Collages by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online Page B

the
sea-gulls was too ephemeral. Their visits were too short. They were always
impatient to be off in space.
    One night he walked on to the end of a natural
rock jetty and came upon a shoal of seals. They swam, dived, clowned, but
always crawled back to the rocks to have their young ones there. They kissed,
barked, leaped, danced on their partly fused hind limbs. Their black eyes were
like mirrors reflecting sea and sky, but the ogival shape of their eyelids gave
them an air of compassion, almost as if they would weep with sympathy. Their
tails were of little use except for swimming but they liked to shake their
webbed flipper-like limbs as if they were about to fly. Their fur shone like
onyx, with dark blue shadows under the fins.
    They greeted the man with cries of joy. By this
time he was an old man. The sea had wrinkled his face so intricately, it was a
surprise when his smile scattered the lines to shine through, like a beautiful
glossy fish darting out of a fishing net.
    The old man fed the seals, he settled near them
in a cave, cooked his dinner, and rolled over and fell asleep with a new
feeling of companionship.
    One night several men came. They wanted to
catch the seals for a display in a pool in front of their restaurant. A
publicity stunt which attracted the children. But the pool was small, it was
surrounded by barbed wire and the old man did not want this to happen to his
seals. So he warned them by an imitation of their cry and bark, and they dove
quickly into the sea. By the time the men reached the end of the jetty the
seals were gone. From then on the old man felt he was their guardian. No one
could get through at night withalking through his bedroom.
    In spite of the tap-dancing of the waves, and
the siren calls of the wind, the old man would hear the dangerous visitors and
always had time to warn the seals in their own language.
    The old man discovered the seals’ names. They
answered to Hilarious, Ebenezer, Ambrosius, Eulalee and Adolfo. But there was
one seal whose name he did not know, who was too old when they first met. The
old man did not have the courage to try out names on him, to see which one he
answered to, for the seal could hardly move and it would have humiliated him.
    One severe winter the old man’s children began
to worry about him, as he was growing old and rheumatic. One rainy day they
came and forced him into their car, and took him to their home and fixed him up
a bedroom.
    The first night he slept on a bed, he fell off
and broke his arm.
    As soon as his arm was well again he returned
to the cave.
    One night when he felt minor quakes were taking
place in the area of his heart, he thought he was going to die, so he tried to
crawl nearer to the seals, into the crevices where they slept. But they gently,
compassionately, nosed him out of the place.
    By then he resembled them so much, with his
mustache, his rough oval eyebrows, his drooping eyelids, and his barking cough,
that he thought they would help him to slide down the rocks and be buried at
sea, like a true seal.

    WHEN RENATE DID NOT SELL ENOUGH PAINTINGS she
worked as a hostess at Paradise Inn. The nightclub, built of rocks and wood,
stood high on a rock above the beach. Palm trees and cactus gave it a semblance
of tropical softness which was belied by the sharpness of the wind. It was more
pleasurable to sit inside near the big fire in the fireplace, and to
contemplate the sea through the enormous windows.
    Renate wore a purple dress she had made herself
and so it did not have the shapelessness of fashion but followed the natural
contours of her body like a second skin.
    She was always in movement, throwing her long
black hair back away from her face, moving forward to greet the visitors, and when
she turned her face towards the bar it seemed as if she set the whole
glittering mechanism in motion to satisfy hunger and thirst.
    She was so gracious in her gestures of welcome
that the diners often stopped talking and drinking to