Anaïs Nin: A Spy in the House of Love

Whatever event (in this case the trivial one of the walk down 18th St.) caused in Sabina either a panic, a shrinking, these two images of Alan would appear, and her desire to return home.

She walked back to the room in which she had awakened that morning. She pulled her valise out from under the bed and began to pack it.

The cashier at the desk of the hotel smiled at her as she passed on her way out, a smile which appeared to Sabina as expressing a question, a doubt. The man at the desk stared at her valise. Sabina walked up to the desk and said haltingly: “Didn’t…my husband pay the bill?”

“Your husband took care of everything,” said the desk man.

Sabina flushed angrily. She was about to say: Then why did you stare at me? And why the undertone of irony in your faces? And why had she herself hesitated at the word husband?

The mockery of the hotel personnel added to her mood of weight and fatigue. Her valise seemed to grow heavier in her hand. In this mood of lostness every object became extraordinarily heavy, every room oppressive, every task overwhelming. Above all, the world seemed filled with condemning eyes. The cashier’s smile had been ironic and the desk man’s scrutiny not friendly.

Haven was only two blocks away, yet distance seemed enormous, difficulties insuperable. She stopped a taxi and said: “55 Fifth Avenue.”

The taxi driver said rebelliously: “Why, lady, that’s only two blocks away, you can walk it. You look strong enough.” And he sped away.

She walked slowly. The house she reached was luxurious, but as many houses in the village, without elevators. There was no one around to carry her bag. The two floors she had to climb appeared like the endless stairways in a nightmare. They would drain the very last of her strength.

But I am safe. He will be asleep. He will be happy at my coming. He will be there. He will open his arms. He will make room for me. I will no longer have to struggle.

Just before she reached the last floor she could see a thin ray of light under his door and she felt a warm joy permeate her entire body. He is there. He is awake.

As if everything else she had experienced were but ordeals and this the shelter, the place of happiness.

I can’t understand what impels me to leave this, this is happiness.

When his door opened it always seemed to open upon an unchanging room. The furniture was never displaced, the lights were always diffused and gentle like sanctuary lam

Alan stood at the door and what she saw first of all was his smile. He had strong, very even teeth in a long and narrow head. The smile almost closed his eyes which were narrow and shed a soft fawn light. He stood very erect with an almost military bearing, and being very tall his head bent down as if from its own weight to look down upon Sabina.

He always greeted her with a tenderness which seemed to assume she had always been in great trouble. He automatically rushed to comfort and to shelter. The way he opened his arms and the tone in which he greeted her implied: “First of all I will comfort and console you, first of all I will gather you together again, you’re always so battered by the world outside.”

The strange, continuous, almost painful tension she felt away from him always dissolved in his presence, at his very door.

He took her valise, moving with deliberate gestures, and deposited it with care in her closet. There was a rock-like center to his movements, a sense of perfect gravitation. His emotions, his thoughts revolved around a fixed center like a well-organized planetary system.

The trust she felt in his evenly modulated voice, both warm and light, in his harmonious manners never sudden or violent, in his thoughts which he weighed before articulating, in his insights which were moderate, was so great that it resembled a total abandon of herself to him, a total giving.

In trust she flowed out to him, grateful and warm.

She placed him apart from other men, distinct and unique. He held the only fixed position in the fluctuations of her feelings.

“Tired, my little one?” he said. “Was it a hard trip? Was it a success?”

He was only five years older than she was. He was thirty-five and had gray hairs on his temples, and he talked to her as if he were her father. Had he always talked in this tone to her? She tried to remember Alan as a very young man. When she was twenty years old and he twenty-five. But she could not picture him any differently than at this moment. At twenty-five he stood the same way, he spoke the same way, and even then he said: “My little one.”

For a moment, because of the caressing voice, the acceptance and the love he showed, she was tempted to say: “Alan, I am not an actress. I was not playing a part on the road. I never left New York, it was all an invention. I stayed in a hotel, with…”

She held her breath. That was what she was always doing, holding her breath so that the truth would never come out, at any time, not here with Alan, and not in the hotel room with a lover who had asked questions about Alan. She held her breath to choke the truth, made one more effort to be the very actress she denied being, to act the part she denied acting, to describe this trip she had not taken, to recreate the woman who had been away for eight days, so that the smile would not vanish from Alan’s face, so that his trustingness and happiness would not be shattered.

During the brief suspense of her breathing she was able to make the transition. It was an actress who stood before Alan now, re-enacting the past eight days.

“The trip was tiring, but the play went well. I hated the role at first, as you know. But I began to feel for Madame Bovary, and the second night I played it well, I even understood her particular kind of voice and gestures. I changed myself completely. You know how tension makes the voice higher and thinner, and nervousness increases the number of gestures?”

“What an actress you are,” said Alan. “You’re still doing it! You’ve entered into this woman’s part so thoroughly you can’t get out of it! You’re actually making so many more gestures than you ever did, and your voice has changed. Why do you keep covering your mouth with your hand? As if you were holding back something you were strongly tempted to say?”

“Yes, that is what she was doing. I must stop. I’m so tired, so tired, and I can’t stop… can’t stop being her.”

“I want my own Sabina back.”

Because Alan had said this was a part she had been playing, because he had said this was not Sabina, not the genuine one, the one he loved, Sabina began to feel that the woman who had been away eight days, who had stayed at a small hotel with a lover, who had been disturbed by the instability of that other relationship, the strangeness of it, into a mounting anxiety expressed in multiple movements, wasted, unnecessary, like the tumult of wind or water, was indeed another woman, a part she had played on the road. The valise, the impermanency, the evanescent quality of the eight days were thus explained. Nothing that had happened had any connection with Sabina herself, only with her profession. She had returned home intact, able to answer his loyalty with loyalty, his trust with trust, his single love with a single love.

“I want my own Sabina back, not this woman with a new strange gesture she had never made before, of covering her face, her mouth with her hand as if she were about to say something she did not want to say or should not say.”

He asked more questions. And now that she was moving away from the description of the role she had played into descriptions of a town, a hotel and other people in the cast, she felt this secret, this anguishing constriction tightening her heart, an invisible flush of shame, invisible to others but burning in her like a fever.