When we reached home I said, ‘Look, here’s Shiva’s bull at our door!’ and I showed her the huge flat stone that lay like a squat Nandi at the edge of our garden.
‘True, how very like a bull he is. You thought of Shiva, and so here is Nandi,’ she said, with unconvinced assurance. And she plucked some grass and gave it to him, saying, ‘Now, Bull, eat!’
And from then on Madeleine never passed by the door of the garden without either touching the huge hump of the bull, or caressing him and saying, ‘Here, Bull, here is your feed today.’ Sometimes coming from the market she would lay a flower or two on his head and add, ‘Be happy, Bull.’ Seeing it from my window, the Hindu in me used to be so happy.
Then there was the elephant too at the top of the hill. A huge, gently curved rock lay almost flat on the ground, and if you sat on him of an evening, very still, you could hear him move: You could actually feel him shake and change sides, one foot first and then the other. When Madeleine and I had questions we could not solve, and she wished to avoid getting irritable and angry, she would say, ‘I will go and consult the elephant.’ Half an hour later there she used to be, her face beaming with wonder that man and woman could live in such harmony. Sometimes as I trudged my heavy-breathing way upwards she would shout and say, ‘Rama-Rama,’ like cow calling to calf at the fall of dusk, when the lamps are just being lit. There was not one question the elephant did not answer. When rarely we saw some schoolchild on a Thursday or Sunday seated on our elephant, or some soldier resting before he reached his barracks, how unhappy we used to feel. On such days we did not give him grass or pine-fruits, but flowers. I have never heard the resonance of Sanskrit so noble as on the back of the elephant. The Ganges flowed at our feet, and Krishna would soon be born.
It was one day almost a year later, as we came down from the elephant that a telegraph-boy ran up our goat-path bringing us the wire to say that Father had been struck with apoplexy, and that I should come home at once. How tender Madeleine was to me that evening! Despite my lack of love for Father, tears came to my throat; I felt the beginnings of my biological presence on the earth disappear one by one. Not that he was my father, I felt; but like the wine in the cellars of Champagne that ferments when spring comes to the vineyard outside, and sinks and bubbles back at the fall of autumn, the sap in me, the continuity in me, was being strained, was being broken. I would be an orphan again.
That evening Madeleine was like my own mother. She said had my mother still been alive she would have flown with me to be beside her in her pain. Death and birth mean different things to different peoples of the earth; to me Madeleine’s presence would have meant the daughter-in-law coming home, the division of family responsibility; truly it would have been ‘the crossing of the threshold’. I almost felt if she came Father could not die, he would not die. How, when the first daughter- in-law came home, could the father die?
Auspicious, so auspicious — with kunkum, coconut and choli- piece, bangles on the arm, the necklace of black beads — is life.
Once again my thoughts had wandered away. ‘Voici, we’re already at Brigonne,’ said Henri, and I woke up to the sudden reality that Aix was indeed there down in the valley. There was the cathedral, proclaiming not that Christ was the Son of God, but that the king of France was the Son of Christ.
This old royalist city, with its spread, low trees, and inward hotels with narrow, decorated entrances — this city of flowers and music was somehow not frank and open, but as if any day Zola’s sans-culottes would invade her Place Publique again, and dragging her countesses on to the streets, not shoot them but make them dance, as if it were the 14th of July, curtseying to them each time and saying, ‘Pardon, Madame la Comtesse, we are the shepherds of the mountains; we have beheld the Magian kings and we come down the valleys that King Christ be anointed and crowned.’ For the Provençaux all is a festival of joy, and they live by the stars.
Madeleine was not at home. The house was securely closed, the blinds drawn; how anxious it looked. I could see from the grass which had fallen down the back of the bull that Madeleine must have gone the previous day; the grass had turned yellow under the sun. Neither did the house allow any mistake; it spoke to me and gave me the same information.
When I went down to the garage the assistant, Hector, said ‘Oh, Monsieur’s car has not come back since yesterday evening. Madame has probably gone out somewhere.’
The postman gave me two letters, one from Oncle Charles, the other from an Indian friend in London. I told Henri to take me to the Hotel du Roi Jean. When Madame Patensier saw me, how she beamed.
‘Madame must have gone to Nice to meet me,’ I told her. ‘And I missed my connection in Rome.’
Madame Patensier had known us from the first time we came to Aix; before we managed to find a villa we had stayed with her. She knew all my needs, shouted that a bath be made ready for me, and instructed Jeanne that I be served with vegetables. ‘Monsieur never, never eats meat,’ she said with such pride. Jeanne shook her head and said nothing, as though Madame la Patronne had become groggy.
After my bath and my lunch served in bed I walked about the familiar place, not like one who lived there, but like someone who was going to live there. It makes all the difference in the world whether the woman of your life is with you or not; she alone enables you to be in a world that is familiar and whole. If it is not his wife, then for an Indian it may be a sister in Mysore, or Little Mother in Benares.
Love is a way of looking at things. If you love you forget yourself, and perceive the object not as you see it, but rather as the seen. The woman therefore is the priestess of God.
There was no way I could contact Madeleine. Where, in Nice, would I find her? We never knew anyone there; besides, Madeleine did not like to see anybody unless I liked to do so myself. She felt that between the Villa Ste-Anne and the elephant on the hill was the space of joy. Beyond was Barbary.
I was anxious, however. I knew she would wait for the next plane, and then return. Hoping against hope I walked back again: the shutters were as firmly closed. The grass on the bull’s back had grown drier. I gave him some more fresh grass, hoping that if Madeleine came while I went to pay a visit to the elephant she would see and know I had returned. I knew she would be unhappy first, then angry, knowing that Indians are so undependable. If a European says he comes by such and such a plane he would come by it; if he missed his connection he would sleep in a hotel, and come by the next. But this Indian haphazardness, like the towels in the bathroom that lay everywhere about, was exasperating to Madeleine.
I put my hand through the gate and with difficulty opened the postbox. With wind and rain it had lost all integrity, and with a little coaxing it always yielded. Inside was the Journal de Genéve — and my telegram. I searched every corner I could reach, but there was no message for me. So with anxious footsteps I went up the goat-path, through the bends in the pinewood to the elephant on the hill.
To feel that beyond the orchard of mirabelles and the slope of olives was the valley, and beyond that the plain stretched out to the sea, gave me a sense of comfort. Space is a comforter of sorrow, and the Mediterranean presence has a human richness that no ocean can give. One never thinks of the galley-slaves, one thinks of the ships of Saint Louis, going out with hero and priest to conquer the Holy Land. And silently the Durance poured her mountain waters to the sea.