A DREAM OF HAITI

My desire surges towards him

NEW YORK, APRIL 18, 1943

A visit from Lucas Premice and Albert Mangones, a Haitian evening, a voyage to Haiti. Premice told us a story about an old Frenchman in the Columbian jungle, a political évadé, carrying the dead arm of a copain, in chains. Premice saved him, taught him Marxism and walked forty days over the mountains to help him escape.

On peut toujours s’évader

by transcending

Again my favorite word

to transcend.

I was happy last night during the journey to Haiti! Upon leaving, they said: “Next time we will bring our drums. Your place has a propitious atmosphere.”

I would like to detach myself completely from Henry. I find his letters ugly—how was it I did not see the ugliness? When he gets the small press from Dudley’s brother, he writes: “I must find someone to do the dirty work for me.” When I refer ironically to Dudley, who like all the others burdened me with himself and his friend he answers: “You are hard on those who use you!”

There is such sterility and dryness in the letters, callousness. The dimension of feeling is missing, as in the criminal and the madman. He is schizophrenic, like my father. I realized Henry’s letters only hurt me, anger me, and I asked him to stop writing. I can’t bear the ugliness of his letters now without my “delusions” which made me not see.

APRIL 23, 1943

On Tuesday, April 20th, we finished Misfortunes of the Immortals for Caresse, a big task, a book whose content and design are worthless. On Monday we finished the printing. Gonzalo and I went out and drank whiskey, ate a Spanish dinner, went to our corner, took our clothes off and had an orgy as frenzied as our early passions, with Gonzalo in ecstasy—a peak!

APRIL 26, 1943

I gave a party, for Premice, Mangones, Irina Aleksander, etc. The few parties I have given have been dreams. This party was a beautiful dream of Haiti, with Premice and his voodoo face, his two daughters Adele and Josephine. Josephine is an inspired dancer, savage and violent and powerful (she is only sixteen). Adele is sedate and learned. Immediately they showed affection and used the toi, to which I respond with all the warmth of my own being. Albert sat on the drum and sang soft, tangy songs beautifully. Josephine danced. Irina was effervescent, revealing herself as a delirious actress, both comic and tragic, rendering Russian poetry with such eloquence and nuances that it was ensorcelling. She took a scene from the Comédie Française Russe, making us laugh and weep—it was wonderful, fiery, effulgent. Canada Lee was enamored by all the women but crystallized his intention of a love affair on me and, on parting, asked if my green eyes denote passion as the legend assures us. As he looked for something to read to us, Hugo suggested Winter of Artifice’s last pages and Canada read them movingly—so I had the unique experience of hearing my work read by someone before me, absorbed before my eyes, a strange violation of the secret lapse which usually separates the writer from his reader. A strange sensation.

APRIL 28, 1943

In his last letter, Henry tells me he met a Greek woman who is me, who resembles me in every way, with whom he had a talk like his first with me. Crazy. She is the same as me “even to the husband situation.” After I sent my letter to Henry I felt slightly guilty of cruelty, for he cannot escape from the truth now, but I wanted to hurt him, to strike against his schizophrenia, his escape from all pain, his great self-protectiveness.

I had the following dream: Henry came to stay at the big hotel where the press was lodged, and I was constantly anxious that Gonzalo should see him. The striking thing about Henry’s appearance was his exaggerated, almost grotesque air of health: a very red skin, shiny, thick, healthy hair, while I was mentally and physically sick. He kissed me as if nothing had happened, but I drew away and said, “Help me to tell you the truth.”

APRIL 29, 1943

Talk with Jaeger. She believes my collapse came from the finality of the break with Henry. She says the letter I wrote to him was truthful and just, not cruel. She was glad I had made the break. As an analyst she was forbidden to pass judgment on Henry, but today she said she was happy for me because Henry would have merely continued to take my whole strength (the healthy Henry of the dream, and the sick me).

How can I be sick, why should my heart fail me? I have Hugo’s complete love, his twinship, I have Gonzalo’s passion; I had, as Jaeger said, the most that Henry was capable of giving as love, more than June; I have the whole world before me and marvelous friendships. Let this be the last of the crucifixions.

How Jaeger has tried to save me from sorrow and self-destruction.

MAY 8, 1943

Albert

Albert is twenty-six, and is almost white, golden in fact, like a smaller, younger, whiter Gonzalo. His hair is curly, his face round and soft, but the great difference is in the mouth. Gonzalo’s mouth is narrow and compressed, and Albert’s is full and sensuous. Albert sings Haitian songs with a beautiful voice, dances, plays the drum, has won a gold medal for architecture at Cornell, and is a painter and sculptor. He is soft, sincere, integrated, a communist. He does not deny his race, though he could easily pass for a Cuban, a South American. He is refined and sensitive. I felt close to him, warm, human. We became friends. At this dinner I turned my attention on him. We danced together, with a lovely warmth. Albert pleases me with the kind of beauty I love in Gonzalo without the darkness. He is made for pleasure. And so my desire wandered—I became all desire and warmth. I got up and danced to the drum…

Then I did a diabolical thing—I let Albert come to the press. He came in and I never saw him look so beautiful, healthy, charming, in contrast to Gonzalo, and I had never noticed the difference and the resemblance. Gonzalo, who has neglected me for ten days, reacted with instant jealousy, instant panic, as if he had been stabbed. And I was glad. I enjoyed hurting him. Gonzalo, you leave me for Helba, and when you leave me, I am unfaithful. I did not try to console him. Yes, I said, Albert was in love with someone else, but Gonzalo did not believe this.

He did not dare explode, but he suffered, and I was glad. Only towards the end of the afternoon did I feel pity for him. I pretended not to know what he was suffering from, and he did not dare to acknowledge it. It is my first experience with sadism. It gave me pleasure. I thought: Well, you like suffering with Helba—I can make you suffer too. When Jaeger called him a masochist I was angered, for I could see I had caused him only pleasure and fulfillment (the only suffering I ever caused Gonzalo was jealousy).

Now, as I write this, my pleasure is gone, and I would like to console him. Has all this come about because Jaeger forced me to face the irrational woman in myself?

Jaeger says I have a rational mind seeking to control my nature, but I have never faced my own irrationality. She thinks I use lucidity and rationality only to deceive myself. I have always thought that I face all truth because I do not try to elude suffering, but there is a masochistic suffering masking deeper truths and terrors. Behind all my suffering lies a greater truth I have not yet faced—I am still amazed how a situation can arouse such passion, create such an intense mirage.

I am not sure that Albert is free, and he is not daring enough. I want to wait until someone compels me, courts me, forces me. I want a man. But the very feeling that I could desire others than Gonzalo gave me such pleasure that when I returned to the press, looked out the window and listened to the street musicians, I felt joy, and I said to myself: I am a free woman. I am free to enjoy. I shall know joy. I paid too heavily for my joy, too heavily, until now.

Of course, my causing Gonzalo’s pain may have been merely rebellion against the pain he causes me out of his own being, his weakness and blindness.

MAY 11, 1943

Jaeger. She laughs at my “cruelty,” its inoffensiveness, laughs that I exaggerate its strength. Then we discover that I have a terror of the irrational, that I have linked irrational behavior to abandon. So I fear it, and as I fear it in myself and repress it, I succumb to its exteriorization in others, and suffer from it.

I have been too good, too saintly, too rational. Now comes rebellion. Gonzalo said during our quarrel (for the next day, of course, we had a big quarrel during which he accused me of being Albert’s mistress) that I “was rebelling against life.”

I said, “And you don’t, and that is why life conquers and crushes you.”

Just as I was being reconciled to Gonzalo and realized I didn’t want to break but to free myself of neurotic suffering, a new catastrophe places Helba in the center again: her mother died. So immediately came the test! Let us see how I will take it. It is a choice between a break and acceptance. During our quarrel we hurt each other, but the love was apparent. Gonzalo said he had become a “saint” since he knew me, completely faithful to me, that he could not see how I could be hurt. In defiance of the hurt I expect from him, thinking he would say he could not come Monday night, I had invited the Haitians, but then he did ask me, and I had to refuse to see him.

I have had a neurotic fear of being irreparably damaged by my straining and suffering, and of being condemned to semi-invalidism. Jaeger says it is merely guilt for my desire to be happy and to enjoy. There is a violent struggle going on now between the sad, sacrificed Anaïs and the dancing, sensuous Venus Anaïs. It is going on in my struggle with the Haitians in spite of Helba’s mother’s death with which Helba will involve Gonzalo for several days now!

I am aware of a pain like that of being born, a difficult birth, I assure you. The drama is apparent in my clothes too, and I change from gay feathers and joyous colors to Madonna shawls and black dresses, from luminosity to paleness and thinness, from sleeplessness and heart palpitations to exuberant intoxicating vivacity, which is now released in company.

My heart and nerves have been very bad, but I will triumph. I have saved Gonzalo in great part. What I couldn’t save is the compassionate, blind Gonzalo, whose blood Helba is drinking like an incubus; but he has lived, loved, enjoyed, gained health, he is working and creating, while life punishes her cruelly. During the day he was most jealous and angry, he talked all the time about new ideas he had for my book of stories. He is pathetic and sincere. I have been blinded by my pities too…so…

Evening: The scene of jealousy gives me reassurance! So this afternoon at the press, the first afternoon we were without pressing work for months, Gonzalo said, “Let us go to sleep, under the covers.” And we took our clothes off and had an orgy—such vibration of desire, such electrical currents that the entire world seemed annihilated— an absolute of pleasure.

Then sleep, peace, contentment. Gonzalo was reassured. He kissed me passionately. Now if only I can keep the poison out of my being, which comes out of fear, and fear out of doubt, and doubt out of self-doubt, and all this comes from illness, just as Gonzalo’s jealousy does…

We laughed. We were happy. I was grateful to Martha. I saw her supremely intelligent face laughing at me, “Well, that wasn’t such a very cruel thing to do, after all.”

As we came out of the press, half a block away Albert greeted us—waved. But he had a hat on and was very differently dressed. Either Gonzalo didn’t recognize him or was free of anguish, and he kept his good mood, observing that the trees were blooming.

I came home, no longer felt my heart aching, sang, patted my face, and realized that suddenly my “beauty” has settled—settled to give others an illusion of beauty.

