Collages by Anaïs Nin Page A

been distorted by external circumstances. She tried to
reconstruct his face as it might have been before the war. She wondered if this
wound had influenced his moods too, for she had heard that he was melancholic
in private and gay and witty in public. At the door he had kissed her hand and
said to her: “We are celebrating a literary prize I received for my book.” He
said this in a wistful tone. Renate asked with her natural frankness: “You do
not seem to be rejoicing over it.”
    “It’s true, but that’s because it came too
late.”
    “Too late! But
you’re at the prime of life!”
    It came too late, just the same, too late for
my mother to know about it. She died during the war. It was she who wanted me
to become a famous writer. I did it for her. Now it does not seem to matter
very much. Why do I write? What does it bring me? One either fails in one’s art
or in one’s life.”
    “Look what your writing brings you. You are
surrounded by beautiful women, your books are being filmed, you travel, and
everywhere you go you have friends. I wanted to meet Jean Delatouche. I was
attracted to his imagination and his wit.”
    “And you’ll be disappointed when I tell you I
am not Jean.”
    “You mean, you are no longer Jean. You have
become someone else.”
    “I never was Jean. I was the non-hero of the
book, the half-gangster, the ambiguous adventurer. The hero was the man my
mother wanted me to be. The gangster was me. The man you came to see is the
hero of the book. The world I create I leave behind me, like an old skin.”
    The Consul’s wife was English. She extended a
pale blonde hand, her delicately tinted face and pale blonde hair were almost
eclipsed by a Chinese mandarin coat, heavily embroidered.
    When Renate admired it she said: “It conceals
the bulges.”
    Then looking wistfully at the Consul who did
not kiss all the women’s hands, only the pretty ones, she added: “Other people
have breakdowns when they do not succeed. He has them when he has a success which
his mother cannot enjoy. He is only really happy when he is locked upstairs
with his writing.”
    The Consul was opening the champagne delivered
by the French Navy. He wore both martial and literary decorations. He made
everyone laugh with sallies and remarks he made without smiling. Most of the
time he did not appear at parties, but let his wife officiate. Visitors
sometimes caught sight of him as he opened his window for a little fresh air
and then his wife would say: “He is working on his novel.”
    The patio evoked Algerian settings. It was
sheltered by a pepper tree and the Consul’s wife had decorated it with Moroccan
rugs and a Turkish coffee set of copper inlaid with floral designs.
    The cook was Russian. Her hobby was collecting
stray cats and injured dogs. More often when she came to the salon it was not
to bring ice but to ask the Consul’s wife for bandages or aspirin for the
animals. The ice never came, but the Consul’s wife told the Westerners in love
with space about the advice given to her by her Russian maid which had proved
valuable: “When your thoughts have too much space, they fly off into the
infinite. It is necessary to work and think in an enclosed room, then the
thoughts cannot escape. They rebound.”
    Officially, publicly, in the eyes of the world,
publishers, magazines, and television people, it was he who was the writer. His
books were known, he had received prizes, and films were being made of thm.
Very few people knew that the Consul’s wife was a writer too.
    She had written a vivid book about four English
women who had wanted to escape from England to the Orient, had wanted an
adventurous life, and had all succeeded and fulfilled their desires richly and
fully.
    She was herself physically such an exact
replica of the delicately tinted women of English paintings that it was
difficult to remember her features. The shell rose, the faintly drawn features
were always about to vanish in one’s memory. Her