Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Madame Patensier had known us from the first time we came to Aix; before we managed to find a villa we had stayed with her. She knew all my needs, shouted that a bath be made ready for me, and instructed Jeanne that I be served with vegetables. ‘Monsieur never, never eats meat,’ she said with such pride. Jeanne shook her head and said nothing, as though Madame la Patronne had become groggy.

After my bath and my lunch served in bed I walked about the familiar place, not like one who lived there, but like someone who was going to live there. It makes all the difference in the world whether the woman of your life is with you or not; she alone enables you to be in a world that is familiar and whole. If it is not his wife, then for an Indian it may be a sister in Mysore, or Little Mother in Benares.

Love is a way of looking at things. If you love you forget yourself, and perceive the object not as you see it, but rather as the seen. The woman therefore is the priestess of God.

There was no way I could contact Madeleine. Where, in Nice, would I find her? We never knew anyone there; besides, Madeleine did not like to see anybody unless I liked to do so myself. She felt that between the Villa Ste-Anne and the elephant on the hill was the space of joy. Beyond was Barbary.

I was anxious, however. I knew she would wait for the next plane, and then return. Hoping against hope I walked back again: the shutters were as firmly closed. The grass on the bull’s back had grown drier. I gave him some more fresh grass, hoping that if Madeleine came while I went to pay a visit to the elephant she would see and know I had returned. I knew she would be unhappy first, then angry, knowing that Indians are so undependable. If a European says he comes by such and such a plane he would come by it; if he missed his connection he would sleep in a hotel, and come by the next. But this Indian haphazardness, like the towels in the bathroom that lay everywhere about, was exasperating to Madeleine.

I put my hand through the gate and with difficulty opened the postbox. With wind and rain it had lost all integrity, and with a little coaxing it always yielded. Inside was the Journal de Genéve — and my telegram. I searched every corner I could reach, but there was no message for me. So with anxious footsteps I went up the goat-path, through the bends in the pinewood to the elephant on the hill.

To feel that beyond the orchard of mirabelles and the slope of olives was the valley, and beyond that the plain stretched out to the sea, gave me a sense of comfort. Space is a comforter of sorrow, and the Mediterranean presence has a human richness that no ocean can give. One never thinks of the galley-slaves, one thinks of the ships of Saint Louis, going out with hero and priest to conquer the Holy Land. And silently the Durance poured her mountain waters to the sea.

It must have been late in the evening, when the day had ended but the night not yet begun, that I heard the steady big footsteps of Madeleine. I was seated on the bull, looking down the pinewood to the little stream that ran at the end of the valley. Madeleine was heavy-laden with her purchases — she had bought two new brooms for the house, a basin, towels, boot-polish, and a summer hat for me, all from the Galeries Lafayette.

‘You,’ she said, almost with a fright, and she stood there helpless, as though she now knew she had lost me. At such moments my breathing always grows faster and heavier, and I cough.

‘Poor dear,’ she said, clinging to my arms, and seated on the bull she cried and cried.

I had no words for her, and when slowly I took the key from her bag and opened the gate, and lead her up the Provencal steps of Villa Ste-Anne, she said, ‘I just do not know why, I do not want to enter the house, I do not want to.’ I put on the light, and when she saw me now she said, with a touch of astonishment, ‘I, I never remembered you were so dark. It must be the sun of India,’ and kissed me for the first time. She said, months later, it was like kissing a serpent or the body of death.

When I lead her to her room, I found her hair was all dishevelled; she had opened the hood of the car to have more air and to forget her disappointment. How man can disappoint a woman, how with a look or by an absence kill the very root of a woman’s flowered awaiting!

She looked to me for help. I said, ‘Come, we’ll go and get my luggage,’ and she, ‘Rama, you go and get your bags while I go and cook something for you.’

With Madeleine in such a mood where she was like a woman who had seen her logic go wrong and had no logic left to connect events with, the best thing, I thought, was to leave her alone. I did not even ask for the key of the car. I walked down in that perfumed spring air, breathing the many herbs and flowers and the warm smell of human flesh as it passed, myself lost. For once I felt a foreigner in France.

When I took my luggage out I waited long before asking for a taxi, and went into great detail about all sorts of things Indian, as if it were urgent for Madame Patensier to know everything about my country. She seemed more like a confessor than the patronne of the Hotel du Roi Jean, and I felt the lighter after talking to her of the interminable Indian journeys; the thousands of miles one travels; the Ganges, nearly two thousand miles long; and of the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world.

‘Bitter than the Alps and Mont Blanc?’ she asked, surprised, in the same voice as two years before, when I said I did not eat meat.

‘Oh, much bigger.’

‘But you have no snow there, so what grows on the top of the mountains?’ she asked.

‘Himalay itself means “the abode of snow”,’ I told her very proudly. ‘La demeure des neiges’; to her Provencal ear it sounded right and beautiful.

Having convinced Madame Patensier of the snow on the Himalayas I convinced myself that all was well with the world. Getting into the taxi, now ready at the door, I went to Villa Ste-Anne with a feeling as if, having crossed evil spittle, I had crossed back three times in expiation; now the road went straight and to Benares. For what is holiness but the assurance man has of himself? The sacred is nothing but the symbol seen as the ‘I’.

I shall never forget as long as I live that evening, with the luggage in the corridor, and the smell of thyme and parsley that came from the kitchen. Wanting to feel that nothing had changed Madeleine called out from the kitchen:

‘I’ve made risotto for you, and the apple semolina, and here I am your wife.’ She was in her thin blue summer dress, with a near-mango design on it, that we had bought in Paris the summer before.

‘And smell me now,’ she said. She smelt of eau de Cologne, for that was the first smell I had smelt on her in Rouen.

I said an awkward ‘thank you’, and she went on: ‘Take the new towels I bought today. I bought a dozen so that your Brahminism, renewed and affirmed, can wash itself as often as it likes. Meanwhile your Brahmin wife will cook you your rice.’

No, things were not going too well. There was nothing we could say to one another which would not sound like something the departing say to each other at a railway station. I remember so clearly how my big white suitcase and the smaller blue one lay on one another. Madeleine went to open them — for that was her habit — and tried to hang my clothes, but she did not go any further than my blue striped suit.

‘The risotto will get burnt,’ she said, ‘and your family will not like me for having given you burnt rice on the night of your arrival home. Rama,’ she warmed up, ‘you know I’ve become a good cook. I have been learning many new dishes from Helène Berichon.’

Helene was the wife of the professor of History in the College de Garçons, and since she was half English, on her mother’s side, she liked to come to us and speak English.