The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  It was my father who thrust me out into the black, soiled corners of the world. Everything I loved I turned my back on because it was also what he loved. Luxury with its serpentines of light, its masquerade costume of gaiety, everything that shined, glittered, threw off perfume, would have reminded me of him. To efface such a love took me years of walking greasy streets, of sleeping between soiled sheets, of traversing the unknown. I was happy because I had finally succeeded in losing him.

  But I almost lost myself too. In those dingy movies, amidst people who reeked of garlic and sweat, I was exiled from my own climate, my light, my temperature.

  Only now have I been able to return to the house of my childhood, to warm rooms, to music, to laughter, to pleasure, to softness and beauty…

  * * *

  My father and I were walking through the Bois. On his lips I could still see the traces of a biting kiss. “We met at Notre-Dame,” he was saying.

  “She began with the most vulgar cross-examination, reproaching me for not loving her. So I proceeded with a slow analysis of her, telling her she had fallen in love with me in the way women usually fall in love with an artist who is handsome and who plays with vehemence and elegance; telling her that it had been a literary and imaginary affair kindled by the reading of my books, that our affair had no substantial basis, what with meetings interrupted by intervals of two years. I told her that no love could survive such thin nourishment and that besides she was too pretty a woman to have remained two years without a lover, especially in view of the fact that she cordially detested her husband. She said she felt that my heart was not in it. I answered that I didn’t know whether or not my heart was in it when we had only twenty minutes together in a taxi without curtains in an over lit city.”

  “Did you talk to her in that ironic tone?” I asked.

  “It was even more cutting than that. I was annoyed that she had been able to give me only twenty minutes.”

  (He had forgotten that he had come to tell her he did not love her. What most struck him and annoyed him was that she had only been able to escape her husband’s surveillance for twenty minutes.)

  “She was so hurt,” he added, “that I didn’t even kiss her.”

  As we walked along I again looked carefully at his lip. It was slightly red, with a deeper, bluish tone in one corner, where no doubt the dainty tooth of the countess had bitten most fiercely. But I did not say anything. I was wondering whether this persiflage of his was not an effort to disguise a scene which my imagination was able to reproduce with more accuracy. Perhaps the little countess had arrived at the steps of Notre-Dame, looking very earnest, very youthful, and very exalted. Perhaps my father had been touched by her demonstration of love. (I remembered the day 1 had meant to tell Pierre that I did not even want to be touched by him, and how difficult I had found it to say so, how I ended by permitting him to kiss me). I did not believe that my father had been annoyed by the countess’s jealousy or worship, but that, on the contrary, it had lulled and caressed his vanity. I believed that he was trying to conceal his pleasure at being pursued by an air of indifference, so that his listener might take him for a casual and cynical Don Juan, the despair of women. On the other hand, it might be that the countess had forgotten him altogether and had simply paid him a visit—that his fancy liked to play with the idea of being harassed by the pursuit of women.

  He repeated a story which he had told me before—of how the countess had slashed her face in order to explain her tardiness to her husband. This story had always seemed highly improbable to me, because a woman in love is hardly likely to endanger her beauty. Any explanation would have been simpler than this far-fetched tale of an automobile accident.

  I was powerfully tempted to say: “When the countess was angry because you did not kiss her she kissed you rather markedly.” But I did not say it.

  Whatever his thoughts he refused to reveal them. Was he lying to me for the same reason I lied to him—because I had discovered his insane jealousy, and because I knew that when he was hurt he withdrew into himself? Here were my own tricks offered me, my own kind of lies. We were both so intent on creating this illusion of an exclusive, isolated twin love, so intent on picturing each other as standing alone in the world, with no ties whatsoever, that we were taken in by our own delusions.

  * * *

  When I arrived the next day he had not slept all night, thinking: I am going to lose you. And if I lose you I cannot live any more. You are everything to me. You are my only real love. My life was empty before you came. My life is a failure and a tragedy anyway.

  He looked deeply sad. His fingers were wandering over the keys, hesitantly. His eyes looked as if he had been walking through a desert.

  “You make me realize,” he said, “how empty my activity is, that in not being able to make you happy I miss the most vital reason for living. And here I am putting down notes on paper, playing the piano—it all seems futile to me if I am to lose you because of it.”

  I told him that I was thinking of exactly the same thing, that as I was coming along I had been thinking that what made me unhappy was that he had no need of me. “There is no place for me in your life,” I said.

  “You are everything to me,” he said, “you are everything I have. If you see me joyous and active it is because of you. If I did not have you I would go under. I am active only because I have you.”

  I was amazed to see him weep, to see the mask completely effaced.

