Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Marseille, as you know, is a big port, and ships come there, come from all over the world, from America and even from India. And people come in them — and people take trains and go away to Paris and to London. People go to London, anyone could go to London. I often go to London myself and I work at the British Museum. I did not tell her — I mean Savithri— that. Madeleine alone knew. Savithri of course knew with the knowledge she had of what Savithri was and not what, I was. For Savithri London was not a city, a place in geography — it was somewhere, a spot, maybe a red spot in herself. Like the London traffic lights, it might suddenly grow red, and then like a kunkum, a large one on the round face of a Bengali woman, would the green go up, the cool, round, auspicious green of London.

‘What a strange noise these trams make,’ she said, ‘and how strange these road signs look. They look so primitive.’ Then remembering Madeleine was French, she added, ‘And as for India, we have no road signs at all.’ That brought the car to a stop — for we were already at the Gare St-Charles. The train came in very simply and easily. Savithri got into the compartment as if she had always known Marseille and the train, but could always be forgotten by herself. I felt anxious for her, and so I said, ‘Please send us a wire as soon as you reach London. Will you?’

‘That’s just like my father or my great-uncle!’ she exclaimed spontaneously. With Savithri truth and tact were but one instinctive experience. She could no more tell a real lie than grow taller — or even maybe, leaner. The departure was normal and simple — I bought a dinner ticket for her, and waved a long and simple goodbye. Madeleine was happy to have met her and was sad at her departure.

‘It’s three thousand years of civilization that produces a thing like her,’ she said, as though paying a compliment to me.

‘And five for me,’ I said, claiming my Upanishadic ancestor, as though my grandfather’s grandfather had seen him, and we’d inherited land from his estate. My sadness was intellectual, abstract; it took refuge in history and metaphysics. What would I have done if there had been no Georges coming at five o’clock and no chance for us to go crazy over the Monophysites. We were now studying their texts, and not knowing Latin I was dependent on Madeleine and Georges to help me decipher Catholic, rather Christian, theology. Georges was the master there, and he was happy. Work is holy because it hides our love of love. The fig leaf, perhaps, was the first civilized act of art.

It was a jolly day though, and Madeleine was singing. She was singing some old refrain from a Provencal berceuse:

Soun enfant en mai blanc que la néou,

E tréluisis coumo uno stello

Ail ail ai! que la maire es bello,

Ai! ai! qu’Enfant est béou.

She said, ‘I’ll drive now,’ and with her at the wheel the car took on a new rhythm, felt familiar and happy, as horses feel when their real masters come, not their grooms; bending and lifting itself up the car carried us back, and I had fallen into myself. I knew that there, in that steadiness, man knew the only everlasting peace.

‘Peace, Madeleine,’ I said, ‘is where the wife drives the car at eighty kilometres an hour, and the man falls into his abysm looking at his nose.’

‘I will put honey on your nose, one day,’ she said and kissed me on the top of my olfactory organ to prove that love lay in familiarity. You think you possess what you have known so well. Love at nineteen is as illusory as happiness at twenty- five. Marriage is a bond, and you live together because you can change hands at the wheel, and bring gateaux for guests, as you pass chez Madame Tissier. I was lonely, and looked at the trees on the Place de la République. I counted them and they were twenty-three.

~

Pages from my diary.

October 17. ‘Catherine came here the day before yesterday. It’s no use pushing her and Georges into each other’s arms. Of course she’s shy — but she looks at men as she would a legal book, for reference and for dependence — not because she’s a lawyer, but because she seeks permanence. All men and women (and they are, for some reason, contemptuously called “bourgeois”) who need permanence — that is, the majority of mankind — are dharmic, in the sense that if they did not know that these fat, huge, gilt-lettered tomes existed the governance of France would be impossible. No child would be born, and no man could keep a shop, and no prostitute a card, and no woman a husband. Birth and death need a law — the smaller law that flows from the greater Law, beyond birth and death. All rules are for liberty. To obey (the dharma) is to be free. (Nobody looks freer than a soldier or a police officer.) A true bourgeois then is a saint, an anointed being, to whom his home is a monastery, his dharma his citizenship.

‘The saint of the monastery is the real bourgeois; he lives frugally, he stores up for Paradise. He who stores up for another age, another world, can only have a great imagination. It was a Provencal woman who said — and Madeleine heard it from a friend, who’d heard it—”Monsieur le Pasteur, are there any English people in Paradise?” “Yes, ma vieille,” answered the good pastor of Antibes. “In that case,” the old lady answered, “I do not wish to go there. They are so immoral, the English are. A second question, Monsieur le Pasteur: Do you think my granddaughter Marguerite could join me in Paradise?” “Oh, yes dear lady!”—”Marguerite makes such lovely fried aubergines.” The good pastor could not say anything so he smiled, lifted his hat in adieu, and went away muttering many a prayer.’

October 23. ‘I am a tired man. I am of a tired race which for three (four or five?) thousand years has led such a studious, thin-fed, sedentary existence, that our nose and throat, our ears and tongue and eyes, have lost somewhat in native agility. We understand by other means, however… I suppose our sensibility — made more for talking to the gods than to man, made more for formulating the incalculable than the concrete— our mind slips round objects with the facility of water over pebbles. Yes, we Brahmins do make engineers, doctors, and even military men today, but it’s like one of those pillars in the inner courts of our old houses — though eaten by woodlice it continues. Not that it supports the roof, no — it supports its roots, and the rest is held by air, by faith. Oh, this fight against the contingency of modern life, of modern civilization; the battle is lost before it’s begun! We’ve the fibres to know, not the sinews to act: We, the real impotents of the earth.’

October 26. ‘The biology of woman — and the cardinal part it plays in her activity — you see it best, not when they are in love (for that is a melodrama) but when they want to get a man and a woman entangled for the continuance of the race. Just as a mother elephant when she senses an enemy lifts her trunk fiercely, whether the little one be hers or another’s — for maternity is anonymous — how Madeleine fights (in mind and body), against sun and rain, as it were, against hunger and cold; her one preoccupation is, a poor meal or a strong mistral might upset her astrology of events. How relentlessly, and with what instinctive wisdom, she makes every move, now pushing Catherine forward for her stability (economic and otherwise, hence talks of the sad fate of notaries, so dependent on the goodwill of everyone, more like a confessor than a doctor, etc., etc….), now for her education (for Catherine had done very well in her exams, especially in her Latin); but when it comes to Georges the maternal instinct gives way to something more unacknowledged, more shy. Madeleine, whom anyone could see has such insight into the human mind, knows Georges’s dependence on her. She knows she has just to come and stand behind us, her hand on my shoulder, as we play chess together— like all Russians, he is excellent at this ancient Indian game — and Georges will suddenly grow so agile with his fingers, and stupid in his calculations. She is the angel against his demon, and now it is not he who bears her rags, but she bears her crown of his making, and resplendent it shines, though somewhat sadly, against my Brahminic autocracy.