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lives with one heart, inseparable twins.
    She restored to the empty landscapes all the
mythological figures of her dreams, thinking of Rousseau’s words in answer to
the question: “Why did you paint a couch in the middle of the jungle?” And he
had said: “Because one has a right to paint one’s dreams.”
    Renate was painting a canal of Venice,
shimmering like an unrolled bolt of changeable lame silver and gold, and the
shadow of a gondolier upon the water, the one seen by Byron or by George Sand.
But the gondola in reality was passing by and through the shadow with a
gondolier dressed in work clothes, not in his nautical finery. And what he was
transporting was not a pair of entranced lovers but a couch, quite obviously
newly covered with fresh and vivid red brocade. To be delivered speedily to
some occupied palace, occupied by a new enemy, the renovators. The second
gondolier, while waiting to help carry the couch to its owner, was resting upon
it, at ease, and had fallen asleep.
    Renate was laughing. to finished the painting
with the face of a cat looking through a heavily barred window.
    When she was a child she felt that she had been
born in the world to rescue all the animals. She was concerned with the bondage
and slavery of animals, the donkey on the treadmills in Egypt, the cattle
traveling in trains, chickens tied together by the legs, rabbits being shot in
the forest, dogs on leashes, kittens left starving on the sidewalks. She made
several attempts to rescue them. She cut the strings around the chicken’s legs
and they scattered all over the market place. She opened all the cages she
could find and let the birds fly out. She opened field gates and let the cattle
wander.
    It was only when she reached the age of
fourteen that she realized the hopelessness of her task. Cruelty extended too
far. She could never hope to extinguish it. It stretched from the peaks of Peru
and the jungle of Africa to Arcadia, California, where the inhabitants
protested against the wild peacocks who were wandering in the neighborhood and
had them arrested.
    So Renate began to paint the friendship of
women and animals. She painted a luminous woman lying peacefully beside a
panther, a woman with blue-tinted flesh floating on the opening wing of a swan,
a woman with eyes like the eyes of her Siamese cat, a woman tenderly holding a
turtle.
    This turtle was so small that Renate had to use
a magnifying glass to study its eyes. She was quite startled when she found
herself facing the cold, malevolent glance of the turtle. Renate did not
believe in the malevolence of animals. She had thought first of imprisoned
animals; then of free animals; and finally of women and animals living in
harmony.
    She was now painting Raven, a girl with very
long black hair and a pale skin who owned a raven, and whose wish for a raven
had been born so early in her life that she could not remember how it had been
born, whether from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, or from a small engraving she still
carried about as others carry photographs of their children.
    She had always considered herself too gentle,
too pliant. This dream of a fierce raven seemed to balance elements of her
being.
    “His black wings, his sharp beak, his strong
claws completed me, added something I lacked, added the element of darkness,”
she told Renate.
    She searched for a raven and grew concerned
when she heard that they were nearly exterminated in the United States.
    She went to visit ravens at the zoo. She read
that they had once been an object of veneration and superstition. Symbol of the
night, of the dark side of our being? She noticed too that they were
intelligent and mischievous. They learned to articulate words in a hoarse,
cracked bass voice.
    Once in San Francisco she picked up a newspaper
and there was an advertisement by a rich eccentric old lady who had collected
birds and animals and was forced to move back to Europe. She had a raven for
sale.
    Raven rushed to see her and met