Collages (11 page)

“Renate, please don’t bother yourself to go
beyond what you can do for my acting career, only what comes neatly in your
way.”

The second visit she made Renate, she wore a
yellow silk kimono and carried a small basket. With her black hair high on her
head, she looked like a giant sunflower with a black velvet core swaying in the
fields.

She opened the smallest pill box in the world
to take out a sucaril tablet.

“I was given a film test today. It was for a
Western, and they shoot so promiscuously.”

Another time she wore a dove grey kimono with
an orange obi, and she let her head incline to one side as the tulips do at
night.

“Renate, I’m at a loss what to do with my
tremendously long and unknown future. I’m really not so sure I’ll be able to
accomplish what I’ve dreamed of, what I’m searching for.”

It was now the month of May. Nobuko wore a
kimono embroidered with a purple jacaranda bloom, with a gold obi. At last she
felt in harmony with nature’s designs.

“All I want, Renate, is not to be a
good-for-nothing.”

Renate painted a portrait of her. While Renate
worked Nobuko watched her freedom of movements, freedom of dress, her quick
responses and inventive language.

And then it was time to leave.

From New York she wrote on purple tissue paper
because the sun was absent. She sent Renate photographs. “Two are loud and
embarrassing for commercials, but the small one is in a funny way old-fashioned
and natural, so this is for my dear person Renate. I have understood very well
what you have explained about independence. It is obvious that life and career
in Japan must be much easier and less strenuous, but I consider myself so
fortunate to be able to taste the bitter sweet of freedom. Vaulting ambition in
theatrical experiment and the obsession not to be a good-for-nothing in
addition to impatience and restlessness cause me a lot of worry.”

Another letter came in orange tissue paper
because the sun was out: “My plant, just a simple rubber plant, is growing
energetically, and it does tell me spring is here. I know this is the end of my
very dear and most thrilling season of life. Imean to leave America and plunge
into the Japanese theatre world, and this is a very strangely complex feeling.
Youth, Passion, Dreams and a long long future… They are quite frightening to
me. Such a great responsibility. If I were to end up as a good-for-nothing.
Renate, the other night I was awe-stricken, truthfully, when I realized that if
you love someone else dearly, for example my parents, my sister… You can’t even
have the last freedom that you possess, the free choice of death…”

Renate could see Nobuko bound in her enveloping
kimono, the wide sleeves like closed wings against her body, the feet in white
cotton and sandals, seeking to shake off the ritualistic past, the thoughtful
meditative forms, the contained stylizations, and she wondered whether she
could emerge from centuries of confinement.

Nobuko wrote: “I could not write you yesterday
because it was raining and I did not find any pearl grey paper to match.”

THE FRENCH CONSULATE WAS HOUSED in a
pseudo-Spanish house at the topof the Hollywood Hills. It conformed in no way
to the Hollywood expectations about a French Consulate. The French Consul was a
novelist, his wife wrote biographies, the secretary who opened the door did not
look like Brigitte Bardot, the desk at the entrance was plain, the rooms were
not furnished in Louis XVI style, nor in the fourteenth-century style, nor
Empire.

The bar was concealed by New Orleans shutters.
There were old Turkish rugs on the tile floor. The pillows around the fireplace
were from Thailand. There were French modern paintings on the walls and a
Russian icon. The black lacquer furniture was pseudo-Chinese.

The secretary was not coquettish. She was
dressed in a plain black sheath and wore two yards of dime store pearls. She
led Renate to the living-room. On the way to the living-room Renate noticed the
table covered with magazines. They were not risque. They were art magazines,
one of them on the new churches built in France with abstract Christs and
abstract Madonnas painted by modern painters.

The Consul stood near the door. He was slight
of build, with large sea-green eyes, a southern skin, and a mouth whose design
was marred by a contraction of the upper lip which gave him an air of sneering,
or of pouting, a twist which gave his whole face an ambiguous expression. He
might have been a conventionally handsome man, but this sneer gave him a
slightly sinister air.

