by Anais Nin
“That’s too bad. I thought we were above questions of good and evil. I am not saying you’re bad. I am not saying you’re a woman chaser. That doesn’t concern me. I am saying only that you’re false with me. I have too much intuition.”
“You have no intuition at all concerning me.”
“That might have affected me when I was a child. To-day I don’t mind what you think of me.”
“Go on,” he said, “now tell me I am selfish, tell me I have no talent, tell me I don’t know how to love, tell me all the things your mother used to tell me.”
“I have never thought any of these things.”
But suddenly I stopped. I knew my father was not seeing me any more, but again that judge, that past which made him so uneasy. I felt as if I were not myself any more, but my mother, my mother with red face and a body tired with giving and serving, a body rebelling at his selfishness and irresponsibility. I felt her anger and despair. For the first time my own image of him fell to the floor. I saw my mother’s image. I saw the child in him who was loved and did not know yet how to love. I saw the child courting caresses and incapable of an act of protection, of strength. I saw the child hiding under her courage, the same child hiding now behind Laura’s skirts. I was my mother telling him again that as a human being he was a failure… and perhaps she had told him too that as an artist he had not given enough to justify his limitations as a human being. All his life he had been playing with people, with love, playing at love, playing at being a pianist, playing at composing. Playing because to no one or nothing could he give his whole soul. He never brought himself to anything intact. There were two regions, two tracts of land, with a bridge in between, a slight, fragile bridge like the Japanese bridges in the miniature Japanese gardens. Whoever ventured to cross the bridge fell into the abyss. So it was with my mother. She had fallen through and been drowned. My mother thought he had a soul. She had fallen there in that space where his emotions reached their limit, where the land opened in two, where circles fell open and rings were unsoldered.
Was it my mother talking now? I was saying: “I am only asking you to be honest with yourself. I admit I lie, but you do not admit it. I am not asking you for anything, except to be real.”
“The violinist is in love with me, but I am not in love with her.”
“Oh God!” I shouted, “don’t get lost in the details. You’re always going off into details.”
“Now say I am superficial.”
“At this moment you are. I wanted you to face me full face. I wanted to make you come to life, by pain, if necessary. But you’re only suffering because your vanity has been wounded.”
“I am working myself to the bone for Laura’s sake.”
“That isn’t altogether true either. Laura doesn’t want you to work. Your work is an opiate. Why can’t you say anything real? I have a good ear for false tones.”
“Then go and have your ears cleaned!”
He was furious. He paced up and down in long strides, pale, his lips blue with anger.
“You only love in me,” I said, “what resembles you. What is different in me you don’t understand.”
“You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known.”
“You never try to know women—that’s why you never give them more than a night.”
It seemed to me that my father was not quarrelling with me but with his own past, that what was coming to light now was his constant feeling of guilt towards my mother. If he saw in me now a sort of avenger it was only because of his fear that I might say to him what my mother used to say. Against her words he had erected a huge defense: the approbation of the rest of the world.
But in himself he had never quite resolved the right and the wrong. He too was driven now by a compulsion to say things he never intended to say, to make me the symbol of the one who had come to punish. I had come to expose his life of lies and deceptions. Perhaps to prove to him his worthlessness.
And yet this was not the nature of my struggle with him at all. I could have stood in front of him and been silent—still he would have interpreted my words as a reproach. He was so far from accepting my real words. It was as if he feared that whoever came near to him had come to punish him, to expose him.
He was not yet convinced that he had acted rightly. He feared so much that I had come to say: “The four people you abandoned in order to live your own life, in order to save yourself, are here again. They have not died. They are not crippled. It is only faith in love they have lost. You lost it, too, when your betrothed betrayed you. We all lose it at some time or other. Your running away was not a crime. Why are you ashamed?”
Because I had come to ask him for the truth he thought I had come to accuse him, or to condemn. I could not make this clear. I was not aware of it at the moment. The scene between us was taking place between two ghosts, talking at each other, saying things that we could not make clear, because we were both choked by our own anger, blinded by our own emotion.
My father’s ghost was saying: “I cannot bear the slightest doubt, the slightest criticism. Immediately I feel judged, condemned.”
My own ghost was saying: “I cannot bear lies and deceptions. It makes the ground shift under my feet. I need truth and solidity.”
