Collages (5 page)

“You never went home again?”

“We did once, but my wife did not like it. She
thought the castle was sad. She was cold, and the plumbing was not efficient.
She didn’t like so much politeness, moth-eaten brocades, yellowed silks, dust
on the wine bottles.”

Count Laundromat, she called him, as she
watched the gold signet ring with the family coat-of-arms flashing through
detergents.

An enormous woman appeared through the back
door and called out to him. She was as tall and as wide as Mae West. The
beautiful eyes, features and hair were deeply imbedded in cushions of flesh
like a jewel in a feather bedspread.

“My wife,” he said, to Renate; and to her he
said: “This is a neighbor who once lived in Vienna.”

Then he took up her bundle of laundry and
carried it to the car, opened the door, fitted it in the seat with care that no
piece should be caught when the door closed, as if it were the lacy edge of a
petticoat.

From the day he told her the story of his
title, the smell of kitchen soap, of wet linen, wet wool, detergents, became
confused in Renate’s nostrils with the smell of an antique cabinet she had once
opened in a shop in Vienna.

The inside of the drawers were lined with
brocade which was glued to the wood and which retained the smell of sandalwood.
The past was like those old-fashioned sachet bags filled with herbs and flowers
which penetrate the clothes and cling to them.

Every time she visited Count Laundromat, the
perfumes of the antique cabinet enveloped her, the smell of the rose petals her
mother kept in a small music box, the smell of highly polished sandalwood of
her sewing table, the vanilla of Viennese pastry, the pungent spices, the
tobacco from her father’s pipe, all these overpowered the detergents.

IN THE SMALL TOWNS OF CALIFORNIA the occasional
absence of inhabitants, or animation, can give the place the air of a still
life painting. Thus it appeared for a moment in the eyes of a woman standing in
the center of an empty lot. No cars passed, no light shone, no one walked, no
windows blinked, no dogs barked, no children crossed the street.

The place had a soft name: Downey. It suggested
the sensation of downy hairs on downy skins. But Downey was not like its name.
It was symmetrical, tidy, monotonous. One house could not be distinguished from
another, and gaping open garages exposed what was once concealed in attics;
broken bicycles, old newspapers, old trunks, empty bottles.

The woman who was standing in the empty lot had
blurred her feminine contours in slacks, and a big loose sweater. But her
blonde hair was round and puffed like the hair of a doll.

She stood motionless and became, for a moment,
part of the still life until a station wagon arrived and friends waved at her
as they slowed down in front of her. She ran swiftly towards them and helped
them open the back of the car and unload paintings and easels which they all
carried to the empty lot.

Then the woman in slacks became intensely
active, placing and turning the paintings at an angle where the sunlight would
illumine rather than consume them.

The paintings were all in sharp contrast to the
attenuated colors of Downey. Deep nocturnal blues and greens and purples, all
the velvet tones of the night.

Cars began to stop and people came to look.

One visitor said: “These trees have no
shadows.”

Another visitor said: “The faces have no
wrinkles. They do not look real.”

The crowd that had gathered was the same one who
came to the empty lot at Christmas to buy Christmas trees, or in the summer to
buy strawberries from the Japanese gardeners.

“I have never seen a sea like this,” said
another spectator. The woman in slacks laughed and said: “A painting should
take you to a place you have never seen before. You don’t always want to look
at the same tree, the same sea, the same face every day, do you?”

But that was exactly what the inhabitants of
Downey wanted to do. They did not want to uproot themselves. They were looking
for duplicates of Downey, a portrait of their grandmother, and of their
children.

The painter laughed. They liked her laughter.
They ventured to buy a few of the smaller paintings, as if in diminutive sizes
they might not be so dangerous or change the climate of their living room.

“I’m helping you to tell your house apart from
your neighbor’s,” said the painter.

There was no wind. Between visitors the painter
and her friends sat on stools and smoked and talked among themselves. But one
capricious, solitary puff of wind lifted a strand of blonde hair away from the
painter’s face and revealed a strand of dark hair under the mesh of the wig.
But no one noticed or commented on it.

The light grew dim. The painter and her friends
packed the remaining paintings and drove away.

Back at her house by the sea, the painter
stacked her paintings against the wall. She went into her bedroom. When she
came out again the wig was gone, her long black hair fell over her shoulders,
and she wore a Mexican cotton dress in all the soft colors of a rainbow.

It was Renate. The blonde wig lay on the bed,
with the slacks and the big sweater. And now she also had to make the paintings
look like her own art work again, which meant restituting to them the
fantasmagorical figures of her night dreams. The plain landscapes, the plain
seascapes, the plain figures were all transformed to what they were before the
Downey exhibit. The figures undulated, became bells, the bells rang over the
ocean, the trees waved in cadences, the sinuosities of the clouds were like the
scarves of Arab or Hindu women, veiling the storms. Animals never seen before, descendants
of the unicorn, offered their heads to be cajoled. The vegetative patience of
flowers was depicted like a group of twittering nuns, and it was the animals
who had the eyes of crystal gazers while people’s eyes seemed made of
stalactites. Explosions of the myth, talkative garrulous streets, debauched
winds, oracular moods of the sands, stasis of the rocks, attrition of stones,
acerose of leaves, excrescence of hours, sibylline women with a faculty for
osmosis, adolescence like cactus, the corrugations of age, the ulcerations of
love, people seeking to live two lives with one heart, inseparable twins.

She restored to the empty landscapes all the
mythological figures of her dreams, thinking of Rousseau’s words in answer to
the question: “Why did you paint a couch in the middle of the jungle?” And he
had said: “Because one has a right to paint one’s dreams.”