Renate was to learn later in the evening that
it was due to a wound he had received during the war, and then she was
distressed to think she had judged his character from his facial design and
that this design had been distorted by external circumstances. She tried to
reconstruct his face as it might have been before the war. She wondered if this
wound had influenced his moods too, for she had heard that he was melancholic
in private and gay and witty in public. At the door he had kissed her hand and
said to her: “We are celebrating a literary prize I received for my book.” He
said this in a wistful tone. Renate asked with her natural frankness: “You do
not seem to be rejoicing over it.”

“It’s true, but that’s because it came too
late.”

“Too late! But
you’re at the prime of life!”

It came too late, just the same, too late for
my mother to know about it. She died during the war. It was she who wanted me
to become a famous writer. I did it for her. Now it does not seem to matter
very much. Why do I write? What does it bring me? One either fails in one’s art
or in one’s life.”

“Look what your writing brings you. You are
surrounded by beautiful women, your books are being filmed, you travel, and
everywhere you go you have friends. I wanted to meet Jean Delatouche. I was
attracted to his imagination and his wit.”

“And you’ll be disappointed when I tell you I
am not Jean.”

“You mean, you are no longer Jean. You have
become someone else.”

“I never was Jean. I was the non-hero of the
book, the half-gangster, the ambiguous adventurer. The hero was the man my
mother wanted me to be. The gangster was me. The man you came to see is the
hero of the book. The world I create I leave behind me, like an old skin.”

The Consul’s wife was English. She extended a
pale blonde hand, her delicately tinted face and pale blonde hair were almost
eclipsed by a Chinese mandarin coat, heavily embroidered.

When Renate admired it she said: “It conceals
the bulges.”

Then looking wistfully at the Consul who did
not kiss all the women’s hands, only the pretty ones, she added: “Other people
have breakdowns when they do not succeed. He has them when he has a success which
his mother cannot enjoy. He is only really happy when he is locked upstairs
with his writing.”

The Consul was opening the champagne delivered
by the French Navy. He wore both martial and literary decorations. He made
everyone laugh with sallies and remarks he made without smiling. Most of the
time he did not appear at parties, but let his wife officiate. Visitors
sometimes caught sight of him as he opened his window for a little fresh air
and then his wife would say: “He is working on his novel.”

The patio evoked Algerian settings. It was
sheltered by a pepper tree and the Consul’s wife had decorated it with Moroccan
rugs and a Turkish coffee set of copper inlaid with floral designs.

The cook was Russian. Her hobby was collecting
stray cats and injured dogs. More often when she came to the salon it was not
to bring ice but to ask the Consul’s wife for bandages or aspirin for the
animals. The ice never came, but the Consul’s wife told the Westerners in love
with space about the advice given to her by her Russian maid which had proved
valuable: “When your thoughts have too much space, they fly off into the
infinite. It is necessary to work and think in an enclosed room, then the
thoughts cannot escape. They rebound.”

Officially, publicly, in the eyes of the world,
publishers, magazines, and television people, it was he who was the writer. His
books were known, he had received prizes, and films were being made of thm.
Very few people knew that the Consul’s wife was a writer too.

She had written a vivid book about four English
women who had wanted to escape from England to the Orient, had wanted an
adventurous life, and had all succeeded and fulfilled their desires richly and
fully.

She was herself physically such an exact
replica of the delicately tinted women of English paintings that it was
difficult to remember her features. The shell rose, the faintly drawn features
were always about to vanish in one’s memory. Her smile, her pale blue glance
were all evanescent. One could not at first relate her tothe characters she had
painted in such rich colors, women of daring, of defiance towards conventions,
and above all, women who had been led completely by their passions and their
whims.

They seemed so distinct from her that Renate
wondered how she had selected them and lived in intimacy with them during years
of library research in many cities.

