Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘The whole thing started, I think, on that Saturday night. The evening walks have been going on, of course. How truly the classical poets have sung of Phoebe and her influence on the lecherous humours of mankind. Georges, of course, has been coming every evening. Though, he’s such an innocent creature, it hasn’t needed much time to realize what he had to know. And like a sincere and good Homo sapiens he has been playing his game discreetly and correctly. He does not look back so often for Madeleine, and sometimes, too, we conveniently stay back or take a different route to return home, for we are skilful with our limbs and we can skip down goat-paths easily. “Catherine,” Madeleine shouts, at the beginning of St Ophalie, “Rama is cold, and you know he needs good exercise. So we’re going to run,” and hooking her arm in mine, she drags me downhill. Though my lungs ache, I just do not interfere. “Look after Georges, Cathy,” she shouts again, from the bottom of the olive grove, and we hear Georges shouting back, “Enjoy yourself. We shall soon be back for the soup.”

‘And in all honesty it could not be said Georges is unhappy. If his voice does not carry that spontaneous, almost innocent lilt, it is not without a human touch. For Georges, like all human beings, wants to care and to be cared for. Nobody knows if ever he has loved anyone in his life — he never mentions it. But one can see, somewhere, a scar on his mind and on his heart; his impotent arm seems but the external signum of an internal event. Catherine has one thing which Georges cannot but see; she has maidenhood, she has innocence — in the Church sense, for in my sense she knew all that she should know as female and future mother — and she is a good Catholic. That she is not so much interested in metaphysical discourses might just as well be the one thing to be recommended in this case.

‘Imagine Catherine with a brood of four children — she says she wants at least six — discussing the Monophysites and the Manicheans, and Georges learning Chinese in order to tell the difference between one monastic costume and the other. One particular order might wear camel-hair and the other yak-hair, but for Georges this made all the difference in their dogma. To Georges, tradition is like a dictionary — it gives the right meanings. Imagine Catherine concerned with the morphology of the word, itsu or Ki-to, which in Chinese, I’ve read somewhere, means “in-between-two” or “the indivisible”. It applies as much to cloth that is woven or to the thought that is constructed. Being probably of Buddhist origin the Manicheans applied it to thought, and Georges will make your Monophysites take it as “garment”, “cloth made of a hard-stuff, the fibre of a hard-fruit or peel of tree, like the acacia cinna, etc. etc….”

‘I heard Madeleine’s discourse with conviction. I am convinced — and it needed little effort to convince me — that Catherine is the right wife, the perfect mate, the holy companion for Georges. If she had nothing in her, at least she would never be an emotional problem for Georges. And Georges above all needs calm and rest — for work and prayer.

‘True, Madeleine fascinates him. She fascinates him by just that which he cannot have, must not have. It is, to use his own expression on another subject, “la concupiscence de l’esprit.” Georges loves the intricacies, the sorties, the clairiéres, the bogs and marshes and clear silences of Madeleine’s mind. To be near her, he realizes, is to feel intelligent. He can no more have a sinful thought beside her, than he could beside a running brook… No, not quite, but almost.

‘Catherine on the other hand is such a safe, such a known creature. (Astrologically speaking, Catherine is a Capricorn and Madeleine a Scorpio — and that makes all the difference between the two cousins.) It did not take long before Catherine knew where Georges should rest, where stop to change the position of his paralysed hand — he put it sometimes at the left elbow, and sometimes he made the two hands clasp one another. And just as I used to ask Grandfather Kittanna, “Grandfather, shall I now give you the snuffbox?” and Grandfather Kittanna would say, “How well you know when I want it, good boy,” and allow me to open his silver snuffbox — not knowing that when he stopped reading it was not because the page had ended but because he wanted to understand something, grasp a philosophical point, may be even wait for an illumination, and then it was snuff just did the thing — so it is with Catherine, when some thought pursues Georges, and it goes round and round his head like a fly in a dark room, and she talking away of Rouen and the quays, of Zoubie’s stories of her diplomatic career— brief though it was — or of Oncle Charles and his jokes about the Republic. “‘In my village,’ Oncle Charles tells proudly,” Catherine will begin, “‘they say when the third Republic of 1870 was proclaimed there was but one man and a dog to salute the tricolour flag on the Mairie, and the name of the man was Leon Henri Portichaut, and his dog was called Zizi. So we always called it the Republic of Zizi Portichaut. And to speak the truth, this Fourth Republic could not even be given such a distinguished name, it should be called the Republic of Mimi Portichaut, in honour of a famous woman who played her part behind the scenes in the making of this great Republic’” And Georges will remark, “Ah, is that so, is that so — Catherine you are full of such wonderful stories.”

‘Catherine does not want much, she just likes to go about with this man, and when one comes to the corner by the Englishman’s villa and the dog, to say, “Shall we stay here for a while?” and see how grateful Georges looks for this kind suggestion, his glasses catching the rays of the evening sun and making him look every inch a professor. Or when they limp up higher to say, “Now, this is what schoolchildren do— les enfants a quatre pattes en avant!” and Georges will even try to laugh. Catherine is not silly or uneducated, but she has that awkward compassion which makes women think a man can be happy by being taken to a picture, or given the cake he usually says he relishes, or offered a packet of neat, nice handkerchiefs. Catherine’s heart is in the right place, only it has to be metaphysically educated; if she be indeed the Catholic she says she is, then must she know the great saying of St John: “For love is of God and he that loveth but loveth God.” And if only Catherine could understand her own face, I am sure she would see what beauty has come into it, what clarity, and what rounded hope. She knows with the simple faith people have, she knows like a local train always coming somehow to the right station, that her destiny is bound with this man’s. When she kisses her cousin Mado so often, it is not merely affection but gratitude.

‘The other day we found Catherine taking Georges’s arm, no, not on the main roads, but when he, impatient, wanted to go down a mule path with us and cut the distance by so much twist and gradation. But as soon as he reached the main road, he said: “Merci, Mademoiselle!” as though to a pupil of his. Madeleine’s arm, he rarely takes — he has too much respect for her, and maybe an unnameable fear.

‘So evening after evening goes without a word being said, without a gesture of any consequence from anyone (for Madeliene waits, and with what anxiety, every evening to come home and cast a sly look at Catherine’s lips, to see if the rouge has had any dents in it — I call it the examining of the wedding sheets, which eunuchs do in upper-class Muslim houses, to report that all is well to the mother-in-law) and yet there seems, like the quiet and simple flow of the Rhone after Lyon, through Valence, Montélimar and Tarascon, that there is nothing but the wide, the inevitable sea. On just a point of this watery expanse of the Middle-of-the-World is the thrice sacred Ste Marie-de-la-Mer, and there the gipsies come once a year for the festival of their saint, because it was there, on those sacred sands, that the early Christians bought the relics of Marie-Madeleine; and it was there that they hid them, in caves and cellars, till they could come out into the open, and raise a cathedral at St Maximin, and praise her with: