Collages by Anaïs Nin Page A

their own, and they
were not certain of paternity or reality.
    There was one more personage who was not
foundering in anonymity like a pilot in weightless space, and that was Leontine
who was singing by the piano.
    Her hair was cut in a boyish style with bangs
over her eyes. It had been dipped in a red glow. Her skin was of a creamy
chocolate, her eyes black and highly polished. Her fingers were long and
sensitive when she touched her long neck, to feel where the voice came from, as
if to coax it pure, and out it came honeyed and heavy, warming, tender, at
times like silk, at other times like zephyr wool on the skin.
    She wore a long jersey swathe striped black and
white, with a turtle neck which accentuated the Ubangi length of her neck, and
black tights which gave her the air of a medieval page.
    When she finished her song, she rushed to
embrace Renate:
    “You didn’t recognize me! I’m Leontine!”
    “You’ve changed so much!” said Renate.
    “Do you remember the first time we met?”
    “Of course I remember. It was at Canada Lee’s
New Year’s party. You were fifteen years old. You had a humorous, turned up
nose…”
    “I changed that, for the photographers,” said
Leontine.
    “I remember you danced Haitian dances. It was
my first year in America. I did not feel at home yet. It was my first meeting
with the dead pan faces of New York City, a Greek play with masks, and all the
dead pans seemed to say: ‘We don’t know you. We don’t see you. We don’t like
you.’ This New Year’s party was my first one in New York, and when Canada Lee
greeted me at the door with his warm melting voice and his joyous smile and
said: ‘Come in, hang up your coat’ as if he meant it and were addressing me
personally, I wept. It was my first personal, intimate, friendly welcome. And
then you came and put your arms around me, and took me to meet your father. But
he was formal and impressive, as if carved of wood. He had all the Haitian
dignity and formality. His stiff silver-gray hair was cut short like the
bristle of a hard brush. Immediately he began to tell me a story I never
forgot.”
    “It was always the same story,” said Leontine.
“About his youth in Haiti and his revolutionary activities, how he was
sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Guiana. How he was tied by a chain
to another prisoner.
    “The unendurable heat, the sadism of the
guards. The same place and the same conditions as for Dreyfus. He was only
seventeen and condemned for life. I forgot how they managed to escape.
    “They worked at it "o years. They
planned well, and found themselves in the jungle, miles from the sea where a
boat with friends awaited them. They fed on fruit, and slept in caves, or
inside dead trees. They were bitten by insects. The chain binding their arms
made walking difficult. They had no way to cut the chain. It was too heavy to
wear down by scraping against a stone. On the third day my father’s companion
drank polluted water and on the fourth day he died. And my father was chained
to a dead man.”
    “At this point I told your father I did not
want to hear any more. His story and the gaiety of the New Year’s party all
around us was too violent a contrast. I covered my ears. The room was filled
with laughter and jazz dancing. The New Year was being greeted with
firecrackers and shouts and kisses. Your father sat impervious, unmoved by all
the agitation and continued his story. How he had freed himself by cutting the
arm off at the shoulder with a small knife. But he had to carry the dead man
all the way to the boat.”
    “Covered with ants,” said Leontine. “I’m sorry
if I sound callous, Renate, but my father told this story so many times that I
couldn’t feel any emotion any more.”
    “You were dancing Haitian dances. Don’t you
dance any more?”
    “I was too lazy to be a dancer. I hated
rehearsals. I took up singing instead, which came naturally to me. It didn’t
require so much