The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  Have I got it now? I asked myself. Have I got it, or will I return to these words one day and find them faded, find that it has all faded like a painting after a hundred years, that the colors are altered and unrecognizable?

  I am only recomposing the whole of that hour because I am ill and thus so much closer to the fear of death. To-morrow when I get well I will rejoice that a different hour will replace this one I worship; I will rejoice that no moment of life ever repeats itself whole.

  I wanted to send for Hans, but I hesitated. He was only for the joyous days, the courageous days. I wanted only the good things for him. While I was lying there he sent me a letter and this letter which was written to the sick Djuna overflowed with his own jubilant mood, with rutilant good health. In the last few days, he related, he had discovered a hundred new things which interested him.

  He could not imagine my m gonor divert me from it. He could never divine others’ moods. His own were immense and loud and they filled his world and deafened him to all others. Like to-day: “I feel such well-being,” he shouted.

  Until to-day I had believed in his phrases. It was enough that he said now and then: “I want to give you things.” It did not matter if he did not give them. It did not matter that he added: “But I wouldn’t give you perfume. I don’t understand your wanting foolish things like perfume.”

  He came to see me, all buoyant with his own mood. He sat before me and said:

  “What’s the matter with you? You look so frail. What’s all this moodiness about?”

  His blue eyes looked cold. He talked about his work, about his jaunt through the country, about his lunch on the road and the marvelous wines he had tasted.

  “Here is the book you wanted,” I said.

  But I was tired of giving. I could not keep myself from saying:

  “The other day you said you would come and help me finish my article, revise it. You came, and you chose to paint a water color instead.”

  “That’s true,” said Hans, unflurried.

  “The other day when there was a rumor of war, and we were discussing what we would do, I was concerned for your security… I made plans… I was full of anxiety. And you, what did you think of? Of your manuscripts—what would become of your papers, your notes, your letters. You never thought of me.”

  “It’s true,” said Hans.

  “You gave André’s little slut the only pair of fine stockings I own—I never have a decent pair of stockings myself; I’m always buying you books instead of getting stockings. Your feeling of pity for her was greater than any desire to protect me. I know I’m talking about little things, but they’re so full of significance! You don’t know what love is!”

  “About the selfishness, I don’t know what to say. About not loving you, well…”

  He began to laugh. “You’ve just got to believe in that.”

  He said it so simply.

  “You were quick, you know. Ordinarily you wouldn’t be hurt by my selfish enjoyment of life. You would relish it. When I wrote you that exultant letter about my being filled with the Holy Ghost, I thought to myself afterwards how queer it is that I should want to palm it off on the Holy Ghost. You are the Holy Ghost inside me. You make my spring.”

  * * *

  I began the day in a golden mood which I carried like a fragile egg. I carried it against my breast, warming it. I rushed to Hans to awaken him, to present him with it, to tell him it was a tropical day, to bring him out into the sun. I offered him my mood like another gift.

  But Hans awoke depressed. Some one had been knocking at his door—some devil with a fiendish persistence. And he had refused to open, as usual. He had been lying there in fear, cursing and sweating, unable to get up and unable to dismiss the incident. He had been lying there prostrated, paralyzed with fear. Whenever there came an unexpected knock Hans would imagine it was some one come to threaten him. A knock at the door could fill him with absolute terror. All his life there had been this frightful knocking at the door—creditors, lovers, jealous husbands, inquisitive friends, bores whom he couldn’t shake off, miserable devils whom he had befriended and couldn’t get rid of, lunatics, tramps, chess fiends, rumhounds, etc., etc. A constant evasion, a perpetual fear of pursuit and of persecution, a tremendous feeling of guilt. His life with Johanna had been a sort of elaborate “underground” existence—a maze of lies and intrigues, of scandals and treacheries and petty deceits. A knock at the door could darken his whole day. It made him furtive, upset, distraught. It was impossible for him to pull himself together again.

  I laid my mood aside and attuned myself to his. As he talked I saw with naked eyes what our life together was, and what I saw was again an ultimate loneliness with intermittences of companionship.

  * * *

  Looking around when left alone in the kitchen, as if I were looking at everything for the last time. Looking attentively at the painting on the wall of a couple making love on a bench in front of a urinoir posted with “ Maladies des voies urinaires” and “ Chocolat Menier.” Looking at the menu, hanging on a nail, of the things Hans and André imagined they were going to eat every day. Bouchées à la Reine, Paté de foie gras truffé, Dinde aux champignons, Canard à la purée de marrons, etc. Looking at the maps on the walls of the streets Hans had played in as a child, looking at the lampshade made out of a corset which Hans had bought from the Marché aux puces… as if I were parting from them and the roguish spirit playing in them. Looking at Hans’ coat hugging the chair, seeing the form of his shoulders and ribs, and feeling his body without the tightening and clutching pains of suffocating jealousies. Parting not from Hans but from the immense pain of jealousy. Taking only the joys he gave me. Sifting away the whole, the dark dependence, the passion which alone caused torture, so that he might mention Johanna and his whores without bleeding me. The multiple bleedings of jealousy through which all my strength had wasted itself, all my joys dispersed and lost themselves. Taking only the joys, his soft swagger, the rough touch of his coat, his mouth and his coups de bélier in my womb. Ejecting the pain, the total giving. Placing a distance between the life-giving climate and that shabby kitchen so that all my substance might not be enclosed in his pranks, the effervescence of his voice when he said: “That’s good.” The word good in Hans’ rich mouth generated goodness and richness. That’s good. And: “ What is it?” He could say “What is it… what’s the matter?” with the most sensitive, the most mellow intonations, as if he cared supremely, supremely, with a melting sympathy. “ What is it?” He awaited the answer, melted, with the softest expression of his otherwise steel-bladed curiosity.

