The Winter of Artifice

LILITH

I am waiting for him. I have waited for him for twenty years. He is coming to-day.

I have almost grown old waiting. Will he be old?

This glass bowl with the glass fish and the glass ship—it has been the sea for me and the ship which carried me away from him after he abandoned me. Why have I loved ships so deeply, why have I always wanted to sail away from this world? Why have I always dreamed of flight, of departure?

To-day this past from which I have struggled to escape strikes me like a whip. But to-day I can bear the lash of it because he is coming and I know that the circle of empty waiting will close.

How well I remember our home near the sea, the villa which was in ruins. I am nine years old. I arrive there with my mother and two brothers. My father is standing behind a window, watching. His face is pale, he does not seem to be happy to see us. I feel that he does not want us, that he does not want me. His anger seems to be directed against all of us, but it touches me more acutely, as if it were directed entirely against me. We are not wanted, why I do not understand. My mother says to him: “It will good for Lilith here.” There is no smile on his face. He does not seem to notice that I am wasted by fever, that I am hungry for a smile.

There is never a smile on his face except when there are visitors, except when there is music and talk. When we are alone in the house there is always war: great explosions of anger, hatred, revolt. War. War at meals, war over our heads when my brothers and I are left in bed at night, war in the room under our feet when we are playing. War. War…

In the closed study, or in the parlor, there was always a mysterious activity. Music, rehearsals, visitors, laughter. I saw my father always in movement, always alert, tense, either passionately gay or passionately angry. When the door opened my father appeared—luminous. incandescent. A vital passage, even when he passed from one room to another. A gust of wind. A mystery. Not a reality like my mother with her healthy red cheeks, her appetite, her frank, natural laughter.

Never any serenity, never any time for caresses, for softness. Tension always. A life ripped by dissension. Even while we were playing the dark fury of their perpetual warring hung over us like a shadow. A constant uneasiness, a continual mystery, blows and threats and curses and recriminations. Never a moment of complete joy. Aware always of the battles that were about to explode.

One day there was a scene of such violence that I was terrified. An immense, irrational terror overwhelmed me. My mother was goading my father to such anger that I thought he would kill her. My father’s face was blue-white. I began to scream. I screamed until they became alarmed. For a few days there was an interval of quiet. A truce. A pretense of peace.

The walls of my father’s library were covered with books. Often I stole into the library and I read the books which I found there, books which I did not understand. Within me there was a well of secret thoughts which I could not express, which perhaps I might have formulated if some one had leaned over them with tenderness. The one person who might have aided me terrified me. My father’s eyes were always cold, critical, unbelieving. He would not believe the drawings I showed him were mine. He thought I had traced them. He did not believe that I had written the poems which were handed to him. He thought I had copied them. He flew into a rage because he could not find the books from which he imagined I had copied my poems and drawings.

He doubted everything about me, even my illnesses. In the train once, going to Berlin where he was to give a concert, I had such an ear ache that I began to weep… “If you don’t stop crying and go to sleep,” he said, “I’ll beat you.” I stuffed my ear under the pillow so that he wouldn’t hear my sobs. I sobbed all the way to Berlin. When we got there they discovered that I had an abscess in my ear.

Another time he was taken down with an attack of appendicitis. My mother was tending him, fussing over him, running about anxiously. He lay there very pale in the big bed. I came from the street where I had been playing and I told my mother that I was in pain. Immediately my father said: “Don’t pay any attention to her, she’s just acting. She’s just imitating me.” But I did have an attack of appendicitis. I had to be taken to the hospital and operated on. My father, on the other hand, had recovered. He was in bed only three days.

Such cruelty! I ask myself—was he really cruel, or was it mere selfishness? Was he just a big child who could not bear to have a rival, even in the person of his own daughter? I do not know. I am waiting for him now. I want to tell him everything. I want to hear what he has to say. I want to hear him say that he loves me. I don’t know why I should love him so much. I can’t believe that he meant to be so cruel. I love him.

Because he was so critical, so severe, so suspicious of me, I became secretive and lying. I would never say what I really thought. I was afraid of him. I lied like an Arab. I lied to elude his stern glances, his cold, menacing blue eyes. I invented another world, a world of make-believe, of illusion, of games, of comedies. I tyrannized over my two brothers. I taught them games, I amused them, acted for them, enchanted them, tortured them. I was a spitfire and they loved me. They never deserted me, even for a moment. They were simple, honest, frank. I complicated everything, even the games we played.

In Berlin, when I was five years old, I ran away from home. I packed a croissant and a dress and I ran away. There was a seven year old boy waiting for me round the corner. His name was Heinrich.

I was a pale, sickly child. The doctor in Berlin had said: “She must live in her native climate. Take her back.” But there was no money for that. My youngest brother had just been born. There was no money in the house—except for books and music, for a fur-lined coat, for the cologne water which my father had to sprinkle over his handkerchiefs, for the silk shirts which he demanded when he went on his concert tours.

At the villa near the sea I lie in bed and weep all night without knowing why. But there is a garden attached to the villa. A beautiful garden in which one can get lost. I sit by the big Gothic window studded with colored stones and I look out through a prismatic-colored stone in the centre of the window; I sit there for hours at a stretch gazing upon this mysterious other world. Colors. Deformations. Trees that are ruby-colored. Orange skies. I get the feeling that there are other worlds, that one might escape from this one which is so full of misery. I think a great deal about this other world.

About my father there is an aureole of fragrance, of immaculateness, of elegance. His clothes are never wrinkled, he wears clean linen every day and the fur collar on his coat is wonderful to caress. Mother is dowdy, busy, bustling, maternal. Mother is never elegant.

Since he often leaves us to go on concert tours we have become so used to father’s departures that we barely cease playing to embrace him. I remember now the day he was leaving to go on tour. He was standing at the door, elegant, aristocratic. He looked the same as always. Suddenly, moved by an acute premonition, I threw myself on him and clung to him passionately. “Don’t go, father! Don’t leave me!” I begged. I had to be torn away. I wept so violently that my father was startled. Even now I can feel again the effort my mother made to loosen my clutch. I can still see the hesitancy in my father’s face. I begged and implored him to stay. I clung to him desperately, my fingers knotted in his clothes. I remember the effort he made to wrench himself loose and how he walked swiftly off without once looking back. I remember too that my mother was surprised by my despair. She couldn’t understand what had possessed me to behave as I did.

Since that day I have not seen my father. Twenty years have passed. He is coming to-day. I am thirty years old…

We entered New York harbor, my mother, my two brothers and I, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. The Spaniards aboard the ship were terrified; some of them were kneeling in prayer. They had reason to be terrified—the bow of the ship had been struck by lightning. When finally we came alongside the pier a group of newsboys clambered up the gangplank shouting “Extra! Extra!” We learned that war had been declared. I saw the passengers reading the papers excitedly. I knew that something terrible had happened, but I was indifferent, I had no desire to read about the war. I busied myself making a last minute entry in my diary, the diary which I had begun when we left Barcelona.

I had intended to send my father the first volume of my diary as soon as it was finished. It was a monologue, or dialogue, dedicated to him, inspired by the superabundance of thoughts and feelings caused by the pain of leaving him. With the sea between us I felt that at least I might be able to reveal to him my innermost thoughts. that I might be able to reveal to him with absolute sincerity the great love I bore him, as well as my sadness and my yearning.

We arrived in New York with huge wicker baskets, a cage full of birds, a violin case and no money. I carried my diary in a basket. I was timid, withdrawn. I caught only fleeting patches of this new reality surrounding me. At the pier there were aunts and cousins awaiting us. The negro porters threw themselves on our belongings. I remember vividly how I clung to my brother’s violin case. I wanted everybody to know that I was an artist.

Entering the subway I observe immediately what a strange place New York is—the staircases move up and down by themselves. And in the train hundreds of mouths chewing, masticating. My little brother asks: “Are Americans ruminants?”

I am eleven years old. My mother is absent most of the day searching for work. There are socks to darn and dishes to wash. I have to bathe and dress my brothers. I have to amuse them, aid them with their lessons. The days are full of bleak effort in which great sacrifices are demanded of all of us. Though I experience a tremendous relief in helping my mother, in serving her faithfully, I feel nevertheless that the color and the fragrance has gone out of our life. When I hear music, when I hear laughter and talk in the room where my mother gives singing lessons, I am saddened by a feeling of something lost.

And so, little by little. I shut myself up within the walls of my diary. I hold long conversations with myself, through the diary. I talk to my diary, address it by name, as if it were a living person, my other self perhaps. Looking out the window which gives on our ugly backyard I imagine to myself that I am looking at parks, castles, golden grilles, and exotic flowers. Within the covers of the diary I create another world wherein I tell the truth, in contrast to the multiple lies which I spin when I am conversing with others, as for instance telling my playmates that I had travelled all around the world, describing to them the places which I had read about in my father’s library.

The yearning for my father becomes a long, continuittle. plaint. Every page contains pleas to him, invocations to God to reunite us—hours and hours of suffocating moods, of dreams and reveries, of feverish restlessness, of morbid, sombre memories and longings. I cannot bear to listen to music, especially the arias my mother sings—”Ever since the day,” “Some day he’ll come,” etc. She seems to choose only the songs which will remind me of him.

I feel crippled, lost, transplanted, rebellious. I am alone a great deal. My mother is healthy, exuberant, full of plans for the future. When I am moody she chides me. If I confess to her she laughs at me. She seems to doubt the sincerity of my feelings. She attributes my moods to my over-developed imagination, or else she lays it to my blood. When she is angry she shouts: “Mauvaise graine, va!” She is often angry now, but not with us. She is obliged to fight for us every day of her life. It requires all her courage, all her buoyancy and optimism, to face the world. New York is hostile, cold, indifferent.

We are immigrants, and we are made to feel it. Even on Christmas Eve we are left alone—she has to sing at the church in order to earn a few pennies.

The great crime, she makes us feel, is our resemblance to our father. Each flare of temper, each tragic outburst is severely condemned. Even my paleness serves to remind her of him. “He too always looked pale and ready to die, but it was all nonsense,” she says. Every day she adds a little touch to the image we have kept of him. My younger brother’s rages, his wildness, his destructiveness, all this comes from Father. My imagination, my exaggerations, my fantasies, my lies, my beautiful edifice of lies, these too spring from my father.

It is true. Everything springs from him, even the lies which originated from the books I had read in his library. When I told the children at school that I had once travelled through Russia in a covered wagon it was not a lie either, because in my mind I had made this journey through snow-covered Russia time and time again. The cold of New York revived the memories of my father’s books, of the journeys I longed to take with him whenever I saw him go away. To face the cold of New York required a superhuman effort. Standing in the snow in Central Park feeding the pigeons I wanted to die. The dread of facing the snow and frost each morning paralyzed me. Our school was only around the corner, but I had not the courage to leave the house. My mother had to ask the negro janitor to drag me to school. “Po’ thing,” he would say, “you ought to live down south.” He would lend me his woollen gloves and slap me to get warm…

Only in the diary could I reveal my true self, my true feelings. What I really desired was to be left alone with my diary and my dreams of my father. In solitude I was happy. My head was seething with ideas. I described every phase of our life in detail, minute, childish details which seem ridiculous and absurd now, but which were intended to convey to my father the need that we felt for his presence. Though I detested New York I painted a picture of it in glowing terms, hoping that it would entice him to come. And when at last I had finished the first volume of my diary, when I had wrapped it tenderly and addressed it to him in my own hand, my mother informed me sorrowfully that it was useless to send it to him because mail from America would never reach Paris. She bade me wait until the war was concluded.

And so once again I am thrust back into my world of illusion. When, in order to amuse my brothers, I impersonate Marie-Antoinette as she marches proudly to the guillotine, I stand on a chariot of chairs with a white lace cap and I weep real tears. I weep over the martyrdom of Marie-Antoinette because I am aware of my own martyrdom. A million times my hair will turn white overnight and the crowd jeer at me. A million times I will lose my throne, my husband, my children, and my life. At eleven years of age I am searching, in the lives of the great, for analogies to the drama and events of my own life which I feel is destined to be shattered at every turn of the road. In acting the roles of other personages I feel that I am piecing together the fragments of my shattered life. Only in the fever of creation can I recreate my own lost life. When in the thunderous voice of Marat I demand a hundred thousand heads I am demanding the vengeance which later I will take with my own hands.

There is a passage in this early diary wherein I say that I would like to relive my life in Spain. It amazes me now when I reread it. Already, at that early age, I was bemoaning the irreversibility of life. Already I was aware of how the past dies. I reexamine what I had written about New York for my father because I feel that I have not done justice to it. I watch each minute of the day as I live so that nothing will be lost. I regret the minutes passing. I weep without knowing why, since I am young and have not yet known any real suffering. But, without being fully aware of it, I had already experienced my greatest sorrow, the irreparable loss of my father. I did not know it then, as indeed most of us never know when it is that we experience the full measure of joy, or of sorrow. But our feelings penetrate us like a poison of undetectable nature. We have sorrows of which we do not know the origin or name.

I had never openly expressed my love to my father. He thought me proud and isolate, and strange and wayward. My mother regarded me as an actress. Neither of them believed in me, neither of them took me into their confidence. And it was so terribly necessary that I have some one to confide in, some one who would listen and silently assent, or silently pass judgment on my doings. But there was no one.

I remember a night before Christmas when, in utter desperation, I began to believe that my father was coming, that he would arrive Christmas Day. Even though it was that very day I had received a postcard from him, even though I was obliged to admit to myself that Arcachon was indeed too far away for my hopes to be realized, still a sense of the miraculous impelled me to expect what was humanly impossible. I got down on my knees and I prayed to God to perform a miracle. I looked for my father all Christmas Day, and again on my birthday, a month or so later. To-day he will come. Or to-morrow. Or the next day. Each disappointment was baffling and terrifying to me.

To-day he is coming. I am sure of it. But how can I be sure? I am standing on the edge of a crater.

My true God was my father. At communion it was my father I received, and not God. I closed my eyes and swallowed the white bread with blissful tremors. I embraced my father in holy communion. My exaltation fused into a semblance of holiness. I aspired to saintliness in order to conceal the secret love which I guarded so jealously in my diary. The voluptuous tears at night when I prayed to God, the joy without name when I stood in his presence, the inexplicable bliss at communion, because then I talked with my father and I kissed him.

I worshipped him so passionately that I grew old and the form of his image grew blurred. But I had not lost him. His image was buried deep in the most mysterious regions of my being. On the surface there remained the image created by my mother—his egoism, his neglectfulness, his irresponsibility, his love of luxury. When for a time my immense yearning seemed to have exhausted itself, when it appeared that I had almost forgotten this man whom my mother described so bitterly, it was only the announcement of the fact that his image had become fluid; it ran in subterranean channels, through my blood. Consciously I was no longer aware of him; but in another way his existence was even stronger than before. Submerged, yet magically ineffaceable, he floated in my blood.

