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

they
delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and deaths,
but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb, and one more day in
it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish policemen, and roses of Sharon
were too gentle a cure for suffocation.
    Grounded. Just before she slid down to the
floor, the bottom of the telephone cabin, the bottom of her loneliness, she saw
the grounded aviator waiting to use the telephone. When she came out of the
booth he looked distressed again as he seemed to be by everything that happened
in time of peace. But he smiled when he recognized her, saying: “You told me
the way to the beach.”
    “You found it? You liked it?”
    “A little flat for my taste. I like rocks and
palm trees. Got used to them in India, during the war.”
    War as an abstraction had not yet penetrated
Sabina’s consciousness. She was like the communion seekers who received
religion only in the form of a wafer on the tongue. War as a wafer placed on
her tongue directly by the young aviator came suddenly very close to her, and
she saw that if he shared with her his contempt for the placidities of peace it was only to take her straight into the infernal core of war. That
was his world. When he said: “Get your bicycle then, and I’ll show you a better
beach further on…” it was not only to escape from fashionable reclining figures
on the beach, from golf players and human barnacles glued to damp bar flanks,
it was to bicycle into his inferno. As soon as they started to walk along the
beach, he began to talk:
    “I’ve had five years of war as a rear gunner.
Been to India a couple of years, been to North Africa, slept in the desert,
crashed several times, made about one hundred missions, saw all kinds of
things… Men dying, men yelling when they’re trapped in burning planes. Their
arms charred, their hands like claws of animals. The first time I was sent to
the field after a crash…the smell of burning flesh. It’s sweet and sickening,
and it sticks to you for days. You can’t wash it off. You can’t get rid of it.
It haunts you. We had good laughs, though, laughs all the time. We laughed
plenty. We would steal prostitutes and push them into the beds of the men who
didn’t like women. We had drunks that lasted several days. I liked that life.
India. I’d like to go back. This life here, what people talk about, what they
do, think, bores me. I liked sleeping in the desert. I saw a black woman giving
birth… She worked on the fields carrying dirt for a new airfield. She stopped
carrying dirt to give birth under the wing of the plane, just like that, and
then bound the kid in some rags and went back to work. Funny to see the big
plane, so modern, and this half naked black woman giving birth and then continuing
to carry dirt in pails for an airfield. You know, only two of us came back
alive of the bunch I started with. We played pranks, though. My buddies always
warned me: ‘Don’t get grounded; once you’re grounded you’re done for.’ Well,
they grounded me too. Too many rear gunners in the service. I didn’t want to
come home. What’s civilian life? Good for old maids. It’s a rut. It’s drab.
Look at this: the young girls giggle, giggle at nothing. The boys are after me.
Nothing ever happens. They don’t laugh hard, and they don’t yell. They don’t
get hurt, and they don’t die, and they don’t laugh either.”
    Always something in his eyes which she could
not read, something he had seen but would not talk about.
    “I like you because you hate this place, and
because you don’t giggle,” he said taking her hand with gentleness.
    They walked endlessly, tirelessly, along the
beach, until there were no more houses, no more cared-for gardens, no more
people, until the beach became wild and showed no footsteps, until the debris
from the sea lay “like a bombed museum,” he said.
    I’m glad I found a woman who walks my stride as
you do,” he said. “And who