Ladies and Gentlemen, because I started in the opposite direction of the general run of grandes amoureuses, that is, I started with the amours difficiles (not faciles). It does not mean that after loving three times tragically and deeply I will not be able to entertain you further with more and more enticing stories of seductions and abductions and deductions. I will have many surprises for you, many enchanting adventures yet. All that has happened has made me a “face” and a woman of seduction. After all, my own husband after twenty years still thinks of me suddenly in the middle of his work, with desire. So whoever is reading this diary shall not always be wearied with stories of deaths, hospitals, asylums, but shall get a certain chronique scandaleuse, and what else is usually expected of Madame Venus?—who is, as Jaeger says, most positively a symbol of erotic seduction for other women.

MAY 16, 1943

Gonzalo hasn’t told Helba about the death of her mother. He is preoccupied and fearful of the moment. I am tender to him, but I run quickly to Albert’s studio and find a weak Albert who is very overwhelmed by my visit, timid and uneasy…and as I want to be seduced by a man, I run out again, feather to the wind, full of wild expectations, out in the spring night… Hoping, desiring love. Wishing, dreaming.

MAY 22, 1943

At least my illness is partly conquered. I have moments when I am free of anguish. I had a moment (they are so rare I can note them like important events) when I was laying down at the press, resting. Gonzalo was at the desk finishing a composition. The window was open on a summerlike day. I was watching the clouds passing over the house top. I was content. There was an organ grinder playing. A feeling of peace.

No one has described fully the horror of this illness called angoisse, or neurosis. Worse than any physical illness, this illness is of the soul, for it is insidious, so elusive, and so overlooked. You have just left your lover. You have just caressed and been caressed. You are walking home to a perfect, tender, devoted, passionate husband. No great catastrophes threaten you. You are not tragically struck down as others are, by the death of a loved one at war. There is no visible enemy, no real tragedy, no hospital, no cemetery, no mortuary, no criminal court, no crime, no horror—there is nothing. You are traversing a street. The automobile does not strike you down. It is not you inside of the ambulance being delivered to St. Vincent’s Hospital. It is not you whose mother died, not you whose brother went to war and got killed. In all the registers of catastrophes your name does not appear. You were not attacked in Harlem, raped, mutilated. You were not kidnapped for white slavery. You were not in the clipper which sank twenty passengers into the sea. You were not in a concentration camp, not on the refugee ship which was not permitted to land anywhere. You were not jailed in Spain, your family was not tortured by France. None of that. But as you cross the street and the wind lifts the dirt and before it touches your face, you feel as if all these horrors had happened to you—you feel the nameless angoisse—the shrinking of the heart, the asphyxiation, the suffocation of pain, the horror of the soul being stabbed… Invisible and pitiless drama, the mute drama. Only the analyst detects this drama and hears your cries. No one else. Every other illness or pain is understood, pitied, shared with all human beings. Not this one. It is mysterious and solitary; it is as ineffectual and unmoving to others as the attempted crying out of a mute person!

Everybody understands hunger, death, physical illness, poverty, slavery. But no one understands that this moment at which I crossed the street, an alluring personage, a seductive one, every privilege granted me, of love, desire, food, health, house, is more completely annihilated than by a concrete catastrophe. It is the true Tantalus torture: it is given to you, the health of your mother, the loves, the desires, the food, the house, like a mirage. It is given and denied. It is present in your vision and removed from your possession because the angoisse, the mysterious disease, the mysterious poison, has corroded your life and being.

This diary has been le livre des angoisses. The rarest pages in it are those of peace, contentment. So rare. Angoisse is the woman of a nightmare, screaming without a voice.

À la Recherche

des Jeux Perdus

MAY 23, 1943

Wearing the fuchsia bird of paradise, the fuchsia veil, the black velvet suit, the new copper colored nails (I made the mixture myself), sandals, no stockings, I went to the fête Haïtienne. I danced with Albert, and I met Jean Brièrre, the young and mythological beautiful black poet, and other Haitians. Josephine performed her voodoo dances.

All of them, the black ones, created this climate of warmth in which I bloom. I was in bloom, susceptible, open, flower-like, and to the first one who courted me, my body acquiesced. Canada Lee came at midnight, and put his arm around me, grasping me so tightly, saying: “When are you coming to see me? I’ve been wanting you to come and see me from the first time I saw you with Caresse.” So I said I would come. His only free evening, because he is in a play now, was Monday, Gonzalo’s night, but I said I would come.

It is a blind desire for sensuality, not for Canada Lee, but for all of their warmth and tenderness. It is strange how I have arrived at the flowering of my love of touch, of caresses. My own warmth is so great, but now it manifests itself in touch. I love to touch. I love to touch all of them, to kiss, to put my arm around all my friends— warmth, warmth, a tropical climate.

And now Hugo says, “I am sure I will make money now, in September,” and gets masterly. And I say: “Well, if you do, I shall then become completely Mlle. Frou-Frou. I shall do nothing but dress up and be beautiful.”

And Hugo answered, equally playful: “Now we are getting down to the truth of it: you are Frou-Frou, and I like it, and it makes me desire you.”

And it all stood clearly revealed, Hugo’s erotic attachment to the exotic Anaïs.

Brièrre, the young African king, noble profile, perfect features. Premice’s extraordinary fanaticism of the eyes—a rare noble.

My French ancestors lived in Haiti. When the uprising came they fled to New Orleans. The taboo last night, the separation between black and white, kept reforming itself.

How I wish Albert were more of a man.

Adventures of Frou-Frou

I awakened this morning to the thought of the night with Canada. I awakened hoping to enjoy it, not to be nervous, not to lose my appetite during the day, hoping for the flowering and the joy. As it happened, Gonzalo was dejected, inert, depressed, absent, etc. So I thought: how criminal to expect all life and joy from one human being. When one is born so full as I am, so rich, so overflowing, what a crime it is to be subjected to people less full, less rich, less alive. How wrong it is to take all my moods from Gonzalo, to starve for caresses, to starve for joy at his side, to wait for crumbs when I desire a feast, to rejoice over little fragments of passion when my whole being is that of a grande amoureuse with enough passion to flood the world! For the first time, I saw the world as a man sees it! I saw the sentimentality of woman. I laughed at myself clinging to the meager love of Gonzalo and sentimentalizing over him, seeing him unable to master or conquer sorrow, pitying him because I was going to give my body that night. Then, as I came up the stairs of my house, I thought: this has nothing to do with Gonzalo. Why confuse the feelings, the emotions, the pities, with the grandeur of the body’s desires, with its climates and tropical orgies? Men know this. Men live by this. That is why they suffer less. Why cannot woman too? Why?

I came home. I enjoyed my bath. I enjoyed perfuming myself. I knew I was born for this, to do it over and over again, the ritual of the dressing, the perfuming for love, for sensuality. I enjoyed everything sensually, thinking of Canada, the body flowering. I brushed my hair with pleasure. I powdered my feet. I put fresh copper on my nails. I was happy, not nervous, free of guilt towards all. Knowing at last what I am, recognizing it, admitting it, confronting it, une grande amoureuse, who disguised some of her passions with love—the woman born for love, for man. I denied this. I punished this. Let it flower. It is the life of nature. Do not punish and crucify it, do not sacrifice it, deny it, or kill it.

When I read the life of Ninon de L’Enclos, I envied her, without guilt. How Venus must have smiled upon my toilette, and how the tragic gods who cross and thwart my Venus must have enjoyed the trick they played on me!

First, when I arrived, people had dropped in on Canada and were making spaghetti: five or six uncouth, inarticulate Jewish boys. A drunken negro was making political tirades. A young actress, too, was studying her part. Canada and the speaker got into a stupid argument. I tried to talk to the actress, Catherine. I liked her red hair and fiery temperament.

I saw the evening was spoiled, and when Canada went into the bedroom to answer the telephone I followed him there to say I thought I should leave and come another time. He began to kiss me. He was aroused. He closed the door. Then, when he made me lie down and was beginning to take me, the telephone rang! For fear someone would come to the door, he answered. It was for Catherine! So she came to the room and I had barely time to fix my face again. Then he said, “I can’t bear to let you go. I’ll send the others home.” I came out with my coat on as if I were leaving too. Then I saw that Catherine was in turmoil. She was pretending it was because Canada had arranged for the boys to see her home. She was pretending even to herself that this had hurt her pride.

But I knew: I knew it was jealousy. A definite intuition prompted me to say to her: “Catherine, you stay, and the three of us will go somewhere together. Stay, Catherine.”

But she went away tempestuously. I said to Canada, “She’s upset about us.” He denied it. But I saw I had hit the mark. He said, “Let’s forget all about it. I want you.” We went into the bedroom, but by now I was quite out of my pleasure mood. Catherine was on my mind, and he was a little bothered too, but his desire was strong, and he would not give it up. We went to bed. Then came what woman desires in her deepest primitive being, when she craves to be possessed—a mad, violent, absolute carnal act—like nothing ever acted by the white man. A devouring hunger, a complete, violent passion, like a storm.

I could not respond. The curse was on me again.

Canada’s pleasure was immense. His cries I can still hear. I bear the mark of his teeth. I loved his possession. It was pure. It was of the flesh, of the flesh alone, and therefore pure and dark and terrible and wonderful, like a source not poisoned by feelings, emotions, sentimentalities, fears, doubts. A strength like the storms, the seas, the jungle, the mountains, the great strength of nature. Oh, Canada, the source of sex is pure in you, and stronger than in us. It is magnificent and of nature. His body was beautiful. A thoroughbred body…

After he had satisfied himself, he awakened to a noise on the terrace. Someone was there. He got up. I noticed he had no fear. Then I understood. I said, “Is it Catherine?” He nodded. He got dressed. I did too. Then the bell rang violently. He said, “It’s Catherine.” I went to the bathroom to fix my face. When I came out Catherine was still clinging to her story of being angry because Canada had sent her home with the boys. I saw a scene was pending. Canada now looked sheepish, and so I said good-bye to both and left!

It is to nature I want to return, it is my nature I want to accept. Here is an Anaïs whose ancestors lived in Haiti, in Cuba, in New Orleans, who were tropical and sensual. There is an Anaïs whose nature is luxuriant, but the great spiritual torments of love almost destroyed it. With Henry, I was nearer the joyous savage climate of sex than with Gonzalo. Gonzalo is a castrated savage, a timid savage. It was the primitive I loved in Gonzalo, but he was a weakened primitive who took only the pain and suffering from Christianity, its punishments! Poor Gonzalo!

Poor me too! What a crucifixion of the nature, what a starvation of the nature, what a perversion of it! Now that I am fully awakened to its power and magnificence, how criminal I find the constant thwarting of it.

