Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘The Cathars, were they Vedantins? They feared no death, they believed in the Pure, they believed in Truth. The Church believed in God.

‘For these few days how happy I feel in the ancient fold of the Church. I feel protected, I feel confirmed in my humaneness. I feel truly happy.

‘Georges has lent me Berdiaev’s book on Dostoevsky and this is what I fell upon tonight: “Tuer Dieu, c’est en mime temps tuer l’homme… Ni Dieu ne dévore l’homme, ni l’homme ne disparait en Dieu; il reste lui-même jusqu’a la fin et pour la consommation des siécles. C’est ici que Dostoevsky se montre chrétien au sens le plus profond du mot.”

‘How I wish I could tell Madeleine I have begun to worship her God.’

August 31. ‘Yesterday as evening was falling Madeleine brought me home and went out again to have a longer walk. I came back to my room, remembered it was an old chapel, and turning towards the window knelt and prayed, saying inconsequent things. (My Latin is too poor to make a prayer, and only in Latin can one feel truly Christian.) Madeleine must have felt something, for she came back unexpectedly, saying she’d forgotten her cane and didn’t want to be bitten by Monsieur Robert’s dogs, but when she came she knew she knew me. There was a common area where we were together, and for the first time, I almost felt she would give me some cotton and say, “Rama, there are a lot of bacteria here. Take care.” Then she would kneel by me — just my bride. Yesterday I felt married to her as never before.

‘Which explains why she came to me last night. Perhaps, too, because Georges has left she knew that apart from the innocent servants nobody would think of Monsieur and Madame in bed together. Madeleine felt the thought of another was even more vile than the look of another. I think she has liked Georges less these last few days; when talking of St John of the Cross he dwelt so much on temptation. Womanhood has been swelling up in her for some days. Last night she rose as she always has, with a single gesture, and on my sick bed in the chapel of Montpalais, when the night was clear as one’s knowledge of oneself, she became my wife again and I called her many sweet names. I also called her my Isobel, and she gave a laugh that the mountains might have seen as a ripple of lightning.

‘I am such a different man today. For to wed a woman you must wed her God.’

While we were at Montpalais Oncle Charles came to us on his annual visit: pilgrimage to the Brahmins, he called it. This sounded all the more absurd as we were on the main route to St Jacques de Compostella, and down below in the Val de Biran you could see many a black cross of pilgrims who must have lost their lives with the fever of the marshes, or from hunger; or even the wolves might have jumped on them and eaten them for Friday lunch, as the curé would say. The whole district was filled with little chapels, opened but once a year when the curé brought the chalice and the cross, and clothed Ste Elise or Ste Rosalie for another year. Old peasants from the country, with lace bonnets and beards on their faces — one woman was ninety-seven years old — came murmuring things to the patron goddess of their fields. Under the loop of sky that covered the yellow of the land and the snow on top of the mountains, ran a series of small pogs —as they call little hills in those parts — and by tree and rivulet goats browsed as the prayers were said. We would take fresh-cut grass and a few violets to Ste Rosalie. Oncle Charles was to be with us at the fête du pays.

‘We leave Place St Nicolas at nine in the morning,’ he had written, ‘and the house will be in charge of Catherine this time. She has to finish her exams the coming year — she is twenty-three, and she cannot go on studying any longer. She never looks at a man; she never looks at a thing; everything is jurisprudence for her. She loves to look after my work so she will manage the office while I am away. She’s happy Madeleine will come back with us. Though Madeleine is just five years older, Catherine talks of her as if she were her mother.

‘Strange, sensitive child. That she should be mine…

‘Well, as for our arrivals and departures, we leave Place St Nicolas, as I said, at nine in the morning. Zoubie may make it a little late — you know what she is like. By one o’clock anyway we should be at Angoulême. And by four or half past, you should see our “angel of resurrection” mount up your puy. I am excited to be back in clear pure sunshine again, with the smell of mountain all about one. Tell Madeleine if she’s not more beautiful this time Oncle Charles will make her eat a foie-de-veau— the veau slit in the garden, under her nose. Oh, la Brahmine… ! Zoubie and I kiss you both tenderly. Charles.’

He is the whole of himself, is Oncle Charles, whatever he does. Pity he did not take more to music, for they say even today he could go and sit in the cathedral and play the organ, if the organist were ill. He was always dressed impeccably; and for his age — he was fifty-seven then — he looked clearly fifteen years younger. Zoubie was a fat, big bunch. She was called Zoubeida because her father, an employee in the railways, had gone to Paris for his honeymoon, and that was in the curious nineties of the last century; he chanced on an operetta called Zoubeida ou l’Esclave de Perse, and it was about a slave girl, Zoubeida, who wished to wed the Prince Soulieman one day — and she did.

Zoubie was a great lady, once divorced, for her husband had run off with someone much younger. He was seven years younger than herself. Oncle Charles was a timid widower. He courted Zoubie for five or six years before she yielded to his requests and married him. But Tante Zoubie had such fantasy, such generosity. It was she who welcomed Madeleine back to the family, not Oncle Charles. He was always afraid of what his old crone of a mother in Arras would say.

‘She will never understand this, never. And after all she’s so near the grave. Let her die in peace.’

Though this was partly the truth, Madeleine once said to me, ‘You will never understand us, the French. There is piety, of course, and compassion. But Lord, there is so much calculation. I tell you, virtue is a part of French bourgeois economy.’

Oncle Charles knows well, for that is his job, how some old women when the fear of death comes nearer simply transfer their ‘goods’ to the holy Church; just to make sure, not only that Paradise awaits them on the other side, but also that there will be a nice sermon pronounced at their funeral, and the right novenna said in their name ever after. Whether this be true or not, Oncle Charles was frightened to hurt his old mother. Whatever happened and wheresoever he might be, on September the twenty-eighth, Oncle Charles had to be in Arras to kiss his mother and spend a week in her company. During that week she would never mention her daughter-in-law, and all letters to Oncle Charles from Zoubie had to be addressed poste restante. Strange the way Oncle Charles — he who held such an important position in Haute Normandie — should tremble as he talked of his mother. How different, I thought, was Grandfather Kittanna.

Of course ‘the dark angel of resurrection’—that huge Citroen quinze-chevaux— sang herself up the hill before Madeleine had had time to dress. She had become so beautiful, had Madeleine, as though you could pluck riches out of her face, that had I been superstitious I should have been afraid to take her out of an evening. She was so childlike that no sooner did she hear the car outside than she ran to the window, pins in hand, and her golden hair actually fell out of the window like a bunch of grapes. For an Indian this golden hair seemed always something unearthly, magical, made of moonbeam and of raven silver.