Winter of artifice; three novelettes

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

WIIVTER

OF ARTIFICE

three novelettes bj^ anais nin

WITH ENi:il/lVI\l-S IIV lA^ HIIUH

AlAIV SHALLOW

Stellu

STELLA sat in a small, dark room and watched her own figure acting on tlie screen. Stella watched her "double" moving in the light, and she did not recognize her. She almost hated her. Her first reaction was one of revolt, of rejection. This image was not she. She repudiated it. It was a work of artifice, of lighting, of stage setting.

The shock she felt could not be explained by the obvious difference between her daily self to which she purposely brought no enhancement and the screen image which was illuminated. It was not only that the eyes were enlarged and deepened, that the long eyelashes played like some Oriental latticework around them and intensified the interior light. The shock came from some violent contrast between Stella's image of herself and the projected self she could not recognize at all. To begin with, she had always seen herself in her own interior mirror, as a child woman, too small. And then this little bag of poison she carried within, the poison of melancholy and dissatisfaction she always felt must be apparent in her coloring, must produce a grey tone, or brown (the colors she wore in preference to others, the sackcloth robes of punishment). And the paralyzing fears, fear of love, fear of people coming too near (nearness brings wounds), invading her — her tensions and stage frights in the face of love. . . The first kiss for example, that first kiss which was to transport her, dissolve her, which was to swing her upward into the only paradise on earth. . . that first kiss of

which she had been so frightened that at the moment of the miracle, out of panic, nerves, from her dehcately shaped stomach came dark rumbhng Kke some long-sleeping volcano becoming active.

Whereas the image on the screen was completely washed of the coloring and tones of sadness. It was imponderably hght, and moved always with such a flowering of gestures that it was like the bloom and flowering of nature. This figure moved with ease, with ilhmitableness towards others, in a dissolution of feeling. The eyes opened and all the marvels of love, all its tonahties and nuances and multiplicities poured out as for a feast. The body danced a dance of receptivity and response. The hair undulated and swung as if it had breathing pores of its own, its own currents of life and electricity, and the hands preceded the gesture of the body like some slender orchestra leader's baton unleashing a symphony.

This was not the grey-faced child who had run away from home to become an actress, who had known hunger and limitations and obstacles, who had not yet given herself as she was giving herself on the screen. . . .

And the second shock was the response of the people.

They loved her.

Sitting next to her, they did not see her, intent on loving the woman on the screen.

Because she was giving to many what most gave to the loved one. A voice altered by love, desire, the lips forming a smile of open tenderness. They were permitted to witness the exposure of being in a moment of high feeling, of tenderness, indulgence, dreaming, abandon, sleepiness, mischievousness, which was only uncovered in moments of love and intimacy.

They received these treasures of a caressing glance, a unique to-

nality and voice, an intimate gesture by which we are enchanted and drawn to the one we love. This openness they were sharing was the miraculous openness and revelation which took place only in love, and it caused a current of love to flow between the audience and the woman on the screen, a current of gratitude. . . . Then this response moved like a searchlight and found her, smaller, less luminous, less open, poorer, and like some diminished image of the other, but it flowed around her, identified her. The audience came near her, touched her, asked for her signature. And she hung her head, drooped, could not accept the worship. The woman on the screen was a stranger to her. She did not see any analogy, she saw only the violent contrast which only reinforced her conviction that the screen image was illusory, artificial, artful. She was a deceiver, a pretender. The woman on the screen went continually forward, carried by her story, led by the plot loaned to her. But Stella, Stella herself was blocked over and and over again by inner obstacles.

What Stella had seen on the screen, the figure of which she had been so instantaneously jealous, was the free Stella. What did not appear on the screen was the shadow of Stella, her demons, doubt and fear. And Stella was jealous. She was not only jealous of a more beautiful woman, but of a free woman. She marvelled at her own movements, their flow and ease. She marvelled at the passionate giving that came like a flood from her eyes, melting everyone, an act of osmosis. And it was to this woman men wrote letters and this woman they fell in love with, courted.

They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.

No metallic eyes or eyes of crystal as in other women, but liquid, throwing a mist dew and vapor. No definite smile but a hovering, evanescent, uncapturable smile which set off all pursuits. An air of the unformed, waiting to be formed, an air of eluding, waiting to be crystallized, an air of evasion, waiting to be catalyzed. Indefinite contours, a wavering voice capable of all tonalities, tapering to a whisper, an air of flight waiting to be captured, an air of turning comers perpetually and vanishing, some quality of matter that calls for an imprint, a carving, this essence of the feminine on which men could impose any desire, which awaited fecundation, which invited, lured, appealed, drew, ensorcelled by its seeming incompleteness, its hazy mysteries, its rounded edges.

The screen Stella with her transparent wax face, changing and changeable, promising to meet any desire, to mould itself, to respond, to invent if necessary... so that the dream of man like some sharp instrument knew the moment had come to imprint his most secret image... The image of Stella mobile, receiving the wish, the desire, the image imposed upon it.

She bought a very large, very spacious Movie Star bed of white satin.

It was not the bed of her childhood, which was particularly small because her father had said she was a pixie and she would never grow taller.

It was not the student bed on which she had slept during the years of poverty before she became a well-known actress.

It was the bed she had dreamed and placed in a setting of

grandeur, it was the bed that her screen self had often been placed in, very wide and very sumptxious and not lilce her at all. And together with the bed she had dreamed a room of mirrors, and very large perfume bottles and a closet full of hats and rows of shoes, and the white rug and setting of a famous screen ac-tress, altogether as it had been dreamed by so many women. And finally she had them all, and she lived among them without feeUng that they belonged to her, that she had the stature and the assurance they demanded. The large bed ... she slept in it as if she were sleeping in a screen story. Uneasily. And not until she found a way of slipping her small body away from the splendor, satin, space, did she sleep well: by covering her head.

And when she covered her head she was back in the small bed of her childhood, back in the small space of the little girl who was afraid.

The hats, properly perched on stands as in all women's dreams of an actress wardrobe, were never taken down. They required such audacity. They demanded that a role be played to its maximum perfection. So each time she had reached into the joyous hat exhibit, looked at tlie treasured hats, she took again the httle skull cap, the unobtrusive page and choir-boy cap.

The moment when her small hand hesitated, lavishing even a caress over the arrogant feather, the challenged upward tilts, the regal velvets, the labyrinthian veils, the assertive gallant ribbons, the plumage and decorations of triumph, was it doubt which reached for the tiny skull cap of the priest, choir boy and scholar?

Was it doubt which threw a suspicious glance over the shoes she had collected for their courage, shoes intended to walk the most entrancing and dangerous paths? Shoes of assurance and daring

exploration, shoes for new situations, new steps, new places. All shined and polished for variety and change and adventure, and then each day rebuked, left like museum pieces on their shelves while she took the familiar and slightiy worn ones that would not impose on her feet too large a role, too great an undertaking, shoes for the familiar route to the studio, to the people she knew well, to the places which held no surprises....

Once when Stella was on the stage acting a love scene, which was taking place after a scene in a snowstorm, one of the flakes of artificial snow remained on the wing of her small and delicate nose. And then, during the exalted scene, the woman of warm snow whose voice and body seemed to melt into one's hands, the dream of osmosis, the dream of every lover, to find a substance that wiU confound with yours, dissolve, and yield and incorporate and become indissoluble — aU during this scene there lay the snowflake catching the light and flashing signals of gently humorous inap-propriateness and misplacement. The snowflake gave the scene an imperfection which touched the heart and brought all the feelings of the watchers to converge and rest upon that infintely moving absurdity of the misplaced snowflake.

If Stella had known it she would have been crushed. The lightest of her defects, weighing no more than a snowflake, which touched the human heart as only fallibility can touch it, aroused Stella's self-condemnation and weighed down upon her soul with the oppressive weight of all perfectionism.

At times the woman on the screen and the woman she was every day encountered and fused together. And those were the moments when the impetus took its flight in full opulence and reached plenitude. They were so rare that she considered them peaks inaccessible to daily living, impossible to attain continuously.

But what killed them was not the altitude, the rarefied intensity of them. What killed them for her was that they remained unanswerable. It was a moment human beings did not feel together or in rhythm. It was a moment to be felt alone. It was the solitude that was unbearable.

Whenever she moved forward she fell into an abysm.

She remembered a day spent in full freedom by the sea with Bruno. He had fallen asleep late and she had slipped away for a swim. All through the swimming she had the impression of swimming into an ocean of feeling — because of Bruno she would no longer move separately from this great moving body of feeling undulating with her which made of her emotions an illimitable symphonic joy. She had the marvellous sensation of being a part of a vaster world and moving with it because of moving in rhythm with another being.

The joy of this was so intense that when she saw him approaching she ran towards him wildly, joyously. Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue. Without hurt to her body, but with immeasurable hurt to her feelings.

Bruno had never seen her on the screen. He had seen her for the first time at a pompous reception where she moved among the other women like a dancer among pedestrians and distinguished herself by her mobility, by her voice which trembled and wavered, by her little nose which wrinkled when she smiled, her lips which shivered, the foreign accent which gave a hesitancy to her phrases as if she were about to make a portentous revelation, and by her hands which vibrated in the air.

He saw her in reality, yet he did not see Stella but the dream of Stella. He loved instantly a woman without fear, without doubt, and his nature, which had never taken flight, could now do so with her. He saw her in flight. He did not sense that a nature such as hers could be paralyzed, frozen with fear, could retreat, could regress, negate, and then in extreme fear, could also turn about and destroy. For Stella this love had been born under the zodiacal sign of doubt. For Bruno, under the sign of faith.

In a setting of opulence, a setting of such elegance that it had required the wearing of one of the museum hats, the one with the regal feather, from two opposite worlds they came: Stella consumed with a hunger for love, and Bruno by the emptiness of his life.

As Stella appeared among the women, what struck Bruno was that he was seeing for the first time an animated woman. He felt caught in her current, carried. Her rhythm was contagious. He felt instantaneous obedience to her movement.

At the same time he felt wounded. Her eyes had pierced some region of his being no eyes had ever touched before. The vulnerable Bruno was captured, his moods and feelings henceforth determined, woven into hers. From the first moment they looked at each other it was determined that all she said would hurt liim but that

she could instantly heal him by moving one inch nearer to him. Then the hurt was instantly healed by the odor of her hair or the light touch of her hand on him.

An acute sense of distance was immediately established, such as Bruno had never known before to exist between men and women. A slight contradiction (and she loved contradiction) separated him from her and he suffered. And this suffering could only be abated by her presence and would be renewed as soon as they separated.

Bruno was discovering that he was not complete or autonomous.

Nor did Stella promise him completeness, nearness. She had the changing quahty of dream. She obeyed her own oscillations. What came into being between them was not a marriage but an interplay where notliing was ever fixed. No planetary tensions, chartered and mapped and measured.

Her movements were of absolute abandon, yieldingness, and then at the smallest sign of lethargy or neglect, complete withdrawal and he had to begin courtship anew. Every day she could be won again and lost again. And the reason for her flights and departures, her breaks from him, were obscure and mysterious to him.

One night when they had been separated for many days, she received a telegram that he would visit her for a whole night. For her this whole night was as long, as portentous, as deep as a whole existence. She dwelt on every detail of it, she improvised upon it, she constructed and imagined and lived in it completely for many days. This was to be their marriage.