Manuel and his wife were poor, and when they first looked for an apartment in Paris, they found only two dark rooms below the street level, giving onto a small stifling courtyard. Manuel was sad. He was an artist, and there was no light in which he could work. His wife did not care. She would go off each day to do her trapeze act for the circus.In that dark under-the-earth place, his whole life assumed the character of an imprisonment. The concierges were extremely old, and the tenants who lived in the house seemed to have agreed to make it an old people's home.So Manuel wandered through the streets until he came to a sign: FOR RENT. He was led to two attic rooms that looked like a hovel, but one of the rooms led to a terrace, and as Manuel stepped out onto this terrace he was greeted with the shouts of schoolgirls on recess. There was a school across the way, and the girls were playing in the yard under the terrace.Manuel watched them for a few moments, his face glowing and expanding in a smile. He was taken with a slight trembling, like that of a man anticipating great pleasures. He wanted to move into the apartment immediately, but when evening came and he persuaded Thrse to come and inspect it, she saw nothing but two uninhabitable rooms, dirty and neglected. Manuel repeated, "But there is light, there is light for painting, and there is a terrace." Thrse shrugged her shoulders and said, "I wouldn't live here."Then Manuel became crafty. He bought paint, cement and wood. He rented the two rooms and devoted himself to fixing them. He had never liked work, yet this time he set about doing the most meticulous carpentry and paint job ever seen, to make the place beautiful for Thrse. As he painted, patched, cemented and hammered, he could hear the laughter of the little girls playing in the yard. But he contained himself, waiting for the right moment. He spun fantasies of what his life would be in this apartment across from a girls' school.In two weeks the place was transformed. The walls were white, the doors closed properly, the closets could be used, the floors no longer had holes in them. Then he brought Thrse to see it. She was quite overwhelmed and immediately agreed to move. In one day their belongings were brought on a cart. In this new place, Manuel said, he could paint because of the light. He was dancing about, gay and changed.Thrse was happy to see him in such a mood. The next morning, when things were but half-unpacked and they had slept on beds without sheets, Thrse went to her trapeze work and Manuel was left alone to arrange things. But instead of unpacking he went downstairs and walked to the bird market. There he spent the grocery money that Thrse had given him to buy a cage and two tropical birds. He went home and hung the cage outside on the terrace. He looked down for a moment at the little girls playing, watching their legs under the fluttering skirts. How they fell upon each other in games, how their hair flew beh Excerpted from Little Birds by Anais Nin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
