Anaïs Nin - Collages

As they talked, Lisa led Renate to a small and shabby apartment house. They walked to the top floor.

“Bill is poor because most of his salary goes in alimony.”

When the elevated passed they had to stop talking. This gave Renate time to wonder why Lisa had not clung to her beautiful life.

When they reached the top floor, instead of a dark, anonymous door, Renate found a canary yellow garden gate. Lisa had covered the walls of the hallway with lattice of vine-covered trellis; the ceilings hung with potted plants and cages filled with singing birds. When she touched the gate Mexican bells chimed. Lisa shed her dark coat and appeared in a flaming orange dress. The small apartment was no longer in New York. Rugs, panels, murals, paintings, statues, serapes, white fur on the bed. It was Acapulco. She had placed her stone gods in niches, her jewelry overflowed from a coffer, and a record player spun tender Mexican songs.

There were Mexican paper flowers in a jar, silks on the windows, and the shutters were painted yellow so that even on this dark day the sun seemed to be shining. There were more birds singing in the small kitchen.

This gallant effort at transplantation touched Renate. Would Lisa survive in this illusory set? Bill had torn her away but had not won her to his own life. What quality did he possess that she should be willing to risk withering her essentially primitive and tropical nature?

“Bill has gone for liquor,” said Lisa. “He will bring back my sister who lives nearby.”

At this moment they both arrived. Bill was small, not handsome, and he was cursing the chiming bells over the door and the wicker gate which clung to his coat. His tie was askew, his coat rumpled, and the end of an unlit cigar hung from his lips. He was in harmony with Third Avenue, and so was his harsh accent, and his way of exaggerating his homeliness and bad manners as if he were proud of them. Lisa’s sister had the accent of a street boy and the impersonal mechanized politeness of a telephone operator. Both of them talked to Lisa as if she were a pretender, as if everything she wore, or said, or hung on the walls were artificial, not hers by birth.

Bill put his short, stocky hand on Lisa’s knee and said smiling at Renate: “Well, isn’t it good to be home again? One of these days you’ll throw out all this fancy foreign stuff and be yourself again.”

“Home?” asked Renate.

“Home, yes,” said Bill. “Lisa lived around the corner from here when we were kids. We played in this street together. I was the first boy who kissed her. We had not seen each other for twenty years. She wanted me to stay in Acapulco and live her life, with all those phonies talking languages I couldn’t understand. I didn’t think she’d bring all this stuff with her. I can’t bring my friends here for a game of cards.”

Lisa’s sister said: “We both worked in the same office. The trouble started when she won a painting scholarship to Mexico. It all went to her head. She married an oil man. And then a man with a yacht big enough to sail to Europe.”

And because the paintings, the plants, the statues, the flowers and birds had been transplanted, not born there, they began to seem as they talked, like a background for a painting, and Lisa herself a model hired for one afternoon to sit for a painter, and Bill and Lisa’s sister like boors who had entered a gallery by mistake, expecting pictures of horses and trout fishing and found themselves in a dream painted by Rousseau, a couch in the middle of the jungle.

Would Bill and his card-playing friends be able to cage Lisa? Her cage now would be the stripes of dusty sunlight falling through the rails of the Third Avenue Elevated trains.

Bill shut off the record player before the Mexican song was finished.

Bill had come and awakened her from her dream of Acapulco with a cigar flavored kiss from the ashcan painting period of her childhood.

THE BELL RANG. IT WAS DOCTOR MANN with flowers for Lisa and a cigar for Bill.

He was collecting paintings to exhibit in Israel. He wanted to borrow some of Lisa’s Mexican paintings.

He had heard about Renate’s paintings and said he would be proud to take some back with him.

But he was not a painting fetichist. His particular hobby was quite exceptional.

Once a year Doctor Mann flewfrom Israel on a mysterious mission. But his leisure time he spent in visiting women writers. One by one he visited them all. He brought them brandy and chocolates from Israel, books to sign for his collection of autographed editions, and kissed them only once on parting.

He boasted of these friendships as other men boast of sexual conquests.

Many of these visits required patience, diplomacy and research work. First of all, to find their addresses, and then someone who might introduce him, and then to obtain an appointment, and, most difficult of all, to gain the privilege of a tete a tete.

His hair grew grey. His library of dedicated books was rich in treasures.

Just as Don Juan was always eager to test his charm on frigid women, Doctor Mann finally encountered the most inaccessible of all women writers and felt challenged to woo her.

He heard that Judith Sands was not only difficult to meet but that she avoided everyone related to the literary world. She led a secluded life in the Village, New York, and it was rumored that she preferred obscure village bars and anonymous company.

A few bar addicts vaguely remembered talking with a woman called Judith Sands but they insisted that she talked like a truck driver and could not possibly have written the poetic and stylized mythological novel she was praised for.

Those who lived in Paris before the war remembered a handsome, red-haired amazon in a tailored suit who sat at the Dome.

A few who lived in the Village knew her, but no one had anything to say, no revelations, no messages, as if those who knew her practiced a sick room secrecy, as if she had sealed their lips. There was an unnatural silence around her, either because she had satirized everyone, which she was known to do, or because those who respected her work did not wish to expose a Judith who did not resemble her parabolic work.

Several of the flat-soled women in tailored suits who walked down Eighth Street could have been Judith Sands. In an age of glaring, crude limelight, she had been able to avoid all familiarity, and her anonymity was preserved by an invisible repellent.

It was as if her novel had been the story of an earthquake by one of its victims; the book once written, and the author with it, seemed to have fallen into a crevice.

This shadowy figure aroused Doctor Mann’s love of conquest. He bought a bottle of champagne and rushed to the address he had been given. There was no name on the bell to the apartment, but he had been told that she lived on the second floor. Doctor Mann climbed the dark stairway and knocked on a dark door. No answer.

He waited and knocked again.

Silence.

He paced the frayed rug. He stared with an ironic smile at the empty niche where the stairway made a turn. When the Village was Italian, the statue of a saint had nestled there. He sat down inside the niche and waited. His ear caught a rustle inside, and it was enough to encourage his verbal gallantry.

He began an interminable monologue like one of the characters in her novel.

Every novelist knows that at one time or another he will be confronted with the incarnation of one of his characters. Whether that character is based on a living person or not, it will draw into its circle those who resemble it. Sooner or later the portrait will attract its twin, by the magnetism of narcissism, and the author will feel this inhabitant of his novel come to life and hear his character speaking as he had imagined.