THE PEACOCK FEATHERS

There was a white house with enormous windows always open and staring at the sea over the heads of the palm trees. She had been born in a place like that.

The white path sprouted out of the heart of the house and led downhill to the sea. It was edged with bristly cactus, long-lingered, writhing, thick and furry, unmoved by the seabreeze. Over the ageless cactus the bamboo shoots trembled close together, perpetually wind-shirred.

There was a lady in the white house who had collected birds from all parts of the world, birds of changeful plumage, vitreous cries and velvety manners who paced the thin alleys during the day and were very still at night. Every night the sound of the sea was covered by that of music.

That night the sea was almost asleep, and the birds and the breeze were silent. A woman’s fluted voice slid out into the garden, down the path in a circle, trilling into space. The white house was full of people who were gathered near the windows to breathe an air which was bristling with the current of close-set tropical stars.

The women sighed in their very tight silk dresses as the a voice of the singer brushed their breasts. The men were bent a little forward with attentiveness.

The husband of the singer stood by the enormous open door, one foot on the gravel of the path. He alone did not look at the singer. Out of the darkness of the garden there came a peacock who waddled slowly into the long column of light, with his fan tail open.

He paced up to the open door thoughtfully. The husband looked at him; the peacock paced up towards the voice and listened. He never moved from there until the singing died down. Only when the clapping carne, he closed his fan tail and went back into the darkness.

The next day the peacock was dead.

The lady of the house had the peacock’s feathers brought to her and with a note she had them delivered to the singer.

The singer received them with a cry: “Oh, they bring bad luck, I know they do! Yet they are too beautiful to throw away. And besides,” she said to her husband, “I think it was quite touching last night how that peacock listened to my singing.”

And she wrote the lady a note of thanks.

The peacock feathers were placed in a flower vase, against the orange walls of her room.

Her husband did not notice them. He was trying not to no­tice anything about her now. Once he had loved her for her voice and had walked into a concert hail with the same still ensorcellment of the peacock. He had gone to the artist room where she was receiving profuse tribute from a crowd. He had asked her to came out with him alone to a quiet place where they might talk of music. During his travels he had unearthed some very old Italian songs which were quite unknown. She laughed and said: “But there’s a big supper being given for me tonight by a group of friends. Why don’t you join us?’’

He had gone away with the same slow pace of the peacock when he had heard the applause. They met again in a place in Italy when she was singing and he had come up to her alter the song and told her that he loved her.

Now they had been married many years and he never listened when she was singing for alter each time there were many people around her and she loved all they said to her and believed them. She sang to them, and for them, for the things they said when they crowded around her and drank to her triumph.

That day, when the peacock feathers were only in the flower vase a few hours, he sat down and wrote her a farewell note and walked down into dark gardens and into silence.

She looked at the feathers and s aid: “They are the cause my misfortune.”

But she went on with her singing. In Egypt she met a young musician and she sang his compositions so that he would love her. He was at the beginning of his career. She did not let him work any longer but demanded all his time for herself, and he soon ceased composing, and merely followed her wherever her concert tours took her. She was tired of his adoration and began to sing the songs of other young composers. Then, at a very big concert, in front of everybody, he killed himself while she was singing, and ruined her triumph.

It is the fault of the peacock feathers, she thought.

She would have thrown them away but for the fact that a poet had said to her: “You can well afford to defy destiny because you are beautiful and talented.” And so she dared the peacock feathers to do her harm.

She wrote her memoirs, as she was sure she would be admired for them. She had known so many years of brilliant living and had always been surrounded by celebrities. In her memoirs she tried to make herself sensitive and tender-hearted. She wrote mincingly and studied her effects carefully. Yet when the memoirs were read they revealed calculatedness, and there were many people who satirized her.

As she had written them with a pen made out of one of the peacock feathers she thought: It is the fault of the peacock feathers.

Once, in a Hindu home, she was offered a long pipe. The smoking of it gave her marvelous dreams. She saw ships of sapphire sailing on seas of coral, and she at the prow singing. She felt herself raised on a light cloud of cotton into a sphere where her voice flowed like liquid light. Circles of strange personages listened to her with astonishment. Then she descended into dark caves where warmth and perfumes dissolved her and she was loved by resplendent men whose love had a thousand-and-one ways of penetrating her. But when she ceased smoking she was empty of all energy and looked haggard. Her voice altered too and she last her power over her audience who once listened to her with the same rapt fixity of the peacock. In spite of that she could not stop smoking, because of the lulling effect on her, and she said it is the fault of the peacock feathers.

Now her life was destroyed but she kept the feathers with more care than ever so as to be able to say to those who observed her ruin: It was the fault of the peacock feathers.

 

 ANAÏS NIN

THE SONG IN THE GARDEN

She discovered that there was something unusual about herself when she refused to pamper her dolls like babies, to air them in baby carriages, to dress them in diapers, and to talk down to them. She consecrated them men and women whose actions scandalized her family when they realized the dolls were an unconscious parody of them. But later, she made no more pretense of handling their lifeless and expressionless bodies, and played with other things.

There was, at first hand, herself. She found this a rather varied spectacle. Staring at others, asking personal questions was useless. She did not get any answers, or the answers were postponed to a distant date when she could understand, and the staring brought her nothing but exile from the rooms where things really happened.

So she watched herself as if she were an insect. She discov­ered first of all that she cried when her mother sang. It was a very delectable sensation, which moved the whole inside of her body, swelled, and overflowed, and then died down slowly to a sweet peace. It was a wonderful feeling. The taste of tears was unlike anything she had ever tasted.

She then tried to find out if this happened to other girls of her age. She had a classmate who had a sullen face, and questioned her. No, said the classmate, she had never heard of any­thing more foolish. One cried if beaten by a teacher, if one bruised one’s knee, if one were deprived of the four-o’clock bread and chocolate by irate parents. Or if some rough brother smashed one’s favorite doll’s face under his electric train, as hers had done, to find out if his train could really run over people.

“Or perhaps,” said the classmate, “your mother has a fright­ening voice. My daddy has one like that.”

This drove her to making a more general investigation.  Then she learned that the feeling was by no means universal and that what Dora felt when she had an earache, and Matilda when her savings box was stolen, was altogether different. As for the taste of tears it could not compete with chocolate.

She was gripped by a joy which filled her to overflowing, and which almost eclipsed the feeling of sadness, at the discovery that she was the only person in the world to be visited by such peculiar moods. This joy, too, she was to find out, did not exist in her classmates.

So she sat longer in the corner of the balcony, in a small wicker chair, between two flower pots, and two cages filled with tropical birds, and cuddled herself in her own arms as she had never cuddled a rag doll, because so many odd things moved inside of her which were superior to the deadness of dolls.

As soon as it grew dark and cool, her mother and father went our for slow walks, to forgot the heat of the day ,and the wild glare of the sun. Ramona, the Valencian maid, would put her to bed and entrust her to all Saints in heaven, and instead of staying to watch her until she fell asleep, she went out to the plaza, by the fountain, where a sailor awaited her. The Saints, however, did not grant sleep to those who were stirred by queer feelings, as if they carried tickling, feathery insects in their chests.

She lay awake, and in the dark she felt something in herself stirring and fluttering. It occurred to her that se might be growing wings, such as she had seen in holly books. The nuns had called wings a soul. She must have that, certainly. It must be that which bothered her when that which grew in the night when Ramona was not there to watch.

Bur her mother and father, not knowing about it, attributed it all to the heat, and the fever which was spreading in the city, and they sent her to the beach.

She found the beach even more interesting than the bal­cony. She was quite free to discover it. Ramona’s sister, with whom she was staying, was always busy with the housework and mending her husband’s fishing nets. The white plaster house they lived in was on the very edge of the beach, and its green shutters could be seen from all the sand dunes and cliffs, so that she could never get lost.

Maria had a daughter, Lola, who was also twelve, and who had a habit of laughing at everything. It seemed to her that Lola knew even less than the other girls in the city. When you make such a lot of noise, run, laugh, scream, jump, sing, call out to everybody, wave to the fishing boars, you can’t possi­bly bear what goes on inside of you. She found in herself an echo of the sounds of the sea, just as if she were a hollow shell, and the colors and smells affected her differently than the singing. They did not bring peace, but an urge to run against the wind, to swim far, and to breathe deeply. but instead of laughing endlessly, of calling out to fishing boats, and of talk­ing continuously at the dinner table, she wrote verses behind her holy pictures.

“Are they hymns?” asked Lola, reading them laboriously. They were about the sea, as if the sea were alive and singing, and hissing like a monster; about the wind, as if the wind bad a human voice; about the sand through which she had looked while pouring it over and over against the sunlight, and which she thought powdered jewels; about the crabs she had watched in the hollows of the cliffs; about the foam which she fancied made with soap.

“I thought,” said Lola, “that one only wrote hymns to God and the Virgin.

 

“That bas been done,” she answered. “But I like to write about things I have seen for myself.”

 

She saw him first. He was a tramp, but not quite like the others who passed almost every day. He wore a hat, long hair, and though be was without a shirt, he was neither blind, nor legless, and his face was  clean.

“Oh, Señora,” he begged of Maria, “give me a piece of soft coal; you’ll see what a beautiful picture I can draw in your wall.”

“You will get it dirty,” said Maria.

“It rubs off easily. I’ll clean it myself. Oh, give me a piece of soft coal, a rather long and thin one if possible. I’ll draw you and the Señoritas.”

He drew them as they stood with embarrassment, her eyes hidden by humorous wrinkes; Maria with a quiet resigned face under the handkerchief she tied under her chin; she with eyes like two question marks;  and even the door half open behind them, the bench, a corner of the fishing net hanging from the low roof, the bunch of garlic, and a quilt hanging out of the window.

When he was finished Maria gave him bread and fish.

 “Shall I rub it off?” asked the tramp.

 “No, no. We will show it to Paco when it comes home.”

But Paco stayed two days at the sea, and when he came home the drawing was partly effaced, so he merely grunted at it.

But she had found a way to illustrate the hymns so that even Lola could not fail to grasp their meaning.

At first she had wanted to be a Saint because they wore such lovely gowns and gold halos around their hair; afterwards a beggar who would travel wide, drawing people with soft coal. But now it was irrevocably  decided that the only thing that counted was what Lola called hymns. In that way she could not only invoke caressingly all the things she loved, the sea, the trees, the sand, the wind, the sun, but she could own them, gather them up to herself, and by reading the hymns over and over again renew each time the feeling she saw at the same time as the objects themselves.

This became clearer to her still when she was taken back to the city, and left again on the balcony. She wished for herself those careless days on the beach, and was able to have them. But the secret of those hymns weighed on her mind, and she thought it was time to confess. she showed them to her mother. And her mother began to cry. What a queer thing? What was there in singing and hymns that made people cry? Even a full grown soul, as her mother’s must be, could cry. And there was no explanation. All her mother would say, when questioned, was that those things were not called hymns.

She was taken into her father’s vast library for the first time. He interrupted his work to give her a slender book.

What she found in it was much better than her own.

 

She felt in that library not at all as if she had come into a roomful of people and they had answered all her questions, and she had been able to stare at them indefinitely, but as if she had suddenly found a door opening into a vaster world where people resembled only vaguely those she bad seen at her parent’s receptions. In the books they were much more active, more colorful, more interesting. The real General who called on Thursdays, who had a sonorous voice, white gloves and medals, was fatter and slower than those in the stories, and fonder of little cakes than of battles. The ladies she had seen were perfumed, but some of them had too few eyelashes, or hair on their chin, or rasping voices when they sang, or looked at her through lorgnettes which made their eyes look like those of the crabs. And then nothing magnificent ever happened to them.

