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Full text of "Winter of artifice; three novelettes"

WI^TEK 

OF ARTIFICL 

three novelettes 
h}i anais nin 




{lA^JUJ^ 



WIIVTER OF ARTIFICE 

THREE !\OVE[ETTEK 



WIIVTER 

OF ARTIFICE 

three novelettes 
bj^ anais nin 



WITH ENi:il/lVI\l-S IIV lA^ HIIUH 



AlAIV SHALLOW 

IIEIVVEII 



Copyright 1945, 1946, 1948 by Anais Nin 
All rights reserved. 

Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 61-17530 



Stella 



Winter of Artifice 55 



The Voice 120 



Stellu 



STELLA sat in a small, dark room and watched her own figure 
acting on tlie screen. Stella watched her "double" moving in 
the light, and she did not recognize her. She almost hated her. Her 
first reaction was one of revolt, of rejection. This image was not 
she. She repudiated it. It was a work of artifice, of lighting, of stage 
setting. 

The shock she felt could not be explained by the obvious differ- 
ence between her daily self to which she purposely brought no en- 
hancement and the screen image which was illuminated. It was not 
only that the eyes were enlarged and deepened, that the long eye- 
lashes played like some Oriental latticework around them and in- 
tensified the interior light. The shock came from some violent con- 
trast between Stella's image of herself and the projected self she 
could not recognize at all. To begin with, she had always seen her- 
self in her own interior mirror, as a child woman, too small. And 
then this little bag of poison she carried within, the poison of mel- 
ancholy and dissatisfaction she always felt must be apparent in her 
coloring, must produce a grey tone, or brown ( the colors she wore 
in preference to others, the sackcloth robes of punishment). And 
the paralyzing fears, fear of love, fear of people coming too near 
(nearness brings wounds), invading her — her tensions and stage 
frights in the face of love. . . The first kiss for example, that first 
kiss which was to transport her, dissolve her, which was to swing 
her upward into the only paradise on earth. . . that first kiss of 



which she had been so frightened that at the moment of the miracle, 
out of panic, nerves, from her dehcately shaped stomach came dark 
rumbhng Kke some long-sleeping volcano becoming active. 

Whereas the image on the screen was completely washed of the 
coloring and tones of sadness. It was imponderably hght, and 
moved always with such a flowering of gestures that it was like the 
bloom and flowering of nature. This figure moved with ease, 
with ilhmitableness towards others, in a dissolution of feeling. The 
eyes opened and all the marvels of love, all its tonahties and nu- 
ances and multiplicities poured out as for a feast. The body danced 
a dance of receptivity and response. The hair undulated and swung 
as if it had breathing pores of its own, its own currents of life and 
electricity, and the hands preceded the gesture of the body like 
some slender orchestra leader's baton unleashing a symphony. 

This was not the grey-faced child who had run away from home 
to become an actress, who had known hunger and limitations and 
obstacles, who had not yet given herself as she was giving herself 
on the screen. . . . 

And the second shock was the response of the people. 

They loved her. 

Sitting next to her, they did not see her, intent on loving the 
woman on the screen. 

Because she was giving to many what most gave to the loved 
one. A voice altered by love, desire, the lips forming a smile of 
open tenderness. They were permitted to witness the exposure of 
being in a moment of high feeling, of tenderness, indulgence, 
dreaming, abandon, sleepiness, mischievousness, which was only 
uncovered in moments of love and intimacy. 

They received these treasures of a caressing glance, a unique to- 



nality and voice, an intimate gesture by which we are enchanted 
and drawn to the one we love. This openness they were sharing 
was the miraculous openness and revelation which took place 
only in love, and it caused a current of love to flow between the 
audience and the woman on the screen, a current of gratitude. . . . 
Then this response moved like a searchlight and found her, smaller, 
less luminous, less open, poorer, and like some diminished image 
of the other, but it flowed around her, identified her. The audience 
came near her, touched her, asked for her signature. And she hung 
her head, drooped, could not accept the worship. The woman on 
the screen was a stranger to her. She did not see any analogy, she 
saw only the violent contrast which only reinforced her conviction 
that the screen image was illusory, artificial, artful. She was a de- 
ceiver, a pretender. The woman on the screen went continually for- 
ward, carried by her story, led by the plot loaned to her. But 
Stella, Stella herself was blocked over and and over again by inner 
obstacles. 

What Stella had seen on the screen, the figure of which she had 
been so instantaneously jealous, was the free Stella. What did not 
appear on the screen was the shadow of Stella, her demons, doubt 
and fear. And Stella was jealous. She was not only jealous of a more 
beautiful woman, but of a free woman. She marvelled at her own 
movements, their flow and ease. She marvelled at the passionate 
giving that came like a flood from her eyes, melting everyone, an 
act of osmosis. And it was to this woman men wrote letters and 
this woman they fell in love with, courted. 

They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, 
the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the 
image of their fantasy. 



No metallic eyes or eyes of crystal as in other women, but liquid, 
throwing a mist dew and vapor. No definite smile but a hovering, 
evanescent, uncapturable smile which set off all pursuits. An air of 
the unformed, waiting to be formed, an air of eluding, waiting to 
be crystallized, an air of evasion, waiting to be catalyzed. Indef- 
inite contours, a wavering voice capable of all tonalities, tapering 
to a whisper, an air of flight waiting to be captured, an air of turning 
comers perpetually and vanishing, some quality of matter that calls 
for an imprint, a carving, this essence of the feminine on which 
men could impose any desire, which awaited fecundation, which 
invited, lured, appealed, drew, ensorcelled by its seeming incom- 
pleteness, its hazy mysteries, its rounded edges. 

The screen Stella with her transparent wax face, changing and 
changeable, promising to meet any desire, to mould itself, to re- 
spond, to invent if necessary. . . so that the dream of man like some 
sharp instrument knew the moment had come to imprint his most 
secret image. . . The image of Stella mobile, receiving the wish, the 
desire, the image imposed upon it. 



She bought a very large, very spacious Movie Star bed of white 
satin. 

It was not the bed of her childhood, which was particularly small 
because her father had said she was a pixie and she would never 
grow taller. 

It was not the student bed on which she had slept during the 
years of poverty before she became a well-known actress. 

It was the bed she had dreamed and placed in a setting of 



10 



grandeur, it was the bed that her screen self had often been placed 
in, very wide and very sumptxious and not lilce her at all. And 
together with the bed she had dreamed a room of mirrors, and very 
large perfume bottles and a closet full of hats and rows of shoes, 
and the white rug and setting of a famous screen ac-tress, altogether 
as it had been dreamed by so many women. And finally she had 
them all, and she lived among them without feeUng that they 
belonged to her, that she had the stature and the assurance they 
demanded. The large bed . . . she slept in it as if she were sleeping 
in a screen story. Uneasily. And not until she found a way of slip- 
ping her small body away from the splendor, satin, space, did she 
sleep well: by covering her head. 

And when she covered her head she was back in the small bed 
of her childhood, back in the small space of the little girl who was 
afraid. 

The hats, properly perched on stands as in all women's dreams 
of an actress wardrobe, were never taken down. They required 
such audacity. They demanded that a role be played to its maxi- 
mum perfection. So each time she had reached into the joyous hat 
exhibit, looked at tlie treasured hats, she took again the httle skull 
cap, the unobtrusive page and choir-boy cap. 

The moment when her small hand hesitated, lavishing even a 
caress over the arrogant feather, the challenged upward tilts, the 
regal velvets, the labyrinthian veils, the assertive gallant ribbons, 
the plumage and decorations of triumph, was it doubt which 
reached for the tiny skull cap of the priest, choir boy and scholar? 

Was it doubt which threw a suspicious glance over the shoes 
she had collected for their courage, shoes intended to walk the most 
entrancing and dangerous paths? Shoes of assurance and daring 



exploration, shoes for new situations, new steps, new places. All 
shined and polished for variety and change and adventure, and 
then each day rebuked, left like museum pieces on their shelves 
while she took the familiar and slightiy worn ones that would not 
impose on her feet too large a role, too great an undertaking, shoes 
for the familiar route to the studio, to the people she knew well, to 
the places which held no surprises. . . . 



Once when Stella was on the stage acting a love scene, which 
was taking place after a scene in a snowstorm, one of the flakes of 
artificial snow remained on the wing of her small and delicate nose. 
And then, during the exalted scene, the woman of warm snow 
whose voice and body seemed to melt into one's hands, the dream 
of osmosis, the dream of every lover, to find a substance that wiU 
confound with yours, dissolve, and yield and incorporate and be- 
come indissoluble — aU during this scene there lay the snowflake 
catching the light and flashing signals of gently humorous inap- 
propriateness and misplacement. The snowflake gave the scene an 
imperfection which touched the heart and brought all the feelings 
of the watchers to converge and rest upon that infintely moving 
absurdity of the misplaced snowflake. 

If Stella had known it she would have been crushed. The light- 
est of her defects, weighing no more than a snowflake, which touch- 
ed the human heart as only fallibility can touch it, aroused Stella's 
self-condemnation and weighed down upon her soul with the 
oppressive weight of all perfectionism. 



12 



At times the woman on the screen and the woman she was every 
day encountered and fused together. And those were the moments 
when the impetus took its flight in full opulence and reached 
plenitude. They were so rare that she considered them peaks 
inaccessible to daily living, impossible to attain continuously. 

But what killed them was not the altitude, the rarefied intensity 
of them. What killed them for her was that they remained unan- 
swerable. It was a moment human beings did not feel together or 
in rhythm. It was a moment to be felt alone. It was the solitude that 
was unbearable. 

Whenever she moved forward she fell into an abysm. 

She remembered a day spent in full freedom by the sea with 
Bruno. He had fallen asleep late and she had slipped away for a 
swim. All through the swimming she had the impression of swim- 
ming into an ocean of feeling — because of Bruno she would no 
longer move separately from this great moving body of feeling 
undulating with her which made of her emotions an illimitable 
symphonic joy. She had the marvellous sensation of being a part 
of a vaster world and moving with it because of moving in rhythm 
with another being. 

The joy of this was so intense that when she saw him approach- 
ing she ran towards him wildly, joyously. Coming near him like a 
ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by 
her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, 
instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embrac- 
ing a statue. Without hurt to her body, but with immeasurable hurt 
to her feelings. 



13 



Bruno had never seen her on the screen. He had seen her for the 
first time at a pompous reception where she moved among the other 
women like a dancer among pedestrians and distinguished herself 
by her mobility, by her voice which trembled and wavered, by her 
little nose which wrinkled when she smiled, her lips which shivered, 
the foreign accent which gave a hesitancy to her phrases as if she 
were about to make a portentous revelation, and by her hands 
which vibrated in the air. 

He saw her in reality, yet he did not see Stella but the dream of 
Stella. He loved instantly a woman without fear, without doubt, 
and his nature, which had never taken flight, could now do so with 
her. He saw her in flight. He did not sense that a nature such as hers 
could be paralyzed, frozen with fear, could retreat, could regress, 
negate, and then in extreme fear, could also turn about and destroy. 
For Stella this love had been born under the zodiacal sign of 
doubt. For Bruno, under the sign of faith. 

In a setting of opulence, a setting of such elegance that it had re- 
quired the wearing of one of the museum hats, the one with the 
regal feather, from two opposite worlds they came: Stella consum- 
ed with a hunger for love, and Bruno by the emptiness of his life. 

As Stella appeared among the women, what struck Bruno was 
that he was seeing for the first time an animated woman. He felt 
caught in her current, carried. Her rhythm was contagious. He felt 
instantaneous obedience to her movement. 

At the same time he felt wounded. Her eyes had pierced some 
region of his being no eyes had ever touched before. The vulner- 
able Bruno was captured, his moods and feelings henceforth deter- 
mined, woven into hers. From the first moment they looked at each 
other it was determined that all she said would hurt liim but that 



14 



she could instantly heal him by moving one inch nearer to him. 
Then the hurt was instantly healed by the odor of her hair or the 
light touch of her hand on him. 

An acute sense of distance was immediately established, such as 
Bruno had never known before to exist between men and women. 
A slight contradiction (and she loved contradiction) separated 
him from her and he suffered. And this suffering could only be 
abated by her presence and would be renewed as soon as they sep- 
arated. 

Bruno was discovering that he was not complete or autonomous. 

Nor did Stella promise him completeness, nearness. She had the 
changing quahty of dream. She obeyed her own oscillations. What 
came into being between them was not a marriage but an interplay 
where notliing was ever fixed. No planetary tensions, chartered and 
mapped and measured. 

Her movements were of absolute abandon, yieldingness, and 
then at the smallest sign of lethargy or neglect, complete with- 
drawal and he had to begin courtship anew. Every day she could 
be won again and lost again. And the reason for her flights and 
departures, her breaks from him, were obscure and mysterious to 
him. 

One night when they had been separated for many days, she 
received a telegram that he would visit her for a whole night. For 
her this whole night was as long, as portentous, as deep as a whole 
existence. She dwelt on every detail of it, she improvised upon it, 
she constructed and imagined and lived in it completely for many 
days. This was to be their marriage. 

Her eyes overflowed with expectancy as she met him. Then she 
noticed that he had come without a valise. She did not seek the 



15 



cause. She was struck by this as a betrayal of their love. Her being 
closed with an anguish inexplicable to him (an anguish over the 
possibility of a break, a separation, made her consider every small 
break, every small separation like a premonition of an ultimate 
one). 

He spent his time in a struggle to reassure her, to reconquer her, 
to renew her faith, and she in resisting. She considered the demands 
of reality as something to be entirely crushed in favor of love, that 
obedience to reality meant a weakness in love. 

Reality was the dragon that must be killed by the lover each time 
anew. And she was blind to her own crime against love, corroding 
it with the acid of her own doubt. 

But a greater obstacle she had yet to encounter. 

At the first meeting the dream of their encounter eclipsed the 
surrounding regions of their hves and isolated them together as 
inside a cocoon of silk and sensation. It gave them the illusion that 
each was tlie center of the other's existence. 

No matter how exigent was the demand made upon Stella by her 
screen work, she always overthrew every obstacle in favor of love. 
She broke contracts easily, sailed at a moment's notice, and no pur- 
suit of fame could interfere with the course of love. This^dlling:. 
ness to sacrifice external achievements or success_to_loye was 
typically feminineJjut^she expected Bru no to bghaye^ in th e same 
manner. 

But he was a person who could only swim in the ocean of love if 
his moorings were maintained, the long established moorings of 
marriage and children. The stately house of permanency and con- 
tinuity that was his home, built around his role in the world, built 
on peace and faith, with the smile of his wife which had become 



for him the smile of his mother — this edifice made out of the other 
components of his nature, his need for a haven, for children who 
were as his brothers had been, for a wife who was that which his 
mother had been. He could not throw over all these creations and 
possessions of his day for a night's dream, and Stella was that 
night's dream, all impermanency, vanishing and returning only 
with the night. 

She, the homeless one, could not respect that which he respected. 
He, by respecting the established, felt free of guilt. He was paying 
his debt of honor and he was free, free to adore her, free to dream 
her. This did not appease her. Nor the simplicity with which he ex- 
plained that he could not tear from its foundation the human home, 
with the children and the wife whom he protected. He could only 
love and Uve in peace if he fulfilled his promises to what he had 
created. 

It was not that Stella wanted the wife's role or place. She knew 
deep down how unfitted she was for this role and to that side of his 
nature. It was merely that she could not share a love without the 
feeling that into this region of Bruno's being she did not care to en- 
ter, that there lay there a danger of death to their relationship. For 
her, any opening, any unconquered region contained the hidden 
enemy, the seed of death, the possible destroyer. Only absolute 
possession calmed her fear. 

He was at peace with his conscience and therefore he feared no 
punishment for the joys she gave him. It was a condition of his 
nature. Because he had not destroyed or displaced, he felt he would 
not be destroyed or displaced and he could give his faith and joy 
to the dream. Her anguish and fears were inexplicable to him. For 
him there was no enemy ready to spring at her from the calm of his 
house. 

17 



If a telephone call or some emergency at home tore him away 
from her, for her it was abandon, and the end of love. If the time 
were shortened it signified a diminishing of love. If a choice were to 
be made she felt that he would choose his wife and children against 
her. None of these fatalistic signs were visible to him. 

This hotel room was for him the symbol of the freedom of their 
love, the voyage, the exploration, the unknovsna, the restlessness 
that could be shared together; the surprises, the marvellously 
formless and bodiless and houseless freedom of this world created 
by two people in a hotel room. It was outside of the known, the 
familiar, and built only out of intensity, the present, with the great 
exalted beauty of the changing, the fluctuating, the dangerous and 
unmoored. . . . 

Would she destroy this world created only on the fragrance of a 
voice, enhanced by intermittent disappearances? The privilege of 
traveUing further into space and wonder because free of ballast? 
This marvellous world patterned only according to the irregular- 
ities of a dream, with its dark abysms in between, its change and 
flow and capriciousness? 

Bruno clung desperately to the beauty, to the preciousness of 
this essence, pure because it was an essence. And for him even less 
threatened by death than his first love had been by the develop- 
ment of daily life. ( For at a certain moment the face of his wife was 
no longer the face of a dream but became the face of his mother. 
At the same moment as the dream died, his home became the 
human and dreamless home of his boyhood, his children became 
the playmates of his adolescence. ) 

And Stella, when he explained this, knew the truth of it, yet she 
was the victim of a stronger demon, a demon of doubt blindly seek- 



18 



ing visible proofs, the proofs of the love in reality which would 
most effectively destroy the dream. For passion usually has the 
instinctive wisdom to evade the test of human life together which is 
only possible to love. For Stella, because of her doubt, so desper- 
ately in need of reassurance, if he surrendered all to her it would 
mean that he was giving all his total love to their dream, whereas 
to him surrendering all meant giving Stella a lesser self (since 
passion was the love of the dreamed self and not the reality). 

There was in this hotel room stronger proof of the strength 
of the dream, and Stella demanded proofs of its human reality 
and in so doing exposed its incompleteness, and hastened its end 
( Pandora's box ) . 

Stella! he always cried out as he entered, enveloping her in the 
fervor of his voice. 

Stella! he repeated, to express how she filled his being and 
overflowed within him, to fill the room with this name which filled 
him. 

He had a way of saying it which was like crowning her the 
favorite. He made of each encounter such a rounded, complete 
experience, charged with the violence of a great hunger. Not hav- 
ing seen her upon awakening, not having helped to free her of 
the cocoon web of the night, not having shared her first contact 
with daylight, her first meal, the inception of her moods for that 
day, the first intentions and plans for action, he felt all the more 
impelled to catch her at the moment of the climax, to join her at 
the culmination. The lost, missed moments of life together, the 
lost, missed gestures, were thrown in desperation to feed the 
bonfire known only to foreshortened lives. 

Because of all this that was lost around the love, the hotel room 



19 



became the island, the poem and the paradise, because of all that 
was torn away, and sunk away. 

The miracle of intensification. 

Yet Stella asked, mutely, with every gasp of doubt and anguish: 
Let us live together (as if human life would give a certitude!). 
And he answered, mutely, with every act of faith: Let us dream 
together! 

He arrived each day with new eyes. Undimmed by familiarity. 
New eyes for the woman he had not seen enough. New, intense, 
deeply seeing eyes, seeing her in her entirety each time like a 
new person. 

As he did not see the process of her walking towards their island, 
dressing for it, resting for it, fighting oflF the inundation and 
demands of other people to reach him, her presence seemed like 
an apparition, and he had to repossess her, because apparitions 
tend to disappear as they come, by routes unknovni, into countries 
unknown. 

There was between them this knowledge of the missing dimen- 
sion and the need to recapture the lost terrain, to play the 
emotional detective for the lost fragments of the selves which had 
hved alone, as separate pieces, in a great effort to bring them all 
together into one again. 



At his wrists the hair showed brilliant gold. 

Hers dark and straight, and his curled, so that at times it seemed 



20 



it was his hair which enveloped her, it was his desire which had 
the feminine sinuosities to espouse and cHng, while hers was rigid. 

It was he who surrounded and enveloped her, as his curled hair 
wound around the straightness of hers, and how sweet this had 
been in her distress and her chaos. She touched his wrists always 
in wonder, as if to ascertain his presence, because the joyousness 
of his coloring delighted her, because the smoothness of his move- 
ments was a preliminary to their accord and rhythms. Their 
movements toward each other were symphonic and preordained. 
Her divination of his moods and his of hers synchronized their 
movements like those of a dance. There were days when she felt 
small and weak, and he then increased his stature to receive and 
shelter her, and his arms and body seemed a fortress, and there 
were days when he was in need of her strength, days when their 
mouths transmitted all the fevers and hungers, days when frenzy 
called for an abandon of the whole body. Days when the caresses 
were a drug, or a symphony, or small secret duets and duels, or 
vast complex veilings which neither could entirely tear apart, and 
there were secrets, and resistances, and frenzies, and again dissolu- 
tions from which it seemed as if neither could ever return to the 
possession of his independence. 

There was always this mingling of hairs, which later in the bath 
she would tenderly separate from hers, laying the tendrils before 
her like the signs of the calendar of their love, the unwitherable 
flowers of their caresses. 

While he was there, melted by his eyes, his voice, sheltered 
in his tallness, encompassed by his attentiveness, she was joyous. 
But when he was gone, and so entirely gone that she was for- 
bidden to write him or telephone him, that she had in reality 



no way to reach him, touch him, call him back, then she became 
possessed again with this frenzy against barriers, against limita- 
tions, against forbidden regions. To have touched the point of fire 
in him was not enough.p'o be his secret dream, his secret passion. 
She must ravage and conquer the absolute, for the sake of love. 
Not knowing that she was at this moment the enemy of love, its 
executionerT^ 

Once he stood about to depart and she asked him: can't you 
stay for the whole night? And he shook his head sadly, his blue 
eyes no longer joyous, but blurred. This firmness with which she 
thought he was defending the rights of his wife, and with which 
in reahty he only defended the equilibrium of his scrupulous soul, 
appeared to her like a flaw in the love. 

If Stella felt an obstacle placed before one of her wishes such 
as her wish that Bruno should stay the whole night with her 
when it was utterly impossible for him to do so, this obstacle, 
no matter of what nature, became the symbol of a battle she must 
win or else consider herself destroyed 

She did not pause to ask herself the reasons for the refusal, or 
to consider the validity of these reasons, the claims to which others 
may have had a right. The refusal represented for her the failure 
to obtain a proof of love. The removal of this obstacle became a 
matter of life and death, because for her it balanced success or 
failure, abandon or treachery, triumph or power. 

The small refusal, based on an altogether separate reason, un- 
related to Stella, became the very symbol of her inner sense of 
frustration, and the effort to overcome it the very symbol of her 
salvation. 

If she could bend the will and decision of Bnmo, it meant that 



22 



Bruno loved her. If not, it meant Bnmo did not love her. The test 
was as devoid of real meaning as the tearing of leaves on a flower 
done by superstitious lovers who place their destiny in the mathe- 
matics of coincidence or accident. 

And Stella, regardless of the cause, became suddenly blind to 
the feelings of everyone else as only sick people can become blind. 
She became completely isolated in this purely personal drama of 
a refusal she could not accept and could not see in any other light 
but that of a personal offense to her. A love that could not over- 
come all obstacles ( as in the myths and legends of romantic ages ) 
was not a love at all. 

( This small favor she demanded took on the proportions of the 
ancient holocausts demanded by the mystics as proofs of devotion.) 

She had reached the exaggeration, known to the emotionally 
unstable, of considering every small act as an absolute proof of 
love or hatred, and demanding of the faithful an absolute surren- 
der. In every small act of yielding Stella accumulated defenses 
against the inundating flood of doubts. The doubt devoured her 
faster than she could gather external proofs of reassurance, and 
so the love given her was not a free love but a love that must 
accumulate votive offerings like those made by the primitives to 
their jealous gods. There must be every day the renewal of 
candles, foods and precious gifts, incense and sacrifice and if neces- 
sary (and it was always necessary to the neurotic) the sacrifice 
of human life. Every human being who fell under her spell became 
not the lover, but tlie day and night nurse to this sickness, this 
unfillable longing, this ravenous devourer of human happiness. 

You won't stay all night? 

The muted, inarticulate despair these few words contained. 



23 



The unheard, unnoticed, unregistered cry of lonehness which 
arises from human beings. And not a loneliness which could be 
appeased with one night, or with a thousand nights, or with a life- 
time, or with a marriage. A lonehness that human beings could 
not fill. For it came from her separation from human beings. 
She felt her separation from human beings and beheved the lover 
alone could destroy it. 

The doubt and fear which accompanied this question made her 
stand apart like some unbending god of ancient rituals watching 
for this accumulation of proofs, the faithful offering food, blood 
and their very lives. And still the doubt was there for these were 
but external proofs and they proved nothing. They could not give 
her back her faith. 

The word penetrated Stella's being as if someone had uttered 
for the first time the name of her enemy, until then unknown to her. 

Doubt. She turned this word in the palm of her dreaming hands, 
like some tiny hieroglyph with meaning on four sides. 

From some little tunnel of obscure sensations there came almost 
imperceptible signs of agitation. 

She packed hurriedly, crushing the hat with the feather, break- 
ing his presents. 

Driving iskst in her very large, too large, her movie star car, 
driving fast, too fast away from pain, the water obscured her vision 
of the road and she set the wipers in motion. But it was not rain 
that clouded the windows. 



24 



In her movie star apartment there was a small turning stairway 
like that of a lighthouse leading to her bedroom, which was 
watched by a tall window of square glass bricks. These shone 
like a quartz cave at night. It was the prism which threw her vision 
back into seclusion again, into the wall of the self. 

It was the window of the solitary cell of tlie neurotic. 

One night when Bruno had written her that he would telephone 
her that night ( he had been banished once again, and once again 
had tried to reconquer her) because he sensed that his voice 
might accomplish what his note failed to do, at the moment when 
she knew he would telephone, she installed a long concerto on 
the phonograph and climbed the little stairway and sat on the step. 

No sooner did the concerto begin to spin than the telephone 
rang imperatively. 

Stella allowed the music to produce its counter-witchcraft. 
Against the mechanical demand of the telephone, the music 
spiralled upward like a mystical skyscraper, and triumphed. The 
telephone was silenced. 

But this was only the first bout. She climbed another step of 
the stairway and sat under the quartz window, wondering if the 
music would help her ascension away from the warmth of Bruno's 
voice. 

In the music there was a parallel to the conflict which disturbed 
her. Within the concerto too the feminine and the mascuhne 
elements were interacting. The trombone, with its assertions, and 
the flute, with its sinuosities. In this transparent battle the trom- 
bone, in Stella's ears and perhaps because of her mood, had a tone 
of defiance which was almost grotesque. In her present mood the 
masculine instrument would appear as a caricature! 



25 



And as for the flute, it was so easily victimized and overpowered. 
But it triumphed ultimately because it left an echo. Long after the 
trombone had had its say, the flute continued its mischievous, 
insistent tremolos. 

The telephone rang again. Stella moved a step farther up the 
stairs. She needed the stairs, the window, the concerto, to help 
her reach an inaccessible region where the phone might ring as 
any mechanical instrument, without reverberating in her being. 
If the ringing of the telephone had caused the smallest tremor 
through her nerves (as the voice of Bruno did) she was lost. 
Fortunate for her that the trombone was a caricature of mascu- 
linity, that it was an inflated trombone, drovwiing the sound of 
the telephone. So she smiled one of her eerie smfles, pixen and 
vixen too, at the mascuHne pretensions. Fortunate for her that 
the flute persisted in its debcate undulations, and that not once 
in the concerto did they marry but played in constant opposition 
to each other throughout. 

The telephone rang again, with a dead, mechanical persistence 
and no charm, while the music seemed to be pleading for a subtlety 
and emotional strength which Bruno was incapable of rivalling. 
The music alone was capable of climbing those stairways of 
detachment, of breaking like the waves of disturbed ocean at her 
feet, breaking there and foaming but without the power to suck 
her back into the life with Bruno and into the undertows of 
sufFering. 



She lay in the darkness of her white satin bedroom, the mirrors 
throwing aureoles of false moonlight, the rows of perfume bottles 
creating false suspended gardens. 

The mattress, the blankets, the sheets had a lightness like her 
own. They were made of the invisible material which had once 
been pawned off on a gullible king. They were made of air, or 
else she had selected them out of famihar, weighty materials and 
then touched them with her aerial hands. (So many moments 
when her reality was questionable — the time she leaped out of 
her immense automobile, and there on the vast leather seat lay 
such a diminutive pocketbook as no woman could actually use, 
the pocketbook of a midget. Or the time she turned the wheel with 
two fingers. There is a hghtness which belongs to other races, 
the race of ballet dancers. ) 

Whoever touched Stella was left with the tactile memory of 
down and bonelessness, as after touching the most delicate of 
Persian cats. 

Now lying in the dark, neither the softness of the room nor its 
whiteness could exorcise the pain she felt. 

Some word was trying to come to the surface of her being. 
Some word had sought all day to pierce through like an arrow 
the formless, inchoate mass of incidents of her life. The geological 
layers of her experience, the accumulated faces, scenes, words and 
dreams. One word was being churned to the surface of all this 
torment. It was as if she were going to name her greatest enemy. 
But she was struggling with the fear we have of naming that 
enemy. For what crystallized simultaneously with the name of the 
enemy was an emotion of helplessness against him! What good 
was naming it if one could not destroy it and free one's self? This 



27 



feeling, stronger than the desire to see the face of tlie enemy, 
almost drowned the insistent word into oblivion again. 

What Stella whispered in the dark with her foreign accent 
enhancing strongly, markedly the cruelty of the sound was: 

ma soch ism 

Sochi Och! It was the och which stood out, not ma or ism but 
the ochi which was like some primitive exclamation of pain. Am, 
am I, am I, am I, am I, whispered Stella, am I a masochist? 

She knew nothing about the word except its current meaning: 
"voluntary seeking of pain." She could go no further into her 
exploration of the confused pattern of her life and detect the origin 
of the suffering. She could not, alone, catch the inception of the 
pattern, and therefore gain power over this enemy. The night 
could not bring her one step nearer to freedom. . . . 

A few hours later she watched on the screen the story of the 
Atlantis accompanied by the music of Stravinski. 

First came a scene like a Paul Klee, wavering and humid, 
delicate and full of vibrations. The blue, the green, the violet were 
fused in tonalities which resembled her feeling, all fused together 
and so difficult to unravel. She responded with her answering 
blood rhythms, and with the same sense she always had of her- 
self possessing a very small sea, something which received and 
moved responsively in rhythm. As if every tiny cell were not 
separated by membranes, as if she were not made of separate 
nerves, sinews, blood vessels, but one total fluid component which 
could flow into others, divine their feelings, and flow back again 
into itself, a component which could be easily moved and pene- 
trated bv others like water, like the sea. 



2S 



When she saw the Paul Klee scene on the screen she instantly 
dissolved. There was no more Stella, but a fluid component 
participating at the birth of the world. The paradise of water and 
softness. 

But upon this scene came the most unexpected and terrifying 
explosion, the explosion of the earth being formed, broken, re- 
formed and broken anew into its famihar shape. 

Tliis explosion Stella was familiar with and had expected. It 
reverberated in her with unexpected violence. As if she had 
already lived it. 

