Anaïs Nin - The Winter of Artifice

It was the moment of silence. The day begun in crystal cearness was blurred by the ascension of blood passing through the cells. The blood rising through the body like the sap in the trees. Antique vases filling with wine.

Djuna stopped walking. Everything had come too near, too near. The cells were full to overflowing with the warm invasion. The moon was shining hypnotically round, a fixed stare, and all the taboos which held the body upright were dissolved by this stare of the moon calling the blood to its own cycle. The moon was circling now inside of her body, with the same rhythm. Djuna lost her face, her name. She was tied to the moon by long threads of red tangled blood. She moved now like one much larger than herself. She moved like a woman tied to the moon, in a space so vast, pushed by a rhythm so strong that the small woman in her was lost. The moon enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night without dawn.

Before the storm in her there was a suspense, there was time for fear. The trees were afraid, the sky was breathless, the air rarified, the earth parched.

Now her heart was no longer a heart, it was a drum beating continuously. The skin of her body was stretched like a drum. The tips of her hair were no longer hair, but electric wires charged with lightning. The hair was linked to lightning, the heart was a drum; the skin was a fruit skin exposed to warmth and cold. The teeth were sharp, lustful, sharpened with appetite.

The blood was rising and drowning the smaller world of the woman, a curtain of red falling over the eyes, drowning pity. Her tongue lashed like a whip, her voice whirled like a simoun wind, her hands tore everything apart, breaking all bonds with man, father, son, lover, brother. What erupted in her body was no longer love but hunger and hatred. Her body filled with teeth, with a drumming fever, with a delirium. Djuna was in a jungle, alone with her storm. She was alone in the forest of her delirium. Desire leaping wild and blind. The human eyes were closed. The storm was panting in her, the moon smiled, her anger seemed immense like the space around her. An enormous fury, as of an animal long taunted, so that when the blood rose every word withheld, every act of yielding, erupted. She trusted no one as she drank alone in the jungle of desire. Her nails were longer, tearing apart everything she had lulled. The storm of blood brought a cloudburst of laughter, the lightning struck down the love, broke all the bondages, drowned the pity.

Djuna was one with the moon, thrusting hands made of roots into the storm, while her heart beat like a drum through the orgy of the moonstorm.

Lilith talking to the Voice. Lilith had a headache.

My father had headaches like this, and he went mad. Do you think I will go mad? I dream of being under ether and I awake in terror. My father’s madness started with headaches. He began slowly to lose his memory. But I kept thinking—perhaps my father is not mad, but has had a dream. This dream has come and installed itself in his life. The dream is his life. What was this dream? Could I understand it? If I could see it, share it with him, enter his world and stay in it, perhaps he wouldn’t go mad. I feel that madness is only solitude. Ynly go mad when you see something no one else sees. There is a moment before madness when people have not yet cut the cord of connection and at this moment some one can hold them back. It’s what you do every day. There was the dream of the man who ate flowers so that the Revolution might not come… He was locked up. Only because he got confused with the symbol, he lived in the symbol. But if you understand it, nothing is mad. Everything is a dream, but we don’t always know the meaning. I wanted to know my father’s fantasy but he enclosed himself in it. I only discovered it when it was too late. And now I will admit all this I’m saying is to elude something I find very hard to tell you. You’ll be angry. The truth is I accepted an invitation to spend a night with Harold and a woman. When I arrived I was shown into his apartment, but he had not yet returned from a party. He had left a note, an erotic book for me to read, and drinks. I just sat there and dreamed about all my curiosities, all my erotic longings, my desire for woman. Arline came first and sat on the edge of the bed which was set in an alcove. Then Harold. Arline was blonde, with lax gestures, as in sleep. She began by taking my hands and admiring them, then she kissed me like a man. I slipped my hand under her skirt. Harold was kneeling down before the two of us and looking under our dresses. Harold made love to me more than to Arline. Do you think it was because I was the guest of honor? We took all our clothes off. I tasted a woman for the first time, and I didn’t like it. It tasted like a sea shell. But I loved her breasts and mouth. And it amused me that while we both caressed Harold we kept looking over his body at each other with something like human closeness. The man seemed the stranger. We would stop caressing him to kiss each other. When Harold, satisfied, fell asleep, Arline and I went on kissing and saying, how lovely you are, how soft you are. It was the abandon I liked. I felt nothing. I was desperately craving for love.

I took Arline home in a taxi. In the taxi, facing an Arline all dressed, I felt shy. The intimacy when we were naked and now the strangeness. Arline telephoned me and it was strange. I know nothing about her except her body, the feel and odor of her, and yet when she called up I felt less lonely, I felt a sort of body warmth, almost like love, just because I had touched her, and felt her. Arline’s voice was lax, and like the voice of a plant. She wanted to spend the night with me. She wanted to see me alone. Arline came as if she were dancing, displacing everything around her, she was terribly drunk. We had dinner together and hardly talked. Just smiled at each other, held each other’s hands, asked foolish questions. Whatever she told me was not part of her body at all. Her body suggested infinitely more, but everything in it was asleep.

Arline was blind. Her eyes said nothing, her mouth said nothing. Her eyes so blind, her speech drunken. When she talked she was just a little girl taking small parts in second rate shows, often out of work, not caring, yet not able to do anything but act. She was indifferent towards the part she acted, and indifferent to the actions of her body, as if she were separate from it. In my room she asked for another drink. She opened the drawers of the dressing table, looked at my clothes, pulled everything out, laughing. Then she said: Kiss me! She caressed me. The night we had been with Harold I felt that Arline did not respond ultimately, completely. I had not felt the violent, quick throbbing under my fingers. I wondered if Arline knew that I hadn’t. And then Arline asked me, asked me with a very slow, very implicit smile. I told her the truth. She said: “That’s why I loved you, you were making believe too. I knew it.” We laughed together, caressed each other into drowsiness; Arline fell asleep,h her body lying right across mine, so that I could not move. My hand was still resting on her leg. I lay there wishing violently to be hypnotized. I felt that if some one made me sleep like this and then took me something would happen to that unyielding part of me. I dreamed of some one caressing me until I fell asleep and then taking me. I remembered the time when I first began to feel with my body. I was in the bath tub. By mistake I turned on the water of the shower, and a jet came down on me and fell between my legs. Like a caress. I thought to be in love must be like this, this marvellous, warm water falling. And every night I fell asleep imagining these caresses falling over me like the water of the shower. Lying there, with the body of Arline asleep, her mouth a little open as if some dream would issue from it with a ribbon, as if she were about to tell me what extraordinary things she was seeing while asleep. There was so much space around her now, and her breathing changed tonalities, as if she were watching a spectacle.