At thirteen I record in my diary that I want to marry a man who looks like the Count of Monte Cristo. Apart from the mention of black eyes it is my father’s portrait which I give: “A man so strong… with very white teeth, with a pale and mysterious face… a grave walk, a distant smile… I would like him to tell me all about his life, a very sad life, full of harrowing adventures… I would like him to be proud and haughty… to play some instrument…”

The image created by my mother, added to the blurred memories of a child, do not compose a being; yet in my haunting quest I fashioned an imagined individual whose fragments I pursued relentlessly. The blue eyes of a boy in school, the talent of a young violinist, a pale face seen in the street—these fleeting aspects of the image that was buried deep in my blood moved me to tears. To listen to music was unbearable. When my mother sang I exhausted myself in sobs.

In this record which I have faithfully kept for twenty years I speak of my diary as of my shadow, my double; I say I will only marry my double. As far as I knew this double was the diary which was full of reflections, like a mirror, which could change shape and color and serve all kinds of imaginative substitutions. This diary which I had intended to send to my father, which was to be a revelation of my love for him, became by an accident of fate a secretive thing, another wall between myself and that world which it seemed forbidden me ever to enter.

I would have liked great love and affection, confidence, openness. My father, I felt certain, would have rejected me—his standards were too severe. I wrote him once that I thought he had abandoned me because I was not an intelligent nor pretty enough daughter. I was a perpetually offended being who fancied that she was not wanted. This fear of not being wanted weighed down on me like a perpetual icy condemnation.

To-day, when he arrives, will I be able to lift my head? Will I be able to keep my head lifted, will I be able to stand the cold look in his eyes when I raise my eyes to his? Will my body not tremble with fear when I hear his voice? After twenty years I am still obsessed by the fear of him. But now I feel that it is in his power to absolve me of all fear. Perhaps it is he who will fear me. Perhaps he is coming to receive the judgment which I alone can mete out to him. To-day the circle of empty waiting will be broken. I am waiting for him to embrace me, to say with his own lips that he loves me. I have made a God of him and I have been punished. Now when he comes I want to make him a man again, to make him a human father. I do not want to fear him any longer. I do not want to write another line in my diary. I want him to smash this monument which I have erected to him and accept me in my own right. To-day when he comes I want to tear out this secret which I have kept inside me so long. It is strangling me. I want him to come and deliver me.

He is coming now. I hear his steps.

I expected the man of the photographs, the young man of the photographs. I had not tried to imagine what twenty years had done to his face.

It was not any older, there were no wrinkles in it, but there was a mask over it. His face was a mask. The skin did not match the sensitive skin of his wrists. It seemed made of earth and papier mache. It was not pure skin. There must have been a little space between it and the real face, a little partition through which the breeze could sing, and behind this mask another smile, another face, and skin like that of his wrists, white and vulnerable.

At the sight of me waiting on the doorstep he smiled, a feminine smile, and moved towards me with a neat compact grace, ease, youthfulness.

I felt unsettled. This man coming towards me did not seem at all like a father. It seemed to me that his first words were words of apology. After he had taken off his gloves, and verified by his watch that he was on time—it was very important to him to be on time—after he had kissed me and told me that I had become very beautiful, almost immediately it seemed to me that I was listening to an apology, an explanation of why he had left us. It was as if behind me there stood a judge, a tall judge whom I could not see, and to this judge my father addressed a beautifully polished speech, a marvellous speech to which I listened with admiration, for the logic was so beautiful, the smooth chain of phrases, the long and flawless story of my mother’s imperfections, of all that he had suffered, the manner in which all the facts of their life were presented, all made a perfect and eloquent pleading, addressed to a judge I could not see and with whom I had nothing to do. He had not come out free of his past. Taking out a gold-tipped cigarette and with infinite care placing it in a holder which contained a filter for the nicotine, he related the story I had heard from my mother, all with an accent of apology and defense.

I had no time to tell him that I understood that they had not been made to live together, that it was not a question of faults and defects, but of alchemy, that this alchemy had created war, that there was no one to blame or to judge but their marriage. Already my father was launched on an apology of why he had stayed all winter in the south; he did not say that he had enjoyed it, but that it had been absolutely necessary to his well-being. It seemed to me as he talked that he was just as ashamed to have left us as he was of having spent the winter in the South when he should have been in Paris giving concerts.

I waited for him to lose sight of this judge standing behind me for which I was not responsible and then, plunging into the present, into our present, I said:

“It’s scandalous to have such a young father.”

“Do you know what I used to fear?” h said. “That you might come too late to see me laughing—too late for me to have the power to make you laugh. In June when I go South again you must come with me. They will take you for my mistress, that’s certain. It will be delightful.”

I was standing against the mantelpiece. He was looking at my hands, admiring them. I jerked backwards, pushing the crystal bowl against the wall. It cracked and the water gushed forth as from a fountain, splashing all over the floor. The glass ship could no longer sail away—it was lying on its side, on the rock crystal stones.

We stood looking at the broken bowl and at the water forming a pool on the floor.

“Perhaps I’ve arrived at my port at last,” I said. “Perhaps I’ve come to the end of my wanderings. I have found you.”

“We’ve both done a lot of wandering,” he said.

“I not only played the piano in every city of the world… sometimes when I look at the map, it seems to me that even the tiniest villages could be replaced by the names of women. Wouldn’t it be funny if I had a map of women, of all the women I have known before you, of all the women I have had? Fortunately I am a musician, and my women remain incognito. When I think about them it comes out as a do or a la, and who could recognize them in a sonata? What husband would come and kill me for expressing my passion for his wife in terms of a quartet?”

When he was not smiling, his face was a Greek mask, his blue eyes enigmatic, the features sharp and wilful. He appeared cold and formal. I realized it was his mask which had terrorized me as a child. The softness came only in flashes, swift as lightning, like breaks. Unexpectedly, he broke when he smiled, the hardness broke, and the softness which came was so feminine, so exposed, giving and seducing with the beauty of the teeth, exposing a dimple which he said was not a dimple at all, but a scar from the time he had slid down the bannister.

As a child I had the obscure fear that this man could never be satisfied, by life, by human beings… by the world. Nothing but perfection would do. It was this sense of his exactingness which haunted me, an obscure awareness of his expectations which excited me to the great efforts I had made. But to-day I told myself that I had strained enough, that I wanted to rest, that I had waited a long time for it. I felt I did not want to appear before him until I was complete, and could satisfy him.

I wanted to enjoy. My life had been a long strain, one long effort to surpass myself, to create, to perfect, a desperate and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, creations, always shedding yesterday’s woman to pursue a new vision.

To-day I wanted to enjoy…

We were walking into a new world together, into a new planet, a world of transparency, where all that happened to us since that day I clung to him desperately was reduced to its essence, to a skeleton, to a silhouette. His vision and his talk were abstract; his rigorous selection acted like an intense searchlight which annihilated everything around us: the color oom, the smell of tabac blond, the warmth of the log fire, the spring sunlight showing its pale face on the studio window, the flash of his gold ring flashing his coat of arms, the immaculateness of his shirt cuffs. Everything vanished around us, the walls, the rug under our feet, the chair we sat on, the velvet pillow under my elbow, the satin rays of my dress, the orange rim of my sleeve, the orange reflections of the walls, the branches swinging before the windows, the bark of the dog, the clock ticking, the books leaning against each other, the soft backs of French books yielding under the stiff-backed English books, the indoor air like human breath and the awareness of the other air outside cooler and lighter than our breath, the lightness and swiftness of his Spanish voice, his Spanish words bowing and smiling between the French… I could only see the point he watched, the intense focussing upon the meaning of our lives, the clear outline of our patterns, and his questions. What are you to-day? What do you believe? What do you think? What do you read? What do you love? What is your music, your rhythm, your language, your vocabulary? What is your climate? What hour of the day do you love best? What are your whims? Your extravagances? Your antipathies? Who are your enemies? Who is your god? Who is your demon? What haunts you? What frightens you? What gives you courage? Whom do you love? What do you remember? What image have you of me? What have you been? Are we strangers, with twenty years between us? Does your blood obey me? Have I made you? Are you my daughter? Are you my father? Have we dreamed? Are we real? Is our life real? Is anything real? Are we here? Do I understand you?

“You are my daughter. We think the same. We laugh at the same things. I was twenty-five when you came into the world. You owe me nothing, you’ve created your self alone, but I gave you the seed.”

He was walking back and forth, the whole length of the studio, asking questions, and every answer I gave was the echo in his own soul. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Blood echoes. Yes, yes to everything. Exactly. I knew it. That is what I hoped. The same. Father and daughter. Unison. The same rhythm.

We were not talking. We were merely corroborating each other’s theories. Our phrases interlocked.

I was a woman, I had to live in a world built by the man I loved, live by his system. In the world I made alone I was lonely. I, being a woman, had to live in a man-made world, could not impose my own, but here was my father’s world, it fitted me. With him I could run through the world in seven-leagued boots. He thought and felt the same thing at the same time.

“Never knew anything but solitude,” said my father. “I never knew a woman I could take into my world.”

We did not speak of the harm we had done each other. The disease we carried in us we did not reveal. He did not know that the tragedy which had marked the first years of my life still colored it to-day. He did not know that the feeling of being abandoned was still as strong in me despite the fact that I knew it was not me who had been abandoned but my mother, that he had not really abandoned me but simply tried to save his own life. He did not know that this feeling was still so strong in me that anything which resembled abandon created a violent inner storm in me: a door closed on me too brusquely, a letter unanswered, a friend going away on a trip, the maid leaving to get married, the least mark of absent-dedness, two people talking and forgetting to include me, or some one sending greetings to some one and forgetting me.

The smallest incident could arouse an anguish as great as that caused by death, and could reawaken the pain of separation as keenly as I had experienced it the day my father had gone away.

In an effort to combat this anguish I had crowded my world richly with friends, loves and creations.

But beyond the moment of conquest there was again a desert. The joys given to me by friend, lover, or book just written, were endangered by the fear of loss. Just as some people are perpetually aware of death, I was perpetually aware of the pain of separation and the inevitability of it.

And beyond this, I also treated the world as if it were an ailing, abandoned child. I never put an end to a friendship of my own accord, I never abandoned anyone; I spent my life healing others of this fear wherever I saw it shadowed, pitying the whole world and giving it the illusion of faithfulness, durability, solidity. I was incapable of scolding, of pushing away, of cutting ties, of breaking relationships, of interrupting a correspondence, of throwing out a servant.

My father was telling me the story of the homely little governess he had made love to because otherwise she would never know what love was. He took her out in his beautiful car and made her lie on the heather just as the sun was going down so he would not have to see too much of her face. He enjoyed her happiness at having an adventure, the only one she would ever have. When she came to his room in the hotel he covered the lamp with a handkerchief, and again he enjoyed her happiness, and taught her how to do her hair, how to rouge her lips and powder her face. The adventure made her almost beautiful.

We were talking about our escapades. Skirting the periphery of our lives, maintaining ourselves there because we knew that by dwelling on our adventures, on the gestures we made without love, we saved ourselves from talking about love. We wanted to give each other the illusion of having been faithful to each other always, and of being free to devote our whole life to each other.

My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!” I was telling him about the books I read, the explorations, the voyages, the discoveries.

My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!”

I was explaining to my father that I had been exposing myself to every danger with joy, that I love risk, I love danger. It was very comical of him to frown and to ask me to take my elbows off the table as if I were a child, because I was so much older than he was; all I was telling him was so much older than his stories of perfumed countesses waiting for him in the reception room after the concerts in Poland, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Hungary. All these perfumed women with wrinkless dresses giving him silver cigarette cases. Always the same. Bathed, perfumed, manicured women. Notes. Rendez-vous. The same words exchangeNone of them leaving a memory. He couldn’t even remember their names. So I take my elbows off the table, my father, but I am so much older than you in daring…

Suddenly I stopped and asked him laughingly: “Did you ever take them to the same room, each new woman to the same room, as if you wanted each new adventure to efface the other? Or perhaps only to compare, or to desecrate?”

“I did! I did!” He said this in a tone of exultancy, as if he had discovered the most important point of resemblance between us. This little detail seemed to him to indicate a profound sameness of feeling.

“I wonder why…?”

He did not know, but the very memory of it gave him a colorful pleasure. His face colored with pleasure and laughter.

“I also liked giving the handkerchief given to me by one lover to another, lending the book belonging to one to another; I liked nothing more than to find them together in the same room, to feel the full flavor of my secrets and my treacheries.”

He forgot all about the elbows.

Love had not been mentioned yet. Yet it was love alone which obsessed us. Not music, not writing, not painting, not decorating, not costuming, but love, the orchestration of love, its metamorphosis. I was living in a furnace of love, a blaze all around. Obsessional loves, passionate loves, sensual loves, love in mystery, in darkness, in resistance, in contrast, love in fraternity, gratitude, imagination. Loving maternally, loving as the artist can love with all my senses. A passion for man, for woman, for change… Changing every day from woman to mother, lulling in my arms at night the men whom I fought and tantalized during the day.

“I do think,” he said, “that we should give up all this for the sake of each other. These women mean nothing to me. But the idea of devoting my whole life to you, of sacrificing adventure to something far more marvellous and deep, appeals so much to me…”

“But I have not been living out adventure only…”

He stopped me and said:

“You should give him up. That isn’t love at all. You know I’ve been your only great love…”

I did not want to say: “not my only great love,” but he seemed to have guessed my thought because he turned his eyes completely away from me and added: “Remember, I am an old man, I haven’t so many years left to enjoy you…”

With this phrase, which was actually untrue because he was only fifty-five years old and younger than most men of his age, he seemed to be asking me for my life, almost to be reaching out to take full possession of my life, just as he had taken my soul away with him when I was a child. It seemed to me that he wanted to take it away now again, when I was a full-blown woman. It seemed natural to him that I should have mourned his loss throughout my childhood. It was true that he was on the oad to death, drawing nearer and nearer to it; it was also true that I had loved him so much that perhaps a part of me might follow him and perish with him, just as the child of nine had followed him and perished with him. Would I die again with him? Would I follow him from year to year—his withering, his vanishing? Was my love a separate thing, or a part of his life? Would I leave the earth with him to-day? He was asking me to leave the earth to-day—and this time I could not. This time I felt that he did not have the power to take my life again in his hands. This time I felt that I would fight against locking myself in with him, giving myself up wholly. I would not die a second time.

Having been so faithful to his image as I bad been, having loved his image in other men, having pursued the men who played piano, the men who talked brilliantly, intellectuals, teachers, philosophers, doctors, every man with blue eyes, every man with an adventurous life, every Don Juan—was it not to give him my absolute love at the end? Why did I draw away, draw away and at the same moment decide to give him the illusion he wanted—but not the abdication, not the absolute.

