Anaïs Nin - A Spy in the House of Love

But when she wished to end a role, to become herself again, the other felt immensely betrayed, and not only fought the alteration but became angered at her. Once a role was established in a relationship, it was almost impossible to alter. And even if she succeeded, when the time came to return to the original Sabina, where was she? If she rebelled against her role towards Donald, if she turned on the “Firebird” record again, the drumming of the senses, the tongues of fire, and denied her mother within her, was she then returning to the true Sabina?

When she replaced the needle on the record and set off on her first assignation with desire was it not her father then walking within her, directing her steps? Her father who, having fed on her mother’s artful cooking, having dressed in the shirt she had ironed, having kissed her unbeautiful forehead damp from ironing, having allowed her marred hands to tie his tie, proceeded to leave her mother and Sabina for his vainglorious walk down the streets of the neighborhood who knew him for his handsomeness and his wanderings?

How many times had a perfumed, a painted, a handsome woman stopped her on the street to kiss her, caress her long hair and say: “You’re Sabina! You’re his daughter! I know your father so well.” It was not the words, it was the intimate glance, the boudoir tone of the voice which alarmed her. This knowledge of her father always brought to women’s eyes a sparkle not there before, an intimation of secret pleasures. Even as a child Sabina could read their messages. Sabina was the daughter of delight born of his amorous genius and they caressed her as another manifestation of a ritual she sensed and from which her mother had been estranged forever.

“I knew your father so well!” Always the handsome women bending over her, hateful with perfume one could not resist smelling, with starched petticoats and provocative ankles. For all these humiliations she would have wanted to punish her father, for all his desecrations of multiple summer evenings of wanderings which gave these women the right to admire her as another of his women. She was also angry at her mother for not being angry, for preparing and dressing him for these intruders.

Was it Sabina now rushing into her own rituals of pleasure, or was it her father within her, his blood guiding her into amorousness, dictating her intrigues, he who was inexorably woven with her by threads of inheritance she could never separate again to know which one was Sabina, which one her father whose role she had assumed by alchemy of mimetic love.

Where was Sabina?

She looked at the sky and she saw the face of John speeding in the pursued clouds, his charm fading like smoke from celestial pyres; she saw the soft night glow of Mambo’s eyes saying: “You don’t love me,” while bearing down on her; and Philip laughing a conqueror’s laugh, bearing down on her and his charm vanishing too before the thoughtful, withdrawn face of Alan. The entire sky a warm blanket of eyes and mouths shining down on her, the air full of voices now mucous from the sensual spasm, now gentle with gratitude, now doubtful, and she was afraid because there was no Sabina, not ONE, but a multitude of Sabinas lying down yielding and being dismembered, constellating in all directions and breaking. A small Sabina who felt weak at the center carried on a giant wave of dispersion. She looked at the sky arched overhead but it was not a protective sky, not a cathedral vault, not a haven; it was a limitless vastness to which she could not cling, and she was weeping: “Someone hold me—hold me, so I will not continue to race from one love to another, dispersing me, disrupting me… Hold me to one… ”

Leaning out of the window at dawn, pressing her breasts upon the window sill, she still looked out of the window hoping to see what she had failed to possess. She looked at the ending nights and the passersby with the keen alertness of the voyager who can never reach termination as ordinary people reach peaceful terminals at the end of each day, accepting pauses, deserts, havens, as she could not accept them.

Sabina felt lost.

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

She felt lost. The dispersion had become too vast, too extended. A shaft of pain cut through the nebulous pattern. Sabina had always moved so fast that all pain had passed swiftly, as through a sieve, leaving a sorrow like children’s sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by another interest. She had never known a pause.

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

Her dress was becalmed.

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

For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.

Anxiety had entered her body and refused to run through it. The silvery holes of her sieve against sorrow granted her at birth, had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her, inescapable.

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

She had lost her sails, her cape, her horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once. She was stranded in the semidarkness of a winter evening.

Then, as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the external body, blurring the eyes, dulling the ears, thickening the palate and tongue, slowing the movements of the body, she felt intensely cold and shivered with the same tremor as leaves, feeling for the first time some withered leaves of her being detaching themselves from her body.

As she entered Mambo’s Night Club she noticed new paintings on the walls and for a moment imagined herself back in Paris, seven years back, when she had first met Jay in Montparnasse.

She recognized his paintings instantly.

It was now as before in Paris exhibits, all the methods of scientific splitting of the atom applied to the body and to the emotions. His figures exploded and constellated into fragments, like spilled puzzles, each piece having flown far enough away to seem irretrievable and yet not far enough to be dissociated. One could, with an effort of the imagination, reconstruct a human figure completely from these fragments kept from total annihilation in space by an invisible tension.

By one effort of contraction at the core they might still amalgamate to form the body of a woman.

No change in Jay’s painting, but a change in Sabina who understood for the first time what they meant. She could see at this moment on the wall an exact portrait of herself as she felt inside.

Had he painted Sabina, or something happening to all of them as it was happening in chemistry, in science? They had found all the corrosive acids, all the disintegrations, all the alchemies of separateness.

But when the painter exposed what took place inside the body and emotions of man, they starved him, or gave him Fifth Avenue shop windows to do, where Paris La Nuit in the background allowed fashions to display hats and shoes and handbags and waists floating in mid-air, and waiting to be assembled on one complete woman.

She stood before the paintings and she now could see the very minute fragments of her acts, which she had believed unimportant, causing minute incisions, erosions of the personality. A small act, a kiss given at a party to a young man who benefited from his resemblance to a lost John, a hand abandoned in a taxi to a man not desired but because the other woman’s hand had been claimed and Sabina could not bear to have her hand lie unclaimed on her lap: it seemed an affront to her powers of seduction. A word of praise about a painting she had not liked but uttered out of fear that the painter would say: “Oh, Sabina… Sabina doesn’t understand painting.”