by Abha Dawesar
At one of their first meetings Pascal had discussed this with him. “You are not manipulating la femme in these cases, mon vieux, you are manipulating yourself.”
“But I am aware of the manipulation, and I don’t want it.”
“You are still a victim of your own imagination. And as long as you work in it, it will capture you. Our work as writers is always bigger than we are. It’s a huge hole into which we think we fit, but find that we lose ourselves. C’est comme comme ça!”
“How can you stand it?”
“There is nothing to do but embrace it. This is the nature of the écrivain. The essence of writerhood.”
Ten years younger than Prem, Pascal seemed to have better self-knowledge. He instinctively understood what it meant to be a writer, the folly, la souffrance, the unbridled freedom contained in the pages of one’s own work, and the war one had to constantly wage against oneself.
Prem had waged that war for the better part of his seventy-five years and produced work that had redeemed his suffering in many ways. He had used the prism of his fiction to negotiate his deepest spaces, exposing his fears to the constant scrutiny of anonymous readers all over the world and to his own scrutiny. It was not as if Prem had been writing thinly veiled memoirs or telling stories that resembled his private life; on the contrary, he had never let even the most painful emotional crises of his existence escape the net of his fiction. And in transforming them, he had to risk each time letting go of that thin cord of sanity that kept him from tumbling into the abyss. His fiction had threatened to balloon and swallow him whole. Writing was not just therapy, self-expression, creation for the heck of it, compulsion, intuition, the twisting of reality, the perversion of facts, the mere recording of reality, and even at times the anticipation of real life; it was a perpetual trap set up by Prem, the writer, to trap himself. Each book held a little piece of him that he had had to cut off and preserve in the work of art. And while Prem hoped fervently that the pieces of his soul were regenerative, there was no proof yet of their having grown back.
As a writer he did not know how to keep a distance from his writing without allowing the writing to keep a distance from himself. And he knew, as all real writers know instinctively, that the writing had to be close to the bone. Creating every day with the dark stuff of the soul, Prem risked each day never having a private life to return to at the end of the day’s work. Each word tampered with his soul. For Pascal it seemed easy to play games with his writing and turn it into an instrument of seduction to get the better of it. