Free Children of the Albatross by Anaïs Nin Page A

exactly like the wave of the ocean intending
merely to roll over, cover the swimmer with an explosion of foam, in a rhythm
of encompassing, and withdrawing, without intent to drag him to the bottom.
    But Paul, with the instinct of the new swimmer,
felt that there were times when he could securely hurl himself into the concave
heart of the wave and be lifted into ecstasy and be delivered back again on the
shore safe and whole; but that there were other times when this great inward
curve disguised an undertow, times when he measured his strength and found it
insufficient to return to shore.
    Then he took up again the lighter games of his
recently surrendered childhood.
    Djuna found him gravely bending over a drawing
and it was not what he did which conveyed his remoteness, but his way of
sitting hermetically closed like some secret Chinese box whose surface showed
no possibility of opening.
    He sat then as children do, immured in his
particular lonely world then, having built a magnetic wall of detachment.
    It was then that he practiced as deftly as
older men the great objectivity, the long-range view by which men eluded all
personal difficulties: he removed himself from the present and the personal by
entering into the most abstruse intricacies of a chess game, by explaining to
her what Darwin had written when comparing the eye to a microscope, by dissertating
on the pleuronectidae or flat fish, so remarkable for their asymmetrical
bodies.
    And Djuna followed this safari into the worlds
of science, chemistry, geology with an awkwardness which was not due to any
laziness of mind, but to the fact that the large wave of passion which had been
roused in her at the prolonged sight of Paul’s little finger was so difficult
to dam, because the feeling of wonder before this spectacle was to her as great
as that of the explorers before a new mountain peak, of the scientists before a
new discovery.
    She knew what excitement enfevered men at such
moments of their lives, but she did not see any difference between the beauty
of a high flight above the clouds and the subtly colored and changing landscape
of adolescence she traversed through the contemplation of Paul’s little finger.
    A study of anthropological excavations made in
Peru was no more wonderful to her than the half-formed dreams unearthed with
patience from Paul’s vague words, dreams of which they were only catching the
prologue; and no forest of precious woods could be more varied than the
oscillations of his extreme vulnerability which forced him to take cover, to
disguise his feelings, to swing so movingly between great courage and a secret
fear of pain.
    The birth of his awareness was to her no lesser
miracle than the discoveries of chemistry, the variations in his temperature,
the mysterious angers, the sudden serenities, no less valuable than the studies
of remote climates.
    But when in the face of too large a wave, whose
dome seemed more than a mere ecstasy of foam raining over the marvelous shape
of his hands, a wave whose concaveness seemed more than a temporary womb in
which he could lie for the fraction of an instant, the duration of an orgasm,
he sat like a Chinese secret box with a surface revealing no possible opening
to the infiltrations of tenderness or the flood of passion, then her larger
impulse fractured with a strange pain into a multitude of little waves capped
with frivolous sunspangles, secretly ashamed of its wild disproportion to the
young man who sat there offering whatever he possessed—his intermittent
manliness, his vastest dreams and his fear of his own expansions, his maturity
as well as his fear of this maturity which was leading him out of the gardens
of childhood.
    And when the larger wave had dispersed into
smaller ones, and when Paul felt free of any danger of being dragged to the
bottom, free of that fear of possession which is the secret of all adolescence,
when he had gained strength within his retreat, then he returned to tease