“When I gradually returned from this dream-like experience I was in your studio. I looked around at your collages and recognized them. It was as if I had been there for the first time. I saw the colors, the luminosity and the floating, mobile, changeable quality. I understood all your stories, and all you had said to me. I could see why you had made your women transparent, and the houses open like lace so that space and freedom could blow through them.”
When she came home on vacation, she had emerged from her grey cocoon. She was now sixteen and sending forth her first radiations and vibrations dressed in Varda’s own rutilant colors.
WHEN RENATE AND VARDA MET at Paradise Inn she had been touched by the story of his daughter. Secretly she wished she had had a father who was a magician with colors and who would have told her stories. To please him she wore a cotton dress in colors which recalled the dresses of his women. Her coat was lined with pale stripes of violet, white and green which immediately attracted Varda’s attention. He was as excited by a new combination of tones or materials as other men might be by a new dish, or a new brand of paint. He was always searching for pieces of textiles for his collages. He caressed the lining of Renate’s coat with delight.
To his amazement Renate took a big pair of scissors from the kitchen and before his eyes she cut out a piece big enough to dress one of his abstract women.
Varda spent a few days at the inn. There were many parties given for him. At these parties the two painters dazzled each other like two magicians practicing all their spells and charms upon each other.
But the friendship remained aerial, like two acrobats speaking to each other only when hundreds of feet above the crowd.
Speaking of modern painting Renate said: “So many of them lack taste.”
“What they lack is distaste,” said Varda.
They laughed together, but the distance remained.
One day Varda absorbed some of Henri’s best wine, the one which fermented the highest content ofeloquence, and he confessed to him: “Renate is marvelous.”
“She is marvelous,” echoed Henri. “I’m going to name a dessert after her.”
“She is femme toute faite.”
“Toute faite?”
“Already designed, completed, perfect in every detail.”
“You say this as if it were not a compliment.”
“I only say it regretfully, Henri. For I myself, I need unformed women, unfinished, undesigned women I can mold to my own pattern. I’m an artist. I’m only looking for fragments, remnants which I can co-ordinate in a new way. A woman artist makes her own patterns.”
“A good recipe for other women,” said Henri.
BRUCE AND RENATE ENTERED A DIMLY-LIT CAFE where anyone could sit on the small stage and sing folk songs, and if he sang well would be kept there by applause and, if not, quickly encouraged to leave. The tables were beer-stained and sticky with Coca-Cola. The waitresses were heavily made up with Cleopatra eyes, and they wore sack dresses and black stockings. The spotlight on the singers was red and made them appear pale and condemned to sing. The shadows were so strong that when they bent over their guitar it seemed suggestively intimate and not like a song one must listen to. A few figures stood in the shadows on the side, and from this vague group a woman sprang towards them and, touching Renate’s arm, said in a chanting voice: “You are Renate,” giving to the name all the musical resonances it contained and adding, with a perfect lyrical illogic: “I am Nina,” as if a woman called Nina must of course address a woman called Renate. Renate hesitated because she was trying to remember where she had seen Nina and yet she could not remember, and this was so manifest on her face that Nina said: “Of course you could not remember, there are fourteen women in me, you may have met only one of them, perhaps on the stage, when I acted at the Playwright’s Theatre, do you remember that? I was the blind girl.”
“Yes, of course I remember her, but you do not seem like the same woman, and even now you do not seem like the same woman who first came out to speak to me.”
It was true that she changed so quickly that already Renate had seen in her a beautiful Medea because of the flowing hair, but a Medea without jealousy, and the next moment she seemed like a wandering Ophelia who had never known repose. It was impossible to imagine her asleep or drowned. She held her head proudly on a very slender neck; she used her hands like puppets, each finger with an important role to play. She was without sadness and so light she seemed almost weightless, as if performing on a stage alone, while her eyes scanned the entire room, her quick-winged words a monologue about to be interrupted. She thrust out her shoulders as if she had to push her way through a crowd and leave.
Bruce’s speech and thoughts were agile, like those of a rootless person accustomed to pack and move swiftly from city to city, from home to home, and yet he could not follow her flights and vertiginous transitions. A touching, apologetic smile accompanied her incoherence. She herself did not get lost in sudden turns and free associations, but she seemed wistful that others could not follow her.
“My name is Nina Gitana de la Primavera.” She said “Gitana” as if she had been born in Spain, and “Primavera” as if she had been born in Italy, and one could see the Persian flowers on her cotton dress flowering.
“But these are my winter names. I change with the seasons. When the spring comes I no longer need to be Primavera. I leave that to the season. It is so far away.” She threw her head back like a young horse trying to sniff the far off spring, so far back Renate thought her neck would snap.
“I am waiting for Manfred, but he is not coming. May I sit with you?”
“Who is Manfred?” asked Bruce.
She repeated the name but separated its syllables: “Man—fred.” As if she were examining its philological roots.
“Man-fred is the man I am going to love. He may not yet be born. I have often loved men who are not yet born.”