I felt such violent love that I understood the difference between my feelings for Henry and for Gonzalo, the difference between passion and love. We were so exalted, we walked the streets laughing, swimming in space. We needed height. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, looked down on this unique creation and kissed. Gonzalo said, “I have not been happy for months.” And then: “American women look ugly to me. Perhaps because I am with you.” I felt his love, the fire of it. Fire. Fire. Fire. A human fire. Everything was transfigured. All the feelings one has at the beginning of love, a love of the whole world, ecstasy. I was ill again, with the grippe, feverish, but I didn’t care. Now my room is filled with objects from Paris, the Chinese lacquered chest, the Madagascar bedspread, the African leather bottles.
Gonzalo and I together produce fire. My power for ecstasy and his earthy fire produce this white heat all the poets and all the lovers dream of, this raging fire, heaven and hell.
FEBRUARY 14, 1940
We have a quarrel, and then I rage and suffer so…I cannot sleep, and it ravages me. Then I feel my loneliness so acutely, I go nearly mad. I stupefy myself with aspirin because I cannot bear the long night, and I think of Hugo. In the morning I set out in a blizzard, intending to stay out all day, to not see Gonzalo, but then I realize, as I have often before, that it is better to see him, to face the quarrel. I walk back to the hotel just as he is coming to see me. I explain to him about the loneliness, that if he hurts me I fall into an abyss. And Gonzalo is so tender and warm, that soon we are lying in bed and his sex is quivering and leaping at my nearness. It is over. I can work again, sing, sleep. I can even be alone. Why such terrible pain, such desperate suffering at a small incident?
MARCH 25, 1940
During the days after Gonzalo’s arrival, I felt the wholeness of our love and began to plan to tell Henry the truth, to break with him. Henry was in Washington, and when he returned to New York, I would face the danger of losing Gonzalo, and this I could not bear. At the same time the anxiety over Henry made me sick. I felt that there was a bond beyond the human, that Henry was alone without me in spite of his admirers and friends. It was while I struggled with the idea of telling Henry that he lost the Indian love ring he had worn since our “marriage” in New York.
The day he returned I found him so frail-looking and sad, I could not say anything. He was anxious about meeting with his parents, whom he had not seen for eleven years. He was going to see them the next day. His father was ill, and he dreaded the reunion. Perhaps they would need his help and he could not give them any. I offered to give him fifty dollars so he would not arrive empty-handed. He said it was not his to give and asked why he should deceive them. I said: “You ought to give them the illusion. Such illusions are life-giving.” But Henry would not do it. The day he visited them, he found them as he feared—poor, and his father ill with cancer of the prostate. Henry came home and sobbed all night with pity and guilt. The next day when I came, he sobbed again. He was altogether changed, human, quite broken and soft. He said he now understood everything he had condemned in me, my care of my mother and Joaquín, that one could not really escape one’s karma, and that with his evasion all he had done was to accumulate guilt. As it happened that very day, a rich collector had given him fifty dollars for a piece of writing to order, which Henry was now taking to his family. All Henry’s intoxication with Greece has vanished. He suddenly began to see his family every week, taking gifts to the three of them, visiting his cousins, aunts, etc. We passed the days sharing his feelings and pity.
One night I pretended to think he had been unfaithful in Greece and teased him. He teased me about Gonzalo, and said that if he put certain facts together about my behavior, it might seem like treachery. I retorted that I could analyze what he wrote and what I heard about his time in Greece. The whole theme was once again pushed aside, and we resumed our life together.
While visiting Caresse Crosby, I had an intuition that her house would be a good place for Henry to live. Coincidence. Sometime later she informed me that there was a room for rent in the same house. I took Henry to see it and it is just what he wants, the kind of room he can write in, large, spacious, peaceful, secluded. Intuitive too because finding this place dissolved his desire to travel, which would have created a conflict in me because I would not follow him. He settled in this room, where I am now, and began to write. I took a tiny studio on the same street where Gonzalo lives, on West 20th, and as Henry’s place is on Lexington and 54th, it is a completely different quarter where the lazy Gonzalo never goes.
I sleep with Henry, enjoy him sensually. I leave him in the morning and return to my little studio, small and modern.
I went through a black storm because Gonzalo would not stay all night. I discovered the real reason—his liver trouble and its humiliating consequences. Poor Gonzalo, paying dearly for all his drinking. During the scene, he used the identical words Henry once used: “I’m happiest of all with you. I’m so happy with you I no longer care about my friends.” In my anger, I had broken the little blue veilleuse he gave me in Paris, the one whose tiny glass lampshade broke the day we moved out of the houseboat Nanankepichu, and which he had replaced.
When Henry was jealous of Gonzalo for a day, I realized the terrible pattern of his destiny, how I was acting exactly as June did, which prevented me from revealing what does not seem right to reveal, while our relationship is still alive.
Meanwhile Jacobson has to take care of my stubborn anemia, and I have to accept my physical limitations. I cannot enjoy late nights, parties, strain. After one night in Harlem (a magnificent night of dancing until five o’clock in the morning) I was tired for a week. As soon as I feel well and strong I spend my strength as recklessly as I do my money. I cannot save, conserve, reserve.
I have to learn. I refuse invitations. I copy diaries. I waste feelings of anxiety over Hugh being in Europe. The news of the war getting violent causes me anguish. It drags on like a nightmare—ghostly, neurotic.
Gonzalo reads either the newspapers or the Spanish classics and fails to notice the very world in which I breathe.
The grotesque evenings at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s, the self-conscious discussions. All America is still in elementary school, with its catechism, declarations, preparations, definitions, mere prefaces to living.
APRIL 13, 1940
Once a month I get the moonstorm, and it is madness recurring rhythmically, only each time more violently. In a week I get persecution mania, obsession, fears, doubts of all kinds—I feel everything I described in my novel. Each time it is more powerful. It is a reversal of what I usually feel: faith, sense of wonder, illusion. Everyone becomes a monster. I trust only Hugh. Wind in the street appears malicious, people’s slightest words a humiliation. I see desertion all around me. I feel hatred, rebellion, resentment, loneliness. I am very near to absolute despair. It is a lie, it is madness. With it come violent erotic longings. I dream of whorehouses, of being possessed by many men, of being possessed to the point of exhaustion, saturation, of touching the depths of sensuality such as one touches only at the beginning of passion. Strangest of all, I write, I create, and stranger still, I am physically stronger than I have ever been. For the first time, I have gained weight, from 107 to 114. A thread of lucidity saves me from insanity. I see it now. I see the insanity in my loves—the obsessions—in my need of the diary as a proof of reality, of the reality of my life.
APRIL 30, 1940
Gloomy days, darkened by Gonzalo’s bad health, neurosis, insomnia. Gonzalo cannot conquer his laziness. Add laziness to illness, and there is little charm left—big and fat, lying prone on the couch, always reading newspapers and listening to the news.
Very rarely have we recaptured the beauty of our days in Paris. I think it is all dying from inertia and laziness. When there is no spirit