by Anais Nin
There was a secret between them. A fire burst upon the hall from the garden. It moved forward like the waves on the shore, waves of smoke and flames rolling in a long line across the garden. She wanted to close the door, but then she understood that if she shut the door the others would be locked outside with the fire, so she opened the door and called them. Her dress was vaporous and enormous around her, like sails. It was raining. The rain was spoiling her dress. She took a carriage. The carriage moved too slowly and they were lost. She wanted to get back to the castle and the dance hall. Her feet were twinkling. She did not mind being wet, she was so happy.
There came the woman so round and full-fleshed, like the mother. So large and full, the Rubens woman, with enourmous breasts. But it was not her mother. She loved her breasts and caressed them. As she caressed the woman she felt her masculinity. She asked: “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” The woman answered: “I thought perhaps you would not like it.” No, it was true, she did not like it, she turned away. But the Rubens woman came back in another form. She was not deluded, she knew it was always the same woman. She was the whore, the woman animal, the lioness. She came back as a heavy luxuriant goddess, too, the goddess of abundance. Her flesh was down, a bed of sensuality, every pore and curve of her. She was the immense statue, the oldest of all the whores, with her mask of avidity. Her hands were grasping, her flesh throbbing in a mountainous heaving way, without electric sparks, rolling, fermenting, saturated with moisture, folded in many lapping layers of voluptuous inertia. Her flesh was without eyes, without antennae. It was without ears, without nerves, without currents. It was a bed of flesh, burning without fire, trembling only from caresses and then dying again. Dead when not touched; like layers of silk, tempting the hands. A river bed of engluing moss, of adhesive rubber plants. Perspiring milk from the heavy flow of desires, the moist currents flowing into the canals of her prone body; all the fluid currents of desire seeping along the silver bark of her legs, around the violin-shaped hips, descending and ascending with a sound of wet silk around the cones and crater edges of her breast. Flesh mother, the oldest of all the whores, who on dark nights of punishment took Hans away from her and left her weeping. She the whore and goddess of earth, whom on other nights Djuna destroyed with lightning, standing like an idol covered with splendor, breathing out a fire which turned the woman into a crumpled heap, like a dead animal. But the woman reappeared. She reappeared in the sparkling costume of the burlesque queens, she came dressed in the tight skirt of the street walker, always preying and waiting. And Djuna did not always hate her; she loved her heavy, obscene walk, her navel glance, her animal passivity, her spreading herself at a café table like a seal, her drunken sullenness. Djuna wanted to enter the woman in her, and be lost in her too, like the feelings of man when he entered and lay in her. She was inside the whore feeling the entrance of man, aware of her feeling, the woman’s feelings and the man’s feelings.
Djuna wanted to kill the Rubens woman. She prepared a bath for her with a strong acid. She said to her: “Let’s take a bath together.” The Rubens woman slapped her when she was naked, laughing. Djuna covered her own body with wax so that the acid would not touch her. She said to the Rubens woman: “This bath comes from Egypt.” The Rubens woman began to dissolve, still laughing. She dissolved completely. The bath was full of jellied substance. She touched it. It was like Jello which she did not like to eat as a child. She felt she must conceal this somewhere. She dug a deep hole in the earth. She filled the hole with the acid. It took her a long time; the hole seemed to get deeper and the jelly more and more abundant. She was so tired she fell asleep. When she awakened it was daytime and the jelly had all come to the surface again. The Voice was looking at the spectacle with his eye glasses shaking. His little hands rubbing together, and his voice unsteadily saying: “Everything is a symbol. The poet is the one who calls death an aurora borealis.”
* * *
While the concert was going on the Voice sat at the back of the box and showed only the refracted light on the rim of his glasses. Georgia, in her long black dress, looked like Rasputin. Her heavy hair straight and long, her two black arms, the chaste black monk gown, agitating herself over the instruments, projecting her strength into them.
