Ladders to Fire by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online Page A

Uncertainty
resolved, relieved by the activity of attack!
    The body of Lillian changed as she talked, the
fast coming words accelerating the dismantling. She was taking off the shell,
the covering, the defenses, the coat of mail, the activity.
    Suddenly Lillian laughed. In the middle of
tears, she laughed: “I’m remembering a very comical incident. I was about
sixteen. There was a boy in love with me. Shyly, quietly in love. We were in
the same school but he lived quite far away. We all used bicycles. One day we
were going to be separated for a week by the holidays. He suggested we both
bicycle together towards a meeting place between the two towns. The week of
separation seemed too unbearable. So it was agreed: at a certain hour we would
leave the house together and meet half way.”
    Lillian started off. At first at a normal pace.
She knew the rhythm of the boy. A rather easy, relaxed rhythm. Never rushed.
Never precipitate. She at first adopted his rhythm. Dreaming of him, of his
slow smile, of his shy worship, of his expression of this worship, which
consisted mainly in waiting for her here, there. Waiting. Not advancing,
inviting, but waiting. Watching her pass by.
    She pedaled slowly, dreamily. Then slowly her
pleasure and tranquility turned to anguish: suppose he did not come? Suppose
she arrived before him? Could she bear the sight of the desolate place of their
meeting, the failed meeting? The exaltation that had been increasing in her,
like some powerful motor, what could she do with this exaltation if she arrived
alone, and the meeting failed? The fear affected her in two directions. She
could stop right there, and turn back, and not face the possibility of disaointment , or she could rush forward and accelerate the
moment of painful suspense, and she chose the second. Her lack of confidence in
life, in realization, in the fulfillment of her desires, in the outcome of a
dream, in the possibility of reality corresponding to her fantasy, speeded her
bicycle with the incredible speed of anxiety, a speed beyond the human body,
beyond human endurance.
    She arrived before him. Her fear was justified!
She could not measure what the anxiety had done to her speed, the acceleration
which had broken the equality of rhythm. She arrived as she had feared, at a
desolate spot on the road, and the boy had become this invisible image which
taunts the dreamer, a mirage that could not be made real. It had become reality
eluding the dreamer, the wish unfulfilled.
    The boy may have arrived later. He may have
fallen asleep and not come at all. He may have had a tire puncture. Nothing
mattered. Nothing could prevent her from feeling that she was not Juliet
waiting on the balcony, but Romeo who had to leap across space to join her. She
had leaped, she had acted Romeo, and when woman leaped she leaped into a void.
    Later it was not the drama of two bicycles, of
a road, of two separated towns; later it was a darkened room, and a man and
woman pursuing pleasure and fusion.
    At first she lay passive dreaming of the
pleasure that would come out of the darkness, to dissolve and invade her. But
it was not pleasure which came out of the darkness to clasp her. It was
anxiety. Anxiety made confused gestures in the dark, crosscurrents of forces,
short circuits, and no pleasure. A depression, a broken rhythm, a feeling such
as men must have after they have taken a whore.
    Out of the prone figure of the woman,
apparently passive, apparently receptive, there rose a taut and anxious shadow,
the shadow of the woman bicycling too fast; who, to relieve her insecurity,
plunges forward as the desperado does and is defeated because this
aggressiveness cannot meet its mate and unite with it. A part of the woman has
not participated in this marriage, has not been taken. But was it a part of the
woman, or the shadow of anxiety, which dressed itself in man’s clothes and
assumed man’s active role to quiet its anguish? Wasn’t it the woman who dressed
as a