Anaïs Nin - A Spy in the House of Love

“Betty! There’s a man hiding in one of the doorways. I saw him sneak in.”

“Well…what do you want me to do about it? He’s just a drunk getting home.”

“No, Betty. He was trying to hide when I leaned out of the window. Ask Tom to go and see. I’m frightened.”

“Oh, don’t be childish. Go to sleep. Tom worked late last night. I can’t wake him. The man can’t get in anyhow, unless you press the button and let him in!”

“But he’ll be there when I go to work. He’ll wait there. Call Tom.”

“Go to sleep.”

Sabina began to tremble. She was certain it was Alan. Alan was waiting down below, to see her come out. For her this was the end of the world. Alan was the core of her life. These other moments of fever were moments in a dream: insubstantial and vanishing as quickly as they came. But if Alan repudiated her, it was the death of Sabina. Her existence in Alan’s eyes was her only true existence. To say to herself “Alan cast me off,” was like saying: “Alan killed me.”

The caresses of the night before were acutely marvelous, like all the multicolored flames from an artful fireworks, bursts of exploded suns and neons within the body, flying comets aimed at all the centers of delight, shooting stars of piercing joys, and yet if she said: “I will stay here and live with Mambo forever,” it was like the children she had seen trying to stand under the showers of sparks from the fireworks lasting one instant and covering them with ashes.

She saw two scenes before her eyes: Alan sobbing as he had sobbed at the death of his father, and this image caused her an intolerable pain. And the second image was Alan angry, as he had never shown himself to her but to others, and this was equally intolerable; both equally annihilating.

It was not dawn yet. What could she do? Her anxiety was so great she could not continue to lie there in silence. How would she explain to Mambo her leaving so early in the morning? Nevertheless she rose quietly after sliding gradually out of bed, and dressed. She was trembling and her clothes slipped awkwardly between her fingers.

She must go and see who was the man hiding in the doorway. She could not bear the suspense.

She left the apartment slowly, noiselessly. She walked barefoot down the stairs, carrying her sandals. When one step creaked, she stopped. Perspiration showed on her eyebrows. A feeling of utter weakness kept her hands trembling. She finally o others, ed the door and saw a man’s outline behind the frosted glass of the door. He stood there smoking a pipe as Alan smoked it. Sabina’s heart was paralyzed. She knew why she had always hated this street without issue. She stood there fully ten minutes, paralyzed by terror and guilt, by regrets for what she was losing.

“It’s the end of the world,” she whispered.

As if she were about to die, she summarized her existence: the heightened moments of passion dissolved as unimportant in the face of the loss of Alan as if this love were the core of her existence.

Formulating this, the anguish increased to the point where she could no longer stand still. She pushed the door open violently.

A stranger stood there, with red, blood-shot eyes and unsteady legs. He was frightened by her sudden appearance and muttered, leaning backwards: “Can’t find my name on the doorbell, lady, can you help me?”

Sabina looked at him with a wild fury and ran past him, the corner of her cape slapping his face.

Mambo reproached her constantly: “You don’t love me.” He felt that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the legends, the trees, the drums of the island he came from, that she sought to possess ardently both his body and his island, that she offered her body to his hands as much as to tropical winds, and that the undulations of pleasure resembled those of swimmers in tropical seas. She savored on his lips his island spices, and it was from his island too that he had learned his particular way of caressing her, a silken voluptuousness without harshness or violence, like the form of his island body on which no bone showed.

Sabina did not feel guilty for drinking of the tropics through Mambo’s body: she felt a more subtle shame, that of bringing him a fabricated Sabina, feigning a single love.

Tonight when the drug of caresses whirled them into space, free—free for an instant of all the interferences to complete union created by human beings themselves, she would give him an undisguised Sabina.

When their still throbbing bodies lay side by side, there was always silence, and in this silence each one began to weave the separating threads, to disunite what had been united, to return to each what had been for a moment equally shared.

There were essences of caresses which could penetrate the heaviest insulations, filtering through the heaviest defenses, but these, so soon after the exchange of desires, could be destroyed like the seeds of birth.

Mambo proceeded to this careful labor by renewing his secret accusation against Sabina, that she sought only pleasure, that she loved in him only the island man, the swimmer and the drummer , that she never touched in him, or ardently desired, or took into her body, the artist that he most valued in himself, the composer of music which was a distillation of the barbaric themes of his origin.

He was a run-away from his own island, seeking awareness, seeking shadi and delicate balances as in the music ofDebussy, and at his side lay Sabina, feverishly dispersing all the delicacies as she demanded: “Drum! Mambo, drum! Drum for me.”

Sabina too was slipping out of the burning moment which had almost welded their differences. Her secret self unveiled and naked in his arms must be costumed once more for what she felt in the silence were his withdrawal and silent accusations.

Before he could speak and harm her with words while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabina he struck down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: “That was not me.”

Any devastating words addressed to the Sabina he had possessed, the primitive one, could not reach her then; she was already halfway out of the forest of their desire, the core already far away, invulnerable, protected by flight. What remained was a costume: it was piled on the floor of his room, and empty of her.

Once in an ancient city in South America, Sabina had seen streets which had been ravaged by an earthquake. Nothing was left but facades, as in Chirico paintings; the facades of granite had remained with doors and windows half unhinged, opening unexpectedly, not upon a household nestled around a hearth, but whole families camping under the sky, protected from strangers only by one wall and door, but otherwise completely free of walls or roofs from the other three sides.

She realized that it was this illimitable space she had expected to find in every lover’s room, the sea, the mountains visible all around, the world shut off on one side. A hearth without roof or walls, growing between trees, a floor through which wild flowers pushed to show smiling faces, a column housing stray birds, temples and pyramids and baroque churches in the distance.

But when she saw four walls and a bed pushed against the corner as if it had been flying and had collided against an obstacle, she did not feel as other voyagers: “I have arrived at my destination and can now remove my traveling costume,” but: “I have been captured and from here, sooner or later, I must escape.”

No place, no human being could bear to be gazed at with the critical eye of the absolute, as if they were obstacles to the reaching of a place or person of greater value created by the imagination. This was the blight she inflicted upon each room when she asked herself: “Am I to live here forever?” This was the blight, the application of the irrevocable, the endless fixation upon a place or relationship. It aged it prematurely, it accelerated the process of decay by staleness. A chemical death ray, this concentrate of time, inflicting the fear of stasis like a consuming ray, deteriorating at the high speed of a hundred years per minute.