by Anais Nin
"For the first time I see some beauty in it all," says Henry.
I am afraid of not having been truthful enough. I am amazed at Henry's emotion.
"Am I not the Idiot?" I ask.
"No, you see, you just see more," says Henry. "What you see is there, all right. Yes." He reflects as he talks. He often repeats a phrase, to give himself time to reflect. What goes on behind that compact forehead fascinates me.
The extravagance of Dostoevsky's language has re-leased both of us. He was a portentous author for Henry. Now, when we live with the same fervor, the same temperature, the same extravagance, I am in bliss. This is the life, the talk, these are the emotions which belong to me. I breathe freely now. I am at home. I am myself.
After being with Henry, I go to meet Eduardo. "I want you, Anaïs! Give me another chance! You belong to me. How I suffered this afternoon, knowing you were with Henry. I never knew jealousy before; and now it is so strong it is killing me." His face is terrifyingly white. He always smiles, as I do. Now he cannot. I am not yet accustomed to the sight of misery given by me; or, rather, given to Eduardo. It upsets me. Yet, deep down, I am cold. I sit there, seeing Eduardo's face distorted with pain, and I really feel nothing but pity. "Will you come with me?"
"No." I employ all the excuses that will not hurt him. I tell him everything except that I love Henry.
Finally, I win. I let him take me in a taxi to the station to meet Hugo. I let him kiss me. I promise to come and see him Monday. I am weak. But I don't want to hurt his life, maim him, deprive him of his newborn self-confidence. Enough of my old love for him survives for that. I warned him that I could destroy him, although I hated to destroy, and that I had found a man I couldn't destroy, that he was the right man for me. I tried to make him hate me. But he said, "I want you, Anaïs." And the horoscope says: we are complements.
The important thing is the response to life. June and Henry respond extravagantly, as I do. Hugo is dimmer, more listless. Today he came out of the dimness to a realization of The Possessed. I made him write down his thoughts, they were so wonderful. His best moments are very profound.
He represents truth. He is Shatov, capable of love and faith. Then what am I? That Friday, when I lay in three men's arms, what was I?
To Eduardo: "Listen, cousin chéri, I'm writing you in the train, going home. I am trembling with pain over this morning. The day seemed so heavy to me I couldn't breathe.... You have been beautiful with activity, life, emotion, strength. It is a tragedy for me that you should be at your highest moment when I love you best, only not sensually, not sensually. We are destined never to meet with equal feelings. Just now it is Henry who owns my body. Cousin chéri, I tried today for the last time to direct life, according to an ideal. My ideal was to wait for you all my life, and I waited too long, and now I live by instinct, and the flow carries me to Henry. Forgive me. It isn't that you haven't the strength to hold me. Would you say that you didn't love me before because I was less lovable? No. It would be as untrue to say you lacked the strength as to say I have changed. Life is not rational; it is just mad and full of pain. Today I have not seen Henry nor will I see him tomorrow. I give these two days to the memory of our hours. Be a fatalist, yes, as I am today but have no mean or bitter thoughts such as the idea that I played with you for my vanity's sake. Oh, Eduardo, querido, I accept pain which comes not from such motives but from real sources—real pain, at the treachery of life, which hurts us both in different ways. Do not seek the because—in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."
I came home and threw myself on the couch; I found it hard to breathe. In answer to Eduardo's plea I met him early this morning. He had spent two days feeling jealous of Henry, realizing that he, the narcissist, was at last possessed by another. "How good it is to come out of one's self! I have thought of you continuously for two days, have slept badly, have dreamed that I struck you hard, oh, so hard and that your head fell off and I carried it about in my arms. Anaïs, I am going to have you all day. You promised me. All day." All I want is to dart out of the café. I tell him so. His pleadings, softness, intensity vaguely stir my old love and my pity, the Richmond Hill love, with its vague expectancies, the old habit of thinking: of course I want Eduardo.
