Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘What can you expect,’ said Georges one day, ‘he lives with that seamstress.’

‘Does he?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I never told you. But one day he was boasting of his bucolic adventures, bucolic I tell you, like some schoolboy’s; “You are a born puritan! and as they said about somebody: You were born middle-aged and will never grow younger. You, Georges, are made for the Inquisitor and hell-fire,” he said. “I, I am, I, of the warm country of Spain; not one of those Bogoroditza, Bogoroditza crying Slavs, weeping over the sleeves of the Virgin. You should see me with Rose. She’s a seamstress all right, but she’s warm and round and wonderful to mettre dessous”—I quote his words. Humiliation,’ continued Georges, ‘is a terrible thing. When you’ve been a professor of a university, and you have drawn a decent salary, and you are forced to emigrate for some brave speech you made, defending your language, your mother tongue, be it Catalan or Serbe or Malgache, and you have to live on giving lessons, far away from father and mother, sisters and brothers — and far away from your Church…’ said Georges. He became silent for a moment, then continued ‘… what else could happen to you? But Madeleine is having a very good influence on him. Perhaps even Buddhism is good for one!’ he declared, and laughed.

I enjoyed Georges’s new, open laughter. No, Catherine was not going to be just an appendage, she was going to bring some strain of happiness into the sad soul of this Slav. Alyosha Karamazov would still be happy…

So Madeleine continued her Pali, and her own gravity increased, partly because of her maternity, I think — for a woman feels very serious and responsible and even ponderous when she bears a baby inside her — and partly because of her natural sadness. Our lives were now grown more intimate, it seemed, for we spoke less in words and gestures than with silences. She knew something, she knew not what herself. Maybe the elephant had told her, or the bull. He often did tell something, with a peculiar telluric vibration, some sort of telegraph code, which seemed to hum on all the time inside; and the moment you touched him, caressed him and left your hand long enough to feel itself, the chthonic message came through and you knew. The bull gave Madeleine these messages too, as to when my letter would come — for I wrote so seldom — or when her Inspector General would visit her college. And sometimes the bull gave her happy news: for example, that she would have a son — and that was about Pierre — or a daughter — and that was Esclarmonde. And it gave sadder news too, sometimes. It seemed more communicative and friendly, this Nandi, to Madeleine than it ever was to me. But, after all, Nandi was Parvathi’s companion and only Shiva’s vehicle.

I remember, as though it was told me but yesterday, how the landowner of the plot opposite, who wanted to get rich and so let the plot lie there till the crise économique was over — the Korean War had brought the price of land down — one day decided to make some money. He was a retired Italian fruit merchant, without children, and he thought it better to do things while he still could, so probably Monsieur Scarlatti said to himself, ‘Let me hew some of this stone, and maybe I could sell it to that Englishwoman who’s just bought the Villa Malherbe opposite.’ Madeleine described how when he put his chisel against the stone and started hammering, two birds, two sparrows ‘with stripes as big and dark as your fingers on them’ came twittering and clamouring to the window, and would not leave till she rose, and when she went to the window there he was, one could see, Monsieur Scarlatti, and he hammering away. ‘My heart bled,’ said Madeleine, ‘as though something terrible was going to happen.’ And without a moment’s thought she ran down to Monsieur Scarlatti and said, ‘You know, we like this huge, bulging stone at our door. Couldn’t you let it stay? Look what a kind shape it has.’ ‘Madame Ramaswamy,’ he replied, ‘I am a man without work; so I thought, why not make some money selling stone to that Anglaise? But I’ll leave it, since you ask, en bon voisinage. I’m too old, in any case, to hew such stone. Look, look at what I have performed, after half an hour of sweat! And please look at these hands — ah la la!’

‘Your husband is back home, Madame Ramaswamy?’ he had asked after that.

‘No, not yet,’ Madeleine said. ‘You know his father died?’

