In one of the stories of Delta of Venus, the events take place in Cala Deià.
One evening some years ago, a fisherman's daughter of eighteen was walking along the edge of the sea, leaping from rock to rock, her white dress clinging to her body. Walking thus and dreaming and watching the effects of the moon on the sea, the soft lapping of the waves at her feet, she came to a hidden cove where she noticed that someone was swimming. She could see only the head moving and occasionally an arm. The swimmer was quite far away. Then she heard a light voice calling out to her, - Come in and swim. It's beautiful -. It was said in Spanish with a foreign accent. ¡Hello Maria!, it called, so the voice knew her. It must have been one of the Young American women who bathed there during the day.
Delta of Venus, 1977
Performed by Glynis German.
(Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1903 – Los Angeles, 1977). Born in 1903 in the town of Neuilly-sur-Seine, close to Paris, Anaïs Nin died in Los Angeles in 1977. She was the daughter of Catalan pianist, Joaquim Nin, and a Cuban singer. When the couple separated, her mother went to live in New York with the children, and Anaïs Nin – one of the 20th century’s most controversial writers - went on to spend the rest of her life travelling between New York and Paris. She was particularly interested in female sexuality and her erotic literature can be regarded as a genuine study of femininity. Anaïs Nin’s best-known works - her diaries - show that her writing was inseparable from the most private aspects of her life. The diaries that she kept from the age of eleven practically right through until her death were trusted friends in whom she could confide her worries, concerns and relationships, and she is astonishingly frank in describing her life.
Nin was friends with – and, on occasions, the lover of – some of the most famous writers of the time. Nonetheless, it was Henry Miller who really exerted a strong influence on Anaïs Nin as a writer and woman, a relationship portrayed in the film Henry and June. Her obsession with her father, whom she re-met almost twenty years after he abandoned the family, is the main theme of her diary Incest: From a Journal of Love.
Her erotic stories were written on commission, for the sum of one dollar a page, in order to overcome financial hardship. The collection of short stories Delta of Venus includes one story set in the cove at Deià, where the writer lived in 1940.
Deià has been a meeting point for artists who have found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape. Now as in the past, they have recreated on their canvasses images of the sea and mountains and given rise to the name of the coastal path between the cove and Bens d'Avall, which passes through the hamlet of Llucalcari.
Anaïs Nin lived in Deià in 1940, in a small house in “el Clot” and she went down to the cove every day. This is the setting for one of the stories in the collection Delta of Venus, based on a well-known story in the town: that of Maria, the daughter of a fisherman, who was seduced by a pair of foreigners and dared to jump naked into the sea to swim with them. The story is a hymn to sexuality, and at the same time a description of the natural environment of Cala Deià, including some of the features that make this a unique setting: the crystal-clear waters, how the sea touches the mountains, and the magnetism of this quiet cove and its white pebbles.