I fear he might shut himself up again in narcissism because he cannot bear pain. "To think I have come to worship your very bones, Anaïs!" I am faintly, faintly stirred, yet I want most of all to run away from him. I don't know why, I obey him, follow him.
I feel hurt while reading Albertine disparue, because it is marked by Henry, and Albertine is June. I can follow each amplification of his jealousies, his doubts, his tenderness, his regrets, his horror, his passion, and I am invaded by a burning jealousy of June. For the moment this love, which had been so balanced between Henry and June that I could not feel any jealousy, this love is stronger for Henry, and I feel tortured and afraid.
Yet I dreamed of June last night. June had suddenly returned. We shut ourselves up in a room. Hugo, Henry, and other people were waiting for us to dress and have dinner together. I wanted June. I begged her to undress. Piece by piece I discovered her body, with cries of admiration, but in the nightmare I saw the defects of it, strange deformations. Still, she seemed altogether desirable. I begged her to let me see between her legs. She opened them and raised them, and there I saw flesh thickly covered with hard black hair, like a man's, but then the very tip of her flesh was snow-white. What horrified me was that she was moving frenziedly, and that the lips were opening and closing quickly like the mouth of the goldfish in the pool when he eats. I just watched her, fascinated and repulsed, and then I threw myself on her and said, "Let me put my tongue there," and she let me but she did not seem satisfied while I flicked at her. She seemed cold and restless. Suddenly she sat up, threw me down, and leaned over me, and as she lay over me I felt a penis touching me. I questioned her and she answered triumphantly, "Yes, I have a little one; aren't you glad?" "But how do you conceal it from Henry?" I asked. She smiled, treacherously. All through the dream there was a sense of great disorder, of movements which accomplished nothing, of everything being late, of everybody waiting, restless and defeated.
And yet I am jealous of all the suffering Henry experiences with her. I feel that I am sinking away from all wisdom and all understanding, that my instincts are howling like jungle animals. When I remember the afternoons with Henry in the Hotel Anjou, I suffer. Two afternoons which are branded on my body and on my mind.
When I came home from Eduardo yesterday I took refuge in Hugo's arms. I was loaded down with feelings of anxiety for Eduardo and yearning for Henry, and at the same time, lying in Hugo's arms and merely kissing his mouth and neck, I found a feeling so sweet and so profound that it seemed to conquer all the darkness and baseness of life. I felt as if I were a leper and that his strength was so great he could heal me instantly by a kiss. I loved him last night with a sincerity that surpasses all the climaxes my fever makes me crave. Proust writes that happiness is something from which fever is absent. Last night I knew happiness and I recognized it, and I can truly say that only Hugo has ever given it to me, and it runs undefeated by the leapings of my fevered body and mind.
Now, when I am living the richest period of my life, again my health fails me. All the doctors say the same thing: no illness, nothing wrong but general weakness, low stamina. The heart barely beats, I am cold, I am easily tired out. Today I was tired out for Henry. How precious the moment in the Clichy kitchen, with Fred, too. They were eating breakfast at two o'clock. Books piled up, the ones they want me to read and the one I brought them. Then in Henry's room, alone. He closes the door, and our talk melts into caresses, into deft, acute core-reaching fucking.
The talk is about Proust, and it brings this confession from Henry. "To be entirely honest with myself I like to be away from June. It is then I enjoy her best. When she is here I am morbid, oppressed, desperate. With you—well, you are light. I am satiated with experiences and
pain. Perhaps I torment you. I don't know. Do I?"
I can't answer that very well, though it is clear to me that he is darkness to me. And why? Because of the instincts he has aroused in me? The word "satiation" terrified me. It seemed like the first drop of poison poured into me. Against his satiation, I match my fearful freshness, the newness in me, which gives intensity to what for him may be of less value. That first drop of poison, poured so accidentally, was like a foretelling of death. I don't know through what crevice our love will suddenly seep out and spend itself.
