Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Except that in the seeing of the seeing there’s a seer.’

‘And the seer sees what?’

‘Nothing,’ she answered.

‘When the I is, and where the Nothing is, what is the Nothing but the “I”.’

‘So, when I see that tree, in that moonlight, that cypress, that pine tree, I see I–I see I–I see I.’

‘Yes.’

‘That is the Truth,’ she said, as we turned and walked back to the village.

She was silent all along the road, over the Rhone bridge, and by Montmajour, through Beaucaire, Aries, Vauvainargues, to the ruminant foothills of Mont Ste-Victoire. Or if she spoke, it was just to say, ‘Sorry,’ when her foot touched mine, as we turned round a curve. Like all Indians she was sensitive to touch, and her foot shot back as though it had touched the unreal.

I told her then about the bull and the elephant and she enjoyed my stories.

‘Could I take grass for your bull?’ she asked, as we stood long above the hill of Cabasson, just before entering the sleeping city.

I said, ‘Of course.’ In the night she plucked some grass, and like a peasant woman she tied it in the hem of her sari. When we came to the Place de la République, she said, ‘How awake everything is! I cannot understand how anything could be dead.’

‘They say, here in Aix, that the dead live in cathedral towers — you can hear their echoes when the dogs sleep.’ And she remembered I had a memory that had not reached whiteness yet.

‘I am sorry I am always kicking at your feet,’ she said, as though in answer to herself. ‘Father says I must once have been a lame horse. You can give me the most flat of flat floors, and I’ll always find something to tumble against. I have fallen from an elephant while we were going shooting — and no sooner did Father realize I was under the elephant, than he started sobbing; but like the budumékaye you spoke of in the fairy tale, I came up out of the jungle bush and nothing ever happened to me. There are people like that. I always fall off horses, stairways, trains — I once fell off a train from Allahabad to Ferozabad, and Father pulled the chain. Fortunately it was a metre-gauge line and we were going uphill, besides we were not far from the station. Yet how frightened everyone was. And I, like a confident child — but of course sobbing — came running behind the train. Since then there’s always been a servant with me, wherever I have travelled, who has never to lose sight of me.’

‘But then how did they send you to Europe?’

‘Well, between vanity and safety, they chose vanity. They wanted me to pass exams that no woman in the Rajput community ever had — so that my father could say, “Here is Savithri; she’s a Doctor of the University of Oxford or London.” Since the princes have lost their titles, they must have other compensations. But I enjoy being in Europe. I love the activity, the singleness of purpose, the sense of freedom,’ she said and laughed. ‘But I am such an inveterate lazer that when I sleep I almost need a redhot needle to awaken me. To me sleep is the most important of biological phenomena.’

‘I am sorry it is so late,’ I said.

‘Nonsense, I meant that when I sleep I sleep. So, don’t expect me before nine in the morning. I shall sleep like a buffalo.’

We had by now got up the steps. She said, ‘Here is my bull, anyway,’ and she laid the grass at his mouth, like one does at the arathi ceremony. Then I lead her to her room and said, ‘Sleep well, sleep well, Savithri.’ I threw a last glance at that moon-coloured night, and as I went in, Madeleine was up and looking through the window at the backyard of Monsieur Ponchon.

‘What a very beautiful night, Rama,’ she said, and led me to the window, and took me into her arms. I could feel the full joy of her presence in myself, and I suspected that there was another, an additional presence, that would grow, as this night, in the texture of being: a third presence, more real than our own, more lasting, and from that on to another, created through other presences, and thus more lasting again — like those olives which had been planted and made real to us by some Roman citizen of another age whose presence, unknown to himself, may have been felt that night — an embryo that had no eyes and no feet yet, but had lit the congress of circumstance in which two beings had known a truth, which had a beginning, a middle and an end, yet had been consecrated for an instant at the edge of the ‘I’. Discovery is a whisper to oneself, and the night of love is an embalmment, a holiness that we place outside of time, in the knowledge that creation is truth.

When I woke to myself, I heard Madeleine crying, as though the womb bore a light that was too difficult to carry. I slipped her back to bed, and lay by her hour after hour, touching her forehead and wiping her perspiration, as though her pain was the first, the only one of mankind. There is no pain more acute than a pain unnameable, and all the shine of the world is only a prophecy, a shout that death is, that one loses another, that a tight breast has a pain no husband can take away, were he even within you. Who is within after all? No one. It is one’s own pain that sobs to oneself. To be woman is to suffer, to bear the yoke of man. The rains will break before the door of the barn is reached. Night alone exists and the exhaustion of an empty day.

Madeleine’s body had reached out to its full womanhood, and I was the lie.

When I came down the next morning, Savithri was out in the garden already, her fingers touching this rose and that, her nostrils smelling the air of pine and sea, and her eyes looking into themselves, as though something arbitrary had happened, as though somewhere the earth had slipped from its centre and a new equinox had commenced. Not that the polar ice would have melted, nor the bears run screaming round the world, nor the arctic palimpeds find it too hot for them to stand on the snow and preen themselves before the males in honoured delight, but something intimate, some geological substratum had broken into bits, and space had emptied itself out of the depths. A new age had commenced, with new fauna and flora, with monkeys that spoke, with birds that walked, with men that were taller and understood each other in the instant of recognition. Time lay like sunshine over the earth, and when flowers grew it was not for adornment or for fruiting, but for the dew to gather itself into a round cognisance, and for woman to go touching herself in lit moments of the sun. There were not many women, there was but one woman — one form, one sound, one love. It was not something to say to another, or even to give or to take, but to see in oneself as a child discovers its navel; and once recognized it still had no name, no more than the navel for the child which saw it constantly.

The trouble with time is that it creates its own myth, and thinks we become with its becoming. Just as we can park motorcars, we can park thoughts in time, and go away on our job, which is living. To forget time is to live in recognition, and whoever said love could be born? Love is never born, but all is premonition of love. You come upon it as you come upon— as you come upon a poppy, by the roadside. You drive past it and say, ‘Oh, the lovely poppy, how beautiful she looks in the sun!’ In fact the poppy has nothing to say, not even that she is a poppy, but to you it has happened; to her nothing has happened, for what can happen to what is. The Is-ness cannot be added on to is-ness, love cannot be added on to love; for to know love is to love love and to love love is just to be.

To lie in the arms of a beloved, Savithri must have thought, is then just to take delight in one’s self, to park the car in the village, go to the top of the mountain in the mist of night, and look out for the sound of the sea.