I walked past his house several times in hopes of a meeting which would reassure me. During the tea he had continually touched my knees with his, and before she had arrived he had run in to excuse a few minutes’ delay and had said tenderly: “Chinchilita, I will see you in New York.” But last night I thought I had spoiled it all, the dream—I, who never hurt people’s feelings!
Gonzalo was having dinner with me. I lured him into the Flagship. I took two whiskeys. Then Edward and the lady came in. We smiled at each other. Gonzalo was jealous. It was a pleasure for me to be able to see him now and then. Strange, she has come alone to see him, she has a room next to his, he drives her car, they are together, yet I feel no jealousy at all, as if she were the mother. She is a woman of my age, ugly, but intelligent and charming, distinguished.
Because of the whiskey I could not sleep all night, not until five in the morning. Then at nine I yielded to an impulse and slipped a note under his door (the door of the house is always open) to come for a minute. I would like to efface last night’s error. I cannot tell what he feels at all. His behavior is contradictory. His obsession with Gonzalo is very pronounced. His need of being the center of love is equally clear. I lie waiting for him. Hugo arrives at twelve. I should forget him.
Twelve. He came. He was very caressing, tender. Opened my blouse and kissed my breasts. Teased, played, admired the fishing net overhead, spoke again of New York, no shadow of anything wrong. All I needed to calm my anguish. But what I should not have had to do was to nourish my dreams. Always he repeats: “How beautiful it was in the dunes!” As if it were for him the highest moment too.
They leave today.
Everything so beautifully timed as Gonzalo was beginning to grow alarmed, observing the difference between Edward’s formal early bows and the irrepressible cordiality of his last ones. Last night I did not desire Gonzalo, but Edward. I have the clear feeling today that I will see him again, that there is a suspended feeling in him too, a question.
I feel a mysterious, soft happiness.
I see again in him the elegance of my father, the pride and the nobility. Once, when I went into the house where he stays, the doors were all open, there was no one around, and I did not know which one was his room. Three rooms all open on the parlor. I peered in and saw on the dressing table the silver hair brush, comb, clothes brush, and mirror, like my father’s, and I knew they were Edward’s. His signet ring too, in gold, like my father’s, and his beautiful long-fingered hands.
I would like to have beautiful clothes again. All that I surrendered for Gonzalo— the automobile, the servants, the good meals, the house in order, the comforts. I can give, with what I have, the illusion of beautiful dressing.
With Hugo returned the budgets, the accounts, the bills, the calculations, the sense of restrictions, the meals at home, tenderness, absence of fantasy, ennui, gloominess (he always errors in his calculations which makes our situation seem worse), talk of insurance, taxes, indulgence towards my stories, towards the smiles I gather from so many people, the forced lovemaking, the refuge from the sickness.
Becalmed. The sails no longer swollen by great winds.
Then last night I touched the roots of Gonzalo’s sadness: no longer supported by alcohol, he is faced with an impasse—the realization of his life, awareness. At the age of forty-four he is faced with a complete paralysis of his will and activity. He cannot even write a letter now, a letter of vital importance. He is completely paralyzed, guilty about his laziness, fully aware of its destructiveness, of all he could have done, of the love and support he got from me.
Eight in the evening. It is all in Proust: “mon mal,” “l’amour maladif,” the anguish of love, of doubt. I have never understood Proust so deeply or loved him so much. It hurts me to read him, the craving for the love of the mother, the suffering over a lost kiss, over a phrase carelessly uttered. Every day I live these angoisses and want to be free of them. When Edward filled my being I was happy. Now I am prey again, waiting for Gonzalo and thinking he might not come; all the beautiful Portuguese girls here seek him out. Calling for him and hearing him converse with Helba. Being with Hugo on the beach and seeing Gonzalo alone, waiting for Helba, and wanting to run to him and having to hold back. If he does not telephone. Finally my anguish, like Proust’s, was only calmed when he began to telephone me every day and I could see him every day. As I know that the disease kills the love, I keep it secret. I get deeply disturbed when I reveal it, when it betrays me, as if I were ugly and monstrous.
Both Hugo and Gonzalo have successfully destroyed my ecstasy. It lies imbedded, deep down. When I am at the beach, I abandon myself to it. But it fades, like the emotions aroused by John Dudley. I think of it in terms of pleasure, an escape, a joy, but not in terms of love. I wish it were.
Gonzalo no longer gives me life. He is like a dead planet.
Since Edward is not my love to come, what then? Or can I have a new, a joyous, a carefree concept of love, devoid of pain perhaps, as I thought Gonzalo’s was at the beginning? Proust: “For what we mistake for our love, our jealousy, is not the same uninterrupted and indivisible passion. They are made up of infinite successive loves, of discrete jealousies, all short-lived, but which, through their uninterrupted multitude, give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.”
I am becalmed for the moment.
Ready to return to New York with the full conviction of my unhappiness and the desire to escape into pleasure or merely to escape.
AUGUST 30, 1941
The day after Edward’s friend arrived, my perfume bottle disappeared, was either broken or stolen. What did it signify? A bad or a good omen? I have been trying to discover the name of the record we dance to, the motif of Provincetown. I was told it was called “Intermezzo,” and it made me sad. I heard it while taking coffee with Gonzalo. I tried to find out its name again and failed.
So it is that the Montparnasse of most people’s knowledge never existed for me, but the dream and essence of it was mine in Henry and Gonzalo, who were both beyond it while they lived its life. So it is that Provincetown, which is vulgar, mediocre, and stupid, was not Provincetown for me, but Siegfried and the dunes, the dunes of Alemany’s photographs. So it is that the Village is not for me the home of poseurs and fakes and mildewed poets, but the Village which does not exist for anyone else, the Village of my painted windows and benches, my autumnal life with Gonzalo, the autumn of my face and not of my body, the autumn which has marked only my eyes and a few strands of my hair, but not my soul yet because my soul was always aged. The afternoon I called on Edward in the prim little New England parlor, which looked too small for his magnificent body, when his head touched the ceiling, and the little New England rocking chair protested at his weight, when he bowed his tender-skinned temples against mine, his mouth on my fingers and kissed me inside my ear and teased me, and it was raining and grey, when I walked away with my breasts heaving as if filled with a potent wind, my sails swollen by the long draughts of life-breath he filled my lungs with, I heard the autumn wind rushing through the leaves, the old trees, like the sea sounds at the beach, like the sea sounds of Proust’s phrases, rolling infinitely and ebbing, throwing tides and echoes all through the marvelous edifice of lucidity, through the tragedy of this too great and too deep lucidity.
Autumn. Only the tender leaves of the laughing wrinkles have withered in me, only the hope of happiness and peace in love, only the hope of living free of anguish and the deep malady of exaggerated sensibility.
The smile of Edward is gone. Simultaneously, the sky clouded, the beach grew cold, the sea icy, the leaves fell on the old library steps, Gonzalo and Hugo became like dark caverns in which my luminosity died.
The poet knows too well, too acutely what vanishes in others’ eyes. When I read Proust I rush to see Gonzalo as if I were not sure of ever seeing him again.
I am so hungry for pleasures, for dinners with music. Last night I lured Hugo to the Flagship. I was fêted by the hostess and waitress there, two girls who are painters. One stole dessert for us and gave me crème de cacoa, and refused a tip. I asked the violinist to play “Intermezzo,” and it was Edward I dined with.
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