by Anais Nin
“But it is your own making. We are simply the ones who can’t be mystified and entangled in your appearance. We’re simply the ones who did not get lost in the labyrinth you create. You hide yourself and then you weep because people get lost in all this external form of your life. It’s only locking doors against those who wish to come near, the same door that you locked against your husband.”
Such simple words he said, yet Lilith left him feeling a great warmth towards him, something that resembled love. She was falling in love with the Voice. She felt that he was the subtle detective who made all these discoveries in her, who made her state the very nature of what hurt her. He liked the game of tracking down her most difficult thoughts. It was only after many detours that she could make these long revelations. It was if he possessed her, somehow, in a way she could not explain to herself. There was a silent, subtle force in him. It was not in the words he said. It was something he exhaled. He confronted one with one’s self, naked, one’s true self as it was at the beginning. He destroyed the deformations, one by one, the acquired disguises of the personality. It was like a return to the original self. It was a return to the beginning where everything was pure.
He took her back, with his questions and his probings, back to the beginning.
She told him all she could remember about her father, ending with: “the need of a father is over.”
The Voice said: “I am not entirely sure that the little girl in you ever died, or her need of a father. What am I to you?”
“The other night I dreamed you were immense, towering over every one. You carried me in your arms and I felt no harm could come to me. I have no more fears since I talk to you like this every day. Yes, one more fear, only one. I find it hard to tell you. The day I left school, the day I wore my hair up for the first time, I examined myself naked in the mirror, looking for the first real proofs of the metamorphosis. It was in the moonlight, because I believed in baths of moonlight. I was looking for the woman, and I decided that my breasts were too small. I thought: ‘nobody will love me’.”
The Voice laughed a little: “But of course, that is not true. You only imagined this because you compared yourself to your mother. Didn’t you tell me she was like a Rubens woman?”
“Yes, and I used to think at times that if I were a man I would love women like my mother. I liked her heaviness, her richness.”
“But you are not the mother type, are you? It was all due to your admiration of your mother. You never saw yourself as others see you.”
“But you don’t know really. What I say is true. If you don’t believe me… You are the only one I can ask this from. Will you really tell me? Will you tell me the truth? I’ll show you.”
She unstrapped her blouse and exposed her breasts. She heard him stop breathing. She looked at his face. She saw a smile, a brilliancy in his eyes she had never seen. She had never seen the blood in his face. He made a gesture of the hand, as if to show her they fitted in his hand. He could not speak. Lilith now laughed to think of herself looking at the Voice with round eyes, the eyes of Virgins on stained glass windows. She laughed now at her fear, at the question she put and at his answer. It took him a long time to say finally:
“The breasts of Diana the huntress.”
After this she would not lie down any more.
She sat up and faced him.
“Lately I have become aware that you are not happy. I think of the way you play upon souls. It must give you a feeling of great power, the way they expose themselves.”
“Power, yes… power. But every moment the human being in me is killed. I am not permitted any weaknesses. It’s true, I could take people’s great need of love and understanding and play upon it. When they open their secrets to me, they are in my power. But I want them to know me, and they don’t. Even when they love me, it is a love that is not addressed to me. I remain anonymous. I am only allowed to watch the spectacle, but I am never allowed to enter. If I enter into a life I am still the oracle or the seer. You are the first one who has asked me a question about myself.”
People came to him for strength, and their image of him was of his tallness, his firmness, his wisdom. His strange phrases which acted on them like some one breaking their chains. Simple phrases. He defended them, supported them, transported them. An Apocalyptic strength in him. Something above confusion and chaos. A total man, not made as they were of wavering moods, dispersed fragments, changes and contradictions. An alchemist who could always transmute the pain. The Sphinx who answered all questions. The one before whom one could always become small again, in whom one could find a refuge. He lulled them, lifted them up out of whatever agonizing region they were trapped in. Brought them where they could live better, breathe better, love better, live in harmony with themselves; he reconciled them to the world, conquered the demons and ghosts haunting them. But when they look at the man inside the armour of impersonal phrases they find him smaller, older, different than their image. The little man rises, his shoulders are stooped, he shakes off the stiffness of his limbs, the cramp of the attentive echo, shakes the blood that was asleep during the trance of clairvoyance, shakes off the role imposed on him.
In their dreams they saw him as a god, or a demon. But always above.
When the confession ended he was no longer above.
Lilith said: “I feel the real you behind the analyst. All you say comes out of YOU. No one else could act the same way towards human beings. It is not a system. It is your own goodness, your own compassion. I am sure they do not all use the same words, the same tone. There is magic in you.”
