by Anais Nin
At other moments it wilted, wavered like a frightened snake, and then it looked bedraggled and absurd and they both laughed.
But soon they learned never to let it break or waver and it became like a thunderbolt in their hands. Paul attacked with audacity and Lawrence parried with swiftness.
At midnight Paul began to look anxious. His luminosity clouded, he resumed his hesitant manner. He ceased to occupy the center of the room and moved out of the focus of light and laughter. Like a sleepwalker, he moved away from gaiety.
Djuna walked with him towards the door. They were alone and then he said: “My parents have forbidden me to come here.”
“But you were happy here, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was happy.”
“This is where you belong.”
“Why do you think I belong here?”
“You’re gifted for dancing, for painting, for writing. And this is your month of freedom.”
“Yes, I know. I wish… I wish I were free…”
“If you wish it deeply enough you will find a way.”
“I would like to run away, but I have no money.”
“If you run away we’ll all take care of you.”
“Why?”
“Because we believe in you, because you’re worth helping.”
“I have nowhere to go.”
“We’ll find you a room somewhere, and we will adopt you. And you will have your month of life.”
“Of life!” he repeated with docility.
“But I don’t want you to do it unless you feel ready, unless you want it so much that you’re willing to sacrifice everything else. I only want you to know you can count on us, but it must be your decision, or it will not mean anything.”
“Thank you.” This time he did not clasp her hand, he laid his hand within hers as if nestling it there, folded, ivory smooth and gentle at rest, in an act of trustingness.
Then before leaving the place he looked once more at the room as if to retain its enfolding warmth. At one moment he had laughed so much that he had slid from his chair. Djuna had made him laugh. At that moment many of his chains must have broken, for nothing breaks chains like laughter, and Djuna could not remember in all her life a greater joy than this spectacle of Paul laughing like a released prisoner.
Two days later Paul appeared at her door with his valise. Djuna received him gaily as if this were the beginning of a holiday, asked him to tie the velvet bows at her wrist, drove him to where Lawrence lived with his parents and where there was an extra room.
She would have liked to shelter him in her own house, but she knew his parents would come there and find him.
He wrote a letter to his parents. He reminded them that he had only a month of freedom for himself before leaving for India on the official post his father had arranged for him, that during this month he felt he had a right to be with whatever friends he felt a kinship with. He had found people with whom he had a great deal to share and since his parents had been so extreme in their demands, forbidding him to see his friends at all, he was being equally extreme in his assertion of his freedom. Not to be concerned about him, that at the end of the month he would comply with his father’s plans for him.
He did not stay in his room. It had been arranged that he would have his meals at Djuna’s house. An hour after he had laid down his valise in Lawrence’s room he was at her house.
In his presence she did not feel herself a mature woman, but again a girl of seventeen at the beginning of her own life. As if the girl of seventeen had remained undestroyed by experience—like some deeper layer in a geological structure which had been pressed but not obliterated by the new layers.
(He seems hungry and thirsty for warmth, and yet so fearful. We are arrested by each other’s elusiveness. Who will take flight first? If we move too hastily fear will spring up and separate us. I am fearful of his innocence, and he of what he believes to be my knowingness. But neither one of us knows what the other wants, we are both arrested and ready to vanish, with such a fear of being hurt. His oscillations are like mine, his muteness like mine at his age, his fears like my fears.)
She felt that as she came nearer there was a vibration through his body. Through all the mists as her body approached to greet him there was an echo of her movements within him.
With his hand within hers, at rest, he said: “Everyone is doing so much for me. Do you think that when I grow up I will be able to do the same for someone else?”
“Of course you will.” And because he had said so gently “when I grow up” she saw him suddenly as a boy, and her hand went out swiftly towards the strand of boyish hair which fell over his eyes and pulled it.
That she had done this with a half-frightened lau as if she expected retaliation made him feel at ease with her.
He did retaliate by trying jiujitsu on her arm until she said: “You hurt me.” Then he stopped, but the discovery that her bones were not as strong as the boys’ on whom he had tested his knowledge made him feel powerful. He had more strength than he needed to handle her. He could hurt her so easily, and now he was no longer afraid when her face came near his and her eyes grew larger and more brilliant, or when she danced and her hair accidentally swung across her face like a silk whip, or when she sat like an Arab holding conversation over the telephone in answer to invitations which might deprive him of her presence. No matter who called, she always refused, and stayed at home to talk with him.
The light in the room became intensely bright and they were bathed in it, bright with the disappearance of his fear.
He felt as ease to sit and draw, to read, to paint, and to be silent. The light around them grew warm and dim and intimate.
By shedding in his presence the ten years of life which created distance between them, she felt herself re-entering a smaller house of innocence and faith, and that what she shed was merely a role: she played a role of woman, and this had been the torment, she had been pretending to be a woman, and now she knew she had not been at ease in this role, and now with Paul she felt she was being transformed into a stature and substance nearer to her true state.
