I think I am talking all this that I have written here, forgetting Hugo and his world, feeling uncensored, free. I am talking. I hear my words.
I feel pain again. I dreamed Hugo died. I have never before had such a clear, absolute feeling of death in dreams. I had killed him with anguish. I had to get into Hugo’s bed to be reassured. It was all the guilt I have for sacrificing him to the care of my children. Then I went to see Henry. I was lying over his bed with my coat on. He lay over me like a child, with his head on my breast. I asked him if he would have preferred a human life with me at his side but with all the imprisonments, submissions to poverty and dependence on the world, or the freedom I gave him. He said he preferred the freedom. But how was I? he asked, was I all right? I didn’t say. Henry took my waist between his hands, almost spanning it (I have lost weight again).
The old man accepted volume 33. I was again given one hundred dollars, which paid for the doctor for Helba and part of Henry’s trip. The old man asked me for expansion of the sexual scenes. I let myself go and wrote descriptions of sexual scenes for volume 34. It was during the moonstorm, and I was powerfully excited by my own writing. I had an orgasm while I wrote, then I went to Henry and was passionate, then to Gonzalo, who was passionate, and I responded to both!
Henry left yesterday. I always feel his leaving; it hurts me. He seems frail, has lost the joy he found in Greece, is not happy. He is forcing himself to travel, to write.
JANUARY 7, 1941
Needing the money urgently for Henry, I set about satisfying the old man by writing four sexual scenes for volume 34. Now I’m inserting some in 40 and 41, the father volume.
Robert is being analyzed, liberated. He too puts all his faith in others. He gives faith, but has none in himself. For this, we depend on our love. He too feels great strength from me. We can talk about all things because we travel equally into the myth or the human. In the legend, women slept with their fathers or brothers. In the legend, one can make love in a mirage, one can be haunted and possessed. It is so strange. Robert in my world has taken away the loneliness.
Tragic love. Why must I suffer so deeply in my earthly loves and find joy only in the mystical ones? The joys with Jean Cateret, the ecstasies! The ecstasies with Robert! Ecstasies of penetration.
JANUARY 8, 1941
Robert fecundated me. I was able to turn to The Winter of Artifice, to see its falsities, to separate the fragments and make them individually perfect. I was able to take up the houseboat story, see where I had deviated from the dream and make it more complete. I extracted the Mouse incident and gave it its own legs to stand on. I worked and worked. I wrote sexual passages for the father volume (as his adventures). I cannot give the real volume so I gave The Winter of Artifice with expansions.
JANUARY 15, 1941
Gave Ruder volume 35, working on 36.
Eduardo came. I saw Robert change, become the woman, seductive, tantalizing. I saw them caressing, enjoying each other. There was such a current of love that I was taken in and saw, through Eduardo’s presence, Robert’s feminine body dilating, becoming passionate. I saw Robert in the atmosphere of love and desire. It was like being admitted into the secret chambers of sensual love and then seeing in Robert what would be otherwise concealed from me. It was a strange transition.
Eduardo said, “You two are exactly alike.”
“But Robert is more truthful,” I said.
“He loves less,” said Eduardo. “He is a narcissist.”
There was warmth in the air. The taboo between Robert and me which makes us act somnambulistically towards each other was annihilated for a moment. The love flowed through and between the three of us, shared, transmitted, contagious, the threads binding us. I could look with Eduardo’s eyes at Robert’s finely designed body—the narrow waist, the square shoulders, the stylized body he has, the corrupt, dilated expression. His face expresses dissolution; it reveals the flow, openness, and changefulness. It is so mobile that it seems like an act of exhibitionism. Everything is revealed to the naked eye.
JANUARY 19, 1941
Working on volume 36.
Robert did not give his true self to Eduardo. I saw Robert give one night of pretenses, then withdraw into creation, then detachment, then the “male fury,” the rebellion, and finally cruelty. He could not conceal his feelings. I pitied Eduardo, but I knew that it was he who failed. We had scenes, talks, tears, shared torments, confusion, and I had to help and console Eduardo. Eduardo had said: “You love him more, you defend him.” So I had to do for Eduardo what Robert could not do: prove to him my love was greater for him, that I judged Robert’s acts as those of cruelty. (In the next room where Eduardo could hear, Robert caressed and took Marjorie [Duncan’s friend with whom he was staying] without reaching the orgasm himself, and afterwards he excluded Eduardo from all our talks, as if he didn’t exist.) I knew this changed nothing in my love for Robert, for Eduardo I love as one loves a sick person, an impotent person (Eduardo is not the artist), but Robert to me is potent and does not need my lies. I knew that I was acting for Robert, to do what he did not have the patience or compassion to do. So I was full of love for a broken and weeping Eduardo and helped him out of the confusion. I knew everything Robert felt—I could not truly judge the cruelty because it was an act of honesty. I knew he was acting more nakedly and naturally within his own drama of confusion between myth and human life. Deep down I love him for this too, because it is the sign of the creator. Secretly, while knowing it is inhuman, I admire it. He has more courage. He acts as I would want to, with a clean wound.
The incapacity for cruelty has been my weakness, and in this Robert is a male twin. He often says: “Am I going to live your life?” I am glad he is not going to live my life, but rather what I failed to live in my life. He stopped reading the diaries, not wanting to be engulfed. He teased me about living to make his diary more interesting for me, as interesting as mine. When he was making love to Marjorie, she said to him, “You have done this before.” “No,” he answered, “I am just very well read.”
There is a sexual drama too. Eduardo takes him as a woman, and his knowledge of the danger of this is far more terrible than the woman’s abandon—in this abandon woman finds her fulfillment, but the man who yields in this way is condemned to a passivity which destroys the active part of himself. It maims him and produces the caricature of the woman which the passive homosexual represents, because in him it is not a fulfillment of the deepest nature, but a destruction of one side of the hermaphroditic body for the sake of the other, a crippling. So what is left in this feeble half-woman—the defeated woman with only woman’s weakness, still flaunting her seductions superficially as the whore does when she is no longer beautiful or potent— is doubt and uncertainty. This is what Robert could not become. He had begun to assert his male aspect with me, in my presence. I feel that what I transmit to him is the masculinity in me, the strength. I feel this current passing from me into him. Robert, I give you the masculine in my own soul, for I am fulfilled as a woman, complete. When Robert is in my presence, erect, firm, stylized, pure, there is a coalescence that takes place, and then he is the perfect hermaphrodite, balanced, effective.
When Eduardo came, Robert’s body softened, his hips swayed, his face became that of the cabotine, receiving flowers with a coquettish batting of the edges of the eyelids, oblique glances, like an upturned corner of a coverlet, the edge of a petticoat, the stage bird’s turn of the head, the little dance of alertness, the petulance of the mouth pursed for small kisses that do not shatter the being, the flutter of the birds, all adornment and change, a mockery of the evanescent and mysterious little darts of invitations and coy exposures, a burlesque of the small gestures of alarm and promises… He becomes the woman without the womb in which child and creation coil and erupt, the woman without the womb in which terrible mysteries take place—but the travesty of the whore’s invitation is that it never leads to the magnificent marriage of blood.
While all this happened, I stood in the room staring at Robert, and perhaps through my