A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin Page B

can you
help me?”
    Sabina looked at him with a wild fury and ran
past him, the corner of her cape slapping his face.
    Mambo reproached her constantly: “You don’t
love me.” He felt that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the
legends, the trees, the drums of the island he came from, that she sought to
possess ardently both his body and his island, that she offered her body to his
hands as much as to tropical winds, and that the undulations of pleasure
resembled those of swimmers in tropical seas. She savored on his lips his
island spices, and it was from his island too that he had learned his
particular way of caressing her, a silken voluptuousness without harshness or
violence, like the form of his island body on which no bone showed.
    Sabina did not feel guilty for drinking of the
tropics through Mambo’s body: she felt a more subtle shame, that of bringing
him a fabricated Sabina, feigning a single love.
    Tonight when the drug of caresses whirled them
into space, free—free for an instant of all the interferences to complete union
created by human beings themselves, she would give him an undisguised Sabina.
    When their still throbbing bodies lay side by
side, there was always silence, and in this silence each one began to weave the
separating threads, to disunite what had been united, to return to each what
had been for a moment equally shared.
    There were essences of caresses which could
penetrate the heaviest insulations, filtering through the heaviest defenses,
but these, so soon after the exchange of desires, could be destroyed like the
seeds of birth.
    Mambo proceeded to this careful labor by
renewing his secret accusation against Sabina, that she sought only pleasure,
that she loved in him only the island man, the swimmer and the drummer , that
she never touched in him, or ardently desired, or took into her body, the
artist that he most valued in himself, the composer of music which was a
distillation of the barbaric themes of his origin.
    He was a run-away from his own island, seeking
awareness, seeking shadi and delicate balances as in
the music ofDebussy , and at his side lay Sabina,
feverishly dispersing all the delicacies as she demanded: “Drum! Mambo, drum!
Drum for me.”
    Sabina too was slipping out of the burning
moment which had almost welded their differences. Her secret self unveiled and
naked in his arms must be costumed once more for what she felt in the silence
were his withdrawal and silent accusations.
    Before he could speak and harm her with words
while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was
preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabina he struck down she could
abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: “That
was not me.”
    Any devastating words addressed to the Sabina
he had possessed, the primitive one, could not reach her then; she was already
halfway out of the forest of their desire, the core already far away,
invulnerable, protected by flight. What remained was a costume: it was piled on
the floor of his room, and empty of her.

    Once in an ancient city in South America,
Sabina had seen streets which had been ravaged by an earthquake. Nothing was
left but facades, as in Chirico paintings; the facades of granite had remained
with doors and windows half unhinged, opening unexpectedly, not upon a
household nestled around a hearth, but whole families camping under the sky,
protected from strangers only by one wall and door, but otherwise completely
free of walls or roofs from the other three sides.
    She realized that it was this illimitable space
she had expected to find in every lover’s room, the sea, the mountains visible
all around, the world shut off on one side. A hearth without roof or walls,
growing between trees, a floor through which wild flowers pushed to show
smiling faces, a column housing stray birds, temples and pyramids and baroque
churches in the distance.
    But when she saw four walls and a