Free Ladders to Fire by Anaïs Nin Page A

What
is it I feel now, fear or premonition?)
    Helen’s knock on the door was vigorous, lik an attack. She was very big and wore a severely
tailored suit. She looked like a statue, but a statue with haunted eyes,
inhuman eyes not made for weeping, full of animal glow. And the rest of her
body a statue pinned down to its base, immobilized by a fear. She had the
immobility of a Medusa waiting to transfix others into stone: hypnotic and
cold, attracting others to her mineral glow.
    She had two voices, one which fell deep like
the voice of a man, and another light and innocent. Two women disputing inside
of her.
    She aroused a feeling in Lillian which was not
human. She felt she was looking at a painting in which there was an infinity of
violent blue. A white statue with lascivious Medusa hair. Not a woman but a
legend with enormous space around her.
    Her eyes were begging for an answer to an
enigma. The pupils seemed to want to separate from the whites of the eyes.
    Lillian felt no longer any jealousy, but a
curiosity as in a dream. She did not feel any danger or fear in the meeting,
only an enormous blue space in which a woman stood waiting. This space and
grandeur around Helen drew Lillian to her.
    Helen was describing a dream she often had of
being carried away by a Centaur, and Lillian could see the Centaur holding
Helen’s head, the head of a woman in a myth. People in myths were larger than
human beings.
    Helen’s dreams took place in an enormous desert
where she was lost among the prisons. She was tearing her hands to get free.
The columns of these prisons were human beings all bound in bandages. Her own
draperies were of sackcloth, the woolen robes of punishment.
    And then came her questions to Lillian: “Why am
I not free? I ran away from my husband and my two little girls many years ago.
I did not know it then, but I didn’t want to be a mother, the mother of
children. I wanted to be the mother of creations and dreams, the mother of
artists, the muse and the mistress. In my marriage I was buried alive. My
husband was a man without courage for life. We lived as if he were a cripple,
and I a nurse. His presence killed the life in me so completely that I could
hardly feel the birth of my children. I became afraid of nature, of being
swallowed by the mountains, stifled by the forest, absorbed by the sea. I
rebelled so violently against my married life that in one day I destroyed
everything and ran away, abandoning my children, my home and my native country.
But I never attained the life I had struggled to reach. My escape brought me no
liberation. Every night I dream the same dream of prisons and struggles to
escape. It is as if only my body escaped, and not my feelings. My feelings were
left over there like roots dangling when you tear a plant too violently.
Violence means nothing. And it does not free one. Part of my being remained
with my children, imprisoned in the past. Now I have to liberate myself wholly,
body and soul, and I don’t know how. The violent gestures I make only tighten
the knot of resistance around me. How can one liquidate the past? Guilt and
regrets can’t be shed like an old coat.”
    Then she saw that Lillian was affected by her
story and she added: “I am grateful to Jay for having met you.”
    Only then Lillian remembered her painful
secret. For a moment she wanted to lay her head on Hlen’s shoulder and confess to her: “I only came because I was afraid of you. I came
because I thought you were going to take Jay away from me.” But now that Helen
had revealed her innermost dreams and pains, Lillian felt: perhaps she needs me
more than she needs Jay. For he cannot console. He can only make her laugh.
    At the same time she thought that this was
equally effective. And she remembered how much Jay liked audacity in women, how
some feminine part of him liked to yield, liked to be chosen, courted. Deep
down he was timid, and he liked audacity in women. Helen could be given the key
to his