‘The peasant would leave his cucumbers and the snake- gourds at the door, “Mother, tell the learned One, Timma, the left-handed, will come tomorrow. We’ve to let down a new boat on the river.” Rukmini, or Kaumudi, would give warm coffee on waking, and once the evening prayers were over, and the betel leaves eaten, and the vessels in the kitchen washed, how wondrous it would be to have a cup of warm milk, and the beauty of Rukmini’s young body beside one. It smells of musk and of the nest of birds…
‘No, I shall never be a Brahmin — I should be such a poor eater at a funeral feast. I shall tear my clothes, and set off to the Himalayas. Something hypostatic calls me. Mother mine, I will go.’
November 1. ‘I must talk less: talk less even to myself.’
November 3. ‘Once again it happened last night — that same emptiness, that mango-seed-like kernel that lay within me, and I remembered what grandmother had said of the mango-seed: “My child, if you swallow it, it will grow and grow within you, put out its branches, through your nostrils first, then through your ears, and then through the mouth, and it will become so big that it will grow out of you a tree.” The whole night I lay with it in me, and I could not go to sleep till the early hours of the morning. Madeleine, too, I could hear, rolled about in bed for a long time. Then she went to sleep and spoke in her dream. I could not make out what it was, but she was not happy either. There should be nothing in an act but the act itself. But if the mango-seed enters into it, then it becomes three acts: one before and one after, and in between is the space of no one, which no one wants. It is like a dead rat in plague-time — you throw it opposite your neighbour’s door, and he throws it opposite his, and this one slings it on to the veranda of widow or concubine. These lift it up by the tail and with mosquitoes, fleas, and all, throw it neatly into the right dustbin. Till the municipal cart comes and takes it away — it lies there, a reminder of our infection. And some, of course, may die of this too…
‘The whole thing started, I think, on that Saturday night. The evening walks have been going on, of course. How truly the classical poets have sung of Phoebe and her influence on the lecherous humours of mankind. Georges, of course, has been coming every evening. Though, he’s such an innocent creature, it hasn’t needed much time to realize what he had to know. And like a sincere and good Homo sapiens he has been playing his game discreetly and correctly. He does not look back so often for Madeleine, and sometimes, too, we conveniently stay back or take a different route to return home, for we are skilful with our limbs and we can skip down goat-paths easily. “Catherine,” Madeleine shouts, at the beginning of St Ophalie, “Rama is cold, and you know he needs good exercise. So we’re going to run,” and hooking her arm in mine, she drags me downhill. Though my lungs ache, I just do not interfere. “Look after Georges, Cathy,” she shouts again, from the bottom of the olive grove, and we hear Georges shouting back, “Enjoy yourself. We shall soon be back for the soup.”
‘And in all honesty it could not be said Georges is unhappy. If his voice does not carry that spontaneous, almost innocent lilt, it is not without a human touch. For Georges, like all human beings, wants to care and to be cared for. Nobody knows if ever he has loved anyone in his life — he never mentions it. But one can see, somewhere, a scar on his mind and on his heart; his impotent arm seems but the external signum of an internal event. Catherine has one thing which Georges cannot but see; she has maidenhood, she has innocence — in the Church sense, for in my sense she knew all that she should know as female and future mother — and she is a good Catholic. That she is not so much interested in metaphysical discourses might just as well be the one thing to be recommended in this case.
‘Imagine Catherine with a brood of four children — she says she wants at least six — discussing the Monophysites and the Manicheans, and Georges learning Chinese in order to tell the difference between one monastic costume and the other. One particular order might wear camel-hair and the other yak-hair, but for Georges this made all the difference in their dogma. To Georges, tradition is like a dictionary — it gives the right meanings. Imagine Catherine concerned with the morphology of the word, itsu or Ki-to, which in Chinese, I’ve read somewhere, means “in-between-two” or “the indivisible”. It applies as much to cloth that is woven or to the thought that is constructed. Being probably of Buddhist origin the Manicheans applied it to thought, and Georges will make your Monophysites take it as “garment”, “cloth made of a hard-stuff, the fibre of a hard-fruit or peel of tree, like the acacia cinna, etc. etc….”
‘I heard Madeleine’s discourse with conviction. I am convinced — and it needed little effort to convince me — that Catherine is the right wife, the perfect mate, the holy companion for Georges. If she had nothing in her, at least she would never be an emotional problem for Georges. And Georges above all needs calm and rest — for work and prayer.
‘True, Madeleine fascinates him. She fascinates him by just that which he cannot have, must not have. It is, to use his own expression on another subject, “la concupiscence de l’esprit.” Georges loves the intricacies, the sorties, the clairiéres, the bogs and marshes and clear silences of Madeleine’s mind. To be near her, he realizes, is to feel intelligent. He can no more have a sinful thought beside her, than he could beside a running brook… No, not quite, but almost.
‘Catherine on the other hand is such a safe, such a known creature. (Astrologically speaking, Catherine is a Capricorn and Madeleine a Scorpio — and that makes all the difference between the two cousins.) It did not take long before Catherine knew where Georges should rest, where stop to change the position of his paralysed hand — he put it sometimes at the left elbow, and sometimes he made the two hands clasp one another. And just as I used to ask Grandfather Kittanna, “Grandfather, shall I now give you the snuffbox?” and Grandfather Kittanna would say, “How well you know when I want it, good boy,” and allow me to open his silver snuffbox — not knowing that when he stopped reading it was not because the page had ended but because he wanted to understand something, grasp a philosophical point, may be even wait for an illumination, and then it was snuff just did the thing — so it is with Catherine, when some thought pursues Georges, and it goes round and round his head like a fly in a dark room, and she talking away of Rouen and the quays, of Zoubie’s stories of her diplomatic career— brief though it was — or of Oncle Charles and his jokes about the Republic. “‘In my village,’ Oncle Charles tells proudly,” Catherine will begin, “‘they say when the third Republic of 1870 was proclaimed there was but one man and a dog to salute the tricolour flag on the Mairie, and the name of the man was Leon Henri Portichaut, and his dog was called Zizi. So we always called it the Republic of Zizi Portichaut. And to speak the truth, this Fourth Republic could not even be given such a distinguished name, it should be called the Republic of Mimi Portichaut, in honour of a famous woman who played her part behind the scenes in the making of this great Republic’” And Georges will remark, “Ah, is that so, is that so — Catherine you are full of such wonderful stories.”