Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (29 page)

All evening his eyes, his mouth, and the ruggedness of his beard stay with me.

I torment Eduardo and arouse his jealousy by awakening the admiration of a young Cuban doctor, whose eyes linger on the lines of my body. We have gone dancing, Hugo, Eduardo, and I. Eduardo wants to draw me back to him, to destroy my exuberance. He is cold, withdrawn, malevolent. He fights against the sinuosity of my body during our dance, the brushing of my cheek, the purring voice in his ears. He kills my joy with his green-eyed fury, and when he has killed it he is unhappy. I see the veins swelling on his temples. He ends the evening with: "What you did to me a few months ago!"

Allendy points out that I abandon myself to the consuming cruelty of life with Henry. Pain has become the ultimate joy. For every cry of joy in Henry's arms, there is a lash of expiation: June and Hugo, Hugo and June. How fervently Allendy now talks against Henry, but I know he is not only discoursing on my plan for self-destruction but that he is moved by his own jealousy. At the end of the analysis I see that he is profoundly disturbed. I have been exaggerating purposely. Henry is the softest, kindest man alive, softer even than I am, though in appearance we are both terrorizers and amoralists. But I enjoy Allendy's concern for me. The power he has nurtured in me is dangerous, more dangerous than my former timidity. He must protect me now by the deftness of his analysis and the strength of his arms and his mouth.

I do not believe men ever had, in one woman, such a potential enemy and such an actual friend. I am full of inexhaustible love for Hugo, Eduardo, Henry, and Allendy. Eduardo's jealousy last night was also my jealousy, my pain. I accompanied him the short distance he wanted to walk, to clear his head, he said. My eyes were blank, my hands cold. I have such a knowledge of pain that I cannot inflict it. Later, at home, Hugo almost threw himself on me, and I opened my legs passively, like a prostitute, empty of feeling. Yet I know that he alone loves generously and selflessly.

Yesterday I told Allendy that I would love to have a dangerous life with Henry and to enter a more difficult, more precarious world; to be heroic and make enormous sacrifices like June, knowing full well that, with my fragility, I would end up in a sanatorium.

Allendy said, "You love Henry out of excessive gratitude, because he has made you woman. You are too grateful for the love given you. It is your due."

I recall the sacrilegious communions during my childhood at which I received my father in place of God, closing my eyes and swallowing the white bread with blissful tremors, embracing my father, communing with him, in a confusion of religious ecstasy and incestuous passion. Everything was for him. I wanted to send him my journal. Mother dissuaded me because it might have gotten lost on the way. Oh, the hypocrisy of my lowered eyes, the hidden bursts of tears at night, the voluptuous secret obsession with him. What I remember best of him at this moment is not paternal protection or tenderness, but an expression of intensity, animal vigor, which I recognize in myself, an affinity of temperament which I recognized with a child's innocent intuition. A volcanic life hunger—that is what I remember and still participate in, secretly admiring a sensual potency that automatically negates my mother's values.

I have remained the woman who loves incest. I still practice the most incestuous crimes with a sacred religious fervor. I am the most corrupt of all women, for I seek a refinement in my incest, the accompaniment of beautiful chants, music, so that everyone believes in my soul. With a madonna face, I still swallow God and sperm, and my orgasm resembles a mystical climax. The men I love, Hugo loves, and I let them act like brothers. Eduardo confesses his love to Allendy. Allendy is going to be my lover. Now I send Hugo to Allendy so that Allendy will teach him to be less dependent on me for his happiness.

When I immolated my childhood to my mother, when I give away all I own, when I help, understand, serve, what tremendous crimes I am expiating—strange, insidious joys, like my love for Eduardo, my own blood; for Hugo's spiritual father, John; for June, a woman; for June's husband; for Eduardo's spiritual father, Allendy, who is now Hugo's guide. It only remains for me now to go to my own father and enjoy to the full the experience of our sensual sameness, to hear from his lips the obscenities, the brutal language I have never formulated, but which I love in Henry.

Am I hypnotized, fascinated by evil because I have none in me? Or is there in me the greatest secret evil?

My analysis was really over when Allendy kissed me the last time and I felt the nascence of a personal relationship. I took great pleasure in his kiss, and an hour later I was in Henry's arms. Henry is asleep now in my writing room, and I sit a few yards away writing about Allendy's kiss. I loved Allendy's bigness, his mouth and his hand at my throat. Henry was waiting for me at the station afterwards. I know I love him and that with Allendy it is coquetry, a pleasant game I am learning to play.

Allendy says that if I were to give Hugo several shocks, like my desire for John, I would rouse him, but I cannot do this, and I prefer to put him in Allendy's hands. To awaken him through pain—here is my limitation, my failure. And secretly, I have a fear of plumbing his limitations. I am afraid to find a fund of deep feeling and nothing else. How much mind, how much imagination, how much sensuality is there in him? Can he ever be resuscitated, or am I to continue this course from man to man? Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?

I see what I do not like in Allendy—a certain conventionality, a veneer of conservatism; he is a lightweight being, when what I love are tragic, heavy-souled men, just as Henry said he loved romantic women.

Today Allendy tried not to acknowledge that I am well. He wants me to need him. His analysis was less perfect insofar as there is now a personal element in it. I could see the crumbling of his objectivity. I marvel that this man, who knows the worst about me, is so strongly attracted. I am his creation.

Henry reads Hugo's journal and finds it to be that of a cripple. He begins to suspect I was also a cripple when I married him.

When Henry said this, I brought out my journal of that period, when I was nineteen, and read it to him. He was startled, jubilant, too. He wanted to read more, and to read the novel I wrote at twenty-one.

Hugo was away on a business trip, and for five days Henry and I lived here together, never going to Paris, working, reading, walking. One afternoon I asked Eduardo to come. They discussed astrology, but secretly they fought each other. Henry told Eduardo he was dead, a fixed star, while he himself was a planet always revolving, always in movement. Eduardo remained composed, superior through his coolness, deftness, courtesy. Henry became confused and lost. Eduardo looked at once faunesque and clever. Henry was slow and Germanic, offering a smile to me, so infinitely moving.

I was glad it was Henry who was staying at Louveciennes—warm, soft, human Henry. He was in such a chastened, helpless mood. We sat in the garden. He said he wanted to be buried there, never to be sent away, to be metamorphosed into a bear who would come in through my bedroom window when anyone was making love to me. He became child, lulled by my tenderness. I had never seen him so small and frail. There is the weirdest contrast between his drunkenness, when he sits flushed, combative, destructive, sensual, all instinct, a man whose animal vitality lures and subjugates women; and his soberness, when he can sit before a woman and read to her from books, talk to her in an almost religious tone, become wistful, pale, holy. It is an amazing transformation. He can sit in the garden like a gentle Eduardo of fifteen years ago, and then a few hours later, bite with great ferocity and utter the most obscene words while we lie convulsed with pleasure.

Yet great tenderness wells up in me when Hugo returns. I want to give him joy, I force myself, and I begin to sincerely respond to his passion. I remember that one evening when Henry and I were lying on the couch in my studio, a string of Hugo's guitar snapped, the deepest string, resonant like his voice. It terrorized me, a foreboding of a finality I do not desire.

I went to Allendy Monday, and I refused to be analyzed because, I said, I had begun to lie to him. So we sat and talked, and he was aware of my hostility. When I first came in I evaded his kiss. What I felt was that he was destroying my relationship with Henry; he was making fissures in it. I resented his strong influence, his domination of me. He answered wisely. Suddenly I again wanted to obey him. I said I was ready for analysis, that I would not lie any more, that I had exaggerated the dangers of my flight with Henry only to see how concerned he was about my life. His strange blue eyes fascinated me. I got up and walked around in my usual way, arms raised behind my head. He stretched out his arms.

He has a big, overwhelming body, like John's. He holds me so tightly I almost suffocate. His mouth is not as voluptuous as Henry's, and we don't understand each other. But I stay in his arms. He says, "I will teach you to play, not to take love so tragically, not to pay such a heavy price for it. You have made it too dramatic and intense a thing. This will be pleasant. I have such a strong desire for you." Detestable wisdom. Oh, I hate him. While he talks I bow my head and smile. He shakes me, wanting to know what I am thinking. I really want to weep. I had aspired to this sort of relationship, and now I have it. Allendy is poised, powerful, but I have upset him. I have got him to love me first, to betray his love. If this is joy, I don't want it. He is aware of my reaction. "This seems tame to you?" There is only his body to fascinate me. He is the unknown.