They could not understand each other. They were gesticulating in space. Gestures of anger, of despair. My father pacing up and down, angry because of my doubts of him, forgetting that these doubts were well founded, forgetting to ask himself whether I was right or not. And I hysterical with despair because my father would not understand, because the fragile, little Japanese bridge between the two portions of his soul would not even hold me for a moment, me walking with such light feet, trying to bring messages from one side to the other, trying to make connections between the real and the unreal…
I could not see my father clearly any more. I could see only the hard profile cutting the air like a st stone ship, a stone ship moving in a sea unknown to human beings, into regions made of rock, of granite, of mineral. No more water, or warmth, or flow between us. All communication paralyzed by falsity. Lost in the fog. Lost in a cold, white fog of falsity. Images distorted as if we were looking through a glass bowl. His mouth long and mocking, his eyes enormous but empty in their transparency. Enormous and bulbous, like the eyes of a fish. Not human. The human contours all lost. No longer the voice of a human being saying simple things, like—”I am hungry, I am sleepy, I am tired.” (I could not remember his ever saying these things.) But like voices saying: “You doubt me. You think I have no talent.” And an interruption. The wind blowing. The wind, or a river boat’s siren, or a storm. Then the voice again: “You think I am bad. I am working so hard. The women I have known I never cared to know. I never did them any harm (but I did not say you did). I sent them red roses when everything was finished. I never saw them cry. When they got sick I didn’t like it. I don’t like sickness. It isn’t aesthetic. You haven’t enough scientific spirit. Life is like a marvellous machine. You must run it with exactitude. As you run the body. When I stop making love my machine gets out of order. I get yellow and I don’t feel well. Be rational, my daughter.”
And I thinking while the radio of his quick, smooth speaking continued: “I stopped loving my father a long time ago.” What remained was the slavery to the pain, the habit of thinking that I loved him, the slavery to a pattern. When I saw him I thought I would be happy and exalted. I pretended. I worked myself up into ecstasies. When one is pretending the entire body revolts. There come great eruptions and revolts, great, dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural and real brings joy. He was pretending too—he had to win me as a trophy, as a victory. He had to win me away from my mother, had to win my approbation. Had to win me because he feared me. He feared the judgment of his children. And when he could not win me he suffered in his vanity. He fought in me his own faults, just as I hated in him my own faults.
Certain gestures made in childhood seem to have
eternal repercussions. Such was the gesture I had made to keep my father from leaving, grasping his coat and holding on to it so fiercely that I had to be torn away. This gesture of despair seemed to prolong itself throughout my life. I grew to love everything that fled, everything that vanished before me, and to believe that everything I loved would always be lost. I repeated this gesture blindly, hundreds and hundreds of times. It was so hard for me to believe that this father I was still trying to hold on to was no longer real or important, that the coat I was touching was not warm, that the body of him was not human, that my breathless, tragic desire had come to an end, that the man I was holding to-day was not the man I needed, and that my love had died.
Great forces had impelled me towards symmetry and balance, had impelled me to abandon my father in order to close the fatal circle of abandon. I had forced the hour glass of pain to turn. We had run after each other. We had tried to possess each other. We had been slaves of a pattern, and not of love.
Our love had long ago been replaced by the other loves which gave us life. All those portions of the self which had been tied up in the tangle of misery and frustration had been loosened imperceptibly by life, by creation. But the feelings we had begun with, twenty years back, he of guilt and I of love, had been like railrotTo-day I held the coat of a dead love—and it was hard to believe in the death of it.
This had been the nightmare—to pursue this search and poison all joys with the necessity of its fulfilment. To discover that such fulfilment was not necessary to life, but only to the mind. We were writing myths with our life blood, books in which destiny forbade us to forget our ideal loves, our promises to ourselves. What we call our destiny—the railroad tracks of our obsessions.
Now I was going to enter the Chinese theatre where I would be shown the trappings of the play as well as the play itself, where it was plain to see that the settings were made of cardboard, where there was no attempt made to conceal the wooden rafts, the electric moonlight. I would go behind the stage to see how it was done, in order to stop weeping, in order to make sure that no one was dead, that there was no tragedy.
If I should never be able to look behind my nightmare I would go mad with fear and despair. I wanted to awaken and see the cheerful white face of the clock pointing to one o’clock in the sunshine. I wanted to be at the Chinese theatre, so that I could bear this sight of my life, so that the screams, the tears, the murders would not be too real. I wanted to see the strings which ruled the scenes, the cardboard in the trees, the false storms and the false lightnings. I would sit at the Chinese theatre and be saved.
I could hear the voices of the world just as I heard the voices of the nurses and doctors, coming out of the ether, the world saying: “You are loved, you are wanted, you are not persecuted, he didn’t leave you, no one laughed at you”—but this voice came across great spaces and sounded very faint. The ether was too strong, I could not move or act differently. The upper part of my head was in a fog: I continued to shed real tears, to tremble with real fears, real suffering, as in a nightmare that repeats itself over and over again. My mind and my body were only half out of the ether of the past. I had not opened my eyes altogether; I was still writing in an ancient pattern.
My anger and despair, my hatred and love of my father grew immense, smudged the whole world, tainted the sky. My fury rose, the thermometer of my despair burst…
His face was the face of the world, the world as enemy, as the not-me. I wanted to strike at it, but I loved it. I could not kill it. I had seen it afraid. I could not destroy it. I had heard it weep. My anger fell. The windmills taunted me. My father had hurt me. The world had hurt me. But my love for the world, for my father, for deaf gods, was indestructible. My love for my father. My forgiveness, my forgiveness…
It was enough that a man without legs should pass me—a man, pushing himself along with his hands—for me to cease feeling my own suffering.
The world was a cripple. My father was a cripple.
In striking out for his own liberty, to save his own life, he had struck at me. And he had poisoned himself with remorse.
No need to hate. No need to punish.
I half sat up. I saw the clock marking one o’ clock in the sun. The light was gold. The doctors and nurses were gone. The birds were singing. The dog was barking. The last time I had come out of the ether it was to look at my dead child, a little girl with long eyelashes and slender hands. She was dead.
The little girl in me was dead too. The woman had been saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father.
THE VOICE
Djuna is lying down in a cell-shaped room of the tallest hotel in the City, in a building shooting upward like a railroad track set for the moon. A million rooms like cells, all exactly alike, and reaching in swift confused layers towards the moon. The rapid birds of elevators traverse the layers with lightning flashes of their red and white eyes signalling, and without a single quiver of their wings. Their eyes red and white lights signalling UP or DOWN, to the sun terraces, the observation towers, the solarium, or the storage rooms in the underground. All the voices of the world captured by the radio wires in this Babel tower, and even when the little buttons are marked off, this music of all the languages seeps through the walls of the hotel, a continuous flute chant of complaints. The people riding up and down the elevators are never permitted to crash through the last ceiling into pure space, and never allowed to pierce through the ground floor to enter the demonic regions below the crust of the earth. When they reach the highest tip they swoop down again back to the heavy repose in darkness. For Djuna the elevator does not stop at the sun terraces. When it clicks up there she feels a great anguish. She is certain it will pass beyond and through the ceiling, as she does with her feelings, explode in a fuse of ascension. When it stops dead on the ground floor she feels again a moment of anguish; it will not stop here, but bury itself below, where there is hysteria and darkness, wells, prisons, tombs.
Passing through the carpeted hallways, she can hear the singing, the weeping, the quarrels and confessions seeping out. Her footsteps are not heard in this convent of adulteries. The chambermaid is passing, carrying old newspapers, magazines, cigarette butts, breakfast left-overs. The boy is running with telegrams, special deliveries and telephone messages. He passes and with him a knife thrust of icy wind angrily banging the doors opened on intimate lives. Trays of food for the lovers and for the unloved. The house detective.
Merely passing down the halls noiselessly over the carpeted floor Djuna is aware of confessions seeping out. In all the eyes she sees only the secret desire to confess. The elevators disgorge people feverishly eager to confess. They ask for the room of the modern priest, where a man in an armchair is listening to the unfaithful lying on the divan, looking down at them, with his own face against the light. Looking down at them to keep fresh in him the wound of compassion. When the glance rests on human beings from this position, where he can see the frailty of the hair, how it parts, falls, where it thins, where he can see the brow like a sharp landslide, discover the delicacy of the skin as it alone reveals itself when watched obliquely, all men seem in need of protection. From where he looks all noses slant without audacity, point without impertinence, a tender root to the mouth merely. The eyes are covered by weary eyelids, their motion slower when watched from above, a curtain of hyate livensitive skin lowered with the gravity of sleep or death. Without the thrusting light-duel of the eyes, without the glaze and fervor of expression, courage, cruelty, humor, all men look crucified, passive, covering dolorous secrets. The mouth without its sensual openness, its breath, appears like a target mark, a vulnerable opening, a wound in the human being through which all his sorrows dribble in hysteric foam.
