Collages Page 8

  With her two index fingers she held up the corners of her mouth into an exaggerated grin. “We must always smile,” and then dropped her lids and mimicked a flood of tears falling from her eyes, “even when we feel like weeping.”

  They were all sitting at the beach, and Renate offered her a drink in a paper cup.

  “It is not a very beautiful cup,” said Renate.

  “But it seems beautiful to me because it is so simple, it does not require a ceremony, to be polished, and served on the right tray at the right moment. Everything is so simple here. In my country I was considered a very advanced girl. But ever since I have started to travel in order to become an actress I have learned that I am still bound to tradition and conventions. When I went to Paris I was invited for a week-end in the country. The young people had a guest house of their own. It was called La Maison des Oiseaux. (When Nobuko said “oiseaux”it sounded like the sibilance of bees, of breeze.) I was so formal and proper. They were sweet about my fears. I came to America to learn to be free. Ancient beliefs are still so strong in Japan, tradition is imposed on us by our parents, but the new Japan pulls us away, the young are caught in this conflict. We cannot emancipate ourselves if we stay there, we must get away. I love my family and I do not like to offend them. I do not feel free.”

  Renate had just visited cherry blossom trees grown by Japanese gardeners. Nobuko laughed at Renate’s admiration of the cherry blossoms. “They are so silly, they bloom so briefly, and the rest of the time they drop worms on our hairdos.”

  When Nobuko spoke of intimate things like the Maison des Oiseaux, she bowed her head and closed her eyes as if she were in a confessional. She locked her small hands as if to pray for this new Nobuko trying to be born.

  Nobuko was given the role of Cassandra in Trojan Women of Euripides. She struggled to emerge from her Japanese print movements. She rolled over rocks, fell on her knees, shook her long black hair and collapsed in disordered grief. It was a caricature of a Western interpretation of Greek tragedy. One feared to see her snap her fragile neck, or force the exquisite lines out of shape forever.

  After the play, receiving visitors and compliments, she held her small hand before her mouth as if to screen the new bold words she might utter, as if to muffle their effect.

  All through rehearsals she avoided using the word “rape.”

  She talked about the Sabine women being deflowered. ”The characterization of Cassandra,” she said, “is still a conflict between the director and the chorus.” But for Nobuko it seemed more like a conflict between a Western interpretation of Greek tragedy as chaos and a classical Japanese elegance of style.

  “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 risqué. 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 t
o 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 cafés, 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 drea
m that they all floated through the sky, and came down to visit me in my lonely army cot.”

  When he had delivered Renate to her home, he gave her his card: “You can always call on Emile, the painter from Marseilles, if you have any secret missions, secret love missions to accomplish. I am discretion itself.”

  One day the Consul’s wife asked Renate and Bruce to take her to the American desert which she had never seen. They agreed to drive her there. The Consul’s wife packed a wicker basket with a picnic lunch. The wicker clasp was broken so she slipped a pencil through the noose. For the desert she wore sandals as worn as the Turkish rugs and loose fitting clothes which seemed like pale echoes of former Oriental wear.

  Was it the American desert she had come to see or was she in her mind, superimposing over it the deserts of China, Africa, India, and this one a background upon which to weave reconstructions of ast scenes, drum heats by an open fire, horse’s hoofs and Arab shouts, while lambs roasted on a spit at night, black tents and midnight blue robes, black eyes and shining beards?

  She was appreciative of the American desert but Renate did not know if she was using it like her worn rugs as a framework upon which to reweave more luxuriant scenes and wilder musical accompaniments.

  Bruce was singing Western songs for her, accompanied by his guitar. The pure voice of a young man who had never known the raucous tones ofpassion, the wild cries of battle, fever, pain, despair, lust. She lost herself in the songs which matched his flawless beauty. Was he evoking for her other songs, other guitars, other young men?

  With those who had lived such full lives it was difficult to know which one they were evoking at the moment, and how much of past colors they were using to paint the present with. Did she seesignboards, motels, coffee shops, giant hot dog signs, or mirages, ochre sand dunes, and vermilion sunsets?

  “How strange it is,” she said, “this beautiful desert seems uninhabited, as if the people living on it did not belong here. As if all of us were tourists!”