Where had she experienced before this total annihilation of a 
blue, green and violet paradise, a paradise of welded cells in a 
perpetual flow and motion, that this should seem like the second 
one, and bring about such a painful, physical memory of disrup- 
tion? 

As the explosions came, once, twice, thrice, the peace was 
shattered and blackened, the colors vanished, the earth muddied 
the water, the annihilation seemed total. 

The earth reformed itself. The water cleared. The colors re- 
turned. A continent was bom above. 

In Stella the echo touched a very old, forgotten region. Through 
layers and layers of time she gazed at an image made small by 
the distance: a small figure. It is her childhood, with its small 
scenery, small climate, small atmosphere. Stella was born during 
the war. But for the diminutive figure of the child the war between 
parents — all division and separation — was as great as the world 
war. The being, small and helpless, was torn asunder by the giant 
figures of mythical parents striving and dividing. Then it was 
nations striving and dividing. Tlie sorrow was transferred, en- 



29 



larged. But it was the same sorrow: it was the discovery of hatred, 
violence, hostihty. It was the dark face of the world, which no 
childhood was ever prepared to receive. In the diminutive and 
fragile vessel of childhood lies the paradise that must be destroyed 
by explosions, so that the earth may be created anew. But the 
first impact of hatred and destruction upon the child is sometimes 
too great a burden on its innocence. The being is sundered as the 
earth is by earthquakes, as the soul cracks under violence and 
hatred. Paradise (the scene of Paul Klee) was from the first 
intended to be swallowed by the darkness. 

As Stella felt the explosions, through the microscope of her 
emotions carried backwards, she saw the fragments of the dis- 
persed and sundered being. Every little piece now with a separate 
life. Occasionally, like mercury, they fused, but they remained 
elusive and unstable. Corroding in the separateness. 

Faith and love united her to human beings as a child. She was 
known to have walked the streets at the age of six inviting all the 
passersby to a party at her home. She hailed carriages and asked 
the driver to drive "to where there were many people." 

The first explosion. The beginning of the world. The beginning 
of a pattern, the beginning of a form, a destiny, a character. Some- 
thing which always eludes the scientists, the tabulators, the 
detectives. We catch a glimpse of it, like this, through the turmoil 
of the blood which remembers the seismographic shocks. 

Stella could not remember what she saw in the mirror as a child. 
Perhaps a child never looks at the mirror. Perhaps a child, like 
a cat, is so much inside of itself it does not see itself in the mirror. 
She sees a child. The child does not remember what he looks like. 

Later she remembered what she looked like. But when she 



30 



looked at photographs of herself at one, two, three, four, five years, 
she did not recognize herself. The child is one. At one with himself. 
Never outside of himself. 

She could remember what she did, but not the reflection of what 
she did. No reflections. Six years old. Seven years old. Eight years 
old. Eleven. No image. No reflection. But feeling. 

In the mirror there never appeared a child. The first mirror had 
a frame of white wood. In it there was no Stella. A girl of fourteen 
portraying Joan of Arc, La Dame Aux Camelias, Peri Banu, 
Carlota, Electra. 

No Stella, but a disguised actress multiplied into many person- 
ages. Was it in these games that she had lost her vision of her 
true self? Could she only win it again by acting? Was that why 
now she refused every role — every role that did not contain at 
least one aspect of herself? But because they contained only one 
aspect of herself they only emphasized the dismemberment. She 
would get hold of one aspect, and not of the rest. The rest 
remained unlived. 

The first miiTor in which the self appears is very large, inlaid 
in a brown wood wall. Next to it a window pours downa so strong 
a hght that the rest of the room is in complete darkness, and the 
image of the girl who approaches the mirror is brought into 
luminous relief. It is the first spotlight, actually, the first aureole 
of lighting, bringing her into relief, but in a state of humiliation. 
She is looking at her dress, a dress of shiny, worn, dark blue serge 
which has been fixed up for her out of an old one belonging to a 
cousin. It does not fit her. It is meager, it looks poor and shrunk. 
The girl looks at the blue dress with shame. 

It is the day she has been told at school that she is gifted for 



31 



acting. They had come purposely into the class to tell her. She 
who was always quiet and did not wish to be noticed, was told 
to come and speak to the Drama teacher before everyone, and 
to hear the compliment on her first performance. And the joy, the 
dazzling joy which first struck her was instantly killed by the 
awareness of the dress. She did not want to get up, to be noticed. 
She was ashamed of the meager dress, its worn, its orphan air. 

She can only step out of this image, this dress, this humilia- 
tion by becoming someone else. She becomes Melisande, Sarah 
Bernhardt, Faust's Marguerite, La Dame Aux Camelias, Thais. 
She is decomposed before the mirror into a hundred personages, 
and recomposed into paleness, immobility and silence. 

She will never wear again the shrunken worn serge cast-off 
dress, but she will often wear again this mood, this feeling of being 
misrepresented, misunderstood, of a false appearance, of an ugly 
disguise. She was called and made visible to all, out of her shyness 
and withdrawal, and what was made visible was a girl dressed like 
an orphan and not in the costume of wonder which befitted her. 

She rejects all the plays. Because they cannot contain her. She 
wants to walk into her own self, truly presented, truly revealed. 
She wants to act only herself. She is no longer an actress willing 
to disguise herself. She is a woman who has lost herself and feels 
she can recover it by acting this self. But who knows her? What 
playwright knows her? Not the men who loved her. She cannot 
tell them. She is lost herself. All that she says about herself is false. 
She is misleading and misled. No one will admit bhndness. 

No one who does not have a white cane, or a seeing eye dog 
will admit bhndness. Yet there is no blindness or deafness as strong 
as that which takes place within the emotional self. 



32 



Seeing has to do with awareness, the clarity of the senses is 
linked to the spiritual vision, to understanding. One can look back 
upon a certain scene of life and see only a part of tlie truth. The 
characters of those we hve with appear with entire aspects missing, 
like the missing arms or legs of unearthed statues. Later, a deeper 
insight, a deeper experience will add tlie missing aspects to the 
past scene, to the lost character only partially seen and felt. Still 
later another will appear. So that with time, and witli time and 
awareness only, the scene and the person become complete, fully 
heard and fully seen. 

Inside of the being there is a defective mirror, a mirror distortei. 
by the fog of solitude, of shyness, by the climate inside of this 
particular being. It is a personal mirror, lodged in every subjective, 
interiorized form of life. 



Stella received a letter from Laura, her father's second wife. 
"Come immediately. I am divorcing your father." 

Her father was an actor. In Warsaw he had achieved fame and 
adulation. He had remained youthful and the lover of all women. 
Stella's mother, whose love for him had encompassed more than 
the man, permitted him great freedom. It was not his extravagant 
use of this freedom which had killed her feeling for him, but his 
inability to make her feel at the center of his life, feel that no matter 
what his peripheries she remained at the center. In exchange for 
her self-forgetfulness he had not been able to give anything, only 



33 



to take. He had exploited the goodness, the largeness, the volun- 
tary blindness. He had dipped into the immense reservoir of her 
love without returning to it an equal flow of tenderness, and so it 
had dried. The boundlessness of her love was to him merely an 
encouragement of his irresponsibility. He thought it could be 
used infinitely, not knowing that even an infinite love needed 
nourishment and fecundation; that no love was ever self-sustain- 
ing, self-propelling, self-renewing. 

And then one day her love died. For twenty years she had 
nourished it out of her own substance, and then it died. His selfish- 
ness withered it. And he was surprised. Immensely surprised, as 
if she had betrayed him. 

She had left with Stella. And another woman had come, younger, 
a disciple of his, who had taken up the burden of being tlie lover 
alone. Stella knew tlie generosity of the second wife, the devo- 
tion. She knew how deeply her father must have used this reservoir 
to empty it. How deeply set his pattern of taking without giving. 
Again the woman's love was emptied, burnt out. 

"He threatens to commit suicide," wrote Laura, "but I do not 
believe it." Stella did not believe it either. He loved himself too 
well. 

Stella's father met her at the station. In his physical appearance 
there was clearly manifested the fact that he was not a man related 
to others but an island. In his impeccable dress there was a touch 
of finite contours. His clothes were of an insulating material. 
Whatever they were made of, they gave the impression of being 
different materials from other people's, that the weU pressed lines 
were not intended to be disturbed by hmnan hands. It was steril- 
ized elegance conveying his uniqueness, and his perfectionism. 



34 



If his clothes had not carried this water-repellent, feeling-repellent 
quahty of perfection, his eyes would have accomplished this with 
their expression of the island. Distinctly, the person who moved 
toward him was an invader, the ship which entered this harbor was 
an enemy, the human being who approached him was violating 
the desire of islands to remain islands. His eyes were isolated. 
They created no warm bridges between them and other eyes. They 
flashed no signal of welcome, no Ught of response, and above all 
they remained as closed as a glass door. 

He wanted Stella to plead wdth Laura. "Laura suspects me of 
having an affair with a singer. She has never minded before. And 
this time it happens not to be true. I dislike being . . . exiled un- 
justly. I cannot bear false accusations. Why does she mind now? 
I can't understand. Please go and tell her I will spend the rest 
of my life making her happy. Tell her I am heartbroken." ( As he 
said these words he took out his silver cigarette case and noticing 
a small clouded spot on it he carefully polished it viath his hand- 
kerchief. ) "I've been unconscious. I didn't know she minded. 
Tell Laura I had nothing to do with this woman. She is too fat." 

"But if you had," said Stella, "wouldn't it be better to be truthful 
this Hme? She is angry. She will hate a lie now more than any- 
thing. Why aren't you sincere with her? She may have proofs." 

At the word proof his neat, alert head perked, cool, collected, 
cautious, and he said: "What proofs? She can't have proofs. I was 
careful. . . ." 

He is still lying, thought Stella. He is incurable. 

She visited Laura, who was small and childlike. She was like 
a child who had taken on a maternal role in a game, and found 
it beyond her strength. Yet she had played this role for ten years. 



Almost like a saint, the way she had closed her eyes to all his 
adventures, the way she had sought to preserve their life together. 
Her eyes always believing, diminishing the importance of his 
escapades, disregarding gossip, blaming the women more often 
than him. 

Today as she received Stella, for whom she had always had 
a strong affection, these same believing eyes were changed. There 
is nothing clearer than the mark of a wound in believing eyes. 
It shows clear and sharp, the eyes are lacerated, they seem about 
to dissolve with pain. The soft faith was gone. And Stella knew 
instantly that her pleading was doomed. 

"My father's unfaithfulness meant nothing. He always loved 
you above all others. He was light, but his deep love was for you. 
He was irresponsible, and you were too good to him, you never 
rebelled." 

But Laura defended her attitude: "I am that kind of person. I 
have great faith, great indulgence, great love. For that reason if 
someone takes advantage of this I feel betrayed and I cannot for- 
give. I have warned him gently. I was not ill over his infidehties 
but over his indehcacies. I wanted to die. I hoped he would be less 
obvious, less insolent. But now it is irrevocable. When I added up 
all his selfish remarks, his reckless gestures, the expression of 
annoyance on his face when I was ill, his indifferences to my sad- 
ness, I cannot beheve he ever loved me. He told me such impossible 
stories that he must have had a very poor idea of my judgment. 
Until now my love was strong enough to blind me . . . but now, 
understand me, Stella, I see everything. I remember words of his he 
uttered the very first day. The kind of unfaithfulness women can 
forgive is not the kind your father was guilty of. He was not unfaith- 



36 



ful by his interest in other women, but he betrayed what we had 
together: he abandoned me spiritually and emotionally. He did 
not feel for me. Another thing I cannot forgive him. He was not a 
natural man, but he was posing as an ideal being. He covered acts 
which were completely selfish under a coat of altruism. He even 
embroidered so much on this role of ideal being that I had all the 
time the deep instinct that I was being cheated, that I was living 
with a man who was acting. This I can't forgive. Even today 
he continues to lie. I have definite proofs. They fell into my hands. 
I didn't want them. And then he was not content with having 
his mistress live near me, he still wanted me to invite her to 
my house, he even taunted me for not liking her, not fraternizing 
with her. Let him cry now. I have cried for ten years. I know he 
won't kill himself. He is acting. He loves himself too much. Let 
him now measure the strengtli of this love he destroyed. I feel 
nothing. Nothing. He has killed my love so completely I do not 
even suffer. I never saw a man who could kill a love so completely. 
I say a man! I often think he was a child, he was as irresponsible 
as a child. He was a child and I became a mother and that is why I 
forgave him everything. Only a mother forgives e%erything. The 
child, of course, doesn't know when he is hurting the mother. He 
does not know when she is tired, sick; he does nothing for her. He 
takes it for granted that she is willing to die for him. The child is 
passive, yielding, and accepts everything, giving notliing in return 
but afiFection. If the mother weeps he will throw his arms around 
her and then he will go out and do exactly what caused her to weep. 
The child never thinks of the mother except as the all-giver, the 
all-forgiving, the indefatigable love. So I let my husband be the 
child. . . . But he, Stella, he was not even tender like a child, he did 



37 



not give me even the kind of love a child has for the mother. There 
was no tenderness in him!" And she wept. ( He had not wept. ) 

As Stella watched her she knew the suffering had been too great 
and that Laura's love was absolutely broken. 

When she retxuned to her father carrying the word "irrevocable" 
to him, her father exclaimed: "What happened to Laura? Such a 
meek, resigned, patient, angeUcal woman. A little girl, full of 
innocence and indulgence. And then this madness. . . ." 

He did not ask himself, he had never asked himself, what he 
must have done to destroy such resignation, such innocence, such 
indulgence. He said: "Let's look at our house for the last time." 

Until now it had been their house. But in reality the house 
belonged to Laura and she asked her husband not to enter it again, 
to make a hst of his belongings and she would have them sent 
to him. 

They stood together before the house and looked up at the 
window of his room: "I will never see my room again. It's incred- 
ible. My books are still in there, my photographs, my clothes, my 
scrap books, and I . . ." 

At the very moment they stood there a shght earthquake had 
been registered in Warsaw. At that very moment when her father's 
life was shaken by the earthquake of a woman's rebelhon, when 
he was losing love, protection, faithfulness, luxury, faith. His 
whole life disrupted in a moment of feminine rebelhon. Earth and 
the woman, and this sudden rebelhon. On the insensitive instru- 
ment of his egoism no sign had been registered of this coming 
disruption. 

As he stood there looking at his house for the last time the bowels 
of the earth shook. Laura was quietly weeping while his hfe 



m 



cracked open and all the lovingly collected possessions fell into 
an abysm. The earth opened under his perpetually dancing feet, 
his waltzes of courtship, his contrapuntal love scenes. 

In one instant it swallowed the colorful ballet of his lies, his 
pointed foot evasions, his vaporous escapes, the stage hghts and 
halos widi which he surrounded and disguised his conquests and 
appetites. Everything was destroyed in the tumult. The earth's 
anger at his hghtness, his audacities, his leaps over reahty, his 
escapes. His house cracked open and through the fissures fell his 
rare books, his collection of paintings, his press notices, the gifts 
from his admirers. 

But before this happened the earth had given him so many 
warnings. How many times had he not seen the glances of pain in 
Laiu^a's eyes, how many times had he overlooked her loneliness, 
how many times had he pretended not to hear the quiet weeping 
from her room, how many times had he failed in ordinary tender- 
ness . . . before the revolt. 

"And if I get sick," he said, walking away from his house, "who 
will take care of me? If only I could keep the maid LucQle. She 
was wonderful. There never was anyone like her. She was the 
only one who knew how to press my summer suits. With her all 
my problems would be solved. She was silent and never disturbed 
me and she never left the house. Now I don't know if I will be able 
to afford her. Because if I have her it will mean I will have to have 
two maids. Yes, two, because Lucille is not a good enough cook." 

Sadly he walked down the street with Stella's arm under his. 
And then he added; "Now that I won't have the car any more, I 
will miss the Fete des Narcisses at Montreux, and I am sure I would 
have got the prize this year." 



••^9 



While he balanced himself on the tight rope of his delusions, 
Stella had no fear for him. He could see no connection between 
his behavior and Laura's rebelhon. He could not see how the most 
trivial remarks and incidents could accumulate and form a web 
to trap him. He did not remember the trivial remark he made to 
the maid who was devotedly embroidering a night gown for Laura 
during one of her illnesses. He had stood on the threshold watch- 
ing and then said with one of his characteristic pirouettes: "I 
know someone on whom this nightgown would look more beauti- 
ful. . . ." This had angered the loyalty of the maid and later 
influenced her to crystallize the proofs against him. Everyone 
around liim had taken the side of the human being he overlooked 
because they could see so obviously the enormous disproportion 
between her behavior towards liim and his towards her. The 
greater her love, almost, the greater had grown his irresponsibility 
and devaluation of this love. 

What Stella feared was a moment of lucidity, when he might see 
that it was not the superficial aspect of his life which had destroyed 
its basic foundation, but his disregard of and undermining of the 
foundation. 

For the moment he kept himself balanced on his tight-rope. 

In fact he was intently busy placing himself back on a pedestal. 
He was now the victim of an unreasonable woman. Think of a 
woman who bears up with a man for ten years, and then when he 
is about to grow old, about to grow wise and sedentary, about to 
resign from his lover's career, then she revolts and leaves him alone. 
What absolute illogicahty! 

"For now," he said, "I am becoming a little tired of my love 
affairs. I do not have the same enthusiasms." 



40 



After a moment of walking in silence he added: "But I have you, 
Stella." 

The three loves of his life. And Stella could not say what she felt: 
'Tou killed my love too." 

Yet at this very moment she remembered when it happened. She 
was then a httle girl of twelve. Her father and mother were sep- 
arated and hved in opposite sections of the city. Once a week 
Stella's mother allowed her to visit her father. Once a week she 
was plunged from an atmosphere of poverty and struggle to one of 
luxury and indolence. Such a violent contrast that it came with a 
shock of pain. 

Once when she was calling on her father she saw Laura there 
for the first time. She heard Laura laugh. She saw her tiny figure 
submerged in furs and smelled her perfume. She could not see her 
as a woman. She seemed to her another little girl. A httle girl 
dressed and hairdressed hke a woman, but laughing, and believ- 
ing and natural. She felt warmly towards her, did not remember 
that she was the one replacing her mother, that her mother would 
expect her to hate the intruder. Even to this child of twelve it was 
clear that it was Laura who needed the protection, that she was 
not the conqueror. That in the suave, charming, enchanting man- 
ners of her actor father there lurked many dangers for human 
beings, for the vulnerable ones especially. The same danger as had 
struck her mother and herself: danger of abandon and loneliness. 

Laura too was looking at Stella with affection. Then she whis- 
pered to her father and Stella with her abnormally sensitive hear- 
ing caught the last words, "buy her stockings." 

(From then on it was Laura who assumed all her father's senti- 
mental obligations, it was Laura who sent gifts to his mother, to 
her later.) 

41 



The father and daughter went ofiF together through the most 
beautiful shopping streets of Warsaw. She had become acutely 
aware of her mended stockings now that Laura had noticed them. 
Her father would be ashamed of walking with her. But he did not 
seem concerned. He was walking now with the famous grace that 
the stage had so much enhanced, a grace which made it appear 
that when he bowed, or kissed a hand, or spoke a comphment, he 
was doing it with his whole soul. It gave to his courtships such a 
romantic totality that a mere bow over a woman's hand took on 
the air of a ceremony in which he laid his life at her feet. 

He entered a luxurious cane shop. He had the finest canes spread 
before him. He selected the most precious of all woods, and the 
most delicately carved. He asked Stella for her approval. He 
emptied his pocketbook, saying: "I can still take you home in a 
cab." And he took her home in a cab. With his new, bmnished cane 
he poLQted out Stella's drab house to the cabman. With a gestiu-e 
of romantic devotion, as if he were laying a red carpet under her 
feet, he delivered her to her poverty, to the aggressions of creditors, 
to the anxieties, the humihations, the corroding pain of everyday 
want. 

Today she was not walking with her father in mended stockings. 
But she was riding in taxis like an ambassador between Laura and 
her father. Laura sent her father an intricate Venetian vase on an 
incredibly slender stem which could not be entrusted to the moving 
van. Stella was holding it in one hand, her muff in the other, and 
at her feet lay packages of old love letters. And her father sent her 
back in the same taxi with a locket, a ring, photographs, letters. 

Stella attended the thousandth performance of a play called The 
Orphan in which her father starred. 



"The Orphan," he said, "that suits me well now, that is how I 
feel, abandoned by Laura." And speaking of the orphan, he the 
orphan, the abandoned one, the victim for the first time, he wept. 
( But not over Laura's pain, or broken faith. ) 

In the middle of the performance, when he was sitting in an 
armchair and speaking, suddenly his arms fell, and he sat stiffly 
back. It was so swift, so brusque, that he looked hke a broken 
marionette. No man could break this way, so sharply, so absolutely. 
People rushed on the stage. "It's a heart attack." said the doctor. 

Stella accompanied him to his house. He lay rigid as in death. 

She could not weep. For him, yes, for his sadness. Not for her 
father. All links were broken. But a man, yes, any man who suf- 
fered. The darling of women. White hair and elegance. Sohtude. 
All the women around him and none near enough. Stella unable 
to move nearer, because none could move nearer to him. He barred 
tlie way with his self-love. His self-love isolated him. Self-love the 
watchman, barring all entrance, all communication. One could not 
console him. He was dying because with the end of luxury, pro- 
tection, of his role, his life ends. He took all his sustenance from 
woman but he never knew it. 

It was not Stella who killed him. She had not been the one to 
say: you killed my love. 

Pity convulsed her, but she could do nothing. He was fulfilhng 
his destiny. He had sought only his pleasure. He was dying alone 
on the stage of self-pity. 

But when he was lying down on a bench in the dressing room, 
his collar for the first time carelessly open, the fat doctor hstening 
to his heart (breaking with self-pity), so slender, so stylized, so 
meticulously chiselled, like an effigy, a burning pity choked her. 



Someone whose every word she had hated, whose every act and 
thought she condemned, whose every mannerism was false, every 
gesture a role, yet because this figure lay on a couch dying of self- 
pity, lay with his eyes closed in a supreme comedian's act, Stella 
could love and pity again. Does the love of the father never die, 
even when it is buried a million times under stronger loves, even 
when she had looked at him without illusion? The figure, the 
slenderness of the body, the fineness of its form, still escaped from 
the dark tomb of buried love and was alive, because he had so 
artfully lain dowTi Hke a victim, fainted before a thousand people, 
because he had been an actor until the end; as for Laura, and 
Stella's mother — no one had seen or heard them weep. 

A fragile Stella, lying in her ivory satin bed, amongst mirrors. 

Her eloquent body can speak out all the feelings in the language 
of the dance. Now her hands he tired on her knees, tired and 
defeated. 

Her dance is perpetually broken by the wounds of love. 

In her white nightgown she does not look like an enchantress 
but hke an orphan. 

In her white nightgovra she runs out of her room downstairs to 
spare the servants an added fatigue, she the exhausted one. 

Her body and face so animated that they do not seem made of 
flesh, but like antennae, breath, nerve. 

Dehcate, she Hes back hke a tired child, but so knowing. 

Bright, she speaks as she feels, always. 

Unreal — her voice vanishes to a whisper, as if she herself were 
going to vanish and one must hold one's breath to hear her. 

Oriental, she takes the pose of the Bah dancers. Her head always 



44 



free from her body like the bird's head so free from its fragile stem. 

The language of her hands. As they curve, leap, circle, trepidate, 
one fears they will always end clasped in a prayer tliat no one 
should hurt her. 

No role could contain her intensity. 

She gave off such a briUiance in acting it was unbearable. Too 
great an exaltation for the role, which breaks like too small a vessel. 
Too great a warmth. The role was dwarfed, was twisted and lost. 
When she begged for the roles which could contain this intensity 
they were denied her. 

Off the stage she continued the same mischievous wrinkling of 
her little nose, the same entranced eyes, tlie child's ease and grace 
and impulsiveness ( in the most pompous restaurant of the city she 
reached out towards a passing silver tray carried by a pompous 
waiter and stole a fried potato). 

The intensity made the incidents she portrayed seem inadequate 
and small. There was a glow from so deep a source of feeling that 
it drowned the mediocre personages of the Hollywood gallery. 

She ate like a child, avidly, as if in fear that it would be taken 
away from her, forbidden her by some parent. Like the child, she 
had no coquetry. She was unconscious of her tangled hair and 
liked her face washed of make-up. If someone made love to her 
while slie still carried the weight of the wax on her eyelashes, if 
someone made love to her artificially exaggerated eyelashes, she 
was offended, as if by a betrayal. 

She was a child carrying a very old soul and burdened with it, 
and wishing to deposit it in some great and passionate role. In 
Joan of Arc, or Marie Bashkirtseff ... or Rejane, or Eleonora Duse. 

There are those who disguise themselves, like Stella's father. 



45 



who disguised himself and acted what he was not. But Stella only 
wanted to transform and enlarge herself and wanted to act only 
what she felt she was, or could be. And Hollywood would not let 
her. Hollywood had its sizes and standards of characters. One 
could not transgress certain hmited standard sizes. 



Phihp. When Stella first saw him she laughed at him. He was too 
handsome. She laughed: "Such a wonderful Don Juan plumage," 
she said, and turned away. The Don Juan plimnage had never 
charmed her. 

But the next morning she saw him walking before her, holding 
himself as in a state of euphoria. She was still mocldng his magni- 
ficence. But as he passed her, with a free, large, lyrical walk, he 
smiled at his companion so briUiant a smile, so wild, so sensual that 
she felt a pang. It was the smile of joy, a joy unknown to her. 

At the same time she took a deeper breath into her lungs, as if 
the air had changed, become free of suflFocating fogs, noxious 
poisons. 

He was at first impenetrable to her, because the climate of 
lightness was anew to her. 

She glided on the wings of his smile and his humor. 

When she left him she heard the wind through the leaves hke 
the very breath of life and again she breathed the large free alti- 
tudes where anguish cannot reach to suffocate. 

She followed with him the capricious outlines of piu^e desire, 
trusting his smile. 

The pursuit of joy. She possessed his smile, his eyes, his assur- 



46 



ance. There are beings who come to one to the tune of music. She 
always erpected him to appear in a sleigh, to the tune ot sleigh 
bells. As a child she had heard sleigh bells and thought: they have 
the sound of joy. When she opened his cigarette case she expected 
the tinkling, light, joyous music of music boxes. 

The absence of pain must mean it was not love but an enchant- 
ment. He came bringing joy and when he left she felt it was to go 
to his mysterious source and fetch some more. She waited wdthout 
impatience and without fear. He was replenisliing his supply. And 
every object he came in contact with was charged with the music 
that causes gayety to flower. 

The knowledge that he was coming held her in a suspense of 
pleasure, that of a high, perilous trapeze leap. The long intervals 
between their meetings, the absence of love, made it like some 
brilhant trapeze incident, spangled, accompanied by music. She 
could admire their deftness and accuracy in keeping themselves 
outside of the circle of pain. The httle seed of anguish to which 
she was so susceptible could not germinate in this atmosphere. 

She laughed when he confessed to her his Don Juan fatigues, the 
exigencies of the role women imposed upon him. "Women keep 
such strict accoimts and compare notes to see if you are always at 
the same level!" A weary Don Juan resting his head upon her 
knees. As if he knew that for her, awake or asleep, he was always 
the magician of joy. 

He bore no resemblance to any other person or moment of her 
Ufa She felt as if she had escaped from a fatal, repetitious pattern. 



One evening Stella entered a restaurant alone and was seated at 
■17 



the side of Bruno. So much time had passed and she felt herself in 
another world, yet the sight of Bruno caused her pain. He was 
deeply disturbed. 

They sat together and lingered over the dinner. 

At midnight Stella was to meet Philip. At eleven-thirty when she 
began to gather her coat, Bruno said: "Let me see you home." 

Thinking of the possibility of an encounter between him and 
Phihp ( at midnight PhiUp was coming to her place ) , she showed 
hesitation. This hesitation caused Bruno such acute pain that he 
began to tremble. At all cost, she felt, he must not know. ... So she 
said quickly: "I'm not going home. I'm expected at some friends'. 
I forgot them when I saw you. But I promised to drop in." 

"Can I take you there?" 

She thought: if I mention friends he knows, he will come with 
me. She said: "Just put me in a taxi." 

This reawakened his doubts. Again a look of pain crossed his 
face, and Stella was hurt by it, so she said hastily and spontane- 
ously: "You can take me there. It's on East Eighty -ninth." 

While he talked tenderly in the taxi, she thought desperately 
that she must find a house with two entrances, of which there are 
many on Fifth Avenue, but as she had never been on East Eighty- 
ninth Street, she wondered what she would find on the corner, 
perhaps a club, or a private house, or a Vanderbilt mansion. 

From the taxi window she looked anxiously at the big, empty 
lot on the right and the private house on the left. Bruno's voice so 
vulnerable, her fear of hiu-ting liim. Time pressing, and Philip 
waiting for her before the door of her apartment. Then she 
signalled the driver to stop before an apartment house on the 
corner of Eighty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue. 



48 



Then she kissed Bruno hghtly but was startled when he stepped 
out with her and dismissed the taxi. "I need a walk," he said. 

First of all the front door was locked and she had to ring for the 
doorman whom she had not expected to see quite so soon. As she 
continued to walk into the hallway, he asked. "Who do you want 
to see? Where are you going?" 

She could only say: "There is a door on Madison Avenue?" This 
aroused his suspicion and he answered roughly: "Why do you want 
to know? Who do you want to see?" 

"Nobody," said Stella. "I just came in here because there was a 
man following me and annoying me. I thought I might walk 
through and slip out of the other entrance and get a cab and go 
home." 

"That door is locked for the night. You can't go through there." 

"Very well, then, I'll wait here for a while until that man 
leaves." 

The doorman could see through the door the figure of Bruno 
walking back and forth. What had happened? Was he considering 
trying to find her? Did he beheve she had no friends in this house 
and that he would catch her coming out again? Was he intuitively 
jealous and wondering if his intuition was right? Waiting. He 
waited there, smoking, walking in the snowy night. She was sitting 
in the red-carpeted hall, in a red plu.sh chair, while the doorman 
paced up and down, and Bruno paced up and down before the 
house. 

Thinking of Phihp waiting for her, sitting there, heart beating 
and pounding, mind whirling. 

She stood up and walked cautiously to the door and saw Bruno 
still walking in the cold. 



49 



Pain and laughter, pain out of the old love for Bruno, laughter 
from some inner, secret sense of playing with difficulties. 

She said to the doorman: "That man is still there. Listen, I must 
get away somehow. You must do something for me." 

Not too gallantly, he called the elevator boy. The elevator boy 
took her down the cellar, through a labyrinth of grey hallways. 
Another elevator boy joined them. She told them about the man 
who followed her, adding details to the story. 

Passing trunks, vaUses, piles of newspapers, and rows and rows 
of garbage cans, then bowing their heads, they passed through one 
more aUeyway, up some stairs and imlocked the back door. 

One of the boys went for a taxi. She thanked them, v^dth the 
gayety of a child in a game. They said it was a great pleasure and 
that New York was a hell of a place for a lady. 