With Paul she was passing from an insincere pretense at maturity into a more vulnerable world, escaping from the more difficult role of tormented woman to a smaller room of warmth.
For one moment, sitting there with Paul, listening to the Symphony in D Minor of Cesar Franck, through his eyes she was allowed behind the mirror into a smaller silk-lined house of faith.
In art, in history, man fights his fears, he wants to live forever, he is afraid of death, he wants to work with other men, he wants to live forever. He is like a child afraid of death. The child is afraid of death, of darkness, of solitude. Such simple fears behind all the elaborate constructions. Such simple fears as hunger for light, warmth, love. Such simple fears behind the elaborate constructions of art. Examine them all gently and quietly through the eyes of a boy. There is always a human being lonely, a human being afraid, a human being lost, a human being confused. Concealing and disguising his dependence, his needs, ashamed to say: I am a simple human being in too vast and too complex a world. Because of all we have discovered about a leaf…it is still a leaf. Can we relate to a leaf, on a tree, in a park, a simple leaf: green, glistening, sun-bathed or wet, or turning white because the storm is coming. Like the savage, let us look at the leaf wet or shining with sun, or white with fear of the storm, or silvery in the fog, or listless in too great heat, or falling in the autumn, drying, reborn each year anew. Learn from the leaf: simplicity. In spite of all we know about the leaf: its nerve structure phyllome cellular papilla parenchyma stomata venation. Keep a human relation—leaf, man, woman, child. In tenderness. No matter how immense the world, how elaborate, how contradictory, there is always man, woman, child, and the leaf. Humanity makes everything warm and simple. Humanity. Let the waters of humanity flow through the abstract city, through abstract art, weeping like riets, cracking rocky mountains, melting icebergs. The frozen worlds in em
pty cages of mobiles where hearts lie exposed like wires in an electric bulb. Let them burst at the tender touch of a leaf.
The next morning Djuna was having breakfast in bed when Lawrence appeared.
“I’m broke and I’d like to have breakfast with you.”
He had begun to eat his toast when the maid came and said: “There’s a gentleman at the door who won’t give his name.”
“Find out what he wants. I don’t want to dress yet.”
But the visitor had followed the servant to the door and stood now in the bedroom.
Before anyone could utter a protest he said in the most classically villainous tone: “Ha, ha, having breakfast, eh?”
“Who are you? What right have you to come in here,” said Djuna.
“I have every right: I’m a detective.”
“A detective!”
Lawrence’s eyes began to sparkle with amusement.
The detective said to him; “And what are you doing here, young man?”
“I’m having breakfast.” He said this in the most cheerful and natural manner, continuing to drink his coffee and buttering a piece of toast which he offered Djuna.
“Wonderful!” said the detective. “So I’ve caught you. Having breakfast, eh? While your parents are breaking their hearts over your disappearance. Having breakfast, eh? When you’re not eighteen yet and they can force you to return home and never let you out again.” And turning to Djuna he added: “And what may your interest in this young man be?”
Then Djuna and Lawrence broke into irrepressible laughter, “I’m not the only one,” said Lawrence.
At this the detective looked like a man who had not expected his task to be so easy, almost grateful for the collaboration.
“So you’re not the only one!”
Djuna stopped laughing. “He means anyone who is broke can have breakfast here.”
“Will you have a cup of coffee?” said Lawrence with an impudent smile.
“That’s enough talk from you,” said the detective. “You’d better come along with me, Paul.”
“But I’m not Paul.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Lawrence.”
“Do you know Paul—? Have you seen him recently?”
“He was here last night for a party.”
“A party? And where did he go after that?”
“I don’t know,” said Lawrence. “I thought he was staying with his parents.”
“What kind of a party was this?” asked the detective. But now Djuna had stopped laughing and was becoming angry. “Leave this place immediately,” she said.
The detective took a photograph out of his pocket, compared it with Lawrence’s face, saw there was no resemblance, looked once more at Djuna’s face, read the anger in it, and left.
As soon as he left her anger vanished and they laughed again. Suddenly Djuna’s playfulness turned into anxiety. “But this may become serious, Lawrence. Paul won’t be able to come to my house any more. And suppose it had been Paul who had come for breakfast!”
And then another aspect of the situation struck her and her face became sorrowful. “What kind of parents has Paul that they can consider using force to bring him home.”
She took up the telephone and called Paul. Paul said in a shocked voice: “They can’t take me home by force!”
“I don’t know about the law, Paul. You’d better stay away from my house. I will meet you somewhere—say at the ballet theater—until we find out.”
For a few days they met at concerts, galleries, ballets. But no one seemed to follow them.
Djuna lived in constant fear that he would be whisked away and that she might never see him again. Their meetings took on the anxiety of repeated farewells. They always looked at each other as if it were for the last time.