Even Frances was asking me yesterday to transmit this force I felt into creation! No—no more transfusions, transpositions or sublimations! Pure nature and creation will come out of it, but nature will be at the roots, nourishing and plentiful! Nature full blown and wild, and the rest can grow like a superfluous fruit! But no more blood transmissions and transfusions, no more diverting of the courses of the blood into other channels. Let the blood live its own life and throw off its rarified flowers incidentally, but let not the blood be diverted.

I understand our going to the black man, to the source, but I do not understand why they desire us, what makes them prize us. I think it is merely the symbol, merely as a token of conquest by the downtrodden, merely our halo, our taboos, our inaccessibility. But what a poor prize, this weaker, paler, ghostly white race!

JUNE 1, 1943

Albert, his girl Pussy, Irina and her husband, the Premices, we all went to George Davis’s house to see Richard Wright. We went like troubadours, carrying the drum. We gave him dancing, singing, drumming, and a taste of Russia, Yugoslavia, Spain, and France. Richard Wright is a handsome, medium-colored man, quiet, simple, direct. Again a beautiful evening.

I was drawn to Albert, sat by him as he sang, wanted to drink the song from his mouth, his full and beautiful mouth. He responds to my warmth. I feel the current, and he receives it, but in the maze of his shyness, youthfulness, pride and passivity, I cannot tell if he wants me. When we walk towards each other either to dance, or because we are drawn to each other, we walk like two waves surging who do not dare to mingle. In this sea of warmth I am lost. I do not know how bound he is to Pussy, the little Jewish girl. As we left Wright’s place, I took his one arm and Pussy the other. I said, “It pains me when you leave.” He answered, “Moi aussi.” And his hand sought mine and clasped it—I felt him moved. I cannot distinguish between his feelings and mine. When he looks at me I travaille. I can’t tell if he does too or if the turmoil is in me. Desire. Albert is the image of the joy I seek, the integrity, the beauty, the nature. He is the sea, the island, the warmth, the tropical dream. He is the languor, the softness, the siesta, the hammock, the sun, the dance, the song, the drum. Desire. In waves of phosphorescent foam my desire surges towards him, and I behave like a dancer, moving towards him, then shy, then retreating.

I am blind.

Yesterday, in the sun and warmth of summer, we went with Albert and his statue of a drummer to Jacques Lipchitz’s studio for criticism. I heard Albert talk luminously, responding to the cosmic vision of Lipchitz. His intelligence is not like ours, monstrously over-developed like a morbid growth, not reaching the point of dissolution, dissection, separation, but fused, integrated, direct, pure. If only Albert were older, not the shy young son…if only he dared. But now I am faced by a new difficulty: I am the intimidating one.

My impulse is to run to him and kiss him, but Jaeger stands guard, the mythological mother, saying: “Do not run towards pain, do not run into pain, do not destroy yourself again, do not follow the mirages of love! He is the son; he is too young; he is too yielding. Wait for the man…”

Albert’s dancing, with the softness and beauty of a woman, his feminine smile.

I live drunk with desire.

I didn’t want to see Gonzalo, be with Gonzalo. He was dark and heavy. To come out of the darkness and heaviness, he drank, and when he drinks the savage Gonzalo is released. So he wooed me, with the violence I like, won me, sought a new embrace, sat me like an idol over his body, urged me to move, lay back, and only at the end I made an effort to respond…

JUNE 3, 1943

They all came last night, Brièrre, Albert, Josephine, Adele, Lionel Durant, and Pierre Roumain. We sat on the porch. Albert’s hands were on the drum, and I could not resist placing mine on the drum. He only touched the tip of my finger. I felt his feeling following me if I sat by Lionel, his feelings welcoming me when I moved towards him, drawing me to the seat beside him. He said, “I wish I had a gift to make you.” I said, “There is something I want—the photo of you drumming in the fields…” He immediately gave it to me, though he had only one. I said I would have one made for him. I took it to the light. He followed me. We were alone in the studio. We leaned over Hugo’s pictures, and the emotion caught us together. I had taken his arm, and he pressed mine, our bodies touched. As we could be seen from the window, we walked away, his arm about my waist. Forever and forever I shall feel how he pressed his temple against mine and said, “Je sais, Anaïs, je sais.” Delicate brushings, charged with feelings, tensions. A moment later others came. We put on the radio. Albert opened his arms and we danced…he held me tightly…simple acts.

After they left I turned out the light, and I fell back into the summer night, drunk. Over and over again I repeated the scene, the movements, from the very first: the hands on the drum, the dance, the feelings, each time anew, the strong current and the ecstasy, the most marvelous moment in all of life, more marvelous even than possession!

I know, Anaïs, I know…

Evening: Albert and I went to the Blue Angel to present Josephine at an audition. When it was over and Josephine was dressing, Albert and I sat at the bar. He first of all kissed my hand. His face, when he becomes passionate, is beautiful, ardent and joyous. We touched cheeks, temples, and then we could not resist the impulse and kissed. His full, so full, so rich mouth taking mine, the grating of our teeth…

He was not free to stay with me because Pussy had arranged an evening with him. But he came back home with me, carrying the drum upstairs. And for the first time we were alone, facing each other, body to body. A marvelous rhythm took place, some secret harmony which made each gesture exactly alike, a new firmness, like a premeditated graceful dance—I cannot describe it, but it was a dream embrace. We stood up, the bodies fitted so closely. I felt his desire. Strength came out of our similar softness and graceful violence; such intensity, but no brusqueness. How beautiful it must have been to see. First we stood up, and, beside himself, he broke away and went to wash his face. But when he was fresh and clean and prepared to leave, he sat on the drum. I moved towards him, and then, with passion, he laid his head on my breast, and I kissed his bowed head, his hair… Again we separated. “I must leave.” But as I stood by the window, leaning against the table, Albert held me again, so powerfully, with his beautiful face resplendent, crushing me so that I lost my breath.

And then he left. And I was full of him, his face, his mouth, his strength. So perfect, so possessive were the caresses!

JUNE 4, 1943

Black hair again, lost among mine, black curled hair. Albert’s high brow, his slanting upward eyes, his high cheek bones (his father was a white Spaniard from Columbia), his round nose, and his full, finely chiseled mouth, always slightly open, beautiful teeth, his mouth the magnet. His carriage: with all the gentle fullness of his body, its indolent form, the soft outlines, he has an erect carriage of pride, joy, perfection. No perversions or deformities. He reflects dance and music and the sun. His skin is the color of the sun.

J’ai peur de l’aimer trop…

For the night and the day after this, I was in ecstasy, an ecstasy so powerful that I thought it would break me. Everything was illuminated, lightened, the air, the light, the sky… The intensity of the desire carried me out of the world and out of reality! I thought too it would carry Albert out of his entanglements with the continuous presence of Pussy and the “group,” for they live a kind of tribal life, always in groups together. But he sweetly, gently, and realistically yielded to the difficulties.

By nighttime, not having heard from him, the ecstasy turned to pain, anguish. I thought everything was lost, that my passionate responsiveness had frightened him. With such anxiety again the next day, I telephoned him, when I didn’t want to, only to find him sweet and soft and pliant.

I made him come at six, for five minutes, I said. Found a pretext: I felt I could not go to the Haitian dance that evening without seeing him. He came. I was trembling with anxiety. He came in quietly, passively, accepting the difficulties, but just as passionate. While I talked, he was the one who began to kiss me. We embraced and kissed, and he said: “This will get us nowhere. We cannot be together.” His brother had arrived. He was surrounded, encircled.

I was reassured by his embrace, but disappointed. It was what I had feared… softness and the lack of audacity. Lack of intensity too, for he is tranquil and passionate without tension.

At least my suffering and fear ceased, and I felt gay again. We went to the dance. The evening was lovelier than the last, more intimate, no whites but ourselves. I was taken out to dance constantly—and then…

Brièrre, whom I call the Port de Prince, Brièrre the Hindu Prince, so black, so intense, nervous, fiery, took me dancing. As soon as he clasped me for the dance, there was a conflagration; such a burning fire came from both of us! He held me closer and closer. He danced almost without moving across the room—we swung our hips. His knee, nervous, wiry, hard, rhythmically moved between my legs with such a sensual simulation of a caress. My knee moved closer between his legs and I felt his desire firm and strong.

A darker, more violent feeling than with Albert.

Brièrre danced with me several times, and each time he aroused me. Once I looked up into his eyes, and his black fiery glance was more like a stab. Those dances were like sexual acts, and I yielded to the drug.

At times I would move my face away…for Jean’s temple touched mine…and look for Albert, look at Albert. Albert, in contrast to Jean, looked more and more tender, gentle, idealized, purer. My feelings went out to his gentleness, but the nervous, fiery intensity of Jean compelled me.

What a beautiful evening! How far I was from the dead parties of surrealists and artists, men without beauty or sex. How often I have commented lately on the complete absence of magnetism, of coquetry between the men and women. Last night I felt beautiful, not in an abstract way as I felt before, but beautiful and desirable, as a woman. All the women were beautiful and desirable. We lived in the dancing and singing. My body was joyous and flowering, but what a division again between my nature and my feelings. My feelings go to Albert, and my nature goes to Jean, whom I do not love because he is cynical and vain of his great beauty, because he is affected and literary. I love the great simplicity of Albert.

Dream of Haiti

Varied and beautiful faces. Aristocratic sensuality, emotion, subtlety.

My unhappy Venus wills that both Albert and Jean are returning home to not be drafted.

JUNE 6, 1943

Great fall tonight from the ecstasies, seeing Albert at the Premices’ singing, wanting to caress him, seeing him with Pussy at his heels, not being able to be with him, caressing him endlessly within myself and realizing I am going to lose him. In a few weeks he returns home.

Jean Brièrre, too, is leaving in a week. Filled with promises, the drum beating, singing, knowing that here is life, revolted by the whites…but I will lose it all like a dream in a few weeks.

My only pleasure is to arouse a sensation when I come in—the Haitians see me as beautiful. I feel desired. But I cannot reach happiness.

JUNE 7, 1943

I have a feeling Albert was jealous to see me dance with Jean. (I looked so white that night of the dance, ivory white. Our bodies fit together so… And Jean so utterly black…) Was he jealous to see us together today when we called for Pierre? Albert was going to work.

No word from Albert, and I do not have sufficient faith. My ecstasy is shattered. I have lost my audacity, my courage. I cannot give Jean a sign. (In the dance, I yielded to the passion which possessed us—the dark, sensual Jean of the dance, compared to the mannered, timid Jean of daylight.)

