The Winter of Artifice

by Anais Nin

  The blood was rising and drowning the smaller world of the woman, a curtain of red falling over the eyes, drowning pity. Her tongue lashed like a whip, her voice whirled like a simoun wind, her hands tore everything apart, breaking all bonds with man, father, son, lover, brother. What erupted in her body was no longer love but hunger and hatred. Her body filled with teeth, with a drumming fever, with a delirium. Djuna was in a jungle, alone with her storm. She was alone in the forest of her delirium. Desire leaping wild and blind. The human eyes were closed. The storm was panting in her, the moon smiled, her anger seemed immense like the space around her. An enormous fury, as of an animal long taunted, so that when the blood rose every word withheld, every act of yielding, erupted. She trusted no one as she drank alone in the jungle of desire. Her nails were longer, tearing apart everything she had lulled. The storm of blood brought a cloudburst of laughter, the lightning struck down the love, broke all the bondages, drowned the pity.

  Djuna was one with the moon, thrusting hands made of roots into the storm, while her heart beat like a drum through the orgy of the moonstorm.

  * * *

  Lilith talking to the Voice. Lilith had a headache.

  My father had headaches like this, and he went mad. Do you think I will go mad? I dream of being under ether and I awake in terror. My father’s madness started with headaches. He began slowly to lose his memory. But I kept thinking—perhaps my father is not mad, but has had a dream. This dream has come and installed itself in his life. The dream is his life. What was this dream? Could I understand it? If I could see it, share it with him, enter his world and stay in it, perhaps he wouldn’t go mad. I feel that madness is only solitude. Ynly go mad when you see something no one else sees. There is a moment before madness when people have not yet cut the cord of connection and at this moment some one can hold them back. It’s what you do every day. There was the dream of the man who ate flowers so that the Revolution might not come… He was locked up. Only because he got confused with the symbol, he lived in the symbol. But if you understand it, nothing is mad. Everything is a dream, but we don’t always know the meaning. I wanted to know my father’s fantasy but he enclosed himself in it. I only discovered it when it was too late. And now I will admit all this I’m saying is to elude something I find very hard to tell you. You’ll be angry. The truth is I accepted an invitation to spend a night with Harold and a woman. When I arrived I was shown into his apartment, but he had not yet returned from a party. He had left a note, an erotic book for me to read, and drinks. I just sat there and dreamed about all my curiosities, all my erotic longings, my desire for woman. Arline came first and sat on the edge of the bed which was set in an alcove. Then Harold. Arline was blonde, with lax gestures, as in sleep. She began by taking my hands and admiring them, then she kissed me like a man. I slipped my hand under her skirt. Harold was kneeling down before the two of us and looking under our dresses. Harold made love to me more than to Arline. Do you think it was because I was the guest of honor? We took all our clothes off. I tasted a woman for the first time, and I didn’t like it. It tasted like a sea shell. But I loved her breasts and mouth. And it amused me that while we both caressed Harold we kept looking over his body at each other with something like human closeness. The man seemed the stranger. We would stop caressing him to kiss each other. When Harold, satisfied, fell asleep, Arline and I went on kissing and saying, how lovely you are, how soft you are. It was the abandon I liked. I felt nothing. I was desperately craving for love.

  I took Arline home in a taxi. In the taxi, facing an Arline all dressed, I felt shy. The intimacy when we were naked and now the strangeness. Arline telephoned me and it was strange. I know nothing about her except her body, the feel and odor of her, and yet when she called up I felt less lonely, I felt a sort of body warmth, almost like love, just because I had touched her, and felt her. Arline’s voice was lax, and like the voice of a plant. She wanted to spend the night with me. She wanted to see me alone. Arline came as if she were dancing, displacing everything around her, she was terribly drunk. We had dinner together and hardly talked. Just smiled at each other, held each other’s hands, asked foolish questions. Whatever she told me was not part of her body at all. Her body suggested infinitely more, but everything in it was asleep.

