved. He thought I was being unfaithful to you.”Here he laughed to himself again. “Listen,” he went on, “do you know what’s so awfully good about whores? It’s this: you don’t have to write them long letters. You don’t have to make love to them. There’s nothing gained and there’s nothing lost. It’s the algebra of love. The more grasping they are, the more whorish they are, the better I like them.” And he laughed again, without looking at me. It was a monologue. He was being “sincere” again, “truthful”! This painful sincerity was to prove to everybody that he had learned to embrace the ugly as well as the beautiful.
I looked at the sulphurous-colored pernod and drank it.
* * *
Summer evening. We were eating in a small restaurant opposite the Gare Saint Lazare, a restaurant wide open on the street. We were eating in the street and it was as if the street were full of people who were eating and talking and drinking. With each mouthful I swallowed I devoured the noises of the street, the voices and the echoes they dropped, the swift glances which fell on me like a piece of lighted wick from a guttering candle. I was only the finger of a whole bigger body, a body hungry and thirsty and avid. The wine running down my throat passing through the throat of the world. The warmth of the day like a man’s hand on my breasts, the smell of the street like a man’s breath on my neck. Wide open on the street like a field washed by a river.
Shouts and laughter exploded near us from the students going to the Quat’z Arts Bal. Egyptians and Africans in feathers and jewelry, with the sweat shining on the brown painted bodies. They ran to catch the buses and it was like a heaving sea of glistening flesh, soft flesh shining between colored feathers and jewelry, with the muscles swelling when they laughed.
Hans leaned over. “I want to lay you on the table—right here. I’m crazy about you. Lean over more. Lean over, I want to see your breasts.”
A band of students entered the restaurant, shouting and laughing. They circled round the table, like savages dancing around a stake.
Hans was laughing softly: “The other day when I left you, I was a little spiffed, you know. And hungry as hell. I ordered a good meal—a good meal. And I’m enjoying it. And then I notice a little whore opposite me, eyeing me up and down, and sort of looking at me wistfully, hungrily. I invited her to eat—naturally. She’s hardly sat down beside me when I run my hand up her skirt—I must have been cockeyed. Anyway, I finally took her to a hotel down the street—and all the while thinking of you, our afternoon, and wondering how the hell I could be doing this, but doing it just the same. And sort of hating myself for it, and yet enjoying myself—do you understand? But when we got to the hotel and it came time to lay her—I don’t know—something happened. I just didn’t have my heart in it, I guess. I couldn’t do a thing. And you know what a whore is! She worked over me like a steam engine. And the more she worked the less interested I got. It seemed to me as if it were all happening to some one else. I remember watching her curiously, as if I were examining a bug under a microscope. Very strange. I seemed to go dead under her. And wasn’t she contemptuous, though! As though I had insulted her. I guess she thought I was a pervert, or an impotent bastard. But she had her money. That seemed to soothe her a little bit. I felt sort of glad, sort of relieved, that I hadn’t given her too much. It was your money, after all… I don’t know, that’s how it was. Sort of queer and sudden. Can you understand it?”
I kept my eyes steady, saying quietly that I understood. But my body was bewildered, hurt beyond all words, beyond all understanding.
“One more thing,” he continued. “I must tell you this—and then I am through. I’ve got to get it off my chest… One night—it was André’s night off—we went to a cabaret. And sure as fate, we soon had a couple of Janes around our neck. They stuck to us like glue. To make it short, we took them home with us. We sat down in the kitchen and had a little snack together, the four of us. They weren’t bad, but they were greedy. Finally we began to talk turkey. They were holding out for some absurd sum—200 francs a piece, I think it was, or something like that. They might just as well have asked for the Woolworth Building. Anyhow, I was for letting them go. I told them so. I even showed them my torn socks. But André, the dope, he insisted that they stay. I don’t know what he gave them—but suddenly they became cheerful again. They began to sing and dance—they acted as if they had lost a screw or two. One of them was an acrobatic dancer. She wanted to show us a few tricks. And so she stripped down and began to do somersaults and handsprings—and every time she came down her high-heeled shoes made the chandelier clatter. They made a hell of a rumpus—the concierge threatened to have us put out next day. Next morning André was furious. ‘You try to tell me you’re in love with Djuna,’ he said. Well, I am—you know that. I think you might even have found a perverse pleasure in watching me, had you been there.”
