Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1 by Anais Nin

Author:Anais Nin [Nin, Anais]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A friend of Joaquin's has just seen my father in the south of France and he tells me, "Your father has suffered from your abandonment. I believe him. He does lie occasionally but I always know when he is lying. He is very sensitive, very effeminate, and extremely selfish, of course. Needs to be loved and pampered. He came to see me the other day and talked for several hours about the sorrow of having lost his children. Said he sometimes reread your letters, which he adored, and he could not understand why you abandoned him. He has suffered very much from this."

I said, "Write to him. that I will see him when he comes to Paris."

When I came home I sat by the fire and, staring at it so long, I became hallucinated. I thought I was standing inside a glass bell such as I have as a paperweight, a ball of glass which I shake and then the flurries of snow dance inside of it and cover a diminutive castle.

This castle resembled "Les Ruines" in Arcachon where my father left us. It was a copy of a medieval castle built for D'Annunzio and which my father had rented for the summer. It was a gloomy place, covered with ivy, completely overshadowed by old trees. A fine haunted-castle setting for the drama which was to take place there. It could have served as a setting for the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The windows were of colored glass, as in churches.

The town itself was a gay sea town, full of summer visitors, but we did not seem to be a part of that life. I had just come out of the hospital after a near-fatal operation on a burst appendix, and after three months of a slow recovery, I was weak and terribly thin. My mother thought the seashore would be good for me. When we arrived, I saw him watching us from the window. He did not seem happy to see us. (I learned later that the parents of Maruca, one of his piano pupils, had rented the place for him so she could continue her studies.)

But there was a garden, a tangled and wild garden one could get lost in. And there were colored glass windows, and through the core of the designs, a button of multicolored glass, one could see a prismatic, colored world in oranges, blues, water-greens, rubies. I kept my eye glued to those stones for hours, looking at this prismatic world. Another world. It was my first sight of another world. Colors. Ruby-colored trees and a sky of orange. Faces elongated like dirigibles, swollen like balloons.

Gabriele D'Annunzio lived near us, the man who wrote that, at any time, he preferred to keep a rendezvous with music rather than with a woman. He had a mistress who loved her dogs better than her children, who sent her children to the hospital but nursed her dogs.

I decided to become a painter. I was ten years old and wrote poetry.

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