Ladders to Fire

by Anais Nin

  Djuna and Jay. For Djuna Jay does not look nonchalant but rather intent and listening, as if in quest of some revelation, as if he were questioning for the first time.

  “I’ve lived so blindly… No time to think much. Tons and tons of experience. Lillian always creating trouble, misery, changes, flights, dramas. No time to digest anything. And then she says I die when she leaves, that pain and war are good for me.”

  Djuna notices that although he is only forty years old, his hair is greying at the temple.

  “Your eyes are full of wonder,” he said, “as if you expected a miracle every day. I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you, obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with Djuna. I’m insatiable, you know. I’ll ask you for the impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You’ll tell me, probably. You’re quicker than I am. And you’re the first woman with whom I feel I can be absolutely sincere. You make me happy because I can talk with you. I feel at ease with you. This is a little drunken, but you know what I mean. You always seem to know what I mean.”

  “You change from a wise old man to a savage. You’re both timid and cruel too, aren’t you?”

  “There is something here it is impossible for Lillian to understand, or to break either. I feel we are friends. Don’t you see? Friends. Christ, have a man and woman ever been friends, beyond love and beyond desire, and beyond everything, friends? Well, this is what I feel with you.”

  She hated the gaiety with which she received these words, for that condemnation of her body to be the pale watcher, the understanding one upon whom others laid their burdens, laying their heads on her lap to sleep, to be lulled from others’ wounds. And even as she hated her own goodness, she heard herself say quietly, out of the very core of this sense of justice: “The destroyers do not always destroy, Jay.”

  “You see more, you just see more, and what you see is there all right. You get at the ce of everything.”

  And now she was caught between them, to be the witch of words, a silent swift shadow darkened by uncanny knowledge, forgetting herself, her human needs, in the unfolding of this choking blind relationship: Lillian and Jay lacerating each other because of their different needs.

  Pale beauty of the watcher shining in the dark.

  Both of them now, Jayand Lillian, entered Djuna’s life by gusts, and left by gusts, as they lived.

  She sat for hours afterwards sailing her lingering mind like a slow river boat down the feelings they had dispensed with prodigality.

  “In my case,” said Jay, alone with her, “what’s difficult is to keep any image of myself clear. I have never thought about myself much. The first time I saw myself full length, as it were, was in you. I have grown used to considering your image of me as the correct one. Probably because it makes me feel good. I was like a wheel without a hub.”

  “And I’m the hub, now,” said Djuna, laughing.

  Jay was lying on the couch in the parlor, and she had left him to dress for an evening party. When she was dressed she opened the door and then stood before her long mirror perfuming herself.

  The window was open on the garden and he said: “This is like a setting for Pelleas and Melisande. It is all a dream.”

  The perfume made a silky sound as she squirted it with the atomizer, touching her ear lobes, her neck. “Your dress is green like a princess,” he said, “I could swear it is a green I have never seen before and will never see again. I could swear the garden is made of cardboard, that the trembling of the light behind you comes from the footlights, that the sounds are music. You are almost transparent there, like the mist of perfume you are throwing on yourself. Throw more perfume on yourself, like a fixative on a water color. Let me have the atomizer. Let me put perfume all over you so that you won’t disappear and fade like a water color.”

  She moved towards him and sat on the edge of the couch: “You don’t quite believe in me as a woman,” she said, with an immense distress quite out of proportion to his fancy.

  “This is a setting for Pelleas and Melisande,” he said, “and I know that when you leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more.”

  The color of the day, the color of Byzantine paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust, held together only by atoms, was ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold so thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous space lying behind the illuson, the absence of color and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder. This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees, which was flowering inside the room, on her black hair, on the skin of his wrists, on his frayed suit sleeve, on the green carpet, on her green dress, on the bottle of perfume, on his voice, on her anxiety—the very breath of living, the very breath he and she took in to live and breathed out to live—that very breath could mow and blow it all down.

  The essence, the human essence always evaporating where the dream installs itself.

  The air of that summer day, when the wind itself had suspended its breathing, hung between the window and garden; the air itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word, and a displaced leaf or word might change the whole aspect of the day.

  The essence, the human essence always evaporating where the dream installed itself and presided.

  Every time he said he had been out the night before with friends and that he had met a woman, there was a suspense in Lillian’s being, a moment of fear that he might add: I met the woman who will replace you. This moment was repeated for many years with the same suspense, the same sense of the fragility of love, without bringing any change in his love. A kind of superstition haunted her, running crosscurrent to the strength of the ties binding them, a sense of menace. At first because the love was all expansion and did not show its roots; and later, when the roots were apparent, because she expected a natural fading and death.

  This fear appeared at the peak of their deepest moments, a precipice all around their ascensions. This fear appeared through the days of their tranquility, as a sign of death rather than a sign of natural repose. It marked every moment of silence with the seal of a fatal secret. The greater the circle spanned by the attachment, the larger she saw the fissure through which human beings fall again into solitude.

