Trapeze. Anais Nin
“When we amalgamate our libraries we shall have a system. I don’t think certain books should be mixed together.” At times he calls me twice a day. He calls me at midnight sometimes, when I am asleep.
I fear his adolescent Don Juanism, his need to charm and conquer, his pleasure in being liked. He teases me. And I feel him react to every pretty woman as he reacts to flowers, trees, music, skies—with enthusiasm. Yet I feel so fortunate to be deeply loved by him, that I want to have faith and courage. Great lovers never trust each other. I imagine him as impetuous as he was with me. He imagines me, no doubt, as impetuously responsive to others as I was with him. Strange life, strange boy, too. Few understand his whims and fancies as I do. Few, perhaps none, understand that his compassion for others means he needs compassion himself. He is vulnerable and requires care and warmth.
Every trip is an adventure, because we explore new realms of love. This one came after his final examination at UCLA when we knew we would not see each other for a week or ten days, and I suggested traveling with him to his summer job in Colorado. At the last minute I teased him: “Perhaps I won’t come.” And then he became anxious and fully aware of how much he wanted me to come. So again Cleo is waiting at the door and we are off.
The first night in Las Vegas, in the little motel room, our caresses became electrical and feverish, wild. He fell asleep murmuring: “The desert is good for us.”
Our lovemaking was like the desert heat, the hair-fine desert flowers, the sharp smells and the hot and warmed-toned sand.
Second night: again the hunger and fever.
Third day: we stopped by a river and took our clothes off. In the water he took me, floating and swaying, cool, lying on the shallow edge, and then he planted a tiny poplar tree by the place. So small and fragile, on the river’s edge, and I was afraid it would be carried away. Our bodies, our moods, our fevers, seem to fight for permanency. His acts moved me, like tender rituals. A poplar tree planted where we loved each other. I laughed and said, “I have met Pan.” I always wanted to meet Pan. He was wonderful. He came out of the river and took me. “You’re a water sprite,” he said.
Again a river. A very wide and wild one, the Colorado. Ice cold. But as we came out the sun was warm and Rupert bent me down on the sand and took me. But this time the cruel green flies stung us while we made love.
At dawn his soft, full mouth on my cheek. Before he opens his eyes he turns to embrace me.
Depression the last day. Cleo broke down. The wild and beautiful voyage was over. He put me on a bus, and although he had said, “This time you’re not unhappy, this time you know it will be a short separation,” I felt pain, pain at leaving him. When I arrived in Hollywood, in my room, I had the feeling of something torn from my body, this painful emptiness, his vivid face, his eagerness, his swiftness, his voice, his telephone calls at night. His warm, lithe body so kneaded with mine. The sensation of his slender body like a vine, all tangled with mine. Often during the trip he told me what kind of place he wanted me to take in San Francisco. How he would paint it, fix it up.
LOS ANGELES, JUNE 26, 1948
Dream: Bill is there. But there is an older woman, severe looking, who is always watching him like a nurse or a governess. She is without pity, never leaves us alone. I try to soften her by telling her Bill and I have been separated for two years and want to talk to each other, but she says she has been told to watch over us. Finally Bill and I manage to come close, physically, but he uses a red gel and we are not happy.
I think of Gonzalo as dead—the Gonzalo I loved is dead. The one I knew at the end, without illusion, I did not love. People create an illusion together and then it is disintegrated by reality.
So I am now writing a book about Gonzalo as he was and I began simply and humanly. It is my last act of love. It is the monument that he will not be able to destroy as he destroyed our life together.
Of the fragments I did, only a few survive. Nothing of what I wrote in Acapulco. Out of hundred pages only twenty are good. I am only beginning now to work seriously. I am lonely; I am hungry for Chiquito. It is a difficult moment. I have acquired a mood of economy, having spent lavishly and now atoning. I eat plainly and frugally. A discipline. An enforced asceticism. Bill is coming to visit soon. I do not want to yield to him physically. I want to be true to Rupert.
The feminine desire to espouse the faith of those I love, as I espoused my father’s and then my mother’s, then Hugo’s. I only swerved from each as my love changed. I swerved from admiration of my father’s values to those of my mother’s, from my mother to Hugo, Hugo to Henry, Henry to Gonzalo (with ramifications of each in minor terms). The curious fact is that I have returned to Hugo by way of Bill and Rupert, who are Hugo’s sons, physically, in build and race (Irish, Welsh, English), mentally and emotionally, men of responsibility and of certain repressions and rigidities in conflict with their emotional and wild natures, men of aristocracy and of certain conventionalism of principle, of kindness, of nobility and honesty. Quite far from Henry and Gonzalo, who were completely neurotic, false primitives, twisted men of nature.
Rupert is more like Hugo than any of them, except that in temperament he has less control over his natural impulses, but equal guilt and control intermittently, which causes a rhythm of expansion and contraction alternately.
At fifty, Rupert will be more like Hugo than like Henry or Gonzalo, except for the Don Juanism, which he has in common with Henry. But Rupert is a man of love, and Henry was not. With his great beauty he could have been narcissistic, pampered, beloved by all women and given everything, protection, wealth. But instead he remained sincere.
There was masochism in my relationship with Henry and Gonzalo, and their brutality and violence may have seemed like necessary elements of primitive life, but in my life today there is an aliveness of emotion, a keenness of sensation that does not need to seek danger, pain or violence to feel its aliveness.
LOS ANGELES, JUNE 27, 1948
In spite of all my machinations I cannot avoid these abysms in which I find myself as in Acapulco, without Rupert and without Hugo, and lonely. Alone with my writing. Alone at night. And never resigned, never able to live like this. I feel depressed, invaded by the past because my work forces me to remember, because it is the source of my stories, my life. If only I could always create out of the present, but the present is sacred to me, to be lived, to be passionately absorbed, but not transfigured into fiction.
The alchemy of fiction is for me an act of embalming. Bill, having been subjected to this process because of his two years in Korea, has lost a good deal of his human reality. What will I feel when I see him? What a hopeless relationship, due to his subjection to his parents, his childishness, his fears and submissions, guilts. What will he make of his life? Such a selfish love! He has never once written me when I asked him to, answered my cables when I wanted to visit him, never answering a need, complete passivity. And when he was staying with Frances Brown, if I called him up to ask him to come, he would rebel. All the rebellions he did not dare at home he dared with me.
Chiquito. When I came in February for our birthdays he said, “Friends have asked me: ‘How old is Anaïs?’ I had to say I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“Guess.”
“From all you have told me, not from your appearance, I would say thirty-two or thirty-three. If you said less I would believe it. But if you say more I won’t believe it.”
He seemed anxious as he looked at me. I laughed. At first I said nothing, but I assented to his guess and added a year or two—thirty-five. And we celebrated his twenty-nine years and my thirty-five gaily. I laughed at my fear, my tragic fear of discovery.
What makes me feel the right to love him is that he was hurt by his first love and by his second. The first was physically good but emotionally and intellectually bad for him (“She was stupid and boring—just a beautiful girl, that’s all”) and the second, hard and selfish. I knew I could love him better. He is so vulnerable, so easily hurt, so susceptible, so easily harmed by criticism. He needs reassurance, warmth, understanding. He is often inarticulate,