In the taxi she lay low on the seat so that Bruno could not see her 
as they passed Madison Avenue. 

Phihp was in a state of anxiety over her lateness. 

She wanted to say: you are not the one who should be anxiousl 
It is you I came back tol I struggled to get to you. But I'm here. 
And Bruno it is who is standing outside, waiting in the cold. 



One day Phihp asked her to wait for him in his apartment 
because his train had been delayed. ( Before that he had always 
come to her. ) For the first time he wanted to find her there, in his 
own home. 

She had never entered his bedroom. 

It was the first time she stepped out of the ambience he created 

50 



for her by his words, stories, actions. The missing dimensions of 
Philip she knew must exist but he had known how to keep them 
invisible. 

And now late at night, out of idleness, out of restlessness, 
fumbling very much like a blind person left for the first time to 
himself, she began to caress the objects he hved with, at first with 
a tenderness, because they were his, because she still expected 
them to emit a melody for her, to open up with playful surprises, 
to yield to her finger an immediate proof of love. But none of them 
emitted any sound resembling him . . . And slowly her fingers grew 
less caressing, grew awkward. Her fingers recognized objects 
made for or given by women. Her fingers recognized the hairpins 
of the wife, the powder box of the wife, the books with dedica- 
tions by women, the photographs of women. The fingerprints on 
every object were women's fingerprints. 

Then in the bedroom she stared at his dressing table. She stared 
at an immaculate and "familiar" set of silver toilet articles. It was 
not that Philip had a wife, and mistresses, and belonged to the 
public which awakened her. It was the silver toilet set on the 
dressing table, a replica of the aristocratic one which had charmed 
her childhood. Equally polished, equally symmetrically arranged. 
She was certain that if she hfted the hair brush it would be fragrant. 
Of course, it was fragrant. 

The silver toilet set of her father had reappeared. And then of 
course, it made the analogy more possible. Everything else was 
there too — the wife, and the public, and the mistresses. 

Her father receiving applause and the flowers of all women's 
tribute, the flowers of their femininity with the fern gamishings of 
multicolored hair given prodigally to the stage figures — the illusion 



.'SI 



needed for desire already artificially prepared for those too lazy to 
prepare their own. ( In the love we have for those who are not on the 
stage the illusion has to be created by the love. The people who 
fall in love with the performers are like those who f aU in love with 
magicians; they are the ones who cannot create the illusion or magic 
with the love — the mise-en-scene, the producer, the music, the 
role, which surrounds the personage with all that desire requires. ) 

In this love Phihp will receive bouquets from women, and Stella 
will find again the famifiar pain her father had given her, which 
she didn't want. 

Because they had touched the ring around the planet of love, 
the outer ring of desire, had taken graceful leaps across visitless 
weeks, she had believed these to be marvelous demonstrations of 
their agility to escape the prisons of deep love's pains. 

There were days when she felt: the core of this drama of mine 
is that at an early age I lost the element of joy. ( In childhood we 
glimpse paradise, its possibihty, we exist in it. ) At what moment 
was it lost and replaced by anguish? Could she remember? 

Standing before the silver brushes, combs and boxes on Phihp's 
dressing table she remembered that just as other people watch the 
sun and rain for barometers to their moods, she had run every day 
to watch these silver objects. When her father was in stormy 
periods and ready to leave the house, they were disarranged and 
clouded. When he was in full bloom of success, harmony and 
pleasure they were symmetrically placed, and highly poUshed. The 
initials shone with exquisite iridescence. And on days of great dis- 
cord and tragedy they disappeared altogether and were placed in 
their niches in his vahse. So she consulted them hke the barometers 
of her emotional cUmate. 



52 



When he left the house altogether it seemed as if none of the 
objects that remained possessed this power to gleam, to shed a 
brilliance. It was a transition from phosphorescence to continu- 
ous greyness. 

It was when he left that her life changed color. Because he took 




only the pleasure, he also shed this pleasure around him. When 
she was thrust out of this effulgence and away from the gleam of 
beautiful objects, she was thrust into sadness. 
How could joy have vanished with the father? 



53 



A person could walk away without carrying everything away 
with him. He might have left a little casket from which she could 
draw joy at will! He could have left the silver toilet set. But no, he 
took everything away with him because he took away the faith, 
her faith in love, and left her the prey of doubts and fears. 

Human beings have a million little doorways of communica- 
tion. When they feel threatened they close them, barricade them- 
selves. Stella closed them all. Suffocation set in. Asphyxiation of 
the feelings. 

She appeared in a new story on the screen. Her face was im- 
mobile like a mask. It was not Stella. It was the outer shell of Stella. 

People sent her enormous bouquets of rare flowers. Continued 
to send them. She signed the receipts, she even signed notes of 
thanks. Flowers for the dead, she miu-mured. With only a httle 
wire, and a round frame, they would do as well. 



54 



Winler of Artifice 



She is waiting for him. She was waiting for him for twenty 
years. Mc is coming today. 

This glass bowl with the glass fish and the glass ship — it has 
been the sea for her and the ship which carried her away from 
him after he had abandoned her. Why has she loved ships so 
deeply, why has she always wanted to sail away from this 
world? Why has she always dreamed of flight, of departure? 

Today this past from which she has struggled so long to 
escape strikes her like a whip. But today she can bear the lash 
of it because he is coming and she knows that the circle of 
empty waiting will close. 

How well she remembers their home near the sea, the villa 
which was in ruins. She was nine years old. She arrived there 
with her mother and two brothers. Her father was standing 
behind a window, watching. His face was pale, he did not 
seem glad to see them. She felt that he did not want them, 
that he did not want her. His anger seemed to be directed 
against all of them, but it touched her more acutely, as if it 
were directed entirely against her. They were not wanted, 
why she did not understand. Her mother said to him: It will 
be good for your daughter here. There was no smile on his 
face. He did not seem to notice that she was wasted by fever, 
that she was hungry for a smile. 

There was never a smile on his face ex'cept when there 
were visitors, except when there was music and talk. When 
they were alone in the house there was always war: great 
explosions of anger, hatred, revolt. War. War at meals, war 



over their heads when her brothers and she were left in bed 
at night, war in the room under their feet when they were 
playing. War. War. . . . 

In the closed study, or in the parlor, there was always a 
mysterious activity. Music, rehearsals, visitors, laughter. She 
saw her father in movement, always alert, tense, either pas- 
sionately gay or passionately angry. When the door opened 
her father appeared, luminous, incandescent. A vital passage, 
even when he passed from one room to another. A gust of 
wind. A mystery. Not a reality like her mother with her 
healthy red checks, her appetite, her frank natural laughter. 

Never any serenity, never any time for caresses, for softness. 
Tension always. A life ripped by dissension. Even while they 
were playing the dark fury of their perpetual warring hung 
over them like threats and curses and recriminations. Never 
a moment of complete joy. Aware always of the battles that 
were about to explode. 

One day there was a scene of such violence that she was 
terrified. An immense, irrational terror overwhelmed her. 
Her mother was goading her father to such anger that she 
thought he would kill her. Her father's face was blue-white. 
She began to scream. She screamed until they became alarmed. 
For a few days there was an interval of quiet. A truce. A 
pretense of peace. 

The walls of her father's library were covered with books. 
Often she stole into the library and she read the books which 
she found there, books which she did not understand. Within 
her there was a well of secret thoughts which she could not 
express, which perhaps she might have formulated if someone 
had leaned over them with tenderness. The one person who 
might have aided her terrified her. Her father's eyes were 
always cold, critical, unbelieving. He would not believe the 

57 



drawings she showed him were hers. He thought she had 
traced them. He did not beheve that she had written the poems 
that were handed to him. He thought she had copied them. He 
flew into a rage because he could not find the books from 
which he had imagined she had copied her poems and draw- 
ings. 

He doubted everything about her, even her illnesses. In the 
train once, going to Berlin where he was to give a concert, 
she had such an earache that she began to weep. If you don't 
stop crying and go to sleep, he said, I'll beat you. She stuffed 
her head under the pillow so that he would not hear her sobs. 
She sobbed all the way to Berlin. When they got there they 
discovered that she had an abscess in her ear. 

Another time he was taken down with an attack of appendi- 
citis. Her mother was tending him, fussing over him, running 
about anxiously. He lay there very pale in the big bed. She 
came from the street where she had been playing and told 
her mother that she was in pain. Immediately her father said: 
Don't pay any attention to her, she is just acting. She is just 
imitating me. But she did have an attack of appendicitis. She 
had to be taken to the hospital and operated on. Her father, 
on the other hand, had recovered. He was in bed only three 
days. 

Such cruelty! She asked herself, — was he really cruel, or 
was it mere selfishness? Was he just a big child who could 
not bear to have a rival, even in the person of his own 
daughter? She did not know. She was waiting for him now. 
She wanted to tell him everything. She wanted to hear what 
he had to say. She wanted to hear him say that he loved her. 
She did not know why she loved him so much. She could not 
believe that he meant to be so cruel. She loved him. 

Because he was so critical, so severe, so suspicious of her, 
she became secretive and lying. She would never say what she 
58 



really thought. She was afraid of him. She lied like an Arab. 
She lied to elude his stern glances, his cold, menacing blue 
eyes. She invented another world, a world of make-believe, of 
illusion, of games, of comedies. She tyrannized over her two 
brothers, she taught them games, she amused them, acted for 
them, enchanted them. She was a spitfire and they loved her. 
They never deserted her, even for a moment. They were 
simple, honest, frank. She complicated everything, even the 
games they played. 

In Berlin, when she was five years old, she ran away. There 
was a seven-year-old boy waiting for her around the corner. 
His name was Heinrich. 

She was a pale and sickly child. The doctor in Berlin had 
said: She must live in her native climate. Take her back. But 
there was no money for that. Her youngest brother had just 
been born. There was no money in the house, except for books 
and music, for a fur-lined coat, for the cologne water which 
her father had to sprinkle over his handkerchiefs, for the silk 
shirts which he demanded when he went on his concert tours. 

At the villa near the sea she lay in bed and wept all night 
without knowing why. But there was a garden attached to 
the villa. A beautiful garden in which one could get lost. She 
sat by the big Gothic window studded with colored stones and 
looked out through a prismatic-colored stone in the center 
of the window; she sat there for hours at a stretch gazing 
upon this mysterious other world. Colors. Deformations. Trees 
that are rubv-colored. Orange skies. She felt that there were 
other worlds, that one might escape from this one which was 
so full of misery. She thought a great deal about this other 
world. 

About her father there was an aureole of fragrance, of 
immaculatcncss, of elegance. His clothes were never wrinkled, 
he wore clean linen every day and the fur collar on his coat 
59 



was wonderful to caress. Her mother was busy, bustling, 
maternal. Her mother was never elegant. 

Since he often left them to go on concert tours they were 
so used to her father's departures that they barely ceased 
playing to embrace him. She remembered now the day he 
was leaving to go on tour. He was standing at the door, ele- 
gant, aristocratic. He looked the same as always. Suddenly, 
moved by an acute premonition, she threw herself on him and 
clung to him passionately. "Don't go. Father! Don't leave 
me!" she begged. She had to be torn away. She wept so vio- 
lently that her father was startled. Even now she could feel 
again the effort her mother made to loosen her clutch. She 
could still see the hesitancy in her father's face. She begged 
and implored him to stay. She clung to him, desperately, her 
fingers knotted in his clothes. She remembered the effort he 
made to wrench himself loose and how he walked swiftly off 
without once looking back. She remembered too that her 
mother was surprised by her despair. She couldn't understand 
what had possessed her to behave as she did. 

Since that day she had not seen her father. Twenty years 
have passed. He is coming today. 

* * • • 

They entered New York harbor, her mother, her two 
brothers and she, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. The 
Spaniards aboard the ship were terrified; some of them were 
kneeling in prayer. They had reason to be terrified, — the bow 
of the ship had been struck by lightning. She busied herself 
making a last-minute entry in her diary, which she had begun 
when they left Barcelona. 

It was a monologue, or dialogue, dedicated to him, inspired 
by the superabundance of thoughts and feelings caused by the 
pain of leaving him. With the sea between them she felt that 
60 



at least she might be able to reveal to him with absolute sin- 
cerity the great love she bore him, as well as her sadness and 
her yearning. 

They arrived in New York with huge wicker baskets, a 
cage full of birds, a violin case and no money. She carried her 
diary in a basket. She was timid, withdrawn. 

She caught only fleeting patches of this new reality sur- 
rounding her. At the pier there were aunts and cousins await- 
ing them. The Negro porters threw themselves on their be- 
longings. She remembers vividly how she clung to her 
brother's violin case. She wanted everybody to know that she 
was an artist. 

Entering the subway she observed immediately what a 
strange place New York was, — the staircases move up and 
down by themselves. And in the train hundreds of mouths 
chewing, masticating. Her little brother asked: "Are Ameri- 
cans ruminants?" 

She was eleven years old. Her mother was absent most of 
the day searching for work. There were socks to darn and 
dishes to wash. She had to bathe and dress her brothers. She 
had to amuse them, aid them with their lessons. The days 
were full of bleak effort in which great sacrifices were de- 
manded of all of them. Though she experienced a tremendous 
relief in helping her mother, in serving her faithfully, she 
felt nevertheless that the color and the fragrance had gone 
out of their life. When she heard music, laughter and talk in 
the room where her mother gave singing lessons, she was 
saddened by the feeling of something lost. 

And so, little by little, she shut herself up within the walls 

of her diary. She held long conversations with herself, through 

the diary. She talked to her diary, addressed it by name, as if 

it were a living person, her other self perhaps. Looking out 

61 



the window which gave on their ugly back yard she imagined 
that she was looking at parks, castles, golden grilles, and exotic 
flowers. Within the covers of the diary she created another 
world wherein she told the truth, in contrast to the multiple 
lies which she span when she was conversing with others, as 
for instance telling her playmates that she had traveled all 
around the world, describing to them the places which she 
had read about in her father's library. 

The yearning for her father became a long, continuous 
plaint. Every page contained long pleas to him, invocations 
to God to reunite them. Hours and hours of suffocating moods, 
of dreams and reveries, of feverish restlessness, of morbid, 
somber memories and longings. She could not bear to listen 
to music, especially the arias her mother sang: "Ever since the 
day," "Some day he'll come," etc. Her mother seemed to 
choose only the songs which reminded her of him. 

She felt crippled, lost, transplanted, rebellious. She was 
alone a great deal. Her mother was healthy, exuberant, full 
of plans for the future. When she was moody her mother 
chided her. If she confessed to her mother, she laughed at 
her. Her mother seemed to doubt the sincerity of her feelings. 
She attributed her moods to her overdeveloped imagination, 
or else to her blood. When her mother was angry she shouted: 
"Mauvaise graine, vaP' She was often angry now, but not 
with them. She was obliged to fight for them every day of her 
life. It required all her courage, all her buoyancy and optimism, 
to face the world. New York was hostile, cold, indifferent. 
They were immigrants, and they were made to feel it. Even 
on Christmas Eve her mother had to sing at the church in 
order to earn a few pennies. 

The great crime, her mother made them feel, was their 
resemblance to their father. Each flare of temper, each tragic 
62 



outburst was severely condemned. Even her paleness served 
to remind her mother of him. He too always looked pale and 
ready to die, but it was all nonsense, she said. Every day she 
added a little touch to the image they had of him. Her younger 
brother's rages, his wildness, his destructiveness, all this came 
from their father. Her imagination, her exaggerations, her 
fantasies, her lies, these, too, sprang from their father. 

It was true. Everything sprang from him, even the lies 
which originated from the books she had read in his library. 
When she told the children at school that she had once 
traveled through Russia in a covered wagon it was not a lie 
either, because in her mind she had made this journey through 
snow-covered Russia time and time again. The cold of New 
York revived the memories of her father's books, of the 
journeys she had longed to take with him when he went away. 

To face the cold of New York required superhuman efforts. 
Standing in the snow in Central Park, feeding the pigeons, 
she wanted to die. The dread of facing the snow and frost 
each morning paralyzed her. Their school was only around 
the corner, but she had not the courage to leave the house. 
Her mother had to ask the Negro janitor to drag her to 
school. "Po' thing," he would say, "you ought to live down 
South." He would lend her his woolen gloves and slap her 
back to get her warm. 

Only in her diary could she reveal her true self, her true 
feelings. What she really desired was to be left alone with her 
diary and her dreams of her father. In solitude she was happy. 
Her head was seething with ideas. She described every phase 
of their life in detail, minute, childish details which seem 
ridiculous and absurd now, but which were intended to 
convey to her father the need that she felt for his presence. 
Though she detested New York, she painted a picture of it 
63 



in glowing terms, hoping that it would entice him to come. 

When, to amuse her brothers, she impersonated Marie 
Antoinette as she marched proudly to the guillotine, standing 
on a chariot of chairs with a lace cap, she wept real tears. She 
wept over the martyrdom of Marie Antoinette because she 
was aware of her own future sufferings. A miUion times her 
hair would turn white overnight and the crowd jeer at her. A 
million times she would lose her throne, her husband, her 
children, and her life. At eleven years of age she was searching 
in the lives of the great for analogies to the drama of her own 
life which she felt was destined to be shattered at every turn 
of the road. In acting the roles of other personages she felt 
that she was piecing together the fragments of her shattered 
life. Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own 
lost life. 

There was a passage in the diary wherein she wrote that 
she would like to relive her life in Spain. At that early age 
she was bemoaning the irreversibility of life. 

Already she was aware of how the past dies. She re-ex- 
amined what she had written about New York for her father 
because she felt that she had not done justice to it. She watched 
every minute of the day as she hved so that nothing would be 
lost. She regretted the minutes passing. She wept without 
knowing why, since she was young and had not yet known 
real suffering. But without being fully aware of it, she had 
already experienced her greatest sorrow, the irreparable loss 
of her father. She did not know it then, as indeed most of us 
never know when it is that we experience the full measure 
of joy or sorrow. But our feehngs penetrate us like a poison of 
undetectable nature. We have sorrows of which we do not 
know the origin or name. 

She remembered a night before Christmas when, in utter 
64 



desperation she began to believe that her father was coming, 
that he would arrive Christmas Day. Even though that very 
day she had received a postcard from him and she knew that 
he was too far away for her hopes to be realized, still a sense 
of the miraculous impelled her to expect what was humanly 
impossible. She got down on her knees and she prayed to God 
to perform a miracle. She looked for her father all Christmas 
Day, and again on her birthday, a month later. Today he will 
come. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. Each disappointment 
was baffling and terrifying to her. 

Today he is coming. She is sure of it. But how can she be 
sure? She is standing on the edge of a crater. 

Her true God was her father. At communion it was her 
father she received, and not God. She closed her eyes and 
swallowed the white bread with blissful tremors. She em- 
braced her father in holy communion. Her exaltation fused 
into a semblance of holiness. She aspired to saintliness in order 
to conceal the secret love which she guarded so jealously in 
her diary. The voluptuous tears at night when she prayed to 
God, the joy without name when she stood in his presence, 
the inexplicable bliss at communion, because then she talked 
with her father and she kissed him. 

She worshiped him passionately but as she grew older the 
form of his image grew blurred. But she had not lost him. His 
image was buried deep in the most mysterious region of her 
being. On the surface there remained the image created by 
her mother — his egoism, his neglectfulness, his irresponsi- 
bility, his love of luxury. When for a time her immense yeirn- 
ing appeared to have exhausted itself, when it seemed that 
she had almost forgotten this man whom her mother described 
so bitterly, it was only the announcement of the fact that his 
image had become fluid; it ran in subterranean channels, 



through her blood. Consciously she was no longer aware of 
him; but in another way his existence was even stronger than 
before. Submerged, yet magically ineffaceable, he floated in 
her blood. 

At thirteen she recorded in her diary that she wanted to 
marry a man who looked like the Count of Monte Cristo. 
Apart from the mention of black eyes it was her father's 
portrait which she gave: "A man so strong. . .with very white 
teeth, a pale, mysterious face, ... a grave walk, a distant smile. 
... I would like him to tell me all about his life, a very sad 
life, full of harrowing adventures. . . .1 would hke him to be 
proud and haughty ... to play some instrument. . . ." 

The image created by her mother, added to the blurred 
memories of a child, do not compose a being; yet in her haunt- 
ing quest she fashioned an imagined individual she pursued 
relentlessly. The blue eyes of a boy in school, the talent of a 
young violinist, a pale face seen in the street — these fleeting 
aspects of the image that was buried deep in her blood moved 
her to tears .... To listen to music was unbearable. When 
her mother sang she exhausted herself in sobs. 

In this record which she faithfully kept for twenty years she 
spoke of her diary as of her shadow, her double; "I say I will 
only marry my double." As far as she knew this double was 
the diary which was full of reflections, hke a mirror, which 
could change shape and color and serve all kinds of imagina- 
tive substitutions. This diary she had intended to send to her 
father, which was to be a revelation of her love for him, be- 
came by an accident of fate, a secretive thing, another wall 
between herself and that world which it seemed forbidden 
her ever to enter. 

She would have liked great love and tenderness, confi- 
dence, openness. Her father, she felt certain, would have 



rejected her — his standards were too severe. She wrote him 
once that she thought he had abandoned her because she was 
not an inteUigcnt or pretty enough daughter. She was a per- 
petually offended being who fancied that she was not wanted. 
This fear of not being wanted weighed down on her like a 
perpetual icy condemnation. 

Today, when he arrives, will she be able to lift her head? 
Will she be able to keep her head lifted, will she be able to 
stand the cold look in his eyes when she raises her eyes to his? 
Will her body not tremble with fear when she hears his voice? 
After twenty years she is still obsessed by the fear of him. But 
now she felt that it was in his power to absolve her of all fear. 
Perhaps it is he who will fear her. Perhaps he is coming to 
receive the judgment which she alone can mete out to him. 
Today the circle of empty waiting will be broken. She is 
waiting for him to embrace her, to say that he loves her. She 
made a God of him and she was punished. Now when he 
conies she wants to make him a human father. She does not 
want to fear him any longer. She does not want to write 
another line in her diary. She wants him to smash this monu- 
ment which she erected to him and accept her in her own 
right. 

He is coming. She hears his steps. 

• • • • 

She expected the man of the photographs, the young man 
of the photographs. She had not tried to imagine what the 
years had done to his face. 

It was not any older, there were no wrinkles on it, but 
there was a mask over it. His face wore a mask. The skin did 
not match the skin of his wrists. It seemed made of earth and 
papier-mache, not pure skin. There must have been a little 
space between it and the real face, a little partition through 

fi7 



which the breeze could sing, and behind this mask another 
smile, another face, and skin like that of his wrists, white and 
vulnerable. 

At the sight of her waiting on the doorstep he smiled, a 
feminine smile, and moved towards her with a neat, compact 
grace, ease, youthfulness. She felt unsettled. This man coming 
towards her did not seem at all like a father. 

His first words were words of apology. After he had 
taken off his gloves, and verified by his watch that he was on 
time — it was very important to him to be on time — after he 
had kissed her and told her that she had become very beautiful, 
almost immediately it seemed to her that she was listening to 
an apology, an explanation of why he had left them. It was 
as if behind her there stood a judge, a tall judge he alone could 
see, and to this judge her father addressed a beautiful polished 
speech, a marvelous speech to which she listened with admira- 
tion, for the logic was so beautiful, the smooth change of 
phrases, the long and flawless story of her mother's imperfec- 
tions, of all that he had suffered, the manner in which all the 
facts of their life were presented, all made a perfect and elo- 
quent pleading, addressed to a judge she could not see and 
with whom she had nothing to do. He had not come out free 
of his past. Taking out a gold-tipped cigarette and with infinite 
care placing it in a holder which contained a filter for the 
nicotine, he related the story she had heard from her mother, 
all with an accent of apology and deference. 

She had no time to tell him that she understood that they 
had not been made to live together, that it was not a question 
of faults and defects, but of alchemy, that this alchemy had 
created war, that there was no one to blame or to judge. Al- 
ready her father was launched on an apology of why he had 
stayed all winter in the south; he did not say that he enjoyed 



it, but that it had been absolutely essential to his health. It 
seemed to her as he talked that he was just as ashamed to have 
left them as he was of having spent the winter in the south 
when he should have been in Paris giving concerts. 

She waited for him to lose sight of this judge standing be- 
hind her and then, plunging into the present, she said: "It's 
scandalous to have such a young father!" 

"Do you know what I used to fear?" he said. "That you 
might come too late to see me laughing — too late for me to 
have the power to make you laugh. In June when I go south 
again you must come with me. They will take you for my 
mistress, that will be delightful." 

She was standing against the mantelpiece. He was looking 
at her hands, admiring them. She leaned backwards, pushing 
the crystal bowl against the wall. It cracked and the water 
gushed forth as from a fountain, splashing all over the floor. 
The glass ship could no longer sail away — it was lying on its 
side, on the rock-crystal stones. 

They stood looking at the broken bowl and at the water 
forming a pool on the floor. 

"Perhaps I've arrived at my port at last," she said. "Perhaps 
I've come to the end of my wanderings. I have found you." 

"We've both done a lot of wandering," he said. "I not only 
played the piano in every city of the world . . . sometimes when 
I look at the map, it seems to me that even the tiniest villages 
could be replaced by the names of women. Wouldn't it be 
funny if I had a map of women, of all the women I have 
known before you, of all the women I have had? Fortunately 
I am a musician, and my women remain incognito. When I 
think about them it comes out as a ^o or a la, and who could 
recognize them in a sonata? What husband would come and 



kill me for expressing my passion for his wife in terms of a 
quartet?" 

When he was not smiling, his face was a Greek mask, his 
blue eyes enigmatic, the features sharp and willful. 

He appeared cold and formal. She realized it was this mask 
which had terrorized her as a child. The softness came only 
in flashes swift as lightning, like breaks. 

Unexpectedly, he broke when he smiled, the hardness 
broke and the softness which came was so feminine, so ex- 
posed, giving and seducing with the beauty of the teeth, 
exposing a dimple which he said was not a dimple at all, but 
a scar from the time he had slid down the banister. 

As a child she had the obscure fear that this man could 
never be satisfied, by life, by human beings, by the world. 
Nothing but perfection would do. It was this sense of his 
exactingness which haunted her, an obscure awareness of his 
expectations which excited her to the great efforts she had 
made. But today she told herself that she had strained enough, 
that she wanted to rest, that she had waited a long time for it. 
She felt she did not want to appear before him until she was 
complete, and could satisfy him. 

She wanted to enjoy. Her life had been a long strain, one 
long effort to surpass herself, to create, to perfect, a desperate 
and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking 
greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, crea- 
tions, always shedding yesterday's woman to pursue a new 
vision. 

Today she wanted to enjoy 

They were walking into a new world together, into a new 
planet, a world of transparency where all that happened to 
them since that day she clung to him so desperately was re- 
duced to its essence, to a skeleton, to a sUhouette. His vision 
70 



and his talk were abstract; his rigorous selection acted like 
an intense searchlight which annihilated everything around 
them: the color of the room, the smell of Tabac Blond, the 
warmth of the log fire, the spring sunlight showing its pale 
face on the studio window, the flash of his gold ring flashing 
his coat of arms, the immaculateness of his shirt cuff's. Every- 
thing vanished around them, the walls, the rug under their 
feet, the satin rays of her dress, the orange rim of her sleeve, 
the orange reflections of the walls, the books leaning against 
each other, the soft backs of the French books yielding under 
the stiff-backed English books, the lightness and swiftness of 
his Spanish voice, his Spanish words bowing and smiling be- 
tween the French. 

She could only see the point he watched, the intense 
focusing upon the meaning of their lives, the clear outUne 
of their patterns, and his questions: What are you today? 
What do you believe? What do you think? What do you 
read? What do you love? What is your music? What is your 
language? What is your climate? What hour of the day do 
you love best? What are your whims? Your extravagances? 
Your antipathies? Who are your enemies? Who is youi; god? 
Who is your demon? What haunts you? What frightens 
you? What gives you courage? Whom do you love? What 
do you remember? What image do you have of me? What 
have you been? Are we strangers, with twenty years between 
us? Does your blood obey me? Have I made you? Are you 
my daughter? Are you my father? Have we dreamed? Are we 
real? Is our life real? Is anything real? Are we here? Do I 
understand you? 

"You are my daughter. We think the same. We laugh at 
the same things. You owe me nothing. You have created 
yourself alone, but I gave you the seed." 
^ — 71 



He was walking back and forth, the whole length of the 
studio, asking questions, and every answer she gave was the 
echo in his own soul. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Blood 
echoes. Yes, yes to everything. Exactly. She knew it. That 
is what she hoped. The same: father and daughter. Unison. 
The same rhythm. 

They were not talking. They were merely corroborating 
each other's theories. Their phrases interlocked. 

She was a woman, she had to live in a world built by the 
man she loved, live by his system. In the world she made alone 
she was lonely. She, being a woman, had to Hve in a man- 
made world, could not impose her own, but here was her 
father's world, it fitted her. With him she could run through 
the world in seven-league boots. He thought and felt the 
same thing at the same time. 

"Never knew anything but solitude," said her father. "I 
never knew a woman I could take into my world." 

They did not speak of the harm they had done each other. 
The disease they carried in them they did not reveal. He did 
not know that the tragedy which had marked the first years 
of her life still colored it today. He did not know that the 
feeling of being abandoned was still as strong in her despite 
the fact that she knew it was not she who had been abandoned 
but her mother, that he had not really abandoned her but 
simply tried to save his own life. He did not know that this 
feeling was still so strong in her that anything which resembled 
abandon created a violent inner storm in her: a door closed 
on her too brusquely, a letter unanswered, a friend going 
away on a trip, the maid leaving to get married, the least mark 
of absent-mindedness, two people talking and forgetting to 
include her, or someone sending greetings to someone and 
forgetting her. 

72 



The smallest incident could arouse an anguish as great as 
that caused by death, and could reawaken the pain of separa- 
tion as keenly as she had experienced it the day her father 
had gone away. 

In an effort to combat this anguish she had crowded her 

world richly with friends, loves and creations. But beyond 

the moment of conquest there was again a desert. The joys 

given to her by friendships, loves, or a book just written, 

were endangered by the fear of loss. Just as some people are 

perpetually aware of death, she was perpetually aware of 

the pain of separation and the inevitability of it. 

/" And beyond this, she also treated the world as if it were 

yn ailing, abandoned child. She never put an end to a friend- 

\ship of her own accord. She never abandoned anyone; she 

/spent her life healing others of this fear wherever she saw 

/ it shadowed, pitying the whole world and giving it the 

1 illusion of faithfulness, durability, solidity. She was incapable 

\of scolding, of pushing away, of cutting ties, of breaking 

relationships, of interrupting a correspondence. 

Her father was telling her the story of the homely little 
governess he had made love to because otherwise she would 
never have known what love was. He took her out in his 
beautiful car and made her lie on the heather just as the sun 
was going down so he would not have to see too much of 
her face. He enjoyed her happiness at having an adventure, 
the only one she would ever have. When she came to his 
room in the hotel he covered the lamp with a handkerchief, 
and again he enjoyed her happiness, and taught her how to 
do her hair, how to rouge her lips and powder her face. The 
adventure made her almost beautiful. 

