Ladders to Fire

by Anais Nin

  The guitar distilled its music. Rango played it with the warm sienna color of his skin, with the charcoal pupil of his eyes, with the underbrush thickness of his black eyebrows, pouring into the honey-colored box the flavors of the open road on which he lived his gypsy life: thyme, rosemary, oregano, marjoram and sage. Pouring into the resonant sound-box the sensual swing of his hammock hung across the gypsy-cart and the dreams born on his mattress of black horsehair.

  Idol of the night clubs, where men and women barred the doors and windows, lit candles, drank alcohol, and drank from his voice and his guitar the potions and herbs of the open road,charivaris of freedom, the drugs of leisure and laziness, the maypole dance of the fireflies, the horse’s neighing fanfaronade, the fandangos and ridottos of sudden lusts.

  Shrunken breasts, vacillating eyes, hibernating virilities, all drank out of Rango’s guitar and sienna voice. At dawn, not content with the life transfusion through cat guts, filled with the sap of his voice which had passed into their veins, at dawn the women laid hands upon his body like a tree. But at dawn Rango swung his guitar over his shoulder and walked away.

  Will you be here tomorrow, Rango?

  Tomorrow he might be playing and singing to his black horse’s philosophically swaying tail on the road to the south of France.

  Now arrived a very drunken Jay with his shoal of friends: five pairs of eyes wide open and vacant, five men wagging their heads with felicity because they are five. One a Chinese poet, tributary of Lao Tze; one Viennese poet, echo of Rilke; Hans the painter derived from Paul Klee; an Irish writer feebly stemming from Joyce. What they will become in the future does not concern them: at the present moment they are five praising each other and they feel strong and they are tottering with felicity.

  They had had dinner at the Chinese restaurant, a rice without salt and meat with tough veins, but because of the shoal beatitude Jay proclaimed he had never eaten such rice, and five minutes later forgetting himself he said: “Rice is for the dogs!” The Chinese poet was hurt, his eyelids dropped humbly.

  Now as they walked up the stairs he explained in neat phrases the faithfulness of the Chinese wife and Jay foamed with amazement: oh, such beautiful faithfulness!—he would marry a Chinese woman. Then the Chinese poet added: In China all tables are square. Jay almost wept with delight at this, it was the sign of a great civilization. He leaned over perilously and said with intimate secretiveness: In New Jersey when I was a boy tables were always round; I always hated round tables.

  Their feet were not constructed for ascensions at the present moment; they might as well remain midway and call at Soutine’s studio.

  On the round stairway they collided with Stella susurrating in a taffeta skirt and eating fried potatoes out of a paper bag. Her long hair swayed as if she sat on a child’s swing.

  Her engaging gestures had lassoed an artist known for his compulsion to exhibit himself unreservedly, but he was not yet drunk enough and was for the moment content with strumming on his belt. Stella, not knowing what spectacle was reserved for her in his imagination, took the offering pose of women in Florentine paintings, extending the right hip like a holy water stand, both hands open as if inviting pigeons to eat from her palms, stylized, liturgical, arousing in Manuel the same impulse which had once made him set fire to a ballet skirt with a cigarette.

  But Manuel was displaced by a figure who moved with stately politeness, his long hair patined with brilliantine, his face set in large and noble features by the men who carved the marble faces in the hall of fame.

  He bowed ciously over women’s hands with the ritualistic deliberateness of a Pope. His decrees, issued with handkissing, with soothing opening and closing of doors, extending of chairs, were nevertheless fatal: he held full power of decision over the delicate verdict: is it tomorrow’s art?

  No one could advance without his visa. He gave the passports to the future. Advance…or else: My dear man, you are a mere echo of the past.

  Stella felt his handkissing charged with irony, felt herself installed in a museum not of modem art—blushed. To look at her in this ironic manner while scrupulously adhering to medieval salutations this man must know that she was one to keep faded flowers.

  For he passed on with royal detachment and gazed seriously for relief at the steel and wood mobiles turning gently in the breeze of the future, like small structures of nerves vibrating in the air without their covering of flesh, the new cages of our future sorrows, so abstract they could not even contain a sob.

  Jay was swimming against the compact stream of visitors looking for re-enforcement to pull out the Chinese poet who had stumbled into a very large garbage can in the front yard, and who was neatly folded in two, severely injured in his dignity. But he was arrested on his errand by the sight of Sabina and he thought why are there women in whom the sediment of experience settles and creates such a high flavor that when he had taken her he had also possessed all the unexplored regions of the world he had wanted to know, the men and women he would never have dared to encounter. Women whose bodies were a labyrinth so that when he was lying beside her he had felt he was taking a journey through the ancient gorge where Paracelsus dipped his sick people in fishing nets into lukewarm water, like a journey back into the womb, and he had seen several hundred feet above his head the little opening in the cathedral archway of the rocks through which the sun gleamed like a knife of gold.

  But too late now to dwell on the panoramic, great voyage flavors of Sabina’s body: the Chinese poet must be saved.

