Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

As I usually went to collect my mail from Cooks in the Place de la Madeleine it was very helpful to me to eat nearby. There was always the Rue de Richelieu in the morning, dull and warm, with the dust making my breathing somewhat difficult. But it was joy to think of all the great men — Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Baudelaire; Sainte-Beuve, Guizot, Taine, Renan, Rainer Maria Rilke — all had worked at those tables. The past, as I said, must always speak to me for the present to become knowledgeable.

The lunch was a dull affair, except that Oncle Charles rang up home from the telephone booth and I talked to Catherine, whose voice was rich and singing, and full of joy. She would soon be married and life would have some meaning. ‘You are my godfather of happiness,’ she said, ‘and you have to be there when the right time comes.’

‘My sister is getting married too, Catherine, and things at home are not going too well. After all, I’m the eldest son. I may have to go home — fly — for a few months, perhaps.’

‘Would you take Mado, then?’ she asked. ‘For unless one of you at least is there, I will not marry till you return.’

‘Well, we won’t put off your happiness even by a day,’ I promised. ‘I only hope by then Madeleine will still be able to move about.’

‘Of course, that’s true. I never thought of it. Fancy being a woman and not remembering things like that. You know, Rama, one grows to be such an egoist in love.’

‘To whom do you say that?’ I replied, as though she would know what I meant.

‘I hope my marriage will turn out to be even a little like yours. Tante Zoubie says I have not gone far enough geographically in my choice. I’ve gone eastward all right, towards Russia, but I haven’t gone far enough. She would have liked me to have married an Indian.’

‘Who would become a notaire at Rouen?’ I laughed, remembering the Cimetière St Médard and the Caveau Roussellin.

‘No, I suppose not. I shall be happy to be a professeuse, as our maid Jeannine says. Yes, Madame la professeuse, I shall be.’

‘Au revoir, Petite Catherine,’ I shouted, as Oncle Charles was scratching his thighs distractedly and paying the telephone bill. He joked about something, and how he made the telephone girl laugh.

‘Au revoir, Patron,’ she smiled. ‘Et a la prochaine.’

Oncle Charles left that very afternoon — he embraced me when he was saying goodbye — and though my work was over, I wandered about Paris doing nothing, feeling foetid and forlorn. It is at such moments one feels the loss of a father or mother, something steady whose affection is assured, as it were biologically, like the sap to the tree in spring. Walking about aimlessly on the quayside I dipped into this old book and that — some history of the Cistercian Order, or the Qualité intellectuelle des Indiens corbeaux, published by some Reverend Father in the hope of converting them to good Christianity. It was the time of Chateaubriand and A tala, and the conquest of empires—’Les écrivains impériaux,’ as Thibaudet called the whole group of Chateaubriand, Hugo, Lamartine, and Balzac. The books on naked women revolted me; who on earth, I wondered, could look at such vulgarity, even if it were real. Was the body so important, so consistently in demand, that man forgot Peter Abelard who had preached Conceptualism just on the other side of the river? How often Eloise and Abelard must have wandered together over the bridges, looking like those young couples into the Seine, to see their still faces side by side.

Love is ever so young, so elevating — like the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, pure, leaping, coloured by the stained-glass windows of the apse. I could love, yes, I could. I was in love, yes, I loved, I knew love now, I spoke Savithri. Round as the Rose of Notre Dame was love. Colourful and violet as the rosace was love. There had been days in Cambridge when I felt I could not say ‘You’ to her, only ‘I’—but what a strange thing to feel, and how foolish it all seemed. Rilke was right: you discover the nature of love as you grow older. What does one know of love at nineteen? The fresh scent of eau-de-Cologne on the hair of Madeleine, or maybe the shy, as yet unformed curve of her breast. Can one really love lips or limbs? — no, that could never, never be complete, and a sin it would be. Love demands nothing, it says nothing, it knows nothing; it lives for itself, like the Seine does, for whom the buildings rising on either side and the parks and the Renault factory farther downstream make no difference. Who can take away love, who give it, who receive? I could not even say that I loved Savithri. It is just like saying ‘I love myself or ‘Love loves Love’. ‘Tautology! Absurdity!’ I cried, and looked more courageously at the naked women in the books. Finally, as though it would make me reverence Savithri the more, I bought a copy — almost a Montmartre copy — of Baudelaire, with big breasts and twisted limbs about the waist: the dark sensuality which seemed so attractive to Oncle Charles.

For I was sure Oncle Charles’s headache had other reasons than the champagne and the cognac. Trying to recapture his youth, he must have looked up old addresses. He probably wanted only to be recognized by some former patronne, some girl who would still hold herself bravely — and he must have received a shock. Age is true, very true; especially when one is past fifty. After that age you might choose other, rarer perversities — and Paris could supply you with anything you wanted — but this barrack mentality was the bane of Europe. No wonder Monsieur Sartre became famous during the phoney war — the devil becomes interesting when you have no devil to face. In the Middle Ages, the devils went up high and on to the roofs and became monster gargoyles against whom the virtuous St Bernard fulminated so. And Baudelaire, he could never have become a Conceptualist. He would have been with the good St Bernard, for having gone as far as Italy on the Crusades, he might have bought himself his liberty, and died contrite, a devout monk. Verlaine fulfilled the secret destiny of Baudelaire, like Ronsard’s inversely might have been by Villon.

Frères humains qui après nous vivez

N’ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis

Car, se pitié de nous povres avez

Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.

The train to Aix swung with a rhythm that seemed to give intelligence and feeling back to me. Esclarmonde would of course be born, and how beautiful she would be, with Madeleine’s gold in her hair, and perhaps my eyes; I already saw her big and tall, ready for the change into lovely womanhood, and the pang of the first ache for love. She would combine the shyness, the natural intelligence and the deep gravity of, say, Saroja — yes, she could be like Saroja! Why not? And perhaps I would touch her, and feel in my fingers that I was touching something very real, something far and personal: the truth.

We seek in our progeny the incarnation of lost hopes. We fornicate on our wives the gifts we would give our loves. We breed bastards, because we lack courage. We lie by each other, clasped in each other’s arms, breathing each other, sucking each other, as though truth was in the instant of that conjointhood. We speak tenderly to one another, year after year and life after life we may go on, but the ultimate may be on the bank of a river, a green patch of wide — awake grass, a Norman archway, bicycles, and the bridge of Clare. There is only one Woman, not for one life, but for all lives; indeed, the earth was created — with trees, rivers, seas, boats, buildings, books, towers, aeroplanes — that we might seek her, and remove the tortor act of St Bernard. Poor Charles Baudelaire.