He was talking about his escapades, skirting the periphery 
of his life, dwelling on his adventiu-es. He did not dare to 

73 



venture into the realm of deep love, for fear of discovering 
she had given her life to another. They wanted to give each 
other the illusion of having been faithful to each other always, 
and of being free to devote their whole life to each other, 
now that he had returned. 

Love had not been mentioned yet. Yet it was love alone 
which obsessed them. Not music, nor writing, not painting, 
not decorating, not costuming, but love, the orchestration 
of love, its metamorphosis. She was living in a furnace of 
love, a blaze all around. Obsessional love, passionate love, 
sensual love, love in mystery, in darkness, in resistance, in con- 
trast, love in fraternity, gratitude, imagination. 

"I do think," he said, "that we should give up all this for 
the sake of each other. These women mean nothing to me. 
But the idea of devoting my whole life to you, of sacrificing 
adventures to something far more marvelous and deep, appeals 
so much to me. . . ." 

"But mine is no adventure. . . ." 

"You should give him up. That isn't love at all. You know 
I've been your only great love. . . ." 

She did not want to say: "Not my only great love," but 
he seemed to have guessed her thought because he turned his 
eyes completely away from her and added: "Remember, I 
am an old man, I haven't so many years left to enjoy you. . . ." 

With this phrase, which was actually untrue because he 
was younger than most men of his age, he seemed to be asking 
her for her life, almost to be reaching out to take full posses- 
sion of her life, just as he had taken her soul away with him 
when she was a child. It seemed to her that he wanted to take 
it away now again, when she was a full-blown woman. It 
seemed natural to him that she should have mourned his loss 
throughout her childhood. It was true that he was on the 
74 



road to death, drawing nearer and nearer to it; it was also 
true that she loved him so much that perhaps a part of her 
might foHow him and perish with him. Would she follow him 
from )ear to year, his withering, his vanishing? Was her love 
a separate thing, or a part of his life? Would she leave the 
earth with him today? He was asking her to leave the earth 
today, but this time she would not. This time she felt that she 
would fight against giving herself up wholly. She would not 
die a second time. 

Having been so faithful to his image as she had been, having 
loved his image in other men, having been moved by the men 
who played the piano, the men who talked brilliantly, in- 
tellectuals, teachers, philosophers, doctors, every man with 
blue eyes, every man with an adventurous life, every Don 
Juan — was it not to give him her absolute love at the end? 
Why did she draw away, giving him the illusion he wanted 
but not the absolute? 

• • • • 

In the south of France. Six silver-gray valises, the scent of 
Tabiic Blond, the gleam of polished nails, the wave of im- 
maculate hands. Her father leaped down from the train and 
already he was beginning a story. 

"There was a woman on the train. She sent me a message. 
Would I have dinner with her? Knew all about me, had sung 
my songs in Norway. I was too tired, with this damnable 
lumbago coming on, and besides, I can't put my mind on 
women any longer. I can only think of my betrothed." 

In the elevator he overtipped the boy, he asked for news 
of the Negro's wife who had been sick, he advised a medicine, 
he ordered an appointment with the hairdresser for the next 
day, he took stock of the weather predictions, he ordered 
special biscuits and a strict vegetarian diet. The fruit had to 

75 



be washed with sterilized water. And was the flautist still in 
the neighborhood, the one who used to keep him awake? 

In the room he would not let her help him unpack his bags. 
He was cursing his lumbago. He seemed to have a fear of 
intimacy, almost as if he had hidden a crime in his valises. 

"This old carcass must be subjugated," he said. 

He moved like a cat. Great softness. Yet when he wanted 
to he could show powerful muscles. He believed in con- 
cealing one's strength. 

They walked out into the sun, he looking like a Spanish 
grandee. He could look straight into the sun, and the tense- 
ness of his will when he said, for instance, "I want," made 
him rigid from head to foot, like silex. 

As she watched him bending over so tenderly to pick up 
an insect from the road in order to lay it safely on a leaf, 
addressing it in a soft, whimsical tone preaching to it about 
its recklessness in thus crossing a road on which so many 
automobiles passed, she asked herself why it was that as a child 
she could only remember him as a cruel person. Why could 
she remember no tenderness or care on his part.^ Nothing but 
fits of anger and severity, of annoyance when they were 
noisy, of beatings, of a cold reserved face at meals. 

As she watched him playing with the concierge's dog she 
wondered why she could not remember him ever sitting down 
to play with them; she wondered whether this conception 
she had of her father's cruelty was not entirely imaginary. 
She could not piece together his gentleness with animals and 
his hardness towards his children. He lived in his world like 
a scientist occupied with the phenomena of nature. The ways 
of insects aroused his curiosity; he liked to experiment, but 
the phenomena which the lives of his children offered, their 
secrets, their perplexities, had no interest for him, or rather, 
they disturbed him. 

76 



It was really a myopia of the soul. 

The day after he arrived he was unable to move from his 
bed. A special medicine had to be found. Samba, the elevator 
man, was sent out to hunt for it. The bus driver was dis- 
patched to get a special brand of English crackers. Paris had 
to be phoned to make sure the musical magazines were being 
forwarded. Telegrams and letters, telephone calls, Samba 
perspiring, the bus man covered with dust, postpone the hair- 
dresser, order a special menu for dinner, telephone the doctor, 
fetch a newspaper, Samba perspiring, the elevator running 
up and down. . . . 

There were no other guests in the hotel — the place seemed 
to be run for them. Their meals were brought to the room. 
Mosquito nettings were installed, the furniture was changed 
around, his linen sheets with large initials were placed on the 
bed, his silver hairbrushes on the dresser, the plumber ordered 
to subdue a noisy water pipe, the rusty shutters were oiled, 
the proprietor was informed that all hotel rooms should have 
double doors. Noise was his greatest enemy. His nerves, as 
vibrant as the strings of a violin, had endowed or cursed him 
with uncanny hearing. A fly in the room could prevent him 
from sleeping. He had to put cotton in his ears in order to 
dull his oversensitive hearing. 

He began talking about his childhood, so vividly that she 
thought they were back in Spain. She could feel again the 
noonday heat, could hear the beaded curtains parting, foot- 
steps on the tiled floors, the cool green shadows of shuttered 
rooms, women in white negligees, the smell of carnations, 
the holy water, the dried palms at the head of the bed, the 
pictures of the Virgin in lace and satin, wicker armchairs, the 
servants singing in the courtyard 

He used to read under his bed, by the light of a candle 
so that his father would not find him out. He was given only 

77 



one penny a week to spend. He had to make cigarettes out 
of straw. He was always hungry. 

They laughed together. 

He didn't have enough money for the Merry-go-Round. 
His mother used to sew at night so that he could afford to 
rent a bicycle the next day. 

He looked out of the window from his bed and saw the 
birds sitting on the telegraph wires, one on each wire. 

"Look," he said, "I'll sing you the melody they make 
sitting up there." And he sang it. "It's all in the key of humor." 

"When I was a child I used to write stories in which I was 
always left an orphan and forced to face the world alone." 

"Did you want to get rid of me?" asked her father. 

"I don't think so. I think I only wanted to struggle with 
life alone. I was proud, and that also prevented me from 
coming to you until I felt ready. . . ." 

"What happened in all those stories?" 

"I met with gigantic difficulties and obstacles. I overcame 
them. I was handed a bigger portion of suffering than is usual. 
Without father or mother I fought the world, angry seas, 
hunger, monstrous stepparents, and there were mysteries, 
pursuits, tortures, all kinds of danger. . . ." 

"Don't you think you are still seeking that?" 

"Perhaps. Then there was another story, a story of a boat 
in a garden. Suddenly I was sailing down a river and I went 
round and round for twenty years without landing any- 
where." 

"Was that because you didn't have me?" 

"I don't know. Perhaps I was waiting to become a woman. 
In all the fairy tales where the child is taken away she either 
returns when she is twenty, or the father returns to the 
daughter when she is twenty." 

78 



"He waits till she gets beyond the stage of having to have 
her nose blown. He waits for the interesting age." 
• • • • 

Her father's jealousy began with the reading of her diary. 
Fie observed that after two years of obsessional yearning for 
him she had finally exhausted her suffering and obtained 
serenity. After serenity she had fallen in love with an Irish 
boy and then with a violinist. He was offended that she had 
not died completely, that she had not spent the rest of her 
life yearning for him. He did not understand that she had 
continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. 
She had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him. 
She had written the diary for him. She had loved him by 
falling in love at the age of eleven with the ship's captain who 
might have taken her back to Spain. She had loved him by 
taking his place at her mother's side and becoming logical and 
intellectual in imitation of him, not through any natural gifts 
for cither. She had loved him by playing the father to her 
brothers, the husband to her mother, by giving courage, 
strength, by denying her feminine, emotional self. She had 
loved him in life creatively by writing about him. 

It is true that she did not die altogether — she lived in 
creations. Nor did she wear black nor turn her back on 
men and life. 

But when she became aware of his jealousy she began 
immediately to give him what he desired. Understanding his 
jealousy she began to relate the incidents of her Hfe in a 
deprecatory manner, in a mocking tone, in such a way that 
he might feel she had not loved deeply anything or anyone 
but him. Understanding his desire to be exclusively loved, to 
be at the core of every life he touched, she could not bring 
herself to talk with fervor or admiration of all she loved or 

79 



enjoyed. To be so aware of his feelings forced her into a 
role. She gave a color to her past which could be interpreted 
as: nothing that happened before you came was of any 
importance. . . . 

The result was that nothing appeared in its true light and 
that she deformed her true self. 

Today her father, looking at her, holding her book in his 
hand, studying her costumes, exploring her home, studying 
her ideas, says: "You are an Amazon. Until you came I felt 
that I was dying. Now I feel renewed and strengthened." 

Her own picture of her life gave him the opportunity he 
loved of passing judgment, an ideal judgment upon the pattern 
of it. 

But she was so happy to have found a father, a father with 
a strong will, a wisdom, an infallible judgment, that she forgot 
for the moment everything she knew, surrendered her own 
certainties. She forgot her own efforts, her own wisdom. It 
was so sweet to have a father, to beheve that there could 
exist someone who was in hfe so many years ahead of her, 
and who looked back upon hers and her errors, who could 
guide and save her, give her strength. She relinquished her 
convictions just to hear him say: "In that case you were too 
believing," or: "That was a wasted piece of sacrifice. Why 
save junk? Let the failures die. It is something in them that 
make them failures." 

To have a father, the seer, the god. She found it hard to 
look him in the eyes. She never looked at the food he put in 
his mouth. It seemed to her that vegetarianism was the right 
diet for a divine being. She had such a need to worship, to 
relinquish her power. It made her feel more the woman. 

She thought again of his remark: "You are an Amazon. 
You are a force." She looked at herself in the mirror with 
surprise. Certainly not the body of an Amazon. 
80 



What was it her father saw? She was underweight, so light 
on her feet that a caricaturist had once pictured her as having 
floated up to the ceihng Hke a balloon and everybody trying 
to catch her with brooms and ladders. Not the woman in 
the mirror, then, but her words, her writing, her work. 
Strength in creation, in life, ideas. She had proved capable 
of building a world for herself. Amazon! Capable of every 
audacity in life, but vulnerable in love ^_ 

She translated his remark to herself thus:(3^henever any- 
one says you are they mean / want you to ^^ He wanted 
her to be an Amazon. One breast cut off as in the myth, so 
as to be able to use the bow and arrow. The other breast far 
too tender, too vulnerable. 

Why? Because an Amazon did not need a father. Nor a 
lover, nor a husband. An Amazon was a law and a world 
all to herself. 

He was abdicating his father role. A woman-ruled world 
was no hardship to him, the artist, for in it he had a privileged 
place. He had all the sweetness of her one breast, together 
with all her strength. He could lie down on that breast and 
dream, for at his side was a woman who carried a bow and 
arrow to defend him. He, the writer, the musician, the 
sculptor, the painter, he could lie down and dream by the 
side of the Amazon who could give him nourishment and 
fight the world for him as well 

She looked at him. He was her own height. He was a little 
bowed by fatigue and the thought of his own frailness. His 
nerves, his sensitiveness, his dependence on women. He looked 
slenderer and paler. He said: "I used to be afraid that my 
present wife might die. \\'hat would I do without a wife? 
I used to plan to die with her. But now I have you. I know 
you are strong." 

Many men had said this to her before. She had not minded. 
81 



Protection was a rhythm. They could exchange roles. But 
this phrase from a father was different ... A father. 

All through the world . . . looking for a father . . . look- 
ing naively for a father . . . falling in love with gray hairs . . . 
the symbol . . . every symbol of the father ... all through 
the world ... an orphan ... in need of man the leader . . . 
to be made woman . . , and again to be asked ... to be the 
mother . . . always the mother . . . always to draw the strength 
she had, but never to know where to rest, where to lay down 
her head and find new strength . . . always to draw it out of 
herself . . . from herself . . . strength ... to pour out love . . . 
all through the world seeking a father . . . loving the father . . . 
awaiting the father . . . and finding the child. 
• • • • 

His lumbago and the almost complete paralysis it brought 
about seemed to her Hke a stiffness in the joints of his soul, 
from acting and pretending. He had assumed so many roles, 
had disciplined himself to appear always gay, always immacu- 
late, always shaved, always faultless; he played at love so 
often, that it was as if he suffered from a cramp due to the 
false positions too long sustained. He could never relax. The 
lumbago was like the stiffness and brittleness of emotions 
which he had constantly directed. It was something like pain 
for him to move about easily in the realm of impulses. He 
was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable 
of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great un- 
even flow of life with its necessary disorder and ugliness. 
Every gesture of meticulous care taken to eat without vulgar- 
ity, to wash his teeth, to disinfect his hands, to behave ideally, 
to sustain the illusion of perfection, was like a rusted hinge, 
for when a pattern and a goal, when an aesthetic order pene- 
trates so deeply into the motions of life, it eats into its spon- 
taneity like rust, and this mental orientation, this forcing of 
82 



nature to follow a pattern, this constant defeat of nature 
and control of it, had become rust, the rust which had finally 
paralyzed his body. . . . 

She wondered how far back she would have to trace the 
current of his life to find the moment at which he had thus 
become congealed into an attitude. At what moment had 
his will petrified his emotions? What shock, what incident 
had produced this mineralization such as took place under 
the earth, due to pressure? 

When he talked about his childhood she could see a lumin- 
ous child always dancing, always running, always alert, always 
responsive. I lis whole nature was on tiptoes with expectancy, 
hope and ardor. His nose sniffed the wind with high expecta- 
tions of stomis, tragedies, adventures, beauty. The eyes did 
not retreat under the brow, but were opened wide like a 
clairvoyant's. 

She could not trace the beginning of his disease, this cancer 
of jealousy. Perhaps far back in his childhood, in his jealousy 
of his delicate sister who was preferred by his father, in his 
jealousy of the man who took his fiancee away from him, 
in the betrayal of his fiancee, in the immense shock of pain 
which sent him out of Spain. 

Today if he read a cHpping which did not give him the 
first place in the realm of music, he suffered. If a friend turned 
his admiration away. ... If in a room he was not the center 
of attention. . . . Wherever there was a rival, he felt the fever 
and the poison of self-doubt, the fear of defeat. In all his 
relations with man and woman there had to be a battle and 
a triumph. 

He began by telling her first of all that she owed him 
nothing; then he began to look for all that there was in her 
of himself. 

What he noted in her diary were only the passages which 
83 



revealed their sameness. She began naturally enough to think 
that he loved in her only what there was of himself, that 
beyond the realm of self-discovery, self-love, there was no 
curiosity. 

Her father said: "Although I was prevented from training 
you, your blood obeyed me." As he said this his face shone 
with the luminosity of early portraits, this luminosity the 
one trait which had never faded from her memory. He 
glowed with a joyous Greek wisdom. 

"We must look for light and clarity," he said, "because 
we are too easily unbalanced." 

She was sitting at the foot of his bed. 

"You've got such strong wings," he said. "One feels there 
are no walls to your life." 

The mistral was blowing hot and dry. It had been blowing 
for ten days. 

"Now I see that all these women I pursued are all in you, 
and you are my daughter, and I can't marry you! You are 
the synthesis of all the women I loved." 

"Just to have found each other will make us stronger 
for life." 

Samba the Negro came in with mail. When her father 
saw the letters addressed to her he said: "Am I to be jealous 
of your letters too?" 

Between each two of these phrases there was a long silence. 
A great simplicity of tone. They looked at each other as if 
they were listening to ?misic, not as if he were saying words. 
Inside both their heads, as they sat there, he leaning against 
a pillow and she against the foot of the bed, there was a con- 
cert going on. Two boxes filled with the resonances of an 
orchestra. A hundred instruments playing all at once. Two 
long spools of flutethreads interweaving between his past 

84 



and hers, the strings of the violin constantly trembling like 
the strings inside their bodies, the nerves never still, the heavy 
potindings on the drum like the heavy pounding of sex, the 
throb of blood, the beat of desire 'which droivned all the 
vibrations, louder than any instnmient, the harp singing god, 
god, and the angels, the purity in his brow, the clarity in 
his eyes, god, god, god, and the drums pounding desire at 
the temples. The orchestra all in one voice now, for an in- 
stant, in love, in love with the harp singing god and the violins 
shaking their hair and she passing the violin bow gently be- 
tween her legs, drawing music out of her body, her body 
foaffiing, the harp singing god, the drum beating, the cello 
singing a dirge under the level of tears, through siibterranean 
roads with notes twinkling right and left, notes like stairways 
to the harp singing god, god, god, and the faun through the 
flute mocking the notes grown black and penitent, the black 
notes ascending the dust route of the cello's tears, an earth 
tremor splitting the music in two fallen walls, walls of their 
faith, the cello weeping, and the violins trevibling, the beat 
of sex breaking throtigh the middle and splitting the white 
notes and black notes apart, and the piano's stairway of sounds 
rolling into the inferno of silence because far away, behind 
and beyond the violins conies the second voice of the orches- 
tra, the dark voice out of the bellies of the instruments, un- 
derneath the notes being pressed by hot lingers, in opposition 
to these notes comes the song from the bellies of the instru- 
ments, out of the pollen they contain, out of the wind of 
passing fingers, the carpet of notes mourn with voices of 
black lace and dice on telegraph wires. His sadnesses locked 
into the cello, their dreams wrapped in dust inside of the 
piano box, this box on their heads cracking with resonances, 
the past singing, an orchestra splitting with fullness, lost loves, 

85 



faces vanishing, jealousy twisting like a cancer, eating the 
flesh, the letter that never came, the kiss that was not ex- 
changed, the harp singing god, god, god, who laughs on 
one side of his face, god was the man with a wide mouth 
who coidd have eaten her whole, singing inside the boxes of 
their heads. Friends, treacheries, ecstasies. The voices that 
carried them into serenity, the voices which made the drum 
beat in them, the bow of the violins passing between the 
legs, the curves of wo7nen^s backs yielding, the baton of the 
orchestra leader, the second voice of locked instruments, the 
strings snapping, the dissojiances, the hardness, the flute 
weeping. 

They danced because they were sad, they danced all 
through their life, and the golden top dancing inside them 
7nade the notes turn, the white and the black, the words they 
wanted to hear, the new faces of the world turning black and 
white, ascending and descending, up and down askew stair- 
ways from the bellies of the cello full of salted tears, the 
water rising slowly, a sea of forgetfidness. 

Yesterday ringing through the bells and castanets, and 
today a single note all alone, like their fear of solitude, quar- 
reling, the orchestra taking their whole being together and 
liffmg thein clear out of the earth where pain is a long, smooth 
song that does not cut through the flesh, where love is one 
long smooth note like the wind at night, no blood-shedding 
knife to its touch of music from distance far beyond the or- 
chestra which answered the harp, the flute, the cello, the 
violins, the echoes on the roof, the taste on the roof of their 
palates, inusic in the tongue, in the fingers when the fingers 
seek the flesh, the red pistil of desire in the fingers on the 
violin cords, their cries rising and falling, borne on the wings 
of the orchestra, hurt and wounded by its knowledge of her, 

86 



for thus they cried and thus they laughed, like the bells and 
the castanets, thus they rolled from black to white stairways, 
and dreaming spirals of desire. 

Where is serenity? All their forces at work together, their 
fingers playing, their voices, their heads cracking with the 
fullness of sound, crescendo of exaltation and confusion, 
chaos, fullness, no time to gather all the notes together, sitting 
inside the spider web of their past, faihires, defeats. 

She writing a diary like a perpetual obsessional song, and 
he and she dancing with gold-tipped cigarettes, wrinkled 
clothes, vanity, and worship, faith and doubt, losing their 
blood slowly from too much love, love a wound in them, 
too many delicacies, too many thoughts around it, too many 
vibrations, fatigue, nervousness, the orchestra of their desire 
splitting with its many faces, sad songs, god songs, quest and 
hunger, idealization and cynicism, humor in the split-opened 
face of the trombone swelling with laughter. Walls falling 
under the pressure of wills, walls of the absolute falling with 
each part of them breathing vnisic into instruments, their 
arms waving, their voices, their loves, hatreds, an orchestra 
of conflicts, a theme of disease, the song of pain, the song 
of strings that are never still, for after the orchestra is silent 
in their heads the echoes last, the concert is eternal, the solo 
is a delusion, the others wait behind one to accompany, to 
stifle, to silence^ to drown. Music spilling out from the eyes 
in place of tears, vmsic spilling from the throat in place of 
words, music falling fro7n his fingertips in place of caresses, 
music exchanged between them instead of love, yearning 
on five lines, the five lines of their thoughts, their reveries, 
their emotions, their unknown self, their giant self, their 
shadow. 

The key sitting ironically, half a question mark, like their 

87 



knowledge of destiny. But she sat on five lines cursing the 
world for the shocks, loving the world because it has jaws, 
weeping at the absolute unreachable, the fifth line and the 
voice, saying always: have faith, even curses make music. 
Five lines running together with sifftultaneous song. 

The poverty, the broken hairbrush, the Alice blue gown, 
twilight of sensations, musique ancienne, objects floating. 
One line saying all the time I believe in god, in a god, in a 
father who will lean over and understand all things. I need 
absolution! I believe in others^ purity and I find myself never 
pure enough. I need absolution! Another line on which she 
was making colorful dresses, colorful houses, and dancing. 
Underneath ran the line of disease, doubt, life a danger, life 
a mockery with an evil mouth. Everything lived out sirmd- 
taneously, the love, the i?npidse, the doubt of the love, the 
knowledge of the lovers death, the love of life, the doubt, 
the ecstasy, the knowledge of its death ger?n, everything like 
an orchestra. Can we live in rhythm, my father? Can we feel 
in rhythm, my father? Can we think in rhythn, my father? 
Khy thm — rhy thm — rhy thm. 

* * • * 

At midnight she walked away from his room, down the 
very long corridor, under the arches, with the lamps watch- 
ing, throwing her shadow on the carpets, passing mute doors 
in the empty hotel, the train of her silk dress caressing the 
floor, the mistral hooting. 

As she opened the door of her room the window closed 
violently — there was the sound of broken glass. Doors, silent 
closed doors of empty rooms, arches like those of a convent, 
like opera settings, and the mistral blowing 

Over her bed the white mosquito netting hung like an 
ancient bridal canopy 

88 



The mystical bride of her father 

It was she who told the first lie, with deep sadness because 
she did not have the courage to say to her father: "Our love 
should be great enough to be above jealousy. Spare me those 
lies which we tell the weaker ones." 

Something in his eyes, a quicker beat of the eyelid, a 
wavering of the blue surface, the small quiver by which she 
had learned to detect jealousy in a face, prevented her from 
saying this. Truth was impossible. 

At the same time there were moments when she experienced 
dark, strange pleasure at the thought of deceiving him. She 
knew how deceptive he was. She felt deep down that he was 
incapable of truth, that sooner or later he would lie to her, 
fail her. And she wanted to deceive him first, in a deeper 
way. It gave her joy to be so far ahead of her father who 
was almost a professional deceiver. 

When she saw her father at the station a great misery over- 
came her. She sat inert, remembering each word he had said, 
each sensation. 

It seemed to her that she had not loved him enough, that 
he had come upon her like a great mystery, that again there 
was a confusion in her between god and father. His severity, 
luminousness, his music, seemed again to her not human 
elements. She had pretended to love him humanly. 

Sitting in the train, shaken by the motion, the feeling of 
the ever-growing distance between them, suffocating with 
a cold mood, she recognized the signs of an inhuman love. 
By certain signs she recognized all her pretenses. Every time 
she had pretended to feel more than she felt, she experienced 
this sickness of heart, this cramp and tenseness of her body. 
By this sign she recognized her insincerities. At the core 
nothing ever was false. Her feelings never deceived her. It 



was only her imagination which deceived her. Her imagina- 
tion could give a color, a smell, a beauty to things, even a 
warmth which her body knew very well to be unreal. 

In her head there could be a great deal of acting and many 
strange things could happen in there, but her emotions were 
sincere and they revolted, they prevented her from getting 
lost down the deep corridors of her inventions. Through them 
she knew. They were her eyes, her divining rod, they were 
her truth. 

Today she recognized an inhuman love. 

Lying back on the chaise longue with cotton over her 
eyes, wrapped in coral blankets, her feet on a pillow. Lying 
back with a feeling like that of convalescence. All weight 
and anguish lifted from the body and life like cotton over 
the eyelids. 

She recognized a state which recurred often, in spite of 
light and sound, in spite of the streets she walked, her acti- 
vities. A mood between sleep and dream, where she caught 
the corner of two streets — the street of dreams and the street 
of living — in the palm of her hand and looked at them simul- 
taneously, as one looks at the lines of one's destiny. 

There would come cotton over her eyes and long unbroken 
reveries, sharp, intense, and continuous. She began to see very 
clearly that what destroyed her in this silent drama with her 
father was that she was always trying to tell something that 
never happened, or rather, that everything that happened, 
the many incidents, the trip down south, all this produced a 
state like slumber and ether out of which she could only 
awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, 
a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one's self 
in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflec- 
tions of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never ad- 
90 



dressing the loved one except through a diary or a book 
written about him, because in reality there was no connec- 
tion between them, there was no human being to connect 
with. No one had ever merged with her father, yet they had 
thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness be- 
tween them but the likeness itself seemed to create greater 
separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no 
understanding, likeness and no nearness. 

Now that the world was standing on its head and the 
figure of her father had become immense, like the figure of 
a myth, now that from thinking too much about him she 
had lost the sound of his voice, she wanted to open her eyes 
again and make sure that all this had not killed the light, the 
steadiness of the earth, the bloom of the flowers, and the 
warmth of her other loves. So she opened her eyes and she 
saw: the picture of her father's foot. One day down south, 
while they were driving, they stopped by the road and he 
took off his shoe which was causing him pain. As he pulled 
off his sock she saw the foot of a woman. It was delicate 
and perfectly made, sensitive and small. She felt as if he had 
stolen it from her: it was her foot she was looking at, her 
foot he was holding in his hand. She had the feeling that she 
knew this foot completely. It was her foot — the very same 
size and the very same color, the same blue veins showing 
and the same air of never having walked at all. 

To this foot she could have said: "I know you." She 
recognized the lightness, the speed of it. "I know you, but 
if you are my foot I do not love you. I do not love my 
own foot." 

A confusion of feet. She is not alone in the world. She 
has a double. He sits on the running board of the car and 
when he sits there she does not know where she is. She is 

91 



standing there pitying his foot, and hating it, too, because of 
the confusion. If it were someone else's foot her love could 
flow out freely, all around, but here her love stands still in- 
side of her, still with a kind of fright. 

There is no distance for her to traverse; it chokes inside 
of her, like the coils of self-love, and she cannot feel any 
love for this sore foot because that love leaps back into her 
like a perpetually coiled snake, and she wants always to leap 
outside of herself. She wants to flow out, and here her love 
lies coiled inside and choking her, because her father is her 
double, her shadow, and she does not know which one is real. 
One of them must die so that the other may find the boun- 
daries of himself. To leap out freely beyond the self, love 
must flow out and beyond this wall of confused identities. 
Now she is all confused in her boundaries. She doesn't know 
where her father begins, where she begins, where it is he 
ends, what is the difference between them. 

The difl'erence is this, she begins to see, that he wears 
gloves for gardening and so does she, but he is afraid of 
poverty, and she is not. Can she prove that? Must she prove 
that? Why? For herself. She must know wherein she is not 
like him. She must disentangle their two selves. 

She walked out into the sun. She sat at a cafe. A man sent 
her a note by the gargon. She refused to read it. She would 
have hked to have seen the man. Perhaps she would have 
liked him. Some day she might like a very ordinary man, 
sitting at a cafe. It hadn't happened yet. Everything must 
be immense and deep. In this she was absolutely unlike her 
father who liked only the most superficial adventures. 

Walking into the heart of a summer day, as into a ripe 
fruit. Looking down at her lacquered toenails, at the white 
dust on her sandals. Smelling the odor of bread in the bakery 
92 



where she stopped for a roll. (This her father would not do.) 

A cripple passed very close to her. Her face was burned, 
scarred, the color of iron. All traces of her features were lost, 
as on a leprous face. The whites of her eyes bloodshot, her 
pupils dilated and misty. In her flesh she saw the meat of an 
animal, the fat, the sinews, the blackening blood. 

Fler father had said once that she was ugly. He had said it 
because she was born full of bloom, dimpled, roseate, over- 
flowing with health and joy. But at the age of two she had 
almost died of fever. She lost the bloom all at once. She reap- 
peared before him very pale and thin, and the aesthete in him 
said coolly: "How ugly you are!" This phrase she had never 
been able to forget. It had taken her a lifetime to disprove it 
to herself. A lifetime to efface it. It took the love of others, the 
worship of the painters, to save her from its effects. 

His paternal role could be summed up in the one word: 
criticism. Never an clan of joy, of contentment, of approval. 
Always sad, exacting, critical, blue eyes. 

Out of this came her love of ugliness, her eff'ort to see be- 
yond ugliness, always treating the flesh as a mask, as something 
which never possessed the same shape, color and features as 
thought. Out of this came her love of men's creations. All that 
a man said or thought ivas the face, the body; all that a man 
invented was his walk, his flavor, his coloring; all that a man 
wrote, painted, sang was his skin, his hair, his eyes. People 
were made of crystal for her. She could see right through 
their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. 
Her eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, 
their stuttering. She overlooked the big ears, the frame too 
small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk 
... she forgave ... she became clairvoyant. A new sense which 
had awakened in her uncovered the smell of their soul, the 

93 



shadow cast by their sorrows, the glow of their desires. Beyond 
the words and the appearances she caught all that was left 
unsaid — the electric sparks of their courage, the expanse of 
their reveries, the lunar aspects of their moods, the animal 
breath of their yearning. She never saw the fragmented indi- 
vidual, never saw the grotesque quality or aspect, but always 
the complete self, the mask and the reality, the fulfillment 
and the intention, the core and the future. She saw always the 
actual and the potential man, the seed, the reverie, the inten- 
tion as one 

Now with her love of her father this concern with the 
truth lying beneath the surface and the appearance became 
an obsession because in him the mask was more complete. The 
chasm between his appearance, his words, his gestures, and 
his true self was deeper. 