  At this moment Sabina intercepted a look of tenderness between Jay and Lillian, a tenderness he had never shown her. The glance with which Lillian answered him was thrown around him very much like a safety net for a trapezist, and Sabina saw how Jay, in his wildest leaps, never leaped out of range of the net of protectiveness extended by Lillian.

  The Chess Player noted with a frown that Sabina picked up her cape and made her way to the imitation Italian balcony. She was making a gradual escape; from the balcony to balcony, she would break the friendly efforts made to detain her, and reach the exit. He could not allow this to go on, at a Party everyone should pursue nothing but his individual drama. Because Lillian and Jay had stood for a moment on the same square and Sabina had caught Jay leaping spuriously into the safety net of Lillian’s protectiveness, now Sabina acted like one pierced by a knife and left the game for a balcony.

  Where she stood now the noises of the Party could not reach her. She heard the wind and rain rushing through the trees like the lamentation of reeds in shallow tropical waters.

  Sabina was lost.

  The broken compass which inhabited her and whose wild fluctuations she had always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in place of direction, was suddenly fractured so that she no longer knew the relief of tides, ebbs and flows and dispersions.

  She felt lost.

  The dispersion had become too vast, too extended. For the first time a shaft of pain appeared cutting through the nebulous pattern. Pain lies only in reflection, in awareness. Sabina had moved so fast that all pain had passed swiftly as through a sieve, leaving a sorrow like children’s sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by a new interest. She had never known a pause.

  And suddenly in this balcony, she felt alone.

  Her cape, which was more than a cape, which was a sail, which was the feelings she threw to the four winds to be swelled and swept by the wind in motion, lay becalmed.

  Her dress was becalmed.

  It was as if now she wore nothing that the wind could catch, swell and propel.

  For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.

  Jealousy had entered her body and refused to run through it like sand through an hourglass. The silvery holes of her sieve against sorrow granted her at birth through which everything passed through and out painlessly, had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her.

  She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies, and her
true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the wild gallopings of romantic riders in operas and legends, but a cavalcade which suddenly revealed the stage prop: a papier-mâché horse.

  She had lost her boat, her sails, her cape, her horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once, leaving her stranded on a balcony, among dwarfed trees, diminished clouds, a miserly rainfall.

  In the semi-darkness of that winter evening, her eyes were blurred. And then as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the senses, the ears, the touch, the palate, all movements of the body, all its external ways of communicating with the exterior, she suddenly felt a little deaf, a little blind, a little paralyzed; as if life, in coiling upon itself into a smaller, slower inward rhythm, were thinning her blood.

  She shivered, with the same tremor as the leaves, feeling for the first time some small withered leaves of her being detaching themselves.

  The Chess Player placed two people on a square.

  As they danced a magnet pulled her hair and his together, and when they pulled their heads away, the magnet pulled their mouths together and when they separated the mouths, the magnet clasped their hands together and when they unclasped the hnds their hips were soldered. There was no escape. When they stood completely apart then her voice spiraled around his, and his eyes were caught in the net grillage which barred her breasts.

  They danced off the square and walked into a balcony. Mouth meeting mouth, and pleasure striking like a gong, once, twice, thrice, like the beating wings of large birds. The bodies traversed by a rainbow of pleasure.

  By the mouth they flowed into each other, and the little grey street ceased to be an impasse in Montparnasse. The balcony was now suspended over the Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea, the Italian lakes, and through the mouth they flowed and coursed through the world.

  While on the wall of the studio there continued to hang a large painting of a desert in smoke colors, a desert which parched the throat. Imbedded in the sand many little bleached bones of lovelessness.

  “The encounter of two is pure, in two there is some hope of truth,” said the Chess Player catching the long floating hair of Stella as she passed and confronting her with a potential lover.

  Behind Stella hangs a painting of a woman with a white halo around her head. Anxiety had carved diamond holes through her body and her airiness came from this punctured faith through which serenity had flown out.

  What Stella gave now was only little pieces of herself, pieces carefully painted in the form of black circles of wit, squares of yellow politeness, triangles of blue friendliness, or the mock orange of love: desire. Only little pieces from her external armor. What she gave now was a self which a man could only carry across the threshold of an abstract house with only one window on the street and this street a desert with little white bones bleaching in the sun.

  Deserts of mistrust.

  The houses are no longer hearths; they hang like mobiles turning to the changing breeze while they love each other like ice skaters on the top layers of their invented selves, blinded with the dust of attic memories, within the windowless houses of their fears.

  The guests hang their coats upon a fragile structure like the bar upon which ballet dancers test their limb’s wit.

  The Party spreads like an uneasy octopus that can no longer draw in his tentacles to seize and strangle the core of its destructiveness.

  In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expose a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defenses, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night—his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. Thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell.

  And if you feel a little compressed, a little cramped in your daily world, you can take a walk through a Chirico painting. The houses have only façades, so escape is assured; the colonnades, the volutes, valances extend into the future and you can walk into space.

