‘Catherine does not want much, she just likes to go about with this man, and when one comes to the corner by the Englishman’s villa and the dog, to say, “Shall we stay here for a while?” and see how grateful Georges looks for this kind suggestion, his glasses catching the rays of the evening sun and making him look every inch a professor. Or when they limp up higher to say, “Now, this is what schoolchildren do— les enfants a quatre pattes en avant!” and Georges will even try to laugh. Catherine is not silly or uneducated, but she has that awkward compassion which makes women think a man can be happy by being taken to a picture, or given the cake he usually says he relishes, or offered a packet of neat, nice handkerchiefs. Catherine’s heart is in the right place, only it has to be metaphysically educated; if she be indeed the Catholic she says she is, then must she know the great saying of St John: “For love is of God and he that loveth but loveth God.” And if only Catherine could understand her own face, I am sure she would see what beauty has come into it, what clarity, and what rounded hope. She knows with the simple faith people have, she knows like a local train always coming somehow to the right station, that her destiny is bound with this man’s. When she kisses her cousin Mado so often, it is not merely affection but gratitude.
‘The other day we found Catherine taking Georges’s arm, no, not on the main roads, but when he, impatient, wanted to go down a mule path with us and cut the distance by so much twist and gradation. But as soon as he reached the main road, he said: “Merci, Mademoiselle!” as though to a pupil of his. Madeleine’s arm, he rarely takes — he has too much respect for her, and maybe an unnameable fear.
‘So evening after evening goes without a word being said, without a gesture of any consequence from anyone (for Madeliene waits, and with what anxiety, every evening to come home and cast a sly look at Catherine’s lips, to see if the rouge has had any dents in it — I call it the examining of the wedding sheets, which eunuchs do in upper-class Muslim houses, to report that all is well to the mother-in-law) and yet there seems, like the quiet and simple flow of the Rhone after Lyon, through Valence, Montélimar and Tarascon, that there is nothing but the wide, the inevitable sea. On just a point of this watery expanse of the Middle-of-the-World is the thrice sacred Ste Marie-de-la-Mer, and there the gipsies come once a year for the festival of their saint, because it was there, on those sacred sands, that the early Christians bought the relics of Marie-Madeleine; and it was there that they hid them, in caves and cellars, till they could come out into the open, and raise a cathedral at St Maximin, and praise her with:
Beatae Mariae Magdalenae, quaesumus, Domine, suffragiis adjuvemur: cujus precibus exoratus quatriduanum fratrem Lazarum vivum ab inferis resuscitasti.
If Georges marries, no doubt it will be in the Chapel of Mary Magdalene at St Maximin. There is no question about it whatsoever. Father Zenobias will be one witness and I the other. How Oncle Charles will love it and thank us for a lifetime…
‘Yes, everything is ready but a gesture — a symbol. It will not be, to put it crudely, the examining of the wedding sheets — and this by now Madeleine has fully realized — but some elevation, some communion; a revelation that will make the inevitable emerge, not as knowledge, but as a fact, a recognition, a binding on the altar of one’s own being.’
Reading through these pages, I can see how a certain vulgarity had entered me — I the great ‘purist’—and how it already indicated the meaning of those confused and sad predicaments which were to follow. The problem, alas, is not for the psychoanalyst to explain, but for the metaphysician to name.
The psychoanalyst, after all, is only like the Indian magician who can make the mango grow before you, but you cannot eat of it; he can make the whole riches of the district treasury come and lie before you with label, seal, and all, and yet you cannot take a copper piece out of it; or make the rope go high and the sun mount with the mounting rope, but you cannot go up to the sun; nor can you be like the boy bound in a basket, and cut into bits before you with sword and knife, and when called, ‘Baloo, Baloo!’ there he is coming down yon coconut palm; you could no more be a Baloo than I a village- beadle. The psychoanalyst is concerned with illusory objects. Yet nobody is happy or unhappy with the mind; we are happy or unhappy with our hearts. And we no more know our hearts than Sigmund Freud knew the being of Leonardo because a feather in the painter’s mouth proved, through the magic of psychoanalysis, that the great Italian painter was a homosexual, or rather ‘had ambivalent tendencies’. Psychoanalysis does not prove why or how Leonardo painted the Saint Anne or that noble bust of St John the Baptist.
Vulgarity had entered from the backwash somehow, and my story will show how we drifted into the whirlpool of the river.
And as all that is true happens simply and undramatically, this happened, too, in the most natural manner.
One evening, Catherine seemed somewhat sad. We had all gone up to St Ophalie on our usual walk, and I stayed back a while to be near her, to feel her, to know her, and maybe to offer her any hope or advice that someone older, and like an elder brother, could give.
I acted, no doubt, from my Indian instinct, for in India every woman who is not your wife — or your concubine — is your sister. You feel the responsibility of a brother to every woman on this earth, whosoever she may be, and in whatever part of the world. Left to himself, the Indian would go tying rakhi2 to every woman he met, feel her elder brother, protect her love, and enjoy the pride of an uncle at marriage and at childbirth; and later he would feel the orphans as his wards, his nephews. Thus the danger has been circumvented, the pride of the hero kept firm; and when you die, if no one else will, your sister will weep for you!
So I joked with Catherine, for joking is part of binding a woman into safety, and told her she was my little daughter, my niece, and my sister-in-law — Georges being my brother — and little by little Catherine opened herself up and spoke to me of herself, of the deep sorrow she felt, something unnameable, un-understandable.
‘I should be so happy, my brother,’ she laughed, ‘but there is sorrow, such sorrow. It seems to come from the very depths. I want to weep, I want to call Madeleine at night, beg her to lie by me, weep with me, even protect me. Rama, I just do not know what it is; it simply aches.’ She became silent. What answer could I give her? Only a woman could have told her the truth.
‘Catherine,’ I said, however, ‘the fact is this. When a girl would become woman, there’s a whole universe that rebels in you, as though a kingdom, a sovereignty were to be lost, as though some demon were at your cavern door, and you would lose the all, in fear, in blood, and in anguish. Catherine, it’s just like the great frost that falls in March, before the spring comes. Death and life are not opposite things but alternate events, like spring and winter heat and monsoon. There’s anguish in India before the rains come, just as when people die in spring — you know most old people die at the end of winter, in the beginning of spring? That is why, Catherine,’ I concluded, ‘there is so much sorrow in spring. You want not to be born, for death, winter, looks like peace. For man, I mean for the male, the leap into spring is his death, but for women the leap into life is anguish, is pain, is rounded knowledge, is continuance. For woman pain and continuance be one, and for man death and joy are one. And that is the mystery of creation.’ I spoke as though I were telling of Madeleine, and not of Catherine.