A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online

warmth of the heart, as a man
could, she had enjoyed a stranger.
    And then she remembered what she had heard men
say: “Then I wanted to leave.”
    She gazed at the stranger lying naked beside
her and saw him as a statue she did not want to touch again. As a statue he lay
far from her, strange to her, and there welled in her something resembling
anger, regret, almost a desire to take this gift of herself back, to efface all
traces of it, to banish it from her body. She wanted to become swiftly and
cleanly detached from him, to disentangle and unmingle what had been fused for
a moment, their breaths, skins, exhalations, and body’s essences.
    She slid very softly out of the bed, dressed
with adroit soundlessness while he slept. She tiptoed to the bathroom.
    On the shelf she found face powder, comb
lipstick in shell rose wrappings. She smiled at them. Wife? Mistress? How good
it was to contemplate these objects without the lightest tremor of regret, envy
or jealousy. That was the meaning of freedom. Free of attachment, dependency
and the capacity for pain. She breathed deeply and felt she had found this
source of pleasure for good. Why had it been so difficult? So difficult that
she had often simulated this pleasure?
    While combing her hair and repainting her
eyelashes, she enjoyed this bathroom, this neutral zone of safety. While moving
between men, lovers, she always entered with pleasure a natural safety zone (in
the bus, in the taxi, on the way from one to another, at this moment the
bathroom) safe from grief. If she had loved Philip, how each one of these
objects—face powder, hair pins, comb—each one would have hurt her!
    (He is not to be trusted. I am only passing by.
I am on my way to another place, another life, where he cannot even find me,
claim me. How good not to love; I remember the eyes of the woman who met Philip
at the beach. Her eyes were in a panic as she looked at me. She wondered if I
were the one who would take him away. And how this panic disappeared at the
tone of Philip’s voice as he introduced her: “Meet Dona Juana.” The woman had
understood the tone of his voice and the fear had vanished from her eyes.)
    What new reassurance Sabina felt as she laced
her sandals, swirled her cape and smoothed her long, straight hair. She was not
only free from danger but free for a quick get-away. That is what she called
it. (Philip had observed he had never seen a woman dress so quickly, never seen
a woman gather up her belongings as quickly and never forgetting a single one!)
    How she had learned to flush love letters down
the toilet, to leave no hairs on the borrowed comb, to gather up hair pins, to
erase traces of lipstick anywhere, to brush off clouds of face powder.
    Her eyes like the eyes of a spy.
    Her habits like the habits of a spy. How she
lay all her clothes on one chair, as if she might be called away suddenly and
must not leave any traces of her presence.
    She knew all the trickeries in this war of
love.
    And her neutral zone, the moment when she
belonged to none, when she gathered her dispersed self together again. The
moment of non-loving, non-desiring. The moment when she took flight, if the man
had admired another woman passing by, or talked too long about an old love, the
little offenses, the small stabs, a mood of indifference, a small
unfaithfulness, a small treachery, all of them were warnings of possibly larger
ones, to be counter-acted by an equal or larger or total unfaithfulness, her
own, the most magnificent of counter-poisons, prepared in advance for the
ultimate emergencies. She was accumulating a supply of treacheries, so that
when the shock came, she would be prepared: “I was not taken unaware, the trap
was not sprung on my naivete, on my foolish trustingness .
I had already betrayed. To be always ahead, a little ahead of the expected
betrayals by life. To be there first and therefore prepared…”
    When she returned to the room Philip was still
asleep. It was the end of the