Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

The Buddha, in one of his previous incarnations, had allowed himself to be eaten by a tiger; like the Bodhisat the pine tree, I told Madeleine. This satisfied her, so we called it the Bodhisat Pine, and the caterpillars never seemed happier. Birds, especially ravens, swallows, and flamingoes, found the tree very interesting; first for the caterpillars, and because Madeleine fed them with peanuts, rice, and wheat. When I told her about the Jains, how they feed ants with sugar, she would secretly take bits of sugar and feed ants also under the tree. When I came home from the library and could not at first find Madeleine, I was sure to see her on her vajrasana —for so I called it, ‘The seat of diamond’—reading away at her book. Sometimes she would look down the hollow valley to Mont Ste-Victoire; you could see she felt the world was true.

But now and again, she would feel great despair — one saw it in the colour of her eyes. Sometimes they grew quite yellow and she became distant and almost inimical. She seemed to hate everything, food, room, books and all, and she would say, ‘Oh, Rama, be patient with me; it’s only the female nature that must be making monthly demands.’ Her horoscope was pretty irregular about these events, and I suspected that human biology might have strange variations according to metapsychical convictions. Maybe, and why not?

Her yogic asanas helped her; she bought a book on yoga by a Swami Paramananda, and she was so competent in her locust pose or the swan posture. She also took the Buddhist vow of lying on her right side — the lion-position — and said she slept splendidly, needing only five hours of sleep now. Her classes became brilliant, so some of her pupils told me, and the Headmistress looked up to her for advice. Colleagues came to ask help with regard to family matters, and very humbly she told them whatever came to her in her morning meditations. Sometimes when the subject was very serious, such as marriage or financial difficulties, Madeleine made many mandalas and sat amongst them. She woke up as in India at three o’clock in the morning, the brahmakala — and sat in meditation till eight o’clock.

Now, one day the holy pansy died—’for like all living things of the eighteen aggregates he had to die,’ said Madeleine — and he was given a proper funeral. We washed him and put him on a grass bed — curiously enough he had no roots at all, we discovered, after almost seventeen days of life — and cremated him with ‘AUM-AUM-AUM-TAM-TAM-TAM-HRI-HRI-HRI- HA-HA-HA’. We buried his ashes under the Bodhisat tree.

The ‘Black Madonna’ appeared to Madeleine after some of her fasts. The divinity gave specific instructions as to medicines, good days and bad days, right people and evil people; and now Madeleine prayed to her, whenever I had fever. ‘Rama,’ she said, ‘you must, must be cured.’ One day, all of a sudden, she declared: ‘I’m going on a forty-one-day fast — on Buddha Avalokiteshwara. I had a vision and I am sure I can cure you.’ And so she started on her fasts and prayers — commencing at dawn, on the seventh day of the month of Ashwija, when the dew was clear as eyes under the late moon.

Those forty-one days were very moving and important. I could hear Madeleine wake up (she had bought herself a new alarm-clock) at two, have her bath, chanting verses in her peculiar round Charentaise accent, and make aspersions to the eight-directions of the house, calling on each god and naming his attributes. Then I could hear her stay long, very long, near my door; after which she would suddenly go back to her room, and I could hear her mantras rise slowly, deeply, as though they needed to make themselves familiar with the world, with the night; and then they came out more and more quickly, more and more articulated and grave, till by four in the morning the whole house would be one unanimous sound, vibrant through walls and roof to the kitchen below. One felt that the trees stood stiff, the birds slept awake; one felt that the roads rose up and lifted themselves to the skies, that the cattle looked into sheer space, and the whole of the valley of Aix and the mountains beyond, with those perched lingering lights on the top, were but one single thought, one single experience. And then after a caesura of interrupted silence, the words came quicker and gentler, the mantras became more and more melodious and little by little the flowers opened to the morning, the Mediterranean sang out its shores, birds spoke, children rose and cried; and man walked back to his journeying work with the spirit of a child, of a happy father, of a new incarnation on a new earth. The morning train could shout as it liked, or the tramcar scream as it turned in the Place Mirabeau; the world was being transmuted — something pink and golden would rise out of the Fire-of-Lotus heart, and Rama would be made whole again.

‘Ah, on dirait que toutes les maisons sentent les fêtes,’ said Madame Jeanne, when she came to work. She knew nothing of Madeleine’s sadhana. But, I ask you, need one be told when the gods are about, and in Provence?

And that the gods were about, who could deny? One heard strange musical sounds — more like drumbeats than melodious wind-instruments — and they seemed to play not all the notes but just three or four, do, re, fa, si, or just do, re, si, as if we had grown subtler, etheric. We played more with each other, Madeleine and I, and sometimes — you must forgive and believe me when I say it — I felt the presence of others playing with us. The red ball went here, went there; the ball stood as if transfixed by someone — the earth moved, one could think, but not the ball: space moved, and not time. Then sound itself became firm and stood on the spot and gyrated; and colours came out, red and green such as parrots have, or blue like the Himalayan hills, and you saw tongues of flame leaping out in the four directions. I could sometimes hear in the heat of the southern sun the Aix tramcars screech away — and yet these flames leapt, they made curves in green and red, turned on themselves and went straight into the ceiling.

Madeleine looked at me and she was so happy. ‘There, there!’ she said, ‘Listen, that’s the music.’

The drumbeat indeed was powerful, and as each sound ended another more powerful one rose as if creating mountains, rivers, seas, roads, man. I felt the nervous spiral uncoil from the spine-end, and stood aghast. ‘Madeleine!’ I cried. But she sat on the floor, with her eyes nobly closed. And I went back to the familiarity of my room. Nothing had happened to my room of course, all things seemed in their place; but everything was dusted, laved and cleared. I was afraid.

Madeleine knew no fear. ‘I am not only Charentaise, I am Santonjoise,’ she said, ‘and we from the Atlantic wilds have no fear.’

But her hair grew curly, her skin somewhat parched, and she began to give out odours that seemed, to speak civilizedly, not too pleasant. I felt the smell of rotten flowers, the smell of the carcasses of birds; I felt foul winds, odour of burnt nails and hair and of damp hides. And in the evenings when we walked back home, sometimes I could hear voices, whispers, pham-phat sounds. Once I saw a man walking in front of me; he was just like a skeleton — he looked like Mahatma Gandhi, but taller, much taller, and bent, and walking quickly, feverishly, in front of me. Madeleine was pleased with this apparition — it was according to the texts. ‘On the twenty-second day, you will see the apparition of a man walking in front of you,’ they said. ‘Do not be afraid: it is the body in its grossest form.’ True it was, for Madeleine showed me the text — and I was astonished. Yes, it was, it was true.

The birds became more familiar with us. Some of the sparrows came and sat on Madeleine’s shoulders as she walked and fed them. She once sat on a stone and lost consciousness thinking on some japa. I waited patiently by her till the moon rose.