  Even his coat could seem to be stirring with his easy flowing life, even to his clothes he gave the imprint of liveliness. Even his coat could stiralive the love in me which wanted only to be liberated from intensity… To enjoy… I wanted to enjoy… to enjoy…

  I parted not from the past, but from past pain, retaining only the humor of the sketches on the wall, and the deep flowing grooves of a mellow undemanding love.

  * * *

  During a sleepless night I thought: Hans, my love, I can love you better now that you cannot hurt me. I can love you more gayly and more easily and loosely. I can endure space and distance and betrayals. Only the best and the strongest for you, Hans, my love, the eternal wanderer, the artist, the faithless one… Nothing is changed except that to-day my courage was born. Lie here, breathing into my hair, over my neck. No hurt will come from me. No judgment. No woman ever judged the life stirring within her womb. To torment you is impossible to me. It is like allying myself with the world against my own flesh and blood. I cannot be against you because I am too close to you. I was harder to-day than I have ever been, for the game of it, but I got no joy. I will always stand by you, with you, against the world. I will laugh with you even if it is against me.

  * * *

  He sat on the edge of my bed, and I watched the transformations in him. I watched the moist, half-open mouth close musingly, the scattered tal
k crystallizing. The man so easily swayed, caught, moved, now collecting his strength again. At that moment I saw the big man in him, the man who appeared to take his work like a drug, who appeared to be merely enjoying recklessly, idling, roaming, but deep down set upon a terribly earnest goal. Intent on handing back to life all the wealth of material he had collected, intent on restituting to the world what he had taken from the world with his enormous creator’s appetite.

  A moment before, flushed by drink, he had been scattering his riches, ideas, imaginings, fantasies, emotions, all diffuse, fragmented. The moment when he crystallized and set himself to work was beautiful to watch. He was not altogether serious yet, was still laughing while he caressed me.

  “What magnetic force have you there? It’s like electricity,” he said, “What have you there inside you that I can’t tear myself away from?”

  “At this moment, with your hair uncombed and some of my rouge on your mouth, you look absolutely illiterate!”

  “Woman, woman, she’s always holding man back from his high purpose.”

  I lay on the bed still sunk in my joy, but watching him with secret pride.

  “I’m going to write about the death of the soul,” he said.

  “And what of the Lemurian man?” I laughed, jumping up. “And what of the surrender to the biologic?”

  “You’re always too quick,” he said, “always too impatient. I’m still in the womb.”

  “Listen, Hans, I feel your book swelling up inside me like my very own child. Better than my very own, because your book inside me is like a fecundation, while writing my own books is like Narcissism. I love to be fecundated. I’m a female, I’m absolutely female, and I glory in it.”

  I stood in the middle of the room laughing and combing my hair.

  “I glory in it. I say, let a woman write books, but let her above everything else remain fecundable by other books—especially if they are good. It’s the woman who writes books in solitude who dies. You paint the gigantic fresco, the cosmic fresco; I bring crumbs like an indefatigable ant.”

  “And you laugh secretly at my important speeches… You’re no ant.”

  “I’m the night then. The all-mother with enormous protective wings covering the world, blanketing it, lulling it. You sleep on the security I give you, on the warmth. I am the night who watches over you through curtained windows with very wide open eyes.”

  “You will put me to sleep.”

  “In the morning I awake singing because I know you have slept profoundly, lulled by the beautiful lies I tell you, beautiful lies like fairy tales.”

  “You lie awake thinking up new lies every day.”

  “I lie awake because you snore. You’re so happy you snore. I love to hear you snore, Hans. I love you because you’re natural. I love you because you forget to have your hair cut, and because you scrub yourself spic and span like a Dutchwoman scrubs the cobblestones in the street. I love you because you live in streets where people wear bedroom slippers and don’t comb their hair. I get rested from my burning fever for perfection.”

  “Don’t talk any more about rest,” said Hans. “I haven’t written a line to-day.”

  “That’s all right, we’re writing chapters all the time, you and I. We write when we sit in a café doing nothing. We’re writing when we dream at night, we’re writing while we eat and even while we fuck. We’re the most industrious couple alive. I wish we could be lazy, layoff. Our profession is in our blood. We can never walk out on it.”

