Collages (9 page)

“What I wanted to teach you is contained in one
page of the dictionary. It is all the words beginning with
trans
:transfigure,
transport, transcend, translucent, transgression, transform, transmit,
transmute, transpire, all the trans-Siberian voyages.”

“You forgot the word transvestite.”

“When I was ten years old I made up my first
story.”

“I’m going to be late for my
expanding-consciousness lecture!”

“This is a very short story. It’s about a blind
old man who had a daughter. This daughter described to him every day the world
they lived in, the people who came to see him, the beauty of their house,
garden, friends. One day a new doctor came to town and he cured the old man’s
blindness. When he was able to see, he discovered they had been living in a
shack, on an empty lot full of debris, that their friends had been hoboes and
drunks. His daughter was crying, thinking he would die of shock, but his
reaction was quite the opposite. He said to her: ‘It is true that the world you
described does not exist but as you built that image so carefully in my mind
and I can still see it so vividly, we can now set about to build it just as you
made me see it.’”

His daughter remained neutral, and as silent as
her rubber-soled tennis shoes. She hung her long legs over the edge of the deck
and swung them like a boy. She dissected snails.

“Such cruelty,” said Varda.

“Not at all,” she said with a newborn
scientist’s arrogance. “They have no nervous system.”

Meanwhile Varda continued to make collages as
some women light votive candles. With scissors and glue and small pieces of fabrics,
he continued to invent women who glittered, charmed, levitated and wore
luminous aureoles like saints. But his daughter resisted all her father’s
potions, as if she had decided from the day she was born never to become one of
the women he cut out in the shape of circles, triangles, cubes, to suit the
changing forms of his desires.

And then one day after she had been away for a
few days she wrote Varda the following letter:

inside.
I looked at the rug on the floor
and it was no longer a plain rug but a moving and swaying mass like hair
floating on water or like wind over a field of wheat. The door knob ceased to
be a plain door knob. It melted and undulated and the door opened and all the
walls and windows vanished. There was a tremor of life in everything. The once
static objects in the room all flowed into a fluid and mobile and breathing
world. The dazzle of the sun was multiplied, every speck of gold and diamond in
it magnified. Trees, skies, clouds, lawns began to breathe, heave and waver
like a landscape at the bottom of the sea. My body was both swimming and
flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was perfect communicability
between my body and everything surrounding me. The singing of the mocking-birds
was multiplied, became a whole forest of singing birds. My senses were
multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred fingertips. On
the walls appeared endless murals of designs I made which produced their own
music to match. When I drew a long orange line it emitted its own orange tone.
The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I
felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange,
gold. The waves of the sounds ran through my hair like a caress. The music ran down
my back and came out my fingertips. I was a cascade of red blue rainfall, a
rainbow. I was small, light, mobile. I could use any method of levitation I
wished. I could dissolve, melt, float, soar. Wavelets of light touched the rim
of my clothes, phosphorescent radiations. I could see a new world with my
middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the
walls behind the sky, the sky behind the Infinite. The walls became fountains,
the fountains became arches, the arches domes, the domes sky, the sky a
flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I looked at a slender line
curving over space which disappeared into infinity. I saw a million zeroes on
this line, curving, shrinking in the distance and I laughed and said ‘Excuse
me, I am not a mathematician.’ How can I measure the infinite? But I understand
it. The zeroes vanished. I was standing on the rim of a planet, alone. I could
hear the fast rushing sounds of the planets rotating in space. Then I was among
them, and I was aware that a certain skill was necessary to handle this new
means of transportation. The image of myself standing in space and trying to
get my ‘sea legs’ or my ‘space legs’ amused me. I
wondered who had been
there before me
and whether I could return to earth. The solitude
distressed me, so I returned to my starting point. I was standing in front of
an ugly garden door. But as I looked closer it was not plain or green but it
was a Buddhist temple, a Hindu colonnade, Moroccan mosaic ceiling, gold spires being
formed and re-formed as if I were watching the hand of a designer at work. I
was designing spirals of red unfurled until they formed a rose window or a
mandala
with edges of radium. When one design was barely born and arranged itself,
it dissolved and the next one followed without confusion. Each form, each line
emitted its equivalent in music in perfect accord with the design. An
undulating line emitted a sustained undulating melody, a circle had a
corresponding musical notation, diaphanous colors, diaphanous sounds, a pyramid
created a pyramid of ascending notes, and vanishing ones left only an echo.
These designs were preparatory sketches for entire Oriental cities. I saw the
temples of Java, Kashmir, Nepal, Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, in all the colors of
precious stones illumined from within. Then the outer forms of the temples
dissolved to reveal the inner chapel and shrines. The reds and the gold inside
the temples created an intricate musical orchestration like Balinese music. Two
sensations began to torment me: one that it was happening too quickly and that
I would not be able to remember it, another
that I would not be able to tell
what I saw
, it was too elusive and too overwhelming. The temples grew
taller, the music wilder, it became a tidal wave of sounds with gongs and bells
predominating. Gold spires emitted a long flute chant. Every line and color was
breathing and constantly mutating. The smoke of my cigarette became gold. The
curtain on the window became gold. Then I felt my whole body becoming gold,
liquid gold, scintillating warm gold. I WAS GOLD. It was the most pleasurable
sensation I have ever known and I knew it was like passion. It was the secret
of life, the alchemist’s secret of life.

“When I gradually returned from this dream-like
experience I was in your studio. I looked around at your collages and
recognized them. It was as if I had been there for the first time. I saw the
colors, the luminosity and the floating, mobile, changeable quality. I
understood all your stories, and all you had said to me. I could see why you
had made your women transparent, and the houses open like lace so that space
and freedom could blow through them.”

