Anaïs Nin - Ladders to Fire

“He talks about nothing but painting.”

She was lonely, deep down, to think that Jay had been at his work for two weeks without noticing either of them. And her loneliness drew her close to Sabina.

“He was glad we were going out together, he said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn’t any idea of time—he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”

A feeling of immense loneliness invaded them both.

They walked as if they wanted to walk away from their mood, as if they wanted to walk into another world. They walked up the hill of Montmartre with little houses lying on the hillside like heather. They heard music, music so off tune that they did not recognize it as music they heard every day. They slid into a shaft of light from where this music came—into a room which seemed built of granified smoke and crystallized human breath. A room with a painted star on the ceiling, and a wooden, pock-marked Christ nailed to the wall. Gusts of weary, petrified songs, so dusty with use. Faces like empty glasses. The musicians made of rubber like the elastic rubber-soled night.

We hate Jay tonight. We hate man.

The craving for caresses. Wanting and fighting the want. Both frightened by the vagueness of their desire, the indefiniteness of their craving.

A rosary of question marks in their eyes.

Sabina whispered: “Let’s take drugs tonight.”

She pressed her strong knee against Lillian, she inundated her with the brilliance of her eyes, the paleness of her face.

Lillian shook her head, but she drank, she drank. No drink equal to the state of war and hatred. No drink like bitterness.

Lillian looked at Sabina’s fortune teller’s eyes, and at the taut profile.

“It takes all the pain away; it wipes out reality.”

She leaned over the table until their breaths mingled.

“You don’t know what a relief it is. The smoke of opium like fog. It brings marvelous dreams and gaiety. Such gaiety, Lillian. And you feel so powerful, so powerful and content. You don’t feel any more frustration, you feel that you are lording it over the whole world with marvelous strength. No one can hurt you then, humiliate you, confuse you. You feel you’re soaring over the world. Everything becomes soft, large, easy. Such joys, Lillian, as you have never agined. The touch of a hand is enough…the touch of a hand is like going the whole way… And time…how time flies. The days pass like an hour. No more straining, just dreaming and floating. Take drugs with me, Lillian.”

Lillian consented with her eyes. Then she saw that Sabina was looking at the Arab merchant who stood by the door with his red Fez, his kimono, his slippers, his arms loaded with Arabian rugs and pearl necklaces. Under the rugs protruded a wooden leg with which he was beating time to the jazz.

Sabina laughed, shaking her whole body with drunken laughter. “You don’t know, Lillian… this man… with his wooden leg… you never can tell… he may have some. There was a man once, with a wooden leg like that. He was arrested and they found that his wooden leg was packed with snow. I’ll go and ask him.”

And she got up with her heavy, animal walk, and talked to the rug merchant, looking up at him alluringly, begging, smiling up at him in the same secret way she had of smiling at Lillian. A burning pain invaded Lillian to see Sabina begging. But the merchant shook his head, smiled innocently, shook his head firmly, smiled again, offered his rugs and the necklaces.

When she saw Sabina returning empty handed, Lillian drank again, and it was like drinking fog, long draughts of fog.

They danced together, the floor turning under them like a phonograph record. Sabina dark and potent, leading Lillian.

A gust of jeers seemed to blow through the place. A gust of jeers. But they danced, cheeks touching, their cheeks chalice white. They danced and the jeers cut into the haze of their dizziness like a whip. The eyes of the men were insulting them. The eyes of men called them by the name the world had for them. Eyes. Green, jealous. Eyes of the world. Eyes sick with hatred and contempt. Caressing eyes, participating. Eyes ransacking their conscience. Stricken yellow eyes of envy caught in the flare of a match. Heavy torpid eyes without courage, without dreams. Mockery, frozen mockery from the frozen glass eyes of the loveless.

Lillian and Sabina wanted to strike those eyes, break them, break the bars of green wounded eyes, condemning them. They wanted to break the walls confining them, suffocating them. They wanted to break out from the prison of their own fears, break every obstacle. But all they found to break were glasses. They took their glasses and broke them over their shoulders and made no wish, but looked at the fragments of the glasses on the floor wonderingly as if their mood of rebellion might be lying there also, in broken pieces.

Now they danced mockingly, defiantly, as if they were sliding beyond the reach of man’s hands, running like sand between their insults. They scoffed at those eyes which brimmed with knowledge for they knew the ecstasy of mystery and fog, fire and orange fumes of a world they had seen through a slit in the dream. Spinning and reeling and falling, spinning and turning and rolling down the brume and smoke of a world seen through a slit in the dream.

The waiter put his ham-colored hand on Sabina’s bare arm: “You’ve got to get out of here, you two!”

They were alone.

They were alone without daylight, without past, without any thought of the resemblance between their togetherness and the union of other women. The whole world was being pushed to one side by their faith in their own uniqueness. All comparisons proudly discarded.

Sabina and Lillian alone, innocent of knowledge, and innocent of other experiences. They remembered nothing before this hour: they were innocent of associations. They forgot what they had read in books, what they had seen in cafes, the laughter of men and the mocking participation of other women. Their individuality washed down and effaced the world: they stood at the beginning of everything, naked and innocent of the past.

They stood before the night which belonged to them as two women emerging out of sleep. They stood on the first steps of their timidity, of their faith, before the long night which belonged to them. Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of premeditation.

Two women. Strangeness. All the webs of ideas blown away. New bodies, new souls, new minds, new words. They would create it all out of themselves, fashion their own reality. Innocence. No roots dangling into other days, other nights, other men or women. The potency of a new stare into the face of their desire and their fears.

Sabina’s sudden timidity and Lillian’s sudden awkwardness. Their fears. A great terror slashing through the room, cutting icily through them like a fallen sword. A new voice. Sabina’s breathless and seeking to be lighter so as to touch the lightness of Lillian’s voice like a breath now, an exhalation, almost a voicelessness because they were so frightened.

Sabina sat heavily on the edge of the bed, her earthly weight like roots sinking into the earth. Under the weight of her stare Lillian trembled.

Their bracelets tinkled.

The bracelets had given the signal. A signal like the first tinkle of beads on a savage neck when they enter a dance. They took their bracelets off and put them on the table, side by side.

The light. Why was the light so still, like the suspense of their blood? Still with fear. Like their eyes. Shadeless eyes that dared neither open, nor close, nor melt.

The dresses. Sabina’s dress rolled around her like long sea weed. She wanted to turn and drop it on the floor but her hands lifted it like a Bayadere lifting her skirt to dance and she lifted it over her head.