But the link between them appeared gradually
and subtly. She had lived in the consulates of the countries she described. The
antique Turkish rug on the floor did not come from a Turkish bazaar. In Los
Angeles she had discovered a Turkish rug merchant in a plain and homely street.
Her knowledge of the language was so perfect that the merchant had invited her
to have native coffee with him. In an enormous loft all the rugs were piled up
upon one another. And it was on top of them, at least two yards from the floor,
that he had the copper tray put down for them to squat by, Turkish fashion.

She had already too many rugs and her husband
complained but she could not resist taking another one home now and then.

The last one was so ancient that only the
backing showed, and very little of the colored wool’s design, but she knew what
this design had been.

She even preferred to re-weave these missing
fragments in her mind. It was a spiritual discipline which enabled her, sitting
in the California patio, to re-weave the fragments of her life in foreign
places. She could find the smell and colors of those evenings spent sitting on
the cream white roofs of Turkish houses, not on chairs but on Turkish rugs and
pillows. She could see every flower, leaf, tendril reborn as a lyric melody of
warm colors like the colors of her life with the Consul. She could re-live
visits to the bazaars and cafes, night in the desert in Arab costumes, scenes
of dances, of tribal war rehearsals, and hear the melodies, chantings and
laments while smoking opium.

Many times it was she who explored the
labyrinthian cities of the Orient while the Consul stayed in his room to write.
So that when she came to write the biographies of those adventurous exiled
English women, she knew the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the contents
of their trunks, baskets, and handbags, details about the furniture, the
insides of the houses, contents of caravans, the talk of servants. Her husband
said “She was always buying things in bazaars, things we did not need, which we
had to carry about.” He did not know she was collecting props which later she
used lovingly in her biographies.

In Los Angeles her bed had a muslin canopy such
as she must have had as a young girl, and Renate felt that whin the mature
woman a young and virginal adolescent was still sleeping under her first
communion and wedding dress innocence. It was the bed of an unawakened woman,
and even though grey hairs showed at the roots of the grey-blonde hair, the
pale blue ribbon which bound it proclaimed a freakish error in nature’s
calculations. It had a buoyant air, an undaunted flying pennant which may
explain why only surprise showed in her eyes when the Consul confessed his
obsession with young girls.

The walls were covered with photographs of the
four women she had written about, who resembled her so much that her face could
have been substituted for all of them.

Bruce had to appear in a television show so he
left the party early, and much later Renate was placed in a taxi by the Consul,
with a taxi driver he knew so that he felt she would be safely driven home.

The taxi driver wore a beret and rather long
hair. “I’m a painter from Marseilles. The Consul and I made friends during the
war. I drive him about. I’m his private chauffeur for special errands. We are
drinking pals. I know him probably better than anyone, because we are bottle
brothers. We both love wine and we both love women. I know his mistress. She’s
a girl from Algiers. I sometimes drive her to the Consulate when he is alone.
In fact, I know him better than you can ever imagine. Because I know him when
he needs to escape from that role he plays, of diplomat, public figure,
gentleman of letters, friend of prominent men. I know him when he wishes to
drown the world he lives in because it doesn’t mean anything to him, and find
girls he can talk roughly to, and does not need to be witty, or gallant, or
kiss hands, or open car doors. With me he drinks all night; he knows I will
drive him back safely and the dogs won’t bark, and I know how to get him to his
room noiselessly. At one time we had the same mistress. She was a lovely girl
who asked so little. I was then working with the American army. The girl needed
a winter coat. All I could give her was an old army blanket. She dyed it, cut a
pattern from her old coat, and made herself a beautiful winter coat. And then
she went off to Paris to spend a few days’ leave with the Consul, in my army
blanket. When her sister got married, I bought them a silk parachute (at that
time they were made of silk, not nylon). The whole family sat down and out of
the parachute they made a beautiful wedding dress, underwear, panties and
petticoats for the whole family, and finally a nightgown for the bride. How I
love to think of all those lovely girls wrapped up in parachute silk. I had a
dream that they all floated through the sky, and came down to visit me in my
lonely army cot.”