Suddenly, because of Jean’s darker life (he was in a Haitian prison for fifteen months for revolutionary activity) and Albert’s joyous one, I saw them as the two faces of Gonzalo, and I realized I was not free of Gonzalo yet.

This afternoon Gonzalo took me. I was without feeling for him, saying to myself: Well, here is a very handsome man! But he seems to have killed my tenderness. Last night I spoke to him strongly, not tenderly, regardless of consequence—consequence was that he took me!

JUNE 8, 1943

What torment, this mirage of love, soon to vanish altogether. What a cruel torment, this passion for both Jean and Albert.

I am burning continuously, as I have never burned, from head to toe like a torch. I am sensitive and open to all. Even in Eduardo I aroused and released a deep emotion, delivered him of his fear of expressing it, and our parting today was in itself like a romance, a true wave of feeling. It is sad, too, that I have my greatest power of fascination, just at this moment, when I cannot pour the passion into anyone, when I am imprisoned in a mirage. Albert is my soft dream, and Jean is my violent one.

The beauty of Jean is royal. He is slender, a little taller than I am (Albert is the same height but rounder, softer, fuller). His carriage is tense, nervous. Jean is as black as he can be, with a finely chiseled head, the close, short negro hair, but the fine, straight nose, the full, rich, but not exaggerated, mouth. He looks somber, rarely smiles. Albert’s mouth is open and smiling, and Jean’s is torturous, labyrinthian and perverse.

JUNE 9, 1943

At the most anguished moment of my watch for Albert’s telephone call, I lay back and said to myself: I deserve happiness. I deserve it!

Days passed. Last Thursday we embraced. No word from him after his visit Saturday. I began to tremble, to doubt, to suffer. Then came Jean, and Jean’s poem. And the darkness again. My heart hurt me. My being wanted Albert, not Jean. A moment after I spoke with Jean, Albert called, his voice rich, deep and intimate: “Pussy is not well. I shall go and see her but could be free at ten. But I’m afraid that you, now, will not be free. Viens chez moi.”

Je viendrai.

My happiness inundated me, but I was still trembling. I took my anguish to Jaeger, my mythological mother. She quieted my heart, unknotted my nerves, magically. Something wonderful is being born; passion is being born, purified of its masculinity, free of guilt. But in birth there is struggle.

Again I found Albert’s mouth, sweeter than Jean’s. Again I felt the strength concealed in his softness, a strength that is aroused by my own. I seek his quietness and integrity. I move towards Albert and the light, out of my prison…

JUNE 10, 1943

Again, bathing with the sandalwood soap, the perfume in the hair, copper on the nails, the black lace panties, the turquoise green dress Albert liked, the hair loose. I walked fast, lightly to him, like an arrow, but I did not enter his room directly.

I stood in the street looking up at his two lighted windows, and I thought: a beautiful lover is awaiting me. I walked around the block, to find the lighted windows again, the anticipation…

“Your hair is wild,” he said, kissing me. I said, “I walked quickly.”

No violence, but quietness and sureness and strength. Aware that it is Albert, it is Anaïs, we called the names… Supple caresses like his dancing. He did not linger enough. His desire impelled him, and soon he had taken his pleasure—all my pleasure was spread throughout the caresses. For each nook and form of the body, there was an answer, cat-like, languorous, voluptuous. The taste of sweetness, of fruit perfection. We lay in the dark. He said, “Tu es contente?” I said yes. Later he asked me why I was amoureuse de lui, as if he did not believe it. I said: “For many, many reasons—I love everything about you, how you think…I feel your being and your beautiful face… you are luminous.” The rolling softness, the warmth we bathed in…after a while I slid down and took his sex in my mouth. All that I knew of caresses I gave him in this—it stirred him; he lay back, sighing. He placed his hand on my hair, and then he moved with my mouth, a soft, continuous undulation, until his pleasure increased and rose to a climax. How I enjoyed giving him this, seeing his body yielding, abandoned, hearing his cry, a greater pleasure than the first. I lay over him now—the silkiness of his skin, the softness, the tranquility, the perfection of the rhythm.

My lasciviousness matched his.

Oh, Albert, how I wanted to know if you felt the miracle. Was it new to you? Were you warmed to the depths of your being, caressed so intimately that the remembrance lingered? I felt near to him, not as in other adventures, but near, near.

I said, “I am heavy.”

He answered, “Non—reste là. Est-ce bon?”

“Oui, c’est bon.”

“Alors reste.”

Simple words. Simple, simple. The body and soul can learn happiness, joy. This was joy, fragrant and miraculous. Oh the sweetness, the sweetness! I felt the lightness, I felt washed of pain and darkness, washed, luminous and clear. I could have slept at his side as quietly as he slept after his pleasure. I felt as if he had transmitted his youth to me, his fresh skin and glossy live curls, his laughter and his singing.

What will he remember of this? My body remembers him. My body did not remember Canada or Chinchilito. Balm and fragrance on my soul, a sexual act like a dance. What did I leave on his skin, in his nerves, what flavor, what magnetic waves? He left his fragrance, like his songs. Douceur, mollesse, chaleur, force souple, force enroulante, the mysterious currents passing through two bodies, in the night, light of foot.

“Don’t you see me through a prism?” he asked.

I didn’t notice then.

What does he mean?

Does he think I dream him?

He does not dream.

He is content, he is sleepy, he is hungry, he smokes, he tells me to wear his slippers to the bathroom, he moves quietly, free, beautiful…very beautiful. More beautiful than Gonzalo, because Gonzalo’s beauty is marred by the weakness of the mouth; Albert’s is rich and full, his face is balanced. Gonzalo’s hands and feet are strong and coarse. Albert’s are delicate. His body has the savour of his songs…Creole gentleness.

Albert—I took you into my arms, and I take you into my diary, into my devastated life, now blossoming anew because of you. Singing and drumming, but with pale hands and without savagery, you come, soft like your songs, tender like your climate, tranquil like your island, vibrant like your plants, rich like your earth, Albert, I take you into my arms again, into my diary, your innocence and your purity, your luminousness. I take you, take you, take you bending over me, and pray and wish you felt as much as I did… remember, retain, absorb. What I gave you was only the perfume of all my suffering, for there is a suffering that can bear a perfume, a magnificent fragrance of the soul. There is a suffering that is without bitterness, like mine, which can give birth to a deeper knowledge of joy, to a deeper reception of joy, to a deeper love for Albert than those who eluded the pain. In each caress of joy there was the magnetic miracle of love that knows the beauty of what it is caressing, knows it more deeply, for all its deprivations, for all its sacrifices, for all its openness to pain… What my hands and mouth know of your fragrance only pain could have made possible. Exquisite joy created by past suffering. To better know Albert, the childlikeness of his laughter, his fragrance, his fragrance.

Eight o’clock in the evening. J’attends Jean.

If only I could live like this, running to Albert in the night, or waiting for Jean.

Gonzalo took me today (his blood mingling with Albert’s), and I felt that I had disengaged the erotic feeling from the soul love, separated my soul from him, and that although I could feel without dislike his strong heavy legs on mine, the heavy magnetism which flows from his body, the violent odor and strong hair, still he could not reach me, torture me, possess me as before. The bondage is over.

He does not know yet that he has lost me.

JUNE 11, 1943

Jean came. At first we sat back on the couch and talked quietly. I said to him: “I feel that you are like me, tormented by constant tension, seeking a release from the tension, and at the same time dreaming of an intensity equal to yours…”

“C’est juste,” he said.

But he was frightened, frightened by my directness. When he is frightened, he uses literature, talks pompously and falsely. He oscillates between Baudelaire and Verlaine and uses the speech of the Comédie Française.

He recites like a bad actor. Poor Jean. He was so afraid. Poor Anaïs too, tense. Tension is fear, not intensity, and it paralyzed us. He put on the music. Then slowly we danced. And when we danced, we found the flame.

Jean kissed and embraced me with a violence of nerves and sinews, embraced me, as we stood, embraced, embraced, knees interwoven, sexes touching. Slowly we moved towards the couch. He opened my blouse, kissed my breast. He penetrated me violently. Then he withdrew to kiss me. When he had kissed me and lay over me again, he was limp. We lay together. He sought to harden himself with his hand. He said, “Comme tu es douce, Anaïs, as you are soft.” It was the only murmur from his heart. Everything else was frozen fright and literature. It was late, and I feared Hugo’s return home. I had to tell him, though our embrace was not fulfilled. I was sad. He said: “I will call you if I can tomorrow. I will write you.” I felt his nervousness like mine, his poses and falsities, his roles and disguises, his forcing of words to say something poetic. Nothing came from his feelings except his wild sensuality, and his, “Comme tu es douce, Anaïs.”

I was sad, but not anxious, not shattered. I felt the weight of life, the prison walls, the many abortions… I fell asleep instantly, deeply tired of my efforts.

Today I am quietly sad. Mirages. Mirages.

The ecstasy and the madness still make me unfit for life, for reality. I am projected into space by passion, and I lose my moorings. If I found the equal to this, we would be consumed in one instant. It would annihilate us. Gonzalo had this power for months, and was himself surprised at its duration—three months drugged, he said.

My mother once sang: mon cœur bat à se rompre…my heart is beating so hard it will burst…

Be quiet, Anaïs.

So much I had to give Albert for his maturity, so much I had to give Jean to help him smash the formal shell of his work. Too late.

When one sees outside, in the daylight, the image of the desire or dream one carries in one’s soul at the moment, when it takes form, incarnates, then one loves.

Albert, the image of joy, the image of my dream of the moment. Albert, the image of my luminous dreams, of my singing and dancing. The hair that has not been tortured, but which curls like leaves, the eyes which have not wept, the mouth that has not known bitterness, the teeth that have not gnashed in anxiety. The flesh unpoisoned by sorrow, the sex pure and strong, the nerves which never tangled, the rhythm which was never broken, the voice that was never wounded, the blood which was never stabbed, the lungs which were never suffocated.

When I went to the press today to meet Gonzalo I felt: I cannot go up those dark stairs; I cannot smell the musty odors; I cannot bear to be shut in with the heaviness of Gonzalo. And I turned away, went to the park and sat on a bench. I have breathed new air, and I cannot return to my prison. I sat on the bench, free, alone, breathing.

When I made myself go to the press, I found Gonzalo without pleasure. He had a toothache. His teeth are all rotting. He wanted sympathy. I had none to give. We lay side by side. I dreamed separately from him. He felt it. I lay at his side thinking: You can go no further. I am going further. It was as if he knew my thoughts. He began to caress me and stopped. He felt the passivity. He asked me: “What is the matter? You seem angry.”

