Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Yes, I should have taken my room at the Hotel Atlantide, Rue de Seine, and it would have been lovely. I suddenly realized it was beyond midnight and Savithri must have gone to bed; or maybe she had her eyes open, and her collyrium was still flowing down her cheeks — with the tears. ‘Let them stay,’ she would say, ‘for when I see them, I know I have wept for you.’ ‘I’ll tell you something terrible,’ she said to me on the telephone, the morning I was leaving, ‘could I tell you, Rama, I’ve not washed my mouth since Sunday, I’ve refused to gargle or wash, as is my Hindu habit, after eating. I may smell bad, but till you left England I wanted your smell to perfume my mouth. I’m a Hindu woman after all, my Lord.’

Yes, it was that very morning she had said this to me. And yet what distances of land and sea and of gathered time had built themselves between us. Even the look of a street-walker in the Champs-Elysées was like the touch of Savithri’s presence, her sound, her gait, her gesture, her womanhood. For man, woman is anonymous. Clean or messy, I offered all my thoughts to Savithri, cleaned my mouth and went to bed. I slept very well.

For the next few days I kept myself busy between the Rue de Richelieu and the Sorbonne, collating my notes, looking up a reference here or there — something about Pierre de Beauville, of Avignonnet (in the fonds Doat at the Bibliothèque Nationale); or some obscure episode in the ghastly burning of the Cathedral of Beziers, for example the woman who begged that she be allowed to escape because she was with child, and the Abbé de Citeaux saying, ‘Like this, my dear, there will be one more heretic killed,’ and pushing her back down the steep pathway.

I also went to the Sorbonne to see my professor, one of those very shy, very dirty, learned, inexorable, breathless, subtle, universal men. I was always happy with professor Robin- Bessaignac, if only for the deep sense he possessed of the poetry of history. For him metaphysics was a game of civilization, and the philosophy of history the more wonderful the greater the paradoxes it cultivated. One of his ideas was that the Buddhist Mani (jewel), become Manichaeism, had travelled through Persia gathering strength, and had penetrated Bulgaria to make itself European and establish the sense of the dual-in-history. ‘It is a particularity unique to Europe,’ he averred, ‘for Europe is feminine. Nobody goes to fight for a Helen in India; rather does Rama send his devoted wife Sita to exile, to protect his impersonal kingship from any shadow falling on it. For if the whispered concoction that a washerman had broadcast were true — that because Lady Sita had been prisoner of the Demon Ravana there was a shadow on the purity of Ayodhya’s queen, an absurd, an illogical formula, and yet a believable one — then must Rama the Kshatriya send his queen away into exile. The masculine, the impersonal principle is affirmed,’ went on Professor Robin-Bessaignac, ‘and here you must read Michelet’s beautiful pages on the Ramayana, in his Bible de l’humanité. What power, what mastery of style, what childishness! But that was the nineteenth century — Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and all that — all so feminine, you see, concepts created and spread by the romanticism of the revolution, with gun and sword in the name of humanity. For, as a clever colleague of mine says: ‘Tout humanisme est une mutilation.’ Childish, perfectly silly that humanity could be bettered by the sword or the lance, any more than Monsieur Benda’s intellectual paternoster had brought about a revolution of ‘clerks’, or Monsieur Sartre’s jejune lubricity will make us more philosophical. Did Sully Prudhomme make us more poetic?

‘Europe, I tell you, is a marketplace of ideas,’ he continued; ‘we sell our wares, not as in India or China where you can trace your artisan ancestor or your Brahmin guru for two or three or five thousand years — we were still in the Iron Age then, and not long before that our men were drawing those bisons in the Dordogne caves — we sell our wares, I tell you, because they are newest, because they are of the temps modernes, the freshest, the most original. Europe is made, my friend, of Fath and Dior, of Leibnitz showing his backside and calling it a monad, and of Renan and Taine calling in the chemistry of the apple to prove their theory of history.’

‘You are, I fear, too harsh on Europe,’ I tried to intercede on behalf of my Europe, but he would not listen to anyone when he made one of those Gangetic escapades into history.

‘You, coming from India, were the first person to bring to my notice,’ he went on, ‘the fact that it was not because there was a change in the building material, or because suddenly after a thousand years of Christianity we wanted to have more light in our cathedrals, that the Romanesque went up and shaped itself into the Gothic ogive — that it was Abelard, Peter Abelard, that castrate prince of thought, who like some Yagnyavalkya or Nagarjuna opened the windows of our smelly Oecumenical Councils, established scholastics (maybe — why not? — because of Eloise) and cried for light and for yet more light. You could perhaps go further, and prove anthropologically that the dead and buried illegitimate rejeton of Eloise and Abelard that becoming a taboo, a crypt in space, made Abelard long for light, for space, for generosity, a hope for truth.

‘If you asked me what was the difference between Vézelay and Notre Dame, I would say one is narrow, earthly, circumscribed, the other is pure gift, the outer adoring the inner, the hiding of the Holy Grail that light may transmigrate into space. “Happy is the people,” as you so rightly quote the Nestorian Martyrs’ Anthem, “happy is the country where are laid up your bones as treasures. For when the light of the sun sets, the light from your bones will shine forth,” Yes, you are right there.

‘But our humpty-dumpty historians would prove that on such and such a date some old municipal clerk made an entry in his accounts book, “Sieur Morothor gave two pieces of gold to the Cathedral of Sens, because his father had gone to the Crusades and had not returned.” And so his grandson Guillaume de Morothor joined the second crusade, and brought back the new style from Constantinople or Syria (only you must add “peut-être” and probably end with a question mark, or your theory will have no academic distinction). Ha, ha, ha, ha…’

‘You are right too, mon ami, when you say that that ecclesiastic of St Denis, hero of the Crusades and enemy of Abelard, St Bernard, condemned the Gothic — its gargoyles, and so on — for he was a realist. Conceptualism in giving essence to objects destroyed the reality of the object, and thus gave lightness to stone and man, and built the apse of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The real heretic, as the Church knew well, and that is why they castrated him, was Abelard, le Socrate de Gaul, as he was called — not some ascetic Cathar of Mont Ségur. But just as Catharism spread and has become an actual part of our culture — through the troubadours, through St Dominic and the purity of a Simon de Montfort — so did the Gothic idea spread and give light to our lives, so that when Constantinople fell we did not have to sit in smelly, bat-infested Romanesque dens, but in the Cluny there,’ said Professor Robin-Bessaignac, pointing in the direction of the Rue des Ecoles.

‘Modernism, you might say, started with Abelard, and perhaps Abelard was in no way ignorant of the Manichaeans. We know definitely that he had read a great deal of Nestorian dogmatics. But our poor scholars think that because we have the wireless and the aeroplane not only do we know more of history — but we actually make it. No, we no more make history than the swallow makes the spring. Students and merchants brought ideas from all over the world, and since in the past people were more earnest for wisdom — they did not have the newspaper or the dull speeches of Monsieur Vincent Auriol— they understood more quickly and deeply what they heard and not what they read. Did you not say the definition of a teacher in India is he from whom one hears? That is real teaching, that is the real cultivation of intelligence, and not this rushing to the Librairie Gibert to get the latest book of Jaspers. We are poisoned by words, we French,’ he concluded, signed my scholarship papers, and started to send me home with a feeling that I had brought light to him and not he to me.