Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘My life has been a dream,’ Benoit de Boigne was often heard to say in Parisian drawing-rooms as his life drew to a close, and was understood, by the fashionable, secretly-contemptuous inhabitants of those rooms, to mean that his adventures in the far-away, unreal land of Hindustan now seemed fantastical and fictional. But when de Boigne, wiping his face and passing a hand over his eyes, muttered ‘My life has been a dream,’ he meant that he had encountered, in that far-away, unreal land called Hindustan, the unbearably real sensations and colours of a dream, had felt unknown forces moving him as if around a chess-board, had felt the touch of mysteries impelling him from one town to the next, from one field to another.

Even as he grew up in Chambéry, in that part of Europe known as Savoy, a hot wind whistled through the soul of Benoit La Borgne, later known as Benoit de Boigne, bringing with it fancies very much out of place in the simple priest’s home that he was born in. In that quiet place of gentle candlelight and musty piety, La Borgne read, again and again, an ancient, tattered copy of a book called The Romance of Alexander, with Stories of Aristotle , by a Prussian officer named Blunt. La Borgne read, and dreamt of hidden treasures, turbaned warriors and princesses in distress; he played strange, wild music on an out-of-tune piano, took fencing lessons and surprised his master with the ferocity and determination of his thrusts. He spent much of his time at a stream that ran through the family’s property, where a water-mill rotated endlessly, grinding, crushing; he liked to go inside, to sit on old wood and watch the wheels spin, driving the faithful machinery in predictable patterns. The workers in that mill grew used to the sight of Benoit La Borgne seated with his chin cupped in a hand, hypnotized by the regularity of the click-click-clicking gears. In that even, metronomic motion, the boy and then the man found a kind of peace; as the myriad grains, gritty and jostling against each other, descended into the hopper to emerge as finely-ground, white, even powder, La Borgne nurtured the other world within him, entertained and enthralled.

He was a somewhat listless and drowsy-looking boy who grew into a strapping young man with a large sloping forehead that belonged on a marble bust of one of the ancient Greek philosophers. His stature, his features, his remoteness, a habit of staring into the distance, as his heart stirred to inexplicable, abruptly-appearing internal images — all these things gave La Borgne an unintentional air of conscious superiority; it was this distant stare that inadvertently rested on a Sardinian officer in an inn in the European year of 1768.

The officer turned back to his food and felt La Borgne’s grey eyes burn into the back of his neck. The food was rough and provincial, but good. The officer laid down his knife and turned slowly to look over his shoulder. La Borgne sat with an untouched glass of wine in front of him, his hands on the table; his glance, filled with something that could have been mistaken for hauteur, was unwavering. By making a physical effort, the officer was able to turn away again; he gestured to a waiter.

‘Who is that? Behind me.’

‘Benoit La Borgne. His father is a priest, and wants him to be a lawyer, but he does nothing.’

The Sardinian turned back to La Borgne, who was still lost in a waking dream, feeling vague unnameable tugs at his soul, pointing him in some unspecified direction.

‘Why do you look at me, sir?’

La Borgne said nothing. The Sardinian pushed back his chair and stood up.

‘Why are you looking at me?’

La Borgne gradually became aware of a dark, mustachioed face glowering at him. Unbidden, the words sprang to his lips:

‘Your face: it reminds me of a pig’s behind.’

A quiver of rage passed through the Sardinian’s body; he patted his pockets, looking for his gloves. Remembering that he had put them on the chair beside him, he turned, but Benoit La Borgne, seized by a wild purpose, had already sprung up and moved around the table between them; the Sardinian felt a hand spin him around, and then he reeled back, his right cheek stinging.

‘Outside,’ said La Borgne, already turning away. Outside, behind the inn, the Sardinian attempted to suppress the bewilderment that threatened to turn into fear; taking off his coat, he clenched his teeth and looked at La Borgne, trying to hold on to his anger, but the other’s cold, blank face and relaxed movements only served to increase his nervousness. The Sardinian had to look away, at the ground, at the yellow hay and brown soil, at the insects crawling across the little yard, at the dung and the cat staring back at him with unmoving, flashing dark eyes.

The Sardinian’s uneasiness mounted; in a few minutes he was actually trembling, but by then it was too late because he was crossing swords with a stone-eyed La Borgne; panicking, the officer flung himself forward into a thrust at the other’s eyes which was parried with a force that made his wrist numb, and then he was backing away, flinging up his blade to block a huge hacking slash at his neck; the Sardinian’s fingers and forearm rang with the shock, and then his blood, deep red, spurted over bright steel which protruded from his belly; blood which spurted, then, over La Borgne’s hand. As he slowly knelt (his sabre already rolling away over the rough reddened earth) the Sardinian looked up at La Borgne, and saw, for the first time, eyes blink and a lip twitch, and wanted to ask why, how, when, why, but the face was already lost in mist, unknown, unreal.

For La Borgne, then, there were witnesses, a furious magistrate and an outraged father. The magistrate threatened proceedings and prison, but was pacified by repeated visits by the good père and a promise from La Borgne to leave the province. Filled with a gratefully-felt sense of purpose, La Borgne set out for France and the famed mercenary ranks of the Irish Brigade.

He spent the next few years in Landrecies, Flanders and the Isle of France, learning the trade and craft of soldiering from men from every nation in Europe. For a while, in the tramp of close-order drill and the eager reconstruction of past victories, La Borgne’s mind was clear, unvisited by the glisten of blood and the smell of fantastical animals; he kept The Romance of Alexander hidden and locked in his trunk. In barracks, however, he became aware of certain stories that were heard at the time of the setting of the sun, that perfumed the dreams of the rough, scarred men who slept, twitching, on wooden beds. There was a story about a huge diamond that glittered, waiting to be taken, in the forehead of a grotesque heathen idol. There was another story about a magical tree that, when shaken, showered rubies and pearls onto the ground. There were swarthy magicians whose curses bit and mangled like war-dogs, beautiful women who twined and twisted and teased and, always, wealth beyond imagining. These stories seduced La Borgne; despite himself, he found himself seeking out the best of the story-tellers, the ones who constructed the most enchanting and the most grotesque of fictions; caught, he struggled — he enjoyed the monotony of days defined by bugle calls and sweat-stained rule-books. For the first time in his life, he was free; he sensed danger in the titillations of the seemingly innocent tales that webbed the twilight air.

Sure enough, one bright crisp morning, La Borgne found himself telling the story of Alexander and a giant knot. ‘Listen,’ he said, to the circle of scarred men, and even as he told the story, as he invented and changed and caressed with his words, he felt the familiar, dangerous turbulence in his heart, like a storm of deep colours from a distant, unknown landscape. He understood that he had learnt enough, that his time of peace was over, that for him there was no deliverance from the tyranny of the future. The next day, he resigned his commission and began wandering through Europe until he was in Greece, where an Admiral Orloff was commanding a Russian force against the Turks, in a war that has already passed out of memory and myth into the deathly still of libraries.