Collages

by Anais Nin

  “I must get back soon,” he said. “I left my car alone for two hours now.”

  “They’re not strict with tourists,” she answered. “Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, it’s not in the street. I wouldn’t leave it in the street. I tried every hotel in town, until I found one where I could park my car near my bedroom. Do you want to come and see it?”

  He said this in the tone of a man offering a glimpse of an original Picasso.

  They walked slowly in the sun. “It’s such a beautiful car,” he said, “the best they ever made. I raced it in Los Angeles. It’s as sensitive as a human being. You don’t know what an ordeal it was, the trip from Mexico City. They are repairing the road—it was full of detours.”

  ”What happened to you?”

  “Nothing happened to me, but my poor car! I could feel every bump on the road; every hole, the dust, the stones. It hurt me to see it struggle along that road, scraped by pebbles, stained with tar, covered with red dust, my beautiful car that I took such care of. It was as if my own body were walking on that road. I had to drive through a river. A little boy sat astride the hood, and guided me with a propeller-like gesture of his hand, indicating the best path through the water. But I never knew when we were going to get stuck there, my poor low-slung car in muddied waters, where the natives wash all their laundry, and bathe the cattle. I could feel the sand and grit in the motor. I could see the flies, mosquitoes, and other insects cluttering the air vent. I never want to put my car through such an experience again.”

  They had reached a low, wide rambling hotel surrounded by a vast jungle garden. There under a palm tree, among sun flowers and ferns, stood the car, sleek and shining, seemingly undamaged.

  “Oh, it’s in the sun,” cried the man from Los Angeles and rushed to move it into shadows. “It’s a good thing I came back. Do you want to sit in it? I’ll order drinks meanwhile.”

  He held the door open.

  Renate said: “I would love to drive to the beach on the other side of the mountain. It’s beautiful at this time of the day.”

  ”I’ve heard of it, but it wouldn’t be good for the car. They’re building on that road. I hear them set off dynamite. I wouldn’t trust Mexicans with dynamite.”

  “Have you been to the bullfight?”

  “I can’t take my car there, the boys steal tires and side mirrors, I hear.”

  “Have you been to the Black Pearl night club?”

  “That’s one place we can go to, they have a parking lot with an attendant. Yes, I’ll take you there.”

  Later when they were having a drink, the sun descended like a meteorite of antique gold and sank into the sea.

  “Ha,” breathed the man, smiling. “I’m glad it’s cooler now. The sun is not good for my car.”

  Then he explained that for the return home he had made arrangements to get his car back without suffering anymore. “I booked passage on a freighter. It will take three weeks. But it will be easier on my car.”

  “Be sure and buy a big bottle of mineral water,” said Renate.

  “To wash the car?” asked the man from Los Angeles, frowning.

  “No, for yourself. You might get dysentery.”

  She offered to speak to the captain of the freighter because she talked Spanish.

  They drove to the docks together. The captain stood half-naked directing the loading of bananas and pineapples. He wore a handkerchief tied to his forehead to keep the perspiration from falling over his face. The orange dress attracted his eyes and he smiled.

  Renate asked him if he would consent to share his cabin with the American, and take good care of him.

  “Anything to please the señorita,” he said.

  “How will you fare on fish and black beans?” she asked the car worshipper.

  “Let’s buy some canned food, and a sponge to wash the salt off my car. It will be on the open deck.”

  The day of his departure the beach town displayed its most festive colors; the parrots whistled, the magnolia odors covered the smell of fish, and the flowers were as profuse as at a New Orleans Carnival.

  Renate arrived in time to see the car being measured and found too big for the net in which they usually picked up the cargo. So they placed two narrow planks from the pier to the deck, and the man was asked to drive the car onto the freighter. One inch out of the way and both car and man would fall into the bay. But the owner of the car was a skillful driver, and an amorous one, so he finally maneuvered it on deck. Once there, it was found to be so near the edge that the sailors had to rope it tightly like a rebellious bronco. Lashed to the ship by many ropes it could no longer roll over the edge.

  Then the man from Los Angeles moved into the only cabin with his big bottle of mineral water and a bag of canned soups.

  As the freighter slowly tugged away he cried: I’ll let you know in what state my car gets there! Thanks for your help.”

  A month later she received a letter:

  “Dear Kind Friend: I will always remember you so gay and carefree in your orange dress. And how wise you were! If only I had listened to your warnings! I used the mineral water to wash the salty mist off my car, and so the first thing that happened was that I got the ‘tourista’ with a high fever. The captain kept his word to you and shared his cabin with me, but also with a barrel of fish, cans of gasoline, and hay for the animals. Then the sea got pretty rough and the car began to roll back and forth, and at each roll I thought it would plunge into the sea. I decided to sleep inside it, and if anything were to happen we would both go together. At the first town we stopped at, we took in a herd of cattle. They were crowded on deck, and they pushed against my car, dribbled on it, and even tried to gore it. At night they quarreled and I don’t need to describe the stench. The heat was as heavy as a blanket. At the second stop we took in a Madame and about twenty call girls who were being moved to another house. The captain gallantly offered his cabin. Tequila was free on board and so you can imagine how rowdy the nights were. After three weeks I arrived in Los Angeles a wreck, but my car is in fine shape. I had it lubricated and I wish you could hear it purr along the roads. Los Angeles has such wonderful roads.”