“I am only a symbol.”
“You are more than a symbol; I know separate and personal things about you. I have watched you. You have a love of the absolute, a passion for extracting the essence. You have been denying the human being in you.”
“That’s all very true.”
“You have a gift for life… which you have never used.”
“I was not permitted to use it. I was not loved for myself but for my understanding, for the strength I gave. It was always unreal and false.”
“I could say to you what you said to me: did you reveal your real self? Wasn’t it you who insisted on wearing the mask of the analyst? You who became a Voice? An impersonal Voice? Look how you sit now, while we talk. You never move. You always sit in the same chair. I know nothing about you. Naturally, I can only attach myself to an image. I wish… I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult. Suppose, just for once, that you lie here on the couch and that I sit in your chair—like this—and now I’m you and you’re me. What did you dream last night?”
She was laughing while she made him change places. He looked uneasy, bewildered.
“Why are you uneasy?” she asked, “what are you afraid to reveal? Tell me what you’re most ashamed to tell.”
“Not to you, because you still need me, and while you need me I must remain a mystery to you.”
“I don’t need you.”
“You do. Even what you’re doing now is only because you need a triumph, a victory, over me. I made you confess, you want to make me confess. As soon as you find some one who has the key to you, you want to reverse the roles. You can’t bear to be discovered or dominated.”
“You’re wrong, you’re utterly wrong,” said Lilith violently. “I only did it because I’m interested in you as a human being, because I’m wondering about this man we all use and whom no one really knows.”
“We’ll see who is wrong,” said the Voice, but this Voice was not as firm as when he sat with his back to the light.
* * *
The Voice is talking to Djuna:
“Do you think Lilith loves me? If Lilith loved me I would give all this up and begin a new life. I want to give up analysis. Otherwise I will go mad. Do you know what has happened to me during the last four days? Everything that I think of becomes the theme of the day, and all the people who come talk to me about the same thing. First I had a dream of jeal
ousy. I was crazily jealous of some one, I don’t know whom. I awakened filled with a kind of fury and hatred as if some one were taking the woman I wanted away from me. I may haand begeen jealous of Lilith, I don’t know. But I awakened jealous. I wanted to walk out into the street and kill some one. And then the people began to come, one after another. I had no more time to think over my dream. But every one of them talked about jealousy. First came a woman who was jealous of her husband’s first wife, now dead. It was her own sister who had died, and whose husband had then married her. But he still loved her sister. The first time he took her he called out the name of the dead wife. He sought out the resemblance, he liked her to wear the same colors. And this woman felt it, and was tortured because she loved him and wanted his love altogether for herself. He lived in a dream, wrapped in the past. He took her without really taking her, as in a trance. She was in such despair that she thought of nothing else: how to kill his love for her dead sister, how to kill this other woman who had not died for him. She observed that he had been very jealous of her. She sought out the men he was attached to, and gave herself to them, always in such a way that it would be known to him. And then he began to suffer. He became slowly aware of her, of her being loved by other men. She became more vivid in him, through his hatred of her. By the presence of the pain and anger, he began to awaken to her, to her presence, nearness, seduction. He passed from long periods of dreaming to long moments of suffering. He lived with this violent consciousness of her sensual life. She would not let him touch her. Finally the pain became so intolerable that it aroused him to a violent awareness of her, desire for her; and in this fury somehow, the past was destroyed, like some vague dream. He became aware of the woman in her, her yieldings, her sensual responses, of their life in the present.
