Collages Read Online Free PDF

deeply asleep, but with a pinched nose, and
unhealthy pallor. I would return a day later and he would still be asleep. He
knew the opium was bad for him but he could not stop. I tried to help him. I
became very firm. I said if he did not begin to work on his film project which
we were going to carry out together, I would leave him. This frightened him. I
was his only friend. We took a trip to Mexico together. There I thought he was
cured. We were working on our film and he took such pleasure in photographing
me and in inventing situations. One night I stayed out later than usual at a
native wedding. He had pleaded fatigue and had returned to the hotel. When I
returned, he was in that deep sleep I could tell apart from normal sleep. He
was still sleeping the next day. I did not like his color. He had the ivory wax
color of death. I called the village doctor. He took one look at him and said:
‘He’s had too much opium. I’m not a doctor for drug addicts. He may never wake
up.’ I had heard that in such cases if he could wake up enough to smoke a pipe
he would come to. I prepared a pipe exactly as I had seen him do it. I was
frightened. His breathing was so feeble I could hardly hear it at times. But I
could not wake him up sufficiently to make him smoke. Deserted by the doctor,
all alone in the Mexican desert, I wondered how to save him. I began to
remember the time I had been closest to death. I was swimming and I had been
carried too far out by a riptide. I stayed too long in the water. I did not
remember being rescued, but I did remember the lifeguard who gave me mouth to
mouth respiration. Mouth to mouth respiration! I took Ken’s pipe and I smoked,
absorbing and holding the smoke and then I leaned over, opened his lips and
blew the smoke into his lungs several times, until he finally breathed deeply
again and opened his eyes. That was the beginning…”
    Renate sat in the sunlight which, reflected
from the sea below, made the ceiling and walls dissolve in waves of lights and
shadows. The stripes on walls and on the table seemed to place her inside a
Chinese box compartment, too, as a figure in Bruce’s past. When he returned she
was still sitting there with the puzzle box open on her knees. She received him
with tenderness and with a silence which did not resemble his, for his eyes
when he was silent resembled the cool colorless spray of fountains, whereas her
eyes showered him with gold specks like those which fell from the fireworks in
Mexico on the night they had felt welded like twins.
    “You say I only love myself,” he had said then,
“that I love Pan, and Pan is me; but you, why have you only painted women?”
    Weeks passed before she felt the need to open
another box. Bruce was acting in a film. His director took him fishing. She did
not like fishing any more than she liked the hunting of birds. She was alone
for three days. During those three days she thought that her imagination had
created the image of a greater union between Bruce and young men than he had
with her, but now she was not sure. She felt that Ken had not been able to win
him to his world of opium. She felt the isolation of Ken. She felt the need to
know Bruce intimately even if it was not today’s Bruce she was discovering but
yesterday’s.
    The second box took longer to open. She had
made a pyramid of them, and then opened the one at the top. She read:
    “In Mexico Ken and I found many beautiful boys.
We hired them for a few pesos. We taught them the pleasures of whipping each
other. Ken’s knowledge of the art was incredible. He was a virtuoso in
gradations. We started with gentle lashings and ended with wounding bamboo. The
ritual we preferred was going out into the woods at dawn, cutting down selected
branches of bamboo and playing at pursuing and capturing the victims. Somehow
or other one morning we became separated. I was left alone with the youngest
boy. I had promised him he could beat me this time. He kept touching my