But in the library she discovered the existence of enormous lands not only covered with thousands of other cities, but castles, forests, haciendas, other beaches, and all of them abounding in incidents and movements. There was treachery, devotion, miracles, strife, death, ferocious jealousy. The ladies did not sit and listen to music only, but rode on horseback, turned into nuns over night, handled guns when necessary, were stolen, or ran away, put poison in glasses of wine, dressed fantastically and far better than the Saints, danced, fanned themselves, made sharp and humourous remarks, wrote secret remarks, played tricks on their husbands.

It was all a bit mixed up and not always easy to understand, but at least there were no black moments as there were at home, no moments of stillness, no days spoiled by bleak teachers, and not much time wasted on prayers.

Far more startling than all this was a certain book she picked out for herself one day when her father was out, having finished the one he had given her. He had warned her not to touch anything but what he chose for her because it would bore her. But as this book stood next to the one she had just read she fancied it would be interesting.

It was. A man gave his friends a big dinner, with candlelight and ample wines; truffles cooked in sand; cakes brought aflame to the table; pheasants with their feathers on, as if ready to fly off, and continuous music. Among the guests was a lady he overwhelmed with compliments. She had, said the book, a pink satin dress which showed, as was the fashion, her very rounded shoulders and the beginning of small but very firm breasts. She laughed at all he said, but leaned backwards whenever he leaned over too much. After dinner, and after dancing a little, she found she could not stay up as long as the other guests because she felt dizzy. In her room she did not have the strength to undress, but  fell on her bed in a dead sleep. Hours later when all the household was asleep, the host crept into the room. She heard and felt nothing. He undressed her very slowly and lingeringly,,c caressing each part of her, and kissing her until she lay quite uncovered, and his enjoyment, said the book, made him tremble and wail.

There was a line and a space and the story took up again with the woman’s utter ruin, her desperation at not knowing who was the father of her child,   and having lost the love of the man who had wanted to marry her before the fatal party at which she was drugged.

And she who was reading this tried in vain to build up the facts evaded by the space in the book. It was all a mystery. She was stirred by the description of entirely new sensations. It was no longer the wind, the soft nights, the silky brushing of the palm trees, but this man so strangely moved by the woman.

If that had happened to me, she thought, I would not have let myself go to sleep.

 

For a time all center of sensation seemed to concentrate in her head. There was in it the sharp image of the man and woman, and the image of more colorful but less subtle adventures; and then accumulated ideas of her own, not so easily written now that she was learning new words. The new words penetrated her with a sweetness, sometimes like a caress, and sometimes they burst on her like explosive revelations, filled hem with a clamor of joy and excitement. They were miraculous; they not only named what was there before her, but revealed the incredible existence of vaster and even more fantastic worlds, of millions of people outside of those she knew, of lands entirely different from hems, of millions of feelings far more upsetting than those which had overwhelmed her at the sound of music. Faces which had before seemed different only by feature, color, or shape, now assumed numerous and incredible variety. All things which had one face before, like her parents, or at the most two, gladness and sadness, were now animated, changing, haunting, by her own knowledge of what they bid.

Words were not only the light, but eyes themselves, and as they accumulated on those printed pages, accumulated in her mind, they appeared to her, by their potent, hypnotic power undeniably more wonderful than the static bearded God who never spoke, but let strange men speak for Him, sometimes quite badly.

She learned too, that there were words which had been spoiled, which could not be used anymore. Her father growled at her use of the word “soul”. “There are words like that” he said, “that have been badly used; they have lost their meaning.”

“Bur what do you do,  then, if the thing exists, and you need the word?”

“You never talk about it,” he said. “Or you make up another”.

Bur apart from taste in words, she was surprised to find that her parents were impervious to them. Her father who owned six thousand books ate them as placidly as his meals, digested them without exciternent, marked their pages with studiousness, and laid them away without any change of expression - or of life. Her mother read less of them, but with docility and  quiet respect. Did they really understand what they meant? And if they did, how could they continue to fill their home with uninteresting people, move only between the beach and the city, when there was a vast, immense fantastic world left to explore? Worse still, when she discovered that they had explored those regions, that they had been in India, in Egypt, in Japan, in France, in North America, in Russia, and that it had left no deep trace on their faces, and that the stories they told were pleasant, but like geographical descriptions learned at school.

There was no doubt in her head now that she would have to see, and do, all that for herself.  Her parents may be wise, but in some ways they reminded her of those classmates who preferred chocolate, which was ordinary, and who also preferred to resemble each other.

Five years. Body almost motionless, bound by walls, by quiet habits. Her mind swayed and stirred by a keen restlessness, impatient to live. Yet it clung to the books, as if they would serve her as a key to the whole world. She really believed that the more she read of them the clearer real living would be to her.

She had at last a taste of travelling. Her parents began carefully the pilgrimage of their own youth. They carried guide books, maps, and went to sleep in the trains.

She tried to find in the static face of the physical world the reflection of the meaning she had found in the written words. To find in ruins, in museums, the proofs of written words, the trace of events. She was surprised to find another meaning to it all, her own meaning. The books were not to serve as keys; they were to stand apart, or at best serve as indications. The best they had done was to train her to see, to think her own thoughts. But as far as standing with them on a secure platform, that was an error. She stood alone. She found streets which were not historical, and which were eloquent. She found eyes of people more eloquent than history. Her parents did not think her respectful enough—of other’s knowledge. But they had no respect for her own visions. She saw that again things did not affect her as they did others. If the world had been transformed in passing through the minds of writers, it was now also altering as it passed hers. She needed not the key to the universe; the universe was in her.

