by Anais Nin
He awakened, and she did not. He passed into other realms. The longer his stay in the enfolding whirls the greater his leap into space again. He awakened, talking of mysticism. He awakened as Laotse, sitting with eyes closed with laughter, laughter sitting on the edge of his high cheeks, laughter in the corners of the mouth, the laughter of great knowingness, but also the laughter of great separateness. The man without wound, sitting on the humorous bull, contemplating the sacrifice of sperm and honey with the great simplicity of a ceremony, a ritual.
She did not awaken. She lay in the darkness of the blood marshes, feeling the tearing between day and night. An ocean bearing nothing on its heavy waves: waves hollowed out in emptiness, waiting for his return. A night hung like a damask ciborium, waiting fo pressure, for a rent in the indigo silk, for an explosion. A plant weighed down by the sap. No laughter runs through plants.
* * *
Lilith was waiting for the steamer bringing her brother from India. She watched the people stepping off the gangplank. She feared she would not recognize him. When he had left he was a boy. A boy in a plaster cast of hardness, of dissimulation. Intent on defending himself against all invasion by others, against feeling, against softness, against himself. A boy swinging between violent, brutal acts, and fits of weeping like a woman. Would she recognize the compressed mouth, the ice blue eyes, the pose of nonchalance, the briefness of speech, the tension and the sudden breaks in the tension? A boy in a plaster cast of hardness. Untouchable. At times she suspected that he had refused to recognize her presence in him. Perhaps it was he walking there, so rigid in his clothes. No. So many people, so many valises, trunks, confusions, explosions of joy. And then suddenly there was no one else passing down the gangplank.
Lilith stopped one of the stewards: “Do you know Eric Norman? Can you tell me if he’s sick? I can’t find him anywhere.”
The steward promised to go and see. Lilith imagines Eric lying in his bunk, sick. She waits, already suffering as she suffered when he was small, in trouble. The steward returns: “I found him. He’s not sick, but his papers are not quite in order, so he can’t step off the boat until to-morrow morning. He wants you to come on board.”
The blue eyes watching behind eye glasses. They face each other without words. There is a break in their pause as if the bodies would break at the shock of the meeting. Then he smiles brusquely, and the talk breaks through the barrier of fifteen years.
“You look swell,” he says. “Are you as bossy as you were? Remember how you wanted to do the fighting for me? You wouldn’t let me fight my own battles with the boys. You came with an umbrella and beat them. They laughed at me for having a sister fighting for me. I had to go so far away to get away from you. You look swell! Who do you fight for now? Who do you help cross the street? Who do you stop the traffic for now, with insults at the drivers? You look swell, much sweller than before. But you can’t boss me now.”
All the passengers had left the boat but a few of the crew and the purser who was adding numbers and names on long green sheets of paper, behind barred windows. A few of the crew were cleaning the cabins and decks. They had drawn the curtains, covered the chairs and pianos and couches. They had waxed the floors, turned over the mattresses, folded up the blankets, put out the lights. The enormous parlors and lounge rooms looked ghostly. So many chairs in rows, with stiffened arms open on emptiness. The ship anchored in earth, it seemed, so steady it was. Room after room without dust, lights, glitter. Funereal. The mirrors reflecting nothing but a brother and sister walking through the enormous ship, through a labyrinth of linoleum hall-ways, passing doors open on a million empty cabins. The bunks like skeletons, showing the springs and the boxlike edges. Silence… A sudden shadow lurking of a sailor polishing brass knobs. Brother and sister walking through the city of abins. No smell in the kitchen, no rolling and swaying or cracking of wood. A carcass at rest. No music in the salons, no glitter of silverware chiming in the dining room. Repose of furniture, windows, lights. A funereal watch of covered chairs. A dead backstage. No vestige of the people who passed. Clean.
