Fourteen ninety-eight: Vasco knows that he lied to himself then, just as he deceives himself now. Men are always rubbing up their aims to a high polish: For the glory of God. . To save endangered humanity. . When what actually impelled him to find a sea route to India, the land of spices, was nautical ambition. It was other people, the "peppersacks," or shopkeepers, who made the big money.
At an evening reception (in his honor), some ladies who have studied in England question Vasco about the aims and motives of the women's liberation movement. Vasco tells
them about a women's tribunal that is being held in Berlin but making headlines far beyond its confines. A captured Flounder, he tells them, is symbolically on trial; the Flounder embodies the principle of male domination; he is being tried in a bulletproof tank. Then Vasco suggests to the ladies that the liberation of Indian women be placed under the high patronage of the goddess Kali. (Mightn't Nehru's daughter, Indira, be an embodiment of her terrible aspect?) While pine nuts are being nibbled, his suggestion arouses interest, although the ladies, daughters of prominent Brahman families, prefer Durga, the mild aspect of the goddess; Kali, it seems, is more popular with the lower castes.
The next day Vasco doesn't feel like going to the museum; he wants to visit a slum. The slum dwellers look at him in amazement. He is intimidated by the cheerfulness of these poverty-stricken people and their unconquerable charm. The giggling of the ragged young girls who, because they have hips, show their hips. True, they beg with their hands and eyes, but they don't complain. (They're not starving, after all, just chronically undernourished.) It all looks so natural. As though that were how it had to be forever and ever. As though the growth of bigger and bigger slums were an organic process that shouldn't be disturbed, but at the most cured of its worst abuses.
Vasco (the discoverer) asks questions about work, wages, number of children, school attendance, family planning, intestinal flora, latrines. The answers confirm the statistics in his possession, no more. Then he is obliged to visit a large fortress (dating from his Mogul days) in which some units of the Indian army are now quartered. Looking down from the battlements at midday, Vasco tries to engrave a picture on his mind: five hundred ragged bodies lying in a flat field (whose grass covering has been eaten away by cows), looking as dead as if English machine guns, firing from the fort's embrasures, had mowed them down. Each bundle lies by itself. Dusty units. Corpses eager to rot. Their death-sleep warmed by the sun. Extras out of a colonial film, waiting for the next pan. A pity Vasco has left his 35-mm camera at the hotel. He makes a note of the word: death-sleepers. And I, he says, am supposed to have discovered this? In vain Vasco
forbids himself to find these sleeping corpses, arranged by chance or some other law, beautiful. If he were tired and lay down among them, he would look awkwardly out of place.
The chairman of the planning commission fills out a Nehru suit and speaks past Vasco deep into the distance: We have, as you know, three thousand years of history behind us. We did not come into existence when that Portuguese discovered us by the sea route.
Vasco appears to be listening attentively while he tries in vain to recall the details of the 1498 landing at Calicut. (We sent a convict ashore to see what would happen.) The chairman of the planning commission explains that despite its infinitely various faces India is nevertheless one. No outsider can fully know us. Calcutta, he says, is indeed a problem, but there are many artists living in this fascinating city. And Bengali poetry. .
The next slum has grown up (organically) beside the Delhi power plant, which uninterruptedly belches vast clouds of smoke. Across the slum stands the modern high-rise building of the World Health Organization, South Asia Section. The clouds of smoke and not the slums are reflected in the windows of the WHO building. Next door, lest there be anything missing, stands the pavilion of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, which has invited Vasco to come, see, and understand that "we are a modern democracy."
In the slum Vasco speaks with women from Uttar Pradesh, who have six or eight children but do not know how many rupees their husbands earn as sweepers at the power plant next door. This slum is reputedly clean. Vasco finds a doctor who, however, has never crossed the street to visit the WHO, just as the WHO has never called on the doctor. Of course we have cases of smallpox, he says. I report them. But they always vaccinate too late. I'm only a volunteer. I have no counterpart in other slum sections. The people here think I'm a fool to be doing this. This doctor doesn't speak English. In translation everything sounds plausible. Maybe he's only a medical orderly. Vasco puts a rupee on the table of the mud-hut dispensary for medicines. As he was leaving home, Vasco's children said: Don't go bringing us any presents. None of that crazy stuff. Give somebody the
money. And on this occasion Ilsebill had no particular wishes, either.
Vasco goes to Fatehpur Sikri to see the sights from his Mogul days. Today he smiles to think how he tried to be tolerant in his spacious fortress apartments by including not only a Mohammedan but also a Hindu woman and a Christian lady from Portuguese Goa in his marriage contract. Only the Hindu woman bore him a son (who turned out badly). Nothing remains but fragments of carved red sandstone. Each column cut differently. But the desert said no. When the water ran out, the city had to be abandoned. All that tolerance for nothing. (When Vasco died in Cochin in 1524, Margarete Rusch, cook and nun, became abbess of Saint Bridget's, after which, as her fancy bade her, she took Protestant, Catholic, and seafaring men into her bed, and runaway monks as well. So tolerant she was, so spacious.)
Still in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Vasco visits a village school, built of clay like the huts and walls round about. Everything is mud-brown — the hard-stamped village street, the cows, the bicycles, the children, the sky. Only the women's saris are colorful, though faded. Once again poverty indulges in beauty. The teacher has light-brown eyes. He shows Vasco schoolbooks. In one little book, which tells the history of India in Hindi script, Vasco sees himself portrayed in simple lines, bearded under a velvet cap. In some wrinkle of his traveler's existence he is proud or touched, but he is also somewhat put out because he has made school history and become textbook material. (What do they actually know about me? About my restlessness. Always looking for goals beyond the horizons. Using my nautical skill as a means of reaching God. And my lifelong fear of Dominican poison. Everything has died away. But I'm still inwardly rich in figures. .)
Because it's expected of him, Vasco asks questions. The teacher complains about social workers who come to the village and use pictures without written commentaries as propaganda for family planning, as though addressing themselves to illiterates. And yet forty-five percent of the children attend school off and on. To prove it, the school-
children read aloud from the book in which Vasco has become textbook material.
In the left-hand niche of the temple the goddess dances, this time in her gentle Durga aspect. The right-hand niche discloses a monkey god. The cawing of the crows, the laughter of the children. The peasants' complaints about the price of wheat, which has suddenly doubled, are translated for Vasco's benefit. Most have sold too cheap. A third of the peasants are landless. Many move to the city. A rich peasant rents out his tractor. For fear of abduction (a common occurrence in the days of the Moguls) the women cover their faces as Vasco passes. In the midst of the dust an old man, who is chewing betel, gives him a carrot. Next day Vasco has diarrhea and has to take Enterovioform — three tablets daily. After a while it helps. But his shit is still mustard-blond and liquid. Bubbles in the soup. He looks for worms and feels disappointed because his stools refuse to turn black like those of the poet Opitz, who was carried off by the plague. That was in the days when the earth was a vale of tears. Opitz's cook was named Agnes. In his book Vasco gives her credit for feelings that she served up to the poet as diet fare. The plague, it was thought, had been brought in from India by the sea route.