Anaïs Nin: A Spy in the House of Love

Was it this quietism that inspired her trust? He told no lies. What he felt and thought he could tell Sabina. At the thought of confession, of confiding in him, she was almost asleep when out of the darkness the image of Alan appeared vividly and he was sobbing, sobbing desperately as he had at his father’s death. This image awakened her with horror, with compassion, and again her feeling was: I must always be on guard, to protect his happiness, always on guard to protect my guardian angel…

In the darkness she relived entirely the eight days spent in Provincetown.

She had walked into the dunes in quest of O’Neill’s house, and had lost her way. The sand dunes were so white in the sun, so immaculate, that she felt like the first inhabitant at the top of a glacier.

The sea churned at the base as if struggling to drag back the sand into its depths, carrying a little away each time only to replace it at high tide in the form of geological designs, a static sea of crystallized sand waves.

There she stopped and took off her bathing suit to lie in the sun. Drifts of sand were lifted by the wind and deposited over her skin like muslin. She wondered whether if she stayed there long enough it would cover her, and would she disappear in a natural tomb. Immobility always brought this image to her, the image of death, and it was this which impelled her to rise and seek activity. Repose, to her, resembled death.

But here in this moment of warmth and light with her face towards the sky, the sea coiling and uncoiling violently at her feet, she did not fear the image of death. She lay still watching the wind forming sand drawings and felt a momentary suspense from anxiety and fever. Happiness had been defined once as the absence of fever. Then what was it she possessed which was the opposite of fever?

She was grateful that, hypnotized by the sun’s reassuring splendor and the sea’s incurable restlessness, her own nerves did not coil and spring within her to destroy this moment of repose.

It was at this moment that she heard a song. It was not a casual song anyone might sing walking along the beach. It was a powerful, developed voice with a firm core of gravity, accustomed to vast halls and a large public. Neither the sand nor wind nor sea nor space could attenuate it. It was flung out with assurance, in defiane of them all, a vital hymn of strength equal to the elements.

The man who appeared had a body which was a full match to his voice, a perfect case for this instrument. He had a strong neck, a large head with high brow, wide shoulders and long legs. A full strong box for the vocal cords, good for resonance, thought Sabina, who had not moved, hoping he would walk by without seeing her and without interrupting this song from Tristan and Isolde.

As the song continued she found herself in the Black Forest of the German fairy tales which she had read so avidly in her childhood. Giant trees, castles, horsemen, all out of proportion in a child’s eyes.

The song ascended, swelled, gathered together all the turmoil of the sea, the rutilant gold carnival of the sun, rivaled the wind and flung its highest notes into space like the bridge span of a flamboyant rainbow. And then the incantation broke.

He had seen Sabina.

He hesitated.

Her silence as perfectly eloquent as his song, her immobility as flowing an essence of her meaning as his voice had been.

(Later he told her: “If you had spoken then I would have walked away. You had the talent of letting everything else speak for you. It was because you were silent that I came up to you.”)

She allowed him to continue his dream.

She watched him walk freely and easily up the sand dune, smiling. His eyes took their color from the sea. A moment ago she had seen the sea as a million diamond eyes and now only two, bluer, colder, approached her. If the sea and the sand and the sun had formed a man to incarnate the joyousness of the afternoon they would have spouted a man like this.

He stood before her, blocking the sun, still smiling as she covered herself. The silence continued to transmit messages between them.

“ Tristan and Isolde sounded more beautiful here than at the Opera,” she said, and donned her bathing suit and her necklace quietly, as if this were the end of a performance of his voice and her body.

He sat down beside her. “There is only one place where it sounds better: the Black Forest itself, where the song was born.”

By his accent she knew that he came from there, and that his physical resemblance to the Wagnerian hero was not accidental.

“I sang it there very often. There’s an echo there, and I had the feeling the song was being preserved in hidden sources and that it will spring up again long after I am dead.”

Sabina seemed to be listening to the echo of his song, and of his description of a place where there was memory, where the past itself was like a vast echo retaining experience; whereas here there was this great determination to pose of memories and to live only in the present, as if memory were but a cumbersome baggage. That was what he meant, and Sabina understood.

Then her tidal movement caught her again, and she said impatiently: “Let’s walk.”

“I’m thirsty,” he said. “Let’s walk back to where I was sitting. I left a bag of oranges.”

They descended the sand dunes sliding as if it were a hill of snow and they had been on skis. They walked along the wet sand.

“I saw a beach once where each step you took made the phosphorous sparkle under the feet.”

“Look at the sand-peekers,” said the singer inaccurately, but Sabina liked his invention, and laughed.

“I came here to rest before my opening at the Opera.”

They ate the oranges, swam, and walked again. Only at sundown did they lie on the sand.

She expected a violent gesture from him, in keeping with his large body, heavy arms, muscular neck.

He turned his eyes, now a glacial blue, fully upon her. They were impersonal and seemed to gaze beyond her at all women who had dissolved into one, but who might at any moment again become dissolved into all. This was the gaze Sabina had always encountered in Don Juan, everywhere; it was the gaze she mistrusted. It was the alchemy of desire fixing itself upon the incarnation of all women into Sabina for a moment but as easily by a second process able to alchemize Sabina into many others.

Her identity as the “unique” Sabina loved by Alan was threatened. Her mistrust of his glance made the blood flow cold within her.

She examined his face to see if he divined that she was nervous, that every moment of experience brought on this nervousness, almost paralyzing her.

But instead of a violent gesture he took hold of her finger tips with his smoothly designed hands, as if he were inviting her for an airy waltz, and said: “Your hands are cold.”

He caressed the rest of her arm, kissing the nook between the elbows, the shoulders, and said: “Your body is feverishly hot. Have you had too much sun?”

To reassure him she said unguardedly: “Stage fright.”

At this he laughed, mockingly, unbelieving, as she had feared he would. (There was only one man who believed she was afraid and at this moment she would have liked to run back to Alan, to run away from this mocking stranger whom she had attempted to deceive by her poise, her expert silences, her inviting eyes. This was too difficult to sustain and she would fail. She was straining, and she was frightened. She did not know how to regain prestige in his eyes, having admitted a weakness which the stranger mockingly disbelieved and which was not in harmony with her provocative behavior. This mocking laughter he was to hear once more when later he invited her to meet his closest friend, his companion in adventure, his brother Don Juan, as suave, as graceful and confident as himself. They had treated her merrily as one of their own kind, the adventuress, the huntress, the invulnerable woman, and it had offended her!)