Strange boy. He is a descendent of the Earl of Dudley, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth, of Thomas Dudley, Duke of Yorkshire. His family owned Kenilworth, of the Walter Scott novels that once enchanted me. And that is how he looks, like a figure out of a novel, a darling of women, a fighter, a tyrant, reckless, courageous, romantic. Fine, tall, white body, hair around his head like a faun’s, curled and golden. Half artist, but a good one who makes marvelous drawings with character. Aware, awake, alert, luminous. When near him, after telling myself I do not love him, I feel sensual warmth. Once I came to him in the middle of a violent storm; I came to him on Sunday, a day when I am usually a prisoner. He is extraordinarily aware of me. His drawings of me are accurate and interesting. He has protective impulses and asks if I had been hurt living with Henry, asks what he can do for me. I said: “You rescued me from death. One rescue in a week, is it not enough?” When he feels unequal to me, I say, “Can you say you are less than me only because I’ve been to exotic places and you have not?” He says: “You accept me. You challenge my strength and make me whole. I feel stronger with you. At the same time I feel weaker than before other women. I was an egoist. I did not consider woman…as an equal.” He has a small, childish, dreamy wife, married only for a year. She is even too small sexually for him…too small, not a giant. He will be someone. He will be loved by women, by everybody. He is already. People listen to him. With him, miracles may happen. He is a conqueror, in a way. He is determined; his only hesitancies are those of youth. He has strong hatreds and strong loves. I see him as light and joy.
His worship revives me so much that I return to Gonzalo full of charm, fancies, rid of the tightness and bitterness of absolute dependence, the poisonous, acrid fears. I return nonchalant, imaginative, and he falls in love with me all over again, takes my clothes off and makes love to me all over the body as I like it. I’m like a drunkard, drunk on love, spending most of my life in bed, in an orgy of caresses. Mad, absolutely mad, lying with all of them, creating, laughing, inventing, writing. Liberated, liberated of the fears which made me clutch at Gonzalo. What pain these last months, watching the passion die, but then replenishment at the source of love itself, a tender, young, passionate love, drinking there and gaining strength, sexually, spiritually, emotionally, all in one week. A miracle. And everything around it is nourished by the miracle, a life transfusion of love given to all. I asked John, “Have you the courage to live something inhuman, the poem?” But as I began to leave him and saw the pain on his face, I yielded to a human impulse and said, “You know there is no more passion between Henry and me.”
Henry took us all last night to 662 Briggs Avenue in Brooklyn, where he lived nine years of his childhood. We walked through it all, listening to him recollecting. John at my side, silent. Jealous? The night was beautiful. The past, so rich and full to the point of bursting, and the present—John—walking together.
What John and I joined together were two quick, pulsing rhythms, quickening blood, adventure.
I have infinite patience with his youthful stuttering, his youthful errors. I tell him when he retracts or apologizes, “Never retract with me.” When he stumbles or hesitates, “Go on.” He asks: “Is that clear? Do you understand?” I say: “Don’t write. You are a painter.” He only wearies me when he tries to make it a great love instead of hunger, electric sparks, everything but love, when he tries to carry me to see if he can carry me away from all the others.
Because he has no past and I had no future, we have traded, but I feel airy and strange. Eduardo said: “You have no center of gravity. You live outside of yourself, in your relationships. You are really mad, in a way. Hugh is your only foundation, which may be wonderful for poetry, but you seek only the peaks.”
I am so grateful to John that I can feel, laugh, and pulse again. He said to me: “Henry has something of death in him, a greyness, Hugh too. But you are of a different color altogether—you are barbaric red.” As an artist, he sees me as beautiful. I see the shadowless translucence of his skin. I like creating him sensually, unleashing him, inflaming him, opening him. I feel his body as if I were making it with my own hands, touching off new cells of responses, new sparks. There are flames again—they leap in my hands.
He is full of delicacies. I have never been served and adored like a princess. He says when I go down the street he wants to push everyone away so I can walk alone, guarded by him alone. When he says romantic things (almost like the ones I said to Henry) I laugh gently, mockingly, a soft laughter. He said after our first afternoon, “This room is now immortalized.” Sensually he is learning; he was fumbling at first, but he is gifted for nuances, he is gifted for love. Can I bear his going away? Will I miss his caresses, his exaltation? He does not sleep; instead, he spends his nights making drawings of me.
I did betray Gonzalo—oh, not by sleeping with John, I do not consider such acts betrayals. No, betrayal is when I brought John a piece of Japanese wood Gonzalo stole for me once, to light and produce the most unique incense perfume, a wood Gonzalo and I only burned for ourselves, to make strange hotel rooms smell like us. That is betrayal: stealing what belongs to the other, to the very soul of the relationship, and desecrating it. My sensual gift is only a great expansion of the self, drawing on new worlds, new senses, new experiences, another self totally unrelated to Gonzalo. I dedicated House of Incest to both John and his wife (of whom I am not at all jealous), which touched him. He places her under my protection. When I was sixteen, I used to read Kenilworth with passion. It had a magic meaning. I shall call John Kenilworth. John I do not like, because of the other John (Erskine), and because it is too simple.
I often can cut through the manifestations of anger and recognize the suffering behind it. Many people react to suffering with anger.
Death and disintegration require passivity like Henry’s and Gonzalo’s, which I do not have, even in small things. Gonzalo does not know when he is hot or cold and goes out for a week in the same costume; if it is too light and the weather changes he gets a grippe. He suffers. He waits. One day I said: “Gonzalo, you’re so hot in that suit. You’re suffering. I saw fine-looking slacks in the store with light shirts.” We go and look at them. I urge him to get them. It is I who had to help Helba and Gonzalo find an apartment. I urge them into more expensive places because I do not want them thrust into dark rooms again, into a drab past.
ORIENTA APARTMENTS. MAMARONECK , JULY 4, 1940
A strange, terrifying thing has happened to me twice now. As soon as I feel the downward curve of love I throw myself into a new one. This time I threw myself into desire for John, a meeting of two fires. After our fourth afternoon together he asked me, “You have never said you loved me.” We were separated for two days. During those two days he was like a wild horse suddenly corralled. He rebelled against my power over him. No woman had ever touched off such deep responses, sensually or imaginatively. Until now he had been the loved one, and here I had taken hold of his body and soul without even saying, “I love you!” On one of those nights of rebellion, he saw the film La Femme du Boulanger, saw the handsome shepherd whom the woman eats like a beautiful fruit. John asked himself if that was all he was to me. I was away with Hugh during those two days, and John was to wait until Monday to see me again before leaving. He cried out, “It hurts, it hurts.” It was a storm of revolt against the wounding pain of passion. He was going to leave before I returned, but Monday morning Henry told him, “Anaïs is coming later.” My name struck John like a bombshell. He waited. Then I came, and he told me all he had suffered, but still I would not say I loved him. We plunged into caresses, and his were violent, hungry. I liked the fire in him—I bathed in it.
All the time I knew it was not love. Then came the last day, when we possessed each other like savages. The last evening we all went out together, Hugh, Eduardo, Lafayette, John and I, to Chinatown. As we walked the streets I was drunk with desire. We wanted desperately to touch each other again. The intoxication was too strong; it was torture. I felt myself on the threshold of doing something mad—I could not let him go away. I promised to see him again. And suddenly, it was all unreal; the exaltation disappeared. I did not feel his departure. I felt nothing. I fell into