Lilith sat below, but not lost among the other faces. Watched by the searchlight of the Voice’s glasses, her face, very white, was open to the music and her restlessness was for a moment suspended. When Mischa came out she thrust herself forward as if she wanted to envelope him in her own strength.
Lilith had gone backstage before the concert.
Georgia had fixed her with her wolf eyes and said: “I am playing for you.” So Lilith felt as if the concert were coming from her. And the Voice had told Georgia: “You will conduct well,” as if it were an order. So the Voice felt the concert was his creation; he was leading, he was the strength of it, in it, directing. And the music had been ordained to transmit the currents of his desire across the space to a Lilith on fire with desires. Mischa was giving a silver icy chant which Lilith accepted as an expression of her disenchantment. All the disenchantments—the Voice stepping out and metamorphosed into a man such as she had seen by the million all around her, less than all, a non-face, a non-body, a non-presence, a vanishing of his force, all the light gone out of him as soon as he stepped out of his mysterious Voice role; in the daylight his skin the color of death, his eyes the blurredness of death, his words the dullness of death. Music carrying in its immense waves a foam crest of delusions, in its falling, running, spilling downfall a moment of suffocation, in its undertows waiting for the moment of despair to engulf one. Lilith falling over with a vertigo of despair, struck in the center of her being by the constantly inaccurate shafts of sex—never thrusting her for life but bleeding her, mereaccuounds.
Georgia would pursue her, panting, having sensed in Lilith the response—and not the ultimate non-response. Throughout the multitude of identical rooms Lilith could see men and women embracing convulsively. The same images—but resonances of all kinds, as varied in power as this music now swelling and dying in plaits of sand combed with silver combs. All the little rooms alike and Djuna lying swathed in the fumes of her dreams from which she would never awaken, wanting only the scenes which resembled the dream and skipping the vast deserts and infernos of daily living.
Lilith had skipped no part of the voyage, yet remained unsatisfied—plunging nowhere for a permanent place in which to erect her illusion, like this music passing and vanishing, leaving no signs of its passage.
* * *
Mischa is falling asleep. The room looks the same as the Voice’s room, or Djuna’s room, or Lilith’s room. Mischa is asleep in the same kind of bed, with the same radio over his head, and the furniture stands around him in the same mathematical order. Where the desk ends, with its little glass top, covering a laundry list, a telephone list, a card from the drugstore, the dressing table begins. And where the dressing table ends there is space for the lamp. The armchair is placed against the window. The room looks like the inside of a chestnut. The furniture is made of chestnut, the rug has the color of new chestnuts, the lamp has the color of old chestnut. In the same sized drawer in which Djuna folds her lace nightgowns Mischa keeps his faded shirts, Lilith her boyish scarfs, the Voice his notes of what he has heard during the day for future conferences. All the letters are written on the same paper. Mischa feels a shiver of horror, feels the madness of sameness. He thinks of all the rooms at once, and what may be happening in them. They are all washing at the same moment, quarreling, writing letters, or twisting themselves with desire or pretense of desire. Mischa thinks that if everyone died to-night and the great city were left abandoned for a hundred years, the tall, empty structures left to mold and rust… those who would come with their geological passions, their instruments, their research maps, they would be convinced that these people were all absolutely identical. Not alike as twins, but a million beings soldered together, forced into the same motions.<
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While he looked at his room he could not sleep. It seemed to him that the room was made to efface Mischa. Mischa’s moods, his differences, his disharmony with everyone. In the corner stood his ‘cello in its black sarcophagus.
He wanted to sleep. He wanted to sleep.