  RENATE MOVED TO MALIBU, CALIFORNIA

  Weeks later, when she was installed in her house, Bruce arrived, as if they had agreed to take a detour and resume their relationship. He laid his dusty and tired head on her shoulder and sought in the darkest part of her hair, at the base of her neck, the place where the nerves most clearly carried messages of future pleasures. His eyes were clear and innocent, free of memories. He smiled innocently, and settled in the house like a privileged guest, detached from the care of it. He took the cover off his typewriter, and then he gave her a few pages to read.

  “That’s the beginning of my novel,” he said. And Renate read:

  “The hotel in Acapulco was a series of cottages. It seems the ‘patron’ was quite a puritan and wanted no scandal, no extra visitors at night. It seemed that he patrolled the cottages at night himself. He wanted the place to remain a ‘family’ hotel.”

  Renate interrupted with: “But that’s the hotel where I stayed.”

  “Read on.”

  “A woman arrived in an orange dress. It was not only the orange dress which aroused attention. She radiated joy and her laughter was warm and spontaneous. The patron knew she was alone and he often hovered around her cottage to catch the foreigner at some unholy hospitality. One night there was a man’s laughter mingled with hers, but the ‘patron’ did not hear it. A neighbor heard it. He stayed awake to listen, saying to himself he must warn the girl in the orange dress if the ‘patron’ came near. She was fortunate. The man remembered being all stirred up by the laughter, by the intimate quality of it. And the next morning he examined the girl in the orange dress with more attention, as if he had failed to notice in her face or in her behavior what would create such laughter at night. She was having breakfast, with her eyelids lowered. And then a ch
ambermaid came in, breathless, and talked to the ‘patron,’ and the ‘patron’ came and talked to the girl in the orange dress, and the girl got up blushing and rushed away. It seems that she had left the visitor early in the morning, that he was to have dressed quietly, unobtrusively, and be gone by the time she came back. But as she left, she unconsciously locked the screen door and imprisoned him, so that he had to call the maid, and the maid, thinking she had trapped a bootlegged occupant had reported him while he rattled the door in anger and thus let everyone know…”

  Renate began to laugh. She laughed until Bruce began to laugh with her, though he was not as certain of the meaning of the incident as she was.

  She saw that he was laughing from contagion, with trust in her comic spirit, and this made her laugh all the more as a touching form of love.

  “I must have been thinking of you, Bruce. You, and how quietly you slipped away at night. It must have been you I wanted to lock up!”

  “Did you love him?”

  Renate laughed. “He looked like Pinocchio at the piano, but sang like Caruso, only more lightly. He was just back from visiting his mother, so beautiful he said, with a luminous skin and eyes just like mine. He had her all to himself, he told me, his brothers and sisters being married, and he loved her, he realized he loved her (and me because I resembled her) so much in the way Freud said!”

  A few days later she brought Bruce a peace dove she had found pinned to the wall of a Swedish shop. It was carved out of paper-thin wood with transparent wings as light as a breath.

  Renate said: “Let’s hang it up by a thread so it will spin.”

  Bruce climbed on a ladder and began to hang it up. He asked Renate for thread which she brought him. It broke. The peace dove fell to the ground. Bruce said: “Now I know why my buttons never stay on. You sew them with such a weak thread.”

  Renate brought stronger thread. She went to light a fire in the fireplace. She prepared dinner. She prepared food for the dogs, Tequila and Sake.

  “Why didn’t you buy a whole flock of doves? I would have liked a whole flock of doves flying around the room.”

  “A whole flock of doves wouldn’t bring peace to our relationship.”

  “You know the consequences of opening Pandora’s box,” he said.

  “You never give me any warning of your departures. You call all amenities balls and chains. You take the only car we have so that I cannot even escape.”

  “To find other Pinocchios?”

  “To find anything that will make me forget you.”

  “You know that what I give to others is nothing I take away from you, nothing that belongs to our relationship.”

  “But Bruce, it’s not what you give to others which hurts me, but what you don’t give to me, your secrets.”

  The big log in the fireplace was damp and smoked so heavily that Renate had to open the doors and windows. They both stood shivering in the cold wind that blew from the sea.

  Renate said: “I’ve always loved garden parties.”

  “Let me tell you my dream. I was listening to music. My body became compressed into a column. At the top of this column grew antennae of science fiction design which threw lassos of blue electric lights in circles. In their centrifugal motion they captured other waves. The waves of the brain? Seeking to contact other vibrations? The radiations of my brain not only designed fever charts but they were neon-lighted and threw off sparks like electric short circuits.”

  Consolation was a Christian act, not Pan’s profession. Bruce could only smile when she could not laugh quickly enough to give her threatening tears time to evaporate. This time they rose to a dangerous water level.

  “We can’t live our Mexican life here,” said Bruce. “Let’s get a sailboat and sail around the world. You can paint while we’re traveling and I will write my novel. I saw an advertisement that sailboats are very cheap in Holland, and they sell a kind of sailboat which can travel both by sea and by river. I will learn to sail it. You rent the house and meet me in Holland when I am ready.”