Brother and sister stranded. Not allowed to land. Walking on a frontier not marked on the marine or earthly charts. Frontiers of memory. The anchor dug deep into the sandy marshes of memory. Here in the skeleton of the marine monster, with its empty windows unblinking, its empty decks, empty salons, deserted by musicians and sailors, beyond the earth and beyond the sea, they sit before a banquet of memories, with the anchor lying deeply coiled in the octopus legs of memories. The ship was the world of their childhood, filled with indestructible games. He had carried it all to India, he had dyed it in foreign colors, his childhood, he had bathed it in exotic music, rinsed it in poisonous rivers, injected it with Oriental maladies, burned it with unnameable fevers, had choked it in strange incenses, perfumed it with yellow flesh, buried it in Mahometan cemeteries, throttled it in new loves. It had turned to ivory, to a mineral in his breast. She had covered it with hatred, he had lost it in opium deliriums, but there it was in their breast, turned to ore, to stalamite. The more they had pressed down on it the stronger the compression, the more it had gained in rarity, in fixity. In indestructibleness. A diamond lodged in the breast.
Brother and sister walking through the skeleton of the monstrous ship which took him away and brought him back with the same diamond lodged in the breast. Bathing in the acid of the past, they bared the bones unbleached and this diamond.
The first voyage with chairs, tables, rags, fancies, was the most prolonged in all their existence. The one they had boarded together at birth had never moved; they were locked in it forever, without passengers and without landing permits. All the other cabins empty, and they cursed forever to sail inside the static sea of their fantasies. Riveted to the shore of the past, forbidden to land, with the anchor set deep in rust.
* * *
Another day in the confessional. Lilith lying down and talking. Lilith watching the Voice with something like hostility, expecting him to say something dogmatic, some banality, some unsubtle generality. She wanted him to say it, because if he did he would be another man she could not lean on, and she would have to go on conquering herself and her own life alone. She was proud of her independence. She was waiting for the Voice to say something unsubtle that she could laugh at.
They were talking about Mischa. He told her that she was an obsession in Mischa’s life. That he saw her as the mother, the sister, the most unattainable of all women, and for this he wanted to conquer her, to free his manhood. Then she confessed how at first she had loved Mischa, but when she had felt his smallness, his way of hiding within woman, she had felt protection but no desire. She had wanted to give him an illusion but feared not to be able to sustain it to the very end. She begged the Voice not to tell him the truth, which would wound him, but to tell Mischa she was a little mad. This would explain the change in her, put all the blame on herself, and Mischa. a might enjoy discovering there were other abnormal people in the world. The Voice agreed with her. He asked her if she did not mind other people thinking she was not normal. She hesitated and then:
“No, I don’t mind. I like them to think me puzzling, mystifying and unpredictable. I feel then that I keep my real self a mystery.”
The Voice laughed a little at this.
“I see you don’t need any help at all, you are quite content, quite strong, quite able to manage your own life.”
At these words Lilith began to tremble, and then she felt her attitude crumble, the façade crumbling all around her. She became intensely aware of her weakness, her need of another. She said nothing but the Voice understood and continued:
“You have acted beautifully towards Mischa. As few women will act. In general women consider men as enemies, and they are glad when they humiliate or demolish them.”
“I could not hurt Mischa. Whenever I see him I remember the story he told me about his first sensual curiosity. His mother had discovered him weighing his sex in his hand, reflectively examini
ng it, had beaten him with a whip and left him locked up in the room. He wept hysterically, then quieted down and, dipping a finger in the tears, he had written on the wall: evil boy. He waited for the words to vanish, but they seemed to remain like stains on the wall, and he grew hysterically afraid the words would never dry and that the whole city would know about his doings.”
Lilith liked the way the Voice’s questions crackled at her from all directions. He was behind her and she was not ashamed to speak of anything. At the same time she felt that she could not deceive him even by a shade of falsity, for he was so attentive to every hesitation, every inflection of the voice, every gesture she made, and especially the silences. Every silence put him on a new scent. He was really the hunter of secret thoughts. They would reach a kind of blank wall. She would repeat: “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t think so.” But the truth was apparent by what she felt at his words. Whenever something had hurt her, and he touched upon it, she felt a churning of feelings, a warning: Here is the place. He uncovered her wars against herself.
“I see myself always too small or too large. I awake one day feeling small, and another day bursting with a power which makes me believe I can rule the whole world.”
When he talked it was like a stirring of quicksands. She felt the whole sandy bottom of her life, a complete insecurity, a rootlessness. He said perhaps she was a woman who was not the enemy of man, but she remembered days of great hatred for man. He talked about the yielding and fear. Fear of being hurt, he said. Why? She did not know. How could man hurt her? He had hurt her already.
