The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  The key sitting ironically, half a question mark, like our knowledge of destiny. But I sat on five lines, cursing the world for the shocks, loving the world because it has jaws, weeping at the absolute unreachable, the fifth line and the fifth voice saying always: have faith, even curses make music. Five lines running together with simultaneous song.

  The poverty, the broken hairbrush, the Alice blue gown, twilight of sensations, musique ancienne, objects floating. One line saying all the time I believe in god, in a god, in a father who will lean over and understand all things; I need absolution, I believe in others’ purity and I find myself never pure enough; I need absolution. Another line on which I was making colored dresses, colorful houses, and dancing. On the top line I danced with a feather on my hat. Underneath ran the line of disease, doubt, life a danger, life with sharp edges, life singing mockery with an evil mouth, or life slobbering, or mouths spitting insults. Everything lived out simultaneously, the love, the impulse, the doubt of the love, the knowledge of the love’s death, the love of life, the doubt, the ecstasy, the knowledge and awareness of its death germ, everything like an orchestra. Can we live in rhythm, my father? Can we feel in rhythm, my father? Can we think in rhythm, my father? Rhythm—Rhythm—Rhythm.

  * * *

  At midnight I walked away from his room, down the very long corridor, under the arches, with the lamps watching, throwing my shadow on the carpets, passing mute doors in the empty hotel, the train of my silk dress caressing the floor, the mistral hooting.

  As I opened the door of my room the window closed violently—there was the sound of broken glass. Doors, silent closed doors of empty rooms, arches like those of a convent, like opera settings, and the mistral blowing…

  The white mosquito netting over my bed hung like an ancient bridal canopy…

  The mystical bride of my father…

  * * *

  It was I who told the first lie, with deep sadness, because I did not have the courage to say to my father: “Our love should be great enough to be above jealousy. Spare me those lies which we tell the weaker ones.”

  Something in his eyes, a quicker beat of the eyelid, a wavering of the blue surface, the small quiver by which I had learned to detect jealousy in a face, prevented me from saying this. Truth was impossible.

  At the same time there were moments when I experienced dark and strange pleasures at the thought of deceiving him. I knew how deceptive he was. I felt deep down that he was incapable of truth, that sooner or later he would lie to me, fail me. And I wanted to deceive him first, in a deeper way. It gave me joy to be so far ahead of my father who was almost a professional deceiver.

  When I saw my father vanishing at the station a great misery and coldness overcame me. I sat inert, remembering each word he had said, each sensation.

  It seemed to me that I had not loved him enough, that he had come upon me like a great mystery, that again there was a confusion in me between god and father. His severity, his luminousness, his music, seemed again to me not human elements. I had pretended to love him humanly.

  Sitting in the train, shaken by the motion, the feeling of the ever-growing distance between us, suffocating with a cold mood, I recognized the signs of an inhuman love. By certain signs I recognized all my pretences. Every time I had pretended to feel more than I felt I experienced this sickness of heart, this cramp and tenseness of my body. By this sign I recognized my insincerities. At the core nothing ever was false. My feelings never deceived me. It was only my imagination which deceived me. My imagination could give a color, a smell, a beauty to things, even a warmth which my body knew very well to be unreal. I could pursue the wanderings of my mind and my imagination but I could never deceive my mouth, my skin, my body, my desire. These could never act. In my head there could be a great deal of acting and many strange things could happen in there, but my mouth, my skin, my desire were sincere and they revolted, they prevented me from getting lost down the deep corridors of my inventions. Through them I knew. They were my eyes, my ears, they were my truth. Through them I recognized love.

  To-day I recognized an inhuman love. I knew I was leaving cliffs, abysses, precipices, clouds, twilights, all the regions to which my love of my father would take me, away from earth and away from my own body…

  * * *

  Lying back on the chaise longue with cotton over my eyes, wrapped in coral blankets, my feet on a pillow. Lying back with a sweet feeling like that of convalescence, lying in a room in darkness but knowing one is no longer ill.

  All weight and anguish lifted from the body and life like cotton over the eyelids.

  In this state of somnolescence I recognized a mood in which I lived often, perhaps almost continually, in spite of light and sound, in spite of the streets I walked, the things I did. A mood between sleep and dream, where I caught the corner of two streets—the street of dreams and the street of living—in the palm of my hand and looked at them simultaneously, as one looks at the lines of one’s destiny.

  There would come cotton over my eyes and long unbroken reveries, sharp, intense and continuous, like those I experienced coming out of the ether when I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, when I began to hear voices. I began to see very clearly that what destroyed me in this silent drama with my father was that I was always trying to tell something that never happened, or rather that everything that happened, the many incidents, the love of twenty years, the trip down south, all this produced a state like slumber and ether out of which I could only awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one’s self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never addressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him, because in reality there was no connection between us, there was no human being to connect with. No one had ever merged into my father, yet we had thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness between us: but the likeness itself seemed to create greater separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no understanding, likeness and no nearness.

