HEJDA / MOIRA / LUCIA
Anaïs Nin. Paris, 1934. © The Anais Nin Foundation.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon on 8th April 1902 to a French mother and a Lebanese father, Lucia Anavi left for Paris as a teenager where she met her husband Francesco C(h)ristofanetti (1901 – 1951) in art class fleeing with him to New York just before World War II broke out in 1938. It was in Paris that she became an artist, tarot card reader and interpreter of dreams and where in 1934, she designed and applied to patent a bra ‘composed of two independent pockets.’ The marriage ended in divorce after fourteen years (if only to be ‘free to unbind’ her ‘overabundant breasts’, ‘to keep open house’) and she later married the fellow artist, Roger Wilcox.
Her early life is detailed in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, in which not only is she transported to Persia or Syria (which Nin believes she should never have left) but also given the fictitious name ‘Moira’. She is described as having ‘golden, just slightly tanned skin.’ Nin describes her and her husband’s paintings in great detail and discusses the dynamics of their marriage – Her husband, she says ‘bound her femininity as the Chinese bound their women’s feet.’ However, he polished her language, her manners and her impulses. In her detailed analysis, one can find the seedlings to the story ‘Hejda’, written in 1944, from the short-story collection Under a Glass Bell. In June 1949, Nin audio-recorded stories from Under a Glass Bell including ‘Hejda’.
In America, Lucia creates a studio furnished with Oriental décor in Oriental colours, sits on the floor or on cushions on the ground, believes in magic, astrology, tarot card readings and palmistry, all of which is mocked by her husband. Once when she was cooking meat in a Pyrex frying pan, she began susurrating to silence the spitting, explaining that her mother’s magic powers prevented it from spitting on her when she did this. Just as she said this, the pan shattered – Her explanation: “I have lived too long with people who did not believe in magic, and so I have lost my power.”
It is at a dinner party given by Bernard Reis and his wife in September 1941, that Nin first meets the ‘voluptuous’ and dark-skinned Lucia. On 26th November she meets her again with her husband at a tea party given at The New School in honour of Nin’s husband, Hugh Guiler.
On 13th October 1942, she writes of meeting her with her second husband, Roger, at a soirée at the home of the writer Bravig Imbs. She chooses to attend another on the 23rd over an assignation with her Peruvian lover, Gonzalo Moré, but they still make love before she leaves.
Nin wears black lace, a swishing taffeta and is ‘sparkling’. When her husband joins her later, he is breathless and eager to take her home and make love to her. Lucia is dressed in white satin that she has bought on Grand Street for a few dollars. She says “The only romantic style left to us is the wedding dress.” Nin compliments her dark skin and deep dark eyes in the diary and the soft contours of her ‘neck, arms and feet’, her ‘round face’ and ‘short curly hair.’
Her ‘brooding Italian, remote, abstract’ aristocrat husband, is an artist too. Nin is invited to Lucia’s studio to see her jewellery designs and her husband’s paintings which she describes in the Diary along with the décor. She adores her ‘elegance and originality’. Nin refers to the drama behind closed doors to which she is made privy but conceals exactly what monster is unleashed that dissolves ‘all the aesthetic beauty, and reveals instinctive, primitive ferocities.’ Except that Lucia cries “Oh, the ugliness, the ugliness.” Her husband begins hurling shocking insults. The whole episode is clouded in mystery. Where did things take a turn for the worse? Why is her husband angry? What leads to them both standing naked?
Revenge, self-love, envy, the wish to murder, destroy, all the crimes of the soul. Jealousy! The ugliest of all the demons. Jealousy, which makes a murderous savage of the most elegant and refined human being. Now we see Moira no longer made of white satin, feathers, velvet, coral, precious stones, and he no longer somber and mysterious, but both of them hurling foaming gutter words from the muddiest lower depths.
In the remainder of the diary entry that Nin expurgated when editing it for publication she recalls witnessing similar anger in June all those years ago and finds herself wondering if she could ever resort to such street language when at her angriest, concluding that she would never do so. Of course, she can reach extremes of anger or envy but she did not possess ‘such vitriolic wells of poison.’
By January 1943, Nin records that she is meeting Lucia again almost every week at Evelyn and Milton Gendel’s top floor apartment on Washington Square. One night she shows Nin and Laurence Vail (who was exhibiting decorated bottles) her own Arab bottles with their ‘tall, narrow necks.’ In March of that year, Nin throws a Haitian themed party to which Lucia is also invite. She is wearing a medieval-looking black velvet robe de style with a bindi that makes her look ‘like a maharani.’
On 15th September, she dreams of Gozalo telling her he has slept with Lucia who he calls La Turca. She weeps and says “Now you are no longer a dream to me but a man like all others.”