“The first feeling I had was that my father was not tied to anything. He was not tied to my mother, he was not tied to us, he was not tied to the women he made love to. He was tied to nothing. He was always leaving, forgetting, throwing out, betraying. “
font size=”2”When she made this very simple statement Lilith suddenly felt the most intense anguish. She turned her head to look at the Voice and said: “I can’t go on.”
“You must go on.”
“The first thing I saw was a father escaping from the mother. Running away from us, from the house. From everything. I saw my mother left maimed, like some one who had lost an arm. I saw our house sold and disrupted. It was like a deluge. Everything was carried away. The strange, mysterious atmosphere we lived in as children, our games which were like an enchantment from which we never freed ourselves: nothing was ever the same. I saw the furniture out in the garden, being sold at auction. I saw my father leaving and sending postcards from all over the world. The world was immense, it seemed to me, and he was in all of it except the corner where he left us. He not only took himself away, but our faith in the marvellous too. The world of our childhood closed with his departure.”
“All these departures, these upheavals, gave you a hatred and fear of change. You, in your anger and pain, stood in the center and refused to move, decided to make a fixed core within you. You accepted outer change, but fought against it by an inner static groove. You would not move. Everything else around you could move, change, but you, because of your mistrust of pain and loss refused to move. You would be the island, the fixed center. For fear of a second loss, a second abandon, a second wound. That is why you never again gave yourself, that is why you are cold. You are afraid of giving yourself wholly.”
Lilith felt a deep anguish as he talked. She could not tell if the Voice was right or wrong, but she could feel with his words the invasion of a most dolorous secret. Exactly as if this set, tense, granite core of herself were being touched and found not to be granite. Found to have nerves, sensibilities, and memories. She remembered at this moment that when she heard that stones had a heart beat, a kind of faint pulse which had never before been registered, she had cried out angrily: “How terrible, everything in the world feels. Exactly what I feared. That is why I am always so tender with everything. To think that even a stone can feel!”
And now the Voice was entering into this secret pain, exposing the vulnerability and the fear in her, and the anguish was immense.
Lilith said:
“Now I hate you. You took away the little protection I had, the little cover I kept over things. I feel humiliated to have exposed myself. I who so rarely confess!”
“And why don’t you confess?”
“It is always I who receive the confidences. People confess their doubts and fears to me. I am afraid of showing my weakness. Why? I think I will be less loved.”
“Do you love those who expose their weakness?”
“Yes, even more. I feel them very near to me. I feel them human and I love them.”
“Then don’t you think they might es. Shehe same towards you?”
“I feel I have been given another role, a non-human one. I don’t know why.”
“Because the father failed you… You cannot depend on others. You prefer to be depended on.”
Lilith went out into the street. She felt the day much softer on her skin. The snow was melting. It seemed to her that she let the day get nearer to her, permitted it to touch her. That before she looked at the day like a stranger. Now she felt the day all over her body, the temperature of it, the sensual touch of it. She remembered Djuna laughing and saying: “the kind of day you feel between the legs.”
Djuna felt everything with her skin, her finger tips, her hair, the soles of her feet. She was like a plant. Every time Lilith saw Djuna she felt this strange, continuous vibration life of leaves, plants and water. There was a mobility, a constant motion and vibration, a continuous change and variety. Djuna ate and drank people; they passed into her.
She, Lilith, had never imagined this until to-day. She was breathing with the day, moving with the wind, in accord with it, with the sky, undulating like water, flowing and stirring to the life about her, opening like the night. What had happened? Only the Voice saying to her, “Don’t you love those who confess to you? Don’t you love their blindness, their blunders, their furies, their hatreds? When they talk to you about their crimes, don’t you dissolve yourself with a kind of human passion, with a desire to carry them, share everything that happens to them?” Yes, yes, cried the being of Lilith. Then YOU… Why do you… But then if I, Lilith, if I leaned, the others would find nothing there to rest on. If I become human, then where will the others go? They would go to the Voice, more of them. If I show anything but this strength, what will happen to them? He asks me what will happen to me? I don’t think I care much what happens to me. I have a feeling that I am responsible for them. How restless he got, the Voice, when I asked him if he thought certain people had a destiny which forbade them to be human. I must have touched something which affected him. I will make him talk. I will question him.
But the Voice did not answer her questions. The Voice pried and prodded into her marriage.
The man Lilith had married was very simple. He had not found the way to woo her, to break down her resistance. Every night it had been the same flight, the same locked door against him, a hatred of his desire. She showed all her claws, her wild hair, her hatred of sex. Finally, one day they discussed it, coolly. She asked him: “What is it like? Tell me.”
He did not know what to say, so he made a drawing. The drawing revolted her and frightened her all the more. She would not even let him kiss her after the drawing. Finally he persuaded her to have it done by a doctor. She preferred the idea of a knife. It was a knife which first cut into her being.
“I tried to feel as a woman afterwards. It was a terrible thing, it was as if the knife had made me close forever rather than open, as if it had made me cold forever. There were times when I felt strong excitement in me, warmth, desire. I yielded to anyone who wanted me, all but my husband. I kept myself drunk so I would not see too much. Adventures, but no feeling. No deep response. They all remained strangers to me. I never wanted to see them again. You don’t know how they tried to stir me, what long sieges, what furious attacks. One night I went to the Burlesque. I looked at the chairs and they all seem
ed stained with sperm. And suddenly I thought: I’m in the wrong world, this is all gymnastics. Do you believe I will ever feel anything? Do you think they killed the feeling in me that time? I can’t bear this any more. I have a constant feeling that I’m living on the edge of something about to happen, and that I can never reach. My nerves are set for a climax of some kind. I feel tense and expectant. It is so agonizing that I begin to wish for a catastrophe which would relieve the expectancy. I wish for all the calamities, all the tragedies to happen at once. I want scenes, quarrels, tears, I want to be devoured, I want to strike at people. I feel restless. I can’t stay very long anywhere. I can’t sit and I can’t sleep. I always have this feeling that I must seek a relief from this waiting, a shattering moment before I can rest, sleep. As if death were waiting, death were pursuing me, watching me. The whole world arouses me. I feel love for people in the streets, music stirs me at times like a caress; I desire violently, and I wait. I feel the storm coming, I feel the anguish, but everything continues the same, sluggish, without break, without lightning. Something in me wants to break, to explode. Instead, I have to take pleasure in breaking the lives of others. I am constantly seducing others, enchanting them, capturing them, while wishing they could do it to me. I want so much to be captured. Every one obeys me but they don’t find the key to me. I like to feel their hearts beating faster, I like to see their eyes waver, their lips tremble, to feel the emotion in them. It is like food. I am fascinated by their feeling. I am like a huntress who does not want to kill, but I want to feel the wound. What do I expect? To be caught in the desire of the other and bathe in it. To burn. But I am always disappointed. No one can take possession of me. It is as if they were all blind, circling around me. I warm myself and then become aware that the current is not passing through me. But they never say the magic word, never make the magic caress that will break this coldness in me. It is as if I were an idol of some kind. I always dream of this: I see myself standing very rigid, and I am covered with jewelry and luxuriant robes. I wear a crown. Don’t you think I will ever turn into a woman? I want to be shattered into bits. Yet at the same time I know I do everything to create my own inaccessibility. I wear strange clothes which estrange people. And then I hate them for failing to reach me. I create the legend, I know. It is not my fault. When I awake I do not look at the weather. I look at the mood I am in. And then I dress for it, and I live it out. It is hard to explain. I have the feeling that I do come from very far. While I sleep I know many things have happened. I do not remember them all. It is true I don’t wake up near everything. That is why sometimes when I come into a room I do look at the people as if they were not of my own race, quite. It is true I feel they look at me and see this distant personage. I sit down next to them and I choose the most remote subject, the most remote from daily life. Immediately they obey this direction, they leap out of their present life into my realm. I feel compelled to do this, while at the same time I want warmth and simplicity. I feel alone. Sometimes they are taken with a furious madness to do violence to me, to clutch at me. But it’s like a desire for a tabooed object, for a secret temple, for some forbidden person. For what is untouchable. And I, the woman inside of all this, I feel this. I feel I have created this personage and that I sit outside of her, lamenting because they are worshipping a sort of image, and they don’t reach with simple, warm hands and touch me. I’s as if I were outside this very costume, desiring and calling for simplicity, and at the same time a kind of fear compels me to continue acting. You are the only one I feel near to, you and Djuna the only ones who don’t make love to my shadow.”