Six silver grey valises, the scent of tabac blond, the gleam of polished nails, the wave of immaculate hands. My father leaped down from the train and already he was beginning a story. “There was a woman on the train. She sent me a message. Would I have dinner with her? Knew all about me… had sung my songs in Norway. I was too tired, with this damnable lumbago coming on, and besides, I can’t put my mind on women any longer. I can only think of my betrothed.”

In the elevator he over-tipped the boy, he asked for news of the negro’s wife who had been sick, he advised a medicine, he ordered an appointment with the hairdresser for the next day, he took stock of the weather predictions, he ordered special biscuits and a strict vegetarian diet. The fruit had to be washed with sterilized water. And was the flautist still in the neighborhood, the one who used to keep him awake?

In the room he would not let me help him unpack his bags. He was cursing his lumbago. He seemed to have a fear of intimacy, almost as if he had hidden a crime in his valises.

“This old carcass must be subjugated,” he said.

He moved like a cat. Great softness. Yet when he wanted to he could show powerful muscles. He believed in concealing one’s strength.

We walked out into the sun, he looking like a Spanish grandee. He could look straight into the sun, and the tenseness of his will when he said, for instance, “I want,” made him rigid from head to foot, like silex.

As I watched him bending over so tenderly to pick up an insect from the road in order to lay it safely on a leaf, addressing this insect in a soft whimsical tone, preaching to it about its recklessness in thus crossing a road on which so many automobiles passed, I asked myself why it was that as a child I could only remember him as a cruel person. Why could I remember no tenderness or care on his part? Nothing but fits of angerand severity of annoyance when we were noisy, of beatings, of a cold, reserved face at meals.

As I watched him playing with the concierge’s dog I wondered why I could not remember him ever sitting down to play with us; I wondered whether this conception I had of my father’s cruelty was not entirely imaginary. I could not piece together his gentleness with animals and his hardness towards his children. He lived in his world like a scientist occupied with the phenomena of nature. The ways of insects aroused his curiosity; he liked to experiment, but the phenomena which the lives of his children offered, their secrets, their perplexities, had no interest for him, or rather they disturbed him.

It was really a kind of myopia of the soul.

The day after we arrived he was unable to move from his bed. He asked me to find him a pair of pyjamas with a Russian collar; they had to be pearl-grey and soft to touch, because he could not bear coarse textures.

I set out quickly to fulfill his wish. For the moment it seemed enormously important to me that the pyjamas should have a Russian collar and be made of delicate fabric. It seemed important not to offend the regal taste of the man who was lying stiffly in bed with sad, exacting, blue eyes always clouded with discontent.

Everybody in the little shops along the seashore declared that such pyjamas had never been seen.

I came back to him with the feeling that a day in which one of my father’s desires had not been fulfilled was a day wasted.

After the pyjamas a special German medicine had to be found. Samba, the elevator man, was sent out to hunt for it. The bus driver was dispatched to get a special brand of English crackers. Paris had to be phoned to make sure the musical magazines were being forwarded. Telegrams came, letters, telephone calls, Samba perspiring, the bus man covered with dust, the German medicine, the Russian pyjamas, postpone the hairdresser, order a special menu for dinner, Samba is there any mail, will you get the newspaper, no these won’t do all, telephone the doctor, he is having dinner, the spaghetti is overdone, Samba perspiring, the elevator running up and down…

There were no other guests in the hotel—the place seemed to be run expressly for us. The waiters gave us the most minute attention—our meals were brought to the room. Mosquito nettings were installed, the furniture was changed around, his own linen sheets with large initials were placed on the bed, his silver hair brushes on the dresser, the plumber ordered to subdue a noisy water pipe, the rusty shutters were oiled, the proprietor was informed that all hotel rooms should have double doors. Noise was his greatest enemy. His nerves, as vibrant as the strings of a violin, had endowed or cursed him with uncanny hearing. A fly in the room could prevent him from sleeping. He had to put cotton in his ears in order to dull his over-sensitive hearing.

He began talking about his childhood—so vividly that I thought we were back in Spain. I could feel again the noonday heat, could hear the beaded curtains parting: footsteps on tiled floors, the cool, green shadows of shuttered rooms, women in white negligees, the smell of carnations, the holy water, the dried palms at the head of the bed, the pictures of the Vrgin in lace and satin, wicker arm chairs, the servants singing in the courtyard…

He used to read under his bed, by the light, a candle so that his father would not find him out. He had only fifty centimes a week. He had to make cigarettes out of straw. He was always hungry. He gave piano lessons to his father’s pupils, and while they played the piano with one hand, with the other hand they played… on other instruments. It went on like that—five or six lessons a day—and he never got tired. Finally he got the little girls to come without their pants, which made things easier. He cut holes in his pockets so that they could go on playing with their two free hands and nobody noticed anything amiss. He was getting more and more popular as a piano teacher.

We laughed together.

He didn’t have enough money for the Merry-go-round. His mother used to sew at night so that she could afford to rent a bicycle the next day.

He looked out of the window from his bed and saw the birds sitting on the telegraph wires—one on each wire.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll sing you the melody they make sitting up there.” And he sang it. “It’s all in the key of humor.”

“When I was a child I used to write stories in which I was always left an orphan and forced to face the world alone.”

“Did you want to get rid of me?” asked my father.

“I don’t think so. I think I only wanted to struggle with life alone. I think I suffered from pride, which prevented me from coming to you until I felt ready…”

“What happened in all those stories?”

“I met with gigantic difficulties and obstacles. I overcame them. I was handed a bigger portion of suffering than is usual—imaginary suffering. Without mother and without father I fought the world, angry seas, hunger, horrible step-parents. There were mysteries, pursuits, torture, all kinds of danger…”

“Don’t you think you’re still doing that?”

“Perhaps. Then there was another story, a story of a boat in a garden. Suddenly I was sailing down a river and I went round and round for twenty years without getting anywhere.”

“Was that because you didn’t have me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was because I was waiting to become a woman. In all the fairy tales where the child is taken away she either returns when she is twenty or the father returns to the daughter when she is twenty.”

“He waits till she gets beyond the stage of having to have her nose blown. He waits for the interesting age.”

My father’s jealousy began with the reading of my childhood diary. He observed that after two years of obsessional yearning for him I had finally exhausted my suffering and attained serenity. After serenity I had fallen in love with an Irish boy and then with a violinist. He was offended that I had not died completely, that I had not spent the rest of my life yearning for him. He did not understand that I had continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. I had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him. I had written the diary for him. I had loved him by falling in love at the age of eleven with the ship’s captain who might have taken me back to Spain. I had loved him by taking his place at my mother’s side and becoming logical and intellectual in imitation of him, not through any natural gifts for either. I had loved him by playing the father to my brothers, the husband to my mother, by giving courage, strength, by denying my feminine, emotional self. I had loved him in life creatively by writing about him.

It is true that I did not die altogether—I lived in creations. Nor did I wear black nor turn my back on men and life.

But when I became aware of his jealousy I began immediately to give him what he desired. Understanding his jealousy I began to relate the incidents of my life in a deprecatory manner, in a mocking tone, in such a way that he might feel I had not loved deeply anything or anyone but him. Understanding his desire to be exclusively loved, to be at the core of every life he touched, I could not bring myself to talk with fervor or admiration of all those I had loved or admired or enjoyed because I knew it would hurt his egoism. To be so aware of his feelings forced me into a role. I gave a color to my past which could be interpreted this way: nothing that happened before you came was of any importance… I was only marking time… Nothing ever satisfied me, deep down…

It was this absorption in the need of the other which was at the root of all the mysteries of my life—at the root of my silences, my evasions, my lies. A sensitiveness to what my father did not want to hear prevented me even from picturing the scenes I had enjoyed. I was perpetually recomposing the scene in such a way that it would bring a balm to his egoism, a lull to his jealousy.

The result was that nothing appeared in its true light and that I deformed my true self.

To-day my father, looking at me, holding my book in his hand, studying my costumes, exploring my home, studying my ideas, says: “You are an Amazon. Until you came I felt that I was dying. Now I feel renewed and strengthened.”

My own picture of my life gave him the opportunity he loved of passing judgment, an ideal judgment upon the pattern of it.

But I was so happy to have found a father, a father with a strong will, a wisdom, an infallible judgment, that I forgot for the moment everything I knew, surrendered my own certainties. I forgot my own efforts, my own wisdom. It was so sweet, so sweet to have a father, to believe that there could exist some one who was in life so many years ahead of me, and who could look back upon mine and my errors, who could guide and save me, give me strength. I relinquished my convictions just to hear him say: “In that case yu were too believing,” or “That was a wasted piece of sacrifice. Why save junk? Let the failures die. It is something in them that makes them failures.”

To have a father, the seer, the god. I found it hard to look him in the eyes. I never looked at the food he put in his mouth. It seemed to me that vegetarianism was the right diet for a divine being. I had such need to worship, to relinquish my power. It always made me feel more the woman.

I thought again of his remark—”You are an Amazon. You are a force.” I looked at myself in the mirror with surprise. Certainly not the body of an Amazon. What was it my father saw? I was underweight, so light on my feet that a caricaturist had once pictured me as having floated up to the ceiling like a balloon and everybody struggling to catch me with brooms and ladders… Not the me in the mirror—but my words, my writing, my work. Strength in creation, in life, ideas. I had proved capable of building a world for myself. Amazon! Capable of every audacity in life, but vulnerable in love…

I translated his remark to myself thus: Whenever anyone says you are they mean I want you to be! He wanted me to be an Amazon. One breast cut off as in the myth, so as to be able to use the bow and arrow. The other breast far too tender, too vulnerable. Why? Because an Amazon did not need a father. Nor a lover, nor a husband. An Amazon was a law and a world all to herself.

He was abdicating his father role. A woman-ruled world was no hardship to him, the artist, for in it he had a privileged place. He had all the sweetness of her one breast, together with all her strength. He could lie down on that one breast and dream, for at his side was a woman who carried a bow and arrow to defend him. He the writer, the musician, the sculptor, the painter, he could lie down and dream by the side of the Amazon who could give him nourishment and fight the world for him as well…

I looked at him. He was my own height. He was a little bowed by fatigue and with the thought of his own frailness. His nerves, his sensitiveness, his dependence on women. He looked slenderer and paler. He said: “I used to be afraid that my wife might die. What would I do without my wife? I used to plan to die with her. But now I have you. I know you are strong.”

Many men have said this to me before. I had not minded. Protection was a rhythm. We could exchange roles. But this phrase from a father was different… A father.

All through the world… looking for a father… looking naively for a father… falling in love with grey hairs… the symbol… every symbol of the father… all through the world… an orphan… in need of man the leader… to be made woman… And again to be asked… to be the mother… always the mother… always to draw the strength I have, but never to know where to rest, where to lay down my head and find new strength… always to draw it out of myself… from myself… strength… to pour out love… All through the world seeking a father… loving the father… awaiting the father… and finding the child.

His lumbago and the almost complete paralysis it brought about seemed to me like a stiffness in the joints of his soul, from acting and pretending. He had assumed so many roles, had disciplined himself to appear always gay, always immaculate, always shaved, always faultless; he had played at love so often, that it was as if he suffered from a cramp due to the false positions too long sustained. He could never relax. The lumbago was like the stiffness and brittleness of his emotions which he had constantly directed. It was something like pain for him to move about easily in the realm of impulses. He was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great uneven flow of life with its necessary disorder and necessary ugliness. Every gesture of meticulous care taken to eat without vulgarity, to wash his teeth, to disinfect his hands, to behave ideally, to sustain the illusion of perfection, was like a rusted hinge, for when a pattern and a goal, when an aesthetic order penetrates so deeply into the motions of life, it eats into its spontaneity like rust, and this mental orientation, this forcing of nature to follow a pattern, this constant defeat of nature and control of it, had become rust, the rust which had finally paralyzed his body…

I wondered how far back I would have to trace the current of his life to find the moment at which he had thus become congealed into an attitude… At what moment had his will petrified his emotions? What shock, what incident had produced this mineralization such as took place under the earth, due to pressure?

When he talked about his childhood I could see a luminous child always dancing, always running, always alert, always responsive. His whole nature was on tip toes with expectancy, hope and ardor. The nose sniffed the wind with high expectations of storms, tragedies, adventures, beauty. The eyes did not retreat under the brow, but were opened wide like a clairvoyant’s. The flesh was tender, the appetite keen, the restlessness immense. Everything then seemed fluid and mobile, soft and pliable and yielding.

I could not trace the beginning of his disease, this cancer of jealousy. Perhaps far back—in his jealousy of his delicate sister who was preferred by the father, in his jealousy of the man who took his fiancee away from him, in the betrayal of this fiancee, in the immense shock of pain which sent him out of Spain to Cuba.

To-day if he read a clipping which did not give him the first place, in the realm of music, he suffered. If a friend turned his admiration away… If in a room he was not the centre of attention… Wherever there was a rival, he felt the fever and the poison of self-doubt, the fear of defeat. In all his relations with man and woman there had to be a battle and a triumph.

He began by telling me first of all that I owed him nothing; then he began to look for all that there was in me of himself.

What he noted in my diary were only the passages which revealed our sameness. I began naturally enough to think that he loved in me only what there was of himself, that beyond the realm of self-discovery, self-love, there was no curiosity.

“How are we to know,” I asked him, “when it is we are writing prophetically, or when it is that our desires work miracles and bring us what we wish? Here we are sitting, telling each other all our adventures—and in my diaryI had written long ago: ‘my husband will have a terribly tragic and adventurous life… we will sit together in the evenings and I will listen to his stories… we will write in my diary together’.”

My father said: “Although I was prevented from training you, your blood obeyed me.” As he said this his face shone with the luminosity of early portraits: this luminosity the one trait which had never faded from my memory. He glowed with a joyous Greek wisdom, as he did on the German postcard photographs I had pasted in my diary… Herr Professor… Berlin… Taken soon after we had left Berlin, when he was thirty years old and the beautiful perfumed countess was in love with him but he could not bear the smell of ether which pierced through her perfume.

“We must look for light and clarity,” he said, “because we are too easily unbalanced.”

I felt as if I were entering a finished world, a static world. Was this the end? The goal? A finished world. A creation to which there was nothing to add. The way he saw his life as a completed work. The air was too rarified, too crystallized his vision. Like rock crystal. I could look through it as I looked for hours through glass and colored stones, with a love of transparency, a love of clairvoyance. But I felt I was not where he was.

“You’ve got such strong wings,” he said. “One feels there are no walls to your life.”

I was sitting at the foot of his bed. The waiter was coming in and out of the room with bottles of mineral water. The mistral was blowing hot and dry. It had been blowing for ten days.

“Now I see that all these women I pursued are all in you, and you’re my daughter, and I can’t marry you! You’re the synthesis of all the women I loved.”

“Just to have found each other will make us stronger for life.”

Samba the negro came in with mail. When my father saw the letters addressed to me he said: “Am I to be jealous of your letters too?”