  The woman who personified this danger never appeared. His description gave no clues. Jay made swift portraits which he seemed to forget the next day. He was a man of many friends. His very ebullience created a warm passage but an onward flowing one, forming no grooves, fixing no image permanently. His enthusiasms were quickly burned out, sometimes in one evening. She never sought out these passing images.

  Now and then he said with great simplicity: “You are the only one. You are the only one.”

  And then one day he said: “The other day I met a woman you would like. I was sorry you were not there. She is coming with friends this evening. Do you want to stay? You will see. She has the most extraordinary eyes.”

  “She has extraordinary eyes? I’ll stay. I want to know her.”

  (Perhaps if I run fast enough ahead of the present I will outdistance the shock. What is the difference between fear and intuition? How clearly I have seen what I imagine, as clearly as a vision. What is it I feel now, fear or premonition?)

  Helen’s knock on the door was vigorous, lik an attack. She was very big and wore a severely tailored suit. She looked like a statue, but a statue with haunted eyes, inhuman eyes not made for weeping, full of animal glow. And the rest of her body a statue pinned down to its base, immobilized by a fear. She had the immobility of a Medusa waiting to transfix others into stone: hypnotic and cold, attracting others to her mineral glo
w.

  She had two voices, one which fell deep like the voice of a man, and another light and innocent. Two women disputing inside of her.

  She aroused a feeling in Lillian which was not human. She felt she was looking at a painting in which there was an infinity of violent blue. A white statue with lascivious Medusa hair. Not a woman but a legend with enormous space around her.

  Her eyes were begging for an answer to an enigma. The pupils seemed to want to separate from the whites of the eyes.

  Lillian felt no longer any jealousy, but a curiosity as in a dream. She did not feel any danger or fear in the meeting, only an enormous blue space in which a woman stood waiting. This space and grandeur around Helen drew Lillian to her.

  Helen was describing a dream she often had of being carried away by a Centaur, and Lillian could see the Centaur holding Helen’s head, the head of a woman in a myth. People in myths were larger than human beings.

  Helen’s dreams took place in an enormous desert where she was lost among the prisons. She was tearing her hands to get free. The columns of these prisons were human beings all bound in bandages. Her own draperies were of sackcloth, the woolen robes of punishment.

  And then came her questions to Lillian: “Why am I not free? I ran away from my husband and my two little girls many years ago. I did not know it then, but I didn’t want to be a mother, the mother of children. I wanted to be the mother of creations and dreams, the mother of artists, the muse and the mistress. In my marriage I was buried alive. My husband was a man without courage for life. We lived as if he were a cripple, and I a nurse. His presence killed the life in me so completely that I could hardly feel the birth of my children. I became afraid of nature, of being swallowed by the mountains, stifled by the forest, absorbed by the sea. I rebelled so violently against my married life that in one day I destroyed everything and ran away, abandoning my children, my home and my native country. But I never attained the life I had struggled to reach. My escape brought me no liberation. Every night I dream the same dream of prisons and struggles to escape. It is as if only my body escaped, and not my feelings. My feelings were left over there like roots dangling when you tear a plant too violently. Violence means nothing. And it does not free one. Part of my being remained with my children, imprisoned in the past. Now I have to liberate myself wholly, body and soul, and I don’t know how. The violent gestures I make only tighten the knot of resistance around me. How can one liquidate the past? Guilt and regrets can’t be shed like an old coat.”

  Then she saw that Lillian was affected by her story and she added: “I am grateful to Jay for having met you.”

  Only then Lillian remembered her painful secret. For a moment she wanted to lay her head on Hlen’s shoulder and confess to her: “I only came because I was afraid of you. I came because I thought you were going to take Jay away from me.” But now that Helen had revealed her innermost dreams and pains, Lillian felt: perhaps she needs me more than she needs Jay. For he cannot console. He can only make her laugh.

  At the same time she thought that this was equally effective. And she remembered how much Jay liked audacity in women, how some feminine part of him liked to yield, liked to be chosen, courted. Deep down he was timid, and he liked audacity in women. Helen could be given the key to his being, if Lillian told her this. If Lillian advised her to take the first step, because he was a being perpetually waiting to be ignited, never set off by himself, always seeking in women the explosion which swept him along.

  All around her there were signs, signs of danger and loss. Without knowing consciously what she was doing, Lillian began to assume the role she feared Jay might assume. She became like a lover. She was full of attentiveness and thoughtfulness. She divined Helen’s needs uncannily. She telephoned her at the moment Helen felt the deepest loneliness. She said the gallant words Helen wanted to hear. She gave Helen such faith as lovers give. She gave to the friendship an atmosphere of courtship which accomplished the same miracles as love. Helen began to feel enthusiasm and hunger again. She forgot her illness to take up painting, her singing, and writing. She recreated, redecorated the place she was living in. She displayed art in her dressing, care and fantasy. She ceased to feel alone.

  On a magnificent day of sun and warmth Lillian said to her: “If I were a man, I would make love to you.”

