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