Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘The day is still bright outside, but I want Madeleine, I want Madeleine, and I say, “Sweet love, shall we try again? For the peacocks are about the garden and I hear the first snows melt on the Himalay, I can hear the winds of the north arise. I’ll take you to Alakananda, and we’ll become clouds, Madeleine; we’ll visit all the townlets of the yakshas. I’ll take you to bejewelled palaces and recite to you Kalidasa; I’ll show you women whose breasts hang like this with love, and whose waistbands fall, for they cannot bear the love that rises in them,

Nïvibandhocehvasanacitalam yaha yakshāganānam

rāsah Kāmād ambhitakaresv ākshipastu priyesu

Arcitungān abhi mukham api prāpya ratuapradipan

hrōmūdhānām bhavaki riphalapreranac cūrnamushi.

The women of the yakshas suddenly discover

The knots of their girdles loosened.

Their lovers, by passion made bold,

Tear down the loose-hanging garments:

Maddened with shame the women throw

On the high-lit lamps — but studded gems—

A handful of the powder of unguents;

To no avail, even when consumed by the light.

I’ll take you to Himalay and make love to you there. Come, Come, Madeleine! The train is ready, and can you not hear the whistle go?”

‘Madeleine chokes and I carry her on my back, she cries that she needs many medicines from all the hospitals of the world, but she had had a coma, and she’s had an internal disorder. Call surgeon Bonnenfant, call Dr Sugérau, call Nathan and Bernadine! You can sense white aprons all about and the smell of ether. There is wondrous music of the yakshas in the Himalaya.

“Madeleine, did I hurt you, did I seek you too far, and too long?”

‘Madeleine simply says, “Lord, leave me alone. I do not belong to the man kingdom. I’m torn as by a porcupine inside. I am finished, I am aghast. O, Tante Zoubie!” And Madeleine cries.’

November 6. ‘She looked at her watch, this time, and it was already ten minutes to two, and Madeleine rushes to the bathroom, adjusts her hair a little, shouts “Au revoir, chérie,” to Catherine, who didn’t need much intuition to see what had happened, and, “Au revoir, Rama,” she says, as though to herself, and goes to teach the Napoleonic Wars to her students — she is teaching them about the duke of Reichstadt, Roi de Rome — while I try to plunge into some magazine, and forget the elephant.’

November 7. ‘How I waited yesterday for Georges to go home, how I hated him for staying on. He knew my knowledge. Oh, I wish Georges had never existed, for God has given eyes to Satanael. Awkward and unashamed, as soon as Madeleine and I came back to our room, while Catherine was having a wash, how I pressed Madeleine to myself, how I forced her to undress, and how without sweetness or word of murmur I took her; and she let me be in her, without joy, without sorrow. I just remembered Georges was not there.

‘I seemed to have no shame either, for when Madeleine had washed and returned, I hurried through my own ablutions and went back to her, and said many silly and untrue things, and she said yes and no, as if it mattered not. Then I told her about Kalidasa and the yakshas, and kissed her again with so great a demand that she said, “Come.” I wandered through empty corridors, and alone. Madeleine caressed my head with compassion, and said, “Be happy, my love, be happy.”

‘But I was not happy. So I spoke to her long whiles about all sorts of things, of Mysore and of Grandfather Kittanna, of my father and of Little Mother. I gave Madeleine details I had never given — how Uncle Seetharamu used to go to his room four times, five times a day, and shout, “Lakshmi! Lakshmi!” And his good, round wife would come, and the door would close. Auntie came back just as she went in, and we children never lost an occasion to know what had happened. “Uncle Seetharamu has had ten children and eight are alive,” I said.

‘“I’ll bear you eleven, if you like,” said Madeleine. And humiliated, I bathed and went back to bed.

‘In the middle of the night, I know not what took hold of Madeleine. She came into my bed and made such a big demand on me that I felt afterwards like a summer river — the sun sizzling on the Deccan plateau, and the stones burning; the cattle waiting with their tongues out; and the neem leaves on the tree, still. You can hear a crow cawing here and there, and maybe the oppressed hoot of an automobile.

‘This morning I made no coffee for Madeleine. She went shyly into the kitchen herself, and when she came to say good morning I pretended I was asleep.

‘I must stop this toofan of the deserts.’

November 9. ‘Tonight, it’s again Madeleine that came to me. She knew, as by an instinct, that I would not go to her.

‘A woman hates a male when he withdraws. She cannot accept his defeat — his defeat is the defeat of her womanhood. She must be the juice of his love, she must give him again and again that which he asks for, till his asking itself becomes a disgust. Then the woman has contempt for him, she rubs her breast on his back, she whispers sweet things to his ears, her body speaks where no words could speak, and she lifts him up and takes him into herself, like a mother a child. Then you want to take a cactus branch and beat her and scratch her all over. You want to bite her lip and pull the breast away from her chest, and taste the good blood of her wounds. You want her to be young and new and never named. You want her to be your first love, your first woman, you want her to be the whole of the earth. She knows it — for every woman is a concubine, a mistress of passion, a dompter of man’s condition — and she becomes virginal and simple and, Lord, so new, so perfumed, that the ichor rises in the elephant, and you are at it again.

‘This time you’ve gone far, very far — the winds have arisen, though the summer heat be still there, and the neem leaves wave a little. You hear the cry of a child, and the washing of cloth by some well. The world will be purified. The world is pure. For the mistress has become the mother.’

November 10. ‘Today I could have destroyed Madeleine, so richly, so perfumedly she hung to me. I could have spat into her mouth and called her the female of a dog. ‘It is time I went away. The farther I go, the farther the truth seems. It cannot be good for that which is ripening in Madeleine. I must respect life. I must respect Madeleine. I must go to London.’

November 13. ‘For these three days I have been much nicer to Georges. The elephant has destroyed the jungle, all the jungle, with the creepers, the anthills and the thorny branches. The monsoon winds have arisen. It will soon rain. And I will go.

November 15. ‘It’s terrible to think of Georges and Catherine going through all this. Madeleine said to me last night, “Rama, it’s gone beyond the stage of powder and lipstick,” and I answered, “Well, don’t be a eunuch anyway, Madeleine, for God’s sake.” Madeleine grew very silent at first, and then went to her room and started reading Katherine Mansfield. Nowadays, she reads Katherine Mansfield a great deal. “No man can understand a woman, Rama, no never,” she said, laying the book down. “Only can a woman speak of a woman. We are not angels. But we are no beasts.” I said, “The elephant dies where no one knows. You seek the true for you know the full falsehood. Maybe Georges is right.”

‘“No, Georges is not right,” Madeleine answered, “but you may not be right either. For if truth is truth it must explain everything. Did you not say, Rama, it was Sri Sankara himself who, defeated in discussion by a woman when she questioned him on things essentially feminine, left his body in the hollow of a tree by the river Narbada, and incarnated in the body of a dead king? That he lived for ten years with the four queens and wrote those celebrated verses on love, which you say are among the most beautiful lyrics of India?” “But that was Sankara,” I said. And after a while, I went on, “I will still defeat you.”