Through this mask of coldness which had terrified her as 
a child she was better able as a woman to detect the malady of 
his soul. His soul was sick. He was very sick deep down. He 
was dying inside; his eyes could no longer see the warm, the 
near, the real. He seemed to have come from very far only 
to be leaving again immediately. He was always pretending to 
be there. His body alone was there, but his soul was absent: it 
always escaped through a hundred fissures, it was in flight 
always, towards the past, or towards tomorrow, anywhere 
but in the present. 

They looked at each other across miles and miles of separa- 
tion. Their eyes did not meet. His fear of emotion enwrapped 
him in glass. This glass shut out the warmth of life, its human 
odors. He had built a glass house around himself to shut out 
all suffering. He wanted life to filter through, to reach him 
distilled, sifted of crudities and shocks. The glass walls were 
a prism intended to eliminate the dangerous, and in this arti- 

94 



ficial elimination life itself was deformed. With the bad was 
lost the human warmth, the nearness. 

There was no change in his love, but the mask was back 
again as soon as he returned to Paris. The whole pattern of his 
artificial life began again. He had stopped talking as he talked 
down south. He was conversing. It was the beginning of his 
salon life. There were always people around with whom he 
kept up a tone of hghtness and humor. In the evenings she had 
to appear in his salon and talk with the tip of her tongue about 
everything that was far from her thoughts. 

This was the winter of artifice. 

In that salon, with its stained-glass windows, its highly 
polished floor, its dark couches rooted into the Arabian rugs, 
its soft lights and precious books, there was only a fashionable 
musician bowing. 

Although in reality he had not abandoned her, she felt he 
had passed into a world she would not follow him into. She 
felt impelled to act out the scene of abandon from beginning 
to end. She wept at the isolation in which her father's super- 
ficiality left her. She told him she had surrendered all her 
friends and activities for him. She told him she could not Hve 
on the talks they had in his salon. Each phrase she uttered was 
almost automatic. 

It was the scene she knew best, the one most familiar to her 
even though it became an utter lie. It was the same scene which 
had impressed her as a child, and out of which she had made 
a life pattern. As she talked with tears in her eyes, she pitied 
herself for having loved and trusted her father again, for hav- 
ing given herself to him, for having expected everything from 
him. At the same time she knew that this was not true. Her 
mind ran in two directions as she talked, and so did her feel- 
ings. She continued the habitual scene of pain: "I gave myself 

95 



to you once, and you hurt me. I am glad I did not give myself 
to you again. Deep down I have no faith at all in you, as a 
human being." 

The scene which she acted best and felt the best was that 
of abandon. She felt impelled to act it over and over again. 
She knew all the phrases. She was familiar with the emotions 
it aroused. It came so easily to her, even though she knew all 
the time that, except for the moment when he left them years 
ago, she had never really experienced abandon except by way 
of her imagination, except through her fear of it, through her 
misinterpretation of reality. 

There seemed to be a memory deeper than the usual one, 
a memory in the tissues and cells of the body on which we 
tattoo certain scenes which give a shape to one's soul and Ufe 
habits. It was in this way she remembered most vividly that as 
a child a man had tortured her; still she could not help feeling 
tortured or interpreting the world today as it had appeared to 
her then in the light of her misunderstanding of people's 
motives. She could not help telling her father that he was de- 
stroying her absolute love; yet she knew this was not true 
because it was not he who was her absolute love. But this 
statement was untrue only in time; that is, it was her father 
who had endangered her faith in the absolute, it was his be- 
havior which she did not understand as a child which de- 
stroyed her faith in life and in love. 

She knew she had deceived her father as to the extent of 
her love, but the thought in her mind was: what would I be 
feeling now if I had entrusted all my happiness to my father, 
if I had truly depended on him for joy and sustenance.^ I 
would be thoroughly despairing. This thought increased her 
sadness, and her face betrayed such anguish that her father 
was overwhelmed. 

96 



After this scene he continued his marionette life: a chain of 
fashionable concerts, of soirees, hairdressers, shirtmakers, 
newspaper clippings, telephone calls. . . . 

She began to hate him for evaporating into frivolity, for 
disguising his soul with such puerilities. 

She was filled with doubts. She saw him in a perpetually- 
haunting shadow of something he was not. This man that he 
was not interfered with her actual knowledge. These encount- 
ers where love never reached an understanding, where all 
ended in frustration, this love which created nothing, this love 
strangled her life. As soon as he was away she began again to 
imagine him as he might be. She imagined him talking to her 
deeply, she imagined tenderness and understanding. 

Imagined! Like a contagious disease withering her actual 
life, this imaginary meeting, imaginary talk, on which she 
spent all her inventiveness. As soon as he came all these ex- 
pectations were destroyed. His talk was empty, marginal. His 
whole ingenuity was spent circling away from everything 
vital, in remaining on the surface by adroit descriptions of 
nothing; by a swift chain of puerilities, by long speeches 
about trivialities, by lengthy expansions of empty facts. 

This ghost of her potential father tormented her like a 
hunger for something which she knew had been invented or 
created solely by herself, but which she feared might never 
take human shape. Where was the man she really loved? The 
windows he had opened in the south had been windows on 
the past. The present or the future seemed to terrify him. 
Nothing was essential but to retain avenues of escape. 

This constant yearning for the man beyond the mask, this 

disregard of the mask, was also a disregard of the harm which 

the wearing of a mask inevitably produced. It was difficult for 

her to believe, as others did, that the mask tainted the blood, 

97 



that the colors of the mask could run into the colors of nature 
and poison it. She could not believe that, like the women who 
had been painted in gold and died of the poison, the mask and 
the flesh could melt into each other and bring on infection. 

Her love was based on faith in the purity of one's own 
nature. It made her oblivious of the deformities which could 
be produced in the soul by the wearing of a mask. It caused 
her to disregard the deterioration that might affect the real 
face, the habits which the mask could form if worn for a long 
time. She could not believe that if one pretended indifference 
long enough, the germ of indifference could finally grow, 
that the soul could be discolored by long pretense, that there 
could come a moment when the mask and the man melted into 
one another, that confusion between them corroded the vital 
core, destroyed the core .... 

This deterioration in her father she could not yet believe. 
She expected a miracle to happen. So many times it had hap- 
pened to her to see the hardness of a face fall, the curtain over 
the eyes draw away, the false voice change, and to be allowed 
to enter by her vision into the true self of others. 

When she was sixteen she could feel his visitations. He 
would descend on her often when she was dancing and laugh- 
ing. He came then like a blight, because when she felt his 
presence, she felt a curtain of criticism covering all things. 
She looked through his eyes then instead of her own. Her 
mother always said: laugh and dance, but her father in her was 
contemptuous. A strange intuition because she did not know 
then that her father could not dance. 

Once she was dancing on the stage. She had just begun her 
first number. The Spanish music carried her away, whirled her 
into a state of delirium. She could feel the audience surrender- 



ing to her. She was dancing; carrying away their eyes, their 
senses, into her spinning and whirling. 

Her eyes fell on the front row. She saw her father there. 
She saw his pale face half hidden in the audience. He was 
holding a program before his face in order not to be recog- 
nized. But she knew his hair, his brow, his eyes. It was her 
father. Her steps faltered, she lost her rhythm. Only for a 
moment. Then she swung around, stamping her feet, dancing 
wildly and never looking his way, until the end. 

When she saw her father years later she asked him if he had 
been there. He answered that not only was he not there but 
that if he had had the power he would have prevented her 
from dancing because he did not want his daughter on the 
stage. Even from a distance she had felt his criticalness. Now 
she saw him as she had divined him, cold, formal, and conven- 
tional; and she was angry at the prison walls of his severity. 

As soon as she left him everything besan to sint; again. 
Everybody she passed in the street seemed like a music box. 
She heard the street organ, the singing of the wheels roUino;. 
Motion was music. Her father was the musician, but in life 
he arrested music. Music melts all the separate parts of our 
bodies together. Every rusty fragment, every scattered piece 
could be melted into one rhythm. A note was a whole, and it 
was in motion, ascending or descending, swelling in fullness 
or thrown away, thrown out in the air, but always moving. 

As soon as she left her father she heard music again. It was 
falling from the trees, pouring from throats, twinklincr from 
the street lamps, sliding down the gutter. It was her faith in the 
world which danced again. It was the expectation of miracles 
which made every misery sound like part of a symphony. 

Not separateness but oneness was music. 



Father, let me ivalk alone into the music of my faith. When 
I am with you the world is still and silent. 

You give the command for stillness, and life stops like a 
clock that has fallen. You draw geometric lines around liquid 
forms, and what you extract frojn the chaos is already 
crystallized. 

As soon as I leave you everything fixed falls into waves, 
tides, is transformed into water and flows. I hear my heart 
beating again with disorder. I hear the music of my gestures, 
and my feet begin to run as music runs and leaps. Music does 
not climb stairways. Music runs and I run with it. Faith makes 
music come out of the trees, out of wood, out of ivory. 

I coidd never dance around you, my father, I could never 
dance around you! 

You held the conductors baton, but no music could come 
from the orchestra because of your severity. As soon as you 
left my heart beat in great disorder. Everything melted into 
music, and I could dance through the streets singing, without 
an orchestra leader. I could dance and sing. 
* * * * 

Walking down the Rue Saturne she heard the students of 
the Conservatoire playing the "Sonate en Re Minetir" of Bach. 
She also heard her mother's beautiful voice singing Schu- 
mann's "J'ai pardonne." . . . Strange how her mother, who 
had never forgiven her father, could sing that song more 
movingly than anything else she sang. 

Walking down the Rue Saturne she was singing "Pai par- 
donne" under her breath and thinking at the same time how 
she hated this street because it was the one she always walked 
through on her way to her father's house. On winter evenings 
his luxurious home was heated like a hothouse, and she found 
100 



him pale and tense, at work upon some trifling matter which 
he took very seriously. Or rehearsing, or else just coming 
down from his siesta. 

This siesta he always took with religious care, as if the 
preservation of his life depended on it. At bottom he felt life 
to be a danger, a process not of growth but of deterioration. 
To love too deeply, he said, to talk too much, to laugh too 
much, was a wasting of one's energy. Life was an enemy to 
him, and every sign of its wear and tear gave him anxiety. He 
could not bear a crack in the ceiling, a bit of paint worn away, 
a stairway worn threadbare, a faded spot on the wallpaper. 
Since he never Hved wholly in the moment a part of him was 
already preparing for the morrow. 

When she saw her father coming out of his room after his 
siesta she always had the feeling that he was making artificial 
efforts to delay the process of growth, fruition, decay, dis- 
integration, which is organic and inevitable. 
(^ He believed he was delaying death by preserving himself 
from life, when on the contrary, it was the fear of life and the 
efforts he made to avoid it which used up his strength. Living 
never wore one out as much as the effort not to live, she be- 
lieved, and only if one lived fully and freely one also rested 
fully and deeply?) Not trusting himself to life, not abandoning 
himself, he coTlla not sink into deep sleep at night without 
fear of death. . . . She always left his house with a feehng of 
having come near to death because everything there was so 
clearly a fight against death. 

She left the neatest, the most spotless street of Paris where 
the gardeners were occupied in clipping and trimming a few 
rare potted bushes in small, still front gardens; where butlers 
were occupied in polishing door knobs; where low cars rolled 
up silently and caught one by surprise; where stone lions 



watched fur-trimmed women kissing little dogs — everything 
that she had rejected — . . . . 

The light was very strong on the newly painted street 
sign. And then she saw that the name of the street was being 
changed. Already it said: "Anciennement Rue Saturne . . . 
now changed to ... " 

Now changed. As she was changed and beginning to move 
away from the past. She wanted to change with the city, that 
all the houses of the past may be finally torn down, that the 
whole city of the past may disappear. That all she had seen, 
heard, experienced would cease to walk with her down streets 
with changed names, through the labyrinth of loss and change 
where all is forgotten .... 

Each step along the Rue Saturne corresponded to a million 
steps she had taken away from her father. In the same city in 
which he lived a thousand steps took her to a different milieu, 
different ideas, different people. 

Walking in the rain to pass before his house, looking up at 
the stained-glass window, thinking: I have at least eluded you. 
Where it is I have my deeper life, you do not know. The 
deepest part of my being you never penetrated. The woman 
who stands here is not your daughter. It is the woman who has 
escaped the stigmata of parental love. 

To escape him she had run away to the end of the world. To 
be free of him she had run away to places where he never 
went. She had lost him, by living in the opposite direction 
from him. She sought out the failures because he didn't like 
those who stuttered, those who stumbled; she sought out the 
ugly because he turned his face away; she sought out the 
weak because they irritated him. She sought out chaos because 
he insisted on logic. She traveled to the other end of life, to 
the drab, the loose, the weak, the wine-stained, wine-soggy, 
102 



in whom she was sure not to find the least trace of him. No 
trace of him anywhere along the Boulevard Clichy where 
the market people passed with their vegetable carts; no trace 
of him at two in the morning in the little cafe opposite La 
Trinite; no trace of him in the sordid neighborhood of the 
Boulevard Jcan-Jaurcs; no trace of him in the cineyna dii quar- 
tier, in the Bal Alusctre, in the burlesque theatre. Never any- 
one who had heard of him. Never anyone who smelled like 
him. Never a voice like his. 

It was her father who thrust her out into the black, soiled 
corners of the world. Everything she loved she turned her 
back on because it was also what he loved. Luxury with its 
serpentine of light, its masquerade costume of gaiety, every- 
thing that shined, glittered, threw off perfume, would have 
reminded her of him. To efface such a love took her years of 
walking greasy streets, of sleeping between soiled sheets, of 
traversing the unknown. She was happy only when she finally 
succeeded in losing him. 

I ler father and she were walking through the Bois. On his 
lips she could still see the traces of a mordant kiss. 

"We met at Notre Dame," he was saying. "She began with 
the most vulgar cross-examination, reproaching me for not 
loving her. So I proceeded with a slow analy.sis of her, telling 
her she had fallen in love with me in the way women usually 
fall in love with an artist who is handsome and who plays 
with vehemence and elegance; telling her that it had been a 
literary and imaginary affair kindled by the reading of my 
books, that our affair had no substantial basis, what with 
meetings interrupted by intervals of r\vo years. I told her that 
no love could survive such thin nourishment and that besides 
she was too pretty a woman to have remained two years with- 
out a lover, especially in view of the fact that she cordially 

103 



detested her husband. She said she felt that my heart was not 
in it. I answered that I didn't know whether or not my heart 
was in it when we had only twenty minutes together in a 
taxi without curtains in an overht city." 

"Did you talk to her in that ironic tone?" she asked. 

"It was even more cutting than that. I was annoyed that 
she had been able to give me only twenty minutes." 

(He had forgotten that he had come to tell her that he did 
not love her. What most struck him and annoyed him was 
that she had only been able to escape her husband's surveil- 
lance for twenty minutes.) 

"She was so hurt," he added, "that I didn't even kiss her." 

As they walked along she again looked carefully at his lip. 
It was slightly red, with a deeper, bluish tone in one corner, 
where no doubt the dainty tooth of the countess had bitten 
most fiercely. But she did not say anything. She was recon- 
structing the scene more accurately in her own head. Probably 
the little countess had arrived at the steps of Notre Dame, 
looking very earnest, very exalted. Probably her father had 
been touched. She did not believe that her father had been 
annoyed by the countess's jealousy and worship, but that it 
had touched his vanity. He was disguising his pleasure under 
an air of indifference, so that his listener might take him for a 
cynical Don Juan, the despair of women. 

He repeated a story which he had told her before, of how 
the countess had slashed her face in order to justify her tardi- 
ness to her husband. This story had always seemed highly 
improbable to her, because a woman in love is not likely to 
endanger her beauty. Any explanation would have been 
simpler than this farfetched tale of an automobile accident. 

But why did he have this need of falsifying all that hap- 
pened to him? She had long before asked him to cease creating 

304 



this illusion of an exclusive love, to be truthful vi^ith her. She 
had offered to be his confidante. He had promised . . . and 
now he was inventing again. 

When she arrived the next day he had not slept at all, think- 
ing: I am going to lose you. And if I lose you I cannot hve 
any more. You are everything to me. My life was empty 
before you came. My life is a failure and a tragedy anyway. 

He looked deeply sad. His fingers were wandering over 
the keys, hesitantly. His eyes looked as if he had been walking 
through a desert. 

"You make me realize," he said, "how empty my activity 
is. In not being able to make you happy I miss the most vital 
reason for living." 

He was again the man she had known in the south. His 
tone rang true. But he could not let her be. If she preferred 
Dostoievsky to Anatole France he felt that his whole edifice 
of ideas was being attacked and endangered. He was offended 
if she did not smoke his cigarettes, if she did not go to all his 
concerts, if she did not admire all his friends. 

And she — she wanted him to abandon his superficialities 
and vanities and deceptions. They could not accept each 
other. 

Realizing more and more that she did not love him she felt 
a strange joy, as if she were witnessing a just punishment for 
his coldness as a father when she was a child. And this 
suffering, which in reality she made no effort to inflict since 
she kept her secret, gave her joy. It made her feel that she 
was balancing in herself all the injustice of life, that she was 
restoring in her own soul a kind of symmetry to the events 
of life. 

It was the fulfillment of a spiritual symmetry. A sorrow 
here, a sorrow there. Abandon yesterday, adandon today. 

105 



Betrayal today, betrayal tomorrow. Two equally poised 
columns. A deception here, a deception there, like twin colon- 
nades: a love for today, a love for tomorrow; a punishment 
to him, a punishment to the other . . . and one for herself .... 
Mystical geometry. The arithmetic of the unconscious which 
impelled this balancing of events. 

She felt like laughing whenever her father repeated that he 
was lucid, simple, logical. She knew that this order and pre- 
cision were only apparent. He had chosen to live on the sur- 
face, and she to descend deeper and deeper. His fundamental 
desire was to escape pain, hers to face all of life. Instead of 
coming out of his shell to face the disintegration of their 
relationship he eluded the truth. He had not discovered as she 
had that by meeting the person she feared to meet, by reading 
the letter she feared to read, by giving life a chance to strike 
at her she had discovered that it struck less cruelly than her 
imagination. To imagine was far more terrible than reality, 
because it took place in a void, it was untestable. There were 
no hands with which to strike or defend oneself in that inner 
chamber of ghostly tortures. But in living the realization 
summoned energies, forces, courage, arms and legs to fight 
with so that war almost became a joy. To fight a real sorrow, 
a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was 
infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep 
struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at invent- 
ing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon 
within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It 
knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and 
lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination 
equal to the task. 

He told her that he had stayed awake all night wondering 
106 



how he would bring himself to tell a singer that she had no 
voice at all. 

"There was almost a drama here yesterday with Laura 
about that singer. I tried to dissuade her from falling in love 
with me by assuring her she was simply the victim of a mirage 
which surrounds every artist, that if she came close to me she 
would be disillusioned. So yesterday after the singing we 
talked for three quarters of an hour and when I told her I 
would not have an affair with her (at another period of my 
life I might have done it, for the game of it, but now I have 
other things to live for) she began to sob violently and the 
rimmel came off. When she had used up her handkerchief I 
was forced to lend her mine. Then she dropped her lipstick 
and I picked it up and wiped it with another of my handker- 
chiefs. After the first fits of tears she began to calmly make up 
her face, wiping off the rouge that had been messed up by 
the tears. \\'hen she left I threw the handkerchiefs into the 
laundry. The fey/nne de chainbre picked them up and left all 
the laundry just outside the door of my room while she was 
cleaning it. Laura passed by, saw them and immediately 
thought I had deceived her. I had to explain everything to 
her; I told her I had not told her about this woman because I 
did not want to seem to be boasting all the time about women 
pursuing me." 

She did not mind his philandering, but she was eager for 
the truth. She knew that he was telling a lie, because when a 
woman weeps the rimmel comes off, but not the lipstick, and 
besides, all elegant women have acquired a technique of weep- 
ing which has no such fatal effect on the make-up. You wept 
just enough to fill the eves with tears and no more. No over- 
flow. The tears stay inside the cups of the eyes, the rimmel is 
preserved, and yet the sadness is sufficiently expressive. After a 

107 



moment one can repeat the process with the same dexterity 
which enables the garden to fill a hqueur glass exactly to the 
brim. One tear too much could bring about a catastrophe, 
but these only came uncontrolled in the case of a deep love. 

She was smiling to herself at his naive lies. The truth prob- 
ably was that he had wiped his own mouth after kissing the 
singer. 

He was playing around now as before, but he hated to admit 
it to himself, and to her, because of the ideal image he carried 
in himself, the image of a man who could be so deeply dis- 
turbed and altered by the love of a long-lost daughter that his 
career as a Don Juan had come to an abrupt end. 

This romantic gesture which he was unable to make at- 
tracted him so much that he had to pretend he was making 
it, just as she had often pretended to be taking a voyage by 
writing letters on the stationery of some famous ocean liner. 

"I said to Laura: do you really think that if I wanted to 
deceive you I would do it in such an obvious and stupid way, 
right here in our own home where you might come in any 
moment?" 

What her father was attempting was to create an ideal 
world for her in which Don Juan, for the sake of his daughter, 
renounced all women. But she could not be deceived by his 
inventions. She was too clairvoyant. That was the pity of it. 
She could not believe in that which she wanted others to 
believe in — in a world made as one wanted it, an ideal world. 
She no longer believed in an ideal world. 

And her father, what did he want and need? The illusion, 
which she was fostering, of a daughter who had never loved 
any one but him? Or did he find it hard to believe her too? 
When she left him in the south, did he not doubt her reason 
for leaving him? 

When she went about dreaming of satisfying the world's 

108 



hunger for illusion did she know it was the most painful, the 
most insatiable hunger? Did she not know too that she suffered 
from doubt, and that although she was able to work miracles 
for others she had no faith that the fairy tale would ever work 
out for herself? Even the gifts she received were difficult for 
her to love, because she knew that they would soon be taken 
away from her, jusr as her father had been taken away from her 
when she loved him so passionately, just as every home she had 
as a child had been disrupted, sold, lost, just as every country 
she became attached to was soon changed for another country, 
just as all her childhood had been loss, change, instability. 

When she entered his house which was all in brown, brown 
wood on the walls, brown rugs, brown furniture, she thought 
of Spenglcr writing about brown as the color of philosophy. 
His windows were not open on the street, he had no use for 
the street, and so he had made the windows of stained glass. 
He lived within the heart of his own home as Orientals live 
within their citadel. Out of reach of passers-by. The house 
might have been anywhere — in England, Holland, Germany, 
America. There was no stamp of nationality upon it, no air 
from the outside. It was the house of the self, the house of his 
thoughts. The wall of the self-created without connection 
with tiie crowd, or country or race. 

He was still taking his siesta. She sat near the long range of 
files, the long, beautiful, neat rows of files, with names which 
set her dreaming: China, Science, Photography, Ancient In- 
struments, Egypt, Morocco, Cancer, Radio, Inventions, The 
Guitar, Spain. It required hours of work every day: news- 
papers and magazines had to be read and clippings cut out, 
dated, glued. He wove a veritable spider web about himself. 
No man was ever more completely installed in the realm of 
possessions. 

He spent hours inventing new ways of filling his cigarette 

109 



holder with an anti-nicotine filter. He bought drugs in whole- 
sale quantities. His closets were filled with photographs, with 
supplies of writing paper and medicines sufficient to last for 
years. It was as if he feared to find himself suddenly empty 
handed. His house was a storehouse of supplies which revealed 
his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the 
improvised, the unexpected. He had prepared a fortress against 
need, war and change. 

In proportion to her father's capacity for becoming invisi- 
ble, untouchable, unattainable, in proportion to his capacity' 
for metamorphosis, he had made the most solid house, the 
strongest walls, the heaviest furniture, the most heavily loaded 
bookcases, the most completely filled and catalogued universe. 
Everything to testify to his presence, his duration, his signature 
to a contract to remain on earth, visible at moments through 
his possessions. 

In her mind she saw him asleep upstairs, with his elbow 
under his chin, in the most uncomfortable position which he 
had trained himself to hold so as not to sleep with his mouth 
open because that was ugly. She saw him asleep without a 
pillow, because a pillow under the head caused wrinkles. She 
pictured the bottle of alcohol which her mother had laugh- 
ingly said that he bottled himself in at night in order to keep 
young forever. . . . 

He washed his hands continuously. He had a mania for 
washing and disinfecting himself. The fear of microbes played 
a very important part in his life. The fruit had to be washed 
with filtered water. His mouth must be disinfected. The 
silverware must be passed over an alcohol lamp like the doc- 
tor's instruments. He never ate the part of the bread which 
his fingers had touched. 

Her father had never imagined that he may have been try- 

110 



ing to cleanse and disinfect his soul of his Hes, his callousness, 
his deceptions. For him the only danger came from the mi- 
crobes which attacked the body. He had not studied the mi- 
crobe of conscience which cats into the soul. 

When she saw him washing his hands, while watching the 
soap foaming she could see him again arriving behind stage at 
a concert, with his fur-lined coat and white silk scarf, and 
being immediately surrounded by women. She was seven 
years old, dressed in a starched dress and white gloves, and 
sitting in the front row with her mother and brothers. She 
was trembling because her father had said severely: "And 
above all, don't make a cheap family show of your enthusi- 
asm. Clap discreetly. Don't have people notice that the pian- 
ist's children are clapping away like noisy peasants." This 
enthusiasm which must be held in check was a great burden 
for a child's soul. She had never been able to curb a joy or 
sorrow: to restrain meant to kill, to bury. This cemetery of 
strangled emotions — was it this her father was trying to wash 
away? And the day she told him she was pregnant and he 
said: "Now you're worth less on the market as a woman" . . . 
was this being washed away? No insight into the feelings of 
others. Passing from hardness to sentimentality. No inter- 
mediate human feeling, but extreme poles of indifference and 
weakness which never made the human equation. Too hot or 
too cold, blood cold and heart weak, blood hot and heart 
cold. 

While he was washing his hands with that expression she 
had seen on the faces of people in India thrust into the Ganges, 
of Egyptians plunged into the Nile, of Negroes dipped into 
the Mississippi, she saw the fruit being washed and mineral 
water poured into his glass. Sterilized water to wash away the 
microbes, but his soul unwashed, unwashable, yearning to be 

111 



free of the microbe of conscience. . . . All the water running 
from the modern tap, running from this modern bathroom, 
all the rivers of Egypt, of India, of America . . . and he un- 
washed. . .washing his modern body, washing. . .washing. . . 
washing. ... A drop of holy water with which to exorcise 
the guilt. Hands washed over and over again in the hope of a 
miracle, and no miracle comes from the taps of modern wash- 
stands, no holy water flows through leaden pipes, no holy 
water flows under the bridges of Paris because the man stand- 
ing at the tap has no faith and no awareness of his soul: he 
believes he is merely washing the stain of microbes from his 

hands 

* « * * 

She told her father she must leave on a trip. He said: "You 
are deserting me!" 

He talked rapidly, breathlessly, and left very hurriedly. 
She wanted to stop him and ask him to give her back her soul. 
She hated him for the way he descended the stairs as if he had 
been cast out, wounded by jealousy. 

She hated him because she could not remain detached, nor 
remain standing at the top of the stairs watching him depart. 
She felt herself going down with him, within him, because 
his pain and flight were so familiar to her. She descended with 
him, and lost herself, passed into him, became one with him 
like his shadow. She felt herself empty, and dissolving into 
his pain. She knew that when he reached the street he would 
hail a taxi, and feel relief at escaping from the person who 
had inflicted the wound. There was always the power of 
escape, and rebellion. 

The organ grinder would play and the pain would gnaw 
deeper, bitterer. He would curse the lead-colored day which 
intensified the sorrow because they both were born inextri- 
cably woven into the moods of natiure. 
112 



He would curse his pain which distorted faces and events 
into one long, continuous nightmare. 

She wanted to beg her father to say that he had not felt 
all this, and assure her that she had stayed at the top of the 
stairs, with separate, distinct feelings. But she was not there. 
She was walking with him, and sharing his feelings. She was 
trying to reach out to him and reassure him. But everything 
about him was fluttering like a bird that had flown into a 
room by mistake, flying recklessly and blindly in utter terror. 
The pain he had eluded all his life had caught him between 
four walls. And he was bruising himself against walls and 
furniture while she stood there mute and compassionate. His 
terror so great that he did not sense her pity, and when she 
moved to open the window to allow him to escape he inter- 
preted the gesture as a menace. To run away from his own 
terror he flew wildly against the window and crushed his 
feathers. 

Don^t flutter so blindly, my father! 
• • • • 

She grew suddenly tired of seeing her father always in 
profile, of seeing him always walking on the edge of circles, 
always elusive. The fluidity, the evasiveness, the deviations 
made his hfe a shadow picture. He never met life full-face. 
His eyes never rested on anything, they were always in flight. 
His face was in flight. His hands were in flight. She never saw 
them lying still, but always curving like autumn leaves over a 
fire, curling and uncurling. Thinking of him she could picture 
him only in motion, either about to leave, or about to arrive; 
she could see better than anything else, as he was leaving, his 
back and the way his hair came to a point on his neck. 

She wanted to bring her father out in the open. She was 
tired of his ballet dancing. She would struggle to build up 
a new relationship. 

113 



But he refused to admit he had been lying. He was pale 
with anger. No one ever doubted him before — so he said. To 
be doubted blinded him with anger. He was not concerned 
with the truth or falsity of the situation. He was concerned 
with the injury and insult she was guilty of, by doubting him. 

"You're demolishing everything," he said. 

"What I'm demolishing was not solid," she answered. 
"Let's make a new beginning. We created nothing together 
except a sand pile into which both of us sink now and then 
with doubts. I am not a child. I cannot believe your stories." 

He grew still more pale and angry. What shone out of 
his angry eyes was pride in his stories, pride in his ideal self, 
pride in his delusions. And he was offended. He did not stop 
to ask himself if she were right. She could not be right. She 
could see that, for a moment at any rate, he believed im- 
plicitly in the stories he had told her. If he had not believed 
in them so firmly he would have been humiliated to see him- 
self as a poor comedian, a man who could not deceive even 
his own daughter. 

"You shouldn't be offended," she said. "Not to be able to 
deceive your own daughter is no disgrace. It's precisely be- 
cause I have told you so many lies myself that I can't be lied 
to." 

"Now," he said, "you are accusing me of being a Don 
Juan." 

"I accuse you of nothing. I am only asking for the truth." 

"What truth?" he said, "I am a moral being, far more 
moral than you." 

"That's too bad. I thought we were above questions of 
good and evil. I am not saying you are bad. That does not 
concern me. I am saying only that you are false with me. 
I have too much intuition." 

"You have no intuition at aU concerning me." 
114 



"That might have affected me when I was a child. Today 
I don't mind what you think of me." 

"Go on," he said. "Now tell me, tell me I have no talent, 
fell me I don't know how to love, tell me all that your mother 
used to tell me." 

"I have never thought any of these things." 

