‘“I’ll bear you eleven, if you like,” said Madeleine. And humiliated, I bathed and went back to bed.
‘In the middle of the night, I know not what took hold of Madeleine. She came into my bed and made such a big demand on me that I felt afterwards like a summer river — the sun sizzling on the Deccan plateau, and the stones burning; the cattle waiting with their tongues out; and the neem leaves on the tree, still. You can hear a crow cawing here and there, and maybe the oppressed hoot of an automobile.
‘This morning I made no coffee for Madeleine. She went shyly into the kitchen herself, and when she came to say good morning I pretended I was asleep.
‘I must stop this toofan of the deserts.’
November 9. ‘Tonight, it’s again Madeleine that came to me. She knew, as by an instinct, that I would not go to her.
‘A woman hates a male when he withdraws. She cannot accept his defeat — his defeat is the defeat of her womanhood. She must be the juice of his love, she must give him again and again that which he asks for, till his asking itself becomes a disgust. Then the woman has contempt for him, she rubs her breast on his back, she whispers sweet things to his ears, her body speaks where no words could speak, and she lifts him up and takes him into herself, like a mother a child. Then you want to take a cactus branch and beat her and scratch her all over. You want to bite her lip and pull the breast away from her chest, and taste the good blood of her wounds. You want her to be young and new and never named. You want her to be your first love, your first woman, you want her to be the whole of the earth. She knows it — for every woman is a concubine, a mistress of passion, a dompter of man’s condition — and she becomes virginal and simple and, Lord, so new, so perfumed, that the ichor rises in the elephant, and you are at it again.
‘This time you’ve gone far, very far — the winds have arisen, though the summer heat be still there, and the neem leaves wave a little. You hear the cry of a child, and the washing of cloth by some well. The world will be purified. The world is pure. For the mistress has become the mother.’
November 10. ‘Today I could have destroyed Madeleine, so richly, so perfumedly she hung to me. I could have spat into her mouth and called her the female of a dog. ‘It is time I went away. The farther I go, the farther the truth seems. It cannot be good for that which is ripening in Madeleine. I must respect life. I must respect Madeleine. I must go to London.’
November 13. ‘For these three days I have been much nicer to Georges. The elephant has destroyed the jungle, all the jungle, with the creepers, the anthills and the thorny branches. The monsoon winds have arisen. It will soon rain. And I will go.
November 15. ‘It’s terrible to think of Georges and Catherine going through all this. Madeleine said to me last night, “Rama, it’s gone beyond the stage of powder and lipstick,” and I answered, “Well, don’t be a eunuch anyway, Madeleine, for God’s sake.” Madeleine grew very silent at first, and then went to her room and started reading Katherine Mansfield. Nowadays, she reads Katherine Mansfield a great deal. “No man can understand a woman, Rama, no never,” she said, laying the book down. “Only can a woman speak of a woman. We are not angels. But we are no beasts.” I said, “The elephant dies where no one knows. You seek the true for you know the full falsehood. Maybe Georges is right.”
‘“No, Georges is not right,” Madeleine answered, “but you may not be right either. For if truth is truth it must explain everything. Did you not say, Rama, it was Sri Sankara himself who, defeated in discussion by a woman when she questioned him on things essentially feminine, left his body in the hollow of a tree by the river Narbada, and incarnated in the body of a dead king? That he lived for ten years with the four queens and wrote those celebrated verses on love, which you say are among the most beautiful lyrics of India?” “But that was Sankara,” I said. And after a while, I went on, “I will still defeat you.”
‘“The queen awaits you, my liege, my Lord,” she said. It was this time not Madeleine who spoke but someone else, superior, simple.’
November 17. “Today I will just copy the following verse of Baudelaire:
L’éphémére ébloui vole vers toi, chandelle,
Crépite, flambe et dit: Bénissons ce flambeau!
L’amoureux pantelant incliné sur sa belle
A l’air d’un moribond caressant son tombeau.
Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe,
O beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu!
Si ton oeil, ton sourire, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte
D’un infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu?’
November 20. “Again I copy from Baudelaire:
Je te hais, Océan! tes bonds et tes tumultes,
Mon esprit les retrouve en lui! Ce rire amer
De l’homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d’insultes,
Je l’entends dans le rire énorme d la mer.
Comme tu me plairais, O Nuit! sans ces étoiles,
Dont la lumiére parle un langage connu!
Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu’
I could thus go on quoting from my endless diary. But I will stop here.
I shall only add I left for England at the end of the month and that Madeleine seemed not unhappy with herself.
4
I took Savithri back to Cambridge. At the station we jumped into a taxi and I left her at Girton College; then I went on to the Lion Hotel (in Petty Cury) where a room had been reserved for me. The short porter, called John, led me up the staircase to my little room under the roof. It was somewhat triangular, but with the Bible beside the bed and the cross above me I felt what I always know I am, a pilgrim. The night was not long, and dawn broke very early. I went to the library and with some difficulty got a card to work there.
Libraries always speak to me; they reveal me to myself— with their high seriousness, their space, and the multiple knowledge that people have of themselves which goes to make a book. For all books are autobiographies, whether they be books on genetics or on the history (in twenty-two volumes) of the Anglican Church. The mechanics of a motor-car or of veterinary science all have a beginning in the man who wrote the book, have absorbed his nights and maybe the nerves of his wife or daughter. They all represent a bit of oneself, and for those who can read rightly, the whole of oneself. The style of a man — whether he writes on the Aztecs or on pelargonium — the way he weaves word against word, intricates the existence of sentences with the values of sound, makes a comma here, puts a dash there: all are signs of his inner movement, the speed of his life, his breath (prana), the nature of his thought, the ardour and age of his soul. Short sentences and long sentences, parentheses and points of interrogation, are not only curves in the architecture of thought, but have an intimate, a private relation with your navel, your genitals, the vibrance of your eyesight. Shakespeare, for ought we know, may have had hypertension, Goldsmith stones in the gall-bladder; Dr Johnson may have been oversexed like a horse, just as Maupassant was a hypochondriac and Proust had to lie in bed with asthma, and weave out long sentences like he eked out a long curve of breath. Breath is the solar herdsman of the living, says the Rig Veda, and hence yoga and all that.