Renate was painting a canal of Venice,
shimmering like an unrolled bolt of changeable lame silver and gold, and the
shadow of a gondolier upon the water, the one seen by Byron or by George Sand.
But the gondola in reality was passing by and through the shadow with a
gondolier dressed in work clothes, not in his nautical finery. And what he was
transporting was not a pair of entranced lovers but a couch, quite obviously
newly covered with fresh and vivid red brocade. To be delivered speedily to
some occupied palace, occupied by a new enemy, the renovators. The second
gondolier, while waiting to help carry the couch to its owner, was resting upon
it, at ease, and had fallen asleep.

Renate was laughing. to finished the painting
with the face of a cat looking through a heavily barred window.

When she was a child she felt that she had been
born in the world to rescue all the animals. She was concerned with the bondage
and slavery of animals, the donkey on the treadmills in Egypt, the cattle
traveling in trains, chickens tied together by the legs, rabbits being shot in
the forest, dogs on leashes, kittens left starving on the sidewalks. She made
several attempts to rescue them. She cut the strings around the chicken’s legs
and they scattered all over the market place. She opened all the cages she
could find and let the birds fly out. She opened field gates and let the cattle
wander.

It was only when she reached the age of
fourteen that she realized the hopelessness of her task. Cruelty extended too
far. She could never hope to extinguish it. It stretched from the peaks of Peru
and the jungle of Africa to Arcadia, California, where the inhabitants
protested against the wild peacocks who were wandering in the neighborhood and
had them arrested.

So Renate began to paint the friendship of
women and animals. She painted a luminous woman lying peacefully beside a
panther, a woman with blue-tinted flesh floating on the opening wing of a swan,
a woman with eyes like the eyes of her Siamese cat, a woman tenderly holding a
turtle.

This turtle was so small that Renate had to use
a magnifying glass to study its eyes. She was quite startled when she found
herself facing the cold, malevolent glance of the turtle. Renate did not
believe in the malevolence of animals. She had thought first of imprisoned
animals; then of free animals; and finally of women and animals living in
harmony.

She was now painting Raven, a girl with very
long black hair and a pale skin who owned a raven, and whose wish for a raven
had been born so early in her life that she could not remember how it had been
born, whether from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, or from a small engraving she still
carried about as others carry photographs of their children.

She had always considered herself too gentle,
too pliant. This dream of a fierce raven seemed to balance elements of her
being.

“His black wings, his sharp beak, his strong
claws completed me, added something I lacked, added the element of darkness,”
she told Renate.

She searched for a raven and grew concerned
when she heard that they were nearly exterminated in the United States.

She went to visit ravens at the zoo. She read
that they had once been an object of veneration and superstition. Symbol of the
night, of the dark side of our being? She noticed too that they were
intelligent and mischievous. They learned to articulate words in a hoarse,
cracked bass voice.

Once in San Francisco she picked up a newspaper
and there was an advertisement by a rich eccentric old lady who had collected
birds and animals and was forced to move back to Europe. She had a raven for
sale.

Raven rushed to see her and met her raven
there. She made a down payment and asked the old lady to hold him for her until
she ound a proper home for him. But before she was quite ready, she received a
telegram: “Raven arriving by T.W.A. Airline Flight 6 at 8 p.m. today.”

The image of her raven flying in a box from San
Francisco startled Raven. She had somehow expected him to fly over on his own
power.

When she found him in his box at the airport he
seemed crestfallen and humiliated. His wings were held close to his body as if
the flight had handicapped him forever. He looked angrily at the plane as an
unworthy rival. He cackled and made harsh angry sounds. Raven took him home.

She had to buy a huge cage. But she was happy.
She felt she had fulfilled a long dream, she felt complete in herself. In the
raven lay some mute, unflying part of herself which would now become visible,
audible and in flight. His wings, so wide open and powerful, became her wings.
His blackness became her blackness. And the child in Raven who had been too
gentle, too docile, now felt liberated of this meek image, felt that the raven
had become a part of her she wanted to express, a stronger, darker, more
independent self. His irony, his mockery, his fierceness suited her. They were
extensions of a Raven who might have otherwise become selfless, self-effacing.
So Raven sat on the red couch, and her raven wandered through the room, the
raven of legends, ravenous, ravishing, raper, rapacious. But Raven loved him in
all his moods.

His black feathers full of dark blue luster,
his eyes so sharp, his claws curling twice around the bars of his cage, he
stared at Renate who was staring at him, a black rayless stare.

Raven loosened the chain. Renate expected him
to perch on Raven’s hair or shoulders. She wanted to see hair and wings
entangled. But Raven and the bird displayed no intimacy. He pecked with his
long beak at Raven’s toes. His hoarse vague sounds, like a man clearing his
throat after smoking, filled the room as he flew from his perch with the speed
of wind.

The young men who visited Raven considered the
bird a menace, a challenge, a rival, a test of their courage, of their
masculinity. They could not court her, dream of her, in front of him. They
wanted to provoke him and drive him away, as if in some obscure way he guarded
Raven from intimacy with them. He was an obstacle, an alien part of her, ruling
a realm they did not want to know. He stared at their eyes as if meditating an
attack.

Raven controlled him like a lion tamer, shook a
folded newspaper to drive him back into his cage, but Renate could see she
enjoyed his angry retreats.

Raven said: “After I tamed him, I let him run
free in the apartment. I wanted to know if he really loved me, if he would stay
with me. So I opened the window and he flew out to the roof of the house next
door. He explored the gutters, pecked at some stray leaves, and flew back to
me. From then on I knew I was as necessary to him as he was to me.”

The raven trod gingerly between delicate
furniture, vases, statuettes and brocades. But when he spread his wings and
shook them, tremulous with rhythm and vibrations, one could hear the wind from
the mountains where ravens like to live, and one marveled that he submitted to
captivity.