But suddenly she stopped. She knew her father was not 
seeing her any more, but always that judge, that past which 
made him so uneasy. She felt as if she were not herself any 
more, but her mother, her mother with a body tired with 
giving and serving, rebelling at his selfishness and irresponsi- 
bility. She felt her mother's anger and despair. For the first 
time her own image fell to the floor. She saw her mother's 
image. She saw the child in him who demanded all love and 
did not know how to love. She saw the child incapable of 
an act of protection, strength, or self-denial. She saw the 
child hiding behind her courage, the same child hiding now 
under Laura's protection. She was her mother telling him 
again that as a human being he was a failure. And perhaps 
she had told him too that as a musician he had not given 
enough to justify his limitations as a human being. All his 
life he had been playing with people, with love, playing at 
love, playing at being a pianist, playing at composing. Play- 
ing because to no one or nothing could he give his whole soul. 

There were two regions, two tracts of land, with a bridge 
in between, a slight, fragile bridge like the Japanese bridges 
in the miniature Japanese gardens. Whoever ventured to cross 
the bridge fell into the abyss. So it was with her mother. She 
had fallen through and been drowned. Her mother thought 
he had a soul. She had fallen there in that space where his 
emotions reached their limit, where the land opened in two, 
where circles fell open and rings were unsoldered. 

Was it her mother talking now? She was saying: "I am 
115 



only asking you to be honest with yourself. I admit when 
I lie, but you never admit it. I am not asking for anything 
except that you be real." 

"Now say I am superficial." 

"At this moment you are. I wanted you to face me and 
be truthful." 

He paced up and down, pale with anger. 

It seemed to her that her father was not quarreling with 
her but with his own past, that what was coming to light 
now was his underlying feeling of guilt towards her mother. 
If he saw in her now an avenger it was only because of his 
fear that his daughter might accuse him too. Against her 
judgment he had erected a huge defense: the approbation 
of the rest of the world. But in himself he had never quite 
resolved the right and the wrong. He, too, was driven now 
by a compulsion to say things he never intended to say, to 
make her the symbol of the one who had come to punish, to 
expose his deceptions, to prove his worthlessness. 

And this was not the meaning of her struggle with him. 
She had not come to judge him but to dissolve the falsities. 
He feared so much that she had come to say: "the four per- 
sons you abandoned in order to Hve your own life, to save 
yourself, were crippled," that he did not hear her real words. 
The scene was taking place between two ghosts. 

Her father's ghost was saying: "I cannot bear the slightest 
criticism. Immediately I feel judged, condemned." 

Her own ghost was saying: "I cannot bear lies and decep- 
tions. I need truth and sincerity." 

They could not understand each other. They were ges- 
ticulating in space. Gestures of despair and anger. Her father 
pacing up and down, angry because of her doubts of him, 
forgetting that these doubts were well founded, forgetting 

116 



to ask himself if she was right or not. And she in despair 
because her father would not understand, because the fragile 
little Japanese bridge between the two portions of his soul 
would not hold her even for a moment, she walking with 
such light feet, trying to bring messages from one side to 
another, trying to make connections between the real and 
the unreal. 

She could not see her father clearly any more. She could 
see only the hard profile cutting the air like a swift stone 
ship, a stone ship moving in a sea unknown to human beings, 
into regions made of granite rock. No more water, or warmth, 
or flow between them. All communication paralyzed by the 
falsity. Lost in the fog. Lost in a cold, white fog of falsity. 
Images distorted as if they were looking through a glass 
bowl. His mouth long and mocking, his eyes enormous but 
empty in their transparency. Not human. All human con- 
tours lost. _ 

And she thinking:\I stopped loving my father a long time 
ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern. When I 
saw him I thought I would be happy and exalted. I pretended. 
I worked myself up into ecstasies. When one is pretending 
the entire body revolts^ There come great eruptions and re- 
volts, great dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, 
bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural brings joy. He 
was pretending too — he had to win me as a trophy, as a 
victory. He had to win me away from my mother, had to 
win my approbation. Had to win me because he feared me. 
He feared the judgment of his children. And when he could 
not win me he suffered in his vanity. He fought in me his 
own faults, just as I hated in him my own faults. 

Certain gestures made in childhood seem to have eternal 
repercussions. Such was the gesture she had made to keep 
117 



her father from leaving, grasping his coat and holding on 
to it so fiercely that she had to be torn away. This gesture 
of despair seemed to prolong itself all through her hfe. She 
repeated it blindly, fearing always that everything she loved 
would be lost. 

It was so hard for her to believe that this father she was 
still trying to hold on to was no longer real or important, 
that the coat she was touching was not warm, that the body 
of him was not human, that her breathless, tragic desire had 
come to an end, and that her love had died. 

Great forces had impelled her towards symmetry and 
balance, had impelled her to desert her father in order to 
close the fatal circle of desertion. She had forced the hour- 
glass of pain to turn. They had pursued each other. They 
had tried to possess each other. They had been slaves of a 
pattern, and not of love. Their love had long ago been re- 
placed by the other loves which gave them life. All those 
parts of the self which had been tied up in a tangle of misery 
and frustration had been loosened imperceptibly by life, by 
creation. But the feehngs they had begun with twenty years 
back, he of guilt and she of love, had been like railroad 
tracks on which they had been launched at full speed by 
their obsessions. 

Today she held the coat of a dead love. 

This had been the nightmare — to pursue this search and 
poison all joys with the necessity of its fulfillment. To dis- 
cover that such fulfillment was not necessary to life, but to 
the myth. It was the myth which had forbidden them to 
deny their first ideal love or to recognize its illusory sub- 
stance. What they called their destiny — the railroad track 
of their obsessions. 

At last she was entering the Chinese theater of her drama 

118 



and could see the trappings of the play as well as the play 
itself, see that the settings were made of the cardboard of 
illusion. She was passing behind the stage and could stop 
weeping. The suffering was no longer real. She could see 
the strings which ruled the scenes, the false storms and the 
false lightning. 

She was coming out of the ether of the past. 

The world was a cripple. Her father was a cripple. In 
striking out for his own liberty, to save his life, he had struck 
at her, but he had poisoned himself with remorse. 

No need to hate. No need to punish. 

The last time she had come out of the ether it was to look 
at her dead child, a little girl with long eyelashes and slender 
hands. She was dead. 

The little girl in her was dead too. The woman was saved. 
And with the little girl died the need of a father. 



119 



The Voice 



DjTJNA is lying down in a cell-shaped room of the tallest 
hotel in the City, in a building shooting upward like a railroad 
track set for the moon. A million rooms like cells, all exactly 
alike, and reaching in swift confused layers towards the 
moon. The rapid birds of elevators traverse the layers with 
lightning flashes of their red and white eyes signaling UP or 
DOWN, to the sun terraces, the observation towers, the 
solarium, or the storage rooms in the underground. All the 
voices of the world captured by the radio wires in this Babel 
tower, and even when the little buttons are marked off this 
music of all the languages continues to seep through the 
walls. The people riding up and down the elevators are never 
permitted to crash through the last ceiling into pure space 
and never allowed to pierce through the ground floor to 
enter the demonic regions below the crust of the earth. When 
they reach the highest tip they swoop down again back to 
the heavy repose in darkness. For Djuna the elevator does 
not stop at the sun terraces. She is certain it will pass beyond 
and through the ceiling, as she does with her feelings, explode 
in a fuse of ascension. When it stops dead on the ground 
floor she feels a moment of anguish; it will not stop here but 
bury itself below, where there is hysteria and darkness, wells, 
prisons, tombs. 

Passing through the carpeted hallways, she can hear the 
singing, the weeping, the quarrels and confessions seeping 
120 



out. Her footsteps are not heard in this convent of adulteries. 
The chambermaid is passing, carrying old newspapers, maga- 
zines, cigarette butts, breakfast left-overs. The boy is running 
with telegrams, special deliveries and telephone messages. He 
passes and with him a knife thrust of icy wind angrily bang- 
ing the doors opened on intimate lives. Trays of food for the 
lovers and for the unloved. The house detective. 

Merely passing down the halls noiselessly over the carpeted 
floor Djuna is aware of confessions seeping out. The eleva- 
tors disgorge people feverishly eager to confess. They ask 
for the room of the modern priest, where a man in an arm- 
chair is listening to the unfaithful lying on the divan, looking 
down at them, with his own face against the light. Looking 
down at them to keep fresh in him the wound of compassion. 
When the glance rests on human beings from this position, 
where he can see the frailty of the hair, how it parts, falls, 
where it thins, where he can see the brow like a sharp land- 
slide, discover the delicacy of the skin as it alone reveals itself 
when watched obliquely, all men seem in need of protection. 
From where he looks all noses slant without audacity, point 
without impertinence, merely a tender root to the mouth. 
The eyes are covered by weary eyelids, their motion slower 
when watched from above, a curtain of hyper-sensitive skin 
lowered with the gravity of sleep or death. Without the 
thrusting light-duel of the eyes, without the glaze and fervor 
of expression, courage, cruelty, humor, all men look cruci- 
fied, passive, covering painful secrets. The mouth without 
its sensual openness, its breath, appears like a target mark, 
a vulnerable opening, a wound in the human being through 
which all his sorrows run hysterically. 

The man listening to confessions is confined to his arm- 
chair and he sees them all struggling, defeated, wounded, 

121 



crippled. They are laying themselves open before him, de- 
manding to be condoned, absolved, forgiven, justified. They 
want this Voice coming from a dark armchair, a substitute 
for God, for the confessor of old. 

Djuna, lying down, remembers all this that she has lived, 
and that so many others are living after her. This talk in the 
dark with one who becomes part of herself, who answers 
all the doubts in her. This man without identity, the Voice 
of all she did not know but which was in her to bring to 
light. The Voice of the man who was helping her to be 
born again. 

He was taking her slowly back to the beginning, and this 
talking to a man she could not see was like a dialogue with 
a Djuna much greater than the everyday Djuna, a Djuna 
she felt at times as clearly as one feels the pushing of the wind 
on street corners. The larger Djuna pushing the smaller one 
to act and speak greatness, not smallness or doubt or fear. 
The Voice had unearthed this larger Djuna, had confronted 
her with her desires, permitted them to fuse. Before this they 
lay separate with an abyss of yearning and hunger between 
them, one the smaller Djuna in a world she feared as tragic, 
the other the larger Djuna in a world she no longer feared. 
The Voice had spoken to dispel the turmoU in her, the dis- 
sonances, and the divisions: "I want to reconcile you to your- 
self." As if she had grown into two irreconcilable branches 
and so lost her strength. 

"There is something wrong with me. I want to live only 
with the intimate self of the other. I only care about the 
intimate self. I hate to see people in the world, their masks, 
their falsities, their surrender to the world, their resemblance 
to others, their promiscuity. I only care about the secret self. 
I only want the dream and the isolation. I have the fear that 
122 



everyone is leaving, moving away, that love dies in an in- 
stant. I look at the people walking in the street, just walking, 
and I feel this: they are walking, but they are also being 
carried aivay. They are part of a current. Each moment that 
is passing takes them somewhere else. I confuse the moods 
which change and pass with the people themselves. I see them 
carried into eddies, always moving out of some state they 
will never return to, I see them lost. They do not walk in 
circles, back to where they started, but they walk out and 
beyond in some irretrievable way — too fast — towards the end. 
And I feel myself standing there; I cannot move with them. 
I seem to be standing and watching this current passing and 
I am left behind. Why have I the feeling thev all pass like the 
day, the leaves, the moods of climate, into death?" 

"Because you are standing still and measuring time by 
your immobility, the others seem to run too fast towards an 
end. If you were living and running with them, you would 
cease to be aware of this death that is actually in you because 
you are watching." 

"I stand for hours watching the river downtown. What 
obsesses me is the debris. I look at the dead flowers floating, 
petals completely opened, the life sucked out of them, flowers 
without pistils. Punctured rubber dolls bobbing up and down 
like foetuses. Boxes full of wilted vegetables, bottles with 
broken tops. Dead cats. Corks. Bread that looks like entrails. 
These things haunt me. The debris. When I watch people it 
is as if at the same time I saw the discarded parts of them- 
selves. And so I can't see their motions except as acts which 
lead them faster and faster to the waste, the end, to the river 
where it will be thrown out. The faster they walk the streets, 
the faster they move towards this maos of debris. That is 
how I see them, caught by a current that carries them off." 
123 



"Only because you are standing still. If you were in the 
current, in love, in ecstasy, the motion would not show just 
its death aspect. You see what life throws out because you 
stand outside, shut out from the ferment itself. What is 
burned, used, is not regretted by anyone who is the fire con- 
suming all this. If you were on fire you would enjoy throw- 
ing out what was dead. You would fight for the lightness of 
your movements. It is not living too fast and abandoning one- 
self that carries one towards death, but not moving. Then 
everything deteriorates. When parts of yourself die they 
are only like leaves. What refuses to live in you will become 
like cells through which the blood does not pass. The blood 
must pass. There must be change. When you are living you 
seek the change; it is only when you stop that you become 
aware of death." 

Djuna walked out into the street, blind with the rush of 
memories. She stood in the center of the street eddies, and 
suddenly she knew the whole extent of her fear of flowing, 
of yielding, of depending on another. Suddenly she began 
walking faster than whoever was walking beside her, to feel 
the exultation of passing them. The one who does not move 
feels abandoned, and the one who loves and weeps and yields 
feels he is living so fast the debris cannot catch up with him. 
She was moving faster than the slowly flowing rivers carrying 
detritus. Moving, moving. Flowing, flowing, flowing. When 
she was watching, everything that moved seemed to be mov- 
ing away, but when moving, this was only a tide, and the 
self turning, rotating, was feeding the rotation of desire. 
• * * * 

It is as if she were in an elevator, shooting up and down. 
Hundreds of floors of sensations varying faster than tempera- 
ture. Up into the sun garden, no floors above. Deliverance. 

124 



A bower of light. Proximity to faith. At this height she 
finds something to lean on. Faith. But the red lights are 
calling: Down. The elevator coming down so swiftly brings 
her body to the concert floor. But her breath is caught mid- 
way, left in midheaven. Now she is breathing music, in 
which all anger dissolves. It is not the swift changes of floor 
which made her dizzy, but that parts of her body, of her 
life, are passing into every floor, into the lives of others. All 
that passes into the room of the Voice he pours back now 
into her, to deliver himself of the weight. She follows the 
confessions, each anguish is repeated in her. The resonance 
is so immense, resonance to wind, to lament, to pain, to de- 
sires, to every nuance of sensibility, so enormous the reson- 
ance, beyond the entire hotel, the high vault of sky and the 
black bowl of hysteria, that she cannot hear the music. She 
cannot listen to the music. Her being is brimming, spilling 
over, cannot contain its own knowledge. The music spills 
out, overflows, meets with the overfullness, and she cannot 
receive it. She is saturated. For in her it never dies. No days 
without music. She is like an instrument so tuned up, so ex- 
acerbated, that without hands, without players, without 
leadership, it responds, it breathes, it emits the continuous 
melody of sensibility. Never knew silence. Even in the darkest 
grottoes of sleep. So the concerts of the Hotel Chaotica Djuna 
cannot hear without exploding. She feels her body like an 
instrument which gives its strongest music when it is used 
as a body. Ecstasy reached only in the orchestra, music and 
sensuality traversing walls and reaching ecstasy. The orches- 
tra is made with fullness, and only fullness rises to God. The 
soloist talks only to his own soul. Only fullness rises. 

Like the fullness of the hotel. No matter what happened 
in each room, what diversions, distortions, hungers, incom- 



pletions, when Djuna reaches the highest floor, the alchemy 

is complete. 

• * • « 

The telephone rang and there was someone downstairs 
waiting to see the Voice. It was urgent. This someone came 
up, shaking an umbrella dripping with melted snow. She 
entered his room walking sideways like a crab, and bundled 
in her coat as if she were a package, not a body. Between 
each two words there was a hesitancy. In each gesture a 
swing intended to be masculine, but as soon as she sat on the 
couch, looking up at the Voice, flushed with timidity, say- 
ing: "shall I take off my shoes and lie down," he knew already 
that she was not masculine. She was deluding herself and 
others about it. He was even more certain while watching 
her take off her shoes and uncover her very small and delicate 
feet. Not that the feet were an indication, but that he felt 
the woman in her through her feet, through her hands. They 
transmitted a woman current. The simple act of taking off 
her shoes betrayed that her caresses were those of a girl, 
girls in school arousing but the surface of each other's feminine 
senses and believing when they had traveled on lakes of 
gentle sensation that they had penetrated the dark, violent 
center of woman's response. All this he knew, and he was 
not surprised when she opened with: "I find it hard to con- 
fess to you, I am a pervert, I've had a lot of affairs with 
women." He wanted to smile. He could have smiled, she 
could not see him, but he could see her passing her delicate 
girl hand through the strands of her heavy hair with gestures 
meant to be heavy with disaster and dark implications. She 
could not, with any of her words, charge the atmosphere of 
the room as she meant to, with the daikness of her acts. The 
atmosphere continued delicate like her hands and feet. No 

126 



matter what she was saying about her last love affairs, it was 
all permeated with innocence. She spoke breathlessly, with 
little repetitions and light gasps of awe and surprise at herself. 
"I loved Hazel so, I was swallowed up by her, just as before 
that I loved Georgia, and she could do anything with me. 
I would even help her to see her lovers, I would do anything 
she asked me. She got tired of me, and I went off alone to 
Holland, and I could not play the violin any more, I wanted 
to die. I made love to other women, but it was not the same. 
What terrible things I have done in my life, you can't imagine. 
I don't know what you will think. I can't see your face and 
that bothers me. I can't tell you because maybe you won't 
want to see me any more. Georgia told me one lies down and 
talks; it is like talking to oneself except that this Voice comes 
and explains everything and it stops hurting. I feel fine here 
lying down, but I am ashamed of so many things and I think 
they are very bad things I did, this sleeping with women, and 
other things. I killed a woman who got married. It was in 
my birthplace, in the South. She got married and then died 
the night of the wedding, and / did it. I thought all the time 
before the wedding that she ought not to love a man, there 
is no tenderness in men, and then I thought of the blood, 
and I prayed she should die rather than be married, and so 
I wished it, and she died. And I am sure it was my fault. But 
there is something much worse than this. It happened in Paris. 
I was working at the violin, I remember. My room was on 
the level with the street and the windows were open; I was 
playing away, and suddenly, I don't know why, I looked at 
the bow and looked at it for a long while and I was taken 
with a violent desire to pass it between my legs, as if I were 
the violin, and I don't know why I did it, and suddenly I 
saw people laughing outside. ... I nearly died of shame. You 

127 



will never tell this to anyone? I can't tell what you are think- 
ing about me. When I don't know what people think I always 
imagine they are laughing at me, criticising me. I don't feel 
that you condemn me, I feel good here, lying down. I feel 
that at last I am getting some terrible things out, getting rid 
of them maybe, maybe I will be able to forget them, like the 
time I gave a little boy an enema with a straw, and I thought 
I had injured him for life, and a few years after that he got 
sick and died, and I didn't dare walk through the town be- 
cause I was sure it was the enema that did it. Don't you think 
it was? I don't know why I did that. I wish I could see your 
face. I want revenge above all, because I was operated on, 
and I was not told why; I was told it was for appendicitis, 
and when I got well I found out I had no more woman's 
parts, and I feel that men will never want me because I can't 
have a child. But that is good because I don't like men, they 
have no tenderness. Not being able to have a child — that means 
I am a cripple; men won't love me. But I'm sure I wouldn't 
like it with a man — I tried how it felt once with a toothbrush, 
and I didn't like it. I had the funniest dream just before 
coming to you; I had opened my veins and I was introducing 
mercury into them, into each vein at the finger tip. Why can 
I never be happy? I am always thinking when I'm in love that 
it will come to an end, just like now I think if I don't find 
more things to tell you, I won't be able to come again, and I 
am afraid of this coming to an end, afraid you will not think 

me sick enough." 

• • • • 

A week later, ten days later, she is lying down and talking 
to the Voice: 

"Last night I was able to play. I felt you standing over me 
like an enormous shadow, and I could see your large signet 

128 



ring flashing, and what was stranger than all this, I smelled 
the odor of your cigar suddenly in the middle of the street. 
How can you explain this, walking casually through a street, 
I smelled your cigar and that made me breathe deeply; I always 
walk with my shoulders hunched up, you've noticed it; I 
walk hke a man; I am sure I am a man after all, because when 
I was a child I played like a boy; I hated to dress up in pretty 
things and I hated perfume. I don't understand why the smell 
of your cigar, which reminds me of my talks with you, made 
me want to breathe deeply. It's very funny. I haven't thought 
about Hazel for the last few days; maybe I don't love her 
any more; I only feel I love her when we are separating, 
when I see her going off on a train; then I feci terrible, terrible. 
Otherwise I am not very sure that I love her, really. I feel 
nothing when she is there, we quarrel a lot, that is all. With 
Georgia it was different, she made me feel she was there: 
Lillian, do this for me; Lillian, do that for me; Lillian, tele- 
phone for me; Lillian, carry my music. She was always 
deathly ill; I had to run around for her all the time; she was 
always dying, but always well enough to receive lovers. Al- 
ways clinging to me, talking to me about her great loneliness, 
her love affairs. This talking to you is the most wonderful 
thing that ever happened to me. How strange it is to talk 
absolutely sincerely as it comes, to say everything in one's 
head. I am getting well, but I don't want you to send me 
away. When I was a child I always wanted to go to Africa. 
I had a scrapbook all about Africa, with maps, timetables, 
boat sailings, information, pictures of airplanes and of the 
boats that could take me there. My school was very far 
away, I had to walk for two hours, and I called it Africa. 
I would set out for it all prepared for a trip. I liked going to 
school because it was Africa, and I thought about it at night. 

129 



And then they built a new school right next to my home, 
five minutes away, and I never went to school again. I was 
expelled; my father never forgave me; he was so mad he threw 
a knife out of the window and it hit our mare in the leg and 
that made a terrible impression on me; it was my fault too. 
Yesterday when I left you I was thinking about God, and 
what do you think happened to me? Walking out of the 
hotel I stumbled on the steps and I found myself kneeling on 
the sidewalk, and I did not mind it at all; it was wonderful, 
so many times I have wanted to kneel on the sidewalk, and 
I had never dared, and now thinking about you and what I 
could say to you the next time so you won't think I'm cured 
yet and send me away I felt that I have something now which 
you can't take from me, ever since I came here I have a 
feeling so warm and sweet and life-giving which belongs to 
me, I know you gave it to me, but it is inside of me now, 
and you can't take it away." 

* * » » 

Mischa came to the Voice limping, but he only talked about 
his hand. He could no longer play the cello. His hand was 
stiff. He was mute about his leg. 

His mother had been a Cossack woman who rode horse- 
back. His father had been obsessed with hunting. Mischa 
himself had never wanted women except when they wore 
red dresses, and then he felt like biting them. Women seemed 
to him something soft and blind, something to hide into. 
When he saw a woman he wanted to become small and hide 
in her. He used to call his mother in Russian, his Holy Secret. 

His hand had been twisted, cramped for many years. He 

held it out to show the Voice. He talked constantly about 

his hand, how it felt, if it was stiffer today than yesterday. 

He had played the cello when he was very young. He had 

130 



been a child prodigy. He remembered early concerts and 
his mother afterwards taking him between her large, strong 
horsewoman's knees and caressing him with pleasure because 
he had played well. His mother had been Uke no woman he 
had ever seen. She had very long black hair which she liked 
to wear down when she was at home, a sort of forest of black 
hair in which he would hide his face. His good-night kiss had 
never been anywhere but inside this black hair. Absolute 
blackness then, the hair tickling his eyelashes and getting in- 
side his mouth. Hair so violent and strong, with a smell that 
made him di/.zy, hair that entwined itself around him. His 
mother had looked like a Medusa. Her hair must have been 
made of snakes, her face somehow fixed into one expression. 
It seemed to him that her eyes had never blinked. And the 
voice of a man and a bass laughter. A laughter that had lasted 
longer than any he had ever heard. He could hear it from 
his bed at night. He had dreamed of climbing with the help 
of his mother's long, heavy hair to a place where his father 
could not reach him. His father, all in leather, armed with 
guns, carrying wounded animals, dripping with blood, sur- 
rounded by dogs. It seemed to Alischa that he had found his 
mother's voice in the cello. 

For days after this Mischa did not talk. He could not play 
the cello, he could not move his hand freely, and there were 
things he didn't want the Voice to know. But he felt that 
the Voice was watching him, feeling his way deftly into his 
secrets. He felt that the Voice was not convinced at all that 
it was the hand which caused Mischa's suffering. He felt 
slowly surrounded by intricate questions, pressed closer by 
unexpected associations. He felt like a criminal, but he could 
not remember the crime. The Voice enveloped him in ques- 
tions. Mischa felt a great anguish, as if he had committed a 
131 



crime and were now concealing it. And he could not remem- 
ber what it was. He felt the place where it was buried. What 
was buried? There, under the flesh, at the very bottom of a 
murky well of clay, there was something buried. Something 
which the Voice pushed him towards. An image. What? An 
image of his magnificient Medusa mother standing in her 
room. He was a little boy of eight. He had not been able to 
sleep. He had limped quietly to her room and knocked faintly 
at her door. She had not heard his knock. He had opened the 
door very slowly. He knew his father was not there, that 
he was out hunting. His mother was standing before him, 
very tall, wearing a long white nightgown. And on this white 
robe there was a blood stain. He had seen the stain. He had 
smelled the blood on her. He had cried out hysterically. He 
ran out of her room to look for the father. He picked up a 
riding whip. His father was returning from the hunt. He was 
standing at the door, taking off his leather coat, laying down 
his gun. There was a bloodstain on his sleeve. The animals 
he had killed were lying in the hall. The dogs were still bark- 
ing, outside. Mischa went up to his father and struck him, 
struck at the man who had stained his mother's white robe 
with blood, who had hunted her as he hunted the animals. 

As he told this he held up before him the stiffened hand. 
He thought the Voice would speak about the hand, but the 
Voice asked him: "And the lameness?" 

Mischa winced and turned his face away. Behind what 
he had told lay his secret. Behind the facade of the image, the 
scene which he saw so clearly, lay a terrain of broken, cutting 
fragments, and on this a dead leg, like some discarded object, 
but not buried. It had always lain there, unburied. Dead. He 
was more aware of it than anything about his life. The dead 
leg rested right across the whole body, wooden. He had nailed 

\:\2 



his hand on it. Life, colors, music, women — all were hung 
around this dead leg, like votive offerings. There had never 
been any Mischa, Mischa was in that leg, imprisoned, bound 
in it. The pain of lameness, of knowing, even as a child, that 
one carries a fragment of death in one. To live with a dead 
fragment of oneself. The fierce graspingness of death already 
setting in. To be crippled, humiliated, left out of games, not 
to be able to ride horseback. The lameness concealed at 
concerts, but not before women. The wounded look in the 
fixed gaze of the mother when she watched him walk. Her 
love for him was not joyous, but heavy with compassion. 
When she kissed others she radiated an animal pride, her 
nostrils quivered. When she kissed Mischa it was as if part 
of her died at the very touch of him, in answer to the part 
in him that was dead. Mischa trembled when he had to walk 
across a room. He hated women because of his lameness, 
because they too closed a fierce part of themselves when 
they approached him, made themselves more tender, more 
attenuated, and looked at him as his mother had looked at 
him. He was ashamed. So terribly ashamed. The Voice said 
very gently: "You preferred to offer your hurt hand to 
people's eyes. You offered the whole world your hurt hand. 
You talked about your hand. You showed your hand so no 
one would notice the lameness. The hand did not shame 
you. The hand that struck your father seemed to you right- 
fully, humanly punished by immobility." 

Mischa was weeping, his face turned to the wall. Now 
that he looked at the lameness, the leg seemed to become less 
dead, less separate from him. The leg was not so heavy, not 
so gruesome, as the secret of the pain he had enclosed in it, 
his fear and pain before the leg. Every nerve and cell in 
him tense with the fear of discovery, tense with rigid pre- 
133 



tending, dissolved in new tears before the fact which ap- 
peared smaller, less dark, less oppressive. The crime and the 
secret did not seem so great as when he had watched over 
its tomb. The pain was not so much like a monster now, but 
a simple, human sorrow. With the tears the great tension all 
through the body softened. He was a cripple. But he had 
committed no crime. He had struck his father, but his father 
had laughed at the scene, and his mother too. They had hurt 
him more than he had hurt them. The tears were like a river 
carrying away the tension. The walls he had erected, the 
nightmares he had buried in his being, the tightness of fear, 
the knots in his nerves, all dissolving. Everything was washed 
away. And the big knot in his hand, that was loosening too. 
It was the same knot. The muted hand that could no longer 
draw his mother's voice out of the cello. The static hand 
that could no longer strike. The crippled hand for the world 
to see, while the real shamed Mischa walked surreptitiously 
before them hoping to conceal his dead leg from the world. 

Exaltation lifted him from the couch, out of the room. He 
was running out of this room filled with knowing eyes, 
through the softly carpeted hall, passing all the rooms filled 
with revelations, to the red lights that bore him down to 
the street. 

In the street he did not feel the sea of ice and snow. The 
warmth was in him like a fire that would never go out. He 

was singing. 

* • * * 

In the underground drugstore, Djuna sat eating at the 
counter. The young man was mixing his sallies with the 
drinks: "Are you a show girl too?" he asked her. The sea 
elephant, owner of the place, swam heavily towards her 
with a box: "I kept this box for you; I thought you would 
134 



like ir. It smells good." The sea elephant sank behind the 
counter, behind waves of perfume bottles, talcum powder, 
candy packages, cigar boxes. She was left with the sandal- 
wood box in her arms. 

She carried it through the lobby. The lobby was full of 
waiting people lumped there, waiting without impatience, 
reading, mumbling, meditating, sleeping. 

Every time she passed through the lobby her throat tight- 
ened. Behind every chair, every palm tree, every sofa, every 
face half-seen in the dim light of the lobby, she feared to 
recognize someone she knew. So7)ieone out of the past. She 
could repeat to herself as she passed that they were all lost, 
that in the enormous city they had lost her tracks. She had 
crossed the ocean, destroyed their addresses. Stretches of 
long years and of sea lay between that first half of her life 
and this. The city had swallowed them. Yet each time she 
crossed the lobby she felt the same apprehension. She feared 
the return of the past. They sat in the lobby waiting, wait- 
ing for a crevice, a passageway back into her life. Waiting 
to introduce themselves again. They had left their names at 
the desk. So many of them. 

They were waiting to be admitted. They wanted to come 
upstairs and enter her present life. Djuna herself did not 
understand why this should be such an intolerable idea. 
Perhaps not so much their coming back, if they came for a 
visit and sat in a chair and talked. But they might act like a 
sea rushing forward and sweeping her back again into the 
undertows of early darkness. Surely she had thrown them 
out with the broken toys, but they sat there, threatening 
to sweep her back. Stuffed, with glass eyes, from a slower 
world, they look at her on this other level of swifter rhythms, 
and they reach with dead arms around her. She wanted to 
135 



escape them in elevators which flew up and down hke great, 
swift birds of variety and change. Moving among many 
rooms, many people, among great secrets and feverish hap- 
penings. Their tentacles like the tentacles of the earth wait- 
ing for the return to where she came from. Could all escape 
be an illusion? That was her fear, seeing duplicates of the 
people who had filled her early world. 

