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.”