Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Je suis fier d’etre admis a vos cérémonies

O Dieu du peuple élu.

Sitting on the deck, with seagulls flying over me and the saline smell of air giving my breath depth, I slowly and deliberately opened my letters one by one. I had not been to Cook’s in Berkeley Street, where I used to receive my mail, for at least six days, and had gathered it all just as I was coming to catch the train. Green Park was so beautiful on that morning as my taxi went up Piccadilly, she seemed lost in her own imaginative agreement with herself, creating space, streams, palaces; and almost as though there was always a palm-wide stretch of England that was mine— my own, named, railed off, consecrated. He who cannot possess a habitation and grove in England has never been admitted to her circle, her ceremony. The Druids have left something of their silent circumambience in the living trees of England.

The letters were four. I was so free within myself, I felt I could walk down to the sea and leap over the waters, or fly across the curve of sky, or be transparent and sheer as a musical note. Happen what might elsewhere in the world, what triple-heat be it to me! I was confirmed and true in my centripetal being.

The first letter I opened was Saroja’s. It was sad and very clear-spoken. She wrote of the frustrations she had had to face, day after day: the refusal by the medical college because at the last moment the university discovered she was a Brahmin; some of the million little indelicacies which life with a mother who is not one’s own can bring, to disturb, distort, and ultimately obsess a feminine existence. ‘I lie in bed, morning and evening, thinking of the father that is not, and the beloved brother, so far away. I cannot fight life’s battle alone, dear brother, and I am not a saint like you are. I have decided to get married. The man I have chosen for myself is not one you would have chosen for me. Such a good man — so generous, sincere, and competent— but he’s just not made for me. It’s as though if I talked Kanarese he would talk Nepali, or if he played golf I would play chess. But he earns well, he will be loyal and devoted, for he’s been wanting to marry me, he says, since I was a girl of five. Brother bless me.’

So that was how I’d functioned after the promises I had made to Little Mother by the sea of Bombay.

The other two letters from India were just business papers needing my signature, concerning my father’s insurance money, some property title-deeds I was transferring to Little Mother, the sale of father’s car, and the change of house-ownership. I also received, being Sukumari’s guardian, the quarterly report on her progress at school. Wish as I might to possess the whole sky that afternoon and feel the freedom of the sea in my nostrils, I was reminded that I was a brother, a son, and the single head of the household.

But Madeleine’s — the last I opened, for the fear in me had tied such knots — was very sad and free. Something had happened to her too; the elephant always communicated everything to her, she said, when I was away. There was about her a sense of calm desperation: nothing could be as it was. Such a chunk of sorrow entered my throat: O Madeleine, Madeleine… ‘I cannot ask anything of you,’ she wrote, ‘for as you say, asking is at a level where receiving can never be. Who asks and who receives? La vie est une mélopée du néant. You are, and I know you are there. You are not, and yet I know you are. I lose you — I know I will lose you. And yet where can I go but to you?’

Boulogne seemed ugly, with chimneys, unwashed houses, bistros and ungainly rain. In the train I warmed myself with some good coffee, and night covered me up with movement and singleness. Nothing helps sorrow so much as a rhythm — a steady prayer-wheel turn, or the sound of an engine. Peace comes with the annihilation of acquired positions. You can slip into sleep and wake to a Paris that is dull, vacant, and elongated with the Eiffel Tower.

My hotel was in the Avenue Mac-Mahon, and its meubles anciens, its boudoirs, panelled cupboards and Louis XV chairs all seemed to come from another world: if I touched them, I thought, I would touch awake death. I undressed, however, and washed; then, being sleepless, I dressed again and wandered down the Champs-Elysées, wishing the bookshops were open. But I was in the wrong area for books. Here the holiness of womanhood seemed torn asunder, when you saw bits of elegant flesh, in all its length, roundedness or thinness, and sorrow filled me — I wished I could have smiled back at that girl outside Fouquet’s, have laid her beside me and told her sweet and enveloping things. My purity was intact, but my sorrow tore holes in it, and gathered me into demands.

Man in his flesh is unutterably weak and the sorrow of a Paris prostitute seems somehow to give meaning to one’s own sorrow, to show one’s intimacy to oneself, and perhaps even reveal the nature of poetry. For all women have the womb of poetry, and it is we that seek back our integrity of flesh and so lose our freedom. In the City of Shiva, Benares, concubines powdered the Ganges with yellow turmeric and gold, and dipped into the river and arose, their breasts firm for the taking, their bodies tender as the vine. They made you leap into yourself, with the feeling that knowledge is of oneself made, that the knowledge of knowledge is fathomless, unnameable, but with the smell of green camphor on the lip: ‘My moon, my jewel, my pride.’

No, these were not the riches, I told myself, of this so different a civilization, where virginity was lost by too much knowledge, and womanhood had lost its rights by forsaking that involved slipping secrecy, that mendicant shyness, with which a woman hides her truth. You should know a woman and not understand her — for if you understand her, then you can never be a pilgrim to knowledge. Women, all women, speak poetry: whether they are talking of houses or aluminium vessels, of a sick child’s napkin or a reception chez la Duchesse d’Uzès, it is all naming. It is because a woman, even a prostitute, can name things that we seek woman and lay her by our side; perhaps love her for a minute, an intuition, a totalness, a luminescence— when we die unto it, and so to ourselves.

I walked back to my hotel alone. My demands were ancient, primal, inevitable. Yet was I Brahmin. The prostitute of Paris could be a woman gone astray, a bourgeois, like the girl I once met in a café in Clichy. After I had given her drinks and made her feel at home, she told me she was an Italian, the honourable wife of an honourable man, who had gone away with a bad woman and left her stranded. So she had wandered faithfully from one respectable man to another, till age had overtaken her unawares. ‘I can keep a house, wash clothes, mend stockings. All I need is an apartment and an ironing machine. You will see how fresh your clothes will be. I am not extravagant — I will look after les economies …’ I gave her some money, took her address to show how very serious I was — and, of course, never went to see her. I needed the smell of camphor, and the yellow of turmeric on the limbs.

No, all this was vague and silly: wandering thoughts that come to a traveller on a cold night, in the Paris of the Champs- Elysées. I wished I had taken an hotel in the Latin Quarter, where I could have gone to the Deux Magots and spoken to Henri Baudouin, the art-critic. He wrote his books or articles in the Rue Jacob, and came out exactly at midnight to go to the Deux Magots; there the lean waiter called Jean would say, ‘Bonsoir, Monsieur Henri, quel temps tout de même, et on est en Février encore,’ and the small-moustached patron would come and say, ‘Bonjour Monsieur Henri; alors, la commande est prise?’ ‘Eh, oui, c’est le chocolat, avec un peu d’eau chaude et une brioche,’ would retort Jean. Of course he knew! Pray, who would, if he did not?