Collages Read online

  He unloaded them at the entrance and stood them up against the rocky banks in the sunlight. They eclipsed the sun, the sea and the plants. The laminated blues dimmed the refractions of the ocean and made it seem ponderous and opaque. His treble greens vibrated and made the plants seem dead and the flowers artificial. His shafts of gold made the sunrays pale.

  With small pieces of cotton and silks, scissors and glue and a dash of paint, he dressed his women in irradiations; his colors breathed like flesh and the fine spun lines pulsated like nerves.

  In his landscapes of joy, women became staminated flowers, and flowers women. They were as fragrant as if he had painted them with thyme, saffron and curry. They were translucent and airy, carrying their Arabian Night’s cities like nebulous scarves around their lucite necks.

  Sometimes they were masked like Venetian beauties at masquerades. They wore necklaces of solar meteorites, and earrings which sang like birds. Velvet petals covered their breasts and stared with enticing eyes. Orange tones played like the notes of a flute. Magenta had a sound of bells. The blues throbbed like the night.

  After his scissors had touched them, his women became flowers, plants and sea shells.

  He cut into all the legendary textiles of the world: damask of the Medicis, oyster white of Greek robes, the mixed gold and blue of Venetian brocades, the midnight blue wools of Peru, the sand colors of the African cottons, the transparent muslins of India, to give birth to women who only appear to men asleep. His women became comets, trailing long nebulous trains, erratic members of the solar system. He gave only the silver scale of their mermaid moods, the sea shell rose of their ear lobes, corollas, pistils, light as wings. He housed them in façades of tent shelters which could be put up for a moment and folded and vanished when desire expired.

  “Nothing endures,” said Varda, “unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.”

  He often spoke of paradise. Paradise was a distillation of women panoplied with ephemeral qualities. His collages taught how to remain in a state of grace of love, extract only elixirs, transmute all life into lunisolar fiestas, and all women, by a process of cut-outs, to aphrodisiacs.

  He was the alchemist searching only for what he could transmute into gold. He never painted homely women, jealous women, or women with colds. He dipped his brushes in pollen, in muteness, in honeymoons, and his women were interchangeable and mobile.

  He allowed space and air in their bodies so they would not become too heavy, nor stay too long. He never depicted the death of a love, fatigue or boredom. Every collage was rich with a new harem, the constancy of illusion, fidelity to euphorias born of woman.

  He took no time to weep over fadings or witherings; he was always mixing a new brew, a new woman, and when he sat at his large table, scissors in hand, searching for a new marriage of colors, a variation in triangles, in squares and semicircles, interweaving cupolas and breasts, legs and columns, windows and eyes on beds of pleasure, under tent of rituals of the flesh, each color became a music box.

  He canonized his women, they bore the names of new brands of sainthood.

  Saint Banality, who reigned over the artists who could take everyday objects and turn them into extraordinary ones, like the postman in France who built a castle out of the stones he found on his route every day; the shoe cleaner in Brooklyn who decorated his shoe shine box with medals, unmatched earrings, broken glass and silver paper to look like a Byzantine crown; the mason in Los Angeles who built towers out of broken cups, tiles, tea pots and washstands.

  There was Saint Perfidia who knew how to destroy the monotony of faithfulness, and Saint Parabola who decorated with haloes those whose stories no one could understand, and Saint Hyperbole who cured of boredom.

  Saint Corona arrived at sunrise to wake him, and Saint Erotica visited him at night.

  The women were interchangeable and flowed into one another as in dreams. He admitted and loved all of them except women in black. “Black is for widows,” he said, for the severe women who had raised him in Greece, for women in churches and women in cemeteries. Black was the absence of color.

  He saw women as feathers, furs, meteorites, lace, campaniles, filigree; and so he was more amazed than other fathers to find his own daughter made of other substances like a colorless doll lying inside a magician’s trunk, with eyes not quite blue, hair not quite gold, as if she had been the only one he had forgotten to paint.

  When she was six years old he felt there was yet time, that it was merely because he had never painted children, and that his gift for painting women would become effective on the day of her womanhood. At seven years of age she listened to his stories and believed them, and he felt that with patience, luminosity and plumage would grow.

  A tall, very strong woman came to visit Varda, and the gossips whispered that she was a gangster’s moll. When she saw Varda’s daughter she said: “Varda, would you mind if someday I kidnapped your daughter?”

  This frightened her and every evening before going to bed she would ask: “She won’t come and kidnap me while I’m asleep, will she?”

  “No,” said Varda, “she can’t take you away without my permission, and I won’t let her. She has tried to bribe me. She came this morning in a boat loaded with sacks of sugar and sacks of fruit (and you know how much I love them) to exchange for you and I said, ‘No, I love my daughter and you can take back your sugar and your fruit.’”

  The next evening at bedtime Varda said: “Today the kidnapper came with a hundred bottles of red wine (and you know how much I love wine) and I told her that I loved my daughter and didn’t want any wine.”

  And the next evening he told her: “She was here with a hundred elephants (and you know how much I love elephants) and I sent her away.”

  Each day she awaited new proofs of her father’s love. One day he turned down a hundred camels left over from a film, and then a hundred sacks of paint (and she knew how much Varda loved paint) and then a hundred sacks of bits of cloth for his collages, beautiful fragments from all over the world (and she knew how much he loved textiles).

  And then Varda said one evening: “The kidnapper thought of the most diabolical offer of all. What do you think it was? She had a hundred little girls, just like you, with blue eyes and blond hair and willowy figures, and all fit for a harem and once again (though I was sorely tempted) I said, ‘No, I love my own girl best of all.”’