Henry, today I am sad for the moments I Him missing, those moments when you talk with Fred until dawn, when you are eloquent or brilliant or violent or exultant. And I was sad that you missed a wonderful moment in me. Last night I was sitting by the fire and talking as I rarely talk, dazzling Hugo, feeling immensely and astonishingly rich, pouring out stories and ideas which would have amused you. It was about lies, the different kinds of lies, the special lies I tell for specific reasons, to improve on living. One time when Eduardo was being overanalytical I poured out the story of my imaginary Russian lover. He was in rapture. And by it I conveyed to him the necessity of folly, the richness in emotion which he lacks, because he is emotionally impuissant. When I am sorely in trouble, perplexed, lost, I invent the acquaintance of a wise old man with whom I converse. I tell everybody about him, how he looks, what he said, his effect on me (someone to lean on for a moment), and by the end of the day I feel strengthened by my experience with the wise old man, and as satisfied as if it were all true. I have also invented friends when the ones I had were not satisfying. And how I enjoy my experiences! How they fill me, add to me. Embroidery.
Today I meet Fred, and as we walk towards Trinité together the sun comes out of a rain cloud and blinds us. And I begin quoting from his writing about a sunny morning in the market, which touches him. He has told me I am good for Henry, that I give him things June couldn't give him. And yet he admits that Henry is entirely in June's power when she is there. June is stronger. I am growing to love Henry more than June.
Fred marvels at how Henry can love two women at the same time. "He is a big big man," he says. "There's so much room in him, so much love. If I loved you, I couldn't love another woman." And I was thinking: I am like Henry. I can love Hugo and Henry and June.
Henry, I understand your clasping June and me. One doesn't exclude the other. But June may not feel this, and certainly you didn't understand June clasping you and Jean together. No, you demanded a choice.
We are going to taste all we can give each other. Before June comes we are going to lie together as often as possible. Our happiness is in danger, yes, but we are going to devour it quickly, thoroughly. For every day of it I am thankful.
Letter to June: "This morning I awakened with a profound and desperate desire for you. I have strange dreams. Now you are small and soft and pliable in my arms, now you are powerful and domineering and the leader. At once mothlike and indomitable. June, what are you? I know you wrote Henry a love letter, and I suffered. I have found at least one joy and that is to be able to talk openly about you to Henry. I did it because I knew he would love you more. I gave him my June, the portrait of you I wrote down during the days we were together.... Now I can say to Henry, 'I love June,' and he does not combat our feelings, he does not abhor them. He is moved. And you, June? What does it mean that you have not written me?...Am I a dream to you, am I not real and warm for you? What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now? I know you don't like to write. I don't ask for long letters, only a few words, what you feel. Have you ever wished yourself back here in my house, in my room, and do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence. June, I hesitate to write everything, as if I felt again that you would run downstairs to escape me, as you did that day, or almost.
"I'm sending you my book on Lawrence and the cape. I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved."
To Fred: "If you want to be good to me, don't talk any more against June. Today I realized that your defense of me only engraves June more deeply into that groove of my being. Do you know how I learned this? Yesterday I listened to you, you remember, with a kind of gratitude. I didn't say very much for June. And then this morning I wrote June a love letter, moved by a selfless instinct of protection, as if I were punishing myself for having listened to praise of myself that lessened June's value. And Henry, I know, feels the same way and acts the same way. But I understand all you said and feel and are, and I like you for it, immensely."
Eduardo says to Dr. Allendy, his psychoanalyst, "I don't know if Anaïs loved me or not, whether she fooled me or fooled herself about her feelings."
"She loved you," said Allendy. "I can see that by her preoccupation with you."
"But you don't know her," said Eduardo. "You don't know the extent of her sympathy for others, her power of < self-sacrifice."
To me Eduardo says, "What did happen, Anaïs? What intuition did you have at that moment when you asked me to let you go? What did you realize?"
