Collages

VIENNA WAS THE
CITY OF STATUES. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets.
They stood on the top of the highest towers, lay down on stone tombs, sat on
horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and
read books made of stone. They adorned cornices like the figureheads of old
ships. They stood in the heart of fountains glistening with water as if they
had just been born. They sat under the trees in the parks summer and winter.
Some wore costumes of other periods, and some no clothes at all. Men, women,
children, kings, dwarfs, gargoyles, unicorns, lions, clowns, heroes, wise men,
prophets, angels, saints and soldiers preserved for Vienna an illusion of
eternity.

As a child Renate could see them from her
bedroom window. At night, when the white muslin curtains fluttered out like
ballooning wedding dresses, she heard them whispering like figures which had
been petrified by a spell during the day and came alive only at night. Their
silence by day taught her to read their frozen lips as one reads the messages
of deaf mutes. On rainy days their granite eye sockets shed tears mixed with
soot.

Renate would never allow anyone to tell her the
history of the statues, or to identify them. This would have situated them in
the past. She was convinced that people did not die, they became statues. They
were people under a spell and if she were watchful enough they would tell her
who they were and how they lived
now.

Renate’s eyes were sea green and tumultuous like
a reduction of the sea itself. When they seemed about to overflow with emotion,
her laughter would flutter like windchimes and form a crystal bowl to contain
the turquoise waters as if in an aquarium, and then her eyes became scenes of
Venice, canals of reflections, and gold specks swam in them like gondolas. Her
long black hair was swept away from her face into a knot at the top of her
head, then fell over her shoulders.

Renate’s father built telescopes nd
microscopes, so that for a long time Renate did not know the exact size of
anything. She had only seen them diminutive or magnified.

Renate’s father treated her like a confidante,
a friend. He took her with him on trips, to the inauguration of telescopes, or
to ski. He discussed her mother with her as if Renate were a woman, and
explained that it was her mother’s constant depression which drove him away
from home.

He relished Renate’s laughter, and there were
times when Renate wondered whether she was not laughing for two people,
laughing for herself but also for her mother who never laughed. She laughed
even when she felt like weeping.

When she was sixteen she decided she wanted to
become an actress. She informed her father of this while he was playing chess,
hoping that his concentration on the game would neutralize his reaction. But he
dropped his king and turned pale.

Then he said very coldly and quietly: “But I
have watched you in your school plays and I do not think you are a good
actress. You only acted an exaggerated version of yourself. And besides, you’re
a child, not a woman yet. You looked as if you had dressed up in your mother’s
clothes for a masquerade.”

“But, Father, it was you who once said that
what you liked about actresses was that they were exaggerated women! And now
you use this very phrase against me, to pass judgment on me.”

Renate spoke vehemently, and as she spoke her
sense of injustice grew magnified. It took the form of a long accusation.

“You have always loved actresses. You spend all
your time with them. I saw you one night working on a toy based on an interplay
of mirrors. I thought it was for me. I was the one who liked to look through
kaleidoscopes. But you gave it to an actress. Once you would not take me to the
theater, you said I was too young, yet you took a girl from my school, and she
showed me all the flowers and candy you sent her. You just want to keep me a
child forever, so I will stay in the house and cheer you up.”

She did not talk like a child angry that her
father did not believe in her talent, but like a betrayed wife or mistress.

She stormed and grew angrier until she noticed
that her father had grown paler, and was clutching at his heart. Frightened,
she stopped herself short, ran for the medicine she had seen him take, gave him
the drops, and then kneeled beside him and said softly: “Father, Father, don’t
be upset.
I was only pretending.
I was putting on an act to prove to you
that I could be a good actress. You see, you believed me, and it was all
pretence.”

These words softly spoken, revived her father.
He smiled feebly and said: “You’re a much better actress than I thought you
were. You really frightened me.”

Out of guilt she buried the actress. It was
only much later she discovered that her father had long been ill, that she had
not been told, and that it was not this scene which had brought on the first
symptoms of a weak heart.

In every relationship, sooner or later, there
is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict.

In this scene with her father, Renate condemned
the actress to death thinking that her guilt came from opposing his will. It
was only later that she became aware that this had not been a trial between
father and daughter.

She had, for a few moments, taken the place of
her mother and voiced accusations her mother had never uttered. Her mother had
been content to brood, or to weep. But Renate had spoken unconsciously a brief
for an unloved wife.

It had not been the rebellion of a daughter
against a father’s orders she felt guilty of, but her assuming what should have
been her mother’s role and place in her father’s heart.

And her father too, she knew now, had not been
hurt by a daughter’s rebellion, but by the unmasking of a secret: he had not
looked upon Renate as a daughter but as a woman, and his insistence on
maintaining her a child was to disguise the companionship he enjoyed.

After this scene, Renate’s father searched for
a tutor because Renate had at the same time refused to continue to go to
school.

He had a brother who had refused to go to school
and had locked himself up in his room with many books. He only came out of it
to eat and to renew his supply of books. At the end of seven years he came out
and passed his examinations brilliantly and became a professor.

He indulged in one gentle form of madness which
did not affect his scholarly and philosophical knowledge. He insisted that he
had no marrow in his bones.