  “I can’t imagine you as a captain of a sailboat.”

  But she felt that perhaps this was the mobility Bruce needed, the fluid, changing, variable way he wanted to live.

  He was gone for a month. In his letters he described the old captain who had sold him a sailboat and who was teaching him to run it. The sailboat had a motor too, in case they were becalmed. There was only room for two on the boat so the old captain would not sail with them. But by the time she arrived Bruce felt he could handle it alone.

  When she came the captain had waited to greet her and to install her in the small cabin. Then with a salute and a smile he was off.

  The boat looked freshly painted and swayed gently by the Dutch pier. Renate loved the lightness of it. She began to unpack, and even set up her painting material.

  Bruce called to her. He was tangled in a mass of cords. Renate had not foreseen that she would have to become his assistant. She unknotted cords, pulled at the sails, ran from one end of the boat to the other, watched their swelling, adjusted a hundred clasps and fought for balance against changing winds. Bruce had absorbed little from the Dutch captain. He read directions from a book. He gave orders to Renate in technical language, which she did not understand. By the time they sailed into the first harbor for the night the graceful sailboat seemed more like a wild, unmanageable bronco under their feet.

  The constant rocking kept her from sleeping. She felt her hair would wear off completely from the constant friction on her pillow. Duties on board were endless, even when they were not sailing. Renate wanted to return and ask the old captain to help, even if it meant sleeping on deck. But Bruce’s pride was offended at this capitulation. At the same time he had never concentrated on any occupation for such long hours and she would find him asleep sometimes under a dangerously swollen sail which would almost tip the boat over.

  They decided motoring along rivers might give them more leisure. They folded the sails and used only the motor. When they cast off anchor Renate could not unfasten the thick wet cord at the other end of the boat. Bruce came to help, and as he straddled it to uncoil it from the shore, he fell into the water, and the boat began to drift away from him. He caught up with it only by swimming furiously.

  They traveled for a while down the rivers and canals, admiring the soft landscape, the browns and greys so famliar from Dutch paintings. Then the motor sputtered and died. They were in the middle of a swift flowing river, becalmed.

  The boat ceased to follow a straight course. Every now and then, like a waltzer, it took a complete turn in the middle of the river.

  Its erratic course did not discourage the barges passing by with cargoes and racing for the locks. They traveled at full speed alongside the sailboat, not noticing that Bruce and Renate were rudderless, and that they might at any moment circle in the path of the swift sliding barges.

  At one moment the sailboat skirted the shore and Bruce maneuvered it towards the right into a small canal. At this very moment the motor revived and pushed them at full speed under too low a bridge. Scraping this they continued to speed past quiet small houses on the shore. Bruce now could not stop the motor.

  It had regained its youthful vigor. He stood on the bridge and remembered his western movies. He picked up a coil of rope and lassoed one of the chimneys of a passing house. This stopped the runaway sailboat but drew a crowd around them.

  “Crazy Americans,” said someone in the crowd.

  A policeman came towards them on a bicycle.

  “You damaged a historical bridge.”

  “I didn’t know it was historical,” said Bruce.

  “You will have to appear in court.”

  That night, like contrabandists, they sailed away (pulled by a tugboat) to a dry dock Bruce had heard of. There he had the boat taken out of the water and loaded on a train.

  “What is your plan,” asked Renate.

  “We’d do better wi
th plenty of room around us, so I thought we’d take the boat to the South of France and sail around the Mediterranean. I’m putting it on the train.”

  The boat occupied an entire railroad car. They could see it from their carriage when they leaned out of the window. It was exposed to the sun, bottom up. The rigging was dismounted and tied to its sides. The sails looked like folded parachutes. The journey was long and hot, with many stops along the way.

  When they reached the South of France it looked to Renate, a painter, exactly like a Dufy poster, all light blue and cream white, sea flags, dresses undulating, brown bodies, music in the cafés, intimate corners for lovers surrounded by oleander bushes, flower vendors at every corner, mimosa, violets, carriages with umbrellas opened over them.

  The railroad had taken them to the dry dock with their boat. It was put on wheels.

  “We are going to do some spherical sailing,” said Bruce. “In spherical sailing, the earth is regarded as a sphere (usually a perfect sphere, though some modem nautical tes allow for its spheroidal shape) and allowance is made for the curvature of its surface.”

  “Couldn’t we do some parallel sailing,” asked Renate, who had been reading the same book. “Perhaps we could just sail parallel to the shore. Then we’d never get lost.”

  The boat was sliding down into the sparkling sea. The men secured the anchor and returned to call for Renate and Bruce and place them upon the deck, and then left them. It was Renate who noticed that it was taking in more than the usual amount of water.

  (How could the innocent sailors have known the hot Mediterranean sun would melt the caulking in the boat’s bottom during the interminable railroad voyage.)

  Bruce turned to the index in the book and read all about pumping. He pumped for a while and fell asleep. Renate pumped for a while and then felt exhausted and tried to wake Bruce.