Children of the Albatross by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online Page A

ready to believe.
    To believe in Paul’s eyes, the mystery and the
depth in them, the sense of some vast dream lying coiled there, undeciphered.
    Lawrence had finished the phosphorescent
painting. He closed the curtains and the cage shone in the dark. Now he decided
to paint with phosphorescence everything paintable in the room.
    The next day Lawrence appeared with a large pot
of paint and he was stirring it with a stick when Paul telephoned: “I can get
away for a while. May I come?”
    “Oh, come, come,” said Djuna.
    “I can’t stay very late…” His voice was
muffled, like that of a sick person. There was a plaintiveness in it so plainly
audible to Djuna’s heart.
    “The prisoner is allowed an hour’s freedom,”
she said.
    When Paul came Lawrence handed him a paintbrush
and in silence the two of them worked at touching up everything paintable in
the room. They turned off the lights. A new room appeared.
    Luminous faces appeared on the walls, new
flowers, new jewels, new castles, new jungles, new animals, all in filaments of
light.
    Mysterious translucence like their unmeasured
words, their impulsive acts, wishes, enthusiasms. Darkness was excluded from
their world, the darkness of loss of faith. It was now the room with a
perpetual sparkle, even in darkness.
    (They are making a new world for me, felt
Djuna, a world of greater lightness. It is perhaps a dream and I may not be
allowed to stay. They treat me as one of their own, because I believe what they
believe, I feel as they do. I hate the father, authority, men of power, men of
wealth, all tyranny, all authority, all crystallizations. I feel as Lawrence
and Paul: outside there lies a bigger world full of cruelties, dangers and
corruptions, where one sells out one’s charms, one’s playfulness, and enters a
rigid world of discipline, duty, contracts, accountings. A thick opaque world
without phosphorescence. I want to stay in this room forever not with man the
father but with man the son, carving, painting, dancing, dreaming, and always
beginning, born anew every day, never aging; full of faith and impulse, turning
and changing to every wind like the mobiles. I do not love those who have
ceased to flow, to believe, to feel. Those who can no longer melt, exult, who
cannot let themselves be cheated, laugh at loss, those who are bound and
frozen. )
    She laid her head on Lawrence’s shoulder with a
kind of gratitude.
    (Nowhere else as here with Lawrence and with
Paul was there such an iridescence in the air; nowhere else so far from the
threat of hardening and crystallizing. Everything flowing…)
    Djuna was brushing her hair with her fingers,
in long pensive strokes, and Lawrence was talking about the recurrent big
problem of a job. He had tried so many. How to work without losing one’s color,
one’s ardor, personal possessions and freedom. He was very much like a delicate
Egyptian scarab who dreaded to lose his iridescence in routine, in duty, in
monotony. The job could kill one, or maim one, make one a robot, an opaque
personage, a future undertaker, a man of power with gouty limbs and a hardening
of the arteries of faith!

    Lawrence lived and breathed color and there was
no danger of his dying of drabness, for even accidents took on a most vivid
shade and a spilled pot of gouache was still a delight to the eyes.
    He brought Djuna gifts of chokers, headdresses,
earrings made of painted clay which crumbled quickly like the trappings for a
costume play.
    She had always liked objects without solidity.
The solid ones bound her to permanency. She had never wanted a solid house,
enduring furniture. All these were traps. Then you belonged to them forever.
She preferred stage trappings which she could move into and out of easily,
without regret. Soon after they fell apart and nothing was lost. The vividness
alone survived.
    She remembered once hearing a woman complain
that armchairs no longer lasted twenty years, and Djuna answered: “But I
couldn’t love an