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. It must have been one of the Young American women who bathed there during the day. Neuilly-sur-Seine, β Los Angeles, She was the daughter of Catalan pianist, Joaquim Nin, and a Cuban singer. She was particularly interested in female sexuality and her erotic literature can be regarded as a genuine study of femininity.
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 β and, on occasions, the lover of β some of the most famous writers of the time. 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. 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. 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.
