Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Thus heresy proves the truth — as the world proves me. Buddhism proves Vedanta, the Cathars the Church of Christ.

Ours was a sort of anonymous collaboration. We spoke in symbols to prove our point. We would often rise in high indignation over some abstruse text of heresiatic commentary. Knowing little Latin, as I did, Madeleine always had the upper hand. Whether Father the Heresiarch de Rodol’s ‘obumbrare’ meant simply the shadow in the etymological sense, as Jean Guiraud explained, or the same as the ‘obumbraverat’ in: ‘Deus non venerat in there for any interpretation we needed. The right would naturally be on the side of Madeleine. Sometimes too, and of late, consult dictionaries and patristic commentaries, but also the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum — and Lezo was always there for any interpretation we needed. The right would naturally be on the side of Madeleine. Sometimes too, and of late, Madeleine would easily and quickly lose her temper. On one such occasion she broke out:

‘You haven’t our academic discipline! How bad your universities must be to lead an intelligent man like you into such confusions. A child of nine in one of our schools would be less muddled.’

I pleaded that neither French nor English were my mother tongue and that I might feel Sanskrit a little more than I did Latin.

‘Then you should not have started writing a thesis on a subject so specifically French, and based on Latin.’

‘But I thought you were writing a thesis on the Prajnaparamatata Pindirtha of Dinnaya,’ I hit back.

‘I am not writing a thesis. I am studying Buddhism for my own spiritual benefit.’

‘And I Catharism to prove that I am metaphysically right.’

There would be one end to such discussions, especially as Lezo was usually waiting downstairs for one of our evening walks. Sometimes it would be the shelling of petit-pois that would retain Madeleine, or the buying of Gruyere cheese—’I forgot it this morning, coming back from college. You both go on your walk. I shall be a good housewife, and make you nice macaroni with black olives.’

On the whole I think Lezo rather liked these quarrels on dogma, as his linguistic help was more often in demand. We used to beg him to stay — especially Madeleine — on rainy, dismal Saturdays when the discussion would have gone on the whole afternoon, and we wished to have some refreshment and repose. His presence made the discussion more superficial, so that we never got anywhere, and that is what we ultimately needed. After dinner I would return to my Church Fathers— good, serious men, who burnt people singing hymns, but who nevertheless loved their Church well, even if they sometimes loved their callings more. Madeleine would go back to her Prajnaparamatata. She always had questions to ask on some Pali or Sanskrit word, and Lezo would demonstrate his knowledge of Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese with the dexterity of an Indian pandit. (‘The book has been translated into Chinese by She Hu, and in Tibetan it was included in mDo agrel: a P’ags pa ses rab kyi pa rol tu p’yin pai ts’ig le’vr bya pa, which in Sanskrit means, Prajna, paramita-sangraha — karika’.) ‘Lakshmana Bhatta,’ I often called Lezo in fun and he liked it, because there were not so many Bhattas in the Indian texts.

‘But there are so many in our Brahmin streets,’ I once consoled him, ‘And Benares is filled with Bhattas.’

‘Ah, Benares,’ he said, ‘near Sarnath, where the Sakyamuni turned the Wheel of Law.’ And he recited with his strange European intonation the whole of the Sermon of Fire. ‘Foucher translates Chakra as “wheel”, but it means in the original Sanskrit the support, the point of being, the withdrawn centre, which comes from the Buddhist idea of the Void. The hole is in the middle of the Wheel — even so is the Void in man. Oh, these European Orientalists!’ he exclaimed. ‘I must go to India and wander as a Buddhist monk. Then I would understand Buddhism, but not till then. No, not till then.’

‘I prefer to go to Tibet,’ Madeleine put in.

‘A country of Devil-worshippers and Devil-dancers,’ Lezo teasingly protested.

‘Women like Devils!’ spat back Madeleine. ‘They are better than Homo sapiens any day.’ Then, feeling she had said too much, she retired to the kitchen and to her macaroni or petit- pois. She came back after a moment and added: ‘Cooking is a biological function of woman: it gives respite to her already small brain. If all the phosphorus in our brains were used up in discussion, woman would easily be fooled by man. So she must retire — cook macaroni or wash men’s clothes — and thus she recuperates her strength. If you want to rule women just let them talk: they will fall into a coma.’

‘Franco’s police know that very well,’ said Lezo. ‘A woman détenue is just made to laugh and talk, and she quickly exhausts herself. They did that with my sister. When they had allowed her to talk herself out they asked discreet questions, and my sister very discreetly said everything about me. Now she’s married to a Franquist. He’s sous-préfet at Bourgos, the old university town. Do you know it?’ he asked, suddenly turning to me.

‘Women,’ interrupted Madeleine, ‘like to hear their own voices and not those of men, however learned.’ And she went back to her petit-pois.

I took only one meal a day, despite the doctor’s advice. The business of masticating and digesting was, I thought, such a waste of the human element. I had even considered, once when I was younger, eating those herbs that yogis eat, and do not need to eat anything again, they say, for six months. The performances of man seem always so much nobler when his belly sticks to his spine, that when like a Brahmin of Benares— or like Oncle Charles — rotundity protrudes from his vertical system. The syphon should be a necessary apparatus for such enormous combustion.

I always wondered what it would be like to die with a big belly. It must make you feel less certain of the other world. Gluttony must indeed, as Dante says, lead one to the Inferno:

Cerbero, fiera crudele e diversa

con tre gole canina-mente latra

Sovra la gente che quivi è sommersa

Li occhi ha vermigli, la barba unta e atra

e ‘l ventrelargo…

Lezo was, in fact, growing in girth. The way he was constantly adjusting his trousers round about the waist began to look somewhat indecent, to speak the truth. There is, of course, every reason for a poor man to make the best use of the clothes he has, but lechery must be bad for the human form. Madeleine heard through a nun who came to collect subscriptions for an orphanage and never stopped talking, that the seamstress was going to have a baby. ‘It will no doubt have the fat lips of the mother, allez,’ said the bonne soeur as she took the twenty francs. ‘It’s no use being learned if one does not know right from wrong.’

‘Strange, this world!’exclaimed Madeleine one evening to me. ‘You can never predict human behaviour, no more than you can predict the virtue of a cat. When you were away,’ she continued, in almost the first personal conversation we had had since my return, ‘when you were away, and Catherine came, I was so happy she was going to be here. We were almost brought up together, and though she’s just five years younger than me, we have always been like twins; besides, she’s a clever girl and was only two classes behind me — I could almost say “This is Catherine” from the smell of her clothes. And yet how little I knew her.’ She became silent for a while, as though taking courage before going any further.