Fragments packed into the trunks with everything else. Drifting selves one cannot sail away from.

She was remembering a garden. All the children were playing in it. She was pushed and pulled by all of them as they chased a ball which bounced wildly between them. Very unexpectedly there came out of the house and through the garden full of children and sun and noise, a song, a crooning song. She heard it and straightened herself with a start. The song slipped into the garden quietly, and the children went on laughing and shouting. But she had felt an overflow of strange sadness. The song wafted past her and over the hedge, lingeringly. Inside of her it penetrated sweetly and painfully. Something was worth crying for; something in the song.

The playing and shouting stopped; all the little girls gathered around her.

“Did you fall?”

“Did you hurt your knee? “

“What is the matter with you?”

They all bowed their heads over her. The song encircled her, plaintively.

“What is the matter?”

“Do you want a piece of chocolate?”

“Oh, come, don’t be a baby.”

“Can’t you even say what you are crying for?”

The garden was quiet now. The last note of the song hung in the air. The crying died down too, and the little girls skipped away.

“Will you come and play again?”

From inside the house the voice which had sung now called out in a very plain, human tone: “Come in, come in. I’ve made you some cake!”

 

In books she could drift independently and indulge her own whims. And this drifting of the body, choiceless, impulsive, unreasoned, was treated with tolerance, and civilized mellowness, a half-sad humor and sense of frailty. Love here was a function, from which the highest pleasure was to be extracted as from an instrument, and only the mechanism was to be admired for its intricacy.

Before she came to the third world, she thought she knew every feeling that could be. But a new dream was revealed to her in this soft and misty language, a language not treacherously musical so that anything trivial spoken in it could sound profound, not irrevocably clear like the second, but poised between the two as if composed of both, and bringing with it a new attitude. If up to now she knew one had to live with fervor, and with intelligence, now she learned one had not only to live for an idea, or die for it, but also fight for it. To passion was added a new quality of profound selection, of resistance to impulse, of deliberate transfiguration. Until now she had seen only something like a configuration, to which one submitted, either through a faintness of the senses, or an indifference to the demands of the mind. It came most sharply to her in the poetry. The poetry, though rich in sensations, in feeling, and in ideas, suggested with words one could put no finger on, the existence of magic, of mystery, of an unseen world.

It seemed to her that the child who could cry, not at a song, but with a premonition of things worth weeping for, led her now into strange worlds, while others, as old as she was now, still preferred chocolates, detective stories, lives labelled and secure like crackers in a jar.

 

ANAÏS NIN

ANTÓNIO SERRÃO DE CRASTO (1613 – 1684)

 

Filhós, fatias, sonhos e mal-assadas 
Galinhas, porco, vaca e mais carneiro 
Os perus em poder do Pasteleiro, 
Esguichar, deitar pulhas, laranjadas
 
Esfarinhar, pôr rabos, dar risadas, 
Gastar para comer muito dinheiro,
Não ter mãos a medir o Taverneiro
Com réstias de cebolas dar pancadas;
 
Das janelas c`um tanho dar na gente,
A buzina a tanger, quebrar panelas,
Querer em um só dia comer tudo;
 
Não perdoar arroz, nem cuscuz quente,
Despejar pratos e alimpar tigelas,
Estas as festas são do gordo Entrudo.

THE FEAR OF NICE

  

There were two of then, an old man permanently bent with rheumatism over an asthmatic guitar, and a younger man who sang with an operatic aggressiveness. But it was early in the morning, in Nice, and the sunlight dissolved all critical faculties. Besides, Lyndall was overloaded with pennies, there was a spare envelope in the scrap basket, her window was open, and she was doing some disagreeable re-writing. So she leaned out the window and smiled at the serenaders.

How sweet life was! She was swimming in warmth and light, floating on cotton. Other music was inspiring and ideal, like her own life; out of tune, sometimes and so often played on cheap instruments, with rheumatic fingers. Hear the funny little note; it reminded her of the time her husband was sea-sick on their honeymoon, that screechy one, of the rapacious guides who took the sublime out of their Italian pilgrimage, that long drawn out, wobbly one, of so many other inglorious moments, when her husband corrected the spelling of her exalted paragraphs, when he pronounced some of her most caressing words a  “foreign invention not to be mistaken for English as he knew it…”.

The man leaning out the window was throwing money  into a cigarette box and laughing at the ridiculous melodies, and as Lyndall could see, laughing at her too because she was swaying thoughtfully over was the balcony in rhythm with the crooning sounds below.

 

That evening Lyndall and her husband were having diner at the Grand Hotel. Lyndall thought there were too many waiters; one to light her cigarette, one to pour the wine, one to present the meat, another the fish, another the dessert, and yet another for the bill.

She tried to find a real meal in that deceptive luxury, but why did her potato salad taste of mint, and her lamb chop look like a flower? The beets were sliced so finely they tasted like air, and the bread vanished with a sound of crisp paper. There was powdered grass on everything, and a permanent wave on the puree of potatoes. A hundred dishes were brought before her on rolling tables but she could not guess what they contained; the vegetables were disguised with pink sauces, the meats were shaped like stars, marbles, scarabs, garnished with candied eyes to look like mice. She gave up guessing, swallowed without tasting, sat with dignity, fed on the anemic music, smoked unreasonably with a show of glistening nails. She had a desire to break her glass in which a stoically faced waiter had just poured water with such an absorbed, con­scientious air that she was sure it would taste like champagne.

Then Lyndall noticed that the man who had thrown money at the serenaders sat at a nearby table. He was smiling with his eyes at the food, at the old ladies, at the dames seules, at the waiters, at everything, with an equal nonchalance which vaguely annoyed her.

