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Mirages. Anais Nin
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Tonight he may yield again. It is always the women who attack him. Not for them the delicate caresses, but the ferocious irony, more ferocious after the yielding, the invincible smile, the abandon. He walks proudly, head high, untouchable. Women can touch his body, but not the core—I touched both. After he has gone, I still see him vividly. It is a kind of enchantment, like love. To discover his qualities, compassion, human evaluations, his absence of vanity, I found more delight in these qualities, and the essence contained by his beauty turns out to be in harmony with it. So that the adventure which, for other women, has turned out elusive, unrepeatable, unseizable, for me has left such a dreamlike taste that I feel content, rich, perfumed. I breathe more deeply when I remember it.
Gonzalo came when I returned from the beach, took me, and I responded fully.
Content. My only wish is that I may feel Edward once, physically, completely. Why do I resist the final abandon? Morning. The flavor remains. I awaken singing the imitated melody of Tristan. In this little book, I passed from death to life, beyond age and change, into the eternal in relationship, lived out a dream with an echo instead of a trite adventure sans lendemain. How he slipped in and out of other hands, but remained in mine to distill his personality.
So overflowing with gayety that I could not have dinner alone. I thought: let me bring some of this gayety to Virginia and Bob, give it, spill it, spread it, share it. Imitating the booming voice of Edward, I said: “Let’s go and have a glamour dinner.” They were enchanted. I took them to the Flagship, drank with them. But poor Virginia and Bob, they are caught in a drama of disease: Bob got gonorrhea from Robert.
Where I sit, eating lunch at Taylor’s, it is like Coney Island. I live in hope of seeing Edward pass, like a king. Nine o’clock. After missing him all day, a rainy day, I passed by his house and he called me. He was expecting his friends. We sat talking in the little parlor. He was tender, caressing, delicate, mischievous, obscene, with strange gestures, from kissing my fingertips and the hair on my temple to suddenly taking out his chinchilito. He said over and over again: “C’est beau, très beau.” Then he asked for my address in New York. His friends are driving him away. His expression was beautiful, radiant. The radiance of his smile unnerved me. My god, is this an adventure? When I left his place I heard the wind through the leaves, like the very breath of life of which he speaks, the breath, the feeling I had the first day walking through the dunes, of breathing largely, deeply, freely because of the way he breathes. Why this joy? This joy? I met one of the girls, the one at the party. I had met her in the bus. I see his face: “C’était beau, c’était beau.”
It is raining. I am out of the house of death and age. Saved by another dream. I recognize the dream. It carries me. My feet are light. I feel imponderable. All the little contingencies cannot touch me. This morning he was looking for me, pursued me, while I looked for him. But I vanished. He did not dare go to my studio. He is always aware of Gonzalo. He said: “On this rainy afternoon I imagined you would both get into bed and make love all afternoon.” Anaïs, beware. Il faut savoir jouer. Il ne faut pas rêver.
Midnight. His friends came so we could not meet. I waited at the Flagship. Then I realized that the scene in the afternoon was a good-bye. And what I felt was too deep. I was frightened. In a few days he filled my imagination constantly. I felt him in everything. Et lui? Tonight I realize it was all too powerful and dangerous. It will be difficult to forget him. What will he remember? C’était beau, très beau… It was very beautiful!
AUGUST 26, 1941
La petite Anaïs ne sait pas jouer.
I was having breakfast when he came in with the friend—the rich woman with the beautiful voice whom he coaches. I did not see them, my back was turned. I walked out to mail a letter. As I passed the restaurant from which one can look into the street he waved at me exuberantly. I smiled. I caught a glimpse of her face. I said to myself: if she is beautiful, I am lost. If she is rich and beautiful, she is his mistress. But the glimpse told me nothing. Merely a distinguished woman, that was all. As I passed them buying fruit on my way to the beach (always at the sight of him I experience a shock, I miss a heartbeat), he stopped me. He came forward and introduced me to the woman (he had already said that he wanted us to meet). She immediately said: “Why, I know your father’s music very well. I have often heard his songs, which Ninon Vallin used to sing. And I have heard your brother’s concert at Town Hall.” She asked news of other people. She was very cordial. I felt very proud for him because he seemed proud of me. It was all very charming. We bowed and smiled. They went off to the beach in her car. I was happy because she was not beautiful! Such nonsense. I was happy. At the beach, the sea, the sand, the sun. Something to dream and remember which has the indolence, the golden colors, the capriciousness, the nature moods of the place. His body the color of sand, with the sun on it, his eyes the color of the sea, and how he lay on the beach, the bigness tapering towards the slender ankles of the aristocrat. My desire detached itself for the first time from the body of Gonzalo and clung to Edward’s image. It finished en beauté like a very elegant dance, with a strange symbolic scene in which he bowed his head over my fingertips and kept his mouth over them like an homage.
Returning from the beach, preceded by a flurry of autumn leaves, the sound of the sea in my ears, I felt the flow again, the mellowness, a sense of connection with the currents of life. I am in the dream again. Intact, as I was at the beginning of dreaming. It is the dreaming which creates the innocence.
Evening: haunted by mirages. I see him whole, entire (sometimes one does not see people full length, but some part of them, an oblique aspect of them), the very image of physical plenitude. By a sensation: the firmness of his skin against mine, the fineness of it, and his powerful sexual thrusts. By an emotion: the discovery of his tenderness, the penetration of his voice. I keep the brilliance like a precious essence, fearing its vanishing.
I say to myself: I only want one more night. But am I deceiving myself? I wish I were not so vulnerable or impressionable. If he loved me, were moved equally, he would have been with me all the time. But there was the barrier of Gonzalo ever-present in his speech and teasing, like a danger sign, and perhaps I felt his own fear of ever being enslaved, his own desire to safeguard himself against it.
So I will not know until I reach New York whether this is to have a continuation. Yesterday I felt on that dark, rainy day that it was the end. But then I always fear the end. With Henry, every day was the end. With Gonzalo too. Yes, I am in love; it is a feeling that opens one like a flower, fills one with essences that make one mobile and singing like the wind or the sea. Even in passing, I react with a deeper romance.
AUGUST 27, 1941
Yesterday another meeting, the lady, Edward and I in the streets. He asked me to join them to go to the ocean, but I had already told Gonzalo I was going to meet him, and it was the day before Hugo’s arrival, so I couldn’t, but I asked them to meet me at the Flagship for a cocktail. The lady and I found much to talk about because she knows music and musicians, but I suffered from a paralyzing uneasiness again from an attack of discouragement, timidity, doubts. The magnification of small incidents with which I torture myself. As I had invited them I had arranged with the waitress beforehand not to present a check. Characteristically Edward discovered this, and he said playfully: “If I had known this I would not have asked for a sandwich.” I replied playfully: “No, you would have asked for a lobster!” A maladroit remark, made out of nervousness, maladroit because of his pride. And I fancied he was hurt. When we parted, finally, it was like the end of an ordeal. I was full of anguish. Tout est perdu. Everything went wrong. I was nervous. I wanted