Collages Page 4

  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 lamé 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.

  How intently he looked at Raven, her hair and eyebrows matching his wings but seeming blacker by contrast with her moonlit skin.

  Posing for Renate, Raven contemplated her painting of Our Lady of the Beast. In the late afternoon light a luminous naked woman reclines beside a panther. The face of the panther shines, more brightly with a phosphorescent light. They are the Beauty and the Beast after a long marriage, both equally beautiful. But later, when it grew dark, it was the face and body of the woman which began to shine with a gold phosphorescence and the panther grew darker and more shadowy. It disappeared finally into the night, leaving on the black canvas only the stare of its golden eyes. They had exchanged souls.

  Renate painted Raven standing nude in front of a mirror. Her back was covered with her abundant, undulating black hair. Her reflection in the mirror was smaller, the skin a shade paler, her eyebrows and eyelashes touched with coal dust. The raven was pecking at the hem of her lace scarf, with his wings closed as if the girl had become more powerful than the raven. The quality of night, mystery and hidden violence had been absorbed by her.

  And the raven, sitting at her feet with folded wings, had he absorbed her timidity?

  WHILE DRIVING ALONG PACIFIC PALISADES, Renate had stopped several times to offer a lift to an old man with his arm in a sling. He was going to get his arm treated nearby and, very slowly, he unraveled his story to her.

  He lived in Malibu, the place by the sea which the Indians called the Humped Mountain, and which in French, if you sang it, sounded like Evil Owl—Mal Hibou,Malibu.

  When he was a young man he became a lifeguard at Will Rogers’ beach. He sat on a chair twelve feet high and studied the moods of the sea. He had no need of weather bureaus. He knew by every undulation, every contortion, every flourish and flounce of the waves, the sea’s exact mood and whether it would be treacherous for the swimmers, or tender and mocking. He knew the omens of the clouds, read the future in their colors and density. He knew the topography of the sand covered by the sea as if he had mapped its depths. From where he sat the cries of the gulls, of children and bathers all fused together and made a sound he liked, musique concrète. He had never been concerned with words.

  He knew the entire coast, from Will Rogers’ beach to where Malibu became wild and solitary.

  He married and had children, but he was restless in the house. The static walls irked him. He did not like the smell of enclosure, of cooking, of wax, nor the sound of the vacuum cleaner. He missed the wind’s flurries, and the spicy smells of the seashore.

  He felt entombed by the stillness of objects, the unchanging landscapes in frames. And the torrent of words spoken by his wife and children did not give him the stinging, whipping sense of aliveness he felt at the beach.

  He returned to his old job as a lifeguard. But each evening he stayed longer at the beach. He liked it best when it was deserted, and when he would start walking homeward along the coast. He discovered the treasures of the sea which lay in the rock crevices, either thrown there by storms, or growing there. The humid, never-withering sea-lemon, the sea-lilies which did not close at night, the sea-lentils tied to giant serpentine string beans, sea-liquor brine, sea-lyme grass, sea-moss, sea-cucumbers. He never knew the sea had such a lavish garden—sea-plumes, sea-grapes, sea-lace, sea-lungs. In the summer he began to stay on after dark. He learned skin diving and stole crabs and lobsters people trapped. He cooked his dinner on the beach. He came home rarely.

  The rocks were continually filled with surprises from shipwrecks, and the nights with sounds which the regular rhythm of the sea orchestrated. The wind flung itself between the rocks, disheveled, wrestled with the waves, until one of them expired. The sky put on its own evanescent spectacles, a pivoting stage, fugitive curtains, decors for ballets, floating icebergs, unrolled bolts of chiffon, gold and pearl necklaces, marabous of oyster white, scarves of Indian saris, flying feathers, shorn lambs, geometric architecture in snows and cotton. His theater was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself.

  On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.

  One night he slept in one of the caves. He thought to himself: Now I am a merman.

  He passed the time detecting mild sea-quakes, he made friends with the sea-lark, he collected sea-palms and made a rug of them for his cave. But some element was missing. The friendship of the sea-gulls was too ephemeral. Their visits were too short. They were always impatient to be off in space.

  One night he walked on to the end of a natural rock jetty and came upon a shoal of seals. They swam, dived, clowned, but always crawled back to the rocks to have their young ones there. They kissed, barked, leaped, danced on their partly fused hind limbs. Their black eyes were like mirrors reflecting sea and sky, but the ogival shape of their eyelids gave them an air of compassion, almost as if they would weep with sympathy. Their tails were of little use except for swimming but they liked to shake their webbed flipper-like limbs as if they were about to fly. Their fur shone like onyx, with dark blue shadows under the fins.

  They greeted the man with cries of joy. By this time he was an old man. The sea had wrinkled his face so intricately, it was a surprise when his smile scattered the lines to shine through, like a beautiful glossy fish darting out of a fishing net.

  The old man fed the seals, he settled near them in a cave, cooked his dinner, and rolled over and fell asleep with a new feeling of companionship.

  One night several men came. They wanted to catch the seals for a display in a pool in front of their restaurant. A publicity stunt which attracted the children. But the pool was small, it w
as surrounded by barbed wire and the old man did not want this to happen to his seals. So he warned them by an imitation of their cry and bark, and they dove quickly into the sea. By the time the men reached the end of the jetty the seals were gone. From then on the old man felt he was their guardian. No one could get through at night withalking through his bedroom.

  In spite of the tap-dancing of the waves, and the siren calls of the wind, the old man would hear the dangerous visitors and always had time to warn the seals in their own language.

  The old man discovered the seals’ names. They answered to Hilarious, Ebenezer, Ambrosius, Eulalee and Adolfo. But there was one seal whose name he did not know, who was too old when they first met. The old man did not have the courage to try out names on him, to see which one he answered to, for the seal could hardly move and it would have humiliated him.

  One severe winter the old man’s children began to worry about him, as he was growing old and rheumatic. One rainy day they came and forced him into their car, and took him to their home and fixed him up a bedroom.

  The first night he slept on a bed, he fell off and broke his arm.

  As soon as his arm was well again he returned to the cave.

  One night when he felt minor quakes were taking place in the area of his heart, he thought he was going to die, so he tried to crawl nearer to the seals, into the crevices where they slept. But they gently, compassionately, nosed him out of the place.

  By then he resembled them so much, with his mustache, his rough oval eyebrows, his drooping eyelids, and his barking cough, that he thought they would help him to slide down the rocks and be buried at sea, like a true seal.

  WHEN RENATE DID NOT SELL ENOUGH PAINTINGS she worked as a hostess at Paradise Inn. The nightclub, built of rocks and wood, stood high on a rock above the beach. Palm trees and cactus gave it a semblance of tropical softness which was belied by the sharpness of the wind. It was more pleasurable to sit inside near the big fire in the fireplace, and to contemplate the sea through the enormous windows.