"Just as I wrote you—an awareness of the importance of your conquering me, to give you the self-confidence you lacked, a stirring of the old love, which we mistook..." Oh, I am slippery.
So he rationalizes, in self-protection. "Then you, too, have a feeling of incest." The frailty of his confidence (If I conquer Anaïs, I have conquered everything) is so pitiable. I acted for his needs. I didn't obey my instincts, my imperative sureness that I want only Henry. But when I think I have done good and been utterly fair, it seems I have done evil, in a subtle, insidious way. I have suggested to Eduardo a doubt about his passion, which has been fostered by psychoanalysis, artificially stimulated by it. The scientific tampering with emotions. For the first time I am against analysis. Perhaps it did help Eduardo to realize his passion, but it does not add to his strength, basically. I feel it is a short-lived thing, something painfully squeezed out, a thin essence pressed out of herbs.
I see similarities between Henry and me in human relationships. I see our capacities for enduring pain when we love, our easily duped natures, our desire to believe in June, our quick rising to defend her from the hatred of others. He talks of beating June, but he would never dare. It is only a wish fulfillment, to dominate what he is dominated by. It is said in Bubu de Montparnasse that a woman submits to the man who beats her because he is like a strong government who can also protect her. But Henry's beating would be futile because he is not a protector of woman. He has let himself be protected. June has worked for him like a man, and so she can say, "I have loved him like a child." Yes, and it diminishes her passion. He has let her feel her own strength. And nothing of this can be changed, because it is engraved in both of them. All his life Henry will assert his manhood by destruction and hatred in his work; each time June appears he will bow his head. Now only hatred moves him. "Life is foul, foul," he cries. And with these words he kisses me and awakens me, I who have been sleeping one hundred years, with hallucinations hanging like curtains of spider webs over my bed. But the man who leans over my bed is soft. And he writes nothing about these moments. He doesn't even try to pull the spider webs down. How am I to be convinced the world is foul? "I am no angel. You have only seen me at my best, but wait...
I was dreaming of reading all this to Henry, everything I have written about him. And then I laughed because I could hear Henry saying, "How strange; why is there so much gratefulness in you?" I didn't know why until I read what Fred wrote about Henry: "Poor Henry, I feel sorry for you. You have no gratitude because you have no love. To be grateful one must first know how to love."
Fred's words added to my own about Henry's hatred hurt me. Do I or do I not believe in them? Do they explain the profound amazement I felt, while reading his novel, at the savagery of his attacks
on Beatrice, his first wife? At the same time I thought it was I who was wrong, that people must fight and must hate each other, and that hatred is good. But I took love for granted; love can include hatred.
I have constant slips of the tongue and say "John" instead of "Henry" to Hugo. There is no resemblance whatsoever between them, and I cannot understand the association in my mind.
"Listen," I say to Henry, "don't leave me out of your book out of delicacy. Include me. Then we'll see what happens. I expect much."
"But meanwhile," says Henry, "it is Fred who has written three wonderful pages about you. He raves about you, he worships you. I am jealous of those three pages. I wish I had written them."
"You will," I say confidently.
"For example, your hands. I had never noticed them. Fred gives them so much importance. Let me look at them. Are they really as beautiful as that? Yes, indeed." I laugh. "You appreciate other things, perhaps."
"What?"
"Warmth, for instance." I'm smiling, but there are so many fine lacerations that Henry's words open. "When Fred hears me talk about June, he says I do not love you."
Yet he won't let me go. He calls out to me in his letters. His arms, his caresses, and his fucking are voracious. He says, with me, that no amount of thinking (Proust's words, or Fred's, or mine) will stop us from living. And what is living? The moment when he rings at Natasha's door (she is away and I have her place) and immediately desires me. The moment when he tells me he has had no thoughts of whores. I am so idiotically fair and loyal to June in every word I utter about her. How can I deceive myself about the extent of Henry's love when I understand and share his feelings about June?
