Anaïs Nin - A Spy in the House of Love

All the small insincerities had seeped like invisible rivulets of acid and caused profound damages. The erosions had sent each fragment of Sabina rotating like separate pieces of colliding planets into other spheres, yet not powerful enough to fly into space like a bird, not organic enough to become another life, to rotate on its own core.

Jay’s painting was a dance of fragments to the rhythm of debris. It was also a portrait of the present Sabina.

And all her seeking of fire to weld these fragments together, seeking in the furnace of delight a welding of fragments into one total love, one total woman, had failed!

When she turned away from the paintings she saw Jay sitting at one of the tables, his face more than ever before resembling Lao Tze. His half-bald head rimmed now with frosty white hair, his half-closed, narrow, small eyes laughing.

Someone standing between Sabina and Jay leaned over to compliment him on his Fifth Avenue windows. Jay laughed merrily and said: “I have the power to stun them, and while they are stunned by modern art the advertisers can do their poisonous jobs.”

He waved at Sabina to sit down with him.

“You’ve been watching my atomic pile in which men and women are bombarded to find the mysterious source of power in them, a new source of strength.” He talked to her as if no years had intervened between their last meeting at a cafe in Paris. He was always continuing the same conversation begun no one knew when, perhaps in Brooklyn where he had been born, everywhere and anywhere until he had reached the country of cafes where he found an audience, so that he could paint and talk perpetually in one long chain of dissertations.

“Have you found your power, your new strength?” asked Sabina. “I haven’t.”

“I haven’t either,” said Jay, with mock contrition. “I’ve just come home, because of the war. They asked us to leave. Whoever couldn’t be drafted was only one more mouth to feed for France. The consulate sent us a messenger: ‘Let all the useless ones leave Paris.’ In one day all the artists deserted, as if the plague had come. I never knew the artists occupied so much space! We, the international artists, were faced with either hunger or concentration camps. Do you remember Hans, Sabina? They wanted to send him back to Germany. A minor Paul Klee, that’s true, but still deserving a better fate. And Suzanne was sent back to Spain; she had no papers. Her Hungarian husband with the polio was put in a camp. Remember the corner of Montparnasse and Raspail where we all stood for hours saying good night? Because of the blackouts you’d have no time to say good night, you’d be lost as soon as you were out of the cafe, you’d vanish in the black night. Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime. Djuna’s house boat was drafted for the transportation of coal. Everything could undergo conversion except the artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of mind out of continuous upheavals?”

As he looked at Sabina his eyes seemed to say that she had not changed, that she was still, for him, the very symbol of this fever and restlessness and upheaval and anarchy in life which he had applauded in Paris seven years ago.

At this moment another personage sat down next to Jay. “Meet Cold Cuts, Sabina. Cold Cuts is our best friend here. When people get transplanted, it’s exactly like plants; at first there’s a wilting, a withering; some die of it. We’re all at the critical stage, suffering from a change of soil. Cold Cuts works at the morgue. His constant familiarity with suicides and terrifying description of them keeps us from committing it. He speaks sixteen languages and thus he’s the only one who can talk to all the artists, at least early in the evening. Later he’ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors.”

Satisfied with this introduction, Cold Cuts left the table and busied himself with the microphone. But Jay was wrong. Although it was only nine o’clock, Cold Cuts was already in difficulties with the microphone. He was struggling to maintain an upright relationship, but the microphone would yield, bend, sway under his embrace like a flexible young reed. In his desperate embraces, it seemed as if the instrument and Cold Cuts would finally lie on the floor entangled like uncontrollable lovers.

When a momentary equilibrium was established, Cold Cuts became voluble and sang in sixteen various languages (including alcoholic esperanto), becoming in quick succession a French street singer, a German opera singer, a Viennese organ grinder singer, etc.

Then he returned to sit with Jay and Sabina.

“Tonight Mambo cut off my food supply earlier than usual. Why, do you think? I shouldn’t be so loyal to him. But he doesn’t want me to lose my job. At midnight I must be fit to receive the dead politely. I mustn’t stutter or bungle anything. The dead are sensitive. Oh, I have a perfect suicide to rept to the exiles: a European singer who was spoiled and pampered in her own country. She strangled herself with all her colored scarves tied together. Do you think she wanted to imitate the death of Isadora Duncan?”

“I don’t believe that,” said Jay. “I can reconstruct the scene. She was a failure as a singer here. Her present life was gray, she was forgotten and not young enough to conquer a second time perhaps… She opened her trunk full of programs of past triumphs, full of newspaper clippings praising her voice and her beauty, full of dried flowers which had been given to her, full of love letters grown yellow, full of colored scarves which brought back the perfumes and the colors of her past successes, and by contrast her life today became unbearable.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Cold Cuts. “I’m sure that’s the way it happened. She hung herself on the umbilical cord of the past.” He sputtered as if all the alcohol he contained had begun to bubble within him, and he said to Sabina: “Do you know why I’m so loyal to Mambo? I’ll tell you. In my profession people would rather forget me. No one wants to be reminded of death. Maybe they don’t want to ignore me , but the company I keep. Now I don’t mind this the rest of the year, but I do mind it at Christmas. Christmas comes and I’m the only one who never gets a Christmas card. And that’s the one thing about my work at the morgue which I can’t stand. So a few days before Christmas I said to Mambo: ‘Be sure and send me a Christmas card. I’ve got to receive at least one Christmas card. I’ve got to feel one person at least thinks of me at Christmas time, as if I were a human being like any other.’ But you know Mambo… He promised, he smiled, and then once he starts drumming it’s like a jag of some kind, and you can’t sober him up. I couldn’t sleep for a week thinking he might forget and how I would feel on Christmas day to be forgotten as if I were dead… Well, he didn’t forget.”

Then with unexpected swiftness, he pulled an automobile horn out of his pocket, affixed it to his buttonhole and pressed it with the exuberance of a woman squeezing perfume from an atomizer and said: “Listen to the language of the future. The word will disappear altogether and that is how human beings will talk to each other!”

And bowing with infinite control of the raging waters of alcohol which were pressing against the dam of his politeness, Cold Cuts prepared to leave for his duties at the morgue.