  Now that the world was standing on its head and the figure of my father had become immense, like the figure of a myth, now that from thinking too much about him I had lost the sound of his voice, I wanted to open my eyes again and make sure that all this had not killed the light, the steadiness of the earth, the bloom of the flowers, and the warmth of all loves but my love for him. So I opened my eyes and the curtain wavered before me.

  The picture of my father’s foot. One day down south, while we were driving, we stopped by the road and he took off his shoe which was causing him pain. As he pulled off his sock I saw the foot of a woman. It was delicate and perfectly made, sensitive and small. I felt as if he had stolen it from me: it was my foot he was looking at, my foot he was holding in his hand. I had the feeling that I knew this foot completely. It was my foot—the very same size and the very same color, the same blue veins showing and the same air of never having walked at all.

  To this foot I could have said: “I know you.” I recognized the weight of it, its speed, its lightness. “I know you, but if you are my foot I do not love you. I do not love my own foot.”

  A confusion of feet. I am not alone in the world. I have a double. He sits on the running board of the car and when he sits there I do not know where I am. I am standing there pitying his foot, and hating it, too, because of the confusion. If it were some one else’s foot my love could flow out freely, all around, but here my love stands still inside of me, still with a kifright.

  There is no distance for my love to traverse; it chokes inside of me, like the coils of self-love, and I cannot say I love you, or feel any love for this sore foot because that love leaps back into me like a perpetually coiled snake, and I am trying to leap out. I want to leap out freely, from the window of my own body, into love. I want to flow out, and here my love lies coiled inside and choking me, because the other, my father, is my doub
le, my shadow, and I don’t know which one is real. One of us must really die so that the other may find the boundaries of himself. To leap out freely and safely beyond the self love must flow out and beyond the wall of confused identities. Now I am all confused in my boundaries. I don’t know where my father begins, where I begin, where it is he ends, what I, the difference between us…

  The difference is this, I begin to see, that he wears gloves for gardening and so do I, but he is afraid of poverty and I am not. Can I prove that? Must I prove that? Why? I hate drabness, but I have no fear of poverty. I have loved only poor men. I want to prove this. To whom? Why? For myself. I must know wherein I am not like him. I must disentangle our two selves.

  I walked out into the sun. The sun slipped between my legs. I sat at a café. A man sent me a note by the garçon. I refused to read it. I would liked to have seen the man. Perhaps I would have liked him. It is possible some day I might like a very ordinary man, sitting at a café. It hasn’t happened yet. Everything must be immense and deep and extremely complicated. I like complicated games and complicated loves. I play at them seriously. The humor in them is at first invisible, because pity forbids irony. I can only laugh years later, when there is no one around who can be hurt by my laughter.

  Walking into the heart of a summer day, as into a ripe fruit. Looking down at my lacquered toe nails, at the white dust on my sandals. Smelling the odor ofbread in the bakery where I stopped for a chocolate-filled roll. The femme deménage passes very close to me. Her face is burned, scarred, the color of iron. The traces of her features are lost, as on a leprous face. The whites of her eyes bloodshot, her pupils dilated and misty. In her flesh I saw the meat of an animal, the fat, the sinews, the blackening blood, the meat we are when fire eats into us. So easily burned and scarred. So easily turned into cinders.

  My father had said once that I was ugly. He said it because I was born full of bloom, dimpled, roseate, overflowing with health and joy. But at the age of two I had almost died of fever. I lost the bloom, the curls, the glow, all at once. I reappeared before him very pale and thin, and the aesthete in him said coolly: “How ugly you are.” This phrase I have never been able to forget. It has taken me a life time to disprove it to myself. A life time to efface it. It took the love of others, the worship ofpainters to save me from its effect. In one instant my faith in myself was killed. From that moment on, no matter what the mirror revealed, I remained unconvinced. All I could see was this phrase of my father’s, the dissatisfied look in his blue eyes. Never could I detect in him the slightest expression of love. His paternal role was summed up in the one word: criticism. Never a word of faith, of encouragement, of enthusiasm. Never an élan of joy, of content, of approval. Always the sad, exacting blue eyes dissatisfied and condemnatory.

  From that moment on it was not the mirror which served me but others. It was the reflection of myself in desirous eyes which I relied on. What I saw in the mirror until the age of sixteen was not myself but my father’s phrase. Even to-day I do not look into the mirror… I look into men’s eyes, into the mirror of men’s eyes…

  Out of this came my love of ugliness, my effort to see beyond ugliness, always treating the flesh as a mask, as something which never possessed the same shape, color and features as thought. Out of this came my love of men’s creations. All that a man said or thought was the face, the body; all that a man invented was his walk, his flavor, his coloring; all that a man wrote, painted, sang was his skin, his hair, his eyes. People were made of crystal for me. I could see right through their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. My eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, their stuttering. I overlooked the big ears, the frame too small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk… I forgave… I became clairvoyant. I saw the aura of persons, the light they threw off. A new sense which had awakened in me uncovered the smell of their soul, the shadow cast by their sorrows, the glow of their desires. Beyond the words and the appearances I caught all that was left unsaid—the electric sparks of their courage, the expanse of their reveries, the lunar aspects of their moods, the animal breath of their yearning. I never saw the fragmented individual, never saw the grotesque quality or aspect, but always the complete self, the mask and the reality, the fulfilment and the intention, the core and the future. I saw always the actual and the potential man, the seed, the reverie, the intention as one…