I couldn’t explain. Each time I have tried to explain he has wounded me. He cannot go further. He is a slave of his own stagnation and weakness.

I don’t want his desire.

I am anxious because I feel strong, but I am in transition, between liberation and a void. I have nothing to guide me except this image…Albert. A dream of joy, evanescent, and like the very image of such dreams, ready to vanish, not very substantial… I am merely dreaming this new life. It is not mine yet. It is the gift of the black man to me, because I turned my back on our white degeneracy, and because I went to him with love.

JUNE 13, 1943

Evening: Sunday. After four days without seeing Albert, I am devoured with restlessness and fever. I cannot be quiet. I am wildly dreaming of escape, voyages, love, wildly craving love. What can I do? We are in debt. The press rent is four months overdue, and there is no hope of moving. I cannot bear the old, the outworn, the drab. The whole world has become uglier by contrast. The dream I have has only caused me greater torment. It is a vision, but how can I make this vision reality?

There has been a strange increase of my intuitive powers. When Eduardo asked Pierce Harwell, the astrologer, to join him at the Cooneys’ Morning Star Farm and said he did not know what he looked like (they fell in love with each other’s letters), I immediately had a dream in which I saw him. I said he was as tall as Féri, rather lean, thin, had blond hair, thin features, freckles.

And tonight Eduardo tells me by telephone that I described him exactly, even to the freckles!

I also dreamed Jaeger’s face before I saw her.

How, how, how, then, can I find someone to love?

JUNE 14, 1943

Albert came at five.

I say to him, “Will it please you to know you have done a marvelous thing for me, that you have liberated me?”

He says, “I merely came at the right moment.”

Slowly the madness comes. Albert closes his eyes.

“Why did you answer my élan towards you?”

“You know I was attiré by you from the first.”

No, I didn’t know.

The madness rises. We touch only the hands, the faces…then, his hand caresses me through the dress, and he returns to the caress he seems to love, gently moving my mouth towards his desire… Then I lie over him and he divines what I want—to feel him inside of me, to bring his desire inside of me. I came nearer to the orgasm— so tantalizing and insinuating he is, so lascivious. He does not thrust, or pierce, but undulates, cat-like, and he is like a woman with a man’s virility. Again I felt I brought him only my purity, my own youth.

Albert—how he carries me into luminosity.

“Tu passe un moment difficile, peut-être…” (I was thinking of his coming separation from Pussy.)

He said: “Not now. A difficult moment awaits me at home.”

His captivating childlikeness, softness of face, yet that mature integrity. Passion and pain have not touched him, fear or jealousy. His deepest love has not yet flowered. He is like some cosmic adolescent…

He gives himself to caresses. He closes his eyes, lies sensual and absorbed, with a mollesse so beautiful to see, like that of being born of Venus herself, the very child of Venus.

Moving slowly towards a dream of happiness, without the reality, a mirage of happiness.

JUNE 15, 1943

I am free. The only terror I have is to look into a space without a lover, without Albert. The dream of Albert has been my support, my guidance. A world without a lover! Will I be able to spread this love among friends, in the world in general?

Last night, I heard myself laughing. I lifted this laughter into the summer night like a wine glass. To Albert…to Albert my laughter… Albert’s body and Albert’s hands in the night, in the air. When I have a lover, it seems as if the summer night itself were in connivance with him, caressing me, the summer a soft duplicity with the lover, the interchange of sun, air, wind, darkness, softness with Albert’s golden skin, the softness of his mouth, the voluptuous undulations.

I remember a morning at Lipchitz’s studio, when Albert was standing by a statue. He stood with all his weight on one leg, his hip protruding. I was sitting near him, and, roused by his grace, I was overcome with such insensate desire.

When he dances…what a swaying of the hips, without vulgarity. Enveloppé de bonheur, le fluide de bonheur, la danse de la joie, desire like tendrils of young plants, the uncorrupted flower-like nature…

Je suis en état de grâce de l’amour.

I can be tender to Gonzalo and once again make him laugh, caress, hope.

I telephoned Chinchilito, intuitively—he has just returned from California and is coming tomorrow night.

I feel Albert’s caresses, and in the middle of the street I close my eyes and feel the ecstasy. I lay back on the bed at the press and looked at the sky, letting the light flood and blind me.

JUNE 17, 1943

When I arrived at Martha’s yesterday, I kissed her and said: “My life is so wonderful. I’m grateful to you, so grateful. I am in a state of grace.”

And then I told her about Albert. She was not concerned over the physical unfulfillment (absence of orgasm). She too felt as I did, that the psychic miracle took place in me first, the mystical communion with my new soul (Albert). So that is why, after being with him, I felt the peace and contentment of communion. A dream has been reached which will slowly take form in the blood too.

I was so filled with this new joy (does anyone know that for the pain-ridden soul even the shivering of the leaves is a sad vibration, even the displacement of a cloud a heart-rending event?), so filled, that even though I could not be with Albert (Pussy, sensing danger, has moved into his place), I was happy to see Chinchilito again. So at nine o’clock it is Siegfried who waits at my door, sun-burnt, with his brilliant Spanish smile and chanting voice.

“Chinchilita,” says Siegfried, who now works in a defense plant, whose operatic career has been postponed.

First he took me to an impasse nearby where he wants to take an apartment in September. Then I took him to the press and showed him Winter of Artifice. I offered him a choice between sitting on a Washington Square park bench or going to the empty apartment where Thurema is not moving in until Wednesday. “My friend asked me to go and water the plants every day. Do you want to water plants, Chinchilito?”

He chose to water the plants. Playfully, with bottles of beer under our arms, we went to the apartment. He played on Thurema’s harp, sang a little, teased, and, as usual, was both serious and clownish. When we lay back on the wide couch talking, he became dreamy and said: “It is very strange, Chinchilita, I have not seen you for six months, a year, it doesn’t matter how long, but the thread does not break. I feel something with you I do not feel with the others. I do not forget you. When I saw Luise Rainer in Cinderella, and the glass slippers were brought out, I thought: these are La Nin’s slippers—I came to see La Nin’s slippers, not Luise Rainer’s. I feel always relaxed with you, at ease. And you have changed. You are happier and freer. It is strange how familiar you are to me.”

He carries my picture in his pocketbook.

He turned out the light. There was moonlight flooding the bed and the head of a tree at the window which might pass for a palm tree. Delicately he woos, as in Provincetown. The courtship begins with the tips of the fingers. Then the rhythm increased slowly and rose to violence.

His teeth shine in the semi-darkness. His teeth sink deeply between my legs. There is a pagan power in him, but he does not reach my feelings, as Albert did. What an infinite, amazing variety of embraces, extraordinary contrasts! Chinchilito brings strength and finesse and knowingness, but it is open like paganism, not mysterious and subtle.

I like his playfulness. He gets up to act for me, to transform himself; he wants to become a gargoyle, the hunchback of Notre Dame, other monsters. He steps out of his beauty into deformity. “I’m tired of acting the hero and the lover when I sing,” he said. “I’d like to be Frankenstein!” He frightens me a little. He is naked in the light now—he wants me to be, but I dress.

“It’s funny,” he mused again. “Wherever you are it becomes wonderful. I thought it was the sand dunes. Then I thought it was your painted apartment. Now we’re in an ordinary apartment that does not belong to you, and it is wonderful too.”

As we walk homeward, we meet Albert and Pussy on 8th Street.

I am quiet and happy. It seems to me at last I am living my deepest need, the lover. The summer night has fulfilled its purpose, has given birth to caresses, the body has breathed and vibrated. The night is sweet. Chinchilito has his hand on my neck. It is I who sings a little under my breath. The shivering of the leaves is paradisiacal, the flight of a cloud is innocent.

Is there anguish and war in the world, hatred and horror? I have only one weapon against destruction and death: love—to love, to love, to love, to love.

C’est le chant des îles. C’est le chant d’Albert qui a réveillé les ondes de la joie. Un être qui n’a connu que la souffrance est un être malade et incomplet.

I once loved through romanticism (which led to neurosis), and I believe I am now entering a life like Russia’s.

SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 1943

Last night I gave a party, to see Albert, whom I had not seen since Monday.

He came, with Pussy, with his brother Robert and Robert’s fiancée, Premice and his daughters, Lionel Durant, Charles Duits, a young poet, Gerald Sykes and his girl, Mrs. Richard Wright and George Davis…

It was a hot night, a sensual atmosphere. We danced to the radio at first, then Albert sang, Josephine danced, they improvised, and we danced again. The porch was dark and cool, the lights low. I wore my fuchsia blouse and danced madly. At the bottom of my heart there was anguish. When I don’t see Albert, I think it is over. I have doubts because Pussy has taken him back, with her humble, modest, pathetic sorrow at his leaving, her desire that he should marry her. But I threw myself into the dancing, abandoned myself to the sensuality and gayety. Gerald Sykes became passionate when we danced.

Albert was beautiful last night, illumined with pleasure, knowing his own beauty like a woman does, knowing any woman would succumb to him.

Frances was overwhelmed with his beauty, the beauty in all of them, the beauty of Carl Offord, the Trinidad writer… She felt and understood and loved them as I do. She never saw such a beautiful, sensual party.

Albert, do not hurt me!

I grew lighter and gayer, I danced, danced… One dance with Albert, who pressed me against him, but the ecstasy, too long subdued, I could not release again as before. The anguish was there, the loss of faith.

But I danced, danced. It was late. Suddenly over the radio came Spanish music. I rushed to my closet, got into my Spanish kimono full of ruffles, and danced a few steps of the Alegrias after not having danced for seven years.

After all the people left I was still dancing! I could not stop.

Albert, do not kill this joy you gave me.

The dancing gave me joy, Frances’s pleasure, the gayety of the others, Sykes’ desire, a hope of life widening into joy…

Today we went to the Premices’, where there were more Haitians. Premice was the first drawn to me, the one who chose me, sought me out. They all love my warmth and openness. My own warmth and spontaneity and sensuality are flowing. I am closer to them than I ever was to the Anglo-Saxons—how I suffered from their inexpressiveness, stiffness, lack of grace and warmth! Where is my state of grace? Frances said, “Be happy—enjoy it while you have it.” Albert was not gone yet.

The Black world, the magic world of soul and sensuality. “There is purity in them,” said Frances. Yes, the sensuality flows into the dancing and singing and gayety… Frances, too, feels revulsion for the whites, shame. It was a dream for her too.