  The painterspeopled the world with a new variety of fruit and tree to surprise you with the bitterness of what was known for its sweetness and the sweetness of what was known for its bitterness, for they all deny the world as it is and take you back to the settings and scenes of your dreams. You slip out of a Party into the past or the future.

  This meandering led the Chess Player to stray from his geometrical duties, and he was not able to prevent a suicide. It was Lillian who stood alone on a square; Lillian who had begun the evening like an African dancer donning not only all of her Mexican silver jewelry but a dress of emerald green of a starched material which had a bristling quality like her mood.

  She had moved from one to another with gestures of her hands inciting others to foam, to dance. She teased them out of their nonchalance or detachment. People would awaken from their lethargies as in a thunderstorm; stand, move, ignite, catching her motions, her hands beating a meringue of voices, a soufflé of excitement. When they were ready to follow her into some kind of tribal dance, she left them, to fall again into limpness or to walk behind her enslaved, seeking another electrical charge.

  She could not even wait for the end of the Party to commit her daily act of destruction. So she stood alone in her square defended by her own bristles and began: “No one is paying any attention to me. I should not have worn this green dress: it’s too loud. I’ve just said the wrong thing to Brancusi. All these people have accomplished something and I have not. They put me in a panic. They are all so strong and so sure of themselves. I feel exactly as I did in my dream last night: I had been asked to play at a concert. There were so many people. When I went to play, the piano had no notes, it was a lake, and I tried to play on the water and no sound came. I felt defeated and humiliated. I hate the way my hair gets wild. Look at Stella’s hair so smooth and clinging to her face. Why did I tease her? She looked so tremulous, so frightened, as if pleading not to be hurt. Why do I rush and speak before thinking? My dress is too short.”

  In this invisible hara-kiri she tore off her dress, her jewels, tore off every word she had uttered, every smile, every act of the evening. She was ashamed of her talk, of her silences, of what she had given, and of what she had not given, to have confided and not to have confided.

  And now it was done. A complete house-wrecking service. Every word, smile, act, silver jewel, lying on the floor, with the emerald green dress, and even Djuna’s image of Lillian to which she had often turned for comfort, that too lay shattered on the ground. Nothing to salvage. A mere pile of flaws. A little pile of ashes from a bonfire of self-criticism.

  The Chess Player saw a woman crumpling down on a couch as if her inner frame had collapsed, smiled at her drunkenness and took no note of the internal suicide.

  Came the grey-haired man who makes bottles, Lawrence Vail, saying: “I still occasionally and quite frequently and very perpetually empty a bottle. This is apt to give one a guilty feeling. Is it not possible I moaned and mooned that I have neglected the exterior (of the bottle) for the interior (of the bottle)? Why cast away empty bottles? The spirits in the bottle are not necessarily the spirit of the bottle. The spirit of the spirits of the bottle are potent, potential substances that should not discarded, eliminated in spleen, plumbing and hangover. Why not exteriorize these spirits on the body of the bottle…”

  The Chess Player saw it was going to happen.

  He saw Djuna slipping off one of the squares and said: “Come here! Hold hands with Jay’s warm winey white-trash friends. It is too early in the evening for you to be slipping off.”

  Djuna gave him a glance of despair, as one does before falling.

  She knew it was now going to happen.

  This dreaded mood which came, warning her by dimming the lights, muffling the sounds, effacing the faces as in great snowstorms.

  She would be inside of the Party as inside a colored ball, being swung by red ribb
ons, swayed by indigo music. All the objects of the Fair around her—the red wheels, the swift chariots, the dancing animals, the puppet shows, the swinging trapezes, words and faces swinging, red suns bursting, birds singing, ribbons of laughter floating and catching her, teasing hands rustling in her hair, the movements of the dance like all the motions of love: taking, bending, yielding, welding and unwelding, all the pleasures of collisions, every human being opening the cells of his gaiety.

  And then wires would be cut, lights grow dim, sounds muffled, colors paled.

  At this moment, like the last message received through her inner wireless from the earth, she always remembered this scene: she was sixteen years old. She stood in a dark room brushing her hair. It was a summer night. She was wearing her nightgown. She leaned out of the window to watch a party taking place across the way.

  The men and women were dressed in rutilant festive colors she had never seen before, or was she dressing them with the intense light of her own dreaming, for she saw their gaiety, their relation to each other as something unparalleled in splendor. That night she yearned so deeply for this unattainable party, fearing she would never attend it, or else that if she did she would not be dressed in those heightened colors, she would not be so shining, so free. She saw herself attending but invisible, made invisible by timidity.

  Now when she had reached this Party, where she had been visible and desired, a new danger threatened her: a mood which came and carried her off like an abductor, back into darkness.

  This mood was always provoked by a phrase out of a dream: “This is not the place.”

  (What place? Was it the first party she wanted and none other, the one painted out of the darkness of her solitude?)

  The second phrase would follow: “He is not the one.”