Siegfried is not always romantic. He is often Rabelaisian in his speech, but grandly. All the Americans who tried to interest me look at this couple where all the European charms center, his and mine together. The three of us, Gonzalo (“the motorized Inca,” Graeffe calls him, seeing him on his bicycle), Graeffe and I are like personages out of a myth. People think I am an actress or a dancer. Luise’s coming heightened everything, and all the stagnant obsessions which haunted me a week ago have vanished. I have escaped, changed climates. The most terrifying, tempting aspect of infidelity is how attractive it makes you to your deepest loves. The afternoon I came back from lying in the sand dunes with Edward, Gonzalo came and took me with the greatest desire he has felt for a week. That has always happened. Love and passion form a current which must be nourished and sustained and renewed and retransmitted. Fixed upon one object it stifles and strangles itself. Desire. Twice I have known desire free of love.
I awakened singing. It was raining, cold, but I was singing. So strange, the passage from sorrowful, shrunken days to luck with money, with desire, with Luise’s visit, expansion and flight.
Gonzalo, Gonzalo, I cannot live in the caverns of my obsessions and doubts.
It was strange and terrible, the night Gonzalo talked to me so wisely about Helba. He reassured me of the love, but not of the passion. It was the first time one of our reconciliations did not take a sensual expression. I felt the love and the tiredness, the deep tiredness of the man who is burning out, as Henry was burned out, the loss of vitality, and my passionate youthfulness celebrating a remarriage without a night of passion. This very night, under my joy at spiritual nearness, there ran the sense of loss and separation. And like a floating uncertain, rootless being, I caught at Siegfried, all shining, and was drawn magnetically to the source of desire again.
Brilliance again. Music.
Pouring again. No beach with Siegfried. Alone. Dreaming. Lying in bed, glad of the rest, for my body always takes on more than it has strength for. It always cracks when I begin to soar. So marvelous to reach for your dream when you are outside of the nightclub and you hear the music and you are locked out, not dancing, you are alone in a room watching the candlelight of the Flagship, but knowing tomorrow you will be inside, dancing, with a new lover.
AUGUST 21, 1941
In spite of Edward’s playfulness and the carefulness with which he preserved himself from this relationship, as I did—the impersonality—a new element entered into it yesterday. The day we planned to go to the beach, it rained, so we did not meet, and I have asked him not to call at my studio. Once I passed by his house and he was out. At a quarter to twelve I passed by the Flagship and he was not there (he came at twelve and did not find me). Meanwhile friends dragged him out all afternoon and evening, took him to the beach at one o’clock, made him drink, etc.
He came home at six in the morning. At twelve we talked. Gonzalo was taking me to the beach. So Edward came, but sat with a friend a few yards away. At three Gonzalo left to teach Helba how to swim. I pretended to leave on my bicycle but I returned, talked to Edward, and we went together to the other end of the beach. And then, because he was tired from the night before, a little less invulnerable, perhaps because I had the intuition of what he needed, I ceased to treat him as a lover. I talked fantastically about Peru, and later at the Flagship I drew him out to talk about his life, and he told me about his first deep love for the daughter of a Peer, whom he could not marry because he was without money.
At this moment the romantic Edward appeared, the one I had sensed through the delicacy of some of his caresses. From this he passed to talking of Tristan and Iseult, the sensuality and eroticism of the music. As it happens, the motif of our dancing music at the Flagship is stolen from Tristan and Iseult. I felt his disgust of the night before, his desire to dwell again in music and poetry. I made the evening beautiful. How true my instinct. He confessed to me how women pursue and demand the lover in him. And at my door he gave me the most delicate of kisses, mere brushings… We had lifted the experience out of the realm of une affaire de rêncontre, a pick-up, a banal incident, into another sphere. The other women saw only a desirable body. It is quite a feat to construct a dream out of an ordinary seaside flirtation and after playing the accessible woman. But I did it. I detected a certain regret when he said: “All this will soon be over. I am leaving the 28th for Nantucket. Will we see each other in New York?”
Je voyage. Je voyage. What I trusted was his smile. There is a Nordic fierceness to his eyes, a power to his neck, but his smile opens like a feminine Iris. In the grandeur there is softness. I could fall in love with his smile. The very image of him makes me breathe more deeply. My pride is reawakened, the desire for beauty and elegance. I feel a curious physical euphoria. Why does the joy of complete yielding elude me? Twice he has taken me, and I do so want to feel him entirely.
AUGUST 22, 1941
We went to the beach together by bus. Went to the farthest end of it, opposite to where Gonzalo was with Helba. We lay on the sand, near people at first. Edward caressed me furtively, when no one was passing, the breasts, between the legs. As I had told him the story of the little animal in Peru who inserts his beak into women’s wombs, he was immensely amused and started to call his ever-rising sex “chinchilito,” and I “chinchilita.” We went into the sea. Under the water he caressed me. How beautiful this was. I could see his marvelous body under the water and I caressed his chinchilito and we laughed so together. So much that when Edward came out of the water he looked for a secret place behind the beach, hidden by the grasses, and there we lay naked for a while, until his desire grew again and we caressed and he took me, too quickly and vigorously for my pleasure, but the sensuous pleasure, the feast for my eyes which he is, the erotic images of his body a feast for the imagination and senses, gave me such joy. I had dreamed once of lovemaking in harmony with the sea and the sand, and here was a laughing god of the sun, teasing, imitating the growling, rather swollen ways of Gonzalo, my alertness and Gonzalo’s old, tired lion manners. I was in such a high mood, exalted with pleasure, shedding radiance and full of charm. I know I enveloped him in essences new to him. How much he perceives, feels of me, I cannot tell. I know he is enchanted.
We were invited to a cocktail at Peter Hunt’s together. He always says, “I would rather be with the chinchilita.”
After the cocktail, we gravitated again together for dinner. He grew talkative, more and more expansive, telling me fantastic stories. The sensualist is there, in a phrase now and then. Always women. More and more the project to see me in New York appears in his talk. I never mentioned this. I accepted his being born of the sea and vanishing with the end of the summer. I have doubts. About love I would know, but about pure pleasure and sensual caprice I am ignorant. Every day I think it is ended. The story of his frustrated love is the alibi all men and women give who cannot love ever again. He is impenetrable to me, because this climate without love is new to me. Yet now and then, unexpectedly, he will press his forehead against mine. He is mysterious to me. A new kind, proud (he was short of money today and would not accept the smallest loan), arrogant, independent. Yet I say to myself: why is he so aware of the motorized Inca? Why does he tease me so persistently? Is it a kind of jealousy? In a climate without emotion to guide me, I am rudderless. It is all new. True, I had no feelings for John, but he was sentimental; he was in love.
A whole day without thoughts of Gonzalo. I went so far away from him in a few days, it was difficult to return, to become aware again that he is spiritless, half-ill, lifeless. We met at nine. My ebullience was contagious, and of course he desired me. What encouragement to unfaithfulness. He took me. I was still talking like a drunkard, amusing, high-spirited, impossible to suffocate again, irrepressible. My thoughts were all centered on the charms of Edward, his infinitely alluring smile and his hands, his coups des belier, his clowning imitations, his cries of Chinchilita!