  “Do you know,” he said, “I can’t play the comedy of love any more. I can’t say anything I don’t mean. You don’t know how you have altered my conception of love.”

  He was again the man I had known in the south. His tone rang true.

  I wanted to beg him to abandon the comedy of good manners. The elusive gaiety and mockery he presented to the world, his costumes, seemed to me more dangerous than my pretenses. The social masquerade was more harmful than the roles I played for the sake of adventure, or illusion. To lie for illusion, to lie to create a pleasure, did not taint the soul; but to lie to satisfy the vanity of a duchess, or to refuse the dinner of a marquis, to lie with flowers and visiting cards, to lie with the engraved writing-paper, with the complicity of butlers, interviewers, secretaries, this sort of lying was harmful.

  I asked myself why it was I wanted to change him, why was it I did not love him as he was. What was it that I thought I could save him from?

  Why could we not make room for each other? Every gesture I made annihilated one of his. Beneath our worship of each other we were waging an obscure war. He took it as an offense if I did not smoke his cigarettes, if I did not go to all his concerts, if I did not admire all his friends, if I did not read all the books he loved. He wanted the woman to be absorbed by him, to become selfless. But at the same time, the truly selfless woman he did not like. He demanded a match, duels, resistance.

  He could not let me be. If I preferred Dostoievski to Anatole France he felt that his whole edifice of ideas was being attacked, endangered. We were too strong for each other.

  Taking a gold-tipped cigarette from his case with infinite care he wiped away a tear and, with a great sigh, said: “It would be much better, anyway, if I died. I’m not of much use in the world.”

  I remembered how in moments of discouragement I had often made similar remarks. I had the feeling, when I made such remarks, of believing implicitly that I would soon be dead. I made theith the absolute conviction of being unequal to the battle which life constantly demanded. In my father’s tragic face I saw the same drooping mouth of my weak days. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I was tempted to laugh, not at my father but at myself, because for the first time I realized that this little talk about death was employed for effect.

  What a comedy, I thought to myself. Yet, realizing how serious I felt when enacting these scenes, I wondered why the similarity of our behaviour did not help us to understand each other.

  Realizing fully I did not love him, I felt a strange joy, as if I were
witnessing my father’s pain, as if he were standing there in the throes of his strong jealousy. And this suffering, which in reality I made no effort to inflict, which took place only in my head, gave me joy. This suffering which I had no intention of actually inflicting, which existed only in my own eyes, made me feel that I was balancing in myself all the trickeries of life, that I was restoring in my own soul a kind of symmetry to the events of life. It was the fulfilment of a spiritual symmetry. A sorrow here, a sorrow there. Abandon yesterday, abandon to-day. Betrayal to-day, betrayal to-morrow. Two equally poised columns. A deception here, a deception there, like twin columnades. A love for to-day, a love for to-morrow; a punishment to him, a punishment to the other—and one for myself… Mystical geometry. The arithmetic of the unconscious which impelled this balancing of events. The law of compensation and substitution. Betrayal against betrayal. I could visualize the morrow’s scenes—the countess so exalted and my father loving so much to be loved. Forgetting, as I bad forgotten, that it was himself she wanted; thinking only of the want, seduced by her want, as I was seduced every day by the emotions of others.

  * * *

  I felt like laughing whenever my father repeated that he was lucid, simple, logical… I knew that this order and precision were only apparent. His order was on the surface only. Beneath the level of his super-rational talk lay oceans of subtle, unformed, unrealized content. He had chosen to live on the surface, like a man who prefers the bus to the subway, but I who lived almost continually in a kind of bottom of the sea atmosphere. I knew that the sifting, filtering power of his language did not do away with the shadows. And I who had a peculiarly good nose for shadows, sensed immense layers of shadow which he refused to explore. My ambition was to descend deeper and deeper within him. His talk, on the other hand, rising in the air like a Parisian sparrow, seemed to say: I want to rise!

  “Come to-night,” he said, “there will be many people there.”

  “I am not made for the salon,” I pleaded. “I am like the guitar, for chamber music only. I give off my best music in the tête-a-tête.”

  He laughed. I knew that intimacy was a rare experience for him, that he covered it always with the din of marginal talk. He dreaded facing all at once the entire panorama of his life, and his fear made him voluble.

  If I made a hasty or mad remark, a little askew with emotion, he would say: “You are deraing!”

  If he found me disturbed, or confused, or unfocussed, he would say: “Allons mettre les choses au point!” An ideal of symmetry, and the birds still flying in the Bois with an invisible order and discipline.

