Au porz d’Espaigne en est passet Rollant
Sur Veillantif sun bon cheval curant…
Vers Sarrazins reguardet fièrement
E vers Franceis humeles e dulcement,
Si lur ad dit un mot curteisement.
From the tower-room, where Madeleine slept, you could contemplate the withdrawn arrogance of a mountain that seemed more a bastion of Spain than a fortress of France.
Outside in the fields such lovely blue and green vines stood, and aubergines grew in the garden behind. Sometimes, as in India, the heat rose and one smelt the acridity of grass. Often when my cough did not trouble me much I woke early; then I would jump on Blanche, the mare, and go romping down to the river. It was as if Blanche could speak to me what no man could. Not that she understood my problem, but she could tell me to contemplate the Guadalupe, the little white stream that meandered with such tranquillity on the yellow countryside.
What after all was the problem? Where exactly did it begin? For Madeleine had never been sweeter. There was nothing I needed which she did not know beforehand, and bring to me: my medicine after lunch, my handkerchief when I started on a walk, my pencil, duly sharpened and laid on my notebook — for I continued to work on my Albigensians. Yet she herself was not there. She was nowhere. Sometimes she used to incarnate in a glance, in the smile of a second — when Georges spoke.
But Lezo she began to detest, and wished to God he had never come. For Lezo like all Spaniards — though he hated being called a Spaniard and insisted he was a Basque — could not help being somewhat frivolous, either with Madeleine or sometimes even with Marie, the healthy-looking servant-girl. Marie’s young man came only on Sunday afternoons and in between Lezo had his little moments of innocent fun. Sometimes while on a walk he would sing, ‘Oh, ciel d’amour!’ at the sight of a young girl with her pail under a tap and then suddenly would make eyes at Madeleine, as though to say, ‘Isn’t she splendid?’ The more Lezo felt isolated, the more his vulgarity appeared. But he was no fool. One evening when he said something quite crude — at coffee after dinner — Madeleine went straight up to her room. He understood, and in a few days left with a stupid excuse. He said he was too near the Spanish frontier, and one never knew with the French Police… Of course, we all knew that Franco’s henchmen had better things to do — bigger fish to capture than this poor philologist Lezo.
Lezo’s departure, though it seemed so inevitable, created an entirely new situation. Looking back at my diaries of those days — for I started writing down things to myself about myself, at Montpalais; it gave some mental relief to see myself in black handwriting against white paper; it made me more objective to myself — I was saying, looking over those diaries I have come across some bewildering remarks.
August 3. ‘Virtue is more difficult to accept than vice. Vice has a way of saying, “Here I am; take me, and forget the rest.” Virtue has a way of saying, “Here I am; you cannot take me, and you cannot forget me.” Virtue seems to defeat itself, whereas vice conquers.
‘This is not strictly true. Lezo, before he left, seemed so intimate, so personal, so generous; as though if you asked he would give his cloak, and bow before you in homage to your presence. But Madeleine is like the choking in my breath. The doctors say the less I cough the better, but when I have coughed little, one day it rushes up with such a burst that my whole bed is covered with blood. And then Madeleine, like her saintly namesake, sits me back and, with such beautiful eyes, wipes the blood off my face, and carries the basin as though she were carrying the blood of a martyr. Sainthood, I think, is natural to man or woman — not virtue.
‘Yesterday when Madeleine had tucked me back to bed and had stayed a while to see whether my breathing were regular and normal, and went back to the central hall, I could hear her whispering voice all through the night talking to Georges. I heard them discuss my illness with deep concern: not for three years had such an effusion of blood appeared. Georges has a voice so grave and deep, especially at night; it makes one think it’s the walls that speak a prophecy.
‘Madeleine looks much more beautiful now: her virtue makes her conspicuous. She reads a great deal out of St John of the Gross, and about Buddhism. She feels happier with the latter, but prefers to read the Christian mystic with Georges. Now it is I who give her Sanskrit lessons. She had begun to loathe Sanskrit, she said, because of Lezo. But Georges has a different opinion: he thinks I “feel” Sanskrit, I do not “know” Sanskrit. Lezo, on the other hand “knew” a language — and did not care whether it were Icelandic or Hebrew. The classical mind has a grandeur I shall never possess. I am too weak, so I see stars where others see planets.’
August 17. ‘This week has been a glorious interlude. Georges has come so near to me. His gentle, vibrant, withdrawn presence makes one feel so selfish, so crude. How the Christian humility has beauty — even as some lovely women wear mourning because it makes them beautiful. The Brahmin, the Vedantin, has such arrogance. It was Astavakra who said, “Wonderful, wonderful, am I”; he with the eight deformations. Yes, one is wonderful— when one is not one, but the “I”.
‘Strange, as I myself go away from Buddhism it is Madeleine who gets deeper into it. She is moved by Buddhist compassion and poetry: it has, as she said, Christian humility without stupidity and blind belief; it has poetry without the smell of the crypt. Oh, the Christian love of relics! This body seems more worthy to the Christian after death than in life. Those who have no roof over their heads still buy space for a caveau de famille, says Madeleine. She knows what she is saying, for the family is talking a great deal about the famous caveau de famille at St Médard. “Caveau for caveau,” says Madeleine, “I would rather my bones felt the warmth of the southern sun than that the mist, penetrating through the earth, should form round globules of perspiration on my non-existent body. Oh!”
‘For Madeleine there is an area which is not me that she fills with Christian longings, but she will not admit it. She thinks it is betraying me to praise St John of the Cross. But sometimes when they sit in the sun of the courtyard, and Georges and she discuss the Spanish mystic, she seems so tender and understanding that it is she who would teach Georges. Catholicism is in her blood. Not all Georges’s fervour can give him the instinct — and religion is an instinct — that gives illumination to a line, a reference. Just the same way when she talks of Buddhism I feel the word dukka almost with the entrails dropping into my hand, whereas for her it is mere sorrow. Dukka is the very tragedy of creation, the sorrow of the sorrow that sorrow is.’
August 23. ‘Madeleine today came and sat near me on my bed. Outside the day was glorious — I could almost hear the parrots cry, or the monkeys leap from branch to branch of the peepul tree. She saw how happy I was. But it was with a happiness that knows life is a continuous jump from awareness to awareness, like a straight line is from point to point. In between is the knowledge of the perpetuity of life. Sorrow is the background of all moments, for moment means the transitory and the transitory is always sorrowful. I remembered Rilke.