After I wrote this I fell asleep. I was awakened by the telephone. It was Albert. Albert, talking quietly about ordinary things, how good the party was, about the job Hugo is getting for Pussy, about casting his statuette of the drummer of which he wants to give us a mold, etc. No word of meeting, of being together. I fell asleep again, half calmed, but sad. I awakened with anguish. I could not bear the incertitude, the void. I waited for his telephone call. Finally I called him, and he was evasive. I began to suffer. The anguish was immense. I felt unfit for life, for love, for sensuality, for everything. I felt all kinds of fears: the loss of Albert, who is perhaps bound to Pussy, who perhaps did not like meeting me on 8th Street with Chinchilito, who perhaps had heard about my evening with Brièrre… Unable to bear the elusiveness, I said to him over the telephone: “You must come and say good-bye. I am going away to the Bahamas.”

Imperturbable. Yes, he would come, sometime. (Frances said: “He is a child, incapable of love; he is also a woman who enjoys being loved. He is not worthy of you.”)

The shallowness of feeling, the acquiescence. The love comes from Pussy, surrounds and fetters him. And there he is, receiving it all, responding sensually, a sensual receptivity, effortless, passive.

Why would I put so much feeling into this, so much significance? Yesterday the nervousness and anguish increased, and I was again caught in my suffering: the incertitude, the ephemeralness of happiness, the unfulfillment, the unreality.

I visited Frances, who calms me, who places Albert in his true proportions.

Tom says, “You two lesbians.”

We said: “We wish we were. We could be much happier.” At this moment I feel strongly tempted to love a woman, rather than the feminine man.

Yes, Frances and I, if we could be lesbians, might have been happy. The same ecstasies and violences propel us, the same need of touch and reality.

My heart hurt me again. I fell asleep like lead. I dreamed I was at a big party. Albert flirted with me, but said, “I am afraid of the hunter.” I was persuading him there was nothing to fear. I had the feeling that I bore in myself an arrow, a shaft, a penetrating arm, an instrument, a masculinity of some kind. I said in the dream, “You know I respect and understand your relations to Pussy.” Then he was relieved.

This morning I called up casually, said I was leaving tomorrow, would he come at five. Yes, said Albert.

But I know now I must leave him too. He is staying on, I heard, and it caused me no pleasure. I must bring this to an end. It hurts me. I must find a love. I cannot live this pagan life so casually.

Will it come to me?

Will he be free?

The moonstorm came in the morning.

Evening: Albert came—caressing and desirous. I told him the truth. I said, “I have to leave because this is causing me pain: I cannot be with you.” He was gently surprised. He explained quietly. All along he knew we would not be able to be together. When he leaves his work, Pussy expects him. He cannot lie. And because it is their last week together, he does not want to hurt her. Now she keeps him in her apartment where there is plenty of room. Pathetically she clings to him and plays at being his wife. I said, “If you had been so attached to Pussy as to not want to be with me, would you have told me?”

“I would have told you.”

And I knew it was true. Again I am the mistress and the passion, the desire, and I am “to respect the wife,” as in the dream. None of my men have my audacity to overcome obstacles, know deception, have the capacity to lie, transcend all barriers. None of them were capable of the prodigious feats by which I managed to be with Henry and Gonzalo—all of them children, or women, and I the Lover, the one who leaped the balconies, who risked danger, who managed by ruse and courage to meet the beloved! It’s laughable too—poor Anaïs, the very symbol of femininity with the soul and mind of a man! Le cœur d’un honnête homme dans un beau corps de femme.

To me the courage, the dynamism, the activity, the action. And Albert, my mistress in the hands of a jealous husband! For the difficulty arises truly from my forgetting myself and betraying my love for Albert, which Pussy quickly divined and which complicates everything, making his visits to me portentous, dangerous, ominous, etc. Anaïs, the Lover of the World. No wonder I cannot find for myself the Lover who will love me as actively as I love others.

JUNE 23, 1943

I shall not describe Pussy, but I will let others. Irina was positively disconcerted: “Is that Albert’s girl? That takes away from his value. She is absolutely quelconque” (ordinary). She is twenty, small, wears glasses, is indistinguishable, works as a salesgirl, has no particular gifts. She is a mouse, very American.

The child-woman fears me.

I come as the Woman, as the maîtresse savante, as the capable, powerful woman, the woman who can make an alluring house, who can be a cook, a head of household, a mother, a sister, a friend, a refuge, a haven, an erotic spell, a witch, a dream…

It is so ironic. When you become gifted, powerful, beautiful, then your rival is the colorless, ungifted, weak, and not beautiful, for such a woman can make a certain kind of man feel powerful, feel his superiority—and I am the challenge, the equal.

Pierce Harwell arrives tonight. It was a marriage manqué. Poor Eduardo.

JUNE 26, 1943

The blue water eyes of Pierce, the tender voice, the divinatory phrases. Huckleberry Finn and Rimbaud. The Bright Messenger, as in the book, bringing music and air. The soul of a bird, without the body of a lover, merely a spirit, not a body one can possess. He is a soul’s reflection, a dream, a mirror, the fortuneteller…

In the street, I kissed him fraternally and said: “You are all I expected. You’re my brother.”

Mystically he woos me, courts me, and seduces me. Mystically there is a love affair going on, with charms, enchantments, retreats, coquetries.

To Frances he said, “I believe I went to Eduardo only to reach Anaïs.”

I shall no longer court Albert out of his small pale lair, but last night, as I rode upon Gonzalo’s body, sitting and galloping, with his sex in me, the movements I made from the hip, the graceful, soft, oriental undulations to circuit the hub of the sex, were those of Albert’s hips—I had made love to my own dancing body.

So the dancer is resurrected, through Albert, the hips sway, sway, in the dance of love and desire.

Chinchilito, who admits he hates the telephone, called me twice, and asks me to visit him Monday at his home as he is alone. I say yes.

When Albert telephones, I do not call him back. To possess me, he would have had to be violent, intense and passionate. I passed through the open interstices of his weakness, passivity and mollesse, slipping out of his painful spell, rejecting the long watches, waits and angoisse…

But the passion in my body torments me—at this moment I want to be Diana more than ever, to violently attack the world and find my Lover.

Always at these violent moments of passion, my bird soul appears to lure me into mystical worlds.

JUNE 28, 1943

Let me celebrate my freedom. I am as free as man has been. I am free to enjoy.

Today with Chinchilito, and not Albert, I experienced for the first time an orgasm within adventure. For the first time I did not feel the orgasm linked to emotional fidelity, as an emotional surrender, as necessarily and fatally bound to love. So that love, being slavery to a master who could not fulfill me, became anguish. Chinchilito sent for me. He was alone and wanted me in his apartment. I saw his Neptunian background, his pictures of ships, his tropical fishes, his atmosphere of blue and taste.

Then he took his clothes off, and as he lay on the couch he was already desirous. I abandoned myself to the pleasure of his vigor, his endurance and his knowingness. The pleasure was relaxed, natural, and complete. It was sweet and satisfying. Oh, the joy of the freedom, the freedom. The freedom man has known. To discover I could abandon myself, without the deeper love, to enjoy and relinquish. (No fear for the morrow, no need to possess. Chinchilito could disappear, and I would not feel abandoned.) No more linking of response to total giving and total giving to the fear of being hurt. I gave all and relinquished all. I gave it to the moment, to his smile, the beauty of his body.

And I believe woman’s great difficulty in achieving sensual liberation and independence has caused her clutchingness and fear.

I returned to Gonzalo soft, more loving, at peace, and when he didn’t take me I was not tormented by the inequality in our power. At peace, relinquishing, with a greater sense of the love of man and not of the One. What a torment the absolute is, when the world is full of lovers and love, when out of the smile of Chinchilito and the sexual dance of Albert, out of the intermittent fires of Gonzalo, I can make a total delight. I have a much greater sensual power than Gonzalo, but romanticism prevented me from accepting this. I sacrificed the sensual life, stunted it to his power. Tonight I feel a boundless strength. It seems to me that I have drawn from the very source of desire, as from a life source—a central, universal source. Romanticism to me is now synonymous with neurosis…neurosis is the outcome of our romanticism.

JUNE 29, 1943

The end of bondage—of fear.

I feel free and strong.

I do not have to court my lover.

He will come.

I can see the trees are beautiful—the vastness of the sky, the immense possibilities of love spreading out. I can see beyond fixation and obsession. How light I feel!

Chinchilito marveled at the swiftness, the lightness of my dressing, like magical smoothness. “Other women make such a fuss, take so much time.”

Jaeger is amazed at the evolution. She did not expect such a swift leap. In a week I leaped from the danger of masculinity to perfect femininity, to submission, yielding, passivity and acting from the deepest Eros source.

But free.

Jaeger knew all the time I would not rest until I had found my deepest primitive self. That was my quest.

The theme of humor appeared. I laughed at myself, at my mishaps as a man. I laughed at my mischief, feeling Jaeger would forgive and understand. Her last words to me were: I hope you have a mischievous summer!

Absolution…

Absolution…

JUNE 30, 1943

Illumination

When I returned from Jaeger, I sensed that Albert would have telephoned. He had. He wanted to see me Thursday. I was in the mood to accept, to accept all the joys. The intensity and ecstasy have gone, have shattered themselves against his tranquility, but perhaps he is teaching me happiness.

So I have Albert, Chinchilito, a loving Hugo, an adoring Gonzalo, and I am happy with them all. This morning, lying in bed, I look at the sunlight, and it appears extraordinarily bright.

Yesterday I conquered illness. The heavy Chinese dinner, a shower which drenched me, and at six I felt ill. Then I lay down and I said to myself: Anaïs, this is one of the happiest days of your life. You cannot be ill. Your analysis has come to a magnificent end, you have two beautiful lovers, one deep love, one deep marriage, a mystic brother, you are healthy and beautiful, you are able to fascinate, to enchant, you are FREE. You cannot be ill on a day like this.

When I got up I was well. I went out with Gonzalo, who reflects my mood—we were gay and tender.

I shall never forget the gout de bonheur I felt this morning on awakening, like the miraculous new flavors of convalescence. After the deep illness of the soul, the fever, the burn, the pain, the convalescence, the new dazzling appearance of the sun, to new eyes a new vision, the new softness of the bed under a body which has recovered its sensitiveness, aliveness, its sensory receptivity, the new taste of coffee on the feverless tongue. “Le bonheur c’est l’absence de fièvre.” Happiness is the absence of fever.

