Organizing my clothes. Alas, trickeries, rearrangements, rafistolages. Organizing my home. Dreaming of Chinchilito. Telephone conversation with Luise. She has serious anemia.
Henry’s agent says: “Henry’s book on America is unacceptable.” Henry owes Doubleday five hundred dollars. His new article for Town and Country was rejected. I had to beg for him, and I can’t write for Ruder. The music “Intermezzo” haunts me like a dream that I would like to repeat. I would like to fall asleep and dream the same dream. As in a dream, I did not possess him, feel him enough. It has no substance. I prepare my clothes as if for a dream.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1941
Curl my hair, I said to the hairdresser, I am going to a dance. What dance? In spite of war and broken beings and disease and death, I am going to dance and to dream, as I dreamed with Edward. I am not in love with him, yet he remains the symbol of the luminous. I dress for him. When I walk into the Savoy Plaza to see Tia Anaïs, I expect to meet him. I see him in luxury and music. He has not telephoned, but he is in the city and I may meet him, only because he lies for me in air and light, and when I remember him I raise my head, my feet are lighter, and I feel light.
Henry is slowly traveling back, but I wish he were not coming. I feel separated from him.
Last night a night of pleasure and lovemaking with Gonzalo. Like the past, his sensual enjoyment was tremendous, as was mine. A younger and slenderer Gonzalo, made beautiful by the sea. But the desire for fever and pleasure remains insufficiently answered.
Every day a little weight is added to my shoulders until I will be bound again: the lack of money, so acute that I hesitate to write Robert “Come back” because of the impossibility of taking care of him (Marjorie has refused to do what I did last winter—feed him and his friends and give him pocket money—so he left for Chicago). Eduardo has a room nearby and lives on a small allowance. Why has the dream of luxury returned after years of drabness and sharing the renunciations and denials of others? With Edward I reach into a dream of luxury, abandoned for so many years. Poverty is monstrous. I see it in the life of Virginia and Bob. Gonzalo is weary of it. I returned to the few years when I knew comfort (Boulevard Suchet and Louveciennes) before I met Henry. I have a need of ascension, not to the same possessions but to a purified luxury, the poetic quality of it. I realize the value of what I surrendered. I asked myself: What is this exaltation? A premonition? An illusion? A mirage again? A preparation for a new love?
NEXT MORNING HE TELEPHONED!
I jumped with joy. I can’t sit still or eat. I’m joyous, joyous, joyous. “I missed you in the café,” he said. “I arrived last night. When are you free?”
“Chinchilita!” he cried gaily as he arrived in his small car. I led him to the studio. He glowed, beamed, purred with contentment. “It’s beautiful here. The painted windows! The benches. You are a real artist. What am I doing here, me with my two vocal cords only?” I gave him the House of Incest, saying: “I give you here dreams you already know.” I showed him my photos and he took two for his pocketbook, he said. We sat in the porch on the swinging hammock. He caressed me, my breasts, my legs. I saw a new Edward, softer, more tender, feminine. At the beach his physical arrogance, which is purely of the body, predominated. In the city it is attenuated by the clothes. And the softness appears. We spent an enchanted hour. And it occurred to me that we were living in a dream. All I could feel was a slight physical pleasure, a great airiness, brilliancy, an entirely new feeling. I wonder what I give him. He called me as soon as he arrived. He took me driving in his toy car, his hand over my legs, sometimes stealing between them. He talks about next year in Provincetown. I was terribly nervous, yet at one moment I divined his own unsureness. The strange thing is that he is so much like a dream that sensuality is dissolved. I would like an orgy in which to feel him more violently. I was exhausted from nervousness. I wanted to enchant him. And I was not sure. Afraid he would vanish. He said: “Provincetown was marvelous…when I met you.”
When I came home, Hugo was not yet there. I stretched myself out as with an opium pipe to remember EDWARD…
In a few days I’m broken by so many marvelous moments: the night with Edward, the arrival of Robert, the night when Luise invited us to see her act in Barrie’s Cinderella. The life I wanted. And Robert, as always, understands this idea of the myth dimensions, my desire to live only with myth people, and he is ready to discard all that does not answer to this. The bond between Robert and me unshakable and pure. The new emotions roused by Luise’s acting, my love for her. I sent her a letter together with one of my glass slippers. A telephone call from Edward. In a few hours I am consumed and burn through all my strength of body.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1941
Robert makes such a true distinction between disguise and transformation. He also said as I say: one person cannot suffice to my great hunger. So again I lie writing in the diary. Hugo is engraving at his table before the window, and Robert is painting the coffre to match the benches.
Last night I was exalted, so vulnerable…every sensation intensified. Music threw me into exalted joy—an intoxicated state, like love. I had dinner with Gonzalo, swept him off his feet. Did he feel my mood for an orgy? He said: “Let’s go to Harlem.” I was delighted. But in the end he led me to our rincon and got me under the covers, naked, and we threw ourselves into pleasure, long, drawn out, a long-lasting orgasm, a bath of caresses, of strong odors, mouth filled with sperm, fingers imbued with honey. A night of joy and plenitude, so like the past that I could not believe in all the little songs of waning love I had been observing.
Conflict in myself: I first took to our rincon the Madagascar bed cover, which I had in rue Cassini and which was stained by Gonzalo, but now I keep it in the apartment because it looks beautiful and I see it more often, and others admire it. But I feel this is a betrayal, a lessening of the passion, a throwing of the objects surrounding our love back into the current of my individual life. I do not feel the same betrayal when I take something from my home for my life with Gonzalo—as if all I had should naturally go into the passion, the passion being at the center.
SEPTEMBER 24, 1941
Last night I went downstairs at nine o’clock and there was Chinchilito already there, moving towards me, crossing the street, with his phosphorescent smile and singing voice. We came back to the studio. We read his horoscope together, which is beautiful and confirmed my heightened image of him, the expansion, the largeness, the idealized figure. When we read of sorrow in love he said: “That’s Chinchilita.” As he recognized my handwriting (Eduardo left me stranded with only a few facts, and I had to complete the horoscope with a book), he was grateful and amazed too. He said, “But what is this, Chinchilita?” Playing upon my horoscope design he said: “There she is, a painter, here a goddess, here an angel, here an astrologer, and down here, a little devil…” and he kissed me on the mouth. Kisses, kisses, kisses, and caresses, but no invitation to make love. We sat at a bar and talked. And then he almost destroyed my mirage by telling me stories as bad as Henry’s or Rabelais, but all concerned with excrement and urine, etc., about himself, which I particularly detest, and which left a bad impression on me. I returned home, baffled.
Robert said: “What makes Winter of Artifice a failure are the falsities, the interchange of personalities and the disguises.”
Eduardo said: “In Winter of Artifice, we get the second transformation of a reality already once transformed in the diary. This twice transformed reality being wonderful but not accessible to all.” Obviously, my idea that my work consists now in retelling it all with greater completeness is implicated in all the criticism of the diary’s incompleteness, but for the moment I prefer to continue and be more complete in the present.
OCTOBER 6, 1941
I am not ready to retire from life and do the masculine creation of the other face of the diary, to labor on what the woman could not