Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

I went back to work. I now understood why the boat of Iseult which carried the white sail first and then the black, was seen by the people of Loonois as though the black came first. Iseult with the lovely hands had to remain a widow. The potion of love was made of the eighteen aggregates. The limb and the lip spoke to one another. King Mark was not fooled, he was wise and he knew, knew that being a king, a Principle, he could not admit sin. Where sin is admitted death is true. Tristan took Iseult of the white hands as bride, but he did not take her maidenhead. Between adultery and virginity is the river Rhone. The gypsies who marry and dance at Stes Maries-de- la-Mer know there is no sin. When you have a gipsy king, and the long road, you play with life distributing destiny cards to yourself. King or queen, Diamond or Heart, they are so many dimensions of one’s living. But when you live in dimension itself, the world is yours. You reap and you enjoy, you breed children and you grow fat, you live in a palace or you give away prizes at a football match (‘Savithri prize at the Allahabad football finals,’ I had read in some Indian newspaper, and seen Savithri giving away a prize to some sturdy fool), but love is continuous with dimension, love is the light of space. Objects are articulated in space, so go right, go left, go north, go east, you cannot go beyond yourself. Love, my love, is the self. Love is the loving of love.

Harmonieuse Moi…

The train came from Sete, and took me away through the night and by the Rhone, to the severe clarity, the austere benignity of Paris.

~

I have now taken a room off the Boulevard St Michel, just where the Rue de Vaugirard goes up by the Lycée St Louis. My room is on the seventh floor — I had long been waiting to live up here, and had asked for it week after week at the hotel. Now, I have it. It’s a small mansard room but from my window the whole of Paris lies spread like a palm-leaf fan under me. Beyond the terrace of the Lycée St Louis line after line of walls, towers and coloured chimneys rise into the air, and then suddenly down below you see the green Seine under the bridges, and to the right, as though abruptly put aside, the parvis of Notre Dame.

Et nous tiendrons le coup, rivés sur notre rame,

Forçats fils de forçats aux deux rives de Seine

Galériens couchés aux pieds de Notre Dame.

Behind me I can feel, though I cannot see, the history— almost the architecture of time — out of which the garden and the Palace of Luxembourg were born. I often walk there, breathing the clean sane air of the park, and see the children play about, setting their ships to sail all over the waters. They must indeed wander through many lands, encircle many continents:

Vaisseau de pourpre et d’or, de myrrhe et de cinname,

Double vaisseau de charge aux pieds de Notre Dame.

And when I am tired, I come and sit by one of those stiff chairs that seem especially reserved for lovers, by the Medici fountain. The water drips and seems to make us forget time, as if it were a cravat pulled loose to one side. For here, woman whispers to man seated on the lap of the sun. I close my book and go down the Boulevard St Michel, feeling that between the top of the hill and the parvis of Notre Dame is the real sanctuary of Europe.

‘When we speak in universal terms of class and category, do these terms correspond to realities existing outside the mind?’ asked scholars at the beginning of the Middle Ages. ‘When we speak of the species man and the species animal, do these terms awaken ideas of collection? And does the idea of collection correspond to a reality outside the mind, or is it a mere concept of the mind? And if these terms, or universals are not mere concepts, but do correspond to realities, what is their nature? Are they corporeal entities? And further, what is their mode of existing? Do they have their being outside the sensual domain, that is outside the individual, or do they lodge within?’ Thus and for a thousand years, through Abelard, St Thomas Aquinas and Dante, and all the monks and poets, going down the centuries, through the alleyways and hard earth of the Sorbonne, you feel the western world has breathed and shaped itself; and he who walks in Paris here, walks somewhere in the steady light of recovered Truth.

Now and again, when I am stuck in my work and I can dip into silence and find nothing to say, nothing to sound, to illumine me, I seek over the walls for an answer, I seek through the space above the river for an answer, I look at the twin towers of Notre Dame. I say a prayer to the Mother of God, at such times: ‘Marie pleine de grace, Mere de Dieu.’ And she always knows and she always answers, for the womb of the world is She.

And when I have shaped a sentence to my satisfaction, word after word repeated back to silence, rediscovered through a backward movement and made whole, reverberant and true, I leave the authenticity of it on the page, and wonder that these round and flat shapes could name meaning as they do. I shiver at the thought that one can speak. I repeat some verse from a troubadour, and then tell myself that only half a century ago, perhaps, Verlaine walked these very streets, drunk, and not knowing how to say his own name. It is good to forget one’s name, it makes one a saint.

So much of Paris rises up, evening after evening, as I sit in this room and work — ghosts, dignitaries, crusaders, kings, poets — that I want to get out, to walk out where no man has ever walked, no one has ever borne his own torture.

J’ ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans.

Then I go down the steps, ring up Georges from the bureau of the hotel, for I have no telephone in my room, and when they say come — they always do — I jump into the 83 bus at the Gare Montparnasse, linger a little by the river as usual, then cross over and take the 63. Down La Muette I walk as if I were in Hyderabad or Mysore, and the street were one that father and son we had walked, so personal it has become. It is always Catherine who opens the door, with her splendid rich smile— as if one could possess happiness with the same certitude of holding a baby in one’s arms.

‘Vera is sleeping,’ she said one day, knowing Vera had become a great friend of mine. ‘She’s had fever, you know, Rama, and I was so frightened. But Georges said it was nothing, just the effect of the temperature outside going up and down in a way that even our adult bodies are not strong enough to bear. Tell me, how are you?’

Georges was standing behind me, as I removed my coat; I could feel him take my scarf and hat, and hang them on the rack. ‘It’s nice to see you, Rama. How terrible to think France is becoming like Russia. It has been twenty-five degrees below at Luxeuil. Can you imagine it! In the Luxembourg even old men have begun to take to skating.’

‘Georges will not allow me to do any patinage in the Bois. But when I see men and women carrying skates I want so much to go, and say, “Gee” like that, and swirl and fall on myself. I love snow and all that is white,’ Catherine said. ‘White, snowwhite is my colour.’

I went in and we sat on the green plush from Aix. Oncle Charles had been very ill.

‘When the strong fall ill, it’s like a bull falling — you need three other bulls to help you out of it,’ said Catherine, ‘not like a horse. Georges falls ill and rises as if it were a game he were playing; I never can believe in his illness. Tante Zoubie is so worried.’

I promised we would go there the week after. And then Catherine gave me a letter from Madeleine.

Madeleine spoke of my visit to her. ‘It’s all like a ghost story,’ she wrote, ‘Rama, India — and the world. Contemplation is the only truth one has. I pray that I be forgiven for my sins— my ignorances, the Buddhist text would call them. By the way, Cathy, before Rama leaves for India, don’t you think it would be wise for the legalities to be settled, once and for all? My own future is settled. I want nothing: what I earn teaching will suffice me for a lifetime. So I have been thinking that Vera, and others who will come after her, should have everything. Anyway it all belongs to the family, my properties in the Charente, in Rouen, and even that plot of land in St Médard. I will just keep mother’s house at Saintongel. Just a spot to call my own, that is all; and that again only as long as I live.