Anaïs Nin: A Spy in the House of Love

Philip awakened and smiled gratefully. He had given and taken and was content.

Sabina lay thinking she would not see him again, and wishing desperately she might. He was talking about his childhood and his love of snow. He had loved to ski. Then without transition, some image came to disturb this idyllic scene and he said: “Women will never leave me alone.”

Sabina said: “If you ever want to be with a woman who will not always expect you to make love, come to me. I will understand.”

“Youre wonderful to say that, Sabina. Women are so offended if you are not always ready and in the mood to play the romantic lover, when you look the part.”

It was her words which brought him back the next day when he had confessed to her that he never spent more than one evening with a woman for: “After that she begins to demand too much, to lay claims…”

He came and they walked to the sand dunes. He was talkative but always impersonal. Secretly Sabina hoped he might tell her something that would melt the unmeltable sensual core, that she might respond, that he might break through her resistance.

Then the absurdity of her expectation amazed her: seeking another kind of fusion because she had failed to achieve the sensual one, when what she wanted was only the sensual one, to reach man’s freedom in adventure, to arrive at enjoyment without dependence which might liberate her from all her anxieties connected with love.

For a moment she saw her love anxieties as resembling those of a drug addict, of alcoholics, of gamblers. The same irresistible impulse, tension, compulsion and then depression following the yielding to the impulse, revulsion, bitterness, depression, and the compulsion once more…

Three times the sea, the sun, and the moon witnessed and mocked her efforts at truly possessing Philip, this adventure, this man whom other women so envied her.

And now in the city, in autumn purple, she was walking towards his apartment after a telephone call from him. The bells on the Indian ring he had given her were tinkling merrily.

She remembered her fear that he would vanish with the summer. He had not asked for her address. The day before he left, a friend arrived. He had spoken of this woman with reserve. Sabina had divined that she was the essential one. She was a singer, he had taught her, music bound them. Sabina heard in his voice a tone of respect which she did not like to inspire, but which was like Alan’s tone when he talked about her. For this other woman Philip had the sympathy Alan had for Sabina. He spoke tenderly of her health not being good, to Sabina who had kept so fiercely the secret of being cold when they swam, or tired when they walked too long, or feverish in too much sun.

Sabina invented a superstitious game: if this woman were beautiful, then Sabina would not see him again. If not, if she was the steadfastly loved one, then Sabina could be the whim, the caprice, the drug, the fever.

When Sabina saw her she was amazed. The woman was not beautiful. She was pale, self-effacing. But in her presence Philip walked softly, happy, subdued in his happiness, less erect, less arrogant, but gently serene. No streaks of lightning in his ice-blue eyes, but a soft early morning glow.

And Sabina knew that when he would want fever he would call her.

Whenever she felt lost in the endless deserts of insomnia she would take up the labyrinthian thread of her life again from the beginning to see if she could find at what moment the paths had become confus friend afont.

Tonight she remembered the moon-baths, as if this had marked the beginning of her life instead of the parents, school, birthplace. As if they had determined the course of her life rather than inheritance or imitation of the parents. In the moon-baths, perhaps, lay the secret motivation of her acts.

At sixteen Sabina took moon-baths, first of all because everyone else took sun-baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon-baths was unknown, but it was intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun’s effect.

The first time she exposed herself she was frightened. What would the consequences be? There were many taboos against gazing at the moon, many old legends about the evil effects of falling asleep in moonlight. She knew that the insane found the full moon acutely disturbing, that some of them regressed to animal habits of howling at the moon. She knew that in astrology the moon ruled the night life of the unconscious, invisible to consciousness.

But then she had always preferred the night to the day.

Moonlight fell directly over her bed in the summer. She lay naked in it for hours before falling asleep, wondering what its rays would do to her skin, her hair, her eyes, and then deeper, to her feelings.

By this ritual it seemed to her that her skin acquired a different glow, a night glow, an artificial luminousness which showed its fullest effulgence only at night, in artificial light.

People noticed it and asked her what was happening. Some suggested she was using drugs.

It accentuated her love of mystery. She meditated on this planet which kept half of itself in darkness. She felt related to it because it was the planet of lovers. Her attraction for it, her desire to bathe in its rays, explained her repulsion for home, husband and children. She began to imagine she knew the life which took place on the moon. Homeless, childless, free lovers, not even tied to each other.

The moon-baths crystallized many of Sabina’s desires and orientations. Up to that moment she had only experienced a simple rebellion against the lives which surrounded her, but now she began to see the forms and colors of other lives, realms much deeper and stranger and remote to be discovered, and that her denial of ordinary life had a purpose: to send her off like a rocket into other forms of existence. Rebellion was merely the electric friction accumulating a charge of power that would launch her into space.

She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as one life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief the shortness of life’s physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moon-rays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramification of myriad lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courtesan depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of many women in herself were fecundated by the moon-rays because they came from that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams, containing roots reaching for all the magnificences of the past, transmitting the rich sediments into the present, projecting them into the future.

In watching the moon she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time, by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.

It was this flame which began to burn in her, in her eyes and skin, like a secret fever, and her mother looked at her in anger and said: “You look like a consumptive.” The flame of accelerated living by fever glowed in her and drew people to her as the lights of night life drew passersby out of the darkness of empty streets.

When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.