Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

I said: ‘I am happy that at last religion is not such a fearful monster for you.’

‘But I’ll always be anti-clerical,’ she insisted.

‘Why, Madeleine, did you think I was going to defend the Pope?’

‘Well, from joint-family to community and from community to Church isn’t such a big leap, is it? I would rather a cowl on your head than an Ave Maria on my lip. I hate the cagots,’ she said, as if to reassure herself of her faith. ‘In fact I think I hate all religions, and would to God man simply lived intelligently.’

‘Intelligence, I suppose, must lead you to Socialism and all that. Or to being fat and a buffoon like Edouard Herriot, or a washerman’s beast like Daladier.’

She nodded and was silent.

‘Or why not Maurice Thorez?’ I persisted.

‘He’s too crude for me,’ she remarked, and went into the kitchen to bring the risotto.

I can remember even today, so clearly, the risotto on our plates: the thyme and the lavender removed and laid on one side, the tomato right in the middle, disembowelled and flat, and when Madeleine had put one spoonful to her mouth, my hand just would not lift. There was a wide area of vivid space all around one, as though some magic circle had been drawn; the night seemed to stand heavy on the world. I said, almost in suffocation:

‘Mado, something has happened.’

She, who was half-filling her spoon with rice, stopped, and said,

‘Yes, something has.’

I was quiet. Then she said, slowly, ‘To whom?’

‘To everything,’ I answered, and laid my spoon down.

I just did not know where I was and what I meant. Madeleine left her spoon in the plate as well, and slowly came nearer me, pushing herself on my lap. She tried to pass her hand through my hair, knowing how much I loved her touch, and she put her face against my skin. She had the Charentaise smell of burnt apple, her smell rising through my nose, almost intoxicant. Her limbs became fervent, and in her pain she thrust her breast against my face, a vocable of God. Lord, how her breath went up and down! Her breast seemed to swell with love, as we say in my own land.

There is in pain something almost physical: the body seems to rise and say for the inarticulate, ‘Here is the speech beyond all speech, the knowledge beyond all knowledge.’ In that moment, for once Madeleine seemed to have intuited womanhood, as if the hair had grown rich and the belly had heaved high; as though the outer turning had slipped back inward, and she saw herself woman. Womanhood has eyes and sees itself in a splendour that man will never know, for his discovery is the outer, hers the inner which widens into a whole world. Childbirth is not the creation of a body; it is for woman, as Madeleine had said, the creation of the world. What she sees she keeps within her womb, as the emperor penguin the egg between its feet; and when the time comes she does not offer you an heir, a son, but her whole regnum of creation.

She might then have taken me into herself as never before, not with the knowledge that she knew me, but with the conviction that she would make me know myself in the shine of annihilation. But I’m a Brahmin, and for me touch and knowledge go with the holiness of surrender, of woman not taking me there, but I revealing to her that. Pain is not of love. Pain could never be incarnate but in the dissimulation of love. The lost lover is the passionate lover. The true man takes woman to his silence and stays in her for her recognition.

Now it was I who had tears. I could not take so much beauty proffered, because man should not do what a woman would do.

She said, ‘My love.’

And I said, ‘M’ami, my friend.’

‘What is it?’ she asked, drawing herself a little away.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I answered; for that nothing, she knew, was the all.

‘I have failed your gods?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said, looking at her; and for some un-understandable reason I added, ‘You’ve failed me.’

She stood up in the full stature of her presence, her sari looking curious against that evening, and suddenly laughing she said, ‘Come, I’ll change, and we’ll go and say hullo to the elephant.’

I could not tell her, in spite of all my truth, that I had been up already. She felt that if nothing else worked our superstitions would work.

We went into the night like two ghosts who had sold their lives not to win some paradise, however brief, but as if telling themselves they were going to heaven; a red-hot star had forked the path, yet through twists and wrong turnings we had been brought where only the flesh is true. But men, all men, walk with something more than flesh, till one becomes like Circassier, to die in front of Moscow and have a cross put up: ‘Mort pour la Patrie.’ Only the dead in battle ever die a true death. All of them die for a purpose, and they have a right to a permanent cross.

‘You know,’ said Madeleine on the way up, ‘your Holy Grail is not such a mysterious affair. The more I read the Church Fathers — and Georges has been a great help to me — the more I realize that it came from the Nestorian heresy, sister to your Albigensian one. Some Orientalists I have been reading do confirm my theory that it was a Buddhist relic that came via Persia to Christendom, and that the Chalice is only the mendicant alms-bowl upturned.’

‘Very poetic indeed.’

‘Why not, pray?’

‘History should not be poetic; it is poetry without events.’

‘What remains then?’

‘Well, facts. Every fact in its place is pure poetry like your broomstick and your towels from Galeries Lafayette. But let us go on to your Holy Grail.’

‘You see there is another, more plausible hypothesis, that it was the cup in which the Mother of God gathered, one by one, the dripping globules of our Lord’s blood. When the Muslims came, naturally it had to be hidden and brought away on some galley to Gaul; yet they say this sacred cup shone like the “moon of God”, and enchanted the winds to holy beckonings, while the idea that it came from Persia was one of the Church’s tricks to steal a march on the Saracen. There are others who say it is the cup of gold that the Chaldeans took to the Temple of Ninurta, and that after they had slain a handsome slave some Semiramis, Queen of the Earth and Mother of Fertility, would drink of it; then call her hero and give it to him with musk and porphyry, that in their procreation the world might see the light of plenty. I read the other day that one still sees in some primitive tribes, they spread the first menses of a woman with the first rains, so that the crops rise yellow as gold, and there’s a glowing hearth in every hut.’

‘In some parts of India, you know, we still do that. In fact I was thinking of it just the other day. But surely there need be no connection between country and country to have a common belief? Otherwise the Mayas of Mexico, who were the only people in the world apart from the Hindus that knew Zero, could only have got it from them. Absurd,’ I said, ‘and thus everything good came from India!’ And I laughed.

‘Everything good for me has only come from India,’ she said, with that humility women know to soften the heart of the cruellest male.

‘And evil,’ I said, and fortunately for me I started such a heavy cough that I had to sit down on a rock beside the path, and let Madeleine massage me on the back. It did us good, this cough, for my helplessness made her position more urgent: she was the wife, the protector of the household hearth. It reminded me of one day, during the early months of our marriage, when I was put out by something, and she brought me a hot-water bottle to be thrust into my bed. It burst over my blanket in such a way that we rolled and rolled on the bed with laughter, happy that so small a thing could bring us together. From that day we always called it the holy hot-water bottle, ‘la sainte bouillotte’ .