Between each one of these phrases there was a long silence. A great simplicity of tone. We looked at each other as if we were listening to music, not as if we were saying words. Inside both our heads, as we sat there, he leaning against a pillow and I against the foot of the bed, there was a concert going on. Two boxes filled with the resonances of an orchestra. A hundred instruments playing all at once. Two longs spools of flute-threads interweaving between his past and mine, the strings of the violin constantly trembling like the springs inside of our bodies, the nerves never still, the heavy poundings on the drum like the heavy pounding of sex, the throb of blood, the beat of desire which drowned all the vibrations, louder than any instrument, the harp singing god, god and the angels, the purity in his brow, the clarity in his eyes, god, god, god, Isolina with auburn hair, and the drums pounding desire at the temples. The orchestra all in one voice now, for an instant, in love, in love with the harp singing god, and the violins shaking their hair and I passing the violin bow gently between my legs, drawing music out of my body, my body foaming, the harp singing god while all the women of the world lay under him in a ritual of fecundation, the drum beating, beating sex, d pollen inside of the violin cases, the curves of the violin case and the curves of women’s buttocks, cries of the ‘cello, the ‘cello singing a dirge under the level of tears, through subterranean roads with notes twinkling right and left, notes like stairways to the harp singing god, god, god, god, and the faun through the flute mocking the notes grown black and penitent, the black notes ascending the dust route of the ‘cello’s tears, an earth tremor splitting the music in two fallen walls, the walls of our faith, the ‘cello weeping, and the violins trembling, the beat of sex breaking through the middle and splitting the white notes and the black notes apart, and the piano’s stairway of sounds rolling into the inferno of silence because far away, behind and beyond the violins comes the second voice of the orchestra, the voice out of the bellies of the instruments, underneath the notes being pressed by hot fingers, in opposition to these notes comes the song from the bellies of the instruments, out of the pollen they contain, out of the wind of passing fingers, the carpet of notes mourn with voices of black lace and dice on telegraph wires. His sadnesses locked into the ‘cello, our dreams wrapped in dust inside of the piano box, this box on our heads cracking with resonances, the past singing, an orchestra splitting with fullness, lost loves, faces vanishing, jealousy twisting like a cancer, eating the flesh, the letter that never came, the kiss that was not exchanged, the harp singing god, god, god, who laughs on one side of his face, god was the man with a wide mouth who could have eaten me whole, singing inside the boxes of our heads. Friends, treacheries, ecstasies. The voices that carried us into serenity, the voices which made the drum beat in us, sex, sex, sex, sex, desire, the bow of the violins passing between the legs, the curves of women’s backs yielding, the baton of the orchestra leader, the second voice of locked instruments, the strings snapping, the dissonances, the hardness, the flute weeping.

We danced because we were sad, we danced all through our life because we were sad, and the golden top dancing inside of us made the notes turn, the white and the black, the words we wanted to hear, the words we heard, the new faces of the world turning black and white, ascending and descending, up and down askew stairways from the bellies of the ‘cello full of salted tears, the water heaving when the violins sang together, the sea coming on us, the sea of forgetfulness, yesterday grinning through the bells and castanets, and to-day a single note all alone, like our fear of solitude, quarreling, the orchestra taking our whole being together and lifting us clear out of the earth where pain is a long, smooth song that does not cut through the flesh, where love is one long smooth note like the wind at night, no bloodshedding knife to its touch, the touch of music from distance far beyond the orchestra which answered the harp, the flute, the ‘cello, the violins, the echoes on the roof, the taste on the roof of our palates, music in the tongue, in the fingers, when the fingers seek the flesh, the red pistil of desire in the fingers on the violin cords, and all desire mounting in space to fall again on the bellies, the bellies of women he fingered like a musician, their cries rising and falling with the heaving wind of the question-marked opening of the ‘cello, borne on the orchestra’s wings, and hurt and wounded by its knowledge of me, for thus we cried, thus we laughed like the bells and the castanets, thus we rolled from black to white stairways, from bodies rolling to bodies erect and dreaming spirals of desire and spirals of liberation from desire, where is serenity? All our forces at work together, our fingers playing, our voices, our heads cracking with fullness of sound, crescendo of exaltation and confusion, the chaos, the fullness, no time to gather all the notes together, sitting in a hall inside the spider webt, the failures, the defeats. I writing a diary like a perpetual obsessional song, and he and I dancing with gold-tipped cigarettes, wrinkless clothes, vanity and worship, faith and doubt, losing our blood slowly from too much love, love a wound in us, too many delicacies, too many thoughts around it, too many vibrations, fatigue, nervousness, the orchestra of our desire splitting with its many faces, sad songs, god songs, sex songs, quest and hunger, idealization and cynicism, humor in the gaping split-open face of the trombone swollen with laughter. Walls falling under the pressure of will, walls of the absolute falling with each part of us breathing music into instruments, our arms waving, our voice, our love, our hatred, an orchestra of conflicts, a theme of disease, the song of pain, the song of strings that are never still, for after the orchestra is silent in our heads the echoes last, the concert is eternal, the solo is a delusion, the others wait behind one to accompany, to stifle, to silence, to drown, and with this singing of feet, head, tongue, sex, this dismembering to pass into the everywhere, trains moving, bodies separating, arms and legs melting together like the spires of cathedrals, drinking life, music spilling out from the eyes in place of tears, music spilling from the throat in place of words, music falling from his finger-tips in place of caresses, music exchanged between us instead of love, yearning on five lines, the five lines of our thoughts, our reveries, our emotions, our unknown self, our giant self, our shadow.

The key sitting ironically, half a question mark, like our knowledge of destiny. But I sat on five lines, cursing the world for the shocks, loving the world because it has jaws, weeping at the absolute unreachable, the fifth line and the fifth voice saying always: have faith, even curses make music. Five lines running together with simultaneous song.

The poverty, the broken hairbrush, the Alice blue gown, twilight of sensations, musique ancienne, objects floating. One line saying all the time I believe in god, in a god, in a father who will lean over and understand all things; I need absolution, I believe in others’ purity and I find myself never pure enough; I need absolution. Another line on which I was making colored dresses, colorful houses, and dancing. On the top line I danced with a feather on my hat. Underneath ran the line of disease, doubt, life a danger, life with sharp edges, life singing mockery with an evil mouth, or life slobbering, or mouths spitting insults. Everything lived out simultaneously, the love, the impulse, the doubt of the love, the knowledge of the love’s death, the love of life, the doubt, the ecstasy, the knowledge and awareness of its death germ, everything like an orchestra. Can we live in rhythm, my father? Can we feel in rhythm, my father? Can we think in rhythm, my father? Rhythm—Rhythm—Rhythm.

At midnight I walked away from his room, down the very long corridor, under the arches, with the lamps watching, throwing my shadow on the carpets, passing mute doors in the empty hotel, the train of my silk dress caressing the floor, the mistral hooting.

As I opened the door of my room the window closed violently—there was the sound of broken glass. Doors, silent closed doors of empty rooms, arches like those of a convent, like opera settings, and the mistral blowing…

The white mosquito netting over my bed hung like an ancient bridal canopy…

The mystical bride of my father…

It was I who told the first lie, with deep sadness, because I did not have the courage to say to my father: “Our love should be great enough to be above jealousy. Spare me those lies which we tell the weaker ones.”

Something in his eyes, a quicker beat of the eyelid, a wavering of the blue surface, the small quiver by which I had learned to detect jealousy in a face, prevented me from saying this. Truth was impossible.

At the same time there were moments when I experienced dark and strange pleasures at the thought of deceiving him. I knew how deceptive he was. I felt deep down that he was incapable of truth, that sooner or later he would lie to me, fail me. And I wanted to deceive him first, in a deeper way. It gave me joy to be so far ahead of my father who was almost a professional deceiver.

When I saw my father vanishing at the station a great misery and coldness overcame me. I sat inert, remembering each word he had said, each sensation.

It seemed to me that I had not loved him enough, that he had come upon me like a great mystery, that again there was a confusion in me between god and father. His severity, his luminousness, his music, seemed again to me not human elements. I had pretended to love him humanly.

Sitting in the train, shaken by the motion, the feeling of the ever-growing distance between us, suffocating with a cold mood, I recognized the signs of an inhuman love. By certain signs I recognized all my pretences. Every time I had pretended to feel more than I felt I experienced this sickness of heart, this cramp and tenseness of my body. By this sign I recognized my insincerities. At the core nothing ever was false. My feelings never deceived me. It was only my imagination which deceived me. My imagination could give a color, a smell, a beauty to things, even a warmth which my body knew very well to be unreal. I could pursue the wanderings of my mind and my imagination but I could never deceive my mouth, my skin, my body, my desire. These could never act. In my head there could be a great deal of acting and many strange things could happen in there, but my mouth, my skin, my desire were sincere and they revolted, they prevented me from getting lost down the deep corridors of my inventions. Through them I knew. They were my eyes, my ears, they were my truth. Through them I recognized love.

To-day I recognized an inhuman love. I knew I was leaving cliffs, abysses, precipices, clouds, twilights, all the regions to which my love of my father would take me, away from earth and away from my own body…

Lying back on the chaise longue with cotton over my eyes, wrapped in coral blankets, my feet on a pillow. Lying back with a sweet feeling like that of convalescence, lying in a room in darkness but knowing one is no longer ill.

All weight and anguish lifted from the body and life like cotton over the eyelids.

In this state of somnolescence I recognized a mood in which I lived often, perhaps almost continually, in spite of light and sound, in spite of the streets I walked, the things I did. A mood between sleep and dream, where I caught the corner of two streets—the street of dreams and the street of living—in the palm of my hand and looked at them simultaneously, as one looks at the lines of one’s destiny.

There would come cotton over my eyes and long unbroken reveries, sharp, intense and continuous, like those I experienced coming out of the ether when I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, when I began to hear voices. I began to see very clearly that what destroyed me in this silent drama with my father was that I was always trying to tell something that never happened, or rather that everything that happened, the many incidents, the love of twenty years, the trip down south, all this produced a state like slumber and ether out of which I could only awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one’s self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never addressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him, because in reality there was no connection between us, there was no human being to connect with. No one had ever merged into my father, yet we had thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness between us: but the likeness itself seemed to create greater separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no understanding, likeness and no nearness.

Now that the world was standing on its head and the figure of my father had become immense, like the figure of a myth, now that from thinking too much about him I had lost the sound of his voice, I wanted to open my eyes again and make sure that all this had not killed the light, the steadiness of the earth, the bloom of the flowers, and the warmth of all loves but my love for him. So I opened my eyes and the curtain wavered before me.

The picture of my father’s foot. One day down south, while we were driving, we stopped by the road and he took off his shoe which was causing him pain. As he pulled off his sock I saw the foot of a woman. It was delicate and perfectly made, sensitive and small. I felt as if he had stolen it from me: it was my foot he was looking at, my foot he was holding in his hand. I had the feeling that I knew this foot completely. It was my foot—the very same size and the very same color, the same blue veins showing and the same air of never having walked at all.

To this foot I could have said: “I know you.” I recognized the weight of it, its speed, its lightness. “I know you, but if you are my foot I do not love you. I do not love my own foot.”

A confusion of feet. I am not alone in the world. I have a double. He sits on the running board of the car and when he sits there I do not know where I am. I am standing there pitying his foot, and hating it, too, because of the confusion. If it were some one else’s foot my love could flow out freely, all around, but here my love stands still inside of me, still with a kifright.

There is no distance for my love to traverse; it chokes inside of me, like the coils of self-love, and I cannot say I love you, or feel any love for this sore foot because that love leaps back into me like a perpetually coiled snake, and I am trying to leap out. I want to leap out freely, from the window of my own body, into love. I want to flow out, and here my love lies coiled inside and choking me, because the other, my father, is my double, my shadow, and I don’t know which one is real. One of us must really die so that the other may find the boundaries of himself. To leap out freely and safely beyond the self love must flow out and beyond the wall of confused identities. Now I am all confused in my boundaries. I don’t know where my father begins, where I begin, where it is he ends, what I, the difference between us…

The difference is this, I begin to see, that he wears gloves for gardening and so do I, but he is afraid of poverty and I am not. Can I prove that? Must I prove that? Why? I hate drabness, but I have no fear of poverty. I have loved only poor men. I want to prove this. To whom? Why? For myself. I must know wherein I am not like him. I must disentangle our two selves.

I walked out into the sun. The sun slipped between my legs. I sat at a café. A man sent me a note by the garcon. I refused to read it. I would liked to have seen the man. Perhaps I would have liked him. It is possible some day I might like a very ordinary man, sitting at a café. It hasn’t happened yet. Everything must be immense and deep and extremely complicated. I like complicated games and complicated loves. I play at them seriously. The humor in them is at first invisible, because pity forbids irony. I can only laugh years later, when there is no one around who can be hurt by my laughter.

Walking into the heart of a summer day, as into a ripe fruit. Looking down at my lacquered toe nails, at the white dust on my sandals. Smelling the odor ofbread in the bakery where I stopped for a chocolate-filled roll. The femme demenage passes very close to me. Her face is burned, scarred, the color of iron. The traces of her features are lost, as on a leprous face. The whites of her eyes bloodshot, her pupils dilated and misty. In her flesh I saw the meat of an animal, the fat, the sinews, the blackening blood, the meat we are when fire eats into us. So easily burned and scarred. So easily turned into cinders.

My father had said once that I was ugly. He said it because I was born full of bloom, dimpled, roseate, overflowing with health and joy. But at the age of two I had almost died of fever. I lost the bloom, the curls, the glow, all at once. I reappeared before him very pale and thin, and the aesthete in him said coolly: “How ugly you are.” This phrase I have never been able to forget. It has taken me a life time to disprove it to myself. A life time to efface it. It took the love of others, the worship ofpainters to save me from its effect. In one instant my faith in myself was killed. From that moment on, no matter what the mirror revealed, I remained unconvinced. All I could see was this phrase of my father’s, the dissatisfied look in his blue eyes. Never could I detect in him the slightest expression of love. His paternal role was summed up in the one word: criticism. Never a word of faith, of encouragement, of enthusiasm. Never an elan of joy, of content, of approval. Always the sad, exacting blue eyes dissatisfied and condemnatory.