When she came home on vacation, she had emerged
from her grey cocoon. She was now sixteen and sending forth her first
radiations and vibrations dressed in Varda’s own rutilant colors.

WHEN RENATE AND VARDA MET at Paradise Inn she
had been touched by the story of his daughter. Secretly she wished she had had
a father who was a magician with colors and who would have told her stories. To
please him she wore a cotton dress in colors which recalled the dresses of his
women. Her coat was lined with pale stripes of violet, white and green which
immediately attracted Varda’s attention. He was as excited by a new combination
of tones or materials as other men might be by a new dish, or a new brand of
paint. He was always searching for pieces of textiles for his collages. He
caressed the lining of Renate’s coat with delight.

To his amazement Renate took a big pair of
scissors from the kitchen and before his eyes she cut out a piece big enough to
dress one of his abstract women.

Varda spent a few days at the inn. There were
many parties given for him. At these parties the two painters dazzled each
other like two magicians practicing all their spells and charms upon each
other.

But the friendship remained aerial, like two
acrobats speaking to each other only when hundreds of feet above the crowd.

Speaking of modern painting Renate said: “So
many of them lack taste.”

“What they lack is distaste,” said Varda.

They laughed together, but the distance
remained.

One day Varda absorbed some of Henri’s best
wine, the one which fermented the highest content ofeloquence, and he confessed
to him: “Renate is marvelous.”

“She is marvelous,” echoed Henri. “I’m going to
name a dessert after her.”

“She is
femme toute faite.
”

“
Toute faite
?”

“Already designed, completed, perfect in every
detail.”

“You say this as if it were not a compliment.”

“I only say it regretfully, Henri. For I
myself, I need unformed women, unfinished, undesigned women I can mold to my
own pattern. I’m an artist. I’m only looking for fragments, remnants which I
can co-ordinate in a new way. A woman artist makes her own patterns.”

“A good recipe for other women,” said Henri.

BRUCE AND RENATE ENTERED A DIMLY-LIT CAFE where
anyone could sit on the small stage and sing folk songs, and if he sang well
would be kept there by applause and, if not, quickly encouraged to leave. The
tables were beer-stained and sticky with Coca-Cola. The waitresses were heavily
made up with Cleopatra eyes, and they wore sack dresses and black stockings.
The spotlight on the singers was red and made them appear pale and condemned to
sing. The shadows were so strong that when they bent over their guitar it
seemed suggestively intimate and not like a song one must listen to. A few
figures stood in the shadows on the side, and from this vague group a woman
sprang towards them and, touching Renate’s arm, said in a chanting voice: “You
are Renate,” giving to the name all the musical resonances it contained and
adding, with a perfect lyrical illogic: “I am Nina,” as if a woman called Nina
must of course address a woman called Renate. Renate hesitated because she was
trying to remember where she had seen Nina and yet she could not remember, and
this was so manifest on her face that Nina said: “Of course you could not
remember, there are fourteen women in me, you may have met only one of them,
perhaps on the stage, when I acted at the Playwright’s Theatre, do you remember
that? I was the blind girl.”

“Yes, of course I remember her, but you do not
seem like the same woman, and even now you do not seem like the same woman who
first came out to speak to me.”

It was true that she changed so quickly that
already Renate had seen in her a beautiful Medea because of the flowing hair,
but a Medea without jealousy, and the next moment she seemed like a wandering
Ophelia who had never known repose. It was impossible to imagine her asleep or
drowned. She held her head proudly on a very slender neck; she used her hands
like puppets, each finger with an important role to play. She was without
sadness and so light she seemed almost weightless, as if performing on a stage
alone, while her eyes scanned the entire room, her quick-winged words a
monologue about to be interrupted. She thrust out her shoulders as if she had
to push her way through a crowd and leave.

Bruce’s speech and thoughts were agile, like
those of a rootless person accustomed to pack and move swiftly from city to
city, from home to home, and yet he could not follow her flights and
vertiginous transitions. A touching, apologetic smile accompanied her
incoherence. She herself did not get lost in sudden turns and free
associations, but she seemed wistful that others could not follow her.

“My name is Nina Gitana de la Primavera.” She
said “Gitana” as if she had been born in Spain, and “Primavera” as if she had
been born in Italy, and one could see the Persian flowers on her cotton dress
flowering.

“But these are my winter names. I change with
the seasons. When the spring comes I no longer need to be Primavera. I leave
that to the season. It is so far away.” She threw her head back like a young
horse trying to sniff the far off spring, so far back Renate thought her neck
would snap.

“I am waiting for Manfred, but he is not
coming. May I sit with you?”

“Who is Manfred?” asked Bruce.

She repeated the name but separated its
syllables: “Man—fred.” As if she were examining its philological roots.

“Man-fred is the man I am going to love. He may
not yet be born. I have often loved men who are not yet born.”

Bruce, who never swerved in the path of a
drunkard, who had once invited a potential burglar to come in for a coffee, was
afraid of this beautiful undrowned Ophelia who borrowed her language from
mythology. He feared she had the power to snap the cord which bound him
securely to ordinary life.

He wanted to leave. But just then a new singer
climbed the wooden stage, and began to talk before he sang as if to sell his
own songs.

Nina never ceased talking except to stare at
Renate and Bruce and touch their faces delicately with her fingertips as if she
were still playing the blind girl on the stage. Then she spread open her hands
and to each separate finger she said severely: “You talk too much.”