Collages Read Free Page B

off
my car, and so the first thing that happened was that I got the ‘tourista’ with
a high fever. The captain kept his word to you and shared his cabin with me,
but also with a barrel of fish, cans of gasoline, and hay for the animals. Then
the sea got pretty rough and the car began to roll back and forth, and at each
roll I thought it would plunge into the sea. I decided to sleep inside it, and
if anything were to happen we would both go together. At the first town we
stopped at, we took in a herd of cattle. They were crowded on deck, and they
pushed against my car, dribbled on it, and even tried to gore it. At night they
quarreled and I don’t need to describe the stench. The heat was as heavy as a
blanket. At the second stop we took in a Madame and about twenty call girls who
were being moved to another house. The captain gallantly offered his cabin. Tequila
was free on board and so you can imagine how rowdy the nights were. After three
weeks I arrived in Los Angeles a wreck, but my car is in fine shape. I had it
lubricated and I wish you could hear it purr along the roads. Los Angeles has
such wonderful roads.”

    RENATE MOVED TO MALIBU, CALIFORNIA
    Weeks later, when she was installed in her
house, Bruce arrived, as if they had agreed to take a detour and resume their
relationship. He laid his dusty and tired head on her shoulder and sought in
the darkest part of her hair, at the base of her neck, the place where the
nerves most clearly carried messages of future pleasures. His eyes were clear
and innocent, free of memories. He smiled innocently, and settled in the house
like a privileged guest, detached from the care of it. He took the cover off
his typewriter, and then he gave her a few pages to read.
    “That’s the beginning of my novel,” he said.
And Renate read:

    “The hotel in Acapulco was a series of
cottages. It seems the ‘patron’ was quite a puritan and wanted no scandal, no
extra visitors at night. It seemed that he patrolled the cottages at night
himself. He wanted the place to remain a ‘family’ hotel.”

    Renate interrupted with: “But that’s the hotel
where I stayed.”
    “Read on.”

    “A woman arrived in an orange dress. It was not
only the orange dress which aroused attention. She radiated joy and her
laughter was warm and spontaneous. The patron knew she was alone and he often
hovered around her cottage to catch the foreigner at some unholy hospitality.
One night there was a man’s laughter mingled with hers, but the ‘patron’ did
not hear it. A neighbor heard it. He stayed awake to listen, saying to himself
he must warn the girl in the orange dress if the ‘patron’ came near. She was
fortunate. The man remembered being all stirred up by the laughter, by the
intimate quality of it. And the next morning he examined the girl in the orange
dress with more attention, as if he had failed to notice in her face or in her
behavior what would create such laughter at night. She was having breakfast,
with her eyelids lowered. And then a chambermaid came in, breathless, and
talked to the ‘patron,’ and the ‘patron’ came and talked to the girl in the
orange dress, and the girl got up blushing and rushed away. It seems that she
had left the visitor early in the morning, that he was to have dressed quietly,
unobtrusively, and be gone by the time she came back. But as she left, she
unconsciously locked the screen door and imprisoned him, so that he had to call
the maid, and the maid, thinking she had trapped a bootlegged occupant had
reported him while he rattled the door in anger and thus let everyone know…”

    Renate began to laugh. She laughed until Bruce
began to laugh with her, though he was not as certain of the meaning of the
incident as she was.
    She saw that he was laughing from contagion,
with trust in her comic spirit, and this made her laugh all the more as a
touching form of love.
    “I must have been thinking of you, Bruce. You,
and how quietly you slipped away at