“Oh, but 1 know that man,” said her husband. “He is the Head of the Rubber Stamp Company. 1 saw him last week on business. 1 must speak to him.”

Introductions. No change whatever in his eyes. He had not seemed to notice Lyndall’s unique 1830 face. Even Lyndall’s husband resented this. What was the use of having so many painters classify her face as an anachronism in an age of uniform production?

“Not much of a place, this,” said Mr. Breman. “It strikes me as a vast expanse of driftwood, for people who got tired doing nothing. It’s languid, boneless, oldish …”

“From the point of view of a young businessman, yes,” said Lyndall’s husband.

“Oh, no, personally. Give me real mountains, and a wind that sweeps up the clouds and mental cobwebs.”

“1 can see you have not been in Europe long enough to succumb to the love of leisure,” said Lyndall with a glance which marked the phrase as a compliment. But the Head of the Rubber Stamp Company was impervious.

“Shall we take a walk?”

“I’l1 lead you,” said Lyndall. ‘I have discovered a wonder­ful place.”

It was a white cement walk, winding down the hill to the sea. It was edged with tropical plants, huge, fierce, bristly cactus, long-fingered bushes spreading like octopuses, others flowering like thick-leaved cabbages, others writhing like snakes, all of them thick and furry. They grew violently, clinging furiously to the ground, and bringing to mind the desert, jungle, and the bottom f the sea. The seabreeze did not move them. They could ever have been young, but must have showed from the fir t a firm plenitude, and they never grew old, never wrinkle or drooped, but showed to the end a strange agelessness. They were plants without scent or delicacy, growing without earth and mysteriously nourished with sun and water.

The three now shadowy figures bent over them and talked about them. Lyndall was afraid hat Mr. Breman would connect the talk of the rubber plant with his rubber factory, the factory with rubber stamps, and all the rest of his business. It was such a fatally smooth path; and the evening would be ruined. Or at least she would have to withdraw from it and go off by herself on a mental tour of other worlds. And Lyndall liked company.

But Breman’s mind did not seem to run that way. “Did you notice in the Hotel the lady who wears an orange silk wig, and whose chin is held in place by an injection of paraffin which would melt the minute she set foot in Algeria?”

Lyndall’s husband asked him if he preferred the South American lady who sat on two chairs at once and could not see her little Pekinese when he curled up on her lap.

“No,” said Mr. Breman.

“Would you prefer,” asked Lyndall, “A lean modern woman who can throw undecipherable phrases at you at the same time as an unanswerable tennis ball?”

“My dream,” said Mr. Breman, “is of a woman who could look pale and intellectual, wear very subtle dresses, listen to music with the expression of da Vinci’s ‘Saint Anne’; who could serve tea with deft hands, make ironic remarks…”

“Not so hard to find.”

“Wait, that is not all. She must at the same time be able to walk tirelessly through mountain roads, in a plain little woolen suit, and have tan cheeks, a cheerful whistle, and a naive conversation.

Lyndall looked quite overwhelmed with this description and answered with a long silence. “It’s too novelistic a wish,” she said at last.

“I write in my spare time,” said Mr. Breman.

“Oh,’ said Lyndall’s husband, “I now understand why the conversation was getting off the logical sphere. I thought it was the Riviera night, the plants, and the sea.”

They could hardly see each other’s faces now. Fragrance from other plants came hovering over them. The waves lapped very gently. The cigarettes gleamed like fireflies.

“I’m also a fake businessman,” added Lyndall’s husband after a moment. “1 prefer biography to economics.”

“He makes this confession only in the dark,” said Lyndall.

“It’s too bad I must leave tomorrow,” said Mr. Breman. “Tomorrow morning at nine.  Business. And then to tell you the truth, I’m afraid of Nice. It’s a tricky place. It takes the sting out of existence. I talk against it to keep myself awake, so to speak. The truth is that it enchants me, lulls me, makes me look down on all the big things I build up, makes me despise activity. And have you noticed that the people who are sunning the last years of their lives here try to keep you, offer you their guest rooms, sun porches and yachts? After a while I don’t feel that I am walking but riding on clouds; all the harsh sounds disappear, all sense of struggle, and all desire. It’s a Hindu philosophy you get here – desirelessness, annihilation.”

“It’s restful,” said Lyndall’s husband.” “Accept it as such, and then when you feel energetic again, get out.”

“But then I never do.”

“So it’s because you are afraid of Nice that you are leaving so suddenly.”

“Yes.” He tapped his side pocket. “I have my ticket here.”

The three of them got up and walked leisurely back to the hotel. In the elevator Lyndall’s husband remembered he had no cigarettes and he always smoked before going to bed. He stepped out. Lyndall and Mr. Breman stood there. Then he looked at her fully, with laughing eyes and said: “It isn’t Nice I’m afraid of, it’s you.”

 

ANAÏS NIN

THE IDEALIST

 From the first day Edward knew they were drawing the wrong person. The whole class was turned towards the model who had been chosen for them, a woman with a very brown body who from the waist down seemed heavily rooted to the ground by a sort of sinking of her flesh, a strong implantation of her feet on the model stand, a heavy droop of her arms and shoulders. But the woman he was looking at and drawing surreptitiously was poised before him with such an air of having stopped only a minute here on her way to something else that he immediately began to think of ways of speaking to her for fear she might not be there the next day. Her face was tranquil, and her eyes virtuously concentrated on the model, and her fingers were correctly drawing wha she was looking at, but even then he felt such a restlessness in her, such a self-sufficiency, as if she carried her own world within her and did not need to cling to any group, or place.

“I hope you will come again tomorrow,” he said suddenly and awkwardly, having found nothing cleverer.

She looked at him sharply for a second and answered: “Why?”

