I began to hate him. The hatred for the being you most adore, who does not escape you in a deep way, through subterranean or tragic routes, but who evaporates into frivolity, who can disguise his soul not by going away, but by dancing, by dancing on a polished floor.
I was filled with doubts. I saw in him a perpetually haunting shadow of something he was not. This man that he was not, or that he refused to continue to be, interfered with my knowledge of him, with my actual knowledge. These encounters where love never reached understanding, where all things ended in clash and frustration, this love which created nothing, this love twisted inside of me like a snake, this love devoured me, this love obsessed me. It was the coil of it which strangled my life. As soon as I lost him, I wanted him; as soon as he was away I began again to imagine him as he might be. I spent hours imagining my father coming to me and talking to me deeply.
Imagining nights of talk wherein we turned over the brilliant facets of our lives as in a game, playing with all that happened, playing with all we knew, playing with new ideas, sharing, giving, discovering, pouring out, exposing the true self as it could only be exposed and given to the twin, to one’s double. I imagined tenderness and understanding.
Imagined! Like a contagious disease withering my actual life, this imaginary meeting, imaginary talk, on which I spent hours and hours of inventiveness. As soon as he came I was frustrated, silenced. His talk would be empty, and above all, marginal. His whole ingenuity was spent making circles, in walking on the margin of everything vital, in eluding it. The more direct I grew, the more marginal he became, dancing on the edge of everything I said. Remaining there so adroitly by an accumulation of descriptions of nothing, by a swift chain of puerile events, by long speeches about trivialities, by lengthy expansions of empty facts.
This ghost of my potential father tormented me like a hunger for something which I knew had been invented or created solely by myself, but which I feared might never take human shape. Where was the man I really loved? The windows he had opened in the south had been windows on the past. The present or the future seemed to terrify him. Nothing was essential but to retain avenues of escape.
This constant yearning for the man beyond the mask, this disregard of the mask was also a disregard of the harm which the wearing of a mask inevitably produced. It was difficult for me to believe, as others did, that the mask tainted the blood, that the colors of the mask could run into the colors of nature and poison it. I could not believe that, like the woman who was painted in gold and who died of the poison, the mask and the flesh could melt into each other and bring on infection.
My love was based on faith in the purity of one’s own nature. It made me oblivious of the deformities which could be produced in the soul by the wearing of a mask. It caused me to disregard the deterioration that might affect the real face, the habits which the mask could form if worn for too long a time. I could not believe that if one pretended indifference long enough, the germ of indifference could finally grow, that the soul could be discolored by long pretense, that there could come a moment when the mask and the man melted into one another, that confusion between them corroded the vital core, destroyed the core…
This deterioration in my father I could not yet believe in. I expected the miracle to happen. So many times it had happened to me to see the hardness of a face fall, the curtain over the eyes draw away, the false voice change, and to be allowed to enter by my vision into the true self of others… It was exactly as if the person confronted had been the monster of the fairy tales, and that the hair, the horns, the leather skin had fallen away to disclose a new man, miraculously handsome.
I always knew why and where the man had become the monster. I loved that moment when the mask fell away.
When I was sixteen I could feel his visitations very much as the mystics experienced the presence of their god. He would descend on me oftener when I was dancing or laughing. He came like a blight, because when I felt his presence, I felt a curtain of criticism covering all things. I looked through his eyes instead of my own. My mother always said laugh and dance, but my father in me was contemptuous. When his seriousness fell on me I knew I was seeing the world with his cold, blue eyes. That was not me. I was sixteen and my mother had made me an Alice blue dress. “Oh, leave your books alone and go to the dance!” she said. I was pleased with the delicate frills on my dress, with the high heels on my slippers, the curls on my head. I wanted to dance.
I did not know then that my father could not dance.
At twenty-five I was a dancer. I was dancing on the stage. I had just begun the first number, no longer intimidated by the public. The Spanish music carried me away, whirled me into a state of delirium. I was dancing. I could feel the audience surrendering to me. I was dancing, carrying away their eyes, their senses, into my spinning and whirling.
My eyes fell on the front row. I saw my father there. I saw his pale face half-hidden behind a program. He was holding a program in front of his face in order not to be recognized. But I knew his hair, his brow, his eyes. It was my father. My steps faltered. I lost my rhythm. I grew dizzy. For a moment only. Then I swung around and began again, stamping my feet, stamping. I never looked at him again. I danced madly, wildly. I knew he was there.
Flowers. Hands to shake. Music. Pleasure. Interviews. Photographs. Carnation perfume. Jewelry. Dresses scattered in the dressing room like enormous bell flowers. swollen like sails. Petticoats still dancing. Castanets still echoing. Hands to shake. Flowers. Words. Beautiful. Marvellous. Beautiful. Marvellous. Come with my ballet to Cairo. Something new in dancing. The hands said so much. When you came out front, close to the audience, with eyes laughing, and looked at the audience fully, directly, that was electrical. Flowers. Words. Something new in dancing.
I so hot. I all wet, under the dress, the paint, the lace, the flowers, so hot and broken. My father was out there in the front row, without a smile, like an angry statue. Angry? Why angry? I had danced well. The words still poured over me. “Do you know what you are? You are ART. Your name could be used as a definition of art.” My father was sitting in the front row. I was hot and tired. I wanted to close my eyes so heavy with paint. The Hindu dancer had said it was not necessary to paint the eyelashes forthe stage. I must remember that. Out into the cold. Covered with fur and Spanish shawls, but the cold slipped inside them insidiously. Home. I awoke the next day paralyzed. Dancing died. I never danced again.
When I saw my father later I found out he had never been there. I asked him if we could spend ourChristmas dancing. Then I saw him, as I had divined him, sitting cold and formal, and I was angry at the prison walls of his severity. I danced in defiance of his mood, but bitterly, to assert my own self distinct from his. He did not dance, nor drink, nor smile.
As soon as I left him everything began to sing again. Everybody I passed in the street seemed like a music box. I heard the street organ, the singing of the wheels rolling. Motion was music. My father was the musician, but in life he arrested music. Music melts all the separate partsof our bodies together. Every rusty fragment, every scattered piece could be melted into one by rhythm. A note was a whole, and it was in motion, ascending or descending, swelling in fullness or thrown away, thrown out in the air, but always moving.