The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  “I met with gigantic difficulties and obstacles. I overcame them. I was handed a bigger portion of suffering than is usual—imaginary suffering. Without mother and without father I fought the world, angry seas, hunger, horrible step-parents. There were mysteries, pursuits, torture, all kinds of danger…”

  “Don’t you think you’re still doing that?”

  “Perhaps. Then there was another story, a story of a boat in a garden. Suddenly I was sailing down a river and I went round and round for twenty years without getting anywhere.”

  “Was that because you didn’t have me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was because I was waiting to become a woman. In all the fairy tales where the child is taken away she either returns when she is twenty or the father returns to the daughter when she is twenty.”

  “He waits till she gets beyond the stage of having to have her nose blown. He waits for the interesting age.”

  * * *

  My father’s jealousy began with the reading of my childhood diary. He observed that after two years of obsessional yearning for him I had finally exhausted my suffering and attained serenity. After serenity I had fallen in love with an Irish boy and then with a violinist. He was offended that I had not died completely, that I had not spent the rest of my life yearning for him. He did not understand that I had continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. I had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him. I had written the diary for him. I had loved him by falling in love at the age of eleven with the ship’s captain who might have taken me back to Spain. I had loved him by taking his place at my mother’s side and becoming logical and intellectual in imitation of him, not through any natural gifts for either. I had loved him by playing the father to my brothers, the husband to my mother, by giving courage, strength, by denying my feminine, emotional self. I had loved him in life creatively by writing about him.

  It is true that I did not die altogether—I lived in creations. Nor did I wear black nor turn my back on men and life.

  But when I became aware of his jealousy I began immediately to give him what he desired. Understanding his jealousy I began to relate the incidents of my life in a deprecatory manner, in a mocking tone, in such a way that he might feel I had not loved deeply anything or anyone but him. Understanding his desire to be exclusively loved, to be at the core of every life he touched, I could not bring myself to talk with fervor or admiration of all those I had loved or admired or enjoyed because I knew it would hurt his egoism. To be so aware of his feelings forced me into a role. I gave a color to my past which could be interpreted this way: nothing that happened before you came was of any importance… I was only marking time… Nothing ever satisfied me, deep down…

  It was this absorption in the need of the other which was at the root of all the mysteries of my life—at the root of my silences, my evasions, my lies. A sensitiveness to what my father did not want to hear prevented me even from picturing the scenes I had enjoyed. I was perpetually recomposing the scene in such a way that it would bring a balm to his egoism, a lull to his jealousy.

  The result was that nothing appeared in its true light and that I deformed my true self.

  To-day my father, looking at me, holding my book in his hand, studying my costumes, exploring my home, studying my ideas, says: “You are an Amazon. Until you came I felt that I was dying. Now I feel renewed and strengthened.”

  My own picture of my life gave him the opportunity he loved of passing judgment, an ideal judgment upon the pattern of it.

  But I was so happy to have found a father, a father with a strong will, a wisdom, an infallible judgment, that I forgot for the moment everything I knew, surrendered my own certainties. I forgot my own efforts, my own wisdom. It was so sweet, so sweet to have a father, to believe that there could exist some one who was in life so many years ahead of me, and who could look back upon mine and my errors, who could guide and save me, give me strength. I relinquished my convictions just to hear him say: “In that case yu were too believing,” or “That was a wasted piece of sacrifice. Why save junk? Let the failures die. It is something in them that makes them failures.”

  To have a father, the seer, the god. I found it hard to look him in the eyes. I never looked at the food he put in his mouth. It seemed to me that vegetarianism was the right diet for a divine being. I had such need to worship, to relinquish my power. It always made me feel more the woman.

  I thought again of his remark—”You are an Amazon. You are a force.” I looked at myself in the mirror with surprise. Certainly not the body of an Amazon. What was it my father saw? I was underweight, so light on my feet that a caricaturist had once pictured me as having floated up to the ceiling like a balloon and everybody struggling to catch me with brooms and ladders… Not the me in the mirror—but my words, my writing, my work. Strength in creation, in life, ideas. I had proved capable of building a world for myself. Amazon! Capable of every audacity in life, but vulnerable in love…

  I translated his remark to myself thus: Whenever anyone says you are they mean I want you to be! He wanted me to be an Amazon. One breast cut off as in the myth, so as to be able to use the bow and arrow. The other breast far too tender, too vulnerable. Why? Because an Amazon did not need a father. Nor a lover, nor a husband. An Amazon was a law and a world all to herself.

  He was abdicating his father role. A woman-ruled world was no hardship to him, the artist, for in it he had a privileged place. He had all the sweetness of her one breast, together with all her strength. He could lie down on that one breast and dream, for at his side was a woman who carried a bow and arrow to defend him. He the writer, the musician, the sculptor, the painter, he could lie down and dream by the side of the Amazon who could give him nourishment and fight the world for him as well…

  I looked at him. He was my own height. He was a little bowed by fatigue and with the thought of his own frailness. His nerves, his sensitiveness, his dependence on women. He looked slenderer and paler. He said: “I used to be afraid that my wife might die. What would I do without my wife? I used to plan to die with her. But now I have you. I know you are strong.”

  Many men have said this to me before. I had not minded. Protection was a rhythm. We could exchange roles. But this phrase from a father was different… A father.

  All through the world… looking for a father… looking naïvely for a father… falling in love with grey hairs… the symbol… every symbol of the father… all through the world… an orphan… in need of man the leader… to be made woman… And again to be asked… to be the mother… always the mother… always to draw the strength I have, but never to know where to rest, where to lay down my head and find new strength… always to draw it out of myself… from myself… strength… to pour out love… All through the world seeking a father… loving the father… awaiting the father… and finding the child.

  * * *

  His lumbago and the almost complete paralysis it brought about seemed to me like a stiffness in the joints of his soul, from acting and pretending. He had assumed so many roles, had disciplined himself to appear always gay, always immaculate, always shaved, always faultless; he had played at love so often, that it was as if he suffered from a cramp due to the false positions too long sustained. He could never relax. The lumbago was like the stiffness and brittleness of his emotions which he had constantly directed. It was something like pain for him to move about easily in the realm of impulses. He was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great uneven flow of life with its necessary disorder and necessary ugliness. Every gesture of meticulous care taken to eat without vulgarity, to wash his teeth, to disinfect his hands, to behave ideally, to sustain the illusion of perfection, was like a rusted hinge, for when a pattern and a goal, when an aesthetic order penetrates so deeply into the motions of life, it eats into its spontaneity like rust, and this mental orientation, this forcing of nature to follow a pattern, this const
ant defeat of nature and control of it, had become rust, the rust which had finally paralyzed his body…

  I wondered how far back I would have to trace the current of his life to find the moment at which he had thus become congealed into an attitude… At what moment had his will petrified his emotions? What shock, what incident had produced this mineralization such as took place under the earth, due to pressure?

  When he talked about his childhood I could see a luminous child always dancing, always running, always alert, always responsive. His whole nature was on tip toes with expectancy, hope and ardor. The nose sniffed the wind with high expectations of storms, tragedies, adventures, beauty. The eyes did not retreat under the brow, but were opened wide like a clairvoyant’s. The flesh was tender, the appetite keen, the restlessness immense. Everything then seemed fluid and mobile, soft and pliable and yielding.

  I could not trace the beginning of his disease, this cancer of jealousy. Perhaps far back—in his jealousy of his delicate sister who was preferred by the father, in his jealousy of the man who took his fiancée away from him, in the betrayal of this fiancée, in the immense shock of pain which sent him out of Spain to Cuba.

