Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Mano budhi Ahankara Chittani naham…

Not Mind, nor Insight, Mineness nor Substance…

I was almost in tears.

Perhaps I was growing weaker. My appetite had gone bad and my attempt to get fatter brought no visible results. I was no more than seventeen when the doctor killed the disease in its infancy, as he thought, by giving egg and port and making me go on long morning walks. I had recovered in due course, and the X-ray showed that there was nothing to fear. The sputum, too, seemed normal. But now I was seven years older, and the weight of the family was perhaps on me. Maybe the death of Pierre was something that no love could heal. Or perhaps it was only that I was tired. Oncle Charles was a fine person, but he had too much vitality.

I was happy to see how cheerful Madeleine looked. Madeleine herself found no difference in me. She was so close to me, she felt, when we lay side by side and heard the frogs that came in with the rains. Or when the cicadas sang through the whole night, she wondered if India was like that, warm and very full of countable sounds. She said for the first time she felt protected by me. Aunt Zoubie remarked that never had she seen a couple so happy. ‘I never thought man could ever be so happy. Oh you Brahmin boy, who came to make this Charentaise happy,’ and she would press me to her enormous bust. Aunt Zoubie was romantic, and she loved to ask Madeleine, awkwardly and gently, details that no woman would herself tell. ‘Be happy, my child, be happy. You are such a lucky girl. Rama reminds me of a giraffe, which has grown its neck through centuries, trying to feed on the tree of Paradise. You will now have a beautiful daughter, and what will you call her?’ asked Tante Zoubie.

‘Esclarmonde,’ said Madeleine.

‘What a beautiful name.’

‘Why, Tante Zoubie, it’s a name of these parts. Esclarmonde of Perelha is one of the famous figures of Albigensian history. She it was who protected the luminous Grail when the Roman armies were marching up Montségur.’

‘Anyway, what will you call the next one.’

‘Why talk of that now, Tante Zoubie?’

‘Well, you know what we say: Time in love goes quicker than the moon.’

‘Well, we’ll call her Isobel. There was an Isobel, Countess of Montpalais.’

Tante Zoubie did not carry the conversation any further, said Madeleine. She wanted to be the patron saint of our love, and maybe she thought she would have a right to perpetuate her own name. But my thoughts were elsewhere, and Madeleine knew me too well not to guess where I was.

‘We’ll call him Ranjit,’ she added, pushing my hair up and putting her hand deep into my pocket; ‘for he will look just like you, and though Ranjit is no Brahmin name, I know, let him be a hero, a Chevalier — a Rajput,’ she said. ‘You know, Rama, women must have names from their mother’s side and sons from their father’s side. It makes everything easier for marriage.’ And she laughed.

I was happy with Madeleine. I could be bent by the knowledge she had of me — the knowledge of my silences, the vigorous twists of my mental domain. But further down, where the mind lost itself in the deeper roots of life, she waited like an Indian servant at the door, for me to come out. Then would she know what was told.

The next day was Sunday. I took the whole family to Auch for the eleven o’clock Mass. The cathedral of Auch is such a silly elucubration of black and Gothic flourishes — it looks awkward, unavowed, as though men had built it, so to say, between famine and sleep and plague, in the slow nightmare ofliving. How civilized, on the other hand, the beautiful building on the opposite side of the market looked. An eighteenth-century structure, no doubt, with the noble lines of the triangular pediment and four Italian windows, but altogether of such a light severity. There was a truth about it that made my morning rich. Madeleine said to me, ‘You know I knelt today for the first time in months. I never thought of cotton wool or bacteria. Tell me I have improved. Haven’t I?’

Tante Zoubie said, just to exasperate her husband, ‘Madeleine, I was admiring your profile. How beautiful you looked in that green hat of yours. You must teach Catherine to dress. She dresses like the notaire’s clerk — like Madame Aufusson, in fact. And if she ever marries she should have a son and he should be called Titus Levitas, Master of Jurisprudence.’

What could you do with Tante Zoubie’s tongue — it was like that. ‘You can’t stitch it with a gunnybag needle,’ I once said to Madeleine, quoting an Indian saying. ‘Nor with hellfire,’ she answered. ‘I think in fact Auntie would enjoy hell.’

But she was a dear creature, and how early she rose in the morning, to see that Marie prepared the best of toast while she made coffee for ‘les enfants’. While she was with us she made us many types of jam — one even a jam of figs — and she put half into my car and half into the ‘angel of resurrection’. Eating sixteen pots of jam in twenty days, I said to myself, would need more than a hero. ‘What remains you can take back to Aix; I’m sure Madeleine would be happy to eat it. And you will remember your aunt, children, won’t you. Goodbye, Rama, goodbye.’

The ‘angel of resurrection’ left first. Madeleine had such joy on her face, seated between her uncle and her aunt — they all sat in front. ‘Look after yourself,’ said Oncle Charles, ‘and we shall look after Madeleine, and send her back to you, a plump and healthy-looking thing. We’ll make her eat a lot of beef.’

‘Oh, Uncle, just as I am leaving Rama!’ protested Madeleine. She kissed me simply. She still looked very lovely in her black suit, the amber necklace falling just between her breasts, and her hair all turned into a big shining bun at the back. She looked true.

I wandered about a bit in the house, went to the chapel and took leave of it with very real pain, and looked out once again at the fig tree and Blanche, who stood grazing in the fields. Blanche looked up and it was a pity I could not rub her with dry grass, nor take her to the stream for a drink of water. Marie filled the thermos with milk and coffee, and I wish I could somehow have consoled her. ‘When you want to marry, let me know,’ I said; ‘Madame and I will help you to complete your trousseau.’

‘Oh, Monsieur is very kind,’ said Marie. ‘But it will not be for a long time to come. We say here, to buy a vineyard or to slip on a wedding-ring, you need more gold than the cross of St Catherine.’ And she added, ‘What is yours you cannot lose, and what is not yours even the good God will take away.’

The day looked broad and very full of breath. Marie brought me a comb and a handkerchief that Madeleine had forgotten in her bed: her hair was so long, she needed a comb wherever she went, did Madeleine. I put them in my pocket, as a gift from Marie. What genuflections of heart the simple, the true — who live with the trees, the fields, and the animals — perform.

‘Next year, sir. And I shall tell Monsieur Robert how well the house has been kept. If all his friends were so considerate…’

‘Au revoir, Marie. And tell Pierre on my behalf that Monsieur Charles thinks Blanche has worms in her belly, the way she rubs her tail against the wall constantly, and sneezes on touching water. He must take her to a vétérinaire. Goodbye.’

‘Au revoir, Monsieur.’

Montpalais was behind me, and I did not want to see it again from the top of the road that twists round Biran. A year was a long way off, and how much the earth would have turned on her base, and how many birds would have gone from Gascony to Africa and the Arctic and back for nesting again by then. The Korean war was still going on, and who could say what the mad world might do. France, that country of peace and courtesy, had known so many wars of late that even as the Korean trouble started, the whole countryside was stockpiling, sugar and paraffin, potatoes, wine, and motor-car tyres. As I drove through the villages the doors were not so widely open, nor were people so carefree as they watched the elders play bowls. But when I neared the Spanish frontier more richness and gaiety came into the life of the people, for they lived on two frontiers, and the noble Pyrénées gave one the assurance that war would never come as far as here. What Napoleon could not do, nor Hitler, the Russian could never do. And from Pau you could look at the Pyrénées and know that to be strong one must be pure as snow. Madeleine then seemed never to have left me.