Anaïs Nin: The Winter of Artifice

His voice reached an ample, assertive tone. The small room seemed too small to contain him. There was cruelty and mischief in his eyes, yet his mouth was still tender.

“You’re going? That hurts. That’s not right. I have lots more to say to you. Come back here. Button your coat properly. It’s raining. I don’t want you to get wet. I’ve got to stay here until the concierge goes to sleep, or she’ll ask me for the rent again.”

The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna. I have infinite possibilities for delicate perversions. I have the capacity to burn like a torch, the love of suffering, the love of terror and death and of descending. Evil is life; I want to live out the evil in me. I want to surrender to Johanna. I want the life she led, desecration, humiliation, poisons, savagery. The demon in me is like the demon in Johanna. It is a demon of frenzy.

I feel such exaltation at the thought of burning and dying quickly. I want to live out my caprices, my fantasies, my erotic desires.

In Johanna I love the darkness, and the abyss.

“If Johanna returns she will poison us against each other. I fear that.”

“There is something between us, a tie which it is not possible for Johanna to understand or to break…”

“For that she will hate us, yes, and she will fight that with all her strength, and all her weapons.”

“And her weapons are… lies…”

He sat down with shoulders bowed, and his head bowed. I saw the grey-blond hair glistening.

How divided his love was at that moment I would never know. My love was so immense at that moment that I felt I could make Hans the ultimate gift… I could give Hans whatever he wanted, give him Johanna.

I smiled, a mask smile. “Her lies, her unnecessary complications make novels. Novels are made out of complications…”

“She never trusted me as you do.”

“I trust you because I understand you.”

I felt mowed down, anchorless with feeling, with terror and pain. But I smiled. “If I had the means to help Johanna come back—would you want me to do it?”

Hans winced and suddenly lurched towards me.

“Don’t ask me such a question. Don’t ask me!” He was suffering. I was asking myself if the full body of Johanna would triumph over all else, over understanding, over the ecstasies of our working together, over the double climaxes always of body and mind burning in unison, over this double flame of creation and love.

I hated my own gaiety which was not only a challenge to life, to pain, but to a tormented self. I challenged and mocked myself for that tightening of the flesh and the ebbing of secret tears. I loved him with a knowledge of him which Johanna never had. It would have been a relief for once to have been unjust and to hate. I could not. I could only hate myself and my own understanding which made me say: “The destroyers do not always destroy. Johanna has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer. And the writer is alive.”

“You give me smething rare. When I am with you I don’t understand how I can love two women…”

“You’re a big man, Hans, a very big man. There’s so much room in you, so much love. There are no limits to you, no boundaries. For that I love you. For being a big man.” And I laughed. “Maybe I’m just the biggest of the idiots.”

“No, you see more, you just see more, and what you see is there all right. You get at the core of everything…”

I imagined myself writing to Johanna: “Johanna, have pity on me. Do not take him away from me too soon. It is easier for you to find a match. I can find the man who will make the woman submit many times, yes, many times, but I cannot find a man who can make my head bow, this full, ripe world inside ofmy head. It is so rare, Johanna, when I can bow altogether, from head to foot, and woman wants secretly to be able to bow and love altogether. I can never be taken whole into a man’s arms, Johanna, take pity on my great hunger. You ask only to be worshipped. I ask that my lover should create beyond me… Take pity on my torment. You don’t carry in yourself the power to stand silently behind a chair, watching with breathless stillness the pages added to his work. You can only love his books for what they contain of you. You can’t love the miracle of the seed sprouting. You only love his work as an offering to you; you don’t love the labor of the creator. You don’t love the source of creation. You only want some one to make your portrait.”

And then I felt guilty before Johanna: I felt myself flushed and burnt with guilt and shame. Johanna was the weaker one, the one who was not there to defend her life. I felt the strength ofmy love to be a crime against Johanna. My whole being shrivelled with a feeling of guilt. I imagined myself restituting to Johanna the love I was sharing with her. I would be Johanna’s genius. I would tie him to her more absolutely than before. When Hans and I would lean over each other’s work, to fill out her portrait, I would engrave the wonder of her everywhere, reveal it, so that he could never free himself of her. I would melt into Johanna so that he could not detect any more flaws in her; I would explain her lies and ennoble and embellish them. I would create a Johanna with Johanna’s beauty and my own imagination and colors. I would be everywhere at once, defending each fragment of her, blinding him, infusing his work with the legend of Johanna. While he caressed me I would poison him with the inextricable mixture of Johanna and myself. The deepest treachery to man ever played. I was a creator of images, of characters and masks. I would recreate Johanna in Hans’ mind. It was I who would tell Hans what dreams, what desires, what impulses Johanna had. And I would give Johanna these gifts which Hans made me of his passionate rages, his curses, his secrets, his mind’s fertility.

I would not become absolutely mad until the end, until I had written the last phrase of the portrait of Johanna which was to change Hans’ image. I would be the witch of words. a silent swift shadow darkened by uncanny knowledge, forgetting myself, my human needs, in the unfolding of the tale, renouncing human joys, with only the pale beauty of a watcher—a watcher who never let life flow into herecause this life belonged to another.

He was wearing bedroom slippers and he was writing, with a bottle of red wine as a paper weight on his pages. Circles of red wine on the pages. Stains. The stains of living. The edge of the table was burnt by cigarette stubs.

He didn’t care. He said that what he had written was not as good as yesterday but he didn’t care, he was enjoying it just the same, he wasn’t worrying about art, everything was good, because if he was an artist as I had said he was, then whatever he said was right, and to hang with perfection, that was for old maids, and he was out of cigarettes and if I would give him one he might finish that page. I had come at the wrong moment, I was interrupting him, but that was good too, that was life, life always getting in the way of writing, but that was good, he believed in that, let the interruptions come, let people walk in, he was glad to be stopped, because everything was good, to write was good, andnot to write was good, and eating was good, and sleeping and fucking, and now he had finished the page and he was hungry, and he wished we might go to the movies, good or bad, it was restful, good or bad he enjoyed it, everything was good…

He seemed constantly in communication with the world, as if he were forever sitting at the head of a gigantic banquet. With two agitated hands he commanded the cymbals. “I want to show you the whore with the wooden stump who waits for clients near the Gaumont cinema. I want to show you the café where the nigger jazz players go after work. I want to show you a restaurant where prize fighters and chorus girls have dinner.”