  Whether she said this to help Helen bloom like a flower in warmth and fervor, or to take the place of Jay and enact the courtship she had imagined, which she felt she had perhaps deprived Helen of, she did not know.

  But Helen felt as rich as a woman with a new love.

  At times when Lillian rang Helen’s bell, she imagined Jay ringing it. And she tried to divine what Jay might feel at the sight of Helen’s face. Every time she fully conceded that Helen was beautiful. She asked herself whether she was enhancing Helen’s beauty with her own capacity for admiration. But then Jay too had this capacity for exalting all that he admired.

  Lillian imagined him coming and looking at the paintings. He would like the blue walls. It was true he would not like her obsessions with disease, her fear of cancer. But then he would laugh at them, and his laughter might dispel her fears.

  In Helen’s bathroom, where she went to powder and comb her hair, she felt a greater anguish, because there she was nearer to the intimacy of Helen’s life. Lillian looked at her kimono, her bedroom slippers, her creams and medicines as if trying to divine with what feelings Jay might look at them. She remembered how much he liked to go behind the scenes of people’s lives. He liked to rummage among intimate belongings and dispel illusions. It was his passion. He would come out triumphantly with a jar: and this, what is this for? as if women were always seeking to delude him. He doubted the most simple things. He had often pulled at her eyelashes to make certain they were not artificial.

  What would he feel in Helen’s bathroom? Would he feel tenderness for her bedroom slippers? Why were there objects which inspired tenderness and others none? Helen’s slippers did not inspire tenderness. Nothing about her inspired tenderness. But it might inspire desire, passion, anything else—even if she remained outside of one, like a sculpture, a painting, a form, not something which penetrated and enveloped one. But inhuman figures could inspire passion. Even if she were the statue in a Chirico painting, unable to mingle with human beings, even if she could not be impregnated by others or live inside of another all tangled in threads of blood and emotion.

  When they went out together Lillian always expected the coincidence which would bring the three of them together to the same concert, the same exhibit, the same play, But it never happened. They always missed each other. All winter long the coincidences of city life did not bring the three of them together. Lillian began to think that this meeting was not destined, that it was not she who was keeping them apart.

  Helen’s eyes grew greener and sank more and more into the myth. She could not feel. And Lillian felt as if she were keeping from her the man who might bring her back to life. Felt almost as if she were burying her alive by not giving her Jay.

  Perhaps Lillian was imagining too much.

  Meanwhile Helen’s need of Lillian grew immense. She was not contented with Lillian’s occasional visits. She wanted to fill the entire void of her life with Lillian. She wanted Lillian to stay over night when she was lonely. The burden grew heavier and heavier.

  Lillian became frightened. In wanting to amuse and draw Helen away from her first interest in Jay, she had surpassed herself and become this interest.

  Helen dramatized the smallest incident, suffered from insomnia, said her bedroom was haunted at night, sent for Lillian on every possible occasion.

  Lillian was punished for playing the lover. Now she must be the husband, too. Helen had forgotten Jay but the exchange had left Lillian as a hostage.

  Not knowing how to lighten the burden she said one day: “You ought to travel again. This city cannot be good for you. A place where you have been lonely and unhappy for so long must be the wrong place.�
��

  That very night there was a fire in Helen’s house, in the apartment next to hers. She interpreted this as a sign that Lillian’s intuitions for her were wise. She decided to travel again.

  They parted at the corner of a street, gaily, as if for a short separation. Gaily, with green eyes flashing at one another. They lost each other’s address. It all dissolved very quickly, like a dream.

  And then Lillian felt free again. Once again she had worn the warrior armor to protect a core of love. Once again she had worn the man’s costume.

  Jay had not made her woman, but the husband and mother of his weakness.

  /

  Lillian confessed to Jay that she was pregnant. He said: “We must find the money for an abortion.” He looked irritated. She waited. She thought he might slowly evince interest in the possibility of a child. He revealed only an increased irritation. It disturbed his plans, his enjoyment. The mere idea of a child was an intrusion. He let her go alone to the doctor. He expressed resentment. And then she understood.

  She sat alone one day in their darkened room. She talked to the child inside of her.

  “My little one not born yet, I feel your small feet kicking against my womb. My little one not born yet, it is very dark in the room you and I are sitting in, just as dark as it must be for you inside of me, but it must be sweeter for you to be lying in the warmth than it is for me to be seeking in this dark room the joy of not knowing, not feeling, not seeing; the joy of lying still in utter warmth and this darkness. All of us forever seeking this warmth and this darkness, this being alive without pain, this being alive without anxiety, fear or loneliness. You are impatient to live, you kick with your small feet, but you ought to die. You ought to die in warmth and darkness because you are a child without a father. You will not find on earth this father as large as the sky, big enough to hold your whole being and your fears, larger than house or church. You will not find a father who will lull you and cover you with his greatness and his warmth. It would be better if you died inside of me, quietly, in the warmth and in the darkness.”