It must have been late in the evening, when the day had ended but the night not yet begun, that I heard the steady big footsteps of Madeleine. I was seated on the bull, looking down the pinewood to the little stream that ran at the end of the valley. Madeleine was heavy-laden with her purchases — she had bought two new brooms for the house, a basin, towels, boot-polish, and a summer hat for me, all from the Galeries Lafayette.
‘You,’ she said, almost with a fright, and she stood there helpless, as though she now knew she had lost me. At such moments my breathing always grows faster and heavier, and I cough.
‘Poor dear,’ she said, clinging to my arms, and seated on the bull she cried and cried.
I had no words for her, and when slowly I took the key from her bag and opened the gate, and lead her up the Provencal steps of Villa Ste-Anne, she said, ‘I just do not know why, I do not want to enter the house, I do not want to.’ I put on the light, and when she saw me now she said, with a touch of astonishment, ‘I, I never remembered you were so dark. It must be the sun of India,’ and kissed me for the first time. She said, months later, it was like kissing a serpent or the body of death.
When I lead her to her room, I found her hair was all dishevelled; she had opened the hood of the car to have more air and to forget her disappointment. How man can disappoint a woman, how with a look or by an absence kill the very root of a woman’s flowered awaiting!
She looked to me for help. I said, ‘Come, we’ll go and get my luggage,’ and she, ‘Rama, you go and get your bags while I go and cook something for you.’
With Madeleine in such a mood where she was like a woman who had seen her logic go wrong and had no logic left to connect events with, the best thing, I thought, was to leave her alone. I did not even ask for the key of the car. I walked down in that perfumed spring air, breathing the many herbs and flowers and the warm smell of human flesh as it passed, myself lost. For once I felt a foreigner in France.
When I took my luggage out I waited long before asking for a taxi, and went into great detail about all sorts of things Indian, as if it were urgent for Madame Patensier to know everything about my country. She seemed more like a confessor than the patronne of the Hotel du Roi Jean, and I felt the lighter after talking to her of the interminable Indian journeys; the thousands of miles one travels; the Ganges, nearly two thousand miles long; and of the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world.
‘Bitter than the Alps and Mont Blanc?’ she asked, surprised, in the same voice as two years before, when I said I did not eat meat.
‘Oh, much bigger.’
‘But you have no snow there, so what grows on the top of the mountains?’ she asked.
‘Himalay itself means “the abode of snow”,’ I told her very proudly. ‘La demeure des neiges’; to her Provencal ear it sounded right and beautiful.
Having convinced Madame Patensier of the snow on the Himalayas I convinced myself that all was well with the world. Getting into the taxi, now ready at the door, I went to Villa Ste-Anne with a feeling as if, having crossed evil spittle, I had crossed back three times in expiation; now the road went straight and to Benares. For what is holiness but the assurance man has of himself? The sacred is nothing but the symbol seen as the ‘I’.
I shall never forget as long as I live that evening, with the luggage in the corridor, and the smell of thyme and parsley that came from the kitchen. Wanting to feel that nothing had changed Madeleine called out from the kitchen:
‘I’ve made risotto for you, and the apple semolina, and here I am your wife.’ She was in her thin blue summer dress, with a near-mango design on it, that we had bought in Paris the summer before.
‘And smell me now,’ she said. She smelt of eau de Cologne, for that was the first smell I had smelt on her in Rouen.
I said an awkward ‘thank you’, and she went on: ‘Take the new towels I bought today. I bought a dozen so that your Brahminism, renewed and affirmed, can wash itself as often as it likes. Meanwhile your Brahmin wife will cook you your rice.’
No, things were not going too well. There was nothing we could say to one another which would not sound like something the departing say to each other at a railway station. I remember so clearly how my big white suitcase and the smaller blue one lay on one another. Madeleine went to open them — for that was her habit — and tried to hang my clothes, but she did not go any further than my blue striped suit.
‘The risotto will get burnt,’ she said, ‘and your family will not like me for having given you burnt rice on the night of your arrival home. Rama,’ she warmed up, ‘you know I’ve become a good cook. I have been learning many new dishes from Helène Berichon.’
Helene was the wife of the professor of History in the College de Garçons, and since she was half English, on her mother’s side, she liked to come to us and speak English.
‘She says her father — or rather her mother’s father — was a colonel in the Indian Army. So now I’ll make you the right curry.’
If speech were born it must have been on a woman’s lip, just as hair if it were born must have sprung from a woman’s pudendum to hide her shame. For women are great hiders of the unsayable, their gossip is only their own sorrow turned downside up.
I went over to my cases, but just could not take anything out, neither books nor dhoti, nor even the sari for Madeleine that Saroja had so carefully folded and put in a corner, with a silver kunkum box, sacred coconut and betel leaves. The customs official had wanted to see whether, being an Oriental, I did not carry opium; he took the lid off the kunkum, and the powder fell on the sari, as at a marriage, or at the seventh-month pregnancy adoration. Auspicious the sari looked, and I thought it best to take it out first. ‘I’ve a gift for you,’ I said.
‘Show it to me,’ she shouted from the kitchen.
‘Here is a gift of a sari from Saroja.’
She was disappointed: she wanted it to be from me. But Saroja’s sari was the one at the top, and it was the one which had the kunkum on, so I took it out. ‘Let me put it on you,’ I said.
As she undressed I could see the contours of her beautiful body, so simple, so erect, so unopened. I tried to dress her, and she let me do it, for she wanted to be touched by me, to be held by me, to know the knowing that has made knowing a single presence. But I was far away, my hands slipped, and several times I had to make and remake the folds. When I had at last tightened her at the waist, I said, ‘Now I’ll go and have my bath.’ She answered, ‘Come quick; the food will be cold, love.’
As the bathwater ran I just did not know what I was thinking or doing. Noise somehow gives one a feeling of rest, noise that is steady and familiar. I went to the bathroom window and saw that the sickly olives had been removed — planted in the days of the Romans, Hector had said — and the open land already showed the emergence of fireflies. They were just beginning to shine here and there and soon, I thought, I would see their dance, as we saw it every summer in the dark of the olives. I slipped into my bath and scrubbed myself dutifully, feeling that I might have more courage thus. A clean body seems full of wisdom.
The fireflies did not start dancing in the backyard. But far away in Monsieur Thibaut’s olive groves they made such a pattern of beauty that I shouted, ‘Madeleine, Madeleine.’ There was no answer. I slipped into my pyjamas and went to Madeleine’s room, where we usually moved our table to eat, and there she was lying on her sofa, silent. She must have been crying, but she put on a brave face. Tears came rarely to Madeleine; she seemed to have a power to stop them.