A little later, Lezo joined us. Lezo was a clever young Basque refugee who knew some eighteen languages. He had been the youngest elected president of the Basque Academy, but when he made his first inaugural speech about the need for teaching in the mother tongue, and substantiated it with multiple quotations from the Church Fathers, Franco’s henchmen were there to listen. After three months of prison he was given liberté surveillée, but he escaped and was now doing Linguistics at Aix University. His father sent him a little money in secret, which he supplemented by giving lessons in languages. He it was who taught Georges Sanskrit.
Lezo was deeply interested in Buddhism. He had been to Heidelberg to study Sanskrit, and there he had come under the influence of Badenspeizer, who preferred Buddhism to every other religion in the world. During the war Badenspeizer was a prisoner of war, first in Shanghai and later in Ceylon. He preferred the Little Vehicle, and so did Lezo. Of Vedanta Lezo knew but the name of Sankara.
The Sanskrit language has a gambhiryatha, a nobility that seems rooted in primary sound. For hour after hour I chanted verses, especially those of Bhartrhari, Kalidasa, or Sankara, which created, as it were, an aura of emptiness around one and one felt the breath of oneself, saw the sight as it were of oneself. Even Georges, who seemed so angry with Indian incursions into Christendom and with Massis and others was frightened of this new Catharism, even he used to sit lost in this primordial rhythm. Lezo, to exasperate his friend, once said, ‘You can hear how your church services came from this rhythm, just as the Christian monasticism of the Thebaid hermits rose in Alexandria at the same time as Buddhism was being preached. ‘Since the time of good king Antiochus, and yet beyond Antiochus from other kings, to wit, Ptolemy, Antigone, mages and Alexander, thus too in the Empire of the Greeks, everywhere they follow the law and the friend of the Law, that is to say the Buddha Sakyamuni’, and so on, he would quote abstruse, and often absurd, texts. He was at once so learned and boyish that nobody could take them too seriously or not give them any consideration at all. When someone quotes an unknown Nestorian text in Pahlevi and links it up with a more ancient tablet in Kharosthi; and when, coming down through the Greeks, he talks to you of the school of Alexandria and of Apollonius of Tyana, who went to India to meet the Brahmins and returned with his belly full of Vedantic wisdom; and when he concludes by saying that St Ambrose of Milan (333—97) wrote a treatise De Moribus Brachmanorum addressed to a certain Palladius, a Greek; you feel convinced that even if all this were true it should not be true. Georges, on the other hand, would rather, it might have seemed, go upward, vertically — for he was hungry for God, and this he preferred to the three-dimensional and historical excursuses of his colleague. It was Vedanta that really attracted Georges, the Neti-Neti, the ‘not-this, notthisness’, as he called it. Some of my most memorable experience of France is having sat hour after hour before this nervous, indrawn, grey-blue-eyed Georges, with his lone hand always trembling as if he held the sword of the crusader and his, ‘But God, but God, where is He, when Sankara says, “Shivoham, Shivoham; I am Shiva, I am Shiva”?’
‘There is no one to say anything then,’ laughed Lezo. Though that was the only answer, coming as it did from Lezo, it gave one the impression he was quoting an author. And of course to prove that it was true he quoted some Buddhist saying of Vasubandhu or Nagarajuna, as if it were an answer from the Vedanta of Sri Sankara himself. The trouble with Lezo was he knew too much, and he understood little. I think the person who learnt most of all during these discussions was Madeleine.
For Madeleine knew the time had come for an important decision: there were many roads out of the forest — which was the one that led most naturally to where she should be? The war had given her the feeling that change is inevitable for man, and that whether you took one road or the other, whether the Germans were behind this hill or in that hamlet, lying beside the broken bridge and the river down below, the chemin de cristal, as she called it, depended not on some preconceived logic but on the logic of the moment: a strange, almost pure reasoning power, that gave you the answer and commanded your step. All it needed was to stay time for a while, and then walk down to your clairière.
So this Sanskrit recitation was like hearing one’s own silence. Madeleine spoke little, partly from timidity, partly in pride, and whatever she said would always be the unexpected. In this she resembled Lezo, for both spoke from an irregular sense of logic, an inaccuracy not of knowledge but of decision.
And during the months that followed (for Lezo and Georges joined us at Montpalais, in Gascony, where we soon went for the summer) the impression remained with me that indecision brought out the most heroic in both of them. Lezo always said the most unusual thing spontaneously, like, ‘The Buddhists were surrealist — or let us say Dadaist?’ and this would send Georges into a holy fury. Such frivolity should have been pardoned for, apart from the learning behind it, it was not so absurd. But in exasperation Georges would say something like, ‘You should be a journalist of philology or a trader in vocables!’ Moved by the helplessness of Lezo, for he was innocent as a child, Madeleine would go into the kitchen and make some hot coffee.
But when Georges spoke, even if she sat cross-legged, Madeleine would bend forward, bring her two feet together, and listen as one would to a hero, to a saint. For Georges spoke with the noble anguish of the believer, with the feeling that if God is not true he must be made true, and that if God could not be made true then must impious man be made to go through hellfire so that God might be, and in the image Georges had given the Supreme Being. Like Shatov, Georges could have said ‘I must, must believe in God.’
His sincerity was moving: one felt he bore the heavy history of humanity on his bent back. He carried our sorrows and our stupidities, rags that we threw on his back, as he went along the street; the more you threw, the more he blessed, for in the earth, deep in the mud, in the shine of the dung-lice and in the wound of the dog; in spittle and in dustbin-bone; in the face of a wriggling pink prostitute; would Georges find his proof of God. For him, to be was to know evil existed, to acknowledge sin was to be already at the ladder of the divine. ‘Dieu est, parce que le mal est,’ he used to repeat. And I often thought Georges was like some municipal street-cleaner in the Middle Ages, who after carrying the dirt on his back would make a bonfire on the other side of the rampart, and having warmed himself would look into the round space, cross himself, and see God. That Georges had seen God you could see from the pleroma of his face.
Madeleine threw all her rags on Georges, as though she were helping someone to be himself. And she felt much lighter after this performance. She hated him to be so impervious: Georges seemed to have only metaphysical interests. When, at Montpalais, we went out on our evening walks Lezo would stick to me, for Lezo wanted to know more of India, of Sanskrit, Buddhism, Jainism, the Lingayats; even the religion and the language of the Todas; and he knew more about India than I did myself. Georges and Madeleine would go off on some quiet mountain footpath, step by step, as if Georges had not only one arm but one leg as well. Sometimes when he stood before a boulder on the path, lost in some discourse of his own, Madeleine would help him as she would a father — though he was only thirty-one — and give him a hand to cross over to the other side.