  To-day if he read a clipping which did not give him the first place, in the realm of music, he suffered. If a friend turned his admiration away… If in a room he was not the centre of attention… Wherever there was a rival, he felt the fever and the poison of self-doubt, the fear of defeat. In all his relations with man and woman there had to be a battle and a triumph.

  He began by telling me first of all that I owed him nothing; then he began to look for all that there was in me of himself.

  What he noted in my diary were only the passages which revealed our sameness. I began naturally enough to think that he loved in me only what there was of himself, that beyond the realm of self-discovery, self-love, there was no curiosity.

  “How are we to know,” I asked him, “when it is we are writing prophetically, or when it is that our desires work miracles and bring us what we wish? Here we are sitting, telling each other all our adventures—and in my diaryI had written long ago: ‘my husband will have a terribly tragic and adventurous life… we will sit together in the evenings and I will listen to his stories… we will write in my diary together’.”

  My father said: “Although I was prevented from training you, your blood obeyed me.” As he said this his face shone with the luminosity of early portraits: this luminosity the one trait which had never faded from my memory. He glowed with a joyous Greek wisdom, as he did on the German postcard photographs I had pasted in my diary… Herr Professor… Berlin… Taken soon after we had left Berlin, when he was thirty years old and the beautiful perfumed countess was in love with him but he could not bear the smell of ether which pierced through her perfume.

  “We must look for light and clarity,” he said, “because we are too easily unbalanced.”

  I felt as if I were entering a finished world, a static world. Was this the end? The goal? A finished world. A creation to which there was nothing to add. The way he saw his life as a completed work. The air was too rarified, too crystallized his vision. Like rock crystal. I could look through it as I looked for hours through glass and colored stones, with a love of transparency, a love of clairvoyance. But I felt I was not where he was.

  “You’ve got such strong wings,” he said. “One feels there are no walls to your life.”

  I was sitting at the foot of his bed. The waiter was coming in and out of the room with bottles of mineral water. The mistral was blowing hot and dry. It had been blowing for ten days.

  “Now I see that all these women I pursued are all in you, and you’re my daughter, and I can’t marry you! You’re the synthesis of all the women I loved.”

  “Just to have found each other will make us stronger for life.”

  Samba the negro came in with mail. When my father saw the letters addressed to me he said: “Am I to be jealous of your letters too?”

  Between each one of these phrases there was a long silence. A great simplicity of tone. We looked at each other as if we were listening to music, not as if we were saying words. Inside both our heads, as we sat there, he leaning against a pillow and I against the foot of the bed, there was a concert going on. Two boxes filled with the resonances of an orchestra. A hundred instruments playing all at once. Two longs spools of flute-threads interweaving between his past and mine, the strings of the violin constantly trembling like the springs inside of our bodies, the nerves never still, the heavy poundings on the drum like the heavy pounding of sex, the throb of blood, the beat of desire which drowned all the vibrations, louder than any instrument, the harp singing god, god and the angels, the purity in his brow, the clarity in his eyes, god, god, god, Isolina with auburn hair, and the drums pounding desire at the temples. The orchestra all in one voice now, for an instant, in love, in love with the harp singing god, and the violins shaking their hair and I passing the violin bow gently between my legs, drawing music out of my body, my body foaming, the harp singing god while all the women of the world lay under him in a ritual of fecundation, the drum beating, beating sex, d pollen inside of the violin cases, the curves of the violin case and the curves of women’s buttocks, cries of the ‘cello, the ‘cello singing a dirge under the level of tears, through subterranean roads with notes twinkling right and left, notes like stairways to the harp singing god, god, god, god, and the faun through the flute mocking the notes grown black and penitent, the black notes ascending the dust route of the ‘cello’s tears, an earth tremor splitting the music in two fallen walls, the walls of our faith, the ‘cello weeping, and the violins trembling, the beat of sex breaking through the middle and splitting the white notes and the black notes apart, and the piano’s stairway of sounds rolling into the inferno of silence because far away, behind and beyond the violins comes the second voice of the orchestra, the voice out of the bellies of the instruments, underneath the notes being pressed by hot fingers, in opposition to these notes comes the song from the bellies of the instruments, out of the pollen they contain, out of the wind of passing fingers, the carpet of notes mourn with voices of black lace and dice on telegraph wires. His sadnesses locked into the ‘cello, our dreams wrapped in dust inside of the piano box, this box on our heads cracking with resonances, the past singing, an orchestra splitting with fullness, lost loves, faces vanishing, jealousy twisting like a cancer, eating the flesh, the letter that never came, the kiss that was not exchanged, the harp singing god, god, god, who laughs on one side of his face, god was the man with a wide mouth who could have eaten me whole, singing inside the boxes of our heads. Friends, treacheries, ecstasies. The voices that carried us into serenity, the voices which made the drum beat in us, sex, sex, sex, sex, desire, the bow of the violins passing between the legs, the curves of women’s backs yielding, the baton of the orchestra leader, the second voice of locked instruments, the strings snapping, the dissonances, the hardness, the flute weeping.