Eduardo, to whom I pour out this story, is glad I am moving towards Allendy. Both of them hate Henry.

Still, I want Henry tonight, my love, my husband, whom I am going to betray soon with as much sorrow as I felt when I betrayed Hugo. I crave to love wholly, to be faithful. I love the groove in which my love for Henry has been running. Yet I am driven by diabolical forces outside of all grooves.

Hugo is being greatly helped and strengthened by Allendy. He is beginning to love him, because there is in him a certain element of homosexuality.

Allendy is now a devil god directing all our lives. Last night as Hugo talked I could observe Allendy's deft and beautiful influence. I laughed riotously when Hugo said Allendy had told him I needed to be dominated. Hugo answered, "Yes, but that is easy. Anaïs is Latin and so pliable." Allendy must have smiled. Then Hugo comes home and throws himself on me with a new savagery, and I enjoy myself, oh, I enjoy myself. It seems to me that at this moment I am blessed with three wonderful men and quite able to love all three.

I suppose only a scruple keeps me from enjoying them. I wish Allendy were more forceful. He submits to women. He liked my aggressivity in our sexual games. His first sexual experience was a passive one when he was sixteen and an older woman made love to him.

I went back to see him with great impatience, trembling now with cold, now with fever. We have discarded analysis. We talked about Eduardo, Hugo, astrology. I asked him to come and see me, but he feels he cannot yet because of his analysis of Hugo. We laughed together about the domination question. I like the way he caresses me. He makes none of Henry's obscene gestures, yet I feel the man whose planetary symbol is the Bull. I like it when we kiss standing up and I am made to feel small in his arms. He knows me better than I know him. I am baffled by his enigmatic character. I told him that I trusted him blindly, that we should just let things happen. I refused to analyze. This, he understood.

From his house I went to a café on the corner, where I had asked Henry to meet me. Before I saw Allendy, I talked with Eduardo. And at eight-thirty I agreed to meet Hugo. When I saw Henry, I felt estranged from him. I hated my capriciousness.

Now I must keep secrets from Henry, and I can no longer confide everything to Allendy because we are man and woman with passion growing between us. I have lost a father! I cannot tell him I still love Henry. Shall I try to be altogether truthful with Henry?

Hugo plays his guitar tonight while I write and draws me to him with a new violence, roused by analysis. He has been writing profusely in his journal and talking expansively, and, at last, interestingly.

Eduardo does not believe my confidences about Allendy. He thinks we have planned to save him by arousing his jealousy—my beloved pathological child, Eduardo, whom I will love in a certain way eternally. The only time we are happy together is when we retrogress to a magical sphere of beauty. He has wiped our sexual hours from his memory, but not my offense. He dreams that I will one day go to him and crawl on my knees, so that he can make me suffer for flaunting Henry before him.

He fights me blindly, furiously, reproaching me for the night we went out to dance, for my trying to force him to be alive. At the same time his jealousy is obvious, and he shows Allendy a note in which I tell him I love him and will always love him, in a strange, mystical fashion.

I rush to Allendy for help, because my apparent desire for Eduardo was expressed merely to efface the offense he cannot bear. I wanted him to have the last word, to feel that he had refused me, because he needs to feel his strength. But when Allendy shows me the tenderest, most protective love, I rebel against it. He wants to postpone personal intimacy for the sake of the analysis he feels I still need. As I fight off analysis, I betray exactly what he suspects: that I require extravagant, passionate demonstrations of love, not tenderness or protection. He has sensed that I want his love as a trophy, not for his very own self. Yet as soon as I write these words, I know they are not entirely true.

I leave him completely shattered. And today I receive my true love, Henry, with great joy, and ardent commingling. How we flash! And then I realize I can only love fully when I have confidence. I am sure of Henry's love, and so I abandon myself.

Then Henry tells me, because he has been jealous and worried, that he has read about those hysterical women who are capable of loving two or three men profoundly at the same time. Is this what I am?