She would go and have her hair washed, which was as 
good as weeping. The water runs softly through the roots 
of the being, like warm rain, and washes away everything. 
One falls into rhythm again. She would have her hair washed 
and feel this simple flow of life through the hair. She passed 
into the hair-washer's cubicle, out of the lobby of the 
waiting past. 

Djuna was soon poised again on the threshold, faced with 
the same fear of traversing the lobby. There was a moment 
of extraordinary silence in the enormous hotel: she could not 
tell if it was in her. A moment of extraordinary slowness of 
motion. Then came a dull, powerful sound outside. A heavy 
sound but dull, without echo. Djuna felt the shock in her 
body. The shock traversed the entire hotel, the silence and 
the panic were communicated, transmitted with miraculous 
speed. All at once, it seemed, without words, everyone knew 
what had happened. A woman had thrown herself from a 
window and fallen on the garage roof. Thrown herself from 
the twenty-fifth floor. She was dead, of course, dead, and 
with a five-month child inside her. She had taken a room in 
the hotel in the morning, given a false name. Had stayed five 
hours without moving from the room. And then thrown 
herself out with the child in her. The sound, the dead heavy 
body sound, resonant still in the structure of the hotel, in 
the bodies of the people communicating this image one to 



another. Djuna could see her bleeding and open. The impact. 
Fallen, fallen so quickly back to the bottom. Birds fell this 
way when they died in the air. Had she died in the air? When 
had she died? Ascension high, to fall from greater heights 
and be sure of death. Lonehness, for five hours in a room 
with this child who could not answer her if she questioned, if 
she doubted, if she feared. . . . 

The radios were turned on again. People moved fast again, 
normally. The silence had been in everyone, for one second. 
Then everyone had closed his eyes and moved faster, up and 
down. One must get dizzy. One must move. Move. 

Djuna sat in the room of the Voice. The little man no one 
ever saw, he was standing by the window. 

"Look," he said, "they are skating in the Park. It is Sunday. 
The band is playing. I could be walking in the snow with the 
band playing. That is happiness. When I had happiness I did 
not recognize it, or feel it. It was too simple. I did not know 
I had it. I only know it now when I am sitting here confined 
to this armchair and listening to confessions. My body is 
cramped. I want to do the things they do. At most I am 
allowed to watch. I am condemned to see through a per- 
petual keyhole every intimate scene of their life. But I am 
left out. Sometimes I want to be taken in. I want to be de- 
sired, possessed, tortured too." 

Djuna said: "You can't stop confessing them, you can't 
stop. A woman killed herself, right there, under your window; 
that noise you heard was the fall of her body. She was preg- 
nant. And she was alone. That is why she killed herself." 

"I listen to them all. They keep coming and coming. I 

thought at first that only a few of them were sick. I did not 

know that they were all sick and bursting with secrets. I did 

not know there was no end to their coming. Did you ever 

137 



walk through the lobby? I have a feeling that down there 
they are all waiting to be confessed. They all have more to 
say than I have time to hear. I could sit here until I die 
and even then there will be women throwing themselves out 
of the window on the same floor on which I live." 
* * * • 

Lilith was waiting for the steamer bringing her brother 
from India. She watched the people stepping off the gang- 
plank. She feared she would not recognize him. When he had 
left he was a boy. A boy in a plaster cast of hardness, of 
dissimulation. Intent on defending himself against all in- 
vasion by others, against feeling, against softness, against 
himself. A boy swinging between violent, brutal acts, and 
fits of weeping like a woman. Would she recognize the com- 
pressed mouth, the ice-blue eyes, the pose of nonchalance, 
the briefness of speech, the tension and the sudden breaks 
in the tension? A boy in a plaster cast of hardness. Untouch- 
able. At times she suspected that he had refused to recognize 
her presence in him. Perhaps it was he walking there, so 
rigid in his clothes. No. So many people, so many valises, 
trunks, confusions, greetings. And then suddenly there was 
no one else passing down the gangplank. 

Lihth stopped one of the stewards: "Do you know Eric 
Pellan? Can you tell me if he's sick? I can't find him." 

The steward promised to go and see. Lilith imagined Eric 
lying in his bunk, sick. She waited, already suffering, as she 
suffered when he was small and in trouble. The steward 
returned: "I have found him," he said. "He's not sick, but 
his papers are not quite in order, so he can't step off the boat 
until tomorrow morning. He wants you to come on board." 

The eyes watching behind eyeglasses. They faced each 
other without words. There was a break in their pause as 
13S 



if the bodies would break at the shock of their meeting. Then 
he smiled brusquely, and the talk broke through the barrier 
of fifteen years. 

"You look swell," he said. "Are you as bossy as you were? 
Remember how you wanted to do the fighting for me? You 
wouldn't let me fight m\- own battles with the boys. You 
came with an umbrella and beat them. They laughed at me 
for having a sister fighting for me. I had to go far away to 
get away from you. You look swell! Who do you fight for 
now? W'hn do you help cross the street? Who do you stop 
the traffic for now, with insults at the drivers? You look 
swell, much sweller, much sweller than before. But you 
can't boss me now." 

All the passengers had left the boat but a few of the crew 
and the purser who was adding numbers and listin<T names 
on long sheets of green paper behind his barred window. A 
few of che crew were cleaning the cabins and decks. They 
had drawn the curtains, covered the chairs and couches and 
the pianos. Thcv had waxed the floors, turned over the mat- 
tresses, folded up the blankets, put out the lights. The enor- 
mous parlors and lounge rooms looked ghostly. So many 
chairs in rows with stiffened arms open on emptiness. The 
ship anchored in earth, it seemed, so steady it was. Room 
after room without dust, without lights. Funereal. The mirrors 
reflecting nothing but a brother and sister walking through 
the enormous ship, through a labvrinth of linoleum hallways, 
passing doors opening into a million cmptv cabins. The bunks 
like skeletons, showing the springs and the box-like edges. 
Silence. ... A sudden shadow of a sailor polishing the brass 
knobs. Brother and sister walking through a city of cabins. 
No smell in the kitchen, no rolling and swaying or cracking 
of wood. A carcass at rest. No music in the salons, no glitter 
139 



of silverware chiming in the dining rooms. Repose of furniture, 
windows, lights. A funereal watch of covered chairs. A dead 
backstage. No vestige of the people who passed. Clean. 

Brother and sister stranded. Not allowed to land, they 
walked on a frontier not marked on the marine or earthly- 
charts. Frontiers of memory. The anchor dug deep into the 
sandy marshes of memory. Here in the skeleton of the marine 
monster, with its empty windows unblinking, its empty decks, 
empty salons, deserted by the musicians and sailors, beyond 
the earth and beyond the sea, they sit before a banquet of 
memories. The ship was the world of their childhood filled 
with indestructible games. He had carried his childhood to 
India, he had dyed it in foreign colors, he had bathed it in 
exotic music, burned it in unnameable fevers, choked it with 
strange incenses, strangled it in new loves, lost it in opium 
deliriums, buried it in Mahometan cemeteries. It had turned 
to ivory, to a mineral in his breast. The more they pressed 
down on it, the stronger the compression, the more it had 
gained in rarity, in fixity. A diamond lodged in the breast. 

Brother and sister walking through the skeleton of the 
monstrous ship which had taken him away and brought him 
back with the same diamond lodged in the breast. Bathing in 
the acid of the past, they bared the bones unbleached and this 
diamond. 

Their first imaginary voyage with chairs, tables, rags, was 
the most prolonged in all their existence. The ship they had 
boarded together at birth had never moved; they were locked 
in it forever, without passengers and without landing permits. 
All the other cabins empty, and they forever cursed to sail 
inside the static sea of their fantasies. Riveted to the shore of 
the past, forbidden to land, with the anchor set deep in rust. 



Another day in the confessional. LiHth lying down and 
talking. Lilith watching the Voice with something like hos- 
tility, expecting him to say .something dogmatic, some banality, 
some unsubtle generality. She wanted him to say it, because 
if he did he would be another man she could not lean on, and 
she would have to go on conquering herself and her own life 
alone. She was proud of her independence. She was waiting 
for the Voice to say something unsubtle that she could laugh 
at. 

They were talking about Mischa. He told her that she was 
an obsession in Mischa's life. That he saw her as the mother, 
the sister, the most unattainable of women, and for this he 
wanted to conquer her, to free his manhood. Then she con- 
fessed how at first she had loved Alischa, but when she had felt 
his smallness, his way of hiding within women, she had felt pro- 
tection but no desire. She had wanted to give him an illusion 
but feared not to be able to sustain it to the very end. She 
begged the Voice not to tell him the truth, which would 
wound him, but to tell Alischa she was a little mad. This would 
explain the change in her, put all the blame on herself, and 
Mischa might enjoy discovering there were other abnormal 
people in the world. The Voice agreed with her. He asked her 
if she did not mind other people thinking she was not normal. 
She hesitated and then: 

"No, I don't mind. I like them to think me puzzling, mysti- 
fying and unpredictable. I feel that I keep my real self a mys- 
ter\\" 

The \^oicc laughed a little at this. 

"I see you don't need any help at all, you are quite content, 
quite strong, quite able to manage your own life." 

At these words Lilith began to tremble, and then she felt 
her attitude crumble, the facade crumbling all around her. 
141 



She became intensely aware of her weakness, her need of 
another. She said nothing but the Voice understood and con- 
tinued: "You have acted beautifully towards Mischa. As few 
women will act. In general women consider men as enemies, 
and they are glad when they can humiliate or demolish them." 

"I could not hurt Mischa. Whenever I see him I remember 
the story he told me about his first sensual curiosity. His 
mother had discovered him weighing his sex in his hand, 
reflectively, had beaten him with a whip and left him locked 
up in the room. He wept hysterically, then quieted down and 
dipping a finger in the tears, he had written on the wall: evil 
boy. He waited for the words to vanish, but they seemed to 
remain like stains on the wall, and he grew hysterically afraid 
the words would never dry and that the whole city would 
know about his doings." 

Lilith liked the way the Voice's questions crackled at her 
from all directions. He was behind her and she was not 
ashamed to speak of anything. At the same time she felt that 
she could not deceive him even by a shade of falsity, for he was 
so attentive to every hesitation, every inflection of the voice, 
every gesture she made, and especially the silences. Every 
silence put him on a new scent. He was really the hunter of 
secret thoughts. They would reach a blank wall. She would 
repeat: "I don't know. I don't remember. I don't think so." 
But the truth was apparent from what she felt at his words. 
Whenever something had hurt her, and he touched upon it, 
she felt a churning of feelings, a warning: Here is the place. 
He uncovered her wars against herself: "I see myself always 
too small or too large. I awake one day feeling small, and 
another day bursting with a power which makes me believe I 
can rule the whole world." 

When he talked it was hke a stirring of quicksands. She 
112 



felt the whole sandy bottom of her life, a complete insecurity, 
rootlessness. He said perhaps she was a woman who was not 
the enemy of man, but she remembered da\'s of great hatred 
for man. lie talked about the unyieldingness and the fear. 
Fear of being hurt, he said. Why? She did not know. How 
could man hurt her? I le had hurt her already. 

"iMy first feeling was that my father was not tied to any- 
thing. He was not tied to my mother, he was not tied to us, 
he was not tied to the women he made love to. He was tied to 
nothing. He was always leaving, forgetting, throwing out, 
betraying." 

When she made this very simple statement Lilith felt the 
most intense anguish. She turned her head to look at the Voice 
and said: "I can't go on." 

"You must go on." 

"The first thing I saw was a father escaping from the 
mother. Running away from us, from the house. From every- 
thing. I saw my mother left maimed, like someone who had 
lost an arm. I saw our house sold and disrupted. It was like a 
deluge. Everything was carried away. The strange, mysterious 
atmosphere we lived in as children, our games which were 
like an enchantment from which we never freed ourselves: 
nothing was ever the same. I saw the furniture out in the 
garden being sold at auction. I saw my father leaving and 
sending postcards from all over the world. The world was 
immense, it seemed to me, and he was in all of it except the 
corner where he left us. He not only took himself away, but 
our faith in the marvelous too. The world of our childhood 
closed with his departure." 

"All these departures, these upheavals, gave you a hatred 
of change. You, in your anger and pain, stood in the center 
and refused to move, decided to make a fixed core within you. 
143 



You accepted outer change, but fought against it by creating 
an inner static groove. You would not move. Everything else 
around you could move, change, but you, because of your 
mistrust of pain and loss, refused to move. You would be the 
island, the fixed center. For fear of a second loss, a second 
abandon, a second wound. That is why you never again gave 
yourself, that is why you are cold. You are afraid of giving 
yourself wholly." 

Lilith felt a deep anguish as he talked. She could not tell if 
the Voice was right or wrong, but she could feel with his 
words the invasion of a most painful secret. Exactly as if this 
set, tense, granite core of herself were being touched and 
found not to be granite. Found to have nerves, sensibilities and 
memories. She remembered at this moment that when she 
heard that stones had a heartbeat, a kind of faint pulse which 
had never before been registered, she had cried out angrily: 
"how terrible, everything in the world feels. Exactly what I 
feared. That is why I am always so tender with everything. 
To think that even a stone can feel!" 

And now the Voice was entering into this secret pain, ex- 
posing the vulnerability and the fear in her, and the anguish 
was immense. 

Lilith said: "Now I hate you. You took away the little 
protection I had, the little cover I kept over things. I feel 
humiliated to have exposed myself. I who so rarely confess!" 

"And why don't you confess?" 

"It is always I who receive the confidences. People confess 
their doubts and fears to me. I am afraid of showing my 
weakness. Why? I think I will be less loved." 

"Do you love those who expose their weakness?" 

"Yes, even more. I feel them very near to me. I feel human 
and I love them." 



"Then don't you think they might feel the same way to- 
wards you?" 

"I feel I have been given another role, a non-human one. 
I don't know why." 

"Because the father failed you. . . .You cannot depend on 
others. You prefer to be depended on." 

Lilith went out in the street. She felt the day much softer 
on her skin. The snow was melting. It seemed to her that she 
let the day get nearer to her, permitted it to touch her. That 
before she had looked at the day like a stranger. Now she 
felt the day all over her body, the sensual touch of it. She was 
now like Djuna who felt everything with her skin, her finger 
tips, her hair, the souls of her feet. Djuna was like a plant. 
Every time Lilith saw Djuna she felt this strange, continuous, 
vibrating life of plants and water. There was a nobility, a 
constant motion and reverberation. 

Lilith had never imagined this until today. She was breath- 
ing with the day, moving with the wind, in accord with it, 
with the sky, undulating like water, flowing and stirring to 
the life about her, opening like the night. What had happened? 
Only the \^oice saving to her: Don't you love those who con- 
fess to you? Don't you love their blindness, their blunders, 
their weakness? When they talk to you about their crimes, 
don't you dissolve with a human passion, with a desire to 
carry them, share everything that happens to them? Yes, yes, 
cried Lilith. Then you . . . Why do vou . . . But then if I, Lihth, 
if I leaned, the others would find nothing there to rest on. If 
I became human, then where will the others go? They would 
go to the Voice, more of them. If I show anything but this 
strength, what will happen to them? He asks me what will 
happen to me; I don't think I care much what happens to me. 
I have a feeling that I am responsible for them. How restless 

145 



he got, the Voice, when I asked him if he thought certain 
people had a destiny which forbade them to be human. I 
must have touched something which affected him. I will make 
him talk. I will question him. 

But the Voice did not answer her questions. The Voice 
pried and prodded into her marriage. 

The man Lilith had married was very simple. He had not 
found the way to woo her, to break down her resistance. 
Every night it had been the same flight, the same locked door 
against him, a hatred of his desire. She showed all her claws, 
her wild hair, her hatred of sex. Finally, one day they dis- 
cussed it coolly. She asked him: "What is it like? Tell me." 
He did not know what to say, so he made a drawing. The 
drawing revolted her and frightened her all the more. She 
wouldn't even let him kiss her after the drawing. Finally he 
persuaded her to have it done by a doctor. She preferred the 
idea of a knife. It was a knife which first cut into her being. 

"I tried to feel as a woman afterwards. It was a terrible 
thing, it was as if the knife had made me close forever rather 
than open, as if it had made me cold forever. There were times 
when I felt strong excitement in me, warmth, desire. I yielded 
without feeling to adventures. They all remained strangers to 
me. I never wanted to see them again. Do you think they 
killed the feeling in me that time? I can't bear this any more. 
I have a constant feeling that I'm hving on the edge of some- 
thing about to happen, and that I can never reach. My nerves 
are set for a climax of some kind. I feel tense and expectant. 
It is so agonizing that I begin to wish for a catastrophe which 
would relieve the expectancy. I wish for all the calamities, all 
the tragedies to happen at once. I want scenes, quarrels, tears, 
I want to be devoured, I want to strike at people. I feel restless. 
I can't stay very long anywhere. I can't sit and I can't sleep. 
146 



I always have this feehng that I must seek a rcHef from this 
waiting, a shattering moment before I can rest, sleep. As if 
death were waiting, death were pursuing me, watching me. 
The whole world arouses me, I feel love for people in the 
streets, music stirs me at all times like a caress; I desire violently, 
and I wait. I feel the storm coming, I feel the anguish, but 
everything continues the same, sluggish, without break, with- 
out lightning. Something in me wants to break, to explode. In- 
stead, I have to take pleasure in breaking the lives of others. 
I am constantly seducing others, enchanting them, capturing 
them, while wishing they could do it to me. I want so much 
to be captured. Everyone obeys me, but they don't find the 
key to me. I like to feel their hearts beating faster, I like to see 
their eyes waver, their lips tremble, to feel the emotion in 
them. It is like food. I am fa.scinated by their feelings. I am 
like a huntress who does not want to kill, but I want to feel 
the wound. What do I expect? To be caught in the desire of 
the other and bathe in it. To burn. But I am always disap- 
pointed. No one can take possession of me. It is as if they were 
all blind, circling around me. I warm myself and then I be- 
come aware that the current is not passing through me. It is 
as if I were an idol of some kind. I always dream of this: I see 
myself standing very rigid, and I am covered with jewelry 
and luxuriant robes. I wear a crown. Do you think I will ever 
turn into a woman? I want to be shattered into bits. Yet at 
the same time I know I do everything to create my own inac- 
cessibility. I wear strange clothes which estrange people. And 
then I hate them for failing to reach me. I know I create the 
legend. It is hard to explain, but I do have the feeling that I 
come from very far. While I sleep I know that many things 
have happened. I do not remember them all but I don't wake 
near everything. That is why sometimes when I come into a 
147 



room I do not look at the people as if they were of my own 
race. It is true I feel they look at me and see this distant per- 
sonage. I talk to them and I choose the most remote subject, 
the most remote from daily life. I feel compelled to do this, 
while at the same time I want warmth and simplicity. I feel 
alone. Sometimes they are taken with a furious madness to do 
violence to me, to clutch at me. But it's like a desire for a ta- 
booed object, for a secret temple, for some forbidden person. 
For what is untouchable. And I, the woman inside of all this, 
I feel this. I feel I have created this personage and that I sit 
outside of her, lamenting because they are worshipping a 
sort of image, and they don't reach with simple, warm hands 
and touch me. It's as if I were outside this very costume, de- 
siring and calling for simplicity, and at the same time a kind 
of fear compels me to continue acting. You are the only one 
I feel near to, you and Djuna, the only ones who don't make 
love to my shadow." 

"But it is your own making. We are simply the ones who 
can't be mystified and entangled in your appearance. We are 
simply the ones who did not get lost in the labyrinth you 
create. You hide yourself and then you weep because people 
get lost in all this external form of your life. It's only locking 
doors against those who wish to come near, the same door 
that you locked against your husband." 

Such simple words he said, yet Lilith left him feeling a 
great warmth towards him, something that resembled love. 
She was falling in love with the Voice. She felt that he was 
the subtle detective who made all these discoveries in her, who 
made her state the very nature of what hurt her. He liked the 
game of tracking down her most difficult thoughts. It was 
only after many detours that she could make these long revela- 
tions. It was as if he possessed her, somehow, in a way she 
148 



could not explain to herself. There was a silent, subtle force 
in him. It was not in the words he said. It was something he 
exhaled. He confronted one with one's own self, naked, one's 
true self as it was at the beginning. He destroyed the deforma- 
tions, one by one, the acquired disguises of the personality. It 
was like a return to the original self, a return to the beginning 
where everything was pure. 

He took her back, with his questions and his probings, 
back to the beginning. She told him all she could remember 
about her father, ending with: "the need of a father is over." 

The Voice said: "I am not entirely sure that the little girl 
in you ever died, or her need of a father. What am I to you?" 

"The other night I dreamed you were immense, towering 
over everyone. You carried me in your arms and I felt no 
harm could come to me. I have no more fears since I talk to 
you like this every day. But lately I have become aware that 
it is you who are not happy. I think too of the way you play 
upon souls. It must give \ou a feeling of great power, the way 
they expose themselves." 

"Power, yes. . .power. But every moment the human being 
in me is killed. I am not permitted any weaknesses. It is true 
that I could take people's great need of love and understanding 
and play upon it. When they open their secrets to me, they 
are in my power. But I want them to know me, and they don't. 
Even when they love me, it is a love that is not addressed to 
me. I remain anonymous. I am only allowed to watch the 
spectacle, but I am never allowed to enter. If I enter into a life 
I am still the oracle or the .seer. You are the first one who has 
asked me a question about myself." 

People came to him for strength; their image of him was of 
his tallness, his firmness, his wisdom. I lis strange phrases which 
acted on them like someone breaking their chains. Simple 
149 



phrases. He defended them, supported them, transported them. 
An apocalyptic strength in him. Something above confusion 
and chaos. A total man, not made as they were of wavering 
moods, dispersed fragments, changes and contradictions. An 
alchemist who could always transmute the pain. The Sphinx 
who answered all questions. The one before whom one could 
become small again, in whom one could find a refuge. He 
lulled them, lifted them up out of whatever agonizing region 
they were trapped in. Brought them where they could live 
better, breath better, love better, live in harmony with them- 
selves, he reconciled them to the world, conquered the demons 
and ghosts haunting them. But when they look at the man 
inside the armor of impersonal phrases they find him smaller, 
older, different from their image. The little man rises, his 
shoulders are stooped, he shakes off the stiffness of his limbs, 
the cramp of the attentive echo, shakes the blood that was 
asleep during the trance of clairvoyance, shakes off the role 
imposed on him. 

In their dreams they saw him as god, or as a demon. But 
always above. When the confession ended he was no longer 
above. 

Lilith said: "I feel the real you behind the analyst. All you 
say comes out of you. No one else could act the same way 
towards human beings. It is not a system. It is your own good- 
ness, your own compassion. I am sure they do not all use the 
same words, the same tone. There is magic in you." 

"I am only a symbol." 

"You are more than a symbol. I know separate and personal 
things about you. I have watched you. You have a love of the 
absolute, a passion for extracting the essence. 

"That's all very true." 

"You have a gift for life which you have never used." 
150 



"I was not permitted to use it. I was not loved for myself 
but for my understanding, for the strength I gave. It was 
always unreal and false." 

"I could say to you what you said to me: did you reveal 
your true self.' Wasn't it you who insisted on wearing the 
mask of the analyst? You who became a Voice? An imper- 
sonal Voice? Look how you sit now, while we talk. You 
never move. You always sit in the same chair. I know nothing 
about you. Naturally, I can only attach my.self to an image. 
I wish ... I am going to a.sk you to do something very difficult. 
Suppose, just for once, that you lie here on the couch and I 
sit in your chair — like this — and now I'm you and you're me. 
What did you dream last night?" 

She was laughing while she made him change places. He 
looked uneasy, bewildered. 

"Whv arc vou so uncasv?" she asked, "what arc you afraid 
to reveal? Tell mc what you are most ashamed to tell." 

"Not to you, because you still need me, and while you need 
me I must remain a mystery to you." 

"I don't need you." 

"You do. Even what you're doing now is only because 
you need a victory over me. I made you confess, you want 
to make me confess. As soon as you find someone who has 
the kev to you you want to reverse the roles. You can't bear 
to be discovered or dominated." 

"Youre wrong, you're utterly wrong," said Lilith violently. 
"I only did it because I am interested in you as a human being, 
because I am wondering about this man we all use and whom 
no one really knows." 

"We'll see who is wrong," said the \^oice, but this Voice 
was not as firm as when he sat with his back to the light. 



151 



The Voice is talking to Djuna: 

"Do you think Lihth loves me? If Lilith loved me I would 
give up all this and begin a new Hfe. I want to give up analysis. 
Otherwise I would go mad. Do you know what has happened 
to me during the last four days? Everything that I think of 
becomes the theme of the day, and all the people who come 
talk to me about the same thing. First I had a dream of jealousy. 
I was crazily jealous of someone, I don't know who. I awak- 
ened filled with a kind of fury and hatred as if someone were 
taking the woman I wanted away from me. I may have been 
jealous of Lilith, I don't know. But I awakened jealous. And 
then the people began to come, one after another. I had no 
more time to think over my dream. But every one of them 
talked about jealousy. First came a woman who was jealous 
of her husband's first wife, now dead. It was her own sister 
who had died, and whose husband had then married her. But 
he still loved her sister. The first time he took her he called 
out the name of the dead wife. He sought out the resemblances, 
he liked her to wear the same colors. And this woman felt it, 
and was tortured because she loved him. He lived in a dream, 
wrapped in the past. He took her without really taking her, 
as in a trance. She was in such despair that she thought of 
nothing else: how to kill his love for her dead sister, how to 
kill this other woman who had not died for him. She observed 
that he was very jealous. She sought out the men he was at- 
tached to, and gave herself to them, always in such a way that 
it would be known to him. And then he began to suffer. He 
became slowly aware of her, of her being loved by other men. 
She became more vivid in him through his hatred of her. By 
the presence of the pain and anger, he began to awaken to her, 
to her presence, nearness, seduction. He passed from long 
periods of dreaming to long moments of suffering. He lived 

152 



with this violent consciousness of her sensual life. She would 
not let him touch her. Finally the pain became so intolerable 
that it aroused him to a violent awareness of her, desire for 
her; and in this fury somehow, the past was destroyed, like 
some vague dream. He became aware of the woman in her, 
her yicldings, her sensual responses, of their life in the present. 
This was the first story I heard in the morning. I was possessed 
with jealousy of Lilith, and everyone who came to me seemed 
possessed with jealousy. I felt my own jealousy in them, and 
it increased it, magnified it. I asked myself: what kind of feel- 
ings has Lilith towards me? Why has she become so vividly 
alive and why do I hate the way she gives herself? It seemed to 
me the world was full of jealousy, and it was contagious. It 
lay at the bottom of every nature. I saw everyone being jealous 
either in the past, the present or the future. One man talked 
to me continuously about scenes which had never taken place, 
which he imagined. He lies for hours imagining this betrayal, 
reconstructing the scenes in every minute detail, until he 
goes nearly crazy believing it. His jealousy was really infernal, 
suffocating, blind, not knowing where to strike and without 
any reality to support it. A continuous state of doubt. At the 
end of the day I was shattered. It seemed to me that whatever 
was in me was awakened in these people and that I was only 
awakening things which ought better to be left asleep. I was 
increasing the awareness of pain, and breaking down all de- 
fenses against it. Yes, I know they are false defenses, but they 
are at least as good as the stones over a tomb. They give the 
illusion that the dead cannot return. But I do not even leave 
the stone. I take away the symbol of the burial. And that's 
not all. The next day I awakened with anguish, with a kind 
of fear. A nameless fear. A kind of universal doubt. I doubted 
everything. Above all Lilith. I feared to know, to know really 

153 



what she felt. I would have given my life then to lose all my 
lucidity. And all day, all day the cripples talked to me about 
fear. I asked them questions I never asked before. Describe 
what you fear most. They exposed so many fears. But as I 
asked them it was like asking myself, and awakening my own 
fears. Fear. The whole world is based on fear, even behind the 
jealousy of the day before lay fear. Fear of being alone, fear 
of being abandoned, fear of hfe, fear of being trapped in 
tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one's hatred, of com- 
mitting a crime, fear of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation. I 
asked myself: was it the fear in me which uncovered all this? 
It was like opening tombs again. It was contagion, Djuna, I 
tell you . . . .Today I don't know whether this is a healing or a 
contagion. I am only discovering that we are all alike, and my 
patients desperately do not want me to be like them." 
• • * * 

Djuna walked slowly after leaving Lilith. The day was 
softer and the snow was melting under her feet. She felt in 
love with everyone, in love with the whole city. She remem- 
bered the tendrils of wild hair on Lilith's neck, and she felt 
herself inside of Lilith, burning with the cold fire which de- 
voured her. She heard again her voice charged with secret 
pain, a voice wet with tears passing through a wide mouth 
made for laughter, a wide, laughing mouth, avid and animal. 

She felt the restlessness of the Voice, sitting and listening 
all day, pinned to his confessions, disguised by the anonymity 
of vision, and desiring to play an active, personal role in these 
scenes perpetually unfolding before him. Too near, every- 
thing was too near. She felt the multiple footsteps of those 
walking along with her, not Uke a march, but like a symphony. 
In the shock of feet against the pavements she felt the whole 
collision and impact of human being against human being. 
154 



They resounded in her. Everything resounded in her. She 
smiled, thinking of what an immense music box she was. The 
relation between music and living was not merely an image. 
What a clear connection between the sound box of instruments 
and the body, and what sameness between the caresses of the 
hands! Djuna felt at once so aroused that it was unbearable. 
She felt all her loves at once, maternal, fraternal, sensual, 
mystical. So many loves! What was she? The lover of the 
world? Crazed with love, with remembrance of every touch 
and flavor, of every caress and word. And simultaneously 
with the communion, this communion with eyes clo.sed, this 
taste of the wafer on her tongue, this sonorousness in her ears, 
this constant simoon wind burning inside of her, came the 
pain of separation again. When people came as near as this, 
and breaths were so confounded and confused, then Djuna 
knew she was possessed. 

In the morning the body had been clear like a statue, and 
as cool. The body moved with the harmony of its form, it 
stood in altitude, like the spire of a cathedral, it was light and 
free and passed through the moments easily like the wind, 
feeling neither doors nor walls nor anger. There was in it 
the tranquillity of depths, of what lay below the level of 
storms. It was a mountain asleep without fire in its bowels. 
It lay asleep as it arranged itself, it moved in accord with its 
own pattern, with an even tread. 

It was the moment of silence. The day begun in crystal 
clearness was blurred by the ascension of blood passing 
throught the cells. The blood rising through the body like 
the sap in the trees. Antique vases filled with wine. 

Djuna stopped walking. Everything had come too near, too 
near. The cells were full to overflowing with the warm in- 
vasion. The moon was shining hypnotically round, a fixed 

155 



stare, and all the taboos which held the body upright were 
dissolved by this stare of the moon calling the blood to its 
own circle. The moon was circling now inside her body, with 
the same rhythm. Djuna lost her face, her name. She was tied 
to the moon by long threads of red tangled blood. She moved 
like a woman tied to the moon, in a space so vast, pushed by a 
rhythm so strong that the small woman in her was lost. The 
moon enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night 
without dawn. 

