Collages (8 page)

VARDA LIVED ON A CONVERTED FERRY BOAT in
Sausalito and sailed the bay in his own sail boat; so it was surprising to see
him arrive at Paradise Inn in an old station wagon bringing his newest collages
for an exhibition: “Collages are not sea-faring.”

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 facades 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?