  Arline was blind. Her eyes said nothing, her mouth said nothing. Her eyes so blind, her speech drunken. When she talked she was just a little girl taking small parts in second rate shows, often out of work, not caring, yet not able to do anything but act. She was indifferent towards the part she acted, and indifferent to the actions of her body, as if she were separate from it. In my room she asked for another drink. She opened the drawers of the dressing table, looked at my clothes, pulled everything out, laughing. Then she said: Kiss me! She caressed me. The night we had been with Harold I felt that Arline did not respond ultimately, completely. I had not felt the violent, quick throbbing under my fingers. I wondered if Arline knew that I hadn’t. And then Arline asked me, asked me with a very slow, very implicit smile. I told her the truth. She said: “That’s why I loved you, you were making believe too. I knew it.” We laughed together, caressed each other into drowsiness; Arline fell asleep,h her body lying right across mine, so that I could not move. My hand was still resting on her leg. I lay there wishing violently to be hypnotized. I felt that if some one made me sleep like this and then took me something would happen to that unyielding part of me. I dreamed of some one caressing me until I fell asleep and then taking me. I remembered the time when I first began to feel with my body. I was in the bath tub. By mistake I turned on the water of the shower, and a jet came down on me and fell between my legs. Like a caress. I thought to be in love must be like this, this marvellous, warm water falling. And every night I fell asleep imagining these caresses falling over me like the water of the shower. Lying there, with the body of Arline asleep, her mouth a little open as if some dream would issue from it with a ribbon, as if she were about to tell me what extraordinary things she was seeing while asleep. There was so much space around her now, and her breathing changed tonalities, as if she were watching a spectacle.

  I envied her her sleep, I thought if some one would force his desire upon me when I am asleep I would close around it like a plant. It would be so simple and soft, speckled with goldness. When Arline leaves me her gestures will fill my room. It is the only thing I believe in. The gestures! What a terrible need of the voice, of body warmth, what a need to put my head where the heart beats, to watch the palpitation of the throat. Afterwards Arline will recede and vanish. Something else will fill the room, some dream of her which will decompose her simplicity, which will disincarnate her, make smoke and fog and ribbons of her. Far away Arline will become a dream. It is that which gives me anguish. When she leaves she will sink into enormous space.

  Lilith lying there, tangled, restless. Finding the absolute only in multiplicity, an absolute composed in space, an absolute in fragments. The smile of Arline, who laughs because she is making believe, as if by this she had escaped tragedy. The eagerness of the Voice, with his finger pointing: “You see? You see? That is what it means. You live in the myth.” Living in the myth. Perhaps. But she was lost in it. Even Arline did not remain Arline. Now, because she was asleep, she was bathing in a world much larger than she knew. Lilith touching Arline asleep, wishing she would remain Arline.

  But the next instant she is caught in the whirl again, a quest, a continuous, incessant, diabolical quest of an absolute that does not flow serenely but is pursued and grasped by sheer wakefulness. In flight always, and she fearing to sleep for fear of its passing. Desire unexploded in her, but the cord lit and the little flames running up and down the cord with Dionysian joyousness: a dancing, the little flames running around the heart of the dynamite and never touching it. The little flames kept her breathless, nerves bristling with their heads up, necks stretched, thirsty eyes, peaked ears, all the little nerves waiting for the orgasm that will send the blood running through them lik
e an anaesthetic and put them to sleep.

  Lilith, lying sleepless, seeing in the yellow faces at the bar the faces of future crimes, drug fiends who with knife or poison would bring a kind of sleep, a pause, a rest from this pursuit of a fugitive absolute. Lilith wishing for the crime, the drug, the death, as deliverance. But the nerves are still awake, waiting for the pause of sleep or death, waiting for the dynamite to explode, for the past to crumble, waiting for an absolute uncapturable. Do all violent fires have a hundred flames pointing in all directions, was there ever one round flame with one tongue? Why did this force which did not erupt in quicksilver through the veins, why did it rush out in a typhoon whirl to round only the monsters walking through the streets, to question their intentions, to imagine their perversities, to slide between the foam of lust, between the most knotted and twisted desires? This man with his little girl, why were his eyes so wet, his mouth so wet, why were her eyes so tired, why was her dress so short, her glance so oblique? Why was that young man so white? There was scum on his lips—the scum of veronal. Why did that woman wait under the lamplight with a hand in her muff? This force which did not explode in Lilith was a poison; it spilled into the streets, ran into the gutters. She wanted to be dismembered, devoured, and she met always with wings, with eyes opening on the heavens, flames turning to the mystic blue of the night lamps in convents and hospitals.

