Anaïs Nin - Children of the Albatross

This image of herself as a not ordinary woman, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams. Nothing more tenuous, elusive to fulfill than men’s dreams.

She might say the wrong phrase, make the wrong gesture, smile the wrong smile, and then see his eyes waver vulnerably for one instant before turning to the glassy brilliance of disillusion.

She wanted desperately to answer man’s most impossible wishes. If the man said: you seem perverse to me, then she would set about gathering together all her knowledge of perversity to become what he had called her.

It made life difficult. She lived the tense, strained life of an international spy. She moved among enemies set on exposing her pretenses. People felt the falseness at times and sought to uncover her.

She had such a fear of being discovered!

She could not bear the light of common, everyday simplicities! As other women blink at the sunlight, she blinked at the light of common everyday simplicities.

And so this race which must never stop. To run from the slanting eyes of one to the caressing hands of another to the sadness of the third.

As she collided with people they lost their identities also: they became objects of desire, objects to be consumed, fuel for the bonfire. Their quality was summarized as either inflammable or noninflammable. That was all that counted. She never distinguished age, nationality, class, fortune, status, occupation or vocation.

Her desire rushed instantaneously, without past or future. A point of fire in the present to which she attached no contracts, no continuity.

Her breasts were always heavy and full. She was like a messenger carrying off all she received from one to carry it to the other, carrying in her breasts the words said to her, the book given her, the land visited, the experience acquired, in the form of stories to be spun continuously.

Everything lived one hour before was a story to tell the following hour to the second companion. From room to room what was perpetuated was her pollen-carrying body.

When someone asked her: where are you going now? whom are you going to meet? she lied. She lied because this current sweeping her onward seemed to cause others pain.

Crossing the street she nourished herself upon the gallant smile of the policeman who stopped the traffic for her. She culled the desire of the man who pushed the revolving door for her. She gathered the flash of adoration from the drugstore clerk: are you an actress? She picked the bouquet of the shoe salesman trying on her shoes: are you a dancer? As she sat in the bus she received the shafts of the sun as a personal intimate visit. She felt a humorous connivance with the truck driver who had to pull the brakes violently before her impulsive passages and who did so smiling.

Every moment this current established itself, this state of flow, of communication by seduction.

She always returned with her arms full of adventures, as other women return with packages. Her whole body rich with this which nourished her and from which she nourished others. The day finished always too early and she was not empty of restlessness.

Leaning out of the window at dawn, pressing her breasts upon the window sill, she still looked out of the window hoping to see what she had failed to grasp, to possess. She looked at the ending night and the passersby with the keen alertness of the voyager who can never reach terminations as ordinary people reach peaceful terminals at the end of each day, accepting pauses, deserts, rests, havens, as she could not accept them.

She believed only in fire. She wanted to be at every explosion of fire, every convergence of danger. She lived like a fireman, tense for all the emergencies of conflagrations. She was a menace to peaceful homes, tranquil streets.

She was the firebug who was never detected.

Because she believed that fire ladders led to love. This was the motive for her incendiary habits. But Sabina, with al her fire ladders, could not find love.

At dawn she would find herself among ashes again.

And so she could not rest or sleep.

As soon as the day dawned peaceful, uneventful, Sabina slipped into her black satin dress, lacquered her nails the color of her mood, pulled her black cape around her and set out for the cafes.

At dawn Jay turned towards Lillian lying beside him and his first kiss reached her through the net of her hair.

Her eyes were closed, her nerves asleep, but under his hand her body slipped down a dune into warm waves lapping over each other, rippling her skin.

Jay’s sensual thrusts wakened the dormant walls of flesh, and tongues of fire flicked towards his hard lashings piercing the kernel of mercury, disrupting a current of fire through the veins. The burning fluid of ecstasy eddying madly and breaking, loosening a river of pulsations.

The core of ecstasy bursting to the rhythmic pounding, until his hard thrusts spurted burning fluid against the walls of flesh, impulsion within the womb like a thunderbolt.

Lillian’s panting decreased, and her body reverberated in the silence, filled with echoes…antennae which had drunk like the stems of plants.

He awakened free, and she did not.

His desire had reached a finality, like a clean saber cut which dealt pleasure, not death.

She felt impregnated.

She had greater difficulty in shifting, in separating, in turning away.

Her body was filled with retentions, residues, sediments.

He awakened and passed into other realms. The longer his stay in the enfolding whirls, the greater his energy to enter activity again. He awakened and he talked of painting, he awakened laughing, eyes closed with laughter, laughing on the edge of his cheeks, laughter in the corner of his mouth, the laughter of great separateness.

She awakened unfree, as if laden with the seeds of his being, wondering at what moment he would pull his whole self away as one tears a plant out by the roots, leaving a crevice in the earth. Dreading the break because she felt him a master of this act, free to enter and free to emerge, whereas she felt dispossessed of her identity and freedom because Jay upon awakening did not turn about and contemplate her even for a moment as Lillian, a particular woman, but that when he took her, or looked at her he did so gaily, anonymously, as if any woman lying there would have been equally pleasant, natural, and not Lillian among all women.

He was already chuckling at some idea for a painting, already hungry for breakfast, ready to open his mail and embark on multiple relationss, curious about the day’s climate, the changes in the street, the detailed news of the brawl of the night before which had taken place under their window.

Fast fast fast moving away, his mind already pursuing the wise sayings of Lao-tse, the theories of Picasso, already like a vast wheel at the fair starting on a wide circle which at no point whatever seemed to include her, because she was there like bread for him, a non-identifiable bread which he ate of as he would eat any bread, not even troubling with the ordinary differentiations: today my bread is fresh and warm, and today it is a little dry, today it lacks salt, today it is lifeless, today it is golden and crisp.

She did not reach out to possess Jay, as he believed, but she reached out because so much of Jay had been deposited, sown, planted within her that she felt possessed, as if she were no longer able to move, breathe, live independently of him. She felt her dependence, lost to herself, given, invaded, and at his mercy, and the anxiety of this, the defenselessness caused a clinging which was the clinging of the drowning…

As if she were bread, she would have liked Jay at least to notice all variations in moods and flavors. She would have liked Jay to say: you are my bread, a very unique and marvelous bread, like none other. If you were not here I would die of instantaneous starvation.