Anais Nin - House Of Incest

1936

ALL THAT I KNOWIS CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK WRITTEN WITHOUT WITNESS, AN EDIFICE WITHOUTDIMENSION, A CITY HANGING IN THE SKY.

The morning I got up to begin this book Icoughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I brokethe thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I havejust spat out my heart.

There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to theworship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of herbones. The quena has a more penetrating, morehaunting sound than the ordinary flute.

Those who write know the process. I thought ofit as I was spitting out my heart.

Only I do not wait for my love to die.

My first vision of earth was water veiled. I amof the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea,and my eyes are the color of water.

I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changingface of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self.

I remember my first birth in water. All roundme a sulphurous transparency and my bones move as ifmade of rubber. I sway and float, stand on boneless toes listening for distantsounds, sounds beyond the reach of human ears, see things beyond the reach ofhuman eyes. Born full of memories of the bells of the Atlantide .

Always listening for lost sounds and searchingfor lost colors, standing forever on the threshold like one troubled withmemories, and walking with a swimming stride. I cut the air with wide-slicingfins, and swim through wall-less rooms.

Ejecfrom a paradiseof soundlessness, cathedrals wavering at the passage of a body, like soundlessmusic.

This Atlantide couldbe found again only at night, by the route of the dream. As soon as sleepcovered the rigid new city, the rigidity of the new world, the heaviest portalsslid open on smooth-oiled gongs and one entered the voicelessness of the dream. The terror and joy of murders accomplished in silence, in thesilence of slidings and brushings. The blanket ofwater lying over all things stifling the voice. Only a monster brought me up onthe surface by accident.

Lost in the colors of the Atlantide ,the colors running into one another without frontiers. Fishes made of velvet,of organdie with lace fangs, made of spangled taffeta, of silks and feathersand whiskers, with lacquered flanks and rock crystal eyes, fishes of witheredleather with gooseberry eyes, eyes like the white of egg. Flowers palpitatingon stalks like sea-hearts. None of them feeling their own weight, the sea-horsemoving like a feather

It was like yawning. I loved the ease and theblindness and the suave voyages on the water bearing one through obstacles. Thewater was there to bear one like a giant bosom; there was always the water torest on, and the water transmitted the lives and the loves, the words and thethoughts.

Far beneath the level of storms I slept. Imoved within color and music as inside a sea-diamond. There were no currents ofthoughts, only the caress of flow and desire mingling, touching, traveling,withdrawing, wanderingthe endless bottoms of peace.

I do not remember being cold there, nor warm.No pain of cold and heat. The temperature of sleep, feverless and chilless . I do not remember being hungry. Food seepedthrough invisible pores. I do not remember weeping.

I felt only the caress of movingmoving intothe body of anotherabsorbed and lost within the flesh of another lulled by therhythm of water, the slow palpitation of the senses, the movement of silk.

Loving without knowingness, moving withouteffort, in the soft current of water and desire, breathing in an ecstasy ofdissolution.

I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, theskeleton of a ship choked in its own sails.

The night surrounded me, a photograph ungluedfrom its frame. The lining of a coat ripped open like the two shells of anoyster. The day and night unglued, and I falling in between not knowing onwhich layer I was resting, whether it was the cold grey upper leaf of dawn, orthe dark layer of night.

Sabinas face was suspended in the darkness ofthe garden. From the eyes a simoun wind shriveled theleaves and turned the earth over; all things which had run a vertical coursenow turned in circles, round the face, around HER face. She stared with such anancient stare, heavy luxuriant centuries flickering in deep processions. Fromher nacreous skin perfumes spiraled like incense. Every gesture she madequickened the rhythm of the blood and aroused a beat chant like the beat of theheart of the desert, a chant which was the sound of her feet treading down intothe blood the imprint of . The tee.

A voice that had traversed the centuries, soheavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me witheternal resonance; a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse criesthat issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.

Her black cape hung like black hair from hershoulders, half-draped, half-floating around her body. The web of her dressmoving always a moment before she moved, as if aware of her impulses, andstirring long after she was still, like waves ebbing back to the sea. Hersleeves dropped like a sigh and the hem of her dress danced round her feet.

The steel necklace on her throat flashed likesummer lightning and the sound of the steel was like the clashing of swords Lepas dacier The steel of New Yorks skeleton buriedin granite, buried standing up. Le pas dacier noteshammered on the steel-stringed guitars of the gypsies, on the steel arms ofchairs dulled with her breath; steel mail curtains falling like the flail ofhail, steel bars and steel barrage cracking. Her necklace thrown around theworlds neck, unmeltable . She carried it like atrophy wrung of groaning machinery, to match the inhuman rhythm of her march.

The leaf fall of her words, the stained glasshues of her moods, the rust in her voice, the smoke in her mouth, her breath onmy vision like human breath blinding a mirror.

Talkhalf-talk, phrases that had no need to befinished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mockorange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk ofsoft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washingagainst the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene,woman within womanlike acid revealing an invisible script. One woman withinanother eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind intofragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make wholeagain.

The luminous mask of her face, waxy, immobile,with eyes like sentinels. Watching my sybaritic walk, and I the sibilance ofher tongue. Deep into each other we turned our harlot eyes. She was an idol in Byzance , an idol dancing with legs parted; and I wrote withpollen and honey. The soft secret yielding of woman I carved into mens brainswith copper words; her image I tattooed in their eyes. They were consumed bythe fever of their entrails, the indissoluble poison of legends. If the torrentfailed to engulf them, or did they extricate themselves, I haunted their memorywith the tale they wished to forget. All that was swift and malevolent in womanmight be ruthlessly destroyed, but who would destroy the illusion on which Ilaid her to sleep each night? We lived in Byzance .Sabina and I, until our hearts bled from the precious stones on our foreheads,our bodies tired of the weight of brocades, our nostrils burned with the smokeof perfumes; and when we had passed into other centuries they enclosed us incopper frames. Men recognized her always: the same effulgent face, the samerust voice. And she and I, we recognized each other; I her face and she mylegend.