  I loved beyond flesh… because flesh was so often a caricature, a disguise, a mockery. No man’s thoughts could ever be so ugly as the charred face of the femme de ménage. It was as if I saw the original innocence. Everywhere I saw innocence. Everywhere I saw a beauty no aesthete ever captured. It was only the body which decomposed, deteriorated, betrayed. Only the body ever emitted a bad smell…

  Now with my love of my father this concern with the truth lying beneath the mask, the depths lying beneath the surface and the appearance, became a obsession and a disease because in him the mask was more complete than in anyone I knew; the chasm between his appearance, his words, his gestures, and his true self was deeper.

  Through this mask of coldness which had terrified my childhood I was better able, as a woman, to detect the malady of his soul. I remembered a meeting at the reception room of the Salle Pleyel during the years I had not wanted to see him. It was after a symphonic concert; I had come into the reception room to see the orchestra leader who was stifling under the pressure of visitors. As I was drawing away from the crowd I caught sight of my father standing apart. I saw his waxen face and I knew that he was ill. His soul was sick. He was very sick deep down. His skin was that of a man who was dying inside; his eyes could no longer see the warm, the real, the near. He seemed to have come from very far only to be leaving again immediately.

  He was pretending to be there. His body was there, but his soul was absent: it had escaped by a hundred fissures, it was in flight, towards the past, or towards to-morrow, everywhere or anywhere which was not here, now. He was very sick. It would be impossible to find him, to unite with him.

  We looked at each other across miles and miles of separation. Our eyes did not meet. His thoughts enwrapped him in glass. This glass shut out the warmth of life, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of life, shut out the breath of things that came too near, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of their voices, the smell of their words, of their clothes, the warmth of their bodies. It shut out all the exhalations of life, the temperature. He had built a glass house around himself, a glass invented to shut out the evil rays of the sun. He wanted life to filter through, to come to him distilled, not crude, juicy, perspiring, but sifted, arranged, digested. The glass wall of his thoughts was a prism which eliminated the bad, the fetid; and with this artificial elimination of the bad life itself was affected, altered. With the bad was lost the warmth, the nearness. It was a glass which human breath could not stain. It was created out of a desire not to be touched by life in the flesh, a desire to keep his body perpetually out of the reach of pain. And it had grown too thick. He did not hear me coming near him, he could not feel the hot breath of human love…

  There was no change in his love, but the mask was back again as soon as he returned to Paris. The whole pattern of his superficial life began again, his artificial ideal law-making began again. He said: “We must work, we must give ourselves wholly to work.” He made an austere inhuman pattern. Slaving. The opium of work. I did not want to write all day. I wanted my life, my loves, my relationships, people, warmth. He made no room for life. He had to live by a pattern. This period in Paris, he determined, was to be a parenthesis between escapades to the south. Three months of severe work, of austerity, of no communication. He could never live except absolutely on one side of his nature. In the south it was all openness, tenderness, sensibility, confession, intimacy. Now it was work, celebrity, the public, his “business.” He could not keep both going as I did. Or slide easily from one into the other.

  To-day it was time to work, to cover up a s
ecret sorrow of some kind, a sorrow which was in reality a kind of sullenness towards the limitations, the imperfections, the flaws in life.

  He had stopped talking as we talked down south. He was conversing. It was the beginning of his salon life. There were always people around with whom he kept up a tone of lightness and humor. In between the salon talk he worked intensely as a teacher. There was always singing or violin playing in the salon.

  He made this absolute, inflexible plan without regard for what I expected, without regard for life. Life would flower again in the south. Meanwhile it was to be ignored. I was to write, write, write. I was to be alone, and in the evenings appear in his salon and talk with the tip of my tongue about the surface of my life, about everything that was far from my thoughts. There was to be no more intimacy and no more exploration of the bottoms of the sea. Whatever was in my mind must not be shown, shared, mentioned. In that salon, with its stained-glass windows, its highly polished floor, its dark couches rooted into the Arabian rugs, its soft lights and precious books, its silver cigarette boxes and piano shining like jet, the self, chaos, feelings, were as out of place as a horse and carriage, as a drunken sailor or a cow.

  This was the winter of artifice. One could not be oneself and at the same time a fashionable musician bowing on the stage with stard shirt and tabac blond on one’s handkerchief. So he discarded his real self altogether and left me stranded in the company of an ultra-civilized man leading a court life of ceremonies.

  At least he would have left me stranded if I had kept my promise to break with all my friends.

  In reality I did not suffer because of the fact that my father was working and bowing and conversing; the truth is I began to suffer an imaginary sorrow, a remembered sorrow. I began to suffer what I imagined I might have suffered if I had counted entirely on my father for a human relationship. While I reproached him inwardly for having no gift for human relationship, he reproached me aloud for eluding him because he sensed I was not living up to our pact of isolation.