From that moment on it was not the mirror which served me but others. It was the reflection of myself in desirous eyes which I relied on. What I saw in the mirror until the age of sixteen was not myself but my father’s phrase. Even to-day I do not look into the mirror… I look into men’s eyes, into the mirror of men’s eyes…

Out of this came my love of ugliness, my effort to see beyond ugliness, always treating the flesh as a mask, as something which never possessed the same shape, color and features as thought. Out of this came my love of men’s creations. All that a man said or thought was the face, the body; all that a man invented was his walk, his flavor, his coloring; all that a man wrote, painted, sang was his skin, his hair, his eyes. People were made of crystal for me. I could see right through their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. My eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, their stuttering. I overlooked the big ears, the frame too small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk… I forgave… I became clairvoyant. I saw the aura of persons, the light they threw off. A new sense which had awakened in me uncovered the smell of their soul, the shadow cast by their sorrows, the glow of their desires. Beyond the words and the appearances I caught all that was left unsaid—the electric sparks of their courage, the expanse of their reveries, the lunar aspects of their moods, the animal breath of their yearning. I never saw the fragmented individual, never saw the grotesque quality or aspect, but always the complete self, the mask and the reality, the fulfilment and the intention, the core and the future. I saw always the actual and the potential man, the seed, the reverie, the intention as one…

I loved beyond flesh… because flesh was so often a caricature, a disguise, a mockery. No man’s thoughts could ever be so ugly as the charred face of the femme de menage. It was as if I saw the original innocence. Everywhere I saw innocence. Everywhere I saw a beauty no aesthete ever captured. It was only the body which decomposed, deteriorated, betrayed. Only the body ever emitted a bad smell…

Now with my love of my father this concern with the truth lying beneath the mask, the depths lying beneath the surface and the appearance, became a obsession and a disease because in him the mask was more complete than in anyone I knew; the chasm between his appearance, his words, his gestures, and his true self was deeper.

Through this mask of coldness which had terrified my childhood I was better able, as a woman, to detect the malady of his soul. I remembered a meeting at the reception room of the Salle Pleyel during the years I had not wanted to see him. It was after a symphonic concert; I had come into the reception room to see the orchestra leader who was stifling under the pressure of visitors. As I was drawing away from the crowd I caught sight of my father standing apart. I saw his waxen face and I knew that he was ill. His soul was sick. He was very sick deep down. His skin was that of a man who was dying inside; his eyes could no longer see the warm, the real, the near. He seemed to have come from very far only to be leaving again immediately.

He was pretending to be there. His body was there, but his soul was absent: it had escaped by a hundred fissures, it was in flight, towards the past, or towards to-morrow, everywhere or anywhere which was not here, now. He was very sick. It would be impossible to find him, to unite with him.

We looked at each other across miles and miles of separation. Our eyes did not meet. His thoughts enwrapped him in glass. This glass shut out the warmth of life, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of life, shut out the breath of things that came too near, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of their voices, the smell of their words, of their clothes, the warmth of their bodies. It shut out all the exhalations of life, the temperature. He had built a glass house around himself, a glass invented to shut out the evil rays of the sun. He wanted life to filter through, to come to him distilled, not crude, juicy, perspiring, but sifted, arranged, digested. The glass wall of his thoughts was a prism which eliminated the bad, the fetid; and with this artificial elimination of the bad life itself was affected, altered. With the bad was lost the warmth, the nearness. It was a glass which human breath could not stain. It was created out of a desire not to be touched by life in the flesh, a desire to keep his body perpetually out of the reach of pain. And it had grown too thick. He did not hear me coming near him, he could not feel the hot breath of human love…

There was no change in his love, but the mask was back again as soon as he returned to Paris. The whole pattern of his superficial life began again, his artificial ideal law-making began again. He said: “We must work, we must give ourselves wholly to work.” He made an austere inhuman pattern. Slaving. The opium of work. I did not want to write all day. I wanted my life, my loves, my relationships, people, warmth. He made no room for life. He had to live by a pattern. This period in Paris, he determined, was to be a parenthesis between escapades to the south. Three months of severe work, of austerity, of no communication. He could never live except absolutely on one side of his nature. In the south it was all openness, tenderness, sensibility, confession, intimacy. Now it was work, celebrity, the public, his “business.” He could not keep both going as I did. Or slide easily from one into the other.

To-day it was time to work, to cover up a secret sorrow of some kind, a sorrow which was in reality a kind of sullenness towards the limitations, the imperfections, the flaws in life.

He had stopped talking as we talked down south. He was conversing. It was the beginning of his salon life. There were always people around with whom he kept up a tone of lightness and humor. In between the salon talk he worked intensely as a teacher. There was always singing or violin playing in the salon.

He made this absolute, inflexible plan without regard for what I expected, without regard for life. Life would flower again in the south. Meanwhile it was to be ignored. I was to write, write, write. I was to be alone, and in the evenings appear in his salon and talk with the tip of my tongue about the surface of my life, about everything that was far from my thoughts. There was to be no more intimacy and no more exploration of the bottoms of the sea. Whatever was in my mind must not be shown, shared, mentioned. In that salon, with its stained-glass windows, its highly polished floor, its dark couches rooted into the Arabian rugs, its soft lights and precious books, its silver cigarette boxes and piano shining like jet, the self, chaos, feelings, were as out of place as a horse and carriage, as a drunken sailor or a cow.

This was the winter of artifice. One could not be oneself and at the same time a fashionable musician bowing on the stage with stard shirt and tabac blond on one’s handkerchief. So he discarded his real self altogether and left me stranded in the company of an ultra-civilized man leading a court life of ceremonies.

At least he would have left me stranded if I had kept my promise to break with all my friends.

In reality I did not suffer because of the fact that my father was working and bowing and conversing; the truth is I began to suffer an imaginary sorrow, a remembered sorrow. I began to suffer what I imagined I might have suffered if I had counted entirely on my father for a human relationship. While I reproached him inwardly for having no gift for human relationship, he reproached me aloud for eluding him because he sensed I was not living up to our pact of isolation.

Although in reality he had not abandoned me, but simply resumed his artificial role. I felt impelled to act out the scene of abandon from beginning to end. I wept at the isolation in which my father’s superficiality left me. I told him I had surrendered all my friends and activities for him. I told him I could not live on the talks we had in his salon. Each phrase I uttered was almost automatic.

It was the scene I knew best, the one most familiar to me even though it had become an utter lie. It was the same scene which had impressed itself on me as a child, and out of which I had made a life pattern. As I talked with tears in my eyes, I pitied myself for having loved and trusted my father again, for having given myself to him, for having expected everything from him. At the same time I knew that this was not true. My mind ran in two directions as I talked, and so did my feelings. I continued the habitual scene of pain: “I cannot live this way, I need warmth and gestures. I do not believe in love which does not express itself. I do not believe in life unless it has continuity.” And the other voice he could not hear saying: “I gave myself to you once, and you hurt me. I am glad I did not give myself to you again. Deep down I have no faith at all in you, as a human being.”

He received all this very sadly. Said he had never been able to do two things at once: either he was a human being in love, obsessed with feeling, pouring all of himself into a relationship, or he was the pianist Paris loved who had to play the role of homme du monde.

I wanted to laugh and say: “You know that’s all untrue, I never isolated myself at all.” But the scene which I acted best and felt the best was that of abandon. I felt impelled to act it over and over again. I knew all the phrases. I was familiar with the emotions it aroused. It came so easily to me, even though I knew all the time that, except for the moment when he left us years ago, I had never really experienced abandon except by way of my imagination, except through my fear of it, through my misinterpretation of reality.

There seemed to be a memory deeper than the usual one, a memory in the tissues and cells of the body on which we tattoo certain scenes which give a shape to one’s soul and life habits. It was in this way I remembered most vividly that as a child a man had tortured me; still I could not help feeling tortured or interpreting the world to-day as it had appeared to me then in the light of my misunderstanding of people’s motives. I could not help telling my father that he was destroying my absolute love; yet I knew this was not true because it was not he who was my absolut love. But this statement was untrue only in time; that is, it was my father who had endangered my faith in the absolute, it was his behaviour which I did not understand as a child which destroyed my faith in life and in love.

I knew I had deceived my father as to the extent of my love, but the thought in my mind was: what would I be feeling now if I had entrusted all my happiness to my father, if I had truly depended on him for joy and sustenance? I would be thoroughly despairing and ready to die. This thought increased my pain, and my face showed such anguish that my father was overwhelmed.

After this scene he continued his marionette life. Life was a chain of concerts, of soirees, of hairdressers and shirtmakers, of correspondence, of newspaper clippings, of scrap books being fed, of files being fattened, of telephone calls during which he talked like a man interested in who would attend the funeral more than the fact of death itself. He liked me to visit him in my astrakhan fur, shedding perfume, so that he might introduce me as a Polish princess. The women were distressed. I seemed to have been given a privileged place which had never been offered to them. They felt uneasy and wondered if their own place was endangered, diminished, why it was that little noses, faience eyes, porcelain hands, marquise feet and lace gestures did not retain his attention as they had before.

I began to hate him. The hatred for the being you most adore, who does not escape you in a deep way, through subterranean or tragic routes, but who evaporates into frivolity, who can disguise his soul not by going away, but by dancing, by dancing on a polished floor.

I was filled with doubts. I saw in him a perpetually haunting shadow of something he was not. This man that he was not, or that he refused to continue to be, interfered with my knowledge of him, with my actual knowledge. These encounters where love never reached understanding, where all things ended in clash and frustration, this love which created nothing, this love twisted inside of me like a snake, this love devoured me, this love obsessed me. It was the coil of it which strangled my life. As soon as I lost him, I wanted him; as soon as he was away I began again to imagine him as he might be. I spent hours imagining my father coming to me and talking to me deeply.

Imagining nights of talk wherein we turned over the brilliant facets of our lives as in a game, playing with all that happened, playing with all we knew, playing with new ideas, sharing, giving, discovering, pouring out, exposing the true self as it could only be exposed and given to the twin, to one’s double. I imagined tenderness and understanding.

Imagined! Like a contagious disease withering my actual life, this imaginary meeting, imaginary talk, on which I spent hours and hours of inventiveness. As soon as he came I was frustrated, silenced. His talk would be empty, and above all, marginal. His whole ingenuity was spent making circles, in walking on the margin of everything vital, in eluding it. The more direct I grew, the more marginal he became, dancing on the edge of everything I said. Remaining there so adroitly by an accumulation of descriptions of nothing, by a swift chain of puerile events, by long speeches about trivialities, by lengthy expansions of empty facts.

This ghost of my potential father tormented me like a hunger for something which I knew had been invented or created solely by myself, but which I feared might never take human shape. Where was the man I really loved? The windows he had opened in the south had been windows on the past. The present or the future seemed to terrify him. Nothing was essential but to retain avenues of escape.

This constant yearning for the man beyond the mask, this disregard of the mask was also a disregard of the harm which the wearing of a mask inevitably produced. It was difficult for me to believe, as others did, that the mask tainted the blood, that the colors of the mask could run into the colors of nature and poison it. I could not believe that, like the woman who was painted in gold and who died of the poison, the mask and the flesh could melt into each other and bring on infection.

My love was based on faith in the purity of one’s own nature. It made me oblivious of the deformities which could be produced in the soul by the wearing of a mask. It caused me to disregard the deterioration that might affect the real face, the habits which the mask could form if worn for too long a time. I could not believe that if one pretended indifference long enough, the germ of indifference could finally grow, that the soul could be discolored by long pretense, that there could come a moment when the mask and the man melted into one another, that confusion between them corroded the vital core, destroyed the core…

This deterioration in my father I could not yet believe in. I expected the miracle to happen. So many times it had happened to me to see the hardness of a face fall, the curtain over the eyes draw away, the false voice change, and to be allowed to enter by my vision into the true self of others… It was exactly as if the person confronted had been the monster of the fairy tales, and that the hair, the horns, the leather skin had fallen away to disclose a new man, miraculously handsome.

I always knew why and where the man had become the monster. I loved that moment when the mask fell away.

When I was sixteen I could feel his visitations very much as the mystics experienced the presence of their god. He would descend on me oftener when I was dancing or laughing. He came like a blight, because when I felt his presence, I felt a curtain of criticism covering all things. I looked through his eyes instead of my own. My mother always said laugh and dance, but my father in me was contemptuous. When his seriousness fell on me I knew I was seeing the world with his cold, blue eyes. That was not me. I was sixteen and my mother had made me an Alice blue dress. “Oh, leave your books alone and go to the dance!” she said. I was pleased with the delicate frills on my dress, with the high heels on my slippers, the curls on my head. I wanted to dance.

I did not know then that my father could not dance.

At twenty-five I was a dancer. I was dancing on the stage. I had just begun the first number, no longer intimidated by the public. The Spanish music carried me away, whirled me into a state of delirium. I was dancing. I could feel the audience surrendering to me. I was dancing, carrying away their eyes, their senses, into my spinning and whirling.

My eyes fell on the front row. I saw my father there. I saw his pale face half-hidden behind a program. He was holding a program in front of his face in order not to be recognized. But I knew his hair, his brow, his eyes. It was my father. My steps faltered. I lost my rhythm. I grew dizzy. For a moment only. Then I swung around and began again, stamping my feet, stamping. I never looked at him again. I danced madly, wildly. I knew he was there.

Flowers. Hands to shake. Music. Pleasure. Interviews. Photographs. Carnation perfume. Jewelry. Dresses scattered in the dressing room like enormous bell flowers. swollen like sails. Petticoats still dancing. Castanets still echoing. Hands to shake. Flowers. Words. Beautiful. Marvellous. Beautiful. Marvellous. Come with my ballet to Cairo. Something new in dancing. The hands said so much. When you came out front, close to the audience, with eyes laughing, and looked at the audience fully, directly, that was electrical. Flowers. Words. Something new in dancing.

I so hot. I all wet, under the dress, the paint, the lace, the flowers, so hot and broken. My father was out there in the front row, without a smile, like an angry statue. Angry? Why angry? I had danced well. The words still poured over me. “Do you know what you are? You are ART. Your name could be used as a definition of art.” My father was sitting in the front row. I was hot and tired. I wanted to close my eyes so heavy with paint. The Hindu dancer had said it was not necessary to paint the eyelashes forthe stage. I must remember that. Out into the cold. Covered with fur and Spanish shawls, but the cold slipped inside them insidiously. Home. I awoke the next day paralyzed. Dancing died. I never danced again.

When I saw my father later I found out he had never been there. I asked him if we could spend ourChristmas dancing. Then I saw him, as I had divined him, sitting cold and formal, and I was angry at the prison walls of his severity. I danced in defiance of his mood, but bitterly, to assert my own self distinct from his. He did not dance, nor drink, nor smile.

As soon as I left him everything began to sing again. Everybody I passed in the street seemed like a music box. I heard the street organ, the singing of the wheels rolling. Motion was music. My father was the musician, but in life he arrested music. Music melts all the separate partsof our bodies together. Every rusty fragment, every scattered piece could be melted into one by rhythm. A note was a whole, and it was in motion, ascending or descending, swelling in fullness or thrown away, thrown out in the air, but always moving.

As soon as I left my father I heard music again. It was falling from the trees, pouring from throats, twinkling from the street lamps, sliding down the gutter. It was my faith in the world which danced again. It was the expectation of miracles which made every misery sound to me like part of a symphony.

Not separateness but oneness was music. Let me walk alone into the music of my faith. When I am with you the world is still and silent.