Renate’s father thought that his brother would
be a good tutor for Renate. He could teach her music, painting, and languages.
It would help to keep her at home, away from the influence of other girls. But
he explained the professor’s obsession to her, and stressed clearly that she
must never refer to bones or marrow as it ignited his irrational obsession.

Renate was naturally strongly tempted to
discuss this very mystifying theme, and the marrow madness of her uncle
interested her far more than anything else he might teach her.

She spent many days trying to find a tactful
way to introduce this theme in their talks together. She did some preparatory
research in the library. She discovered that birds have no marrow in their
bones. She bought her uncle a canary with a coloratura voice and said: “Did you
know that birds do not have marrow in their bones?”

“Yes,” said her uncle, “but neither have I.”

“How marvelous,” said Renate, “that means that
you can fly!”

Her uncle was impressed but would not put
himself through the test. For fear she might urge him to explore this new
concept, he never referred to his handicap again. But before adopting complete
silence on this subject he offered her a rational explanation of its cause.

“My mother told me that she became pregnant
while still nursing me. Slowly I realized that this other child, my brother,
had absorbed all the nourishment away from me, thus leaving me without marrow
in my bones.”

WHEN BRUCE FIRST CAME TO VIENNA Renate noticed
him because of his resemblance to one of the statues which smiled at her
through her bedroom window. It was the statue with wings on its heels, the one
she was convinced traveled during the night. She observed him every morning
while eating her breakfast. She was certain she could detect signs of long
journeys. His hair seemed more ruffled, there was mud on his winged feet.

She recognized in Bruce the long neck, the
runner’s legs, the lock of hair over the forehead.

But Bruce denied this relationship to Mercury.
He thought of himself as Pan. He showed Renate how long the downy hair was at
the tip of his ears.

Familiarity with the agile, restless statue put
her at ease with Bruce. What added to the resemblance was that Bruce talked
little. Or he talked with motions of his body and the gestures were more
eloquent than the words. He entered into conversation with a forward thrust of
his shoulders, as if he were going either to fly or swim into its current, and
when he could not find the words he would shake his body as if he were
executing a jazz dance which would shake them out like dice. His thoughts were
still enclosed within his body and could only be transmitted through it. The
words he was about to say first shook his body and one could follow their
course in the vibrations running through it, in the shuffling rhythm of his
feet. Gusts of words agitated every muscle, but finally converged into one, at
the most two words: “Man, see, man, see here, man, oh man.”

At other times they rushed out in rhythmic
patterns like variations in jazz so swift one could barely catch them. He was
looking for words equivalent to jazz rhythms. He was impatient with sequences,
chronology, and construction. An interruption seemed to him more eloquent than
a complete paragraph.

But Renate, having been trained for years to
read the unmoving lips of statues, heard the words which came from the perfect
modeling of Bruce’s lips. The message she heard was: “What does one do when one
is fourteen times removed from one’s true self, not two, or three, but fourteen
times away from the center?”

She would start with making a portrait of him.
He would see himself as she saw him. That would be a beginning.

They worked together for many afternoons. What
Bruce observed was compassion in her voice, what he saw under her heavy sensual
eyelids was a diminutive image of himself swimming in the film of emotion which
humidified her eyes.

“Come with me to Mexico,” said Bruce. “I want
to wander about a little until I find out who I am, what I am.”

And so they started on a trip together. Bruce
wanted to put space and time between the different cycles of his life.

It ws during the long drives through hot
deserts, the meals at small saffron-perfumed restaurants on the road, the walks
through the prismatic markets to the tune of soft Mexican chants that he said,
as Renate’s father had said: “I love to hear you laughing, Renate.”

If the heavy rains caught them in their finest
clothes, on the way to a bullfight, Renate laughed as if the gods, Mexican or
others, were playing pranks. If there were no more hotel rooms, and if by
listening to the advice of the barman they ended in a whorehouse, Renate
laughed. If they arrived late at night, and there was a sandstorm blowing, and
no restaurants open, Renate laughed.

“I want to bring all this back with us,” she
said once.

“But what is this?” asked Bruce.

“I am not sure. I only know I want to bring it
back with us and live according to it.”

“I know what it is,” said Bruce, spilling the
contents of their valises over the beds, and searching for the alarm clock.
Then he repacked negligently, and as they drove away, a few hours later, on a
deserted road, he stopped, wound up the alarm clock, and left it standing on
the middle of the road. As they drove away, it suddenly became unleashed like
an angry child, the alarm bell rang like a tantrum, and it shook with fury and
protest at neglect.

Sometimes they stopped late at night in a motel
which looked like a hacienda. The gigantic old ovens, shaped like cones, had
been turned into bedrooms. The
brasero
in the center of the tent-shaped
room threw its smoke to the converging opening at the top. The cold stone was
covered with red and black
serapes.
Renate would brush her long hair.
Bruce would go out without a word. His exit was like a vanishing act, because
he made no announcement, and was followed by silence. And this silence was not
like an intermission. It was like a premonition of death. The image of his pale
face vanishing gave her the feeling of someone seeking to be warmed by
moonlight. The Mexican sun could not tan him. He had already been permanently
tinted by the Norwegian midnight sun of his parents’ native country.