The man listening to confessions is strapped to his armchair and he sees them all struggling, defeated, wounded, crippled. They are laying themselves open before him, demanding to be condoned, absolved, forgiven, justified. They want this Voice coming from a dark armchair,
a substitute for god, for the confessor of old.
Djuna, lying down, remembers all this that she has lived, and that so many others are living after her. This talk in the dark with one who becomes a part of herself, who answers all the doubts in her. This man without identity, the Voice of all she did not know but which was in her to bring to light.
The Voice of the man who helped her to be born again.
He was taking her slowly back to the beginning, and this talking to a man she could not see was like a dialogue with a Djuna much greater than the every day Djuna, a Djuna, she felt at times as clearly as one feels the pushing of the wind on street corners. The larger Djuna pushing the smaller one to act and speak greatness, not smallness or doubt or fear. The Voice had unburied this larger Djuna, had confronted her with her desires, permitted them to fuse. Before this they lay separate with an abyss of yearning and hunger between them, one the smaller Djuna in a world she feared as tragic, now the larger Djuna in a world she no longer feared. The Voice had spoken to dispel the turmoil in her, the dissonances, and the divisions: I want to reconcile you to yourself. As if she had grown into two irreconcilable branches and by this lost her strength.
“Hans,” she was telling him, “is both very near to me and at the same time very far. I can’t understand it. I don’t want to lean on you any more, but I must. I feel at times an abyss under my feet. When he moves away I cannot be quiet and alone. He seems bound to me and then completely unbound. He leaps out of my orbit and then inside again. He changes. I look at him one morning and he seems dispersed, ghostly. One day there is warmth in him, the next none. There are times when he kisses me and I feel it is unreal. He is like sand, like water, like wax, like cotton. When he returns to me I can see the imprint of others on him, I hear their voices, their thoughts in him. What does this mean? Does love die in one day, like this? Or is it my faith in the love? Is he gone from me? I feel as if I were running down empty corridors, leading me nowhere. I feel dissolved in doubt. We went out together last night, we drank together. Some one was courting me. And Hans became like soup, and when he is like soup he fraternizes with everyone, even this man who was trying to take me away from him. He falls into states of effusive display, he loves everybody. His whole self opens in warmth and hospitality. There was no longer any Hans but this man for everyone to take hold of, to sit near to. He is promiscuous, I tell you. I can’t bear it, how near they come. They talk in his face, they breathe his breath. Anyone at all has this privilege. He is like a whore. Anyone at all can talk to him in the street, sit at his table, share his house and perhaps me. He gives away everything. He makes all the promises, asks questions, informs himself of everyone’s needs. He melts away in a kind of sensual generosity. When I see him this way, I feel him lost. I returned alone to the hotel. In the hotel room I looked out of my window at the electric signs, and I pictured him like a drunken sailor, embracing everyone in the street, falling into the avid arms of the whores, yielding, laughing with his mouth so open, unsteady on his legs, without memory of me, and the more the electric signs blinked, danced before me, the greater I imagined his debauch. Instead of a heart I felt a hole in my body. A black hole where my heart had been. If this is love, this falling into a mesh, this knotted, bound, knotted union to another body which makes all the gestures made by the other so tormentingly alive in me… what will I do? I cannot stand separate from him. If is as if I am inside of him, the same flesh, feeling all he does even when away from me, and it is me he gives away to other people. I kept looking at the electric signs which were lighting the red dance halls where he was, lost to me. I never thought of the next day, never thought of a return, only of his body torn from me, and this black hole left in its place, and each moment of his betrayal was a life-time. Every movement of this night was slowed up, the electric lights moved more slowly, to make the night last longer. What interminable hours—he had been out for many years, laughing, enjoying the dance hall women. Will I die like this every night? This night without faith was longer than all the rest of my life. I can’t free myself of this image. I am more lonely than before, when I loved no one. This jealousy really stops the life in me, strangles me. What am I going to do? I waited all night for the sound of his door opening. He came back and laid his head right where the hole had been. He was not drunk. I was sobbing. He was amazed: ‘What have I done? I would not hurt you, not you. I would not want to hurt you, but what have I done? How can you suffer when nothing has happened? You must have faith.’ That’s what he said. He was right. There is something wrong with me. I want to live only with the intimate self of the other. I only care about the intimate self. I hate to see people in the world, their masks, their falsities, their surrender to the world, their resemblance to others, their promiscuity. I only care about the secret self. I suppose I only want the dream and the isolation.