  “I’m going to sit down and add to my Self-Portrait. I want to write about the time when I was fifteen years old and expounding Nietzscheu salready had a dose of clap.”

  When I heard the typewriter’s dry crackling, I was happy.

  I felt myself softly closing the door upon the world. I drew in long mystical bolts. I pulled in rustless shutters. Silence. I imprisoned within myself that mood and texture of Hans’ being which would never go into his book, that which only a woman could see and know.

  * * *

  Johanna arrived last night. Johanna arrived last night.

  I repeated this to myself as if I could not understand it. Only the night before I had been with Hans, and now Johanna was here.

  Day of hallucination. I imagined Johanna in Hans’ room, preparing to possess his life again. I choked over my food. I tried to work, and I choked over my work. Johanna in Billancourt. I remembered Hans’ pleading words: to wait.

  When I slept the pain suffocated me. I had to get up and walk about. When I awoke in the morning the pain lay on the back of my head like a stone. What would become of Hans now, of his life, his work, his joys? What would Johanna do to him?

  The most terrible pain of all is the pain which does not explode, which makes no sound, which beats against nothing, which refuses to be exhausted by cry or gesture. The most prolonged and intricate of tortures. There is no air, no rain, no thunder, no lighting, no darkness, no fire. There is nothing to fight. The pain is in the tissues, in the cells, in the silence, in the breathing, invisible and soundless. To shift, to move away, to elude the torture was impossible, since there was no separation between me and the pain. No space, no distance, no voice, no face that one could strike.

  I took a long walk alone. The “vigne vierge” was blood red on the walls and fences. I walked against the wind, weeping for Hans, for the lover I could never forget, soft, tender, dangerous, defenceless in women’s hands. My love, Hans, whom I had filled with strength and self-knowledge. I would always be there for him, always his. The day Johanna hurt him I would be there to love him again into wholeness. No one knew the softness in me for Hans, the softness, the forgivingness, the patience, the knowledge I had of his weakness, the love of his weakness…

  * * *

  As she walked heavily towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the doorway, I saw for the first time the woman I had always been hungry to know. I saw Johanna’s eyes burning, I heard her voice so rusty and tragic saying: “I wanted to see you alone,” and immediately I felt drowned by her beauty, felt that I would do anything Johanna might ask of me.

  I wanted to say: “I recognize you. I have often imagined a woman like you.” But I was too timid, tead I sat silent in the tall black armchair.

  Johanna did not sit still like an idol to be worshipped. She talked profusely and continuously, with feverish breathlessness, like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long, and when she walked about she was eager to sit down again. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked. Restless and keen, making jerking gestures with her hands and shoulders, drinking hurriedly, speaking hurriedly, smiling swiftly, and listening to only half of my phrases.

  “You’re beautiful, beautiful,” I said simply.

  “Women, what things women see,” said Johanna as if she were talking to herself, but looking at me all the while. “The way you hand over the glass of Madeira—you have the gestures of a temple dancer.”

  Johanna’s dress shimmered like black water. We sat wide apart on the green couch, fearful of the silence between our phrases and of the way our eyes clung to each other. Johanna left many of her phrases unfinished. She described everything rapidly, hazily, so that the impression was blurred and strange. She would not linger too long over any of her phrases, as if in fear of their effect. If the phrase was bitter she would smile to blunt it.

  After a short circuitous anecdote, she would come back to me.

  “Hans’ description of you,” she said, “simply left out everything that was important. You are all nuances. Even your pallor is different from mine. Mine is white and yours golden.”

  “And you,” I said, “you’re the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.”

  “It’s a good thing then that I’m soon going away. You would unmask me too quickly.”

  At this I looked at Johanna and my eyes said so clearly, “I want to become blind with you,” that Johanna trembled a little and turned
her face away.

  “I thought your eyes were blue,” she said, “but I See now they are a strange and beautiful grey-gold. You glide when you walk.”

  I noticed the hole in Johanna’s sleeve. And suddenly I felt ashamed not to have a hole in my sleeve, too.

  “Let me look at your feet. They are so lovely and delicate and alive. And you wear sandals. I love sandals. I never wore anything else until… until…”

  She looked down at her worn shoes. I saw that she was wearing cotton stockings, and it hurt me to see Johanna in cotton stockings.

  “Let’s go out and get some sandals,” I said.

  “Later, later,” said Johanna hoarsely. And then we both began to tremble. Johanna began to talk again, vaguely. The intimacy vanished. Her talk was like a turbulent river, like a broken necklace. Suddenly Johanna was silent, and then a changed voice she resumed:

  “What a lovely way of dressing you have! I love this dress, its faded color, the little velvet jacket, the lacing over the breasts. I love the way you cover yourself, too: there is so little nudity showing—just your neck really. I never wanted to imitate any one else before, but now I should like to become as much like you as possible.”

  Her hands were shaking.

  “Johanna,” I thought, “I want to touch you.”

  “When you look up at me you look like a child. When you look down you look like a sage, very old and very sad,” said Johanna.