He showed her his drawing of her. “It isn’t finished, you see.

“You picked the wrong model,” she said, smiling.

“No. I think the others did.”

“It is true she is hard to do; there is an awful lot to dispose of”.

Edward looked at her drawing, in which the model had been over-refined.

I see you are given to improvements and to anemia,” he said, and immediately feared he had lost her. He was elated to see her laugh.

“I’m so glad you are frank! Tomorrow you can help me be realistic. Au revoir.”

She arrived the next day at half past nine. She wore, Edward observed, a dark blue velvet suit which made her look like a page from medieval stories. Her hat looked jaunty and yet soft, and when it was hung up in the hallway among the other tailored beige, brown and neutral colored ones, it looked unmodern, and it made him feel that just as the class had picked the wrong model she had picked the wrong century. But since he lived in this century and was fully able to appreciate her there was nothing wasted.

She smiled at him, but she was thinking of something else. This was the mystery he was intent on clearing. Where did her thoughts go when they were not on her drawing. Not to other centuries; she was carrying a book of Cocteau about. But she had a fearful way of looking high over the heads of everybody, and through walls.

Edward could think of nothing better than to criticize the quality of her chalk and pencils so that he might suggest where she should buy them. With sweet docility she met him there after class. He enjoyed seeing her shop, talk, move, even argue. She was real. She could even count her money quickly.

When they came out it was raining. Edward shivered as realistically as he could and said in an accent of profound distress: “How good a cup of coffee would taste now. Have you ever been to the Viking?”

His model looked at her watch. “I have plenty of time.

This rather startled him, although he had keenly hoped for it. She knew the Viking, then; she was accustomed to drinking coffee, not alone, and she even knew how much time it all required. Edward had forgotten they were in Montparnasse, two yards from the Grande Chaumière.

She told him she knew he was the author of some very keen impressionistic sketches of night life, of marker women, rag packers, and policemen.

He told her all he fancied about her. And came back three times to his question, “So you have been here often?” with a sort of anxious curiosity.

“Yes, many times. Isn’t that natural?”

“No,” he said, rather gloomily.

“Bur why not? Why not? I’m alive, Edward Lunn, I’m modern. You have simply taken a painter’s liberty and dated me rather far back. An 1830 face you said. That’s possible. But not my mind.” She leaned over, laughing, and touched his hand as if to emphasize her humanness. He looked so startled she withdrew it instantly.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, “that you are an idealizer of women, and that you see an aureole of poetry around my head!”

“The modern flippancy does not suit you at all,” he said. “It’s a pose.

“I’m sorry,” said Chantal, “I teased you. You were dreaming. I did it to break the spell. I always do it to break the spell. I have become suspicious of dreaming. I did a lot of it myself once, and while I was doing it many agreeable things, real things, passed me by.”

“I hare real things,” said Edward, looking around rather bearishly at the rest of the people.

Chantal knew he had not understood.

 

They changed books and arguments while hunting the Luxembourg Gardens under one umbrella. They discussed psychology over the café rabies of the Bouie Mich. They shared the love of painting while working side by side at the Grande Chaumière. And while hunting down special books among the quays, they felt the excitement and the fever of mental communion.

Paris was newer to him than to Chantal who had been born in it. She had to wait around the corners, sometimes, with a little watchful smile, while he made his discoveries. They were very old discoveries. Chantal wanted sometimes to mock them. His surprise and his elation were so childlike. Then she realized he was discovering himself, and was silent, soft eyed, and patient. He had drawn things exactly as he had seen them and with such intuition that they suggested all the meaning there was in them to others. Bur what they suggested was beyond Edward’s own knowledge and understanding. His little women had heavy eyes, and faces one could imagine any moment altered by a violent enjoyment of the senses; his men wore sardonic smiles, and all his people in the street the skepticism and mellowness of an old race. Bur it was all accuracy of drawing, and he himself had no key to the meaning of his work.

She took him to the Salon des Humoristes and they laughed together. She put many French books in his way. She saw that he was stirred to a new conception of fearless living. His mind grew bright and flexible. He saw that from her hands came a warm knowledge, but he still thought her a legendary apparition.

 

One morning they were all working intently when Chantal noticed that the model’s body was trembling a little. After a minute she slipped down on the model stand, took her head in her hands and sobbed. Someone in the front row rushed up to her with her kimono and covered her. “Are you cold?” they asked her. She went on sobbing and mumbling. Chantal went up to her. The model was Russian and knew little French, but she finally explained that she had not eaten for three days. Chantal asked her to be patient for a few minutes, and ran out to the café, and came back with a boy carrying coffee, Porto and a basket of brioches. The boy stared at the model. Chantal sent him away, The whole class was chattering and commenting, but only three persons stood near the model. Edward looked upset. She was sitting as Chantal had left her, with her knees under her, her kimono open at the front which she did not bother to close.

In general they all showed a callous indifference to the model during working hours. She was like a piece of furniture. Few of the students talked with her. Knowing her body so intimately seemed to eliminate her value as an individual:

Bur here, crying, eating her brioche, and her face swollen, and her kimono hanging loose, she suddenly became someone to have a feeling about. Chantal pitied her. Edward did not talk, but looked troubled. One woman drew her kimono around her tightly, “You must not catch cold,” she said. Then she turned away. One placid elderly man asked if she wanted him to take up a collection for her.

Suddenly Chantal noticed a change on Edward’s face. His eyes were on the woman’s body, still heaving a little. It was not the same look he had while he was drawing.

Alter a while they all went back to work. Bur Chantal could not draw anymore. She had been shadowing the breasts, to bring our their swelling and the angle at which they fell, a little sideways, with their overripeness. Bur she could not see pure lines anymore. It seemed to her that the breasts were still heaving and trembling. Chantal could not understand why, when the model had taken her face with her wet hands to whisper in her ear, she had wanted to move away.