I bowed my head. “I understand… I understand,” I kept repeating. He was still swimming on the airy, elastic waves of his drunkenness. The students were singing and laughing so hard they had to wipe their eyes. I looked at Hans and felt the whole world rocking.
The sign over the Hotel Anjou was in red lights. The red lights shone into the room. A red well. Blood madness. Blood rhythm. A charging, a hoofing, a clangor, a rushing through the world. Thumping. The torrent pressure of a machine panting, sliding back and forth, back and forth. A machine t/fontyielding honey. Swing. Swing. The bed- like stillness and downiness of summer foliage, heavy summer foliage rocking the warm, wine-filled senses. Rolling. Rolling. Clutching and folding. All curves filled. Steam. Steam. The machine on giant oiled gongs yielding honey, rivers of honey on the bed of summer foliage. The boat slicing open the lake waters, ripples extending to the tips of the hair and the roots of the toes. Honeysuckle juice and pistilled tongues, the jet of fountains on odored sheets, the room filled with fever and blood-red lights.
He sank into sleep. I lay at the bottom of the red well, laughing, while my joy mounted in endless spirals.
Through the open window came the riotous shouts of the students and the groaning of the heavy buses. I ran to the window naked and watched them. I looked at the patches of brown flesh and I wished I were there at the ball. Hans has made me suffer, but I am going to destroy pain with drunkenness. I want to go to the ball. I want to let life flow around me and drown me.
Hans awoke. He laughed seeing me standing at the window naked. “You’re curious and wild like a savage,” he said. “Come here!”
“I want to go to the ball!”
“Come here,” he said angrily. But I stood there in the halo of the red light and shouted: “I want to go to the ball!”
“I won’t have you leaning out of the window naked!”
I wrapped the brocaded curtain around myself and went on watching. Finally with arms extended I turned back to the bed where he lay, and as I approached the bed I made the gesture of closing my fists tight. Then slowly, as I neared him, I opened my fists again. “See, I wanted to hold on to you, but look, I am opening my hands. Have your little whores, if that will make you happy. Anyway, I am a gay whore myself.” And dancing around the bed I exclaimed gaily: “See what a gay whore I am! Twenty francs, please, Mister!”
When I rushed out of the hotel a gust of summer heat enveloped me. I used to wait for the seasons sitting behind a window, watching and waiting, and now they catch me living so fast, they come upon me with my dress only half buttoned, my hair wild, running for a taxi because I am late.
* * *
I had arrived too early and Hans was out. André opened the door to me. I stood in the middle of the room without moving at first, breathing this a
ir in which he lived, the only climate in which I myself could live.
I looked at the photograph of Johanna tacked on his wall. The fevered profile, taut even in the photograph, so alive that I shivered a little, expecting the face to turn towards me with that slight twitching of the lips and the occasional tic of the eyelids. I half expected her to open her mouth and pour forth that eddying voice with the spinning phrases which gave one vertigo. There was in her portrait the imperious fever of her rhythm, like her wide, crunching walk. Looking at the taut, fevered mask of Johanna, I dreaded the malice behind her pretense; I remembered the hatred which Hans had ascribed to Johanna, the fierce possessiveness of the woman.
My eyes turned instinctively to his desk which was littered with notes. I read them over slowly… Johanna… Johanna’s life in the cellar on Sullivan Street… Johanna selling cigarettes and candy… Johanna’s cock and bull stories… Johanna’s drunken orgies with Hildred… Johanna’s extravagances… Johanna’s fear of humiliation… Johanna the female Stavrogin… Johanna’s bracelets… Johanna’s cat’s eyerings… Johanna this, Johanna that…
Johanna had made the world rock for him and that had been her great gift to him. The moment when the world rocks and mouths join, and the earth spins like a mad top, when the dreams rise like pyramids… And now Hans was erecting pyramids of notes. Johanna had shed her hair on his pages, her perfume, her torn dresses, her shadow as she dressed, her tears, her nail lacquer, her painted eyelashes, her broken bracelets. The notes were stained and brimming with her presence.
A volume of Proust was open on the desk. It was marked with Johanna’s name, with references to Johanna’s lies, Johanna’s friends. The last page on the typewriter was a description of Johanna’s jealousies, the scenes she created, the brusque reconciliations. Johanna. Johanna.
I picked a book out of his bookcase. Johanna’s name in the margin. I looked at the maps on the walls, the large maps Hans made of his future novels. “Life with Johanna on Sullivan Street.” A list of incidents, of the friends who surrounded them, of the quarrels and the despairs and the separations.
