Collages by Anaïs Nin

watch her, as if she were
the spectacle they had come to see. The bar man looked at her while he shook
his potions, the old chef looked at her over his charcoal pit, the musicians
sang for her, looked at her over the black wings of the piano, and one thought
of the French word for hostess, entraineuse ,which meant to pull, to
magnetize, to lure in her wake.
    Eat, drink, talk, she seemed to whisper as she
placed the menu into the visitor’s hand, as if she were giving them the secret
to all delights, and often they moed aside to make room and said: “Renate, sit
down, have a drink with us.”
    Animator, bringing animation to silent tables,
staying long enough to light the candles.
    They arrived in disparate costumes, formal and
informal, summer coats, furs, gloves, sport shirts, Hawaiian shirts, Harper’s
Bazaar plumes, racing-car goggles, motorcycle helmets, dancing pumps, or
leather boots. They arrived heavily made up, with false eyelashes, wigs, or
unkempt, ungroomed. No one was surprised. It was the movie colony, at work on
films. It looked as if they had snatched a few items from the costume
department: beards, gangster’s raincoats, the star’s false jewels. It matched
the jumbled styles of their homes, imitations of the styles of other countries
which, bereft of their natural atmosphere, looked like stage sets.
    Nothing seemed to belong to them organically,
to be stamped with their own identity, but no one seemed to expect that. Even
the painters and writers wore disguises which outdid Venetian masked balls. The
beards of men shipwrecked for years on desert islands, the unmatched clothes
from thrift shops, the girls with hair uncombed, and black cotton stockings,
and eyes painted a tubercular violet. In this costume they meant to convey a
break with conventions, with the stylish mannequins in Beverly Hills shop
windows, but it created the impression of merely another uniform, which they
bore self-consciously, and it did not portray freedom, nonchalance. They wore
them stiffly, as if on display, like extras for a Bohemian scene, proclaiming:
look at me.
    All of them were impatient to drink the
dissolvent remedy which would loosen the disguise, disintegrate the
self-conscious shell, to drink until the lower depths of their nature would
rise to the surface in sodden debris, brash words, acid angers, to shatter the
mannequins they stifled in, to shatter the disguises.
    “Renate,” they called, not because they were
hungry or thirsty, but because she knew who she was, and as she knew who she
was, she might also be able to identify them, with a smile and a word, just as
with a smile and a word she had said to Bruce: “You are a poet.”
    There was food on the table, and the glasses
were full, but who was at the table? Would Renate know? They were at sea, and
Renate was more than a woman, she was a compass. What confused them did not
confuse her. If she did not answer their distress signals, if she left them
stranded in the vacuum they lived in, then to assert their existence they would
have to begin a quarrel with someone, anyone.
    The features became muddied, the facades
collapsed. When a glass broke, Renate appeared as if this were a signal of
danger, the start of a drama, as if the restaurant had become a ship at sea,
and they all floundered on waves of anger. Strangers were flung together and collided
in tidal waves of alcohol, in incoherent quarrels.
    I am a star, I am a director, I am a cameraman,
I am married, I have two children, I have discovered oil, I have built a house,
I have written a script, I won the Oscar, I bought a horse, I rented my ranch,
I started the fashion of boar hunting, I am having an exhibition, I am sailing
to Acapulco.
    But none of these facts the full-bodied power
Renate had when she said: “I am a painter.”
    Her painting had been born from within just as
her son had been, organic, part of her flesh, whereas for the desperate
anonymous, they were adopted accidental children, not truly