  But in spite of the stories, it was as if she had determined to grow contrary to all the women he loved. She let her hair fall as it willed, never brushing it to bring out the gloss. She wore faded jeans and greasy tennis sneakers. She shredded the edge of her jeans so they would look like those of beggars on the stage. She wore Varda’s torn shirts and discarded sweaters and went out with boys more sullen and mute than herself.

  On her fifteenth birthday when he expected a metamorphosis as spectacular as that of a butterfly, she wrote him a long reproachful letter from school asking him to give up “those women.” She said that she would not stay with him anymore while those flashy, glittering women were about.

  She doubted his prestidigitations with words, as if he were a stage magician, as if to say: “See, they have no effect on me. I do not believe in fairy tales. I am going to study science.”

  When she came on holiday Varda told her another story: “There was a woman from Albania who was famous for her beauty. A young man from America came, very handsome, slim and blond and he paid court to her and said: ‘I love you because you remind me of a cousin of mine I loved when I was in school. You also remind me of a movie actress I always adored on the screen. I love you. Will you marry me?’ The Albanian girl took a small pistol out of her boot and shot him. When she was brought to trial the old Albanian judge listened with sympathy as she made her own defense. ‘Your honor, I have been humiliated several times in my life.’ ‘How could that be,’ said the judge, ‘you are such a
beautiful woman.’ ‘Yes, your honor, it has happened. I was humiliated the first time by a man who left me waiting in church when we were to be married. He was in a car accident, it is true, but still in my family there is a tradition of unfailing courtesy about marriage ceremonies. The second time I was told by a Frenchman that I was too fat. The third time I was “clocked” by a policeman on a motorcycle. He said I had been speeding and I contradicted him and he said he had “clocked” me. Imagine that. But, your honor, I never killed before. You know Albanian pride. Until this American came and told me I reminded him of two other women, and that, your honor, was too much. He offended my uniqueness.”’

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Women in Albania do not carry pistols in their boots. And who wants to be unique anyway? It’s a dated concept.”

  When she criticized modern painting he tried to explain the state of painting today.

  “There was a painter who was asked to send his best painting to an exhibition and he accepted on condition that it would be curtained off until the day of the opening. This condition was accepted. The crowd came, quite a large one. His painting was the only one hidden behind a curtain in a box, and the last to be exposed. When the curtain was finally parted, the painting was a large square canvas, pure blank. Blank! The public was outraged. There were insults: ‘Surrealist! Dadaist! Beatnik! Mutant!’ Then the painter came forward and explained that he had painted a self-portrait and that his dog had found it such an exact likeness that he had licked it all off. But there had been a portrait, and this was merely the proof of the faithfulness of the likeness. And so, dear daughter, for those who are interested in progress, twenty years ago painting was judged by critics, and today it is judged by a dog. This is the state of painting today.”

  Varda also had a theory on uncouth manners which he told very often in the presence of his daughter’s sulky visitors.

  “This is a modernized version of the Princess and the Dragon. Today she would be the Imperial Valley Lettuce Queen and the young man could be any one of you. The dragon had to be killed before the young man could marry the girl. The dragon had a corrugated skin, bluish and silvery and scaly like a mirror broken into a thousand small pieces. His eyes wept chronically. He spouted fire with the regularity of a lighter. The young man turned off the gas first and then cut off the dragon’s head. He took the beauty queen brusquely by the arm and pushing her ahead of him said in a Humphrey Bogart style of speech: ‘Oh, come on, we’ve wasted enough time on the old dragon. I’ve got a motel room waiting.’ The queen looked at the expiring dragon weeping at her leaving, and suddenly she put her arms around the beast and said: ‘I’ll stay with him. I don’t like the rough tone of your voice.’ And as she encircled the scaly dragon, he turned into a young man handsomer and tenderer than the one she had jilted.”

  His daughter shrugged her shoulders, blew into her bubble gum of a pink Varda had never in all his life conceded to use, counted her new freckles, and went back to her science homework.

  She was chewing the end of her pencil while she studied a chemical which produced visions and hallucinations. She read to her father in a flat-toned voice the effect of consciousness-expanding chemicals.

  “Colors breathe and emit light.”

  “But my colors do that,” said Varda.

  “Figures dissolve into one another and appear at times transparent.”

  “As they do in my collages,” said Varda.

  “Someone saw whirling clouds, suns and moons,” she read in the same voice as she might have read: “Imperial Valley produced 20,000 head of lettuce.”

  “As in the paintings of Van Gogh,” said Varda. “What need of chemicals?”

  “But when you take a chemical you know it will affect you for only a few hours and then you will return to normality. You can control it, modify it, you can even stop its effects if you wish to, if you don’t like what is happening to you.”

  “In other words, a return ticket,” said Varda.

  “The next day the world is back again in its proper place, the real colors are back.”

  “Doesn’t that prove that when you remove an inhibiting consciousness and let men dream they all dream like painters or poets?”

  “But you dream all the time, whereas a pill is more scientific.”

  Perhaps science would illumine his cautious child. Perhaps by way of a chemical she might respond, vibrate, shine? He watched the eyelashes pulled down like shades, the ears covered by hair, the lips parsimonious of words.

  What had he absorbed through the years which had opened these worlds to him which others sought in mushrooms? Where had he learned the secret of phosphorescence, of illumination, of transfiguration? Where had he learned to take the shabbiest materials and heighten them with paint, alter their shapes with scissors?

  “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.