The room did become smaller and smaller, and darker, as if he were being placed in a real chestnut which closed around him. And as soon as it became smaller, he saw windows flung open and flames bursting from them. Behind the flames the faces of madmen shrieking and grimacing. The walls crumbled. The bars were twisted open. The madmen crawled out between them, then ran in all directions, with their hair standing on end. Some of them still wore their straight-jackets. They fell on their backs and could not pick themselves up. They lay there like scarabs and the crowd ran over them. Bells. Whistles. Dust raised. Stones rolling. Hands twisted trying to rend the air. When the people crashed into each other they looked at each other. They saw the same face. It was the face of a madman. The eyes protruded and the mouth hung lower on the right side. They touched each other. It was a mirror they were touching. Another mirror. Another mirror. A thousand faces all alike. They ran, they bowed, they kneeled, they fell on their faces, they wept, and all of them were doing exactly the same thing… They rushed into a house. A tall man was sitting in an armchair. He was looking down at his insides which were exposed. He was watching how the blood moved, how the liver functioned. Intestinal functioning, like the wheels, chains, canals, labyrinths of a factory. Microbes climbing through the arteries in military order. Food deteriorating. Canals like inside a coal mine; little wagons travelling up and down, carrying food. Bridges. Canals. Plants growing. Seeds falling. It was the Voice who was oiling the mechanism with an eye-dropper. The Voice who picked up a few drops and placed them in a bottle. He examined it with a microscope. Enlarged it showed the inside of an egg. Inside of this egg there were clouds, and resting on the clouds two eyes shedding tears, with their roots dangling behind. The tears fell into an oyster opening and closing. A woman slipped her tongue into the oyster.
The inside of the Voice was now like a printing press shaped like a liver, a heart, the entrails. Words fell into separate letters inside a small drawer. Words and letters were running through the intestines like the words in a printing press. The pages came out in neat piles. The Voice read them. The pages were dripping blood on the rugs. The Voice closed the little door of his insides and leaned over towipe the stains away. The mad crowd surrounded him. He pointed to the sky. The sky was the roof of his room. The stars and moon were made of cardboard and moved with strings like puppets. The Voice pressed a button. The motions of the planets were reproduced, but shakingly, hesitatingly, as if the machine were not working very well. The madmen looked on, bewildered. The Voice opened the little door to his brain. The brain like the skeins of tangled wool. The ribbon of a movie film, a travelogue picture passing very fast. Monuments, streets, churches, but appearing upside down. A little boy was buying a newspaper from another little boy in the street. In his room he spread the newspaper on the floor and made a paper boat and a bird. He wrote in big letters: “Dear Papa and Mamma, please return Pinocchio to the library or you will be fined for it.” He sat on the paper boat and immediately it sank. Then the paper boat floated up again, half open, lying on its side, floating down the river.
The Voice closed the little door to his brain. He turned the X-ray machine on the crowd. He turned it upon the women standing there. On the stomach of one of the women. One could see inside her womb a dead child. Inside another woman twins lying entangled. One twin is dead and the other is writhing, seeking to escape. Inside another woman there is a child asleep, covered with fur. Inside another woman lies a coiled snake, asleep.
A woman is following Mischa stealthily. He falls. She leans over with a heavy stick and beats his legs until they break. She leans over to look at them. They are the knotted roots of trees; mushrooms are growing all over them. The woman runs to the village to get a coffin. They try to place Mischa in the coffin, but he is too long for it. They begin to saw off his legs, and then the body is placed in the coffin. The woman picks up the legs. They stand alone like a pair of boots. The boots begin to sink into the sand.
The noise of strong suction was not the noise of the sand finally sucking his legs down, but the breakfast contraption being violently sucked closed again, and on the rug lay the tiny box he hated, with a breakfast arranged like a mathematical calculation. He looked at it from the receding shores of his dream. He wanted to return to the dream. There was nothing left of it. An island there, a deserted island where many things had happened. He could see it receding. The sand must still be in his clothes. His legs buried. He looked at them. They were asleep. But no scar left where they had been sawed off.
* * *
“I never noticed,” said Lilith to the Voice, “that the sun comes into this room. I always felt it was a dark room, because of all the secrets.”
“Maybe it’s in you there are no more secrets.”
“I don’t know. Your understanding saved me from confusion and pain. I feel dependent on you. You have the vision. I get lost. You teach, you are humanly tender and protective. Do you really think a woman can find her way all alone, completely alone?”
“Not if she’s a real woman.”