On New Year’s Eve 1943, Nin and Hugo take Lucia to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. The ballroom has just had its licence renewed in October after having been shut down in April of that year due to ‘charges of vice’. Nin ‘felt the caressing hands’ and Lucia ‘loved it’ and they all have a great time dancing. In the Diary, Nin goes on to praise the qualities of the ‘Negro’.
In January of the New Year, Lucia relates her dream in which she saw Nin drown as she leans into a lake to fetch something Lucia has lost. Nin writes that this was at a time in her analysis when Lucia was going through a period of introspective exhibitionism to counter the unimaginable physical restraints she had imposed upon her – She wears transparent blouses with no bra on underneath, adjusting her garter in the street, opening her shirt to nearly reveal her voluptuous breasts, flirting with all and sundry and full of self-adulation. Once a button fell off Lucia’s blouse but she did not replace it. Nin compares her own subjugation and writes ‘I was as bound by my ideal self as Moira by her traditions. To breathe freedom I had to live close to my shadows, my primitive shadows.’ She recounts a night when they go to a dilapidated Arabian restaurant hidden under tall, imposing buildings ‘in the deserted business section full of sinister buildings.’ Nin enjoys the food and wine. As musicians play, Lucia gets up and starts performing an Arabian dance ‘undulating, shaking, and quivering.’ Instead of enjoying it, the men in the restaurant eye her in utter contempt. One even walks right up to her, calling her a “whore” to her face! She immediately stops dancing and returns to the table, weeping, saying things have not changed in all these years. This was exactly how it was back home. The whole episode puts a damper on the evening, the rest of which is ‘quiet and subdued’ as a result.
It was probably around this period that Nin wrote her a letter:
Dear Lucia: Three things made me lose confidence in the clarity of our relation (and believe me I say this without anger, just merely out of my very old knowledge of the unconscious) one, your dream, and secondly your not knowing that your analysis is not finished, and third your intimacy with people dangerous to me and so lack of protection of me—None of these I hold against you because I see you are unconscious of them, of their meaning—but I do think that you are eluding the final facing of your unconscious, the final effort at truth—that you are deceiving yourself when you tell me Martha said you no longer need analysis.
All my personal feelings I hold suspended—waiting for you to handle this and if Mme Chareau invites us together on Sunday night as she said she might I will be glad to see you, having confidence that you will conquer all this as you did your other past confusions.
I believe there is an identification of you with me which is not good for you or for me—Ask Martha if that is not true—So perhaps a Dimanche.
Anaïs.
On 5th March Nin is with Hugo and her brother Thorvald at the Wakefield Gallery hanging his prints along with the artist Betty Parsons.
There is a party at Lucia’s place in May. In July she invites Nin and friends to spend a long weekend at a big house she has rented in Amagansett. Nin enjoys soaking up the sun and being close to the sea for four days. Another visit proves to be less jovial when Nin, the Jaeger’s and Charles Duits refuse to accompany her to a cocktail party. She told them there was scarcely any food in the icebox. They sat at the kitchen table and replaced the food with reading Finnegan’s Wake to each other out loud! Savouring its ‘delectable’ sounds. When Lucia returns, she finds them still sitting there reading happily and not even hungry.
Another day when they return from the beach, they help out in the kitchen in their bathing suits before showering and dressing for dinner. Nin praises Lucia’s Lebanese cooking as she adds the final touches to the dish while Nin washes her hair and puts on a white dress. As she descends the stairs, Lucia reminds her it is her turn to take out the garbage. She says she would go back to change her dress but Duits says he would take it out instead.
Lucia introduced Nin to Berthie Zilka, a Syrian poet who wrote in French. She is staying with a philosopher who was a professor at the Sorbonne and had survived the concentration camp. They would often spot him at the beach in the same tight black suit, black shoes, black socks, black hat and dark glasses. They tried to get to know him without much luck ‘He sat far from us, never undressed, and rarely joined us.’
Lucia went blind two years before her death from cancer in Manhattan on 2nd September 1974. She was buried at the Green River Cemetery, New York and was survived by her son.
Sources
Franklin V, Benjamin. Anais Nin: A Bibliography. (The Kent State University Press, 1973).
Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary & Index to Diary Excerpts. (Sky Blue Press, 2009. Updated & expanded, 2024).
The New York Times, (25th April 1943).
‘Ballroom Regains Permit’, (16th October 1943). 10.
Nin, Anaïs. ‘Black Shadows & the New Woman’. Anais: An International Journal, (2000).
Under a Glass Bell. (1944 and subsequent editions).
Anais Nin Reading Her Own Short Stories from ‘Under a Glass Bell’. (Contemporary Classics, June 1949).
The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Three: 1939 – 1944. Edited By Gunther Stuhlmann. (Harcourt,
Brace & World Inc, 1969).
The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Four: 1944-1947. Edited By Gunther Stuhlmann. (Harcourt,
Brace & World Inc, 1971).
Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1939 – 1947. Edited by Paul Herron. (Swallow Press: Ohio University, 2013).
Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, (January 1937).