Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Madeleine had by now decided that she would give up even Villa les Rochers — the garden was too much of a burden. Besides, who was there to enjoy it? She took rooms on rue Ste Genevieve, round the corner, not far from the post office. It was a quiet street, and on the top floor she had, she wrote to Catherine, two very spacious rooms (the landlord was a retired customs officer, and thank God, they had no children!). She had sent some of the unnecessary furniture, including the green chairs, the large spare bed, the two cupboards (ancient eighteenth-century ones, that had come from some English ancestors, they said) to Catherine. ‘You have a large family — I mean you will soon have a large family, and what does a single person need all this for?’ she had written to Catherine. I think Catherine showed me that letter with a purpose. Often it seemed strange to enter the room and find those green plush chairs; I would look behind me to see if the door would open and Madeleine come in saying, ‘Oh these professeurs, these women! They never have any courage. They will fight with each other, but will not stand and fight for a principle. I’m tired of them!’ No, Madeleine never had much kindness for women!

Oncle Charles sometimes came over from Rouen. He slept in the room next to the kitchen where I had first stayed. And once in a while he would come up to my new rooms, at the Hotel des Parcs, Rue de Seine, and try to take me somewhere, anywhere.

‘Oh, my daughter, she’s like her mother. My first wife was not like Zoubie. She was a rat d’Eglise, a smelly fat thing, that went to Mass every dawn, and cooked for her husband and her daughter, dressed the girl up for the church and the school, and the rest of the time lay on her bed reading the Lives of the Saints. As time goes on Catherine, too, will become like her mother. There is no sap in her; I cannot say, ‘Come, let us go somewhere’, she always chooses to go to the Bazar de l’Hotel-de-Ville to buy children’s toys or napkins for her lovely baby. Au diable, little round pieces of pink flesh!’ said Oncle Charles, and took me first to the Place Clichy, and then to Montmartre.

My own feeling was — though there was nothing to prove it — that since Tante Zoubie’s illness, Oncle Charles had other reasons for coming to Paris than to see his granddaughter. I did not think, from a careless remark he once made, that he went to his daughter each time he came down to Paris. Besides, at dinner he always took some mysterious pills out of the same round tube, with no label on it.

‘I am not young any more,’ he explained one evening. ‘But then there is no reason why I should have such a big belly. I will never be like you, Rama, but I don’t want to look like Monsieur Herriot either.’ From his face I knew he spoke without conviction. ‘Look, don’t you think I have grown much thinner. Oh, I have such a lot of work! When business is bad, people begin to have crooked minds. These bad years mean much more work for a notary. People are so afraid of war. Do you think there will be war, Rama?’

‘No,’ I answered, without much conviction.

After such a conversation I would say, ‘I will take a walk now, and go back and work,’ and he seemed always sad to see me go. Poor Oncle Charles, he wanted someone to go with him, so that he could laugh and talk and drink, and maybe take a woman to himself; his companion could always have chosen his own brunette or blonde, and, I imagine, he would have paid for it all. Georges once said that a mysterious woman — a frail, young voice — telephoned every Thursday evening to know if Oncle Charles was at home.

‘From her accent I can see she is a woman from a very special milieu,’ said Georges. ‘She is so courteous, full of such elegant apologies. Catherine thinks it is an act of precaution. Should anything ever go wrong she could always come to the rue Michel Ange, and say whatever has to be said.’

‘They always know whom to approach for the final settlement,’ added Catherine.

‘What is better than a daughter on the rue Michel Ange?’ continued Georges. ‘They know the nature of a man or maid from the quartier they live in. Besides, they have their own private detectives. Well, poor Oncle Charles — he never had much success with his marriages. One woman was less cultured than him, and the other, the former wife of a future Ambassador. It makes one feel so sad and he is such a good man.’

But Catherine was worried about the legal consequences. After all she was the daughter of a notary public.

‘Ah, là là,’ Oncle Charles said one day to me, ‘I am a crook among crooks, you know, Rama. I am not like your Gandhi, if hit on the right cheek, showing the left. I hit before anyone hits me. All I see every day is how someone wants to protect himself from being cheated by someone else. But when a man calculates that the other will cheat him, it means he would do the same to the other fellow when the time came. There is no love lost, I tell you, in this country. This is the country of Balzac,’ he concluded, as if he were quoting scriptures.

Sometimes I went with Georges and Catherine to Rouen— going in the morning and returning that same evening, often as late as twelve o’clock, past Pont de l’Arch, Vernon, and Mantes. I always felt happy to see Tante Zoubie. True, her face was much disfigured with disease, but that did not make her tell less fascinating stories. Again and again it would be about the central European diplomat, whose amorous adventures all the chancelleries knew, but who was nevertheless employed by everybody. Then when the war was over and everybody had the original documents to compare, it transpired that he had played tricks on all the governments, now acting the fool, now a drunkard, now a debauchee.

‘Ah, là là!’ said Aunt Zoubie, ‘his love affairs were written on his face. He wore his women as he wore his cufflinks or his pince-nez, and hid them when he wanted to. Oh, that grand tradition is gone now. Now you need bawds at your service. They say that in Egyptian marriages they employ bawds to abuse the bridegroom’s party. Like this the bride will be happy: luck is brought by insult, this is an ancient anthropological law. Oh, Rama, the more you travel in space or in time, the more you see the same phenomenon. Man is such a frail, such a foolish creature. If you respect him too much, he will cheat you. If you treat him with condescension, he will obey and insult you. So you must give him a hot bath at one moment and a cold bath at another, as the doctors have advised me. If you ask me who is paralysed, I or the world, I would say I and the world. My face is turned this way, but their faces are turned backwards like this, like they say the devil’s is. It’s just silly to live. And as silly, don’t you think? to die? Imagine that that silly woman, la Comtesse de Noailles — I used to know her well, once, chez la Duchesses d’ Uzès — could write of her terrible solitude in the tomb: “Moi, qui n’a pas dormi seule, aux jours de la terre!” I ask you, wise man, is one ever but alone. Tell me, Charles, did you marry me because you were alone? Speak. You married me because you wanted a wife, somebody to sew on your buttons, and wipe your mouth when your saliva ran down your face. Oh, la la! marriage is a grand institution. It prepares you handsomely for the grave. You lie by one another, at St Médard, and you are known eternally — do you hear, eternally — as “Monsieur et Madame Charles Roussellin, Notaire, Rouen (Seine Inférieure)”. The Greeks at least wrote elegies. That made death interesting. In life there is a time for everything, love, marriage… and then — nothing at all. But now, notaire, Charles Roussellin.’ Tante Zoubie laughed. By now Oncle Charles had left the room; he hated to hear about death. ‘It will come, when it will, as my huissier does. Why ask him to come earlier? Why waste the leather on my chair or the wine in my bottles? I know no dog will bark when they carry my hearse away.’