You give the command for stillness, and life stops like a clock that has fallen. You draw geometric lines around liquid forms, and that which you extract from the chaos is already crystallized.

As soon as I leave youeverything fixed falls again into waves, tides, is transformed into water and flows. I hear my heart beating again with great disorder. I hear the music of my gestures, and my feet begin to run as music runs and leaps. Music does not climb stairways. Music runs and I run with it. Faith makes music come out of the trees, out of wood, out of ivory.

I could never dance around you, my father, I could never dance around you!

You held the conductor’s stick, but no music could come from the orchestra because of your severity. As soon as you left my heart beat in great disorder. Everything melted into music, and I could dance through the streets singing, without an orchestra leader. I could dance and sing.

Walking down the Rue Saturne I heard the students of the Conservatory playing the Sonate en Re Mineur of Bach. I also heard my mother’s beautiful voice singing Schumann’s J’ai pardonne, which aroused me so deeply that it would make me sob. Did I sense the whole tragedy then? J’ai pardonne… Strange how my mother, who had never forgiven my father, could sing that song more movingly than anything else she sang.

Walking down the Rue Saturne I was singing J’ai pardonne under my breath and thinking at the same time how I hated this street because it was the one I always walked through on my way to my father’s house. So often on winter evenings I came out of his luxurious house, heated like a hot-house, where I had seen him pale and tense, at work upon some trifling matter which he took very seriously. Very neat, in his silk dressing gown, with brilliantine in his hair, polished nails, delicate beads of perspiration on his brow—from rehearsing a sonata with a violinist. Or else just coming down from his siesta.

This siesta he took with religious care, as if the preservation of his life depended on it. At bottom he felt life to be a danger, a process not of growth but of deterioration. To love too wildly, he said, to talk too much, to laugh too much, was a wasting of one’s energy. Life was an enemy to him, and every sign of its wear and tear gave him anxiety. He could not bear a crack in the ceiling, a bit of paint worn away, a stairway worn threadbare, a nail hole in the wall, a faded spot on the wall paper. Since he never lived wholly in the moment a part of him was already preparing for the morrow. To economize his strength he would bring himself to a stop—for the sake of to-morrow.

When I saw my father coming out of his room after his siesta I always had the feeling that here was a man who had preserved himself, who was making artificial efforts to delay the process of growth, fruition, decay, disintegration, which is organic and inevitable. He was delaying death by preserving himself from life; it was the fear of life and the effort made to avoid life which used his strength. Living never wore one out as much as the effort not to live. If one lived fully and freely one also could rest fully and deeply. Not trusting himself to life, not abandoning himself, he could not sink into sleep without fear of death…

I always left his house with a feeling of having come near to death, because everything there was clearly a fight against death.

I left the neatest, the most spotless street of Paris where the gardeners were occupied in clipping and trimming a few rare potted bushes in smv>

The light was very strong on the new street sign. I walked up to it. Yes, there was a sign which said: Anciennement Rue Saturne now changed to…

Now changed. Something effaced, something lost. I wished I were a street. I wished my name could be changed and that I might change with the city, that certain houses standing eternally inside of me might be finally torn down, that certain streets forever marked in me might have their names changed, that the whole city of the past might disappear, the whole topography change as after an earthquake or a war—that the map of my life be lost. To change as Paris changed. Streets could die out. New houses could be erected. But always what I had heard, seen, experienced would continue to walk with me down streets with changed names in the labyrinth of loss and change where nothing could be forgotten…

To be able to catch all that walked with me to my father’s house could be done only in one great flash, in one instant of absolute understanding. Each step along the Rue Saturne corresponded to a million steps I had taken during my life, the thousands of steps which had taken me from France to Germany, from Belgium to Spain, from Spain to America, from our apartment in New York, where my mother sang J’ai pardonne to the American school where I told the children I had been all around the world, from there to White Plains where I spent all my time going and coming from the Public Library, from all the studios of American artists, where I once posed, to the dismal shops on Sixth Avenue where I worked as a dress model, back to White Plains where I wrote my first novel. from Paris where I blossomed into womanhood to Italy, to Switzerland. A thousand steps into cafés, night clubs, movies, and above all, away from my father who lived in the same city. Away from him by living in a different quarter, by living a life so different from his that I knew I would never meet him there. I finally lost track of him, my memory of him.

In the same city in which he lived a thousand steps took me further away from him than a trip to India. No trip to Egypt, but a different milieu, different ideas, different people—the people and places he did not like, the ideas he did not like.

Walking in the rain to pass before my father’s house, looking up at the stained-glass window, thinking: I have at last eluded you. I am a woman you do not know. Where it is I take my pleasure, where it is I laugh, you don’t know. Part of my life you never entered. Parts of my life were poisoned by your presence, your will, your ideals. I who stand here am not your daughter, nor my mother’s daughter. It is the me who escaped the stigmata of parental love.

Standing there asserting the self that was not sunk in my love of him. Standing in the rain with tired eyes.

To escape him I had run away to the other end of the world. To be free of his memory I had run away to places where he never went. I had lost him, finally, by living in the opposite direction from him. I sought out the failures because he didn’t like those who stuttered, those who stumbled; I sought out the ugly because he tureight=”s face away; I sought out the weak because they irritated him. I sought out chaos because he insisted on logic. I travelled away from him to the whore Bijoux on the Rue Fontaine, an enormous coal-eyed whore with black painted eyelids and thickly powdered face, who was the quintessence of all whores. So far from my father’s marquises in porcelain to the animal glow of Bijoux’s eyes, the passivity of her body, the nerveless, passive whore flesh. Because my love of him was so great, my frustrated, defeated love, I travelled to the other end of life, to the drab, the loose, the weak, the wine-stained, wine-soggy men in whom I was sure not to find the least trace of him. No trace of him anywhere along the Boulevard de Clichy where the market people passed with their vegetable carts; no trace of him at two in the morning in the little café opposite the Trinite; no trace of him in the sordid neighborhood of the Boulevard Jean-Jaures; no trace of him in the cinema du quartier, in the bals musette, in the burlesque theatre. Never anyone who had heard of him. Never anyone who smelled like him. Never a voice like his. To lose him I almost had to lose myself. Sometimes, sitting at a stained and dirty table, I would ask myself: “Why am I here? How did I get here? How is it I am marketing in this street, next to a woman with a wart-covered face, next to a femme de menage with a stump for fingers, next to drunkards and beggars?”

It was my father who thrust me out into the black, soiled corners of the world. Everything I loved I turned my back on because it was also what he loved. Luxury with its serpentines of light, its masquerade costume of gaiety, everything that shined, glittered, threw off perfume, would have reminded me of him. To efface such a love took me years of walking greasy streets, of sleeping between soiled sheets, of traversing the unknown. I was happy because I had finally succeeded in losing him.

But I almost lost myself too. In those dingy movies, amidst people who reeked of garlic and sweat, I was exiled from my own climate, my light, my temperature.

Only now have I been able to return to the house of my childhood, to warm rooms, to music, to laughter, to pleasure, to softness and beauty…

My father and I were walking through the Bois. On his lips I could still see the traces of a biting kiss. “We met at Notre-Dame,” he was saying.

“She began with the most vulgar cross-examination, reproaching me for not loving her. So I proceeded with a slow analysis of her, telling her she had fallen in love with me in the way women usually fall in love with an artist who is handsome and who plays with vehemence and elegance; telling her that it had been a literary and imaginary affair kindled by the reading of my books, that our affair had no substantial basis, what with meetings interrupted by intervals of two years. I told her that no love could survive such thin nourishment and that besides she was too pretty a woman to have remained two years without a lover, especially in view of the fact that she cordially detested her husband. She said she felt that my heart was not in it. I answered that I didn’t know whether or not my heart was in it when we had only twenty minutes together in a taxi without curtains in an over lit city.”

“Did you talk to her in that ironic tone?” I asked.

“It was even more cutting than that. I was annoyed that she had been able to give me only twenty minutes.”

(He had forgotten that he had come to tell her he did not love her. What most struck him and annoyed him was that she had only been able to escape her husband’s surveillance for twenty minutes.)

“She was so hurt,” he added, “that I didn’t even kiss her.”

As we walked along I again looked carefully at his lip. It was slightly red, with a deeper, bluish tone in one corner, where no doubt the dainty tooth of the countess had bitten most fiercely. But I did not say anything. I was wondering whether this persiflage of his was not an effort to disguise a scene which my imagination was able to reproduce with more accuracy. Perhaps the little countess had arrived at the steps of Notre-Dame, looking very earnest, very youthful, and very exalted. Perhaps my father had been touched by her demonstration of love. (I remembered the day 1 had meant to tell Pierre that I did not even want to be touched by him, and how difficult I had found it to say so, how I ended by permitting him to kiss me). I did not believe that my father had been annoyed by the countess’s jealousy or worship, but that, on the contrary, it had lulled and caressed his vanity. I believed that he was trying to conceal his pleasure at being pursued by an air of indifference, so that his listener might take him for a casual and cynical Don Juan, the despair of women. On the other hand, it might be that the countess had forgotten him altogether and had simply paid him a visit—that his fancy liked to play with the idea of being harassed by the pursuit of women.

He repeated a story which he had told me before—of how the countess had slashed her face in order to explain her tardiness to her husband. This story had always seemed highly improbable to me, because a woman in love is hardly likely to endanger her beauty. Any explanation would have been simpler than this far-fetched tale of an automobile accident.

I was powerfully tempted to say: “When the countess was angry because you did not kiss her she kissed you rather markedly.” But I did not say it.

Whatever his thoughts he refused to reveal them. Was he lying to me for the same reason I lied to him—because I had discovered his insane jealousy, and because I knew that when he was hurt he withdrew into himself? Here were my own tricks offered me, my own kind of lies. We were both so intent on creating this illusion of an exclusive, isolated twin love, so intent on picturing each other as standing alone in the world, with no ties whatsoever, that we were taken in by our own delusions.

When I arrived the next day he had not slept all night, thinking: I am going to lose you. And if I lose you I cannot live any more. You are everything to me. You are my only real love. My life was empty before you came. My life is a failure and a tragedy anyway.

He looked deeply sad. His fingers were wandering over the keys, hesitantly. His eyes looked as if he had been walking through a desert.

“You make me realize,” he said, “how empty my activity is, that in not being able to make you happy I miss the most vital reason for living. And here I am putting down notes on paper, playing the piano—it all seems futile to me if I am to lose you because of it.”

I told him that I was thinking of exactly the same thing, that as I was coming along I had been thinking that what made me unhappy was that he had no need of me. “There is no place for me in your life,” I said.

“You are everything to me,” he said, “you are everything I have. If you see me joyous and active it is because of you. If I did not have you I would go under. I am active only because I have you.”

I was amazed to see him weep, to see the mask completely effaced.

“Do you know,” he said, “I can’t play the comedy of love any more. I can’t say anything I don’t mean. You don’t know how you have altered my conception of love.”

He was again the man I had known in the south. His tone rang true.

I wanted to beg him to abandon the comedy of good manners. The elusive gaiety and mockery he presented to the world, his costumes, seemed to me more dangerous than my pretenses. The social masquerade was more harmful than the roles I played for the sake of adventure, or illusion. To lie for illusion, to lie to create a pleasure, did not taint the soul; but to lie to satisfy the vanity of a duchess, or to refuse the dinner of a marquis, to lie with flowers and visiting cards, to lie with the engraved writing-paper, with the complicity of butlers, interviewers, secretaries, this sort of lying was harmful.

I asked myself why it was I wanted to change him, why was it I did not love him as he was. What was it that I thought I could save him from?

Why could we not make room for each other? Every gesture I made annihilated one of his. Beneath our worship of each other we were waging an obscure war. He took it as an offense if I did not smoke his cigarettes, if I did not go to all his concerts, if I did not admire all his friends, if I did not read all the books he loved. He wanted the woman to be absorbed by him, to become selfless. But at the same time, the truly selfless woman he did not like. He demanded a match, duels, resistance.

He could not let me be. If I preferred Dostoievski to Anatole France he felt that his whole edifice of ideas was being attacked, endangered. We were too strong for each other.

Taking a gold-tipped cigarette from his case with infinite care he wiped away a tear and, with a great sigh, said: “It would be much better, anyway, if I died. I’m not of much use in the world.”

I remembered how in moments of discouragement I had often made similar remarks. I had the feeling, when I made such remarks, of believing implicitly that I would soon be dead. I made theith the absolute conviction of being unequal to the battle which life constantly demanded. In my father’s tragic face I saw the same drooping mouth of my weak days. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I was tempted to laugh, not at my father but at myself, because for the first time I realized that this little talk about death was employed for effect.

What a comedy, I thought to myself. Yet, realizing how serious I felt when enacting these scenes, I wondered why the similarity of our behaviour did not help us to understand each other.

Realizing fully I did not love him, I felt a strange joy, as if I were witnessing my father’s pain, as if he were standing there in the throes of his strong jealousy. And this suffering, which in reality I made no effort to inflict, which took place only in my head, gave me joy. This suffering which I had no intention of actually inflicting, which existed only in my own eyes, made me feel that I was balancing in myself all the trickeries of life, that I was restoring in my own soul a kind of symmetry to the events of life. It was the fulfilment of a spiritual symmetry. A sorrow here, a sorrow there. Abandon yesterday, abandon to-day. Betrayal to-day, betrayal to-morrow. Two equally poised columns. A deception here, a deception there, like twin columnades. A love for to-day, a love for to-morrow; a punishment to him, a punishment to the other—and one for myself… Mystical geometry. The arithmetic of the unconscious which impelled this balancing of events. The law of compensation and substitution. Betrayal against betrayal. I could visualize the morrow’s scenes—the countess so exalted and my father loving so much to be loved. Forgetting, as I bad forgotten, that it was himself she wanted; thinking only of the want, seduced by her want, as I was seduced every day by the emotions of others.

I felt like laughing whenever my father repeated that he was lucid, simple, logical… I knew that this order and precision were only apparent. His order was on the surface only. Beneath the level of his super-rational talk lay oceans of subtle, unformed, unrealized content. He had chosen to live on the surface, like a man who prefers the bus to the subway, but I who lived almost continually in a kind of bottom of the sea atmosphere. I knew that the sifting, filtering power of his language did not do away with the shadows. And I who had a peculiarly good nose for shadows, sensed immense layers of shadow which he refused to explore. My ambition was to descend deeper and deeper within him. His talk, on the other hand, rising in the air like a Parisian sparrow, seemed to say: I want to rise!

“Come to-night,” he said, “there will be many people there.”

“I am not made for the salon,” I pleaded. “I am like the guitar, for chamber music only. I give off my best music in the tete-a-tete.”

He laughed. I knew that intimacy was a rare experience for him, that he covered it always with the din of marginal talk. He dreaded facing all at once the entire panorama of his life, and his fear made him voluble.

If I made a hasty or mad remark, a little askew with emotion, he would say: “You are deraing!”