“This was the first story I heard in the morning. I was possessed with jealousy of Lilith, and everyone who came to me seemed to be possessed with jealousy. I felt my own jealousy in them, and it increased it, magnified it. I asked myself: what kind of feelings has Lilith toward me? Why has she become so vividly alive and why do I hate the way she gives herself? It seemed to me the world was full of jealousy, and that it was contagious. It lay at the bottom of every nature. I saw everyone as being jealous either in the past, the present, or the future. One man talked to me continuously about scenes which had never taken place, which he imagined. He lies for hours imagining this betrayal, reconstructing the scenes in every minute detail, until he goes nearly crazy believing it. His jealousy was really infernal, suffocating, dark, blind, not knowing where to strike and without any reality to support it. A continuous state of doubt. At the end of the day I was shattered. It seemed to me that whatever was in me was awakened in these people and that I was only awakening things which ought better be left asleep. I was increasing the awareness of pain, and breaking down all defences against it. Yes, I know they are false defences, but they are at least as good as the stones over a tomb. They give the illusion that the dead cannot return. But I do not even leave the stone. I take away the symbol of the burial. And that’s not all. The next day I awakened with anguish, with a kind of fear. A nameless fear. A kind of universal doubt. I doubted everything. Above all, Lilith. I feared to know, to really know what she felt. I would have given my life then to lose all my lucidity. And all day, all day the cripples talked to me about fear. I asked them questions I never asked before. Describe what you most fear! They exposed so many fears. But as I asked them it was like asking myself, and awakening my own fears. Fear. The whole world is based on fear, even behind the jealousy of the day before lay fear. Fear of being alone, fear of being abandoned, fear of life, fear of being trapped in tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one’s hatred, of commiing a crime, fear of one’s violence, bestiality, of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation. I asked myself: was it the fear in me which uncovered all this? It was like opening tombs again. It was contagion, Djuna, I tell you…
“To-day I don’t know whether this is a healing or a contagion. I am only discovering that we are all alike, and my patients desperately do not want me to be like them. The third day I dreamed of death. And the first man I talked with said: ‘There is something I must know, I must absolutely ask some one. You must tell me this: when a man is dead is his sex stiff, too? Is it as hard as it is in the morning? This has been an obsession with me, all my life. In death… if one died while inside of a woman, would one lie stiff in her? Or could one, after being dead, still have one last spasm? The nails keep growing, the hair too. Could it happen again after death if one died inside of a woman?’ “
* * *
Djuna walked slowly after leaving Lilith. The day was softer and the snow was melting under her feet. She felt in love with everyone, in love with the whole city. She remembered the tendrils of wild hair on Lilith’s neck, and felt herself inside of Lilith, burning with the cold fire which devoured her. She heard again her voice charged with secret pain, a voice wet with tears passing through a wide mouth made for laughter, a wide, laughing mouth, avid and animal.
She felt the restlessness of the Voice, sitting and listening all day, pinned to his confessions, disguised by the anonymity of vision, and desiring to play an active, personal role in these scenes perpetually unfolding before him. Too near, everything was too near. She felt the multiple footsteps of those walking along with her, not like a march, but like a symphony. In the shock of feet against pavements she felt the whole collision and impact of human being against human being. They resounded in her. Everything resounded in her. She smiled, thinking of what an immense music box she was. The relation between music and living was not merely an image. What a heavy connection between the sound box of instruments and the body, and what sameness between the caresses of the hands! Djuna felt at once so aroused that it was unbearable. She felt all her loves at once. Maternal, fraternal, sensual, mystical. So many loves. What was she? The lover of the world? Crazed with love, with remembrance of every touch and flavor, of every caress and word. And simultaneously with the communion, this communion with eyes closed, this taste of the wafer on her tongue, this sonorousness of sea in her ears, this constant simoun wind burning inside of her, came the pain of separation again. When people came as near as this, and breaths were so confounded and confused, then Djuna knew she was possessed.
In the morning the body had been clear like a statue, and as cool. The body moved with the harmony of its form, it stood in altitude, like the spire of a cathedral, it was light and free and passed through the moments easily like the wind, feeling neither doors nor walls, nor anger. There was in it the tranquillity of depths, of what lay below the level of storms. It was a mountain asleep without fire in its bowels. It lay asleep as it arranged itself, it moved in accord with its own pattern, with an even tread.
It was the moment of silence. The day begun in crystal cearness was blurred by the ascension of blood passing through the cells. The blood rising through the body like the sap in the trees. Antique vases filling with wine.
Djuna stopped walking. Everything had come too near, too near. The cells were full to overflowing with the warm invasion. The moon was shining hypnotically round, a fixed stare, and all the taboos which held the body upright were dissolved by this stare of the moon calling the blood to its own cycle. The moon was circling now inside of her body, with the same rhythm. Djuna lost her face, her name. She was tied to the moon by long threads of red tangled blood. She moved now like one much larger than herself. She moved like a woman tied to the moon, in a space so vast, pushed by a rhythm so strong that the small woman in her was lost. The moon enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night without dawn.
Before the storm in her there was a suspense, there was time for fear. The trees were afraid, the sky was breathless, the air rarified, the earth parched.
Now her heart was no longer a heart, it was a drum beating continuously. The skin of her body was stretched like a drum. The tips of her hair were no longer hair, but electric wires charged with lightni
ng. The hair was linked to lightning, the heart was a drum; the skin was a fruit skin exposed to warmth and cold. The teeth were sharp, lustful, sharpened with appetite.