  We danced because we were sad, we danced all through our life because we were sad, and the golden top dancing inside of us made the notes turn, the white and the black, the words we wanted to hear, the words we heard, the new faces of the world turning black and white, ascending and descending, up and down askew stairways from the bellies of the ‘cello full of salted tears, the water heaving when the violins sang together, the sea coming on us, the sea of forgetfulness, yesterday grinning through the bells and castanets, and to-day a single note all alone, like our fear of solitude, quarreling, the orchestra taking our whole being together and lifting us clear out of the earth where pain is a long, smooth song that does not cut through the flesh, where love is one long smooth note like the wind at night, no bloodshedding knife to its touch, the touch of music from distance far beyond the orchestra which answered the harp, the flute, the ‘cello, the violins, the echoes on the roof, the taste on the roof of our palates, music in the tongue, in the fingers, when the fingers seek the flesh, the red pistil of desire in th
e fingers on the violin cords, and all desire mounting in space to fall again on the bellies, the bellies of women he fingered like a musician, their cries rising and falling with the heaving wind of the question-marked opening of the ‘cello, borne on the orchestra’s wings, and hurt and wounded by its knowledge of me, for thus we cried, thus we laughed like the bells and the castanets, thus we rolled from black to white stairways, from bodies rolling to bodies erect and dreaming spirals of desire and spirals of liberation from desire, where is serenity? All our forces at work together, our fingers playing, our voices, our heads cracking with fullness of sound, crescendo of exaltation and confusion, the chaos, the fullness, no time to gather all the notes together, sitting in a hall inside the spider webt, the failures, the defeats. I writing a diary like a perpetual obsessional song, and he and I dancing with gold-tipped cigarettes, wrinkless clothes, vanity and worship, faith and doubt, losing our blood slowly from too much love, love a wound in us, too many delicacies, too many thoughts around it, too many vibrations, fatigue, nervousness, the orchestra of our desire splitting with its many faces, sad songs, god songs, sex songs, quest and hunger, idealization and cynicism, humor in the gaping split-open face of the trombone swollen with laughter. Walls falling under the pressure of will, walls of the absolute falling with each part of us breathing music into instruments, our arms waving, our voice, our love, our hatred, an orchestra of conflicts, a theme of disease, the song of pain, the song of strings that are never still, for after the orchestra is silent in our heads the echoes last, the concert is eternal, the solo is a delusion, the others wait behind one to accompany, to stifle, to silence, to drown, and with this singing of feet, head, tongue, sex, this dismembering to pass into the everywhere, trains moving, bodies separating, arms and legs melting together like the spires of cathedrals, drinking life, music spilling out from the eyes in place of tears, music spilling from the throat in place of words, music falling from his finger-tips in place of caresses, music exchanged between us instead of love, yearning on five lines, the five lines of our thoughts, our reveries, our emotions, our unknown self, our giant self, our shadow.