Bruno
A married man in love with Stella, who will not leave his wife and children and does not think that this diminishes anything. He wants to dream with her. She wants to live with him, and cannot forgive him for the difference.
To keep the affair as a dream, undamaged by daily life — he says so directly whenever Stella asks him to make it real.
The book
At a glance
- Stella's lover, in "Stella"
- With a wife and children and a permanent house, none of which he will give up
- At a formal reception. He had never seen her films
- Nothing except that the affair stay a dream
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBruno is Stella's lover in the first of the three novellas printed in Winter of Artifice, the 1939 book by the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin. He is married, with children and a settled house, and he has no intention of leaving any of it.
He had never seen Stella on the screen when he met her. He saw her at a formal reception, moving among the other women like a dancer among pedestrians, and was caught by her voice and her hands before he knew who she was. What follows is a love conducted in intervals: he arrives, he is entirely present, and then he goes home.
Nin is unusually fair to him. He is not a coward and not a liar; he is a man with what the book calls moorings, who can only love freely because he has paid what he owes elsewhere, and who feels no guilt and therefore expects no punishment. Stella reads every hour he cannot give her as evidence that the love has failed, and Nin lets the reader see that this is her illness rather than his fault — and also that it will finish them.
This profile is drawn from the Swallow Press edition of 1948, read in the Internet Archive's scan of the book.
How the book draws them
- Seeing an animated womanAt the reception where they meet, what strikes him is that he is looking at the first animated woman he has seen: a trembling, wavering voice, a nose that wrinkles when she smiles, a foreign accent that makes every phrase sound like the start of a revelation, hands going in the air. He feels caught in her current.
- Going rigidWhen she runs and leaps at him he braces instead of catching her, and she embraces a statue. It hurts her feelings enormously and does not hurt her body at all, which is the shape of the whole affair.
- His mooringsNin says he can only swim in the ocean of love if the ropes hold: the marriage, the children, the permanent house, the wife whose smile long ago became his mother's smile. He explains this to Stella simply, and it does not reassure her at all.
- Saying her name at the doorHe calls out "Stella!" as he comes in, and again, to fill the room with the name that is filling him. She hears it as a kind of crowning.
- Dream against lifeThe book puts their positions in two silent sentences: she asks him, with every gasp of doubt, to live together, and he answers with every act of faith that they should dream together instead.
- The night he will not stayAsked whether he can stay a whole night, he shakes his head sadly and his blue eyes go from joyous to blurred. Stella takes the refusal as a flaw in the love; the book says he is not defending his wife's rights so much as the balance of his own conscience.
- Arriving with new eyesBecause he never sees her wake up, never shares her first meal or the start of her moods, she appears to him as an apparition each time, and he has to repossess her. He turns up every day looking at her as if she were a new person.
- Walking in the snowSuspicious for the first time, he steps out of the taxi with her, dismisses it, says he needs a walk, and paces up and down outside the building she has ducked into. She watches him through the glass from a red plush chair in the lobby.