‘I bore him, your son, with such love, for he was a child of love; but you were more interested in his sonship than in his being my son. The feminine to the Indian must always be accessory, a side issue. Yet I loved my son from the time I felt him kicking inside me, for he was your son. You thought of his future: I thought of the present. You told me how in India you had to have different hymns and diet according to whether you wanted the child to be a hero, a wise man, a doctor, or a grammarian. I just wanted a man: my son.
‘Your impersonal approach was strange to me, you yourself so impersonal. I loved you for it, for in touching you I smelt, as it were, some mountain air, the honey-pine of the heights, the smell of incense while the mist rises. Your heart was so like a mountain stream, its tenderness so pure. I loved to bathe in it. But how cruel it can be, how exasperating for a European. You people are sentimental about the invisible, we about the visible. And to me you were the invisible made concrete, so visible, incarnate, beside me — and my husband.
‘You will never know, m’ami, dear husband, what it was to have your little child beside me; how, as he lay against my breast, I told him a million silly things that I always wanted to tell you, but could never tell you. You make the simple too big, and everything human seems ridiculous before you. You remember how we laughed one day when you told me, “Madeleine, why put that nasty powder — some chemical — on your skin; it cannot make the skin more beautiful than it is. I hate to touch the chemical; I want the true.” Then I told you a feminine lie, I said it protected the skin in our climate; and how satisfied you were with my answer. You were cruel, as you would have been to a Hindu wife. But months later, when I told you the truth, instead of becoming angry you laughed and laughed at yourself. It is so easy to fool you: you have no understanding of woman at all, dear Rama. I thought I was the innocent one, but you are more foolish than me. No wonder Oncle Charles thinks it served me right to have married such an outlandish creature.
‘The child in the cradle. And the cradle against the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean the cradle of our civilization. I slept, Rama, night after night in the nursing home, not thinking of Pierre or of you but of Demeter and Poseidon and the voyage of Ulysses. In fact at first I thought a second name for Krishna would be Ulysses. How I rounded the names on my tongue: Krishna Ulysses Ramaswamy. Absurd, absurd, said something to me, but I repeated them so often together, thinking that with familiarity it might become natural. No, the name seemed so absurd. Then I thought of Achille, as I told you; Achille was the name of one of the servants in the clinic, but I thought it too heroic for the son of a Brahmin. Well, there was no hurry and Krishna was Krishna. Krishna. Krishna, Krishna, I said to myself, as one repeats a mantra, and I was so filled with delight. He would be copper-coloured, and with your eyes. He would have your limbs, but not your heavy lips or your big nose. A little bit of my nose might not do him any harm. And I prayed and I prayed to some unknown divinity that he should be just a son — not yours or mine, just ours.
‘One night, the night before his birth, a great sweep of mistral cleared the air, and we could see as far as Corsica. Far away against the horizon lit boats went across the Mediterranean — to Africa perhaps, and to farthest America. The world moved. Fishing boats were all about the place, for the fishes come up to the surface on moonlit nights; and as the hill went rolling down with the olives and the lone cypress stood against the tower by the Hotel de Ville I wondered who I was: what I was doing there? You were away in the hotel, but I told you later of the vision I had that night. Demeter, with fruits and stalks in her hand, rose out of the invisible sea, as though she were made more of silken thread than of substance. It was as if you could see beyond her and she could vanish into herself, as some birds hide their faces in their down. Do you know that beautiful Homeric hymn? Demeter Kourotrophos, I thought to myself, and she not even the daughter of Poseidon. But the sea was auspicious and the whole world bathed in simple delight. There was no sorrow, no place for imperfection, no death or misery for man. The corn grew, the gods played, the fife filled the valley, the girls danced before the altars and flowers grew everywhere — roses, crocuses, violets, narcissus. Beauty filled the magnanimity of creation and I was happy, Rama, happy as I have never been.
‘The next morning at five the pain started, and by eleven the little baby was born. I was neither happy nor sorry to see him, and when I saw your glowing face I wondered why such a lump of flesh which gave me so much pain should give you so much joy. For you it was not a child, a son, your son, and my son; but your heir. For me it was just a something — but then suddenly when I took him in my arms and held him against my breast the whole of creation shone in a single second — the nativity, I repeat, the first and only birth, the proud proof of happiness. Yes, for me Pierre was happiness, he did not make me happy. He was proof that man is, and cannot be happy but be happiness itself.
‘The olive trees still go down to the sea. Achille is still at Bandol, but he’s become a gargon-de-café. There are no rich English people coming to have their babies in the South of France. I went down to the port; the jetty was still unrepaired, as it was during the German-Italian occupation. I bought flowers chez Henriette, where you said you bought me fresh tulips every morning. I wanted to sleep again in Bandol, so I went to your hotel, the Hotel des Pêcheurs, and got the self-same room. The patron did not recognize my name; he probably thought it was Russian. I put the tulips into a vase, put the car in the garage, and went out again into the night. I was not sad, I was just empty. Would I see Demeter again?
‘The moon was still in the sky. I felt so pagan. I wish there were an Aliscamps, as in Arles, and that I could write a beautiful epitaph to my dead son. It would read something like this: “He was born to the cypress, he was born to the syllable, he the child of silence and of Woman.” Or some such thing. He had your silence, Rama, and his hair smelt of thyme.
‘The Greek gods are jealous. They are jealous of happiness. My votive offerings brought no answer. No Demeter came in vision with Polos and veil, nor did the sea throw up a broken raft on which was to be found the golden child. Like Penelope I sat on the seashore, weaving my web. When will you come, O Ulysses?
‘Strange, Rama, nowadays I often go to church. I love ruins, and especially the ruins of cathedrals or chapels. On my way here I passed by St Maximin and visited the Dominican monastery. That is, I went to the chapel for Mass, and Oh, how deeply it affected me, that Regina coeli, laetare. I wandered all over the place, visited the crypt and saw the relic of holy Mary Madeleine. The smell of incense that used to hurt me now gives me a pained delight. I hate to kneel and yet sometimes I half bend my knees and remember what my mother always said: “Never kneel without cotton on your knees; God knows what infection may lie there.” I still have such a fear of bacteria — how shall I ever stand India?
‘You say you are going to Benares with your mother. Of Benares all I know is the bits of floating human flesh and the pyres of the dead, and that the Ganges water when chemically examined shows no bacteria. We Europeans are not yet holy enough to have crypts with no bacteria.