I was not eager to have him drop his philandering—I was much more eager for the truth and for the destruction of illusion. I was tired of the card-board of illusion. I knew perfectly well he was telling me a lie, because the rimmel comes off when one weeps, but not the lipstick, and besides all elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no such fatal effect upon the make-up. I knew this from my own experience. You wept just enough to fill the eyes with tears and no more. No overflow. The tears stayed inside the cups of the eyes, the rimmel was preserved, and yet the sadness was sufficiently expressive. After a moment one could repeat the process with the same dexterity which enables the garcon to fill the liqueur glass exactly to the brim. One tear too much could bring about a catastrophe, but these only came uncontrolled in the case of a real love affair.
I was smiling to myself at his naive lies, knowing that no change of lipstick could soil two handkerchiefs. The truth probably was that he had wiped his own mouth after kissing her.
He was playing around now just as much as before, but he hated to admit it to himself, and to me, because of the ideal image he carried in himself, the image of a man who could be so deeply disturbed and altered by the love of a long lost daughter that his career as a Don Juan had come to an abrupt end.
This romantic gesture which he was unable to make attracted him so much that he had to pretend he was making it, just as I had often pretended to be taking a voyage by writing letters on the stationery of some famous ocean liner.
“I said to Laura—do yo really think that if I wanted to deceive you I would do it in such an obvious and stupid way, right here in our own home where you might come in any moment?”
I knew only too well the blandness of the voice, the innocence of the eyes, the phrase tailed off with a smile which so melted the heart that one felt—well, if he is lying, I forgive him.
While my father was talking I was chuckling to think that the very same tricks I had played on others were now being played on me. But there was this difference between us, that on certain days I could be as sincere, or more sincere, than the people who never told any lies.
Suddenly I asked myself whether or not I wanted to be lied to. Both my father’s lies and mine were created to sustain the illusions of others. I was coming nearer and nearer to the realization that nobody had ever been grateful to me for my lies. Now they would know the truth. And yet I dreaded to hurt people. People may not appear to be injured, but they are, and fatally so, by certain truths. I had seen people crippled and broken from the knowledge of truth.
The trouble lay not in my lying, but in the fact that we are all brought up on fairy tales. We all expect the marvellous, the miraculous. I had been more poisoned by fairy tales than anyone. I actually believed that I could work miracles. When anyone said I want, or I need, I set out then and there to fulfill this need, this desire. I decided to be the fairy tale. And to a great extent I succeeded.
I could give each man the illusion that the world and I were exactly as he wished them to be. I wanted everyone to have what he wanted. The mistake I made was to encompass too much. I could carry one or two or three fairy tales out, but no more.
What my father was attempting was very much the same. He was trying to create an ideal world for me in which Don Juan, for the sake of his daughter, renounced all women. But I could not be deceived by his inventions. I was too clairvoyant. That was the pity of it. I could not believe in that which I wanted others to believe in—in a world made as one wanted it, an ideal world. I no longer believe in an ideal world at all.
And my father, what did he want and need? The illusion, which I was fostering, of a daughter who had never loved anyone but him? Or did he find it hard to believe me too? When I left him in the south, did he not doubt my reason for leaving him?
When I went about dreaming of satisfying the world’s hunger for illusion did I not know it was the most painful, the most insatiable hunger? Did I not know too that I suffered from doubt, and that although I was able to work miracles for others I had no faith that the fairy tale would ever work out for myself? Even the gifts I received were difficult for me to love, because I knew that they would soon be taken away from me, just as my father had been taken away from me when I loved him so passionately, just as every home I had as a child had been disrupted, sold, lost, just as every country I became attached to was soon changed for another country, just as all my childhood had been loss, change, instability. Even as a child, when I was sailing to America after the loss of my grandmother, I had promised myself never to love anybody again so as not to suffer so much.
When I entered his house which was all in brown, brown wood on the walls, brown rugs, brown furniture, I thought of Spengler writing about brown as the color of philosophy.
His windows were not open on the street, he had no use for the street, and so he had made the windows of stained glass. He lived within the heart of his own home as Orientals live within their citadel. Out of reach of passers-by. The house might have been anywhere—in England, Holland, Germany, America. There was no stamp of nationality upon it, no air from the outside. It was the house of the self, the house of his thoughts. The wall of the self—erected without connection with the crowd, or country or race.
He was still taking his siesta. I sat near the long range of files, the long, beautiful, neat rows of files, with names which set me dreaming: China, Science, Photography, Ancient Instruments, Egypt, Morocco, Cancer, Radio, Inventions, The Guitar, Spain. It required hours of work every day: newspapers and magazines had to be read and clippings cut out, dated, glued. He wove a veritable spider web about himself. No man was ever more completely installed in the realm of possessions.
He spent hours inventing new ways of filling his cigarette holder with an anti-nicotine filter. He bought drugs in whole-sale quantities. His closets were filled with photographs, with supplies of writing paper and medicines sufficient to last for years. It was as if he feared to find himself suddenly empty-handed. His house was a store-house of supplies which revealed his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the improvised, the unexpected. He was a man who had prepared a fortress against need, against war, change, loss, etc.
Were Paris to be invaded to-morrow my father could go on living off his supply of Quaker Oats, biscuits, tonics, strichnine injections, iodine, etc. He could never use up the shirts he owned, the underwear, the hair lotions, the tooth-paste, the writing paper, the pencils…
Objects, it is true, are a great protection against ghosts. A piece of fur, a bottle of bath salts, my satin negligee, had often consoled and comforted me against invisible sorrows and fears. To turn on the light in my room, to lie on the white fur bed, to put my hand on the telephone and call some one, anyone, to turn on the water for a bath, to throw into the bath sandalwood salts, all this had the magical power of making the world warmer, sweeter. The vague anxieties, premonitions, haunting, invisible misfortunes hanging over me thus evaporated. At night, in the dark, I could touch the telephone and say to myself: I can turn the little disk and a voice will answer. A voice I don’t know. But it will be a real voice, and I will know that I am not gone yet, that the cruelty of human beings has not killed me, that to-morrow there will be a dawn, the sun will shine, the radiators will whistle, the maid will bring hot coffee, and death will be postponed.