A few days before my father left, when I was trying not to think of him at all, when I was trying to remember that I had not pitied him at all actively during his fall, not helped or protected him, or tried to keep him from going to Cuba, that I had been silent, evasive and neutral, keeping control of myself not to utter the last murderous words: "My love for you is dead," suddenly I pictured him vividly, first when he fainted at the piano during his concert, then when he was lying down on the bench in the artist room, his collar open, and at this remembrance of his slender, elegant effigy, unconscious, such a burning pity lanced through me that I jumped: My God, I love him. Love what? Someone whose every awake word you hate, whose every act and thought you abhor, whose every desire, aspiration, you despise, whose every tic and mania and idiosyncrasy is distasteful and ridiculous—and this figure lies on a couch, this body empty of its consciousness, lies with eyes closed, the supreme comedian's act, this effigy of my father. And some inexplicable, remote, puerile detail reawakens a love that died a million times and was buried. The figure, the slenderness of his body, the fineness of its form, its essence that every act and reality denied, this escapes still from the dead tomb of the love and is alive in you? "My God, does love ever die?" I ask, and will die asking. For years I buried him. I buried him in my novel, which will appear while he is sailing away. I buried him when I let him decide to go to Cuba. I buried him by not acting as the refuge, the third mother. Over and over again I buried him. I buried him under my sensual and vivid love for Henry, under my sensual and vivid love for Gonzalo. I looked at him without illusion, opened my eyes, saw all his faults, his many faults. I saw the truth. Yet when he left, the night before he sailed, I wept over him, and awakened in the morning thinking of him, lying at Gonzalo's side, and parting from my father even then succeeded in mixing these feelings in myself so well that the parting from my continuous life with Gonzalo seemed the stronger emotion, and the other an echo of something very old. What I tear off and throw away is only a part of my own flesh and is never dead, it keeps on quivering. I do not know death or indifference. Time kills nothing in me. I will die before my lovers and my memories. Each time a little bit of my flesh stirs somewhere, my brother Thorvald in Colombia, I will feel it in my body even though I have tried by art to deliver myself of all possessions. A possessed being. Succubus and incubus of old loves. No disillusion, hatred, contempt kills love in me. This is my crucifixion.
Reunited: The Correspondence of Anais and Joaquin Nin, 1933-1940