‘Yes, that is what the postman told me. And such a nice husband you have. Always saying “Bonjour, bonjour,” to all the neighbours. You never hear him make a sound in the house.’

‘Ah,’ Madeleine protested, ‘you haven’t heard him singing! When he sings in his bath, it’s as though the roof would fly to his own country.’

‘He has every reason to be happy. My wife says, “That couple there, they’re nice people — and so learned. They have such interesting looking visitors too.” And, being Italian, she likes to hear a foreign language. It makes her feel at home when you pass our windows speaking in English.’

‘Thank you, Monsieur Scarlatti.’

‘Thank you, thank you, Madame. And if ever Madame has something to dig or carry, a bulb to be planted, the jasmines to be trimmed, “There he is,” you should say to yourself, “there’s neighbour Scarlatti”. By the way, Madame Ramaswamy, I was telling Madame Jeanne you should cut that jasmine a little now, that it may grow big by spring and make you a nice bower by summer. Anyway, it’s good to have spoken to you, Madame, and say bonjour on our behalf to Monsieur your husband when you write to him…’

Madame Scarlatti, seeing them from the window, had shouted, ‘Bonjour Madame; comme il fait beau! Les hirondelles sont déjà là …’

And Madeleine looked at the sky and found the world glorious. The bull was saved. He had only a knock on the head, and Madeleine said she had filled the hole with olive-oil that night so that the stone would absorb it and grow black. When I came back from India the hole remained, but like some caste- mark on a basavanna bull it gave him a look auspicious. I must have gazed so many, many times at Nandi in Shiva’s temples and he must have liked to look like his Indian counterpart. And why not, I ask you? Is there a difference between an Indian bull and a Provencal one? Our bull nodded his head like a basavanna bull and said no.

So, news of sorrow or joy came to Madeleine through the good bull’s messages. She read them like a gypsy reads her cards. In some past life Madeleine must have been an Indian woman, no doubt. She believed it firmly, and so believed even more firmly in the truth, the everlastingness of our marriage. Otherwise she could not explain, she said, how a man from Hariharapura, Mysore State, could come and marry a girl from Rouen, St Ouen — orphan of an engineer, niece of a notaire et conseiller municipal de la Ville de Sainte Jeanne. I myself, of course, believed in reincarnation — how could I not? — but it did not always explain everything. Some time, in England, I would be an elm.

I shall be very honest: there is no need to be otherwise. On those early spring days — it was just a year since my father had died — when the birds were coming back and I could almost feel the swell of the earth as it rose to greet the revival of sap and returning great sunshine, I thought once again of the large spaces of atmosphere before me and the journey back to India, and there was a sorrow that filled me and which had no name. The whole sky and jubilant earth were one dominion of sorrow, as though somewhere the earth was seen as a drama, enacted in an isolate, an unuplifted, a non-happening apocalypse. What you loved most, the closest, the nearest, that which spoke its breath to you, that which was the balsam, the burthen-bearer, the hearer, the carrier of your sorrow — was impotent, dead. I pressed Madeleine, on those nights, with the warmth and tenderness of a mother for her child — I would have suckled her if I could, and thought how well I now understood why pregnant wives at home are sent to their mothers. Just as bottled champagne remembers its own spring-time, the grandmother- to-be goes through a new motherhood, and absolves the pain of her own child. She offers her big, round daughter cashew nuts and paprika, Bengal gram paysam and hot tamarind chutney; she makes brinjal curry for the evening, with Maratha- buds, coriander, and cardamom; and once in three days there is onion-curry, smelling from the kitchen to the mat on the floor. The pregnant daughter eats almost where she lies, and when she is taken into the lying-in room, how wonderful to hear the child cry — a long, broken-glass sound, but happy, new, reviving — the limbs become renewed, fresh, whole; the stomach feels vacant, and nostrils are filled with the smell of garlic and betel nut. I wished I were the one who would press Madeleine’s legs — I wished I might have cared for her as I should.