  I got dizzy leaning over his silences. Not because I could not easily guess the multiple facts of his life, but because of the spaces, the vast distances, the widening and infinitely expanding regions impossible to cover, or explore. The more I looked into his clear eyes, as though eager to reveal everything, so open, so transparent, the more I realized all he had not given. And exactly the same thing had been said of me, and now I was writing a book in which I was trying to capture all of my own thoughts, but my father would continue to write music through which his thoughts could escape. As soon as the ground on which he stood was revealed my father abandoned it.

  His impression of me, oddly enough, was the same: “You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known. You’re all mystery,” he would say.

  I thought that in capturing our likenesses I had found the key to this mystery which was, fundamentally, a supreme desire to escape pain. Either into the planets, or into human affections, or into another love. One love as a refuge from another. The need of refuge immense in proportion to the sensitiveness.

  If I hurt him he would withdraw into his shell. But how I hurt him, or when or where, I could never discover. Was it simply the pain of jealousy which he was running away from? He had been the first to feel anxiety—perhaps because I was so much younger and hence more capable of unfaithfulness. It was the question of my faithfulness which had caused him so much concern.

  Instead of coming out of his shell to fight against the possible disintegration of our relationship, he pretended not to mind. Every silence, every comedy enacted was but a weak attempt to avoid pain. He had not yet discovered, as I had, that almost all suffering is imaginary, that by coming out into the world and going forward to meet pain one becomes aware of its feebleness. I had discovered that by meeting the person I feared to meet, by reading the letter I feared to receive, by giving life a chance to really strike at me, I had discovered almost every time that there was no intention of striking at me, that reality was far less terrifying, far less cruel, than my imaginings. This coming out into the open, offering my face, my body, to the shocks and blows and disillusions, was like going to war, because the actual fact of war is less terrible than the imagining of it.

  To imagine, I found, was worse than to realize, because the process of imagining took place in a void, it was untestable, it was like a fume rising out of a crater and choking one, or like a snake inside the body. There were no hands with which to strike or defend oneself in that inner chamber of ghostly tortures. But in life the realization summoned energies, forces, instruments, gave us courage, arms and legs to fight with, so that war almost became a joy. To fight a real sorrow, a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

  * * *

  He told me that he had stayed awake all night wondering how he would bring himself to tell a singer that she had no voice at all.

  “There was almost a drama here yesterday with Laura about that singer. I tried to dissuade her from falling in love with me by assuring her she was simply the victim of a mirage which surrounds every artist, that if she came close to me she would be disillusioned. So yesterday after the singing we talked for three quarters of an hour and when I told her I would not have an affair with her (at another period of my life I might have done it, for the game of it, but now I have other things to live for) she began to sob violently and all the rimmel came off. When she had used up her handkerchief I was forced to lend her mine. Then she dropped her lipstick and I picked it up and wiped it with another of my handkerchiefs. After the first fit of tears she began to do as all women do, to calmly make up again, wiping off the rouge that had been messed up by her tears. When she left I threw the handkerchiefs in with the laundry. The femme de chambre picked them up and left all the laundry just outside the door of my room while she was cleaning it. Laura passed by and immediately thought I had deceived her. I had to explain everything to her; I told her I had not talked about this woman because I did not want to seem to be boasting all the time about women pursuing me.”

  I was not eager to have him drop his philandering—I was much more eager for the truth and for the destruction of illusion. I was tired of the card-board of illusion. I knew perfectly well he was telling me a lie, because the rimmel comes off when one weeps, but not the lipstick, and besides all elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no such fatal effect upon the make-up. I knew this from my own experience. You wept just enough to fill the eyes with tears and no more. No overflow. The tears stayed inside the cups of the eyes, the rimmel was preserved, and yet the sadness was sufficiently expressive. After a moment one could repeat the process with the same dexterity which enables the garçon to fill the liqueur glass exactly to the brim. One tear too much could bring about a catastrophe, but these only came uncontrolled in the case of a real love affair.

  I was smiling to myself at his naïve lies, knowing that no change of lipstick could soil two handkerchiefs. The truth probably was that he had wiped his own mouth after kissing her.

  He was playing around now just as muc
h as before, but he hated to admit it to himself, and to me, because of the ideal image he carried in himself, the image of a man who could be so deeply disturbed and altered by the love of a long lost daughter that his career as a Don Juan had come to an abrupt end.

  This romantic gesture which he was unable to make attracted him so much that he had to pretend he was making it, just as I had often pretended to be taking a voyage by writing letters on the stationery of some famous ocean liner.

  “I said to Laura—do yo really think that if I wanted to deceive you I would do it in such an obvious and stupid way, right here in our own home where you might come in any moment?”