Collages by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online

her raven
there. She made a down payment and asked the old lady to hold him for her until
she ound a proper home for him. But before she was quite ready, she received a
telegram: “Raven arriving by T.W.A. Airline Flight 6 at 8 p.m. today.”
    The image of her raven flying in a box from San
Francisco startled Raven. She had somehow expected him to fly over on his own
power.
    When she found him in his box at the airport he
seemed crestfallen and humiliated. His wings were held close to his body as if
the flight had handicapped him forever. He looked angrily at the plane as an
unworthy rival. He cackled and made harsh angry sounds. Raven took him home.
    She had to buy a huge cage. But she was happy.
She felt she had fulfilled a long dream, she felt complete in herself. In the
raven lay some mute, unflying part of herself which would now become visible,
audible and in flight. His wings, so wide open and powerful, became her wings.
His blackness became her blackness. And the child in Raven who had been too
gentle, too docile, now felt liberated of this meek image, felt that the raven
had become a part of her she wanted to express, a stronger, darker, more
independent self. His irony, his mockery, his fierceness suited her. They were
extensions of a Raven who might have otherwise become selfless, self-effacing.
So Raven sat on the red couch, and her raven wandered through the room, the
raven of legends, ravenous, ravishing, raper, rapacious. But Raven loved him in
all his moods.
    His black feathers full of dark blue luster,
his eyes so sharp, his claws curling twice around the bars of his cage, he
stared at Renate who was staring at him, a black rayless stare.
    Raven loosened the chain. Renate expected him
to perch on Raven’s hair or shoulders. She wanted to see hair and wings
entangled. But Raven and the bird displayed no intimacy. He pecked with his
long beak at Raven’s toes. His hoarse vague sounds, like a man clearing his
throat after smoking, filled the room as he flew from his perch with the speed
of wind.
    The young men who visited Raven considered the
bird a menace, a challenge, a rival, a test of their courage, of their
masculinity. They could not court her, dream of her, in front of him. They
wanted to provoke him and drive him away, as if in some obscure way he guarded
Raven from intimacy with them. He was an obstacle, an alien part of her, ruling
a realm they did not want to know. He stared at their eyes as if meditating an
attack.
    Raven controlled him like a lion tamer, shook a
folded newspaper to drive him back into his cage, but Renate could see she
enjoyed his angry retreats.
    Raven said: “After I tamed him, I let him run
free in the apartment. I wanted to know if he really loved me, if he would stay
with me. So I opened the window and he flew out to the roof of the house next
door. He explored the gutters, pecked at some stray leaves, and flew back to
me. From then on I knew I was as necessary to him as he was to me.”
    The raven trod gingerly between delicate
furniture, vases, statuettes and brocades. But when he spread his wings and
shook them, tremulous with rhythm and vibrations, one could hear the wind from
the mountains where ravens like to live, and one marveled that he submitted to
captivity.
    How intently he looked at Raven, her hair and
eyebrows matching his wings but seeming blacker by contrast with her moonlit
skin.
    Posing for Renate, Raven contemplated her
painting of Our Lady of the Beast. In the late afternoon light a luminous naked
woman reclines beside a panther. The face of the panther shines, more brightly
with a phosphorescent light. They are the Beauty and the Beast after a long
marriage, both equally beautiful. But later, when it grew dark, it was the face
and body of the woman which began to shine with a gold phosphorescence and the
panther grew darker and more shadowy. It disappeared finally into the night,
leaving on the black canvas only the stare of its golden eyes. They