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."Up early the next day to go to die Villa Seurat to arrange to have it cleaned, to take Henry's typewriter to be oiled, to pick up his mail.He writes desolate letters: "Everything looks dead and dull.I feel like a ghost."Where will he rest to regain his strength? He is worn and nervous.From there to visit the owners of the small white boat which was tied next to my houseboat, and which I always admired.It was owned by a German painter and he was constantly improving it, rebuilding it, lovingly repainting it.He had asked to see me.Then he told me that he and his wife were Jews and that they were afraid of the turn of events, and wanted to leave for Africa or South America.Would I buy their boat and help them to escape? He did not want to be drafted into the German army, or put in a concentration camp.Their plight moved me deeply, but I am unable to buy the boat.But I found someone who did, and we parted emotionally, like very old friends.Winter of Artifice lies unfinished.Moricand wants to set me afloat again in the world of dreams and makes me read Séraphita, and talks all evening about mythology.I am living out through others what I cannot live out myself directly: chaos, disorder, tumult, obscure instincts, caprices, fears, fevers, violence.They live it out for me.They destroy what I create.They blunder, they get lost, they fall, they shock me, they hurt themselves, and some part of me is dragged into their destructiveness, and another part of me fights their destructiveness, and another part of me, which is wise, which has passed beyond this, suffers deeply with them, for them, through them.It is my karma, to pass through darkness, confusion, violence and destruction not of my own making, which I have controlled, transmuted, tamed in myself.My deep friendships are like the selves I tried to transcend, the lives I skipped, escaped, by magical ascensions into other realms: philosophy, psychology, art.So the earthy, the demons, the instincts, grasped me in the form of Henry, June, Gonzalo, as if to say you must experience everything, even the Dostoevskian hells, because they cannot be transmuted, they remain all instinct, all nature and chaos.Tomorrow I place this diary volume in the vault.I must be ready and unburdened for the uprooting to come.War looms again.Mobilization.Women weep openly in the streets.Crowds stand in line at the savings banks to withdraw their meager savings.There is fear in the air.And Gonzalo thrives on this anguish and feels alive.At last the world and he are synchronized, his personal agonies are matched by the universal one.Everyone turns to me for help, and I do not have enough for all.I must help Mother and Joaquin to get off to America.I must get Helba to a safe place.The same day I finally get Gonzalo much-needed eyeglasses, he drops and breaks them.I must send money to Henry, give Moricand enough to eat once a day.He begs me to take him to America, as he will starve if I leave him in Paris.Fred asks me to get his typewriter out of the pawnshop.Gonzalo asks me to teach him organization.I buy him a small loose-leaf notebook and show him how I note down all I have to do, and as soon as it is done I tear the leaf off and throw it away.How light I feel when all the leaves are gone! But this has no appeal for Gonzalo.I said I could not bear the weight of things left undone.He admitted they weighed on him.I am silent when Gonzalo blames everything on the established order because "capitalism is to blame for everything, even Helba's illness." I cannot explain to him that there is an individual responsibility and that not all tragedies are pressures from the outside, some come from within us.Gonzalo tells me: "I think Hitler is backing down."Henry returned.We all expect a revolution in Germany which would put an end to the war.Jean says: "You must permit the work of destiny and not interfere with others' completion of themselves, with their self-punishments or other ways to sainthood or human life." I have never learned this for others, yet I let no one save me from necessary suffering and error.Moricand came to fetch me one day.Henry had had an accident.It was not very serious, but he had fallen down the ladder leading to the terrace of the studio, he had cut himself against the shattered glass door, had wounds on his back, on the soles of his feet.He could not walk.So all of us were to take turns at running errands, cooking for him, attending to his needs.Henry needed me, my father needed me, Maruca needed me.My only pleasure this month was Henry's writing in Capricorn.Extremes of sensuality and lyricism, spirituality and the demon.After he wrote the pages on the black star we talked sadly because anciently all literature was symbolical, and everyone understood the symbol, but today we can no longer write in terms of symbol or myth.Never having lived a truly chaotic, capricious life, I had to imitate it first to gain my freedom.I imitated Henry's erratic whims, Héléne's sudden changes of plans, Gonzalo's irrational behavior, their unaccountableness, unexpected reactions.So they all lost track of me as I lost track of them.It is really a camouflage.Finally, by imitating this, which I had never been able to do out of considerateness for others (I could not even fail to appear at a café when I promised I would), I began to live genuinely what I tolerated in others.Allowing myself the same freedom they took.Jean Carteret, who cannot read English, listened to my translation of Winter of Artifice and said: "You walk over water.Others will be afraid.If they follow you they might drown."That day on the houseboat talking with my father was like talking to a madman
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