I asked for a second cup of coffee! The beds had been moved to stand side by side near the window because of the heat, so Hugo awakened at my side and found me floating on the cool blankets, bathing in the sun of a new joy which reminded me of the return to life after the child birth, after the illumination, light. I looked at the strip of sunlight by the Venetian blind, marveling how, because I possessed it inwardly, I could see it externally. Surely it must have shone other mornings, equally, but I did not see it or feel it. I was filled and distorted by my illness. Surely it was the same coffee, but I did not taste it so acutely, I did not ask ever for a second cup!

How I exorcised the illness of the body! Out, I cried, this is a body made for joy.

My birth to life again…

JULY 1, 1943

There is no issue for the romantic, except to commit suicide. We were the romantics who were not courageous enough to die (the absolute demands death), but who killed ourselves slowly by degrees (neurosis), had either to die pathologically (Artaud, Helba, etc.), or to transcend the romanticism.

I have now lived through and beyond romanticism, transcended it.

The erotic, open state I am in is openness and fire. I am near and in love with all. There are no more barriers.

I said to Jaeger, “I feel very big things have been accomplished.”

“You have a big soul,” said Jaeger.

JULY 2, 1943

Yesterday at five I received Albert at Thurema’s (96 MacDougal Street).

I felt a new feeling had been roused in him (the deepest layer of his nature has not yet been touched). I felt a new passion. As he came in, I waited for his embrace. It came more brusquely, more impulsively, more aggressively than before. Before, there was a hypnotic quality to it, simultaneousness.

He came as if he had been hungry for me, he came with impatience, a stronger feeling. He was more passionate, more active. And as for me, he entered into my very being and feelings with a terrifying penetration like that of love. It was more than bodies mingling, interweaving. But perhaps for his nature, a youthful singing nature, a fleur de peau, this was pure sensuality. In the middle of our caresses he was beside himself, and he said: “Comme tu es bonne a prendre! Tu es si bonne a prendre!”

We were naked for the first time in daylight—his body so perfect, so proud and certain of its beauty. Such keen pleasure, delight and anxiety for me. The feelings were roused, the sadness of losing him, the fear, and I did not feel the orgasm. The joy was pain again. It is my very own happiness eluding me. I have been ill for three days now.

I feel something happened yesterday to Albert, like a plant that has lived only a plant life and experiences a human tremor, he, who has eluded disturbance and passion. I may be wrong. It may be pure sensuality which I invest with my own feelings.

JULY 4, 1943

The return of the illness (it is said this happens when the analyst leaves one, and Jaeger has left for two months).

With this comes jealousy again, the feeling Helba is responsible for my estrangement from Gonzalo, the resentment, the regrets, monologues to make Gonzalo aware of this.

As if seeking the magic cure, I invite the Premices, and I visit them today, Sunday, instead of seeing Gonzalo. In their humble and simple life I seek an antidote.

Pierce gives them astrology in such fabulous terms that I hesitate to translate to Lucienne Azar what he says. Like Jean, he talks in symbols. He says, “She swallowed a mirror!”

Adele tells me of the passions Jean Brièrre aroused without himself being caught, of how she almost fell in love with Albert, of how Albert distresses Pussy by his indifference and, above all, by not marrying her.

Then, speaking of Josephine’s aggression, she said, “While you, you just sit back and look wistful, and everybody falls at your feet!”

I know the Haitians love me. D’abord pour eux je suis jolie.

JULY 7, 1943

Pierce and I last night, walking along the East River, through the ghetto. How light we are together, arm in arm, hand in hand, warm and light. He is bodiless and warm with feeling. The contrast always between the mystic brother and Gonzalo is that the first is all light and air and wateriness, and Gonzalo lacks light and airiness and is all earth and instinct. Only the mystic understands.

One afternoon I went up to be with Canada, who was passionately aroused and made violent love to me, but I could not respond, and I felt again: it cannot be without love. I cannot yield to sensuality.

With this came a great sadness at the bondage to love. If I could yield to pure sensuality then I would have yielded to the most marvelous sensuality of all, Canada’s violence and Albert’s lasciviousness.

Canada’s words: “Feel my big black dick in your small white pussy…you’ve got lovely red hair on your pussy…come all over my big black dick…” At the end, he cried out: “That just one woman should be so good, so good, so wonderful… Oh, your wonderful skin. You throw me, you throw me!”

His ravenous morsures leaving their mark on my body.

Unpossessed.

I wore my beautiful white silk suit given to me by Thurema. I looked radiant. I looked equally radiant Saturday night at the Premices’ for the farewell party for Albert. But I was not present; I had removed myself. The dream of Haiti was over. There was Albert singing the same songs and the women acting as if he were taking them all, there was Pussy clutching, clinging, no men to dance with to distract me from hearing the silly chatter, the childish pranks, the emptiness. Suddenly I was no longer there. At midnight I looked at Hugo, saw that he was lost, disconnected, and we quietly abandoned the party.

Seeing Albert in relation to Pussy’s insignificance revealed the Albert I didn’t want to see. I am always deceived by the heightened selves others give to me, and I only see them smaller in relation to others, such as Henry’s relations to the repulsive Fraenkel and Fred. Hugo was revolted by Pussy, and suddenly I was revolted by Pussy’s Albert, as I am revolted by Helba’s Gonzalo.

The dream of Haiti was punctured.

I wish Albert were gone now, now that I see him clearly, that I may forget his lasciviousness, which answers mine. The dream of pure sensual connection is over.

The anguish about the love that is ending and the new one not here yet, the intermediate state—alas, how I suffer from this.

JULY 12, 1943

Mon petit journal, I feel as when I was a little girl, and I came to tell you about an unexpected fairytale end to a tale of great suffering…

I doubted again, as always. I suffered to have been Albert’s mistress for a few hours. I doubted when he didn’t see me for the week before leaving. I thought I had been a passion, a whim, a drug for him, that I had only imagined the depths.

This morning he came. I was withdrawn from him. He came to choose one of Hugo’s prints. When we stood near, I felt him aroused. But as he reached for me, I stood back and said, “Je ne comprends pas ta façon d’aimer.”

“Anaïs,” he said simply, looking at me with his entire soul naked, “I love you too much to be content with those small moments. It is my nature to want everything or nothing. I wanted to be with you altogether, and I couldn’t bear just being your lover of the moment, so I withdrew…”

“Albert, then you felt as I did, then I didn’t just imagine that you felt as I did, something deeper…”

“I felt as you did.”

“What I gave you was strong and true,” I said.

“I too. That is why I couldn’t bear the stolen moments, I can’t bear half measures—I wanted a whole measure, or nothing.”

“If you feel as I do, then if you tell me to, ask me to, I shall come and be with you in Mexico.”

“If I can get work there and can stay, I’ll write you. But If I don’t get work I will only stay a week.”

We embraced. Without touching lips, we let the passion well up through our bodies like a powerful current…it took our breath away.

A tragic moment too, a dangerous moment—I remembered suddenly that just as I had imagined myself going to Peru with Gonzalo, I had sat by Albert’s side on the porch once and felt it quite possible to be sitting next to him, married in Haiti. It seemed as natural, as fatal...!

But my imagination plays tricks on me. I never went to Peru with Gonzalo. I went into an inferno.

Is this a spell? This deceptive imagination in which I lose myself is not always blind! I felt the deeper layer of the sensual accord! I felt rightly—I failed to understand Albert’s suffering at this partial, incomplete relation. Saturday night I was jealous. Now I remember that while Pussy pursued him, clung to him, barred his way to me, sat between us, he was looking at me dancing, and to explain his looking at me I heard him say to Pussy, “Look what a beautiful dress Anaïs is wearing!”

Albert is imprisoned by Pussy, as I was last night with Gonzalo, tortured by Gonzalo, Gonzalo tortured by his guilt, hating himself, full of anger at himself, humiliated, but doing nothing to conquer it. He said, “I am in hell. You don’t know what hell it is to be taking money…” A hell he drags me into. And I wept. To be out of hell, I have to abandon Gonzalo, as I abandoned Henry (Henry now writes Pierce he is in the agony of regret over my loss and realizes now what a drag he was on me). Gonzalo didn’t know what I was weeping over. I was shattered, but for a reason he doesn’t know. I was shattered before I saw him, for the loss of Albert. To know that Albert felt as I felt, and that I didn’t love into a void, which saved me from a fall and saved the dream. But it is worse that this forbidden, restrained, arrested love was about to bloom into passion…

What I felt for Albert was more than desire, it was something that penetrates deeper into the being. I can’t let myself think of the sensual harmonies, for it is painful.

Albert…

Albert saw this greater love that was possible and which did not fit into the stolen hours of mere desire.

The mystery remains, then, of the sensual that is not separate from the feelings, as it appears…

Albert. I write his name to bathe in it.

JULY 14, 1943

After this scene with Albert, I needed love so badly, consolation, someone’s nearness, that I turned to Gonzalo, and took his tenderness, drew close to him, seeking to survive the shock I received. Un amour impossible.

If I closed my eyes, I felt the wild desire for Albert, and the abysm, and the pain. Un amour impossible, Anaïs, you must surrender it. He is between two women, and one is his fiancée awaiting him at home. I must surrender him. It cannot be because he is twenty-six and I am forty.

I returned so nervous I was not even tired, but keyed up. Dinner with Hugo and Gerald Sykes at Jai-Alai. I threw myself into the refuge of sleep. I awoke trembling. Now I am so nervous and confused I cannot bear it. I asked Albert to see me today. I await him. What I must tell him is that just as he decided last week it was better to forget me, he must now tell me when he gets to Mexico if he decides it is better we forget each other.

I see now he wants to elude the pain, the danger. I run into them so recklessly. For a few moments of ecstasy I am always willing to endure the pain.

How mad it would be to meet in Mexico, knowing we will love deeply, and knowing he can only stay in Mexico six months. Pain again, everywhere I turn, pain and tragedy.

I had said to Albert that I must speak with him for five minutes. Not wanting him to feel I was seeking one of the short meetings his nature drew away from, I offered to meet him in the street. I felt in his voice that he wanted to see me again, was succumbing to the temptation. He came for a “moment.”

Then I asked him to please tell me, whatever decision he made in Mexico, to spare me the pain. Then he said: “Anaïs, you are as I used to be, you are dreaming a dream, and you break yourself in this. I have suffered from this, so deeply that now I have given up the personal dreams. I have a sense of reality. We were not permitted the time. It doesn’t matter how long, but if it is a week, it has to be a free week. We have not the freedom. If I can stay in Mexico, I’ll tell you. I don’t know what awaits me there. I am afraid you are dreaming me. Perhaps I do not have the qualities you believe.”

