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Mirages. Anais Nin
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AUGUST 23, 1941
Suddenly my wings no longer carried me. I fell. Leaving Siegfried at the beach, I suddenly fell into an abyss. It was too impersonal, too lonely, not tender enough, this brilliant affair. Though we lay four hours on the sand and talked about his family, and he caressed my hands so delicately, still it was not love. I cannot carry it off. I glided on the wings of his humor, and then I fell. I wanted love, love, love. When my exaltation fell, I saw Gonzalo ill and sad. I said: “Come and eat with me at the Flagship.” He said, “Restaurant food does me harm.” But we went. I took a whiskey. Suddenly I understood people’s feverish seeking of pleasure. I drank a whiskey, and Gonzalo can’t drink one— he drank two. Then we went out for a while, to buy bicarbonate of soda for Gonzalo. At eleven he took me home and returned to his room to listen to the news. People were going to the costume ball. Edward had not asked me to go to the Flagship. He was engaged with friends. This caused a terrible feeling of desertion and loneliness. I wept. Gonzalo could not understand. I cannot escape into surface living, and I wanted to! I thought I was saved, that I could leave the caverns of desolation and regrets and little deaths, but I cannot do it by desire alone. It must be love.
Siegfried said yesterday, referring to the evening before, when after our dinner together I left him to meet Gonzalo at nine: “Change of guards at Buckingham Palace.”
When one says I cannot reach the world of pleasure, one should add: you can only reach it if it is in you. Siegfried, please lead me into the world of pleasure.
AUGUST 24, 1941
Ce chagrin étrange de hier soir. This morning I met him at the coffee place. He said playfully: “Is the Inca’s wife not well today so you have to go with him?”
“I don’t know yet, but whichever it is, I am free all the same.”
“You must not be so revolutionary,” he said. “It will hurt him. He may need you.”
This angered me, though it was delicate. I said so. I left then, to see Gonzalo. He had planned to go with me. I yielded. I returned to the coffee shop to fill my thermos and to say: “I cannot come. Chinchilita est fâché” (annoyed).
He was so soft then, gentle. “Don’t be fâché. Will I see you later?”
“If you can défâché me!”
I left. He told me later, “Last night, at the dance, it was dull. An American girl appropriated me. I cannot be with them more than an hour.”
But why didn’t he stay with me then? Or take me to the dance? He always says: “I prefer to be with Chinchilita.”
I do not understand him.
AUGUST 25, 1941
He went to our place on the beach, alone, and waited. But I…I imagined him arriving with friends. My eyes are not good for distance. I was a little sad. When Gonzalo left me to teach Helba to swim, I stood there and again imagined it was Chinchilito in the water with another woman, probably caressing her as he had caressed me. Jealous. I turned away and rode home. But at six o’clock I could not stay away, and I called on him at his rooming house with some pretext. Then I heard he had waited for me. Even in playing, I spoil it with my lack of confidence. Of course, I am not altogether unjustifiably jealous. The night before he had made love to the American girl. And at the restaurant he pointed her out to me, but saying, “I always return to Chinchilita, and I would give up all the others for Chinchilita.” We had dinner together. He talked expansively, about the wealthy people he knows (he is the singing coach for one of the wealthiest American families), talking like a revolutionary, an independent being who is detached from the world, as he is detached from bohemianism, and most all, from American life. At nine o’clock, change of guards. At eleven, the Flagship (for Gonzalo I appeared to be falling asleep so that I could slip out early for Edward).
At the Flagship he was in a tender mood, saying: “Tonight what I would like is for you to come to my room, undress me, and cover me, and put me to sleep!” So his invulnerability breaks down. But in the crowded, noisy, chaotic nightclub, he places my hand where I can see he is not asleep yet. He walks home with me, and as before he has eluded kisses on the mouth except at the moment of possession (which is the proof that we are not in love—men never kiss the whore, and I didn’t like to kiss John because I didn’t love him), now he kissed me lingeringly on the mouth and pressed me against him so that I could feel his desire. But he did not come into my studio out of delicacy for Gonzalo. So that while I play and follow with Edward the capricious outline of pure desire, at the same time I am looking for the wild frenzy and abandon of passion and forget how this is lacking from the world of desire and pleasure.
In the world of desire and pleasure I am in danger, in danger from my imagination which embellishes, from my tenderness which releases in the man the cruel tensions imposed by other women when faced with the sensual relationship (the old Don Juan talking to Colette: “They did not forgive me for one raté, one défaillance, they kept such strict accounts and compared notes with other women to see if I was always at the same level”). This tension of the men chosen by women for the role of lover, unrelenting women, as in an Olympic championship game of sexes, a night without lovemaking is his only refuge from women’s pursuit. Poor Don Juan. Edward is fated to this role. Women have marked him for the stallion. They disregard the human being, his moods, his needs, his fatigues, his moments of detachment, everything but the erect phallus.
He talks at times delicately: “My father was born in Samoa. He did not leave until he was sixteen years old. When he took the boat home it snowed. He had never seen snow or cold. He thought the snowflakes were butterflies. He tried to catch them and was amazed to see them melt.” Then again, he talks like my father, suddenly a voyou (guttersnipe) with a Rabelaisian language, cynical, gross, with obscene gestures, but playful. He uses obscene words and then, just as suddenly, becomes tender again, delicate, or once more clownish, like Henry in his writing.
He eluded all the women, came to the beach alone, waited, got impatient, came to where I was with Gonzalo (Gonzalo had just left to see if Helba had arrived), sat near us, waited. When Gonzalo finally left, we went together to the other end of the beach. I told him tenderly what I had already told my diary, and my intuition was right. He was amazed at my understanding of his Don Juan problems, and he talked openly about women. I heard astounding things about women. He dropped his role completely, all the impersonality. He talked about all that he is passionate about, the development of his voice, his studies, his feeling that he is ready as few singers are ready, not only by an arduous, extraordinary discipline, but all of his life, being, experience, feeling, all dedicated to the one end, his singing. He, who said that he always listened, now talked flowingly and confessed how right I was, how he was sick of women who hated him if he didn’t always make love. And as I leaned over with a curious wisdom and said, “When you need a friend you do not have to make love to, you can come to Chinchilita,” the look in his eyes was almost a look of love, whereas for the other women he shows brutality and cynicism and contempt. I wonder if it is because he realizes that it is their self-love and vanity they reveal in their relentless need to be made love to which is more about their power and charms than a true desire which would consider Edward as a human being. Anyway, he gave me his sincerity. All the other women cannot hold him for more than a moment. I am the only one he spends hours and hours with. He told me how angry they were. One woman whom he refused to accompany to the ball said about me: “But she is not very young…”
Our afternoon was so sincere