Today I said to him: “When you return, if you still want to marry me, we will get a place and live together. I will leave Hugo.”
At this moment I had forgotten Gonzalo. I imagined a whole life of creation and love with the One. Henry said, “I thought you could never separate from Hugo.” Separate or break. When the moonstorm comes, I separate, and then it is madness. I write heavily, with the stone of realism weighing on me.
MARCH 4, 1941
One infernal week. Robert brings me all his children to feed. I write for Ruder, who is never satisfied. My period is late, and I am worrying already about the expense of an abortion, about where I can get a cheap one. Coming every morning are angry bill collectors and threats. Feelings of defeat, exhaustion. Henry becomes aware, tender, asking questions he has never asked. I had to beg Ruder for the hundred dollars for Henry’s departure. He at first refused, then offered me an advance of forty dollars, but today he rejected the hundred pages as definitely not erotic enough. I took it quietly, but I am beaten.
I went to see Slocum, who advises Henry to stop traveling for a while and write, to catch up. Henry cannot break his contract with Doubleday, so he must go on with his trip. I have spoiled them. It’s too late. When I asked Gonzalo only to be careful with the money, he had a crisis of guilt and desperation. The guilt turned into fear, then jealousy. He made a scene again as violent as those in St. Tropez. This one was directed at Robert. He shouted: “I want purity! Purity! You’re still going around with the degenerates.” He got wild, monstrous. He said, “You are still forming groups around and for Miller. That is what it is, Miller’s world. You won’t give it up!”
Saturday Henry left. Last night Gonzalo took all his clothes off, I mine. He was caressing, voluptuous, with his whole body. It was like the nights of rue Cassini, sex through the whole body, a whole love. I became baffled. Why, why? I asked myself. How did this wave of passion return, like the waves of its highest peaks, in spite of the day before, in spite of the poison, in spite of Gonzalo’s bad health, in spite of my doubts of him and his love? When one stops demanding it, it comes; the passion came, flooded me. I said, “Estoy contenta.” “Yo también,” said Gonzalo. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been this happy,” as if he knew Henry was gone. It was one of those dazzling nights. I felt strong.
MARCH 8, 1941
I am down to my last pair of stockings, and they are torn. I sell my books. Every morning I get angry, threatening letters from somebody or other. My only fear of war is: what will happen to my children? If Hugo loses his job, how will I protect them all? What saintliness Hugo has, accepting to sacrifice for others with me. When he scolds me it is always just. He does not ask for himself. He is concerned for me.
If Hugo is the husband of me at twenty, at least he has not deteriorated—he has grown. He has become the artist. He is more today than he ever was.
All my strength goes into the erotica. The diary was abandoned. I look at it tonight to just to assure myself it is still there. I have nothing to say.
Wrote forty pages of erotica with the possibility of selling it.
MARCH 27, 1941
Robert is gone, ordered to report for induction. I could not eat; I walked the streets. Hugo began to work for his return, his liberation. They do not want homosexuals in the army. When Robert left, for the first time he did not give me a child’s kiss, but a lover’s kiss.
What I want to tell Gonzalo, but cannot, is that his love for Helba is destroying mine for him. When one brings, as he does, the past into the present, one surrenders the present to the past. His blind, foolish devotion to a person who is willfully and voluntarily enlarging every little pain, magnifying every discomfort and malaise in order to command pity and attention, finally tires out my love for him.
I know this is not true—it is my own sickness that makes me feel this. Perhaps Gonzalo feels the same about Hugo or Henry. Even of Eduardo he is jealous. He was insanely jealous of Robert. Now I am the one insane with this trauma.
How can I surmount the feeling? My life is full, but is there always to be one point of disease in it? Before it was fear of losing Hugo, then Henry, and now Gonzalo? Do I fear losing him? Fear alone causes jealousy, and my fear is invading me—it invades the love and eats into it. The hatred for Helba is growing stronger than my love for Gonzalo. It is a monstrous thing.
I write ten or fifteen pages a day. I see Eduardo, Thurema, Slocum, Ruder. I write to Henry. I paint the benches. When I am with Gonzalo, we paint together when we are not making love. But as soon as I am alone, I fall into this obsession.
I read this tale as if I had never known all this.
I wanted to join Henry, but I do not have the money. Robert is in army prison. I shy away from people. I have isolated myself.
In my own love there is duality, which is why cannot I accept another’s duality when it has forced me into mine (or when my duality forces others into theirs). Who is waiting for a whole love, to give whole love? Henry gave me a whole love when he separated from June, but I did not consider this separation absolute, because after June the human being came June the legend, the theme of his work. So I threw myself into a new love only to meet with the same situation, only worse.
APRIL 15, 1941
Still restless, restless, not to be able to meet Henry in Santa Fe, to escape. Then came a day of defeat, the diary finally ending its tour of the publishers, rejected, then the exhaustion of my erotic themes, the debts.
Caresse came. Her lover Canada Lee is a star on Broadway, in Native Son. She asked me to accompany her to Harlem, where I met him. I had given her the courage to live out her love. We both worried about our lives growing shabby because love has brought us both poverty and restrictions. I have what all women want, love, but it has enslaved me, not freed me. It is devouring me. I am tired of writing. I am losing everything, the little beauty I have, my gifts for expansion. I am imprisoned by devotion. Look where I am! I am watching Native Son, sitting by Mr. Ruder, who is ugly, vulgar and familiar. This is the prostitution I have entered into for Henry and Gonzalo. Look at Anaïs Nin in her dark wine-colored velvet suit (seven dollars at the Lerner shop), in her frilled grey blouse from New Orleans, given to her by Caresse, in the six-year-old wine-colored velvet hat with a feather, the one I wore on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, with a cape cut out of the dilapidated princess fur coat, with mended stockings, walking with a twaddling, deformed monster who invades the privacy of others! Who wants to enter my life and meet my friends?
However, people still say I look dashing and elegant. I discard my costume d’époque to better match Gonzalo’s workman’s clothes, his corduroy trousers and leather jacket, and down Broadway again we walk to see a jungle film, the only film I would see twice, in which the savagery of the animals trains me for the savagery of man and war.
Henry’s adventure trip around America is catastrophic, a wasted sacrifice, for he is creating nothing out of his trip; he is only spitting in America’s eye, like a preacher in an endless sermon casting it to hell.
MAY 4, 1941
The madness reached a climax, where I banged my closed fists against my brow, awakened in the morning dreaming I was murdering Helba…and then I fought it, dissolved it. How? There is a way of bringing the monster out of the cave, and in the clarity of the day it shrinks.
What a strange night, when Eduardo asked me: “Come with me to the Tavern” (the night before he had been there and had picked up a homosexual boy). This tavern was next door to my place with Gonzalo, 132 MacDougal Street, a basement room full of monsters, ugly, mediocre types. It was the rhythm of the two negroes playing the piano and cello which Gonzalo and I could hear from our little studio, the music Gonzalo and I lay down to and caressed each other into druggedness and desire. And to this same music, Eduardo and I sat before a little table, watching the door for the marvelous being that might enter, but no one came. Rats and mice and rabbits scurried, snickered, dawdled, munched, hunched, but there was no marvelous being to love. Eduardo