“I do not dream you, Albert, I feel you, I feel what you are, and what you are is close to me.”

It was strange. He was talking to me like my wide awake self, as if to save me and himself from pain. He gave me the feeling that he had abdicated the individual quest, the search, fulfillment, as if he had become “collective.” I could not quite understand if this came out of a shock, as he spoke of having suffered for his dreaming—yes, I believe it is this. Then he found communism and relinquished the self. I am afraid I awakened or reawakened his deeper, more violent desires again, disturbed the peace he had gained. It was strange, this mixture of my dreaming at the same time of this “reality” of Albert’s—this Albert who said: “I want to stay on the ground, to keep my feet on the earth,” as if it had cost him much to achieve this and he wanted to keep it. So the “romantic” Albert is in me now. “I was like you,” he said. I said, “I would rather be like you at this moment,” because the suffering comes from the inacceptance of reality. I said, “I believe all obstacles can be overcome.” It is strange. His equilibrium attracts me, because I see him always tranquil, and I enjoy it when slowly, slowly desire and passion disturb it. We were talking quietly, so quietly. He was caressing the center of my arm, the softest part. I said, “We have so much to give each other.” The understanding passed between us, subtle and equal to the physical. He spoke of the “grande richesse” in our being together. He spoke also as if “personal happiness” didn’t matter. He will not cling to the impossible. We walked out on the porch. We stood quietly together, his arm around my waist. His goal is not personal. It is the work he can do in his country for the peasants, his political work. That was why I did feel his “impersonality.” He lived in the “group.” The personal clutching of Pussy, or the personal intense anguish I felt to be with him, he transcends as “individualism.” There it was, his practical, terrestrial, natural acceptance. And I received his peace and acceptance while we stood there, mastering the passion. The wind caressed us. He had a pose I loved (everywhere he is natural, simple, without timidity or self-consciousness). I looked up at him. Then we went back into the studio, and I showed him what I wrote in the Winter of Artifice for Jacques Romain, “This scene of what I look back upon as a white decadence which led me to the beliefs we have in common now.”

Then we stood and embraced. Bodies pressed together, mouths together. His body began to shiver and tremble. The feelings were violent, electrical…we couldn’t break the embrace. The intensity held us together like a fire, painful, surcharged, unbearable. Albert then lost his head and led me to the couch. We undressed. What a passionate, intense possession, then, long-lasting, powerful and filled with love, with a love which strove to plant a seed, a memory, an imprint, a caress full of meaning, like a marriage, deep-reaching and emotional!

Alas. That was certainly a moment to pay highly for, a moment to haunt us, a hopeless, impossible love born in a moment of separation.

Albert may recover his tranquility, as nature does after a storm. Yes, he has the power to do this, to accept the inevitability of the war forcing him home, of his work pointing him home, of the fiancée who awaits him, of his father’s power, but I?

I have no resignation, no acceptance! The obstacles drive me onward to master them, to fight! But it is this I must not do. It is the man’s role. And it is also against greater forces.

My greatest inner weakness which kills my courage is the knowledge of the difference of age. But how Albert looks at me, takes me with his eyes, and what a strange intuition runs between us, a strange relationship like a twinship. He reminds me of myself at sixteen before the storms uncovered fears and infernos, that calm I had, harmonious, poised, serene.

But deeper in him, there is the passion—how tangled we are! I light the flame in him, and he diffuses the radiance so it will not burn us, hurt us.

His face as he takes me, the desire, the love, the identification. Only this moment to see each other, to express the complete embrace. Oh, god, will I forget this? Can I now forget it?

“If you decide we must forget each other…”

“I cannot forget this, Anaïs, and I do not want to forget.”

But I fear what will happen. I would like to haunt him forever, until he returns, but he knows what pain there is in this, and he will circumnavigate it.

JULY 16, 1943

I fell into an inferno. The night before he left, the pain in the body kept me awake. If I slept awhile it was to have a nightmare: Albert’s bus was in an accident. He died. I slept awhile but awakened at dawn, at five o’clock, the hour of his departure. The pain was terrible. I felt everything, the intoxication, the separation, the emptiness. My present life seemed unbearable. Nothing could help me. I didn’t want Gonzalo, or Hugo, or any of my friends.

Oh, the suffering, the suffering. How could I learn to relinquish this, accept the loss? I thought of so many things: to throw myself into communism, to relinquish personal happiness, the quest for love, as when women used to go into a convent at such moments. Worst of all, when I was all tangled with Albert, while he so vividly lived inside my body, Pierce chose this moment—the worst of all—to make love to me. And what a violent effort I had to make not to murder him! Pierce, with his bodily ugliness! Pierce, playing the role of a woman seeking to tempt a man. Pierce in his kimono, languorous and inviting, showing a little shoulder, a leg!

For the sake of the mystical sensitiveness he showed, I refrained. I let him kiss me, as if to prove to him he was not a man, not a body, but a woman! And I left, revolted and incensed.

That he should dare desire me, he, the impotent, the weakling, the degenerate. This desire of a eunuch, of a castrated being, of a woman! Suddenly the fraternal affection I had turned to repugnance. After Albert’s beauty and power, the long, thin, ugly body, freckled, red-skinned, and above all, the degenerate face!

I wanted to hurt him, send him away. He has been using his mediumship evilly, reading only catastrophes, striking terror in Thurema and Frances—he did not dare towards me.

He drinks, he creeps into places and stays, and again I was blind, because Pierce was one person with me and only betrayed the diabolical self on the outside. I had to sum up all the images together to obtain a complete one. But the image of “courtship” (and his fears afterwards, his discussing with Thurema his fear of not carrying through physically!) was enough to revolt me. Degeneracy, madness.

JULY 18, 1943

The suffering became unbearable, and it attacked the body. I got ill. In spite of the illness, I could not be at rest, so I took another trip with Gonzalo, and went on a weekend with Hugo, searching for a vacation place…

Last night in the hotel room, filled with torment and devastation, I took a sleeping pill. Then, as I felt the torpor of sleep, I mistook it for death. I felt: now my hand is asleep, now my shoulder. I am dying. My heart feels strange. I am dying.

It was sleep.

Can I master this alone? Can I relinquish Albert? I have no faith I will see him again. He will bow to “reality.” My only reality is passion and its need of fulfillment. He is like all those I love, passive before destiny, events, outer obstacles, lost in them. He hasn’t the strength. I must relinquish him.

I am caught again in the wound net of the dream.

Caught.

Will I die?

I could go to Jaeger, but I would like to transcend this alone.

JULY 21, 1943

The illness burnt me. I had to go to Jacobson. I had an inflammation, an intoxication of the kidneys which may be caused by sexual excesses! The pain, the loss of the body, pleasure and life, meeting with a weak Gonzalo again after the magnificence of Albert, Canada and Edward!

Jacobson gave me drugs. Nothing for the pain of the heart. Frances said: “You must give up Albert, because he is the son. He can only make you suffer. You must give up what causes you pain.”

Yes, I have given him up, because he is the son, and the mistress. I will have to jump over the obstacles on my Diana horse and court him, and I will have to sweep him off his feet. My whole being craves the man, and no longer the immolation of the mother to the son.

But he still lives in my being, and when I remember him it is with passion.

I sent Gonzalo and Helba to Quogue, to the beach. I am free.

It is only mother and child now. The passion is over. Chinchilito telephones me, wants to see me.

Pierce—we should all have known that his impotence would inevitably make him a criminal. Everywhere he finds the husband, the lover, the man, and he, like Robert, tries to get inside the marriages, to separate the father and mother, the mother from her lover. He tried to wreck the bond between Thurema and Jimmy, “It will not last, because of the difference of age.” To Frances: “Tom has two mistresses. He will leave for Hollywood and not send for you, or return.” To me: “There is no relation between your chart and Albert’s. He is dangerous. He is a vampire. I see no love there!”

Laughable when I see it now. His sadism and then his masochism, seeking to be punished and loving it, knowing I would reject him, knowing I had abandoned Henry and Dudley…seeking the pain.

At four o’clock in the morning, when I am asleep, he telephones me: “I have The Bright Messenger here. May I bring it over?”

Hugo was furious, and rightly. I refused to see him, not only that night, but the next day. I told him: “You’ve destroyed everything. I don’t want to see you.” Without hesitation I cut him off. He cannot crawl into my life with his weakness and destructiveness. I reject his illness, degeneracy and impotence, his insanity.

As he warned me, out of jealousy, against Mexico, I told him I was leaving for Mexico. He uses astrology unscrupulously for himself, for his personal ends. Since he cannot be loved, or possess, he will destroy.

What does a certain mysticism do to the body? The lack of care, the illness, the neglect, as in the Russian hysterics, saints, maniacs, a punishment of the body which inevitably mutilates it. Pierce was tall, but his face was sickly. His skin was particularly ugly: red, very white, freckled and subject to red patches, rashes, or at times it turned to blue. He had watery, irritated eyes, as if he never slept well, a small turned-up nose like a clown, and teeth with spaces between them which always seemed weak.

I was not surprised that the spirits who understood me looked like this (Rank, Jean). I accept it as a prank of destiny, a cruel prank. I thought again of the fanatics, the insane Artaud, and as a defense against this, the great physical beauty of Albert, of Edward Graeffe.

Lucas Premice: He is about fifty. He has the true African mask face, his hair straight and stiff, standing on his head as if carved out of wood, fanatical eyes, a nose which wrinkles up when he laughs, big mouth and big teeth, emotional and independent character. He had wanderlust and worked on ships so that he could travel all over the world. When he was very young, he was exiled from Haiti for political activities. At thirty he landed in America, was gravely ill in a hospital, met his loyal, devoted wife, married, and had Adele and Josephine. He worked then as a fur cutter, organized the workmen, and lost his job as a consequence. He talks bad French and bad English, almost unintelligible, wanders when he talks. He has natural refinement of manners, sensibility, dignity, practices a noble hospitality. He is deeply homesick for Haiti.

Adele: about twenty, wears glasses which magnify her eyes, so she is not beautiful. She has no confidence in herself, is afraid of her father, is effaced, but kind. Has a beautiful voice and plays the piano.

Josephine is seventeen. Her zest and aliveness are dominant. She is not beautiful, but is very bright, flaming, has a well-proportioned body and intensely brilliant eyes. Her dancing is marvelous, her singing husky. She is full of humor and improvisations. She is naturally coquettish, magnetic and romantic. A stony brook.

I pack my valise to visit Irina for a few days.