Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

I went back to my room a desperate little creature, my breath broken within me. So this was the Madeleine I had cherished and made! The next day some of my own ‘irregularities’ disappeared, I reduced my food, bed, and clothes to real needs. Madeleine was sore distressed with this transformation of me. ‘You are not of this country. Besides you must think of your lungs,’ she protested. But the next time I went to her room she did not treat me as though I were an outsider, an intruder to her sanctuary. I started taking her soup, her medicines. Sometimes when I knocked she would whisper, ‘Come in.’ And I would see her with a rosary in her hands, which she never hid from me any more. I did not go back to my rosaries, but I started on my meditations more seriously. In fact my health improved a great deal with them.

Lezo came less and less. He must be having difficulty with his fat Communist and her baby, I thought. Or was it that the atmosphere of Villa les Rochers was becoming too oppressive for him?

‘We are so happy — are we not, Rama?’ asked Madeleine one day, when I was sitting in her room. Her health though was not too good the whole winter. Even so she would not allow me to make up a fire in her room: she said, ‘Why this luxury?’ I begged her to accept it as corruption brought in by a Brahmin. She could still be persuaded by humour, and she accepted that I should prepare her fire every evening. ‘After all, the Brahmin’s first job is to make fire,’ I said, quoting a Rig Vedic text.

Now and again when I went to her room she would be seated by her narrow bed reading away at some text, her legs crossed in lotus posture. She would sometimes ask me for the meaning of a Pali word, but I did not know Pali at all, and my Sanskrit was not always a help.

Her face shone as if she had come nearer death, and there was a glow of truth between her eyes. She reduced her food to considered proportions — she took the right vegetables according to the eight seasons of the round long year. She observed every festival, decorated the house with lamps and mandalas, burning incense everywhere. She even observed an eclipse and fasted the night before; she bathed both as the eclipse started and as it ended, though it was in the early hours of the morning. On the whole she grew gentler, but when she did become angry at times she spat the five fires.

She decided, after reading a Tibetan text, that three hundred words a day were enough to cover all our daily needs, so once a week, on Saturdays, she took what she called the vow of moderate silence. ‘But just as I need a little more cloth here than in India, the French language may need a little more statistical elongation,’ I teased her. ‘In French you have more prepositions like en, a, de, etc….’ So I sought Lezo’s help, and we added one hundred and fifty words to her restricted vocabulary.

I should say Madeleine was happy, if simplicity and truthfulness are the attributes of happiness. Her colleagues, so Lezo told me, almost revered her, and she was elected president of the college syndicate. When the inspectors came, they always made the best report on her work. The headmistress laughed and said: ‘This is the sister-soul of Simone Weil. Simone Weil always regretted never having gone to India. So here is her hope fulfilled.’ Even I received a little of this veneration; they thought I was the noble cause of this transformation of Madeleine.

Sometimes Madeleine would start off in the early morning, with just a bare pair of sandals, on an expedition to her various sanctuaries. She had discovered one on the way to St Ophalie, that she called the ‘Black Madonna’ which answered her all her questions. There was the poor woman whose husband was fighting in Indo-China; she had had no letters from him for six or seven weeks. The ‘Black Madonna’ gave Madeleine the answer. ‘He’s all right, and he’ll soon be back in Saigon from the front. You’ll receive a letter in ten days.’ Nine days passed and nothing had happened. On the tenth day there was nothing in the morning either. Madeleine went to visit the woman after morning classes, to verify that nothing had come, and to console if need be. She said, ‘The mistake must be mine, though I can still see it clear in my mind, as if on the classroom blackboard — ten days.’ That evening Madeleine and I went on a walk together and as we were returning, there was the young woman waiting for us at the door. She had her youngest, a child three years old, in her arms, and she beamed such gratitude. The letter had come, of course, and Jean felt fresh as a carp. She had bought us some oranges. Madeleine would not touch them. She said, ‘I am not a priest, I am a miserable woman. It is your prayers, Madame, that have helped; yours and not mine.’ We took the woman in and gave her coffee, for the day was very cold.

There were days when Madeleine took her haversack and left a note for me to say she had gone away to the mountains— and Provence is full of mountains and sanctuaries. She would return late at night, having trudged for kilometres on end. On such expeditions she found grottoes and forgotten sanctuaries, and she was sure that most of the Virgins were old Roman gods and goddesses. Often she tried to scratch some plinth to discover the name of Mithras, Jupiter, or Mercury, but I do not think she ever had luck in that direction. She laid flowers at their feet and probably sang a Buddhist hymn. For her, whatever was not Catholic was sacred and true. She said it was now sufficiently proven that the Druids were Buddhist, so all these sanctuaries were certainly of Buddhist origin. Her meditations gave her remarkable indications. She took me sometimes on her ‘spiritual hikes’, as I called them. ‘If we go this way, that is, in the direction in which this grass-head has turned on itself and fallen,’ she once said, ‘and we come to the top of that hill, we may find an old ruined windmill; I can see it as clearly as a cat in the night. We must turn to the left then, and go twenty yards and dig. We may find an ancient stone. I am sure it was a sanctuary.’ We went up the hill — it was near St Ouen — and the windmill was there; we dug twenty yards away and found nothing. Disappointed, she searched all about the place, as mountaineers do, when they ponder on the direction of the avalanche. She drew deep breaths to find her chemin de cristal, and said, ‘Now I know — it must be at the fountain here.’ When we washed the stone and dug a little, true, there was a ruin of some sort. I could not say whether it was Roman, Greek, or Christian. It was a small, circular slab, like marble, and there had certainly been some characters on it at one time, but I could not read them, nor could Madeleine.

She started putting flowers into this fountain. ‘I am sure it can heal,’ she said. ‘Let us try it at Madame Fellandier’s: when her son had a stroke, you know, I gave her a cloth, which I had held in my hand for eight days during my meditations. The child sat up for the first time for months, Madame Fellandier told me.’ This must have been a fact, for Madeleine introduced me to her. The child was up and looked at us with much affection. We had taken him almonds — salted almonds — and his mother opened the packet eagerly and gave us to eat, two to Madeleine and one for me.

‘Certainly we’ll give your Fellandier a dip in your Roman fountain,’ I laughed. ‘Why not, after all!’

No, I could not disbelieve in Madeleine’s powers, but she felt she owed them to me. ‘I was an atheist,’ she said, ‘with a horror of the Church. You it was, Rama, with your Brahminism, that gave me the eyes to see.’

‘To see Buddhism,’ I protested, and laughed again.

‘Look how beautiful the evening is,’ she said, sitting down on the grass. ‘How far from the elephant and the bull, Rama! You have been a wonderful friend to me. Promise to be happy.’