Anaïs Nin - Ladders to Fire

Sabina’s eyes were like a forest; the darkness of a forest, a watchfulness behind ambushes. Fear. Lillian journeyed into the darkness of them, carrying her blue eyes into the red-brown ones. She walked from the place where her dress had fallen holding her breasts as if she expected to be mortally thrust.

Sabina loosened her hair and said: “You’re so extraordinarily white.” With a strange sadness, like a weight, she spoke, as if it were not the white substance of Lillian but the whiteness of her newness to life which Sabina seemed to sigh for. t;You’re so white, so white and smooth.” And there were deep shadows in her eyes, shadows of one old with living: shadows in the neck, in her arms, on her knees, violet shadows.

Lillian wanted to reach out to her, into these violet shadows. She saw that Sabina wanted to be she as much as she wanted to be Sabina. They both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. There was in both of them the dark strain of wanting to become the other, to deny what they were, to transcend their actual selves. Sabina desiring Lillian’s newness, and Lillian desiring Sabina’s deeply marked body.

Lillian drank the violet shadows, drank the imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors, other caresses. How all the other loves clung to Sabina’s body, even though her face denied this and her eyes repeated: I have forgotten all. How they made her heavy with the loss of herself, lost in the maze of her gifts. How the lies, the loves, the dreams, the obscenities, the fevers weighed down her body, and how Lillian wanted to become leadened with her, poisoned with her.

Sabina looked at the whiteness of Lillian’s body as into a mirror and saw herself as a girl, standing at the beginning of her life unblurred, unmarked. She wanted to return to this early self. And Lillian wanted to enter the labyrinth of knowledge, to the very bottom of the violet wells.

Through the acrid forest of her being there was a vulnerable opening. Lillian trod into it lightly. Caresses of down, moth invasions, myrrh between the breasts, incense in their mouths. Tendrils of hair raising their heads to the wind in the finger tips, kisses curling within the conch-shell necks. Tendrils of hair bristling and between their closed lips a sigh.

“How soft you are, how soft you are,” said Sabina.

They separated and saw it was not this they wanted, sought, dreamed. Not this the possession they imagined. No bodies touching would answer this mysterious craving in them to become each other. Not to possess each other but to become each other. Not to take, but to imbibe, absorb, change themselves. Sabina carried a part of Lillian’s being, Lillian a part of Sabina, but they could not be exchanged through an embrace. It was not that.

Their bodies touched and then fell away, as if both of them had touched a mirror, their own image upon a mirror. They had felt the cold wall, they had felt the mirror that never appeared when they were taken by man. Sabina had merely touched her own youth, and Lillian her free passions.

As they lay there the dawn entered the room, a grey dawn which showed the dirt on the window panes, the crack in the table, the stains on the walls. Lillian and Sabina sat up as if the dawn had opened their eyes. Slowly they descended from dangerous heights, with the appearance of daylight and the weight of their fatigue.

With the dawn it was as if Jay had entered the room and were now lying between them. Every cell of their dream seemed to burst at once, with the doubt which had entered Lillian’s mind.

If she had wanted so much to be Sabina so that Jay might love in her what he admired in Sabina, could it be that Sabina wanted of Lillian this that madeJay love her?

“I feel Jay in you,” she said.

The taste of sacrilege came to both their mouths. The mouths he kissed. The women whose flavor he knew. The one man within two women. Jealousy, dormant all night; now lying lit their side, between their caresses, slipping in between them like an enemy.

(Lillian, Lillian, if you arouse hatred between us, you break a magic alliance! He is not as aware of us as we are of each other. We have loved in each other all he has failed to love and see. Must we awake to the great destructiveness of rivalry, of war, when this night contained all that slipped between his fingers! )

But jealousy had stirred in Lillian’s flesh. Doubt was hardening and crystallizing in Lillian, crystallizing her features, her eyes, tightening her mouth, stiffening her body. She shivered with cold, with the icy incision of this new day which was laying everything bare.

Bare eyes looking at each other with naked, knife-pointed questions.

To stare at each other they had to disentangle their hair, Sabina’s long hair having curled around Lillian’s neck.

Lillian left the bed. She took the bracelets and flung them out of the window.

“I know, I know,” she said violently, “you wanted to blind me. If you won’t confess, he will. It’s Jay you love, not me. Get up. I don’t want him to find us here together. And he thought we loved each other!”

“I do love you, Lillian.”

“Don’t you dare say it,” shouted Lillian violently, all her being now craving wildly for complete devastation.

They both began to tremble.

Lillian was like a foaming sea, churning up wreckage, the debris of all her doubts and fears.

Their room was in darkness. Then came Jay’s laughter, creamy and mould-breaking. In spite of the darkness Lillian could feel all the cells of his body alive in the night, vibrating with abundance. Every cell with a million eyes seeing in the dark.

“A fine dark night in which an artist might well be born,” he said. “He must be born at night, you know, so that no one will notice that his parents gave him only seven months of human substance. No artist has the patience to remain nine months in the womb. He must run away from home. He is born with a mania to complete himself, to create himself. He is so multiple and amorphous that his central self is constantly falling apart and is only recomposed by his work. With his imagination he can flow into all the moulds, multiply and divide himself, and yet whatever he does, he will always be two.”

“And require two wives?” asked Lillian.

“I need you terribly,” he said.

Would the body of Sabina triumph over her greater love? “There are many Sabinas in the world, but only one like you,” said Jay.

How could he lie so close and know only what she chose to tell him, knowing nothing of her, of her secret terrors and fear of loss.

He was only for the joyous days, the days of courage, when she could share with him all the good things he brought with his passion for novelty and change.

But he knew nothing of her; he was no companion to her sadness. He could never imagine anyone else’s mood, only his own. His own were so immense and loud, they filled his world and deafened him to all others. He was not concerned to know whether she could live or breathe within the dark caverns of his whale-like being, within the whale belly of his ego.

Somehow he had convinced her that this expansiveness was a sign of bigness. A big man could not belong to one person. He had merely overflowed into Sabina, out of over-richness. And they would quarrel some day. Already he was saying: “I suspect that when Sabina gives one so many lies it is because she has nothing else to give but mystery, but fiction. Perhaps behind her mysteries there is nothing.”

But how blinded he was by false mysteries! Because Sabina made such complicated tangles of everything—mixing personalities, identities, missing engagements, being always elsewhere than where she was expected to be, chaotic in her hours, elusive about her occupations, implying mystery and suspense even when she said goodbye…calling at dawn when everyone was asleep, and asleep when everyone else was awake. Jay with his indefatigable curiosity was easily engaged in unraveling the tangle, as if every tangle had a meaning, a mystery.