If he found me disturbed, or confused, or unfocussed, he would say: “Allons mettre les choses au point!” An ideal of symmetry, and the birds still flying in the Bois with an invisible order and discipline.

I got dizzy leaning over his silences. Not because I could not easily guess the multiple facts of his life, but because of the spaces, the vast distances, the widening and infinitely expanding regions impossible to cover, or explore. The more I looked into his clear eyes, as though eager to reveal everything, so open, so transparent, the more I realized all he had not given. And exactly the same thing had been said of me, and now I was writing a book in which I was trying to capture all of my own thoughts, but my father would continue to write music through which his thoughts could escape. As soon as the ground on which he stood was revealed my father abandoned it.

His impression of me, oddly enough, was the same: “You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known. You’re all mystery,” he would say.

I thought that in capturing our likenesses I had found the key to this mystery which was, fundamentally, a supreme desire to escape pain. Either into the planets, or into human affections, or into another love. One love as a refuge from another. The need of refuge immense in proportion to the sensitiveness.

If I hurt him he would withdraw into his shell. But how I hurt him, or when or where, I could never discover. Was it simply the pain of jealousy which he was running away from? He had been the first to feel anxiety—perhaps because I was so much younger and hence more capable of unfaithfulness. It was the question of my faithfulness which had caused him so much concern.

Instead of coming out of his shell to fight against the possible disintegration of our relationship, he pretended not to mind. Every silence, every comedy enacted was but a weak attempt to avoid pain. He had not yet discovered, as I had, that almost all suffering is imaginary, that by coming out into the world and going forward to meet pain one becomes aware of its feebleness. I had discovered that by meeting the person I feared to meet, by reading the letter I feared to receive, by giving life a chance to really strike at me, I had discovered almost every time that there was no intention of striking at me, that reality was far less terrifying, far less cruel, than my imaginings. This coming out into the open, offering my face, my body, to the shocks and blows and disillusions, was like going to war, because the actual fact of war is less terrible than the imagining of it.

To imagine, I found, was worse than to realize, because the process of imagining took place in a void, it was untestable, it was like a fume rising out of a crater and choking one, or like a snake inside the body. There were no hands with which to strike or defend oneself in that inner chamber of ghostly tortures. But in life the realization summoned energies, forces, instruments, gave us courage, arms and legs to fight with, so that war almost became a joy. To fight a real sorrow, a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

He told me that he had stayed awake all night wondering how he would bring himself to tell a singer that she had no voice at all.

“There was almost a drama here yesterday with Laura about that singer. I tried to dissuade her from falling in love with me by assuring her she was simply the victim of a mirage which surrounds every artist, that if she came close to me she would be disillusioned. So yesterday after the singing we talked for three quarters of an hour and when I told her I would not have an affair with her (at another period of my life I might have done it, for the game of it, but now I have other things to live for) she began to sob violently and all the rimmel came off. When she had used up her handkerchief I was forced to lend her mine. Then she dropped her lipstick and I picked it up and wiped it with another of my handkerchiefs. After the first fit of tears she began to do as all women do, to calmly make up again, wiping off the rouge that had been messed up by her tears. When she left I threw the handkerchiefs in with the laundry. The femme de chambre picked them up and left all the laundry just outside the door of my room while she was cleaning it. Laura passed by and immediately thought I had deceived her. I had to explain everything to her; I told her I had not talked about this woman because I did not want to seem to be boasting all the time about women pursuing me.”

I was not eager to have him drop his philandering—I was much more eager for the truth and for the destruction of illusion. I was tired of the card-board of illusion. I knew perfectly well he was telling me a lie, because the rimmel comes off when one weeps, but not the lipstick, and besides all elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no such fatal effect upon the make-up. I knew this from my own experience. You wept just enough to fill the eyes with tears and no more. No overflow. The tears stayed inside the cups of the eyes, the rimmel was preserved, and yet the sadness was sufficiently expressive. After a moment one could repeat the process with the same dexterity which enables the garcon to fill the liqueur glass exactly to the brim. One tear too much could bring about a catastrophe, but these only came uncontrolled in the case of a real love affair.

I was smiling to myself at his naive lies, knowing that no change of lipstick could soil two handkerchiefs. The truth probably was that he had wiped his own mouth after kissing her.

He was playing around now just as much as before, but he hated to admit it to himself, and to me, because of the ideal image he carried in himself, the image of a man who could be so deeply disturbed and altered by the love of a long lost daughter that his career as a Don Juan had come to an abrupt end.

This romantic gesture which he was unable to make attracted him so much that he had to pretend he was making it, just as I had often pretended to be taking a voyage by writing letters on the stationery of some famous ocean liner.

“I said to Laura—do yo really think that if I wanted to deceive you I would do it in such an obvious and stupid way, right here in our own home where you might come in any moment?”

I knew only too well the blandness of the voice, the innocence of the eyes, the phrase tailed off with a smile which so melted the heart that one felt—well, if he is lying, I forgive him.

While my father was talking I was chuckling to think that the very same tricks I had played on others were now being played on me. But there was this difference between us, that on certain days I could be as sincere, or more sincere, than the people who never told any lies.

Suddenly I asked myself whether or not I wanted to be lied to. Both my father’s lies and mine were created to sustain the illusions of others. I was coming nearer and nearer to the realization that nobody had ever been grateful to me for my lies. Now they would know the truth. And yet I dreaded to hurt people. People may not appear to be injured, but they are, and fatally so, by certain truths. I had seen people crippled and broken from the knowledge of truth.

The trouble lay not in my lying, but in the fact that we are all brought up on fairy tales. We all expect the marvellous, the miraculous. I had been more poisoned by fairy tales than anyone. I actually believed that I could work miracles. When anyone said I want, or I need, I set out then and there to fulfill this need, this desire. I decided to be the fairy tale. And to a great extent I succeeded.

I could give each man the illusion that the world and I were exactly as he wished them to be. I wanted everyone to have what he wanted. The mistake I made was to encompass too much. I could carry one or two or three fairy tales out, but no more.

What my father was attempting was very much the same. He was trying to create an ideal world for me in which Don Juan, for the sake of his daughter, renounced all women. But I could not be deceived by his inventions. I was too clairvoyant. That was the pity of it. I could not believe in that which I wanted others to believe in—in a world made as one wanted it, an ideal world. I no longer believe in an ideal world at all.

And my father, what did he want and need? The illusion, which I was fostering, of a daughter who had never loved anyone but him? Or did he find it hard to believe me too? When I left him in the south, did he not doubt my reason for leaving him?

When I went about dreaming of satisfying the world’s hunger for illusion did I not know it was the most painful, the most insatiable hunger? Did I not know too that I suffered from doubt, and that although I was able to work miracles for others I had no faith that the fairy tale would ever work out for myself? Even the gifts I received were difficult for me to love, because I knew that they would soon be taken away from me, just as my father had been taken away from me when I loved him so passionately, just as every home I had as a child had been disrupted, sold, lost, just as every country I became attached to was soon changed for another country, just as all my childhood had been loss, change, instability. Even as a child, when I was sailing to America after the loss of my grandmother, I had promised myself never to love anybody again so as not to suffer so much.

When I entered his house which was all in brown, brown wood on the walls, brown rugs, brown furniture, I thought of Spengler writing about brown as the color of philosophy.

His windows were not open on the street, he had no use for the street, and so he had made the windows of stained glass. He lived within the heart of his own home as Orientals live within their citadel. Out of reach of passers-by. The house might have been anywhere—in England, Holland, Germany, America. There was no stamp of nationality upon it, no air from the outside. It was the house of the self, the house of his thoughts. The wall of the self—erected without connection with the crowd, or country or race.

He was still taking his siesta. I sat near the long range of files, the long, beautiful, neat rows of files, with names which set me dreaming: China, Science, Photography, Ancient Instruments, Egypt, Morocco, Cancer, Radio, Inventions, The Guitar, Spain. It required hours of work every day: newspapers and magazines had to be read and clippings cut out, dated, glued. He wove a veritable spider web about himself. No man was ever more completely installed in the realm of possessions.

He spent hours inventing new ways of filling his cigarette holder with an anti-nicotine filter. He bought drugs in whole-sale quantities. His closets were filled with photographs, with supplies of writing paper and medicines sufficient to last for years. It was as if he feared to find himself suddenly empty-handed. His house was a store-house of supplies which revealed his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the improvised, the unexpected. He was a man who had prepared a fortress against need, against war, change, loss, etc.

Were Paris to be invaded to-morrow my father could go on living off his supply of Quaker Oats, biscuits, tonics, strichnine injections, iodine, etc. He could never use up the shirts he owned, the underwear, the hair lotions, the tooth-paste, the writing paper, the pencils…

Objects, it is true, are a great protection against ghosts. A piece of fur, a bottle of bath salts, my satin negligee, had often consoled and comforted me against invisible sorrows and fears. To turn on the light in my room, to lie on the white fur bed, to put my hand on the telephone and call some one, anyone, to turn on the water for a bath, to throw into the bath sandalwood salts, all this had the magical power of making the world warmer, sweeter. The vague anxieties, premonitions, haunting, invisible misfortunes hanging over me thus evaporated. At night, in the dark, I could touch the telephone and say to myself: I can turn the little disk and a voice will answer. A voice I don’t know. But it will be a real voice, and I will know that I am not gone yet, that the cruelty of human beings has not killed me, that to-morrow there will be a dawn, the sun will shine, the radiators will whistle, the maid will bring hot coffee, and death will be postponed.

In proportion to my father’s capacity for becoming invisible, untouchable, unattainable, in proportion to his capacity for metamorphosis, for disappearance even, he had made the most solid house, the strongest walls, the heaviest furniture, the most heavily loaded bookcases, the most heavily covered walls, the most heavily filled linen closets, the most completely filled and catalogued universe. Everything to testify to his presence, his duration, his signature to a contract to remain on earth, visible at moments. All this he promised, with his house, his possessions, his servants, his luxurious car. It was a lease, a lease on life. He lives in his own house, the neighbors could say, it may be he will stay a while. It took so much to persuade him to stay. At bottom life had offended him, failed him, like a shallow mistress. He didn’t have much use for it, but he would not spit on it. He was an aristocrat. His body continued to be courteous. But no one could tame his wandering spirit. There were consolations. Out of contempt for life, he seemed to be saying, for big sorrows there are consolations, things like bath salts and fur bed-covers. No more.

In my mind I saw him asleep upstairs, with his elbow under his chin, in the most uncomfortable position, one he had finally trained himself to hold so that he would never sleep with his mouth open, because that was ugly. I saw him asleep without a pillow, because a pillow under the head brought wrinkles. I pictured the bottle of alcohol which my mother had laughingly said, when I was a child, my father bottled himself in at night in order to keep young…

Now he was before me, and he was doing a stunt which used to make me laugh wildly when we were living in Brussels. He used to come in and imitate the cackles of a hen about to lay an egg. His cries were comical. He would produce one egg after another, which made the three of us laugh wildly. To-day he was doing it just as of old, but I was no longer able to laugh. Suddenly it occurred to me that his gaiety had never been genuine. It was simulated. It was for others. He did not feel it himself. It was a pretense, and realizing it, I felt sad.

After this prank he left me to wash his hands. He washed his hands after everything he did. He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself.

The fear of microbes played a very important part in his life. The fear of microbes was his rational explanation. The fruit had to be washed with filtered water. The water had to be filtered for drinking. His mouth must be disinfected. The silverware had to be passed over an alcohol lamp before using it. He washed his hands continuously. He bathed meticulously. He never ate the part of the bread which his fingers had touched.

Thus it seemed to me had people washed in the baptismal waters of rivers all through the ages, hut they had always known that it was to wash away the traces of sin.

My father had never imagined that he was trying to cleanse his soul in the waters of his bathroom, to wash it of his lies, his deceptions, his callousness. The microbe for him was a danger to the body. He did not study the microbe of conscience which we carry within us.

When I saw him washing his hands, as I watched the soap foaming, I could see him again arriving behind stage at the concert hall in Berlin, with his fur-lined coat and white silk scarf, and being immediately surrounded by women. I seven years old, sitting in the front row with my mother and brothers, in a starched dress and white gloves, trembling a little because my father had said: “And above all, don’t make a cheap family show of your enthusiasm. Clap discreetly. Don’t have people notice that the pianist’s children are clapping away like a bh of jolly, noisy peasants.” This enthusiasm which was to be held in check was a great burden for child’s soul. I had never been able to curb a joy a sorrow; to restrain oneself meant to kill, to bury. This cemetery of strangled emotions—was it this my father was trying to wash away? And the day I told him I was pregnant and he said: “Now you’re worth less on the market as a woman…”—was this being washed away? No thought or insight into the feelings of others. Incapable of reading into others’ feelings, passing from extremes of hardness to weakness; no intermediate stage of human feelings, but extreme poles of emotions which never made the human equation… too hot or too cold, blood cold and heart weak, blood hot and heart cold…

While he was washing his hands with that expression I had seen on the faces of people in India thrust into the Ganges, of Egyptians plunged into the Nile, of Negroes dipped into the Mississippi, I saw the fruit being washed for his lunch and mineral water poured into his glass. Sterilized water to wash away the microbes, but his soul unwashed, unwashable, yearning to be free of the microbe of conscience… All the water running from the modern tap, running, floating in this modern bathroom, all the rivers of Egypt, of India, of America… and he unwashed… All the taps open in the modern world, and every man standing before it washing his modern body, washing… washing… washing… A drop ofholy water with which to exorcise the guilt.

Hands washed over and over again in the hope of a miracle, and no miracle comes from the taps of modern washstands, no holy water flows through leaden pipes, no holy water flows under the bridges of Paris because the man standing at the tap has no faith and no awareness of his soul: he believes he is merely washing the stain of microbes from his hands…

My father came in unexpectedly and saw that the outline of rouge on my lips was slightly blurred by kisses just received. My father talked rapidly, breathlessly, and left very hurriedly. I wanted to stop him and ask him to give me back my soul. I hated him for the way he descended the stairs as if he had been cast out, wounded by jealousy. I hated him because I could not remain detached, could not remain standing at the top of the stairs watching him depart. I felt myself going down with him, within him, because his pain and flight were so familiar to me. I descended with him, and lost myself, passed into him, became one with him like his shadow. I felt my self growing empty, and dissolving, and passing into him. I knew that when he reached the street he would hail a taxi even though it was a forbidden luxury. I knew that once in the taxi he would feel a certain relief in having again escaped from the place, the person who had inflicted the wound. There was always a possibility of removing one’s self physically. I knew he would sit in the taxi entranced with the speed of it, and abandon himself to rebellion: “I won’t see her again. I don’t want to be hurt any more.”