Edward stopped working too. “I’m through for this morning,” he said, without looking at her.

As several of them walked out together they left some money on the model stand, bur they did not look at the model.

 

Edward carne to Chantal’s studio late one evening. He appeared restless and tense, seemed unwilling to sit, as was his habit, next to the books. He looked out of the window, into darkness, and finally came to stand in front of Chantal and without looking at her, he burst out: “1 suppose you have guessed it, I am obsessed by that woman.”

“The model,” said Chantal quietly, as to herself. And she looked far beyond him. He, thinking she sought to meet his eyes, bowed his head. “Oh, but you can’t possibly understand what she means to me. She has taught me joys, joys such as I never suspected the existence of. No other moments in my life seem worth remembering, no, not even those when I did my best work, and God knows I thought I had reached then the heights of ecstasy. My feeling for you, that is entirely apart: it’s religious. Let me talk to you, Chantal. I need you.

“You can talk to me.

“Forgive me for talking about her, but here with you is the only peace and coolness I know. The other is like a fever, which wears me out, like bad fever, a horrible thirst. I need her so much, want her so much. I go to her. We spend the day together in her room, but when I go away I do not feel satisfied, and yet I have been fearfully happy.” He sat on the edge of a chair and breathed deeply.

“It’s queer, here I feel freer. It is the light atmosphere of your intelligence, of your calm will. The other woman dominates me and all my senses. I can’t think. I can’t work. I can only enjoy her; I am only aware of her. In a way that powerful forgetfulness is sweet, terribly sweet. I can’t give it up, I can’t give it up.“

“I know, I know.” Her voice was very gentle, and she almost crooned the words.

“You couldn’t know! You sense things, you understand, you never say the wrong word, you are healing, but you can’t know. It’s like an explosion of the whole world. Nothing else matters or means anything except that intoxication of the senses. And that woman, would you believe it, warned me against herself, the first day. She said: ‘Go away before I reach you joys that you will never get from the kind of women you admire. Go back to your dear wholesome comrades.’ She despised me as she said it. I stayed. It has been the devil trying not to be sentimental. She is so callous, and I did not want her to think me ridiculous. Do you know what I sent her yesterday instead of flowers? An electric radiator—she has been cold in her hotel room-—a radiator!”

He was laughing. He stood up and walked around the room. Suddenly he noticed that Chantal had not laughed.

“Why do you think I can’t understand? I have known all those feelings. My will has been dissolved. I have known that forgetfulness . . .”

“You Chantal, you! But your face, your extraordinarily pure face!”

“Never mind my face from now on,” she said crisply.

He sat down and looked crushed.

“Aren’t you glad,” she said very softly, “since it is because of that I can understand you today?”

“Glad? Glad? But how can I be glad when I have lost my ideal of you?”

“Well, I am glad of that,” said Chantal, looking very soft and human, leaning over a little, waiting.

Bur he did not understand.

 

Anaïs Nin

WASTE OF TIMELESSNESS

It was the usual invitation to a usual houseparty, the usual people, and with her usual husband. Why must it be friends of the “great writer” Alain Roussel rather than Alain Roussel himself who invited them out for the weekend?

Besides, it was raining.

The first thing Mrs. Farinole said was: “It has not rained here all summer. What a pity it should today, of all days! It will be impossible for you to imagine how perfectly lovely this place can be.”

“Oh, but I can very easily imagine,” she answered and looked around appreciatively at the hills, the pines, the sea, quite formally framed to make a cozy windless nook. And then she imagined a gigantic gust of wind sweeping the whole place clean, and Mrs. Farinole saying: “I am so sorry, our house has flown away, and so I cannot ask you to spend the night. I shall have to telephone the carpenter. He must do something about it immediately.”

And then Alain Roussel would happen to pass by in quest of material, carrying a crab net. Seeing her on the road he would say: “Will you come with me? We can spend the weekend out that old fishing boat on the beach. It is a grand place.” (He would use another word, a better one than “grand,” but she could not think of it just at that moment.)

Her husband would say: “Wait a minute then. I must get her raincoat. She is subject to neuritis.”

“There is Roussel’s house,” said Mrs. Farinole. “He has painted his gate in turquoise green. It will soon turn grey with the sea air.”

“Have you read all his books?” she asked.

“We will, by and by,” said Mr. Farinole. “Did you know that he wrote the last three right here?”

“And while they were repairing his house, too,” said Mrs. Farinole. “I don’t know how he could do it.”

“And his cook was ill the house was terribly disorganized,” added Mr. Farinole.

“He wrote something very extraordinary in a magazine, she said.

“He is a very extraordinary man,” said Mr. Farinole. “Did you ever hear how he repaired bis own car when the me­chanic could not make out what was the matter?”

“And here is our house,” said Mrs. Farinole. “Henry, show her the stubborn wisteria.”

They paused in front of the door.

“Do you see this wisteria? It was a stubborn plant—insisted on growing to the left for two years, and at last I got it around to the right, and over the door, where I wanted it.”

During this story little Mrs. Farinole shone with pride. “That is just like Henry, to be so beautifully persistent.”

“Do you think,” she asked, “that he could make me grow to the right too? I would really lilce to grow to the right, and over the door, but it seems impossible.”

Mr. Farinole laughed, “You have Irish in you, have you?”

‘‘No, why?’’

“Whenever Henry says something funny we said: ‘You have Irish in you, have you?’

“You do!”

“And he, invariably, answers. ‘And a little Scotch besides!’

“Now,” said Mrs. Farinole, “you know the family’s pet joke.”

“I think that is delicious,” she said. For a Little while she did not hear the rest of the conversation. She was thinking that she would like to ask Roussel what he meant by intuitional reasoning. “By intuitional reasoning,” she thought, “I could be made to grow to the right, and over the door, but not by reasoning alone.”

