love?
Tam, tam, tam…the piano and cello while Gonzalo and I lie on the bed, and his black fingers drum on my skin and play the cello between my legs. We are laughing at the music because it is always the same. But what goes on inside of us is never the same. The millions of days, nights, and moods varying in color, smells, form, climate, depths are never repeated. All the millions of nuances of one love, one love turning its million faces towards each other, the millions of gestures altered by the mood of each day, colored by fear, misunderstandings, revelations, creations, books, films, the past, voyages, other loves, dreams. Tam, tam, tam…Gonzalo’s body each time is sufficient to awaken erotic feelings—his hair, his neck, his chest, his smooth back, his iron legs, his odor, his color, his laughter, his voice. Gonzalo is unfastening my new panties with the garters attached, and saying: “It looks like a pulpo (octopus)—how many pulpos do I have to unfasten? Gonzalo, throwing his cigarette butts still lighted in the middle of the room…
Eduardo’s eyes are riveted to the door…tam, tam, tam…of emptiness. His blood will flow back to its source unspent and hurtful; his love flows back like poison. I look at the door too. Gonzalo will come in, as he came in the first time into the small room of Roger Klein’s apartment in Paris, looking very tall and demonic, his black hair wild, his body bigger than everybody’s, but big like a child’s, retaining the softness of contours and the awkwardness… Eduardo said sadly, at midnight, “Let’s go.”
JUNE 1, 1941
Gave Ruder fifty pages.
Dorothy Norman will print fragments of volume 1, the childhood diary. Paul Rosenfeld, the literary critic, kept the diary a month without reading it. Henry is in Hollywood and refused to do script writing at two hundred dollars a week. Ruder said: “Doesn’t it make you angry?” “No,” I said, “I expect this. He does not want to sacrifice himself.” What a relief from tension when he receives one hundred and twenty-five dollars from Town and Country (for his article “The Colossus of Maroussi”) for the next two weeks.
Gonzalo makes me happy. He has the secret to the kind of love I want, which only the child-man can give, the child-man who has all the time and freedom to love, who gives himself to love like a woman does. What a continuous multitude of kisses and tender gestures. When he meets me, he hides to surprise me. He is always touching me, on the street, in the movies, in the restaurant.
Everyone rages against the child-man: he is irresponsible, he lets his women take care of him, he permits the mother’s sacrifices and care, he takes it for granted. It is not selfishness. He accepts his weakness and need of protection. He trusts, believes, and it is all natural. Henry never tells himself that writing scripts for Hollywood would unburden Anaïs. No child ever thinks of unburdening the mother. Henry has not tried to find other protectors…he wants protection with love and understanding from someone who lets him be free. I have never asked him to accept the Hollywood offer, which is merely for money, and Henry has never done anything for money.
What no one understands that this child-man also has a precious gift. His very irresponsibility makes him relaxed, soft, gay. Very often after grim hours of responsibility with Hugo, who worries about the future, who has stomach troubles because he worries too much about the future, as I do with him because of the children, I go to Gonzalo and enter his insouciant child-world of such absence of reality and sense of burden that I relax, I forget, I am free. As with Henry, there is purity, almost an innocence regarding the commercial basis of life.
Care often debases one. I have written a hundred pages, which I do not believe in, to take care of my children. I have accepted many humiliating things.
If only people would accept that each one has a role and fulfill it without guilt. Eduardo is not a delightful companion because he is a guilty child. He is not a man, but he is not a child either. He cannot play unknowingly, nor can he be mature and responsible. He never chose between being a bourgeois and an artist—he is always in between.
JUNE 4, 1941
For three days I thought Henry was lost to me because of his enthusiasm for Luise Rainer, born the same day as his mother and June. I was sad, but not desperate as I would be if it were Gonzalo. I was sad like a mother losing a child. I thought of Henry with tenderness, a deep tenderness.
I took a humorous, teasing letter of Henry seriously. He teased me because of his own jealousy aroused by reading 180 pages of erotica, which he is trying to sell for me in Hollywood. “I’m not in love with anyone,” writes Henry.
JUNE 10, 1941
I said to Gonzalo how strange it is that the spermatozoa sometimes lingers in the womb before fecundating the egg. He said, “Yes, it’s slumming!”
I said, “Janet saw a hermaphrodite, half of her body a man’s, half a woman’s.”
“And the sex,” said Gonzalo, “was it a banana split?”
He talked to me for a whole evening about the activity of microbes. Coming home, we saw lovers sitting in Washington Square. Gonzalo said, “I wonder what makes people fall in love.” I said, “Don’t tell me it’s microbes!”
Gave Ruder another fifty pages. Hugo says, “I need money,” so I wrote fifty more, then fifty again about Elena, and about a seductive man who is Gonzalo with a will.
Robert is awaiting his release after weeks at the hospital, after he declared himself as a homosexual to the army.
The old man is begging me to write, to write now. He wants my erotica like a drug.
Jealousy is a small undercurrent, and all I can do is to recognize it, to be honest about it. It is ugly, and I want to conquer it. Henry says: “You have no confidence in yourself.” So gently he answers me, my alarms, my panic. I knew he would laugh at my angry telegram. He writes: “Do you really mean that if you had the money you would join me? You’re not stringing me along?”
Hugo, poor Hugo, has regrets now for all he has not done. He has regrets when he reads Picasso et ses amis, whereas Gonzalo says, “I thought I was reading my life.”
Those who do not enter life—I live in the Village yet I stand outside of it. I walk the streets and I am estranged from all promiscuity. I live only within my deep loves. My last adventure was a fiasco.
Je vis en marge. I have regrets. I have saved one hundred dollars for Henry, which he does not need. I can keep it for joining him—but do I want to?
Stuffed with French books, I write for Ruder.
I only feel I am living when I am meeting my lover, or walking with my lover, or lying down with my lover; I feel that everything else is death, that I should have had many lovers. An evening of soft climate, animated streets, open bars throwing out music and confused voices, gives me no peace, only restlessness. Outside of the orbit of love I do not exist.
Why do I find everything but peace? Great, deep human love should give peace. Every day I abandon a mystical belief, a psychic interpretation. Every day I find new physical roots to the dream.
Jacobson has taken the place of the analyst, and of course I am less happy because only the illusions and delusions create ecstasy. The discovery of the physical and of the earth saddens me. That is why earth people are sad and mystics alone know joy.
When Gonzalo and I sat on the porch this morning and I looked out into space above the houses, he said, “You look as if you were preparing for flight, right out into space.” I had asked the airline for the cost of a trip to Hollywood.
I carry armfuls of books back and forth from the library and write…it is like a beehive…pollen and semen indeed.
JUNE 18, 1941
When I think I have conquered the monster, it attacks me again. I awaken in the morning charged with poisons. I see failure of my writing, failure to live for one absolute love, failure to free myself from economic tyranny.
Then Henry’s letter this morning quieted me: “If you can’t join me I’ll be starting back slowly.” Is that all I needed?