Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Madeleine, however, went into the bathroom and stayed away so long that Catherine went knocking and banging at the door and said, ‘One can have diarrhoea laughing.’ Georges hung down his paralysed arm and went about moving the ladle in the saucepan. We were having tomato sauce, and the wheat flour must not become sticky. Catherine took the ladle from Georges and went back to tease Madeleine about the diarrhoea.

I went into my room for a while and drew the shutters. My work was not progressing too well, was it? So I laid the pencil beside some fresh paper, as though that were enough to make my work go forward more quickly. When Madeleine came out of the bathroom I went in to have a wash, and we had a wonderful dinner. Everything looked so perfect — except that there was a little too much salt in the tomato sauce — and we naturally fell into a large and meaningful silence. Afterwards Catherine went into her room and must have wept, for when she came out her voice seemed different.

Georges went away carrying some book. ‘Goodnight, Rama; Goodnight, Madeleine; Goodnight, my little wife,’ he said and kissed Catherine again in front of us both. Then the night fell back into the world, and when I went to our bedroom, Madeleine was busy at her Katherine Mansfield.

I went to say goodnight to Catherine, but before she came to her door I was already in our bedroom. ‘Goodnight, brother. Goodnight, my knight protector,’ she shouted from the corridor.

‘Goodnight, my sacred sister; sleep well.’ How I waited for Madeleine to wash and return. I read this and that, but nothing went into my head. She had let down her lovely, her golden hair, as she came in — she had on a Kashmir nightdress I had bought in London; and her limbs moved as to destiny. She came to me so gravely, elevatedly, and lifted me up into herself.

November 4. ‘I love Madeleine now with a new love. I love in bits and parts and all, like an antelope does its doe, the elephant does with the ichor dripping from his brows,

Kandula-dui-paganda-pinda-sanotkampena Sampathi bhir…

Elephants wild with ichor frenzy

Shake the trees, rubbing trunk on trunk;

Freed, the heat-loose flowers in worship

Fall to the waters of Goddess Godavari.

Birds, leaf-canopied, twist forth the tunnelling grub;

In the mirrored treetops hemming the river’s edge

Loudly murmurs the heat with languorous swans

And the ‘coo, coo, tackularn, coolay’ of the nesting doves.

I love the curved nape of her neck, so gentle, so like marble for me, almost saffron-coloured under the light of the moon, or when I call her to myself in the day, and take her in my arms, how her throat smells of some known musk.

‘The body of woman is so like a wood, with herbs and marjoram and creepers that fall from the top; and bees that hum, while the tiger calls for his mate. The cubs are all about; and you lick the head first, and then the neck, and then the back, and when you slip over the breasts, you feel the navel shake as with oxyaphic anguish. You delay and you wander, you creep over the zone and you say sweet tinkling things to yourself. You know the still wonder is already within her, the wonder that makes the sun shine, or the moon speak; you know the world will be, for it is; you know the banana ripens on the stem and the coconut falls on the fertile earth — that rivers flow, that the parijata blossoms, white and pink between leaves. And as the wind blows, wave after wave of it, and mountains move, the wind stops and you settle into yourself; and you hear it again… And Madeleine is there, with her hips so wondrous blue and red, and she smells, God, she smells of me, of my elephant, of my suchness, and I ask of her, and she murmurs such ontological things that her very eyes seem fixed; and taking me into myself, I transpire as the truth, as though touched by itself, like the wave that sees itself to be sea, like the earth that was spread out and was called Madeleine. But when I want to call her Madeleine, I have to say Rama — her lips are mine turned outward, her flesh mine turned inward, and what a sound she makes, the sound of a jungle doe.

‘And she calls me, does the doe, with sweet cries and painful cries, as though I were far; and I tell her, “My love, my doe, I am drinking the waters of many fountains, for the evening be come and the tigers have not yet left their lairs,” and she sayeth, “I am full and alone; I am the bearer of the day; I run with the waters, I leap with the skies, I murmur with the trees, the frogs; I become the serpent of sweetness, I am the song that leapeth; take me into the evening and fold me in Kashmir silk.” And I take her away to a world from which there is no returning — like those Tibetan tanakas, with cypresses and moons and waters below, and the dragon throne in the middle. You seat him and say, “Son, sit here,” and he sits, does he, the lama; you cover him in brocade and sound the horn outside, and wave after wave of it comes echoing back to Lhasa; across mountains and deserts it incarnates and comes, for the Lama is crowned and seated in the Potala. Then all the treasuries are opened and all the windows too, and the white horse waits with decoration, sash, and fife, for the summer palace and the pools.

‘Lord, it is full of scented grass, and the music had been piping a long while, and you have eyes in between the ears, you accept gifts in between the acts, you touch the heart between the breasts; and you lie on Madeleine as though on a great seashore. The night has ended, the dawn has not yet broken. It’s the time for ablutions, for the murmur of prayers and the road to the temple by the river. The God knows you and you know the God, and his jewels shine as if arisen from the earth but yesternight. For a moment you had gone beyond the body, and oh, how sad it is to come back — to bear this heavy limb.

‘The elephant has been lost in a dream by the winter pool: you feel a tear by his left eye. And he must rise and he must go. For you can never be free, son, but through yourself. You see those hills there? You would go beyond them, and beyond the hills, my son, my child, be the mountains and the rivers, bigger and full of maned lions. And beyond the lions, the country of man, where they build houses, factories, funeral grounds; where they buy and they sell, where they shout and they sing. And beyond that again be another forest and another lake, another tiger and another porcupine, and beyond again other towns and cities, other worlds and nights. But the dream is the same, you can no more catch it than you can speak to the elephant who is speaking to you, there in the waters; he is but you, seen on the other side. You cannot talk on the other side; the ichor flows on itself, and becomes the tear with which we’ve made the lakes, the fountains, the rains. The ichor made the rivers of the worlds, and the fruits and the perfumes, the cities and the zoological gardens have all been made; for man has been led by his own ichor.

‘I give it to you Madeleine, but you are where you are, and I am but nowhere. Madeleine, dear Madeleine, let us go on another voyage, on another excursus of the world. Let me smother you in muslin, let me take the lip to its ultimate twist and congression. Madeleine, let me touch you here by the waist from which rises birth, and Madeleine, let me touch you on this the right breast, that I lie there as on my deathbed, Madeleine, dear Madeleine. Oh, give it to me, give it, give it! Oh, give that! Madeleine do not cry. Oh Madeleine, do not suffer. For God’s sake, Madeleine, I’ll hang all the tanakas about you; I’ll call him Krishna again, Madeleine; let me squeeze the juice out of you, let me lick you like a dog, and let me see you in my spittle, on my tongue; and Madeleine, let me smell you, smell the you of me and the I in you; Madeleine it’s sweet to the taste, it’s so wondrous bitter, it smells of peppermint and of gelatine, Madeleine, dear Madeleine. Oh, give me back my saffron, my honey of woodbine, my parijata of the temple yard. Why do you cry so Madeleine, did I hurt you, did I awaken you, did you rise and did I fail? Oh, I would smother your sobs, Madeleine, I would die with your pain.