  Arline was still asleep. In Lilith the seed would not burst; the body left the earth, pulled upward by a string of nerves, and spilled its pollen only in space, because the fairy tale wore too light a gown, a gown that made a breeze, a space between the feet and earth. Lilith’s footsteps would soon not be heard, the blood would remain quicksilver, blue like the night flames of places where people weep.

  * * *

  Lilith entered Djuna’s room tumultuously, throwing her little serpent skin bag on the bed, her undulating scarf on the desk, her gloves on the book shelf, and talking with fever and excitement:

  “I’m falling in love with the Voice. I feel he is like a soul detective, and that the day he captures me, I will love him.”

  “It’s a mirage,” said Djuna.

  She went to the window. There was snow and ice on the rim of it, like a window giving on Iceland. She tried to open it a little, but it was jammed with snow and ice. She had a feeling they were blocked in, snowed in with tremendous obstacles. She knew Lilith was pursuing another mirage. Adventures, a mirage. The love of the Voice for what the Voice said to her, because the Voice reached into the roots of her being.

  “A mystical illusion,” repeated Djuna. “A mirage. If you know what happens to woman when she pursues a mirage, when she has a love affair with a mirage?”

  “What can happen to her? It’s poetry.”

  “It may be poetry, Lilith, but her nature revolts against it. At some moment or other your body will revolt, because it’s not real.”

  “But it is only in his presence I feel true, natural.”

  “But don’t get closer to him. If you come closer you will defeat your own salvation. But then… you are too lovely, he won’t let you pass without making an effort to retain you. That is what happened to me. I lost the father in him—perhaps I wanted to. I tempted him as a man, and then he became a man and desired me, then I was angry at him, as if it had been only a test, a test of the saviour in him. And he’s noe’s noee’s trying to save himself too.”

  “You bitch, you bitch,” laughed Lilith.

  “I liked upsetting him. Then, when he became a man and ran after me I was very angry—it seemed to prove that he was only human.”

  “The world is very small, Djuna. If what you say is true it is very small. I’m going to choke in it. He can’t be merely human. He must be something else, something more. He has a magic power.”

  Lilith enveloped Djuna in great softness. They lay talking in the dark. Only the softness, the glistening touch of legs mixed together, only to feel the softness and warmth of woman, the weight of her arm, the curve of her neck. Only to hear her breathing and talking and laughing in the dark. To lie there, wishing perhaps to be a man for a moment, but as a woman knowing there is no way of possessing a woman but as a man.

  “Try and close your eyes, you’ll find another world that is immense, at night, Lilith.”

  “I never remember the night. Why don’t I find a man who makes me feel what I feel with you? You are so warm, you are so quick. You are always where I am. Our impulses towards each other happen at the same moment. You are never late or slow or indifferent, and you have the gift of gesture. When I feel anguished, lost, alone, you always have the gift for saying what I need to hear, as if you knew when I am wandering alone, when I need to be called. After we are together you write me letters, and I need so much to feel again what we said, to be able to touch the words, to feel palpably that what happened to us is real. It’s the only thing I believe in, Djuna, everything else is ghostly. You say everything with your body, like a dancer. All your body talks, your hands, your walk. I believe you.”

  “But none of this is love, Lilith. We are the same woman. Every woman in this hotel is the same woman. There is always a moment when all the outlines, the differences between women disappear, and we enter a world where all feelings, yours and mine, seem to issue from the same source. We lose our separate identities. What happens to you is the same as what happens to me. Once a month, you and I are exactly alike; and you know it. Listening to you is no longer watching a world different than my own, it’s a kind of communion.”

  “And meanwhile everybody laughs, jeers and calls us all kinds of names.”

  What softness. To lie on a wave. The marvellous silence—two women, one woman becoming plants. To turn over and watch the rivulets of shadows between the breasts, to lie on the down of the bed sleeping over one’s own body, like sleeping in the forest at night. The marvellous silence of woman’s thoughts, the secret and the mystery of night and woman become air, sun, water, plant. Feel the roots resting in the soil, the feet well planted in the coolness, in the brown pressure, firm against this creamy wall of earth. When you press against the body of the other you feel this joy of the roots compressed, sustained, enwrapped in its brownness, with only the seeds of joyousness stirring. A pleasure ebbing back and forth. Sun pressed luxuriantly against the body. Mystery and coolness of darkness between the four walls of another’s flesh. The back of Lilith, this soft, musical wall of fleh, the being floating in the utter waves of silence, enclosed by the presence of what can be touched. No more falling into space. No more quest, anxiety, seeking, yearning, turning, within this compact wall of tender flesh. Touch the delicate tendrils of hair, you touch moss and an end to hunger. This hand holds a strand of hair, the world complete, reduced, in the palm of the hand. You have entered from the dissonances of the street, from the separate, hard fragments walking without legs or head or arms, always mutilated, into the immense vault of an organ chant. Djuna lay at the centre of a wheel. Lilith warm and near. Or Hans talking rumblingly into her ear. The earth turns with a chant of roundness, fullness. It turns into a smooth, full round of plenitude. The spokes pass fast and are not seen at this moment. Only the drunkenness of rotation. Other days the wheel slows down and one gets caught in the spokes. One falls between them, they cut and mangle one. You are caught. The rhythm broken, you dangle, you are dragged, you are mutilated.

  * * *

  The steps of Georgia at the door. A voice with a mustache, the heavy pounding of her enormous feet. Her hands about to strike. Her breath like a beaver, her feet like giant ducks’ feet, her hands slapping the air. When she entered the room of the Voice it was like an attack. Thrusting herself into it as if her shoulders would hatchet down the obstacles.

  She made the room seem small. She was not talking to the Voice, but smelling him, breathing over him, with her tongue flicking constantly over the wet lips, as if she had just finished eating him and were seeking the flavor again with her saliva.

  Her lips were wet with appetite. She b
reathed, she snorted, warm and musky. She sat down as a gorilla sits on a branch with her arms ready to climb. When she said: I love, it was incongruous. She ought to have said: I am hungry. I am thirsty.

  She had hair on her upper lip, hair in her nose, and hair like seaweeds on her head. The Voice was haunted by the vision of this hair, imagined that she might have hair inside her too, that her sex must be lined like the backs of sea-urchins.

  She was very angry because the Voice had not answered her telephone call during the night. She had needed him desperately.

  “I never answer the telephone at night,” said the Voice.

  “And why not?”

  “Because everyone would telephone at night. That is the moment when everyone feels the solidtude. Didn’t you ever sit by a telephone at night when in anguish and feel like calling some one, just to hear a voice? At night people don’t resist their impulses, their obsessions. One feels like addressing another human being just to make sure one is still among them.”

  “That’s true. But I called for a more important reason. I have to conduct my orchestra to-morrow, and I have a new obsession. If you don’t help me somehow I’ll never be able to conduct. There was a story about my father which I didn’t tell you yesterday. I remembered it as son as I left you. When I was a girl I knew about his affairs with women. He confided in me. I knew exactly how he behaved, and the most cynical details. There are times even now, when I am making love, I suddenly become aware that I am acting like my father, I feel like him at the moment. One of his favorite amusements was to come to my door in the morning to wake me up, because I was lazy and found it hard to get up. He would knock very hard with his stick, then say: ‘Guess what I’m knocking with, guess!’ At first I didn’t. I laughed without knowing. Then one day I understood his laughter. For years this caused me a great shock. I used to hear this knocking of my father in my dreams. Then I forgot about it. I became an orchestra leader. One day, wanting to amuse a woman I loved, I knocked at her door with my orchestra baton: guess what I am knocking with? That night while conducting, while I was waving my stick, the whole scene came back to me. Do you think that’s why all women are so fascinated by me? I think about it day and night. The stick burns my fingers; I will never be able to conduct again.”