Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [42]
When she reached Casutza, she was uneasy. She wanted to leave. The desire for flight was already asserting itself. By this she recognized that she was facing a danger. She thought of returning to Paris. In the end, she stayed.
One day the piano, which had been growing rusty downstairs, began to pour out music. The slightly false notes sounded like the pianos of dingy little bars. Elena smiled. The stranger was amusing himself. He was, in fact, playing up to the nature of the piano, and giving it a sound quite alien to its bourgeois staleness, nothing like what had been played on it before by little Swiss girls with long braids.
The house was suddenly gay, and Elena wanted to dance. The piano stopped, but not before winding her up like some mechanical puppet. Alone on the porch, she turned on her feet like a top. Quite unexpectedly a man’s voice very near her said, ‘There are live people in this house after all!’ and laughed.
He was calmly looking through the bamboo slits, and she could see his figure clinging there like that of an imprisoned animal.
‘Won’t you come for a walk?’ he asked her. ‘I think this place is a tomb. It is the House of the Dead. Madame Kazimir is the Great Petrifier. She will make stalactites out of us. We shall be allowed one tear an hour, hanging from some cave ceiling, stalactite tears.’
So Elena and the neighbor started out. The first thing he said was, ‘You have a habit of turning back, starting a walk and turning back. That is very bad. It is the very first of crimes against life. I believe in audacity.’
‘People express audacity in various ways,’ said Elena. ‘I usually turn back, as you say, and then I go home and write a book which becomes an obsession of the censors.’
‘That’s a misuse of natural forces,’ said the man.
‘But then,’ said Elena, ‘I use my book like dynamite, I place it where I want the explosion to take place, and then I blast my way through with it!’
As she said these words an explosion took place somewhere in the mountain where a road was being made, and they laughed at the coincidence.
‘So you are a writer,’ he said. ‘I am a man of all trades, a painter, a writer, a musician, a vagabond. The wife and child were temporarily rented – for the sake of appearance. I was forced to use the passport of a friend. This friend was forced to lend me the wife and child. Without them I would not be here. I have a gift for irritating the French police. I have not murdered my concierge, though I should have. She has provoked me often enough. I have merely, like some other verbal revolutionaries, exalted the revolution too loudly on too many evenings at the same café, and a plainclothes man was one of my most fervent followers – follower, indeed! My best speeches are always made when I am drunk.
‘You were never there,’ continued the man, ‘you never go to cafés. The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded café when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories.’
His eyes, smiling, remained on her all the time that he talked. They were fixed on her with the exact knowledge of her evasions and elusiveness, and acted like a catalyst on her, rooting her to the spot where she stood, with the wind lifting her skirt like a ballerina’s, inflating her hair as if she would blow away in full sail. He was aware of her capacities for becoming invisible. But his strength was greater, and he could keep her rooted there as long as he wanted. Only when he turned his head away was she free again. But she was not free to escape him.
After three hours of walking, they fell on a bed of pine needles within sight of a chalet. A pianola was playing.
He smiled at her and said, ‘It would be a wonderful place to spend the day and night. Would you like it?’
He let her smoke quietly, lying back on the pine needles. She did not answer. She smiled.
Then they walked to the chalet and he asked for a meal and a room. The