Anaïs Nin: A Spy in the House of Love

When he saw she did not share his laughter, he became serious, lying at her side, but she was still offended and her heart continued to beat loudly with stage fright.

“I have to go back,” she said, rising and shaking the sand off with vehemence.

With immediate gallantry he rose, denoting a long habit of submission to women’s whims. He rose and dressed himself, swung his leather bag over his shoulder and walked beside her, ironically courteous, impersonal, unaffected.

After a moment he said: “Would you like to meet me for dinner at the Dragon?”

“Not for dinner but later, yes. About ten or eleven.”

He again bowed, ironically, and walked with cool eyes beside her. His nonchalance irritated her. He walked with such full assurance that he ultimately always obtained his desire, and she hated this assurance, she envied it.

When they reached the beach town everyone turned to gaze at them. The Bright Messenger, she thought, from the Black Forest of the fairy tales. Breathing deeply, expanding his wide chest, walking very straight, and then this festive smile which made her feel gay and light. She was proud of walking at his side, as if bearing a trophy. As a woman she was proud in her feminine vanity, in her love of conquest. This vainglorious walk gave her an illusion of strength and power: she had charmed, won, such a man. She felt heightened in her own eyes, while knowing this sensation was not different than drunkenness, and that it would vanish like the ecstasies of drink, leaving her the next day even more shaky, even weaker at the core, deflated, defeated, possessing nothing within herself.

The core, where she felt a constant unsureness, this structure always near collapse, which could so easily be shattered by a harsh word, a slight, a criticism, which floundered before obstacles, was haunted by the image of catastrophe, by the same obsessional forebodings which she heard in Ravel’s Waltz.

The waltz leading to catastrophe: swirling in spangled airy skirts, on polished floors, into an abyss, the minor notes simulating lightness, a mock dance, the minor notes always recalling that man’s destiny was ruled by ultimate darkness.

This core of Sabina’s was temporarily supported by an artificial beam, the support of vanity’s satisfaction when this man so obviously handsome walked by her side, and everyone who saw him envied the woman who had charmed him.

When they separated he bowed over her hand in a European manner, with mock respect, but his voice was warm when he repeated: “You will come?” When none of his handsomeness, perfection and nonchalance had touched her, this slight hesitation did. Because he was for a moment uncertain, she felt him for a moment as a human being, a little closer to her when not altogether invulnerable.

She said: “Friends are waiting for me.”

Then a slow to unfold but utterly dazzling smile illumined his face as he stood to his full height and saluted: “Change of guards at Buckingham Palace!”

By his tone of irony she knew he did not expect her to be meeting friends but most probably another man, another lover.

He would not believe that she wanted to return to her room to wash the sand out of her hair, to put oil over her sunburnt skin, to paint a fresh layer of polish on her nails, to relive every step of their encounter as she lay in the bath, in her habit of wanting to taste the intoxications of experience not once but twice.

To the girl she shared the room with she owed but a slight warning that she would be out that evening, but on this particular evening there was a third person staying with them for just one night, and this woman was a friend of Alan as well as hers; so her departure would be more complicated. Once more she would have to steal ecstasy and rob the night of its intoxications. She waited until they were both asleep and went silently out, but did not go towards the main street where all her friends the artists would be walking and who might offer to join her. She leaped over the wharf’s railing and slid down the wooden pole, scratching her hands and her dress against the barnacles, and leaped on to the beach. She walked along the wet sand towards the most brightly lighted of the wharves where the Dragon offered its neon-lighted body to the thirsty night explorers.

None of her friends could afford to come there, where even the piano had discarded its modest covering and added the dance of its bare inner mechanism to the other motions, extending the pianist’s realm from abstract notes to a disciplined ballet of reclining chess figures on agitated wires.

To reach the nightclub she had to climb large iron ladders planted on the glistening poles, on which her dress caught and her hair. She arrived out of breath as if she had been diving from there and were returning after freeing herself from the clasp of the sea weeds. But no one noticed her except Philip, the spotlight being on the singer of cajoling blues.

A flush of pleasure showed even through the deep tan. He held a chair out for her and bent over to whisper: “I was afraid you were not coming. When I passed by your studio at ten o’clock, I didn’t see any light, so I walked up and knocked at the window, not too hard, because I don’t see well at night, and I was afraid I had made a mistake. There was no answer. I stumbled about in the dark…waited…”

At the terror that Philip might have awakened her friends, at the danger that had barely been averted, she felt fever mounting, the heat of the blood set off by danger. His handsomeness at night became a drug, and the image of his night-blinded self seeking her, touched her and disarmed her. Her eyes now turned dark and rimmed with coal dust like those of oriental women. The eyelids had a bluish tint, and her eyebrows which she did not pluck, threw shadows which made her eyes’ dark glints seem to come from a deeper source than during the day.

Her eyes absorbed the vivid modeling of his features, and the contrast between his strong head and the long fingered hands, hairless, covered by the finest down. He not only caressed her skin along her arm, but seemed to exert a subtle musician’s pressure on the concealed nerves of an instrument he knew well, saying: “The beauty of your arm is exactly like that of your body. If I didn’t know your body I would want it, just from seeing the shape of your arm.”

Desire made a volcanic island on which they lay in a trance, feeling the subterranean whirls lying beneath them, dance floor and table and the magnetic blues uprooted by desire, the avalanches of the body’s tremors. Beneath the delicate skin, the tendrils of secret hair, the indentations and valleys of flesh, the volcanic lava flowed, desire incandescent, and where it burned the voices of the blues being sung became a harsh wilderness cry, bird and animal’s untamed cry of pleasure and cry of danger and cry of fear and cry of childbirth and cry of wound pain from the same hoarse delta of nature’s pits.

The trembling premonitions shaking the hand, the body, made dancing unbearable, waiting unbearable, smoking and talking unbearable. Soon would come the untamable seizure of sensual cannibalism, the joyous epilepsies.

They fled from the eyes of the world, the singer’s prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man’s sensual mast.

She reopened her eyes to find herself lying at the bottom of a sail boat, lying over Philip’s coat gallantly protecting her from sediments, water seepage and barnacles. Philip lies beside her, only his head is above hers, and his feet extend further down than hers. He lies asleep, content, breathing very deeply. She sits up in the moonlight, angry, restless, defeated. The fever had reached its peak, and waned separately from her desire, leaving it unfulfilled, stranded. High fever and no climax—Anger, Anger—at this core which will not melt, while Sabina wills to be like man, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger. Her body will not melt, will not obey her fantasy of freedom. It cheated her of the adventure she had pursued. The fever, the hope, the mirage, the suspended desire, unfulfilled, would remain with her all night and the next day, burn undimmed within her and make others who saw her say: “How sensual she is!”