They walked to the end of the garden.

“What is that? A boat? A boat in this garden?”

“I will show you,” said Mr. Farinole. “It was here when we got the house. It is an old Norman fishing boat, used as a tool house. See, it is black because they put tar on it to preserve it. What a shape it has, eh? So deep, so fat, so comfy, so safe looking.”

“May I look inside, oh, may I?”

“We put a bed there once for a little boy guest. He insisted on sleeping there. He got such a thrill out of it!”

The inside smelt of tar. There was a bed, several old trunks, garden tools, pots, seeds, and bulbs. There was a tiny square window on each side of the door. The roof sloped down squatly.

“Oh, I would like to sleep here, too.” she said.

“Have you Irish in you?” said Mrs. Farinole.

“Think of your neuritis,” said her husband.

“Henry is awfully proud of that boat,” said Mrs. Farinole.

“I hear the dinner bell,” he said evasively and modestly.

 

It was all so much easier since she knew about the existence of the boat—so much easier to jump gaily from topic to topic, being always careful not to exceed a certain moderate temperature.

There was the boat waiting in the dark garden, at the end of the very narrow path, the boat with its little twisted doorway, its small windows, the peaked roof, its smell of pungent tar . . . the very old boat which had travelled far, now sunk in a quiet dark garden.

The atmosphere in the Farinoles’ library was dense with laughter. She must not stop laughing. Her husband had said:

“The Farinoles have the most delightful sense of humor.” There was nothing to be done about it.

 

It was bedtime.

The Farinoles did not believe that she meant to sleep on the boat, not until she was half way down the path, with her nightgown under her arm. Then they shouted: “Wait! Wait! We’ll walk down with you.”

“I know the way,” she called back, running faster.

“You will need a candle.”

“Never mind, there is a sickle moon, it will do.”

Then they called out something else but she did not hear them.

She walked around the boat. It was tied to an old tree. She unfastened the mildewed rope. “And now I am gone,” she said, stepping into the boat and banging the little door after her.

She leaned out of one of the windows.

The sickle moon was covered by a cloud.

The wind rushed once through the garden.

She sat on the bed and cried: “I would really like to go away. I would like never to see the Farinoles again. I would like to be able to think aloud, not always in hushed secrecy.” She heard the sound of water. “There must be a trip one can take and come back from changed forever. There must be many ways of beginning life anew if one has made a bad beginning. No, I do not want to begin again. I want to stay away from all I have seen so far. I know that it is no good, that I am no good, that there is a gigantic error somewhere. I am tired of struggling to find a philosophy which will fit me and my world. I want to find a world which fits me and my philosophy. Certainly on this boat I could drift away from this world down some strange wise river into strange wise places . .

 

In the morning the boat was no longer in the garden.

Her husband took the 2:25 train home to talk this problem over with his partner.

 

The boat was drifting down a dark river.

There was no end to the river.

Along the shores there were plenty of landing places, but they were very ordinary looking places.

Roussel had a house on the banks. When she made as ii to pay him a visit he asked: ‘Do you admire me?”

“I love your work,” she said.

“And no one else’s?”

“I do care for Gurran’s poetry, and Josiam’s criticisms.”

“Don’t stop here,” said Roussel. And she saw that he was surrounded with ecstatic worshippers, so she pushed her boat away.

Along the shore she saw her husband one day. He signalled to her: “When are you coming home?”

“What are you doing this evening?” she asked.

“Having dinner with the Parks.”

“That is not a destination,” said she.

“What are you headed for?” he shouted. “Something big,” she answered, drifting away. More quiet shores unfolded. There was nothing resplendent or marvellous to see. Little houses everywhere. Sometimes little boats tied to a stake. People used them for small rides.

“Where are you going?” she asked them.

“Just resting from ordinary living,” they said, “off for a few hours for just a little fantasy.”

“But where are you going?”

“Back home alter a while.”

“Is there nothing better further on?”

“You’re stubborn,” they said coldly. She drifted away. The river had misty days and sunny days, like any other river. Occasionally there was magic; moments of odd stillness when she felt the same intense exaltation she had experienced the first night on the boat, as if she were at last sailing into unutterable living.

She looked out of the little window. The boat was sailing very slowly and going nowhere. She was beginning to get impatient.

On the shores she saw all her friends. They called out to her cheerfully but formally. She could feel that they were hurt. “And no wonder,” she thought, “they must have sent me many invitations and I have not answered them.”

Then she passed Roussel’s place again. Now she was sure she had travelled in a circle. He called out to her: “When are you coming home? The Farinoles need their garden tools, and the trunks, too.”

“I would like to know,” she called out, “what you mean by intuitional reasoning?”

“You can’t understand,” he called back. “You have run away from life.”

“It was the boat which sailed away,” she said.

“Don’t be a sophist,” he said. “It sailed away at your own bidding.”

“Do you think that if I came ashore we could have a real talk? I feel then that I might not be wanting to travel.”

“Oh,” said Roussel, “but it might be me who would want to travel. I do not like perfect intimacy; you might write an article about it.”

“You’re missing something,” she said. “It would be an interesting article.” And she drifted away.

The shores still offered commonplace scenery, and there was no world beyond.

Her husband called out to her: “When are you coming home?”

“I wish I were home now,” she said.

The boat was in the garden. She tied up the cord to the old tree.

“I hope that you had a good night,” said Mrs. Farinole. “Come and see our wisteria. It has grown to the left after au, in spite of everything.”

“During the night?” she asked.

“Have you Irish in you? Don’t you remember how the wisteria looked twenty years ago when you first came to our house?”

“I have been wasting a lot of time,” she said.

 

Anaïs Nin, 1977