Before the storm in her there was a suspense, there was 
time for fear. The trees were afraid, the sky was breathless, 
the air rarified, the earth parched. 

Now her heart was no longer a heart, it was a drum beating 
continuously. The skin of her body was stretched like a drum. 
The tips of her hair were no longer hair, but electric wires 
charged with lightning. The hair was linked to lightning, the 
heart was a drum; the skin was a fruit skin exposed to warmth 
and cold. 

The blood was rising and drowning the smaller world of 
the woman, a curtain of red falling over the eyes, drowning 
pity. Her tongue lashed like a whip, her voice whirled like a 
simoon wind, her hands tore everything apart breaking all 
bonds with man, father, son, lover, brother. Her body was 
filled with drumming fever, with a delirium. Djuna was in a 
jungle, alone with her storm. She was alone in the forest of her 
delirium. Desire leaping wild and blind. The human eyes were 
closed. The storm was panting in her, the moon smiled, her 
anger seemed immense like the space around her. An enormous 
fury, as of an animal long taunted, so that when the blood rose 
every word withheld, every act of yielding, erupted. She 
trusted no one as she drank alone in the jungle of desire. Her 
nails were longer, tearing apart everything she had lulled. The 

156 



storm of blood brought a cloudburst of laughter, the light- 
ning struck down the love, broke all the bondages, drowned 
the pity. Djuna was one with the moon, thrusting hands made 
of roots into the storm, while her heart beat like a drum 
through the orgy of the moonstorm. 

• • • • 

Lilith talking to the Voice. Lilith had a headache. 

"jMy father had headaches like this, and he went mad. Do 
you think I will go mad? I dream of being under ether and I 
awake in terror. My father's madness started with headaches. 
He began slowly to lose his memory. But I kept thinking — 
perhaps my father is not mad, but has had a dream. This 
dream has come and installed itself in his life. The dream is 
his life. What was this dream? Could I understand it? If I 
could see it, share it with him, enter his world and stay in it, 
perhaps he would not go mad. I feel that madness is only 
solitude. You only go mad when you see something no one 
else sees. There is a moment before madness when a person 
has not yet cut the cord of connection and at this moment 
someone can hold him back. It's what you do every day. There 
was the dream of the man who ate flowers so that the war 
might not come! He was locked up. . .only because he got 
confused with the .symbol, he lived in the symbol. But if you 
understand it, nothing is mad. F.verything is a dream, but we 
don't always know the meaning. I wanted to know mv father's 
fantasy but he enclosed himself in it. I only discovered it 
when it was too late." 

At night Lilith could not sleep. She lay tangled, restless. 
Lilith who found the absolute only in fragments, in multi- 
plicity. Remembering the eagerness of the V^oice with his 
finger pointing: "You see? You see? That is what it means. 
You live in the myth." She lived in the myth. And she was 

157 



lost in it. Always bathing in a world much larger than other 
people's, the world of dreams. Always caught again in a 
whirl, a quest, a continuous, diabolical quest of an absolute 
that does not flow serenely but is pursued and grasped by 
sheer wakefulness. In flight always, and she fearing to sleep 
for fear of its passing. Desire unexploded in her, with the 
fuse lit and the little flames running up and down with Dyoni- 
sian joy; the httle flames running around the heart of the 
dynamite and never touching it. The little flames kept her 
breathless, nerves bristling with their heads up, necks 
stretched, thirsty eyes, peaked ears, all the little nerves waiting 
for the orgasm that will send the blood running through them 
like an anesthetic and put them to sleep. 

Lilith, lying sleepless, seeing in the yellow faces at the bar 
the faces of future crimes, drug addicts who with knife or 
poison would bring a kind of sleep, a pause, a rest from this 
pursuit of a fugitive absolute. Lilith wishing for the crime, 
the drug, the death, the deliverance. But the nerves are still 
awake, waiting for the pause of sleep or death, waiting for the 
dynamite to explode, for the past to crumble, waiting for an 
absolute uncapturable. Do all violent fires have a hundred 
flames pointing in all directions, was there ever one round 
flame with one tongue? Why did this force which did not 
erupt in quicksilver through the veins, why did it rush out in 
a typhoon whirl to round up the monsters walking through 
the streets, to question their intentions, to imagine their per- 
versities, to slide between the foam of lust, between the most 
knotted and twisted desires? This man with his little girl, why 
were his eyes so wet, his mouth so wet, why were her eyes 
so tired, why was her dress so short, her glance so oblique? 
Why was that young man so white? There was the scum of 
veronal on his lips. Why did that woman wait under the 

15S 



lamplight with her hand in her muflf? This force which did 
not explode in Lilith was a poison; it spilled into the streets, 
ran into the gutters. She wanted to be dismembered and de- 
voured but she encountered always wings, eyes opening on 
the heavens, flames turning to the mystic blue of the night 
lamps in convents and hospitals. 

In Lilith the seed would not burst; the body left the earth, 
pulled upward by a string of nerves and spilled its pollen only 
in space, because the fairy talc wore too light a gown, a gown 
that made a brcez.c, a space between feet and earth. Lilith's 
footsteps would soon not be heard and her blood would turn 
to quicksilver, blue like the night flames of places where 
people weep. 

• • • • 

Lilith entered Djuna's room tumultuously, throwing her 
little serpent-skin bag on the bed, her undulating scarf on the 
desk, her gloves on tlic bookshelf, and talking with fever and 
excitement: "I'm falling in love with the Voice. I feel he is 
like a soul detective, and that the day he captures me, I will 
love him." 

"It's a mirage," said Djuna. 

She knew that Lilith was pursuing another mirage: the love 
of the \^oice for what the Voice said to her, because the V'oice 
reached into the roots of her being. 

"A mystical illusion," repeated Djuna. "A mirage. You 
know what happens to a woman when she pursues a mirage, 
if she has a love affair with a mirage?" 

"\^^^at can happen to her? It's poetry." 

"It may be poetry, Lilith, but her nature revolts against it. 
At some moment or other your body will revolt because it's 
not real." 

"But it is only in his presence that I feel true, natural." 

159 



"But don't get any closer to him. If you come closer you 
will defeat you own salvation. But then. . .you are too lovely, 
he won't let you pass without making an effort to retain you. 
That is what happened to me. I lost the father in him — because 
I wanted to. I tempted him as a man, and when he became a 
man and desired me, then I was angry at him, as if it had been 
only a test, a test of the savior in him. And he is no savior. He 
is trying to save himself too. I liked upsetting him. Then when 
he became a man and ran after me I was very angry — it seemed 
to prove that he was only human." 

"The world is very small, Djuna. If what you say is true it 
is very small. I'm going to choke in it. He can't be merely 
human. He must be something else, something more. He has 
a magic power." 

Lilith enveloped Djuna in great softness. They lay talking 
in the dark. Only the softness, only to feel the softness and 
warmth of woman, the weight of her arm, the curve of her 
neck. Only to hear her breathing and talking and laughing in 
the dark. To lie there, wishing perhaps to be a man for a 
moment, but as a woman knowing there is no other way of 
possessing a woman but as a man. 

"Try and close your eyes, you'll find another world that 
is immense at night, Lilith." 

"I never remember the night. Why don't I find a man who 
makes me feel what I feel with you? You are so warm, you are 
so quick. You are always where I am. Our impulses towards 
each other happen at the same moment. You are never late 
or slow or indifferent, and you have the gift of gesture. When 
I feel anguished, lost, alone, you always have the gift for 
saying what I need to hear. After we are together you write 
me letters, and I need so much to feel what we said, to be able 
to touch the words. It's the only thing I believe in, Djuna, 
160 



everything else is ghostly. You say everything with your 
body, like a dancer. All your body talks, your hands, your 
walk. I believe you." 

"But none of this is love, Lilith. We are the same woman. 
There is always the moment when all the outlines, the differen- 
ces between women disappear, and we enter a world where 
all feelings, yours and mine, seem to issue from the same source. 
We lose our separate identities. What happens to you is the 
same as what happens to me. Listening to you is not entering 
a world different from my own, it's a kind of communion." 

"And meanwhile everybody laughs, jeers, and calls us all 
kinds of names." 

What softness between women. The marvelous silences of 
twinship. To turn and watch the rivulets of shadows between 
the breasts, to lie on the down of the bed sleeping over one's 
own body, like sleeping in the forest at night. The marvelous 
silence of woman's thoughts, the secret and the mystery of 
night and woman become air, sun, water, plant. Feel the roots 
resting in the soil, the feet well planted in the coolness, in the 
brown pressure, firm against this creamy wall of earth. When 
you press against the body of the other you feel this joy of the 
roots compressed, sustained, enwrapped in its brownness, with 
only the seeds of joy stirring. A pleasure ebbing back and 
forth. Sun pressing luxuriantly against the body. Mystery 
and coolness of darkness between the four walls of another's 
flesh. The back of Lilith, this soft, musical wall of flesh, the 
being floating in the waves of silence, enclosed by the presence 
of what can be touched. No more falling into space. No more 
quest, anxiety, seeking, yearning, turning within this compact 
wall of tender flesh. Touch the delicate tendrils of hair, you 
touch moss and an end to hunger. This hand holds a strand of 
hair, the world complete, reduced, in the palm of the hand. 

U>I 



You have entered from the dissonances of the street, from 
the separate, hard fragments walking without legs or head or 
arms, always mutilated, into the immense vault of an organ 
chant. Djuna lay at the center of the wheel. Lilith warm and 
near. The earth turns with a chant of roundness, fullness. It 
turns into a smooth, full round of plenitude. The spokes pass 
fast and are not seen at this moment. Only the drunkenness of 
rotation. Other days the wheel slows down and one gets 
caught in the spokes. One falls between them, they cut and 
mangle one. You are caught. The rhythm is broken, you 
dangle, you are mutilated. 

« * * * 

"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." 

"Perhaps it is in you there are no more secrets." 

"I don't know. Your understanding saved me from pain 
and confusion. 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 alone, com- 
pletely alone?" 

"In the world of feeling, yes, but not in the world of in- 
terpretation." 

"I don't mind my dependence on your interpretations." 

"Do you know the meaning of your name? It's the un- 
mated woman, the woman who cannot be truly married to any 
man, the one whom man can never possess altogether. Lilith, 
you remember, was born before Eve and was made of red 
clay, 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 substance." 

"Do you think I am altogether like the first Lilith?" she 
asked without looking at him. 

162 



"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 " 

A\'hat she read in his eyes was the immense pleading of 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 savior, 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 sacri- 
fice of the self, with the demand of another, a hunger, a prayer, 
a need, 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 as 
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 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 long ago by the fairy tales. What usually pre- 
vented the fairy talcs 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. Giving was the only flight in space permitted to human 
beings. 

While the Voice who was no longer the Seer talked, what 
she saw was a dark-skinned mythological crab, the cavernous 

163 



sorrows of the monkey, the agedness of the turtle, the tender- 
ness of the kangaroo, the facile humihty 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 myths and man's dreams but not 
his own soul. He did not know that the man in him had been 
denied. He was begging to be made man. The man had been 
buried within the sage. He had grown old, withered, without 
having fulfilled his life on earth. That is what his eyes were 
begging for: a life on earth. 

It was a father she was looking for, not a lover. 

He said: "With you one travels so far away from reality 
that it is necessary to buy a return ticket." 

She liked him better serious than laughing. He did not know 
how to laugh. His pranks were pranks of the mind, his humor, 
paradox, the reversal of ideas. He had not learned what she 
had learned: not to clutch at the perfume of flowers, not to 
touch the dew, not to tear all the curtains down, to let exalta- 
tion and breath rise, vanish. The perfume of the hours distilled 
only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by 
human fingers. The friction of words generated only pain and 
division. He had not learned to formulate without destroying, 
without tampering, without withering. An awe of the senses. 

His understanding was infinite, like a sea, but Lilith was 
sailing on it alone. He was everywhere, immense, but not a 
man, because his understanding ended where the life of silence 
and mystery began. 

He was walking at Lilith's side now in full daylight. His 
clothes hung about him as on a cross of wood. They did not 
dress him, make him incarnate. His small hands made brusque 

W4 



gestures as if made of bones. Clothes take the shape of a man's 
body, of his gestures. They bear the imprint of his character, 
his habits, his moods. The hat reveals if he is mellow and 
tolerant, if he is gay or lavish. Every line, fold, wrinkle, testi- 
fies to his tenderness or roughness, his sensuality or asceticism. 

The Voice's clothes did not fit him, were never a part of 
him. They were not molded by his body, kneaded to his 
moods. Nothing that men wore seemed to be made for him. 
The tailors had not cut for his body, his body was not made 
for clothes. His hat stood stiffly detached from him. It seemed 
either too large or too small for him. Either his hats were 
formal and the face under them too lax, or the hat was humor- 
ous and nonchalant and his face too serious and heavy. Or else 
he looked humiliated. In every detail his clothes were a misfit. 
The body was denied: it did not flow into the clothes, espouse 
them. There was a kind of blight upon his body; it was the 
idea made flesh, the idea always standing in the way of natural 
gestures, the idea upright and standing in the way of rhythm. 
His flesh was the color of death. He had died in the body and 
never been resurrected. Heavy with melancholy, jealousy. 
The life of the mind had shriveled the body too soon. It was 
a sad flesh tyrannized by the idea, drawn and quartered on a 
pattern, devoured by concepts. No matter how clear or divine 
the soul was, the flesh was dark and sad and muddied like the 
very ancient flesh exiled from joy and faith to the kingdom 
of thought. 

When they returned from the theater or a dance and stood 
before her door there was always a pause. The Voice would 
say: "Come and talk with me awhile longer. I hate to surrender 
you to sleep." 

If she refused she would find a note under her door the next 
day: "You belong to the night. I have to give you up to the 

ia5 



night, to your mystery." She smiled. Her mystery was so 
simple, but he could not understand it. 

The next day he wrote her a long letter and slipped it under 
her door. Tied to it was a diminutive frog. "This," he wrote, 
"is my transformation, to permit my entrance through the 
closed door." 

But this diminutive frog she held in the palm of her hand 
resembled him so much that it made her weep. Indeed the 
frog had come just as in the fairy tales; and just as in the fairy 
tales, she must keep her faith and her inner vision of him, 
must keep on believing in what lay hidden in this frog's body. 
She must pretend not to notice that the Voice was born dis- 
guised, to test her love. If she kept her inner vision the disguise 
might be destroyed, the metamorphosis might occur. 

She sat on the floor with the letter in her lap and the frog 
in the palm of her hand, weeping over his ugliness and humiUty 
and the faith she must retain. 

She was asking him questions about his childhood. He 
stopped in the middle of a story to weep. "Nobody ever 
asked me anything about myself. I have listened to the con- 
fessions of others for twenty-five years. No one has ever 
turned and asked me about myself, has ever let me talk. No 
one has ever tried to divine my moods or needs. There are 
times, Lilith, when I wanted so much to confess to someone. 
I was filled with preoccupations. Do you know what I fear 
most in the world? To be loved as a father, a doctor. And it 
is always so I am loved." 

She used his own formulas against him. When he com- 
plained that she left him alone she gave him mysterious ex- 
planations: that the reality of living always brought tragedy, 
that she preferred the dream. The Voice was forced to admit 
gallantly that he preferred the dream. The explanations en- 

166 



chanted and eluded him and saved her from saying: "I don't 
want you near me because I don't love you." 

His concern with the accuracy of the psychological in- 
terpretations was so great that once, after the discovery that 
she had lied to him (he thought he had cured her of lying) he 
said: "Let me solve this thing alone. Don't bother about details 
of any kind. What do our personal lives matter when the 
whole man-made world is at stake?" 

The only joy she experienced was that of being completely 
understood, justified, absolved in all but her relationship to 
him. I le always asked her what she had been doing. No matter 
what she told him, even about the trivial purchase of a bracelet, 
the Voice pounced upon it with exxitement and raised the 
incident to a complete, dazzling, symbolical act, a part of a 
legend. The little incident was all he needed to compose and 
complete this legend. The bracelet had a meaning — every- 
thing had a meaning. Every act revealed more and more 
clearly this divine pattern by which she lived and of which the 
Voice alone knew the entire design. Now he could see. He 
repeated over and over again: "You see? You see?" Lilith had 
the feeling that she had been doing extraordinary things. 
When she stepped into a shop and bought a bracelet it was 
not, as she thought, because of the love of its color or its shape, 
or because she loved adornment. She was carrying in herself 
at that moment the entire drama of woman's slavery and de- 
pendence. In this obscure little theater of her unconscious 
the denouement brought about by the purchase of the brace- 
let was a drama which had everlasting repercussions on her 
daily life. It signified the desire to be bound to someone, it 
expressed a desire to yield. You see? You see? Not only was 
the bracelet or the lovely moment spent before the shop 
window magnified and brought into violent relief — as an act 

167 



full of implications, of repercussions — but all she had done 
during the week seemed to open like a giant hothouse camellia 
whose growth had been forced by a travail of creation from 
the moment she first drew breath. 

While the Voice tracked down each minor incident of her 
life to expose the relation between them, the fatality and im- 
portance of the link between them, the heavy destined power 
of each one, she felt like an actress who had never known how 
moving she had been, she felt like a creator who had prepared 
in some dim laboratory of her soul a life like a legend, and 
only today could she read the legend itself out of an enormous 
book. 

This was part of the legend, this little man brusquely deci- 
phering each incident, marveling ever at the miracle which 
had never seemed a miracle before, her walking along and 
buying a bracelet, as miraculous to the Voice as lead turning 
to gold in an alchemist's bottle. She had not only covered the 
earth with a multitude of spontaneous acts but these acts ac- 
complished so slidingly, so swiftly, could all be illumined with 
spiritual significance, divine intentions, loved for their human 
quality or feared for their uniqueness. He worshiped them for 
the very act of their flowering. 

He revolted now and then against her uncapturableness, 
but she subtilized the situation. She did not want reality. She 
feared reality. She was really a flame. No one could possess a 
flame. She annulled the boundaries, confused the issues. All the 
definite decisions, outlines, reahties, she melted into a dream- 
like substance. She enchanted him, hypnotized him with inven- 
tions and creations, so that he would cease his clutching, 
become cosmic again. She talked him out of the reality of her 
presence. 

What he did not know was that at the same time she was 

16S 



losing her faith in all interpretations, since she saw how they 
could be manipulated to conceal the truth. She began to feel 
the illusory quality of all man's interpretations, and to believe 
only in her feelings. Every day she found in mythology a new 
pretext for eluding his desire for her. First she needed time. 
She must become entirely herself and without need of him. 
She was waiting for the moment when she would have no need 
of him as a doctor. She was waiting for the man and the doctor 
to become entirely separate and never to be again confused in 
her. This he accepted. 

But when he was not being the doctor, she discovered, he 
was not a man but a child. He wept like a child, he raged, he 
was filled with fears, he was possessive, he complained and 
lamented about himself, his own life. He was desperately 
hungry and awkward in life, clutching rather than enjoying. 
The human being hidden in the healer was stunted, youthful, 
hysterical. As soon as he ceased to be a teacher and a guide, he 
lost all his strength and deftness. He was disoriented, chaotic, 
blind. As soon as he stepped out of his role he collapsed. Lilith 
found herself confronting a child lamenting, regretting, im- 
patient, fretful, lonely. He wrote inchoate love notes with ink 
blots, he leaped to meet her in the street, perspiring and nerv- 
ous. He was jealous of the man who washed her hair. The 
child that she awakened in him was like the child in those who 
had come to him for care, unsatisfied, lamenting, tearful, 
sickly. Neither her powers of illusion nor her dreams had 
worked the miracle. He remained nothing but A VOICE. 
• • • • 

Awareness hurts. Relationships hurt. Life hurts. But to 

float, to drift, to live in the dream does not hurt. Her eyes 

were closing. She was drifting, drifting. Drunkenness. It was 

not the Hotel Chaotica which had many rooms, but she, Djuna, 

169 



when she lay on her bed, folding them all together, the layers 
and all the things that she was not yet. 



When I entered the dream I stepped on a stage. The lights 
cast on it changed hue and intensity like stage lights. The 
violent scenes happened in the spotlight and were enveloped 
by a thick curtain of blackness. The scenes were cut, inter- 
rupted, or broken with entr'actes. The mise en scene was 
stylized, and only what has meaning was represented. And 
very often I was at once the victim and observer. 

The dream was composed like a tower of layers without 
end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or 
layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of 
the earth. When it swooped me into its undulations, the 
spiraling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no 
vault and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were 
themes repeating themselves with exactitude. 

If the walls of the dreaiti seemed lined with moist silk, and 
the contours of the labyrinth lined with silence, still the steps 
of the dream were a series of explosions in which all the con- 
demned fragments of ?nyself burst into a mysterious and vio- 
lent life, with the heavy maternal solicitude of the night ever 
attentive to their flowering. 

On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness. I 
could still see the daylight between the fringe of eyelashes. 
I could still see the interstices of the world. This was the 
penumbra, where the thoughts were inlaid in filaments of 
lightning. It was the place where the images were delicately 
filtered and separated, and their silhouettes thrown against 
space. It was the place where footsteps left no trace, where 
laughter had no echo, but where hunger and fear were im- 
170 



mense. It ivas the place where the sails of reverie could swell 
while no wind was felt. 

The vegetation no longer concealed its breathing, its lamen- 
tations. The sand no longer concealed its desire to enmesh, to 
stifle; the sea showed its true face, its insatiable craving to 
possess; the earth yawned open its caverns, the fogs spewed 
out their poisons. The drea?n was full of danger like the Afri- 
can jungle. The dreain was full of animals. All the animals 
killed, stuffed, imprisoned by man, walked alive in the dream. 
The faces mocked all desire to identify, to personalize: they 
changed and decomposed before my eyes. 

There was no time: events passed without leaving a trace, 
a footprint, an echo. They left SPACE around them. Even a 
crowded street lay perpendicular between two abysses, as if 
it belonged to a planet without gravitation. 

The dream was a filter. The entire world was never ad- 
7mtted. It was a stage surrendered to fragments, with many 
pieces left hanging in shreds. 

At the tip of the spiral I felt passive, felt bound like a 
munrmy. As I descended these obstacles loosened. 

The loss of memory was like the loss of a chain. With all 
this fluidity came a great lightness. Without memory I was 
irmnensely light, vaporous, fluid. The memory was the density 
which I could not transcend except in the dream. 

I was not lost, I had only lost the past. Sand passing through 
the hourglass which never turned. Passing. 

When the dream fell to one side, wounded, and the day- 
time into another, what appeared through the crack was the 
real death. The crack of daylight between the curtains, the 
slit between night and day was the mortal moment for it killed 
the dream. The soul then lost its power to breathe, lost its 
space. 

171 



Nights when I awaited the dream, as one awaits the ship 
that is to take one far away, and the nightmare came in its 
place, then 1 knew that I had something to expiate. The night- 
mare was the messenger of guilt. The night^nare brought me 
whatever suffering 1 had rejected or eluded during the day or 
given to others. 

Now it was not altogether the dream nor was it the day- 
light. It was the moment when one was awake with a million 
eyes and a mouth that had said everything and was now struck 
with silence; a place so high that breathing ceased and divina- 
tion began. 

It was the twilight of mercury. It was here that everything 
happened to me. The daytime was only a sketch. In the day- 
time all the gestures were thickened by remembrance. Only 
in the dream was the loved one wholly possessed, only in the 
dream was there ecstasy without death. Life began only be- 
hind the curtain of closed eyelashes. 

The woman who walked erect during the day and the 
woman who breathed and walked and swam during the night 
were not the same. The day woman was like a cathedral spire, 
and the opening into her being was a secret. It was inaccessible 
like the tip of the most labyrinthian sea shell. 

But with the night came the openness. 

The day body made of rigid bones, made rigid with fears 
and dissonances, was set against yielding. At night it changed 
substance, form and texture. With the night came fluidity. 
With the night there ran through the marrows not only blood 
which could commingle with other bloods, but a mercury 
which ran in all directions, swift, mordant, uncontrollable, 
spilling and running in star points, changing shape at each 
breath of desire, spilling and dispersing without separating. 

With the night came space. No crowded city. The dream 
172 



was never crowded. It was filtered through the prism of 
creation. The pressure of time ceased. Joy lasted longer and 
suffering less, or else all the feelings were telescoped into a 
second. Tnne was arranged and ordained by feeling. Fear was 
eternal, anger immediate and catastrophic. Sifted and envel- 
oped in a niineral glow, each object of the eternal landscape 
appeared on the scene with space around it. The space was 
like an enormous silence in which there was no sword of 
thought, no rending comments, no thread ever cut. I walked 
among symbols and silence. 

I ceased to be a wo?nan. The secret S7nall pores of the 
being began to breathe a life of plant and flower. I went to 
sleep a human being and awakened with the nervous sensibility 
of a leaf, with the fin-knowledge of fish, with the hardness of 
coral, with the stdphurous eyes of a mineral. I awakened 
with eyes at the end of long ar?ns that floated everywhere and 
with eyes on the soles of my feet. I awakened in strands of 
angel hair with lungs of cocoon milk. 

With the night ca7ne a mtdtiplied breathing and new cells 
like honeycombs filled with a strange activity. Filling and 
refilling with white tides and red currents, with echoes and 
fever. Cells, beehives of feelings, inundated with new forms 
of life dissolving the outline of the body. All forms became 
blurred and the woman who was lying there slowly turned 
into a heavy sea, carrying riches on her breast, or became earth 
with many fissures of thirst, drinking rain. 

With the night came the boat. This boat I was pushing 
with all my strength because it could not float, it was passing 
through land. It was chokingly struggling to pass along the 
streets, it coidd not find its way to the ocean. It was pushed 
along the streets of the city, touching the walls of houses, and 
I was pushing it against the resistance of earth. So many 

173 



nights against the obstacles of mud, marshes, garden paths 
through which the boat labored painfully. 

I was not altogether asleep. The night was like a very 
black silk curtain, but there was still a slit of daylight. I felt 
the approach of the dream. But while there was a slit of day- 
light there were words floating around her. They were sharp, 
they cut like knives into the feelings, they separated, they 
scalded, they uncovered the skin, they exposed, they killed 
the feelings. The moment words cut into the dream, into the 
feeling, they cut into the pulse and the pulse ceased to beat. 
The slit of daylight was made of steel. 

The boat was passing through the city unable to find the 
ocean that transmitted its life voyages. The light cut into the 
bones with bony words that could not commune or change 
substance for communion. 

By day I followed the dream step by step. I felt lost 
and bewildered if the day did not bring its replica. I felt 
compelled to recover the lost flavor, colors, to recapture the 
personage, the moment, the place. When I found it 1 was 
aware at the same moment of the part of the dream which was 
missing. The missing fragment was unrecoverable, yet 1 
felt its presence during the day attended with an uneasy, 
yellow aura of incompleteness. 

If I could find the missing fragment of the dreajn in the 
daylight I might reconstruct the entire tapestry. I was seeking 
a window I had seen in the dream. I was walking through the 
city at night, looking for the window, and I found it. It was 
the window of a house open on two avenues. In the drea?n it 
was the window of Prousfs house. It was also the window 
of a house I had lived in, I could not remember when. But I 
was certain that I had already known the feeling of standing 
at this window looking down at the two avenues like opened 
legs. I was certain that I stood many times hesitating between 

174 



these tivo avenues. My route constantly split in tivo, the whole 
structure of my life constantly splitting open into two sec- 
tions. I could never make a choice. I would follow the avenues 
until the pain of being thus quartered became ecstasy and the 
two avenues fused together into a point of absolute sorrow. 
The drama was this window opening on the dual aspect of 
existence, on its dual face. The drama was this window I had 
seen in a dream, which was the window of Proust's house 
when he was writing the endless book in which he made no 
choice but followed the labyrinth of remembrance. I had 
chosen as an answer to the dream this pursuit of the dream 
without memory. Yet I left behind a web of memory which 
wove itself inexorably and slowed up my walking and dream- 
ing. 

Only while following the dream was I free but at some 
point the pattern of my life hung like a frayed cloth and the 
street of dreams turned into darkness. 

When I entered certain rooms filled with people I had 
never seen in the dream, I was instantly aware that this was 
not the place. The need of flight was imperative. 

When 1 found the place, I sat very still and content. I 
was reme^nbering the dreain and seeking to recapture the 
lost pieces. 1 had caught Tuy dream. Then it seemed to me 
that all the clocks in the world chimed in unison for the 
7?iiracle. As the clocks chimed at midnight for all metamor- 
phoses. The dream was synchronized. The miracle was ac- 
complished. All the clocks chimed at midnight for the meta- 
morphosis. It was not time they chiTned for, but the catching 
up, catching up with the dream. The dream was always run- 
ning ahead of one. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison 
with it, that was the miracle. The life on the stage, the life of 
the legend dovetailed with the daylight, and out of this mar- 
riage sparked the great birds of divinity, the eternal moments. 

175 



u 



Comments on the work of AlVAIS NIIV 

Lawrence Durrell: "... a poetic notation of the female artist's world 
.... her books are irredescent, held together by a finely spun web of 
crossreferences. Their preoccupation is with poetic truth and the 
human personality, not in terms of rigid objective valuations but in 
terms of symbol. Their subjectivity demands complete surrender in 
the reader. . . . Those who care for finely-wrought musical writing shot 
through with clear insights into the inner world of human beings will 
not be disappointed." 

William Carlos Williams: "There is a feminine touch in the arts, she 
has it. It's disturbing, it forces a man to an opposite extreme." 

Lloyd Morris in New York Times: "She v^dshes to immerse readers in 
that flow of sensibility and reflection from which human beings distill 
the significance of what they do and suffer." 

This World: ". . . cutting a gem so as to release its inner fires." 

Robert Gk)rham Davis: "What Anais Nin records are configurations of 
character, the fields of electric tension, movement and resistance in 
human relationships. She defines these with elegance and insight." 

Charles Rolo in The Atlantic: "She explores relationships on a level to 
which very few contemporary novels penetrate." 

Richard McLaughlin: "She has chosen the dark, labyrinthian passage- 
ways of the interior, that region of light and shadow . . . the anguish, 
the ecstasy, and sometimes the death of the spirit." 

Masterplots: "A real contribution towards new dimensions in lit- 
erature." 

Jean Fanchette in Two Cities "A constant dialogue between the 
dream and lucidity." 

Maurice Edelman in The Sunday Times: "The cadences of Miss Nin's 
writing are those of a musician; its colour that of a painter. But its 
total sfeength lies.in the involutions of her thought with the sound of 
the sceh'e. . . . h^ comment 'the criminal relieves others of their vdsh 
to commit murder. He acts out the crimes of the world.' That, in a 
sense, is tlie function of the novelist as well." 

Tto Irish Times: ". . . the author's subtle sensitivity which enables her 
to follow and convey every ripple of a mood. Like the spider in Pope's 
poei^. Miss Nin possesses an exquisitely fine touch, and feels at each 
thread whatever enters the silken web of her awareness." 

Edmund Wilson: ". . . the imagery does convey something and is 
always appropriate. The spun glass is also alive: it is the abode of a 
secret creature." 

Karl Shapiro: ". . . the beautiful, rare novels of Anais Nin." 

Allen Tate: "Beautiful writing in these books, and I shall return to 
them many times."