Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

What sweetness flowed from Little Mother to me. She it seemed was my inmost centre, the mirror of my life. With no word, or sometimes with just a word, she understood the curvatures of my silences and thoughts. She seemed to have borne me without bearing me, and somewhere, I knew, she suffered for me, felt the sorrow that filled my nights with such breathlessness.

Often I would lie with the moonlight entering my window, my bed was at the farther end of the room, almost by the window, and that of Madeleine against the wall, for light disturbed her— and feel the wakefulness of the olives, the figs ripening on their branches, the nests waiting for the blue swallows to come; I could see the long, white highway to Marseille, on which yellow-lit cars must still be moving, and beyond St Charles and the Vieux-Port, you could almost go step by step to the top of Notre Dame de la Garde, turn round the cathedral and look at the stretch of the Mediterranean—’la mer, la mer, toujours recommencée’. After a lapse of long silence, I would look towards Madeleine. The secret of inner formulations and growth had widened her cheeks, given poise and sadness and a certain pride to her lonesome face. I could have knelt by her and taken her hand and pressed my lips against it, and whispered many irrelevant, untrue things.

Sometimes, on an afternoon, breaking her clear quiet she would say, ‘Rama, talk to me, say something to me,’ and she would look at herself as though she carried some holy sin, some loved impurity, and I would remove my heavy glasses and tell her, ‘Oh, Madeleine, I’m sure Little Mother would be so happy to see you,’ or ‘She will be so lovely, Esclarmonde, just like Saroja.’ She would say, stopping her knitting (for knitting, like nest-making, is an instinct, a biological function), ‘Rama, say something about yourself.’ And I, speechless, for one cannot tell an untruth before a child-bearing mother, she is holy, a symbol of some certitude: like breath, like a mountain, or the silence of a river. I would take her head in my arms, play in the gold of her hair, and kiss her on the crown of her head. She was not mine, maternity had given her an otherness — she seemed secretive, whole, incommunicable. Words had no great meaning for her; she spoke, it seemed, always to herself, and alone. I wished I could have bought her a garland of thousand- petal jasmines, and tied them round her hair. And all the night I could smell them. But Madeleine, unlike other women, never seemed to have pregnancy-desires, no sudden intolerable wish for malagoa-mango or for red grapefruit — not even for good strong eau-de-Cologne. Her passion had turned elsewhere. She read and read a great deal, though doctors told her to be very careful; she continued her Pali lessons, and studied every book she could find on Buddhism. She went to the library and brought back Renan, Senart, and Alexandra David Neel. She ordered books from England, from the Sacred Books of the East series. She loved the Psalms of the Sisters so much she started translating them herself. One story particularly upset her for, coming home that evening from one of my long walks alone, I found her bathed in tears. I could not understand what had upset her — I always thought the chief, the single origin of all sorrow could only be me. I wondered what I had done. Then she slowly put her head on my lap, and told me the story of Vassita and the Lord.

‘Go, mother, go, bereft mother, go and find a household where they have mustard seed, and bring it to me quickly. I shall awaken thy child, Vassita. So shall he be the Buddha-become. Only this, Vassita, must thou remember, ask whilst thou crossest the threshold, sister, “Brother, has there been anyone dead in this house ever?” And if they say, “None, none, sister Vassita,” then bring thou a seed of mustard to me…’ Vassita, whose child had lain dead on her arm, said at each door, ‘Has there been anyone dead in this house ever!’ And they all said, ‘Yes, yes, sister, yes, mother.’ Then did she come back to the Lord and say, ‘Lord, be this not the name and nature of motherhood, that which we bare must always perish, as we ourselves shall, of eighteen aggregates compounded.’ And to her then, with the child, the dead child before her, did the Buddha, the Lord of Compassion speak and say, ‘Thou speakest the Truth indeed, little Mother, for all that has birth must perforce have death. The complex must dissolve, the becoming end in being.’ Then she said, did Vassita, ‘Lord, take me unto thy fold.’

‘Lord,’ muttered Madeleine to me, ‘Lord, take me unto thy fold.’

The sorrow of woman be indeed the barrenness of man.

Every evening Georges came as usual to the house. He became freer and more simple and jolly, making puns, laughing, and making us laugh; and thanks to his new certitude and happiness — for he really was beginning to be happy — he brought a release from the sorrow of our household. Sometimes he carried his papers to correct; I gave him a little table in my room, and as I worked on my history he would correct his papers, and from time to time make humorous remarks.

‘Look, look, what humanity is coming to!’ he said one day. ‘A sixth-form student, when I asked what duty was, said: “Duty is what one does the soonest”—and forgets all about afterwards, I suppose! And another bright young lad puts it: “If duty be anything universal, then it seems strange that in Tibet, they say, the same woman has five husbands, and in Islam four wives at least are de regle (for example, the Sultan of Morocco). August Comte was probably right in saying that duty is the law of the Great Being, who is nothing but growing humanity itself. Your duty is to the narrow world around you — the serf of the Middle Ages has his duty to his lord, the bourgeois to his city-council, and in Soviet Russia duty is to the Party. Duty could be defined as that system of personal behaviour which gives man the maximum of happiness and incurs the least pain to other…” How well defined,’ continued Georges, ‘and to think this bright lad is a Communist. C’est triste.’ And he went on to his next paper.

Meanwhile three times a week, on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Tuesdays, Madeleine continued her lessons with Lezo. There was such a change in Lezo since I had seen him in Pau. Either because he realized the sorrow of Madeleine, for I think he did care for her a great deal, or because Georges had given him a nice talking-to, or possibly just because he had learnt more of life — he had changed considerably!

Later I was to know that one day while I was still in London Georges did not come — he had one of his usual ‘malarial’ fevers that shook him all over and made him take to his bed, an aftermath of some infection caught during his Resistance days— well, Georges had not come, and Madeleine was taking her Pali lessons. As usual, after the work was over Madeleine went into the kitchen to make some fresh, good coffee for Lezo—’Poor man, he’s so lonely — think what it must be like to have so little money and live in a pension’—and when she came back, with a cup in each hand, and entered the drawing room, she saw no Lezo. Before she could know what had happened he had come from the back, having hidden behind the door like a schoolboy, put his hands over her eyes, and tried to bring his hands farther down, when Madeleine, with her Charentaise ire, dashed the cups against his face, and slapped him angrily and kicked him. in the belly.

‘I was a fury — a wild fury,’ she explained. ‘He fell on the floor, and begged me, begged me humbly and simply to forgive him. “Je ne suis qu’une bete sauvage,” he pleaded; “my ancestors were probably Berbers. Forgive me”.’

‘What does one do to such a fool but forgive,’ said Madeleine. ‘And after that, he’s become obedient as a dog. Sometimes I tell him: “Don’t behave like a rat,” and he smiles. Now, Rama, there’s no fear. You could go to Quimper-Corentin, and Lezo would behave like a faithful dog.’