“I must have become a real woman right here, for I feel the dependence now, and I don’t mind it. I like it.”
Then Lilith stopped because she saw he did not like what she was saying.
“Do you know the meaning of your own name?” asked the Voice. “It’s the unmated woman, the woman who cannot truly be married to any man, the one whom man can never possess altogether. Lilith, you remember, was born before Eve and made out of red earth, not of human substance. She could seduce and ensorcell but she could not melt into man and become one with him. She was not made of the same human substance.”
“Do you think I am altogether like the first Lilith?” she asked without looking at him.
“I don’t know. The way you talk about dependence does not mean love. It means the love for the Father, who is the symbol of God. You are seeking a father… How exactly do you think of me?”
But before she could answer his question the little man left his analyst’s chair and walked up to her. Lilith heard his breathing and felt he did not want to hear the answer.
What she read in his eyes was the immense pleading of a man, a man imprisoned inside a seer, calling out for the life in her, and at the very moment when every cell inside her body closed to the desire of the man she saw a mirage before her as clearly as men saw it in the desert, and this mirage was a figure taller than other men, a type of saviour, the man nearest to God, whose human face she could no longer see except for the immense hunger in the eyes. And she felt a kind of awe, which she recognized. Every time she was faced with a sacrifice of the self, with the demand of another, a hunger, a prayer, a n, there came this joy. It was like the joy of a prisoner who finds the bars of his cell suddenly broken down. The mirage took the place of all actual physical sensation. It was if all the walls, all the limitations, all the personal desires were transcended. It was not an ecstasy of the body, but a sudden break with the body, a liberation and a stepping into a new region. With the abandon came this joy as of a transcendent flight upward, breaking the chains of awareness. Abandon brought a drunkenness, the fever of generosity, the joy of self-forgetting. A joyous victim, a victim of the imperfections of the universe which it was in her power, for the moment, to redress, to alter. In her power, for the moment, to make all the gifts promised so long ago in the fairy tales of childhood. What had prevented the fairy tales from materializing was the lack of faith and the lack of love.
Human life at this moment seemed the unreal and miniature city, with too many boundaries, too many laws, and too many simplicities. Giving was the only flight in space permitted to whomever could abandon the human substance. Better to be made of red clay, as she was, for she would
never die, and she would never die because of this joy that came in being more than one woman, and for the moment the woman the Voice wanted.
What would he demand of her?
While the Voice, who was no longer the Seer, talked, what she saw was the dark-skinned mythological crab, not quite a man, but an animal, with the cavernous, pre-historic sorrows of the monkey, the agedness of the turtle, the tenderness of the kangaroo, the facile humility of the dog.
In the Voice she felt the ugliness of tree roots, of the earth, and this terrific dark mute knowing of the animal, for though he was the one most aware of what happened inside others he was the one least aware of what happened in himself. It was too near. He could read the myth, and man’s dreams, but not in himself. The man had been denied. He was begging her to be made a person, a man. The man had been buried, had grown very old, withered, without having achieved his life on earth. That is what his eyes were asking for: a life on earth.
Lilith knew it was all based on a lie, and he could not be lied to. That is why he never lived: he had not learned to let himself be lied to. He will be another victim. I don’t know, I feel possessed and diabolical. I like the pleasure I give him.
It was a father I was looking for. And I found him. But he is a father who turns white with passion, who trembles with doubts and jealousies. He says that with me one travels so far away from reality that it is necessary to buy a return ticket. He is afraid of not being able to come back. I like him better serious than laughing; he doesn’t know how to laugh. His pranks are pranks of the mind, his humor is paradox, the reversal of ideas, the trickeries and trapeze stunts of ideas. He has not learned what I have learned—to not clutch at the perfume of flowers, to not touch the dew, to not tear all the curtains down, to let exaltation and breath rise, vanish. The perfume of the hours distilled only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by human fingers. Flesh touching flesh generates perfume. The friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying, without tampering, without withering. An awe of the senses. Silence.