Through this fear of loss she took longer glances at his face, and every facet of it, every gesture, every inflection of his voice thus sank deeper into her, to be stored away against future loss—deeper and deeper it penetrated, impregnated her more as she fought against its vanishing.
She felt that she not only saw Paul vividly in the present but Paul in the future. Every expression she could read as an indication of future power, future discernment, future completion. Her vision of the future Paul illumined the present. Others could see a young man experiencing his first drunkenness, taking his first steps in the world, oscillating or contradicting himself. But she felt herself living with a Paul no one had seen yet, the man of the future, willful, and with a power in him which appeared intermittently.
When the clouds and mists of adolescence would vanish, what a complete and rich man he would become, with this mixture of sensibility and intelligence motivating his choices, discarding shallowness, never taking a step into mediocrity, with an unerring instinct for the extraordinary.
To send a detective to bring him home by force, how little his parents must know this Paul of the future, possessed of that deep-seated mine of tenderness hidden below access but visible to her.
She was living with a Paul no one knew as yet, in a secret relationship far from the reach of the subtlest detectives, beyond the reach of the entire world.
Under the veiled voice she felt the hidden warmth, under the hesitancies a hidden strength, under the fears a vaster dream more difficult to seize and to fulfill.
Alone, after an afternoon with him, she lay on her bed and while the bird he had carved gyrated lightly in the center of the room, tears came to her eyes so slowly she did not feel them at first until they slid down her cheeks.
Tears from this unbearable melting of her heart and body—a complete melting before the face of Paul, and the muted way his body spoke, the gentle way he was hungering, reaching, groping, like a prisoner escaping slowly and gradually, door by door, room by room, hallway by hallway, towards the light. The prison that had been built around him had been of darkness: darkness about himself, about his needs, about his true nature.
The solitary cell created by the parents.
He knew nothing, nothing about his true self. And such blindness was as good as binding him with chains. His parents and his teachers had merely imposed upon him a false self that seemed right to them.
This boy they did not know.
But this melting, it must not be. She turned her face away, to the right now, as if to turn away from the vision of his face, and murmured: “I must not love him, I must not love him.”
The bell rang. Before she could sit up Paul had come in.
“Oh, Paul, this is dangerous for you!”
“I had to come.”
As he stopped in his walking towards her his body sought to convey a message. What was his body saying? What were his eyes saying?
He was too near, she felt his eyes possessing her and she rushed away to make tea, to place a tray and food between them, like some very fragile wall made of sand, in games of childhood, which the sea could so easily wash away!
She talked, but he was not listening, nor was she listening to her own words, for his smile penetrated her, and she wanted to run away from him.
“I would like to know…” he said, and the words remained suspended.
He sat too near. She felt the unbearable melting, the loss of herself, and she struggled to close some door against him. “I must not love him, I must not love him!”
She moved slightly away, but his hair was so near her hand that her fingers were drawn magnetically to touch it lightly, playfully.
“What do you want to know?”
Had he noticed her own trembling? He did not answer her.
He leaned over swiftly and took her whole mouth in his, the whole man in him coming out in a direct thrust, firm, willful, hungry. With one kiss he appropriated her, asserted his possessiveness.
When he had taken her mouth and kissed her until they were both breathless they lay side by side and she felt his body strong and warm against hers, his passion inflexible.
He laid his hand over her
with hesitations. Everything was new to him, a woman’s neck, a shoulder, a woman’s hooks and buttons.
Between the journeys of discovery he had flickering instants of uncertainties until the sparks of pleasure guided his hand.
Where he passed his hand no one else had ever passed his hand. New cells awakened under his delicate fingers never wakened before to say: this is yours.
A breast touched for the first time is a breast never touched before.
He looked at her with his long blue eyes which had never wept and her eyes were washed luminous and clear, her eyes forgot they had wept.
He touched her eyelashes with his eyelashes of which not one had fallen out and those of hers which had been washed away by tears were replaced.
His hair which had never been crushed between feverish pillows, knotted by nightmares, mingled with hers and untangled it.
Where sadness had carved rich caverns he sank his youthful thrusts grasping endless sources of warmth.
Only before the last mystery of the body did he pause. He had thrust and entered and now he paused.
Did one lie still and at peace in the secret place of woman? In utter silence they lay.
Fever mounting in him, the sap rising, the bodies taut with a need of violence.
She made one undulatory movement, and this unlocked in him a whirlpool of desire, a dervish dance of all the silver knives of pleasure.
When they awakened from their trance, they smiled at each other, but he did not move. They lay merged, slimness to slimness, legs like twin legs, hip to hip.
The cotton of silence lay all around them, covering their bodies in quilted softness.
The big wave of fire which rolled them washed them ashore tenderly into small circles of foam.
On the table there was a huge vase filled with tulips. She moved towards them, seeking something to touch, to pour her joy into, out of the exaltation she felt.
Every part of her body that had been opened by his hands yearned to open the whole world in harmony with her mood.
