Anaïs Nin - The Winter of Artifice

Hans leaned over. “I want to lay you on the table—right here. I’m crazy about you. Lean over more. Lean over, I want to see your breasts.”

A band of students entered the restaurant, shouting and laughing. They circled round the table, like savages dancing around a stake.

Hans was laughing softly: “The other day when I left you, I was a little spiffed, you know. And hungry as hell. I ordered a good meal—a good meal. And I’m enjoying it. And then I notice a little whore opposite me, eyeing me up and down, and sort of looking at me wistfully, hungrily. I invited her to eat—naturally. She’s hardly sat down beside me when I run my hand up her skirt—I must have been cockeyed. Anyway, I finally took her to a hotel down the street—and all the while thinking of you, our afternoon, and wondering how the hell I could be doing this, but doing it just the same. And sort of hating myself for it, and yet enjoying myself—do you understand? But when we got to the hotel and it came time to lay her—I don’t know—something happened. I just didn’t have my heart in it, I guess. I couldn’t do a thing. And you know what a whore is! She worked over me like a steam engine. And the more she worked the less interested I got. It seemed to me as if it were all happening to some one else. I remember watching her curiously, as if I were examining a bug under a microscope. Very strange. I seemed to go dead under her. And wasn’t she contemptuous, though! As though I had insulted her. I guess she thought I was a pervert, or an impotent bastard. But she had her money. That seemed to soothe her a little bit. I felt sort of glad, sort of relieved, that I hadn’t given her too much. It was your money, after all… I don’t know, that’s how it was. Sort of queer and sudden. Can you understand it?”

I kept my eyes steady, saying quietly that I understood. But my body was bewildered, hurt beyond all words, beyond all understanding.

“One more thing,” he continued. “I must tell you this—and then I am through. I’ve got to get it off my chest… One night—it was Andre’s night off—we went to a cabaret. And sure as fate, we soon had a couple of Janes around our neck. They stuck to us like glue. To make it short, we took them home with us. We sat down in the kitchen and had a little snack together, the four of us. They weren’t bad, but they were greedy. Finally we began to talk turkey. They were holding out for some absurd sum—200 francs a piece, I think it was, or something like that. They might just as well have asked for the Woolworth Building. Anyhow, I was for letting them go. I told them so. I even showed them my torn socks. But Andre, the dope, he insisted that they stay. I don’t know what he gave them—but suddenly they became cheerful again. They began to sing and dance—they acted as if they had lost a screw or two. One of them was an acrobatic dancer. She wanted to show us a few tricks. And so she stripped down and began to do somersaults and handsprings—and every time she came down her high-heeled shoes made the chandelier clatter. They made a hell of a rumpus—the concierge threatened to have us put out next day. Next morning Andre was furious. ‘You try to tell me you’re in love with Djuna,’ he said. Well, I am—you know that. I think you might even have found a perverse pleasure in watching me, had you been there.”

I bowed my head. “I understand… I understand,” I kept repeating. He was still swimming on the airy, elastic waves of his drunkenness. The students were singing and laughing so hard they had to wipe their eyes. I looked at Hans and felt the whole world rocking.

The sign over the Hotel Anjou was in red lights. The red lights shone into the room. A red well. Blood madness. Blood rhythm. A charging, a hoofing, a clangor, a rushing through the world. Thumping. The torrent pressure of a machine panting, sliding back and forth, back and forth. A machine t/font>yielding honey. Swing. Swing. The bed- like stillness and downiness of summer foliage, heavy summer foliage rocking the warm, wine-filled senses. Rolling. Rolling. Clutching and folding. All curves filled. Steam. Steam. The machine on giant oiled gongs yielding honey, rivers of honey on the bed of summer foliage. The boat slicing open the lake waters, ripples extending to the tips of the hair and the roots of the toes. Honeysuckle juice and pistilled tongues, the jet of fountains on odored sheets, the room filled with fever and blood-red lights.

He sank into sleep. I lay at the bottom of the red well, laughing, while my joy mounted in endless spirals.

Through the open window came the riotous shouts of the students and the groaning of the heavy buses. I ran to the window naked and watched them. I looked at the patches of brown flesh and I wished I were there at the ball. Hans has made me suffer, but I am going to destroy pain with drunkenness. I want to go to the ball. I want to let life flow around me and drown me.

Hans awoke. He laughed seeing me standing at the window naked. “You’re curious and wild like a savage,” he said. “Come here!”

“I want to go to the ball!”

“Come here,” he said angrily. But I stood there in the halo of the red light and shouted: “I want to go to the ball!”

“I won’t have you leaning out of the window naked!”

I wrapped the brocaded curtain around myself and went on watching. Finally with arms extended I turned back to the bed where he lay, and as I approached the bed I made the gesture of closing my fists tight. Then slowly, as I neared him, I opened my fists again. “See, I wanted to hold on to you, but look, I am opening my hands. Have your little whores, if that will make you happy. Anyway, I am a gay whore myself.” And dancing around the bed I exclaimed gaily: “See what a gay whore I am! Twenty francs, please, Mister!”

When I rushed out of the hotel a gust of summer heat enveloped me. I used to wait for the seasons sitting behind a window, watching and waiting, and now they catch me living so fast, they come upon me with my dress only half buttoned, my hair wild, running for a taxi because I am late.

I had arrived too early and Hans was out. Andre opened the door to me. I stood in the middle of the room without moving at first, breathing this air in which he lived, the only climate in which I myself could live.

I looked at the photograph of Johanna tacked on his wall. The fevered profile, taut even in the photograph, so alive that I shivered a little, expecting the face to turn towards me with that slight twitching of the lips and the occasional tic of the eyelids. I half expected her to open her mouth and pour forth that eddying voice with the spinning phrases which gave one vertigo. There was in her portrait the imperious fever of her rhythm, like her wide, crunching walk. Looking at the taut, fevered mask of Johanna, I dreaded the malice behind her pretense; I remembered the hatred which Hans had ascribed to Johanna, the fierce possessiveness of the woman.

My eyes turned instinctively to his desk which was littered with notes. I read them over slowly… Johanna… Johanna’s life in the cellar on Sullivan Street… Johanna selling cigarettes and candy… Johanna’s cock and bull stories… Johanna’s drunken orgies with Hildred… Johanna’s extravagances… Johanna’s fear of humiliation… Johanna the female Stavrogin… Johanna’s bracelets… Johanna’s cat’s eyerings… Johanna this, Johanna that…

Johanna had made the world rock for him and that had been her great gift to him. The moment when the world rocks and mouths join, and the earth spins like a mad top, when the dreams rise like pyramids… And now Hans was erecting pyramids of notes. Johanna had shed her hair on his pages, her perfume, her torn dresses, her shadow as she dressed, her tears, her nail lacquer, her painted eyelashes, her broken bracelets. The notes were stained and brimming with her presence.