The organ grinder would play and the pain would gnaw deeper, hotter, bitterer, because even tuneless music could dissolve the crust we build around our feelings. Coming out of the taxi he would curse the leaden day which engraves its color on our mood, and from which we can never escape because we are born inextricably woven into the texture, color and temperature of nature. p align=”JUSTIFY” height=”0” width=”24”> He would curse the mood which dispossessed him of his own soul, and the tragic sense of life which distorted trees, faces, events, like one long, continuous nightmare. He would overtip the taxi driver because he imagined he might be suffering too, and that perhaps a gift and a smile might prevent him from committing suicide. He would have the feeling in so doing that he had relieved the sufferings of mankind. Then he would breathe a little more lightly. Giving to the taxi driver’s wife and crippled children was to give to his suffering self the gift he wished some one would make him—of a smile and of thoughtfulness.

I wanted to beg my father to tell me that he had done something else, something different from what I would have done. I wanted to beg him to assure me I had stayed at the top of the stairs.

But I was not there. We were standing in the street, looking at our empty pocketbooks and wondering wistfully why we were not given, as we gave others, at least the illusion of perfection. We lamented our isolation, yet we were the ones who had run away. The next time we would meet we would show false, high-pitched gaiety and our sensitive ears would catch the sound of the effort. This gaiety which was false, which made him smile with only half of his mouth, was the same gaiety I used on dark days as my last gift.

I wanted to reach out to my father and warn him. I wanted to reassure him and caress him. But everything about him was fluttering like a bird that had flown into a room by mistake, flying recklessly and blindly in utter terror. A bird bruising itself against wall and furniture while one stands there mute and compassionate. A terror so great that it did not sense one’s pity, and when one opened the window to allow it to escape it interpreted the gesture as a menace. To run away from its own terror it flew wildly against the window and crushed its feathers.

Don’t flutter so blindly, my father!

Or perhaps during that taxi ride he had arranged to sever himself from the situation which caused him pain. I knew how he would plan his escape. He was planning a long trip, he was writing letters, addressing the flowers, waving good-byes, enacting the departure. He was cutting all the cords as if he were a ship being launched, slipping down the ways… He would sever the tie, that was simple. A big sabre cut, once and for all, and he would be free. That would be a fancy too, as fanciful as the idea that music, this music which filled the air we breathed, was silenced when the radio was turned off. Life could not be sliced to separate the regions of pain from those of joy. Everything that happened to us happened deep down, where it could not be hacked away.

I grew suddenly tired of seeing my father always in profile, of seeing him always walking on the edge of circles, of seeing him always elusive, always covering essentials with long, dizzy phrases about nothing. The fluidity, the evasiveness, the deviations made his life a shadow picture. He never met life full face. His eyes never rested on anything, they were always in flight. His face was in flight. His hands were in flight. I never saw them lying still, but always curving like autumn leaves over a fire, curlind uncurling. Thinking of him I could picture him only in motion, either about to leave, or about to arrive; I could see better than anything else, as he was leaving, his back, the way his hair came to a point on his neck, the birth mark on his neck. I had a three-quarter picture of him taking leave, his face partly turned towards the door, his hand stretched to say good-bye. In his own home the sound of his steps was unreal—he could arrive without being heard.

When I got into the taxi I had a feeling that I was going to bring the tiger in my father out into the open. I was tired of his secret muscles, his feline mysteries, his ballet dancing. I told myself I would begin by telling him the whole truth, and demand the same of him. I would struggle to build up a new relationship.

He was leaving for a concert with a young violinist. He had asked me to rent a private compartment in which he said he wanted to prepare some notes for a conference. When I brought the ticket to him I said I knew that the compartment would be put to other uses. He leaped up in great anger and said: “You suspect me, you suspect me?”

But he refused to admit that he had been lying. He was pale with anger. No one ever doubted him before—so he said. To be doubted blinded him with anger. He was not concerned with the truth or falsity of the situation. He was concerned with the injury and insult I was guilty of, by doubting him.

“You’re demolishing everything,” he said.

“What I’m demolishing was not solid,” I answered. “Let’s make a new beginning. We created nothing together except a sand pile into which both of us sink now and then with doubts. I am not a child. I cannot believe your stories.”

He grew still more pale and angry. What shone out of his angry eye was pride in his stories, pride in his ideal self, pride in his delusions. And he was offended. He did not stop to ask himself if I were right. I could not be right. I could see, that for the moment at any rate, he believed implicitly in the stories he had told me. If he had not believed in them so firmly he would have been humiliated to see himself as a poor comedian, a man who could not deceive even his own daughter.

“You shouldn’t be offended,” I said. “Not to be able to deceive your own daughter is no disgrace. It’s precisely because I have told you so many lies myself that I can’t be lied to.”

“Now,” he said, “you’re accusing me of being a Don Juan.”

“I accuse you of nothing. I am only asking for the truth.”

“What truth?” he said. “I am a moral being, far more moral than you.”

“That’s too bad. I thought we were above questions of good and evil. I am not saying you’re bad. I am not saying you’re a woman chaser. That doesn’t concern me. I am saying only that you’re false with me. I have too much intuition.”

“You have no intuition at all concerning me.”

“That might have affected me when I was a child. To-day I don’t mind what you think of me.”

“Go on,” he said, “now tell me I am selfish, tell me I have no talent, tell me I don’t know how to love, tell me all the things your mother used to tell me.”

“I have never thought any of these things.”

But suddenly I stopped. I knew my father was not seeing me any more, but again that judge, that past which made him so uneasy. I felt as if I were not myself any more, but my mother, my mother with red face and a body tired with giving and serving, a body rebelling at his selfishness and irresponsibility. I felt her anger and despair. For the first time my own image of him fell to the floor. I saw my mother’s image. I saw the child in him who was loved and did not know yet how to love. I saw the child courting caresses and incapable of an act of protection, of strength. I saw the child hiding under her courage, the same child hiding now behind Laura’s skirts. I was my mother telling him again that as a human being he was a failure… and perhaps she had told him too that as an artist he had not given enough to justify his limitations as a human being. All his life he had been playing with people, with love, playing at love, playing at being a pianist, playing at composing. Playing because to no one or nothing could he give his whole soul. He never brought himself to anything intact. There were two regions, two tracts of land, with a bridge in between, a slight, fragile bridge like the Japanese bridges in the miniature Japanese gardens. Whoever ventured to cross the bridge fell into the abyss. So it was with my mother. She had fallen through and been drowned. My mother thought he had a soul. She had fallen there in that space where his emotions reached their limit, where the land opened in two, where circles fell open and rings were unsoldered.

Was it my mother talking now? I was saying: “I am only asking you to be honest with yourself. I admit I lie, but you do not admit it. I am not asking you for anything, except to be real.”

“The violinist is in love with me, but I am not in love with her.”

“Oh God!” I shouted, “don’t get lost in the details. You’re always going off into details.”

“Now say I am superficial.”

“At this moment you are. I wanted you to face me full face. I wanted to make you come to life, by pain, if necessary. But you’re only suffering because your vanity has been wounded.”

“I am working myself to the bone for Laura’s sake.”

“That isn’t altogether true either. Laura doesn’t want you to work. Your work is an opiate. Why can’t you say anything real? I have a good ear for false tones.”

“Then go and have your ears cleaned!”

He was furious. He paced up and down in long strides, pale, his lips blue with anger.

“You only love in me,” I said, “what resembles you. What is different in me you don’t understand.”

“You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known.”

“You never try to know women—that’s why you never give them more than a night.”

It seemed to me that my father was not quarrelling with me but with his own past, that what was coming to light now was his constant feeling of guilt towards my mother. If he saw in me now a sort of avenger it was only because of his fear that I might say to him what my mother used to say. Against her words he had erected a huge defense: the approbation of the rest of the world.

But in himself he had never quite resolved the right and the wrong. He too was driven now by a compulsion to say things he never intended to say, to make me the symbol of the one who had come to punish. I had come to expose his life of lies and deceptions. Perhaps to prove to him his worthlessness.

And yet this was not the nature of my struggle with him at all. I could have stood in front of him and been silent—still he would have interpreted my words as a reproach. He was so far from accepting my real words. It was as if he feared that whoever came near to him had come to punish him, to expose him.

He was not yet convinced that he had acted rightly. He feared so much that I had come to say: “The four people you abandoned in order to live your own life, in order to save yourself, are here again. They have not died. They are not crippled. It is only faith in love they have lost. You lost it, too, when your betrothed betrayed you. We all lose it at some time or other. Your running away was not a crime. Why are you ashamed?”

Because I had come to ask him for the truth he thought I had come to accuse him, or to condemn. I could not make this clear. I was not aware of it at the moment. The scene between us was taking place between two ghosts, talking at each other, saying things that we could not make clear, because we were both choked by our own anger, blinded by our own emotion.

My father’s ghost was saying: “I cannot bear the slightest doubt, the slightest criticism. Immediately I feel judged, condemned.”

My own ghost was saying: “I cannot bear lies and deceptions. It makes the ground shift under my feet. I need truth and solidity.”

They could not understand each other. They were gesticulating in space. Gestures of anger, of despair. My father pacing up and down, angry because of my doubts of him, forgetting that these doubts were well founded, forgetting to ask himself whether I was right or not. And I hysterical with despair because my father would not understand, because the fragile, little Japanese bridge between the two portions of his soul would not even hold me for a moment, me walking with such light feet, trying to bring messages from one side to the other, trying to make connections between the real and the unreal…

I could not see my father clearly any more. I could see only the hard profile cutting the air like a st stone ship, a stone ship moving in a sea unknown to human beings, into regions made of rock, of granite, of mineral. No more water, or warmth, or flow between us. All communication paralyzed by falsity. Lost in the fog. Lost in a cold, white fog of falsity. Images distorted as if we were looking through a glass bowl. His mouth long and mocking, his eyes enormous but empty in their transparency. Enormous and bulbous, like the eyes of a fish. Not human. The human contours all lost. No longer the voice of a human being saying simple things, like—”I am hungry, I am sleepy, I am tired.” (I could not remember his ever saying these things.) But like voices saying: “You doubt me. You think I have no talent.” And an interruption. The wind blowing. The wind, or a river boat’s siren, or a storm. Then the voice again: “You think I am bad. I am working so hard. The women I have known I never cared to know. I never did them any harm (but I did not say you did). I sent them red roses when everything was finished. I never saw them cry. When they got sick I didn’t like it. I don’t like sickness. It isn’t aesthetic. You haven’t enough scientific spirit. Life is like a marvellous machine. You must run it with exactitude. As you run the body. When I stop making love my machine gets out of order. I get yellow and I don’t feel well. Be rational, my daughter.”

And I thinking while the radio of his quick, smooth speaking continued: “I stopped loving my father a long time ago.” What remained was the slavery to the pain, the habit of thinking that I loved him, the slavery to a pattern. When I saw him I thought I would be happy and exalted. I pretended. I worked myself up into ecstasies. When one is pretending the entire body revolts. There come great eruptions and revolts, great, dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural and real brings joy. He was pretending too—he had to win me as a trophy, as a victory. He had to win me away from my mother, had to win my approbation. Had to win me because he feared me. He feared the judgment of his children. And when he could not win me he suffered in his vanity. He fought in me his own faults, just as I hated in him my own faults.

Certain gestures made in childhood seem to have eternal repercussions. Such was the gesture I had made to keep my father from leaving, grasping his coat and holding on to it so fiercely that I had to be torn away. This gesture of despair seemed to prolong itself throughout my life. I grew to love everything that fled, everything that vanished before me, and to believe that everything I loved would always be lost. I repeated this gesture blindly, hundreds and hundreds of times. It was so hard for me to believe that this father I was still trying to hold on to was no longer real or important, that the coat I was touching was not warm, that the body of him was not human, that my breathless, tragic desire had come to an end, that the man I was holding to-day was not the man I needed, and that my love had died.

Great forces had impelled me towards symmetry and balance, had impelled me to abandon my father in order to close the fatal circle of abandon. I had forced the hour glass of pain to turn. We had run after each other. We had tried to possess each other. We had been slaves of a pattern, and not of love.

Our love had long ago been replaced by the other loves which gave us life. All those portions of the self which had been tied up in the tangle of misery and frustration had been loosened imperceptibly by life, by creation. But the feelings we had begun with, twenty years back, he of guilt and I of love, had been like railrot>To-day I held the coat of a dead love—and it was hard to believe in the death of it.

This had been the nightmare—to pursue this search and poison all joys with the necessity of its fulfilment. To discover that such fulfilment was not necessary to life, but only to the mind. We were writing myths with our life blood, books in which destiny forbade us to forget our ideal loves, our promises to ourselves. What we call our destiny—the railroad tracks of our obsessions.

Now I was going to enter the Chinese theatre where I would be shown the trappings of the play as well as the play itself, where it was plain to see that the settings were made of cardboard, where there was no attempt made to conceal the wooden rafts, the electric moonlight. I would go behind the stage to see how it was done, in order to stop weeping, in order to make sure that no one was dead, that there was no tragedy.

If I should never be able to look behind my nightmare I would go mad with fear and despair. I wanted to awaken and see the cheerful white face of the clock pointing to one o’clock in the sunshine. I wanted to be at the Chinese theatre, so that I could bear this sight of my life, so that the screams, the tears, the murders would not be too real. I wanted to see the strings which ruled the scenes, the cardboard in the trees, the false storms and the false lightnings. I would sit at the Chinese theatre and be saved.

I could hear the voices of the world just as I heard the voices of the nurses and doctors, coming out of the ether, the world saying: “You are loved, you are wanted, you are not persecuted, he didn’t leave you, no one laughed at you”—but this voice came across great spaces and sounded very faint. The ether was too strong, I could not move or act differently. The upper part of my head was in a fog: I continued to shed real tears, to tremble with real fears, real suffering, as in a nightmare that repeats itself over and over again. My mind and my body were only half out of the ether of the past. I had not opened my eyes altogether; I was still writing in an ancient pattern.

My anger and despair, my hatred and love of my father grew immense, smudged the whole world, tainted the sky. My fury rose, the thermometer of my despair burst…

His face was the face of the world, the world as enemy, as the not-me. I wanted to strike at it, but I loved it. I could not kill it. I had seen it afraid. I could not destroy it. I had heard it weep. My anger fell. The windmills taunted me. My father had hurt me. The world had hurt me. But my love for the world, for my father, for deaf gods, was indestructible. My love for my father. My forgiveness, my forgiveness…

It was enough that a man without legs should pass me—a man, pushing himself along with his hands—for me to cease feeling my own suffering.

The world was a cripple. My father was a cripple.

In striking out for his own liberty, to save his own life, he had struck at me. And he had poisoned himself with remorse.

No need to hate. No need to punish.

I half sat up. I saw the clock marking one o’ clock in the sun. The light was gold. The doctors and nurses were gone. The birds were singing. The dog was barking. The last time I had come out of the ether it was to look at my dead child, a little girl with long eyelashes and slender hands. She was dead.

The little girl in me was dead too. The woman had been saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father.