I always headed toward the direction in which the sun set, because I knew that Goa was in that direction, and other cities in which there were trading-posts of men of my race.
And time passed.
THE AVATAR
I had just traversed, in a mountainous country, jungles intercut with forests. Some distance away, I perceived a large village, and I was tempted at first to go around it, for I thought that I could see from afar an inexplicable agitation there. I had even seen the reflection of sunlight on armor. But everyone ought to march without hesitation toward his destiny.
“There he is! That’s him!”
Such were the cries that I heard when I arrived at the first houses. All the inhabitants of the village were assembled on the road. They were shouting and agitating. It seemed to me that there were the silhouettes of cavaliers behind them.
I’m doomed, I thought.
But flight would have been futile, all the more so as my lacerated feet would not have carried me very far. I therefore continued to advance, simulating the greatest indifference.
I marched with my eyes lowered. When I raised them I saw that the crowd was kneeling around me. Many foreheads were in the dust. A woman touched my ankle and rapidly withdrew her hand, as if it had been burned, but her face had an ecstatic expression. An old man who was holding a garland of flowers hesitated as to whether to launch it around my neck, and consulted with his gaze another old man who shook his head to express that it would be a lack of respect. I heard the word avatar repeated frequently.
A man who was wearing a turban and a chemise with a belt, who had to be the village chief, addressed several phrases to me in a local dialect that was unknown to me. My absence of response did not astonish him and he began marching in front of me.
As we passed in front of several modest shops I saw men dressed as soldiers of the Emperor who were leading a horse to drink. They expressed themselves in Hindi, and as they were marching close to me I overheard their conversation. This is what I was able to deduce from it.
Some time before, an astrologer had announced to the inhabitants of the village that on that very day, between sunrise and sunset, an avatar incarnate in the body of a Jain ascetic would pass before their houses and attract great blessings to them. An avatar, as I was to discover, is a man into whom a little of the divine being has descended in order to aid souls in emerging from their miserable darkness.
Now, the inhabitants had been waiting since dawn, and the sadness of disappointment had begun to take possession of them, all the more so because a child had just been born, and if the avatar did not pass through until the following day, because of some delay, it would not be blessed in the same fashion. A fortunate combination of circumstances, with which I had nothing to do, had caused me to trace the sign of the Jains on my forehead. The sun was about to set. I could only be the avatar.
The headman of the village led me to a centenarian banyan some distance from the house. There, they had deposited milk, fruits and rice for the avatar. I sat down in the middle of a respectful circle.
I experienced a certain emotion on seeing a man in European dress accompanied by an officer of the imperial troops. He had to be a Dutchman. He was stout, with little cunning eyes, and must have had a ruddy complexion before being bronzed by the sun. In general, Europeans lend one another mutual assistance in India, although the Portuguese and the Dutch never forget their rivalry. But I was French and not Portuguese, and I wondered whether if I might be able to interest the Dutchman in my fate. I was retained by the obsequiousness that he was manifesting in regard to his companion. The crescent that the other had on his turban indicated that he was a Muslim.
They had come to see me out of pure curiosity, but for a Muslim and a Christian a Hindu ascetic inspires a certain respect, for they are supposed to possess powers of sorcery.
I heard some of what they were saying.
“One of the rules of the Jains,” the officer explained, “is not to kill any living being. Even if the ascetic feels a cobra on his body, and even if he is bitten by it, he does not move.”
“Is that possible?” exclaimed the Dutchman.
“We can make the experiment,” the officer went on. “There’s no danger, for it’s well known that snakes don’t bite saints of that sort.”
Saying that, to my great terror, he lifted up a stone that was nearby. Fortunately, there was no snake underneath it.
“This category of religious individual has an incredible power of fasting,” said the officer then. “I’m convinced that if we came back tomorrow morning we’d see that none of these aliments had been touched.”
They conversed further about various subjects, and I understood that the officer was returning to Agra after having searched or months for a dangerous foreigner who had attempted to assassinate the Emperor on the same day as the death of the great Akbar.
“An avatar, if I understand tightly,” said the Dutchman, “is a prophet of sorts.”
“No, a prophet preaches and this one is silent. An avatar is, in sum, the divinity himself who has incarnated himself. These poor Hindus don’t reflect that the divinity wouldn’t make the choice of such an ordinary body to come and enlighten humans.”
Problem of theology were foreign to the Dutchman, a founder of commercial enterprises. He stared at the ground. “However, look at Jesus Christ…,” he began, slowly and not without a crude logic.
The two men drew away. I resumed my route the same night, for I had found a particularly piercing character in the Muslim officer’s gaze. And then, is not the destiny of an avatar to travel eternally?
I was to experience a surprise no less great in another village, but it was after having traversed it and as the sun was about to set. It is noticeable that an entire order of events chooses the end of the day to present itself to humans, as a sort of present or chastisement, according to whether the event is fortunate or unfortunate.
In that village cotton cloth ornamented with colored thread was fabricated. Some sheets were painted and were hung out on ropes in order to dry. They appeared to me to be agreeable to see and reawoke in me the attraction of vestimentary sumptuousness that I have always experienced and which was only asleep within me.
The artisans worked on bamboo looms in the depths of small, dark low-ceilinged rooms sunk in three or four feet of earth like basements or cellars. I wondered as I passed why those men, who could have had the enjoyment of the beautiful celestial light, were condemned to weave in the shadows. By the same token, even though they could have dressed in light colored fabrics, they only wore sordid rags.
But there was something more surprising in the village. All the inhabitants that I encountered had one leg visibly stouter than the other. I could not help noticing it. It was usually the right leg, and that deformation was innate, for I noticed it in very young children playing in the dust.
Seeking a shelter in which to spend the night I took a little path that seemed to lead to a ruin behind trees. It was on that path that I saw an apparition, extraordinary because it was real, while having a phantasmal character, at the same time as it enlightened my mind in a fulgurant fashion.
Advancing in front of me was a skeleton carrying a cross—a skeleton that was laughing. It was not entirely a skeleton, for parchment-like skin maintained the bones grouped in accordance with the law that regulates bodies. I recognized him immediately, and, what is more marvelous, he recognized me in spite of the difference there was between my present appearance and that of old. It was Brother Octave that I had before my eyes, whom I had last seen in Surat, at the moment when he was departing, without knowing exactly where he was bound: Octave de Zaalberg, who had departed in quest of the Cross of Bartholomew, the apostle of Christ who had come, according to pious legend, to convert the Hindus.
Brother Octave deposited the cross that he had over his shoulder, which appeared to me to be very heavy, on the ground and took me in his arms. He gave me a kiss on the forehead, and it seemed to
me that I was receiving it from Death itself, or, rather, a statue of death made of gnarled wood, but whose substance was not at all repulsive and had something of a vegetal character.
Then he considered me, still laughing. His joy was great on seeing me, and I understood immediately that he no longer had a very solid head. For my part, I savored a keen satisfaction in expressing myself in French, which I had only been able to do with my cousin Pierre Du Jarric since arriving in India.
“Come and see the church of Saint Bartholomew,” he said to me.
A little further on, half-buried in the vegetation, there were indeed the ruins of a Christian church. How had he discovered it? What genius had led him, in immense India, to the only place where Christians, in an era we could no longer determine, had built that church? Was it Nestorians who had come that far, or Portuguese anterior to the first conquerors who established themselves in Goa? Did the church date from the time of Bartholomew? I could not learn anything from Brother Octave’s incoherent words. He said a thousand astonishing things, but had he not invented them?
He had found the apostle’s cross lying on the vestiges of the altar. That cross, made of exceedingly hard wood, was worm-eaten and seemed very ancient. It was awaiting the courageous Christian who would seize it and utilize its virtues, for that cross had a power of conversion. It gave faith to those who did not have any. Had I not noticed in traversing the village a strange particularity in the physical conformation of the inhabitants?
I replied that I had indeed been struck by the thickness of certain right legs.
Brother Octave laughed for a long time, longer than is appropriate to a Christian when it is a matter of a punishment imposed by a God of forgiveness. Saint Bartholomew had been stoned by the inhabitants of the village and, by way of punishment, they were to be born for a indeterminate duration with one leg stouter than the other. Why the right leg? Because the first stone of the lapidation had broken the saint’s right leg.
I did not point out the contradiction there was between the fact of being stoned by pagans and that of possessing a cross that converted. The unutilized power of the cross was, however, the greatest concern of Brother Octave. He considered the inhabitants of the village as converts. A stranger to the study of languages, he only knew French and Flemish, and it was in those languages that he had instructed them. He had been well understood. He saw the proof of it in the rice and bananas that people came very day to deposit on a stone with his intention.
But a village was nothing. It was the whole earth that it was necessary to convert. If he had not departed it was because God had not wanted him to accomplish that work, but me. His strength was being taken away. It withdrew a little further every day. It was only by virtue of a great and painful effort that he was able to put the cross over his shoulder, and when it was there he was no longer capable of making the tour of the little church on the path that he had traced himself, and followed every evening at sunset. It was to me that the glory of the conversion of humankind would belong. He told me in confidence that those it was necessary to convert first were the Christians, and especially the priests.
The cross was still in the place where we had met. I was obliged to carry it to the church, for Brother Octave’s strength was exhausted. He even told me, quite simply, that he would die the following day. He showed me a kind of deep pit that might have been an ancient tomb, which he had discovered behind the altar. He had thought that it was the tomb of Saint Bartholomew, and he had emptied it of the earth that filled it. It was there that he desired to repose. He made me promise to place him in it when he was dead and to cover him with enough stones for the jackals to be unable to disinter him.
“Bones are sufficient for those filthy animals,” he told me, with disgust.
For obscure reasons, or antipathies with regard to certain animal species, Brother Octave had a horror of jackals.
“On the other hand, I like monkeys,” he said, pensively.
I took that as an eccentricity of a deranged mind, but of all the things he told me, those relative to his death were the most veridical. He did, indeed, die the following day.
THE CROSS OF BARTHOLOMEW
I would have sworn that the monkeys came to dance by night on the tomb of Saint Bartholomew, which was also that of Brother Octave. Why were there monkeys and not jackals? Is there a difference of hierarchy between animal species? Some eat fruits and others nourish themselves on carrion; but one does not judge the superiority of beings over one another by the quality of their nourishment.
That problem occupied me, as well as others more serious. Until then, I had never asked myself questions. Everything appeared natural to me. And suddenly, the world was, for me, filled with enigmas.
I don’t know what force made me stay in the ruins of the church. Every evening I put Brother Octave’s cross on my shoulder and I followed he path that he had traced. I was accomplishing a duty. It was not in conformity with the one he had prescribed for me, since he had counted on me to convert humankind. It was, however, a tribute that I was rendering to him. I was accomplishing a pious ritual. I have no idea what the inhabitants of the village thought if they perceived a silhouette different from the ne they knew, but I found aliments sufficient for my nourishment every day, on the same stone.
Perhaps it was the transportation of that cross that determined in me the curious phenomenon, entirely new for me, of reflection. I began to meditate on things about which I had never thought: the creation of the world, what a soul was, and what might become of it after death. Until then, I had thought that those questions had been resolved by the knowledgeable and religious men who had studied them, but in remembering the conversations that the Jesuit fathers had had together on the deck of the Santa-Fé and all the discourses that I had heard in Aboul Fazi’s entourage, I was obliged to conclude that those problems had not received a definitive solution.
What were the laws that regulated sympathies and antipathies? Why was one drawn toward one person rather than another? Why was I, who had known many women of great beauty, unable to forget Inès de Saldanna? Why were there monkeys on Brother Octave’s tomb, sometimes dancing round and sometimes sitting in melancholy attitudes?
It was in wanting to make sure of that fact that an even of great importance for me occurred, although I cannot characterize it and I still wonder, even now, what its nature was.
The tomb in which I had placed Brother Octave was behind the altar, but as there was no kind of vault in the church and the roof had collapsed, the tomb was in the open air. One night, therefore, I went to sit down on a section of all that formed a bench of sorts, and I contemplated the night, which was particularly serene. I felt intensely a need to have a certainty regarding God and a need to appeal to him by a name.
But what should I call him? Jesus Christ, evidently, but that was only apparently logical, and because I had been raised in the Christian religion. I had known in Agra many men full of science and wisdom, as virtuous as the best Christians, who honored other prophets and gave God different names. From afar, I had called them pagans and thought, like all the inhabitants of Toulouse, that there was no other valid religion than that of the Pope. But since it had been given to me to hear them, a great perplexity had entered into me.
What was the reason for the hatred that men bore for religious reasons? It could only be the same God that they worshiped under different names. What importance did that name have? Was it not normal that the unique God had had different prophets, according to the time and the country? Was it not wise, for anyone who wanted to approach the Unique God, to invoke him under all the names that he had been given and to ask for the support of all the prophets successively?
That is what I tried to do, with a sincere heart. I pronounced the same of Ahura Mazda, which I had heard so often on the lips of Emperor Akbar; that of Allah, which the mullahs cried from the top of mosques; that of Jehovah, whose wrath quivers in all the pages of the Bible; that of the Brahma of the Hindus; and
I even found in the memory of my childhood studies a forgotten invocation to Olympian Jupiter. I also appealed to the mediators, those who had given themselves as messengers or sons of God: Zoroaster the Persian; Krishna, whom I imagined playing the flute among shepherds; Buddha, seated under a tree; Jesus Christ, walking on the water; and Mohammed, guiding a caravan of camels through an Arabian desert.
But I don’t know whether my appeals were heard and whether marvelous presences populated the ruins in the midst of which I was sitting. I don’t know whether it was to those presences that I owed the interior light that illuminated me. I cannot help thinking, if I want to be just, and in spite of the implausibility of the assertion, that the principle cause of what I saw was in the curiously fixed gaze of a little monkey that was kneeling, with its hands clasped together, and which never took its eyes off me. I believed, for a moment, that after asking itself the same questions as me about God and the prophets, it had started praying, and it was exhorting me silently to do the same.
I don’t know whether it was a dream or a real image that passed before my eyes. I saw with the color of life the treasure of the Mongol sovereigns where I imagined hat it reposed, in the tomb of the Muslim saint not far from the steep banks of the Jumna some distance from Agra. I was conscious of the force that kept it prisoner beneath the stone. It was a magical force issuing from a higher and vaster power, which embraced the entire earth, the power of evil. It was symbolized by the bearded head of Baphomet, the sign of the Templars, which had also been that of the Asiatic conquerors, the one that Akbar bore on his linen chemise, and the one that the Jesuits utilized secretly. And it was only the sign of evil under one of its aspects. Under another, it was the sign of force, under yet another that of the authority from which order, organization, peace and even good stem. The treasure was simultaneously good and evil, evil in its origin, by virtue of the evil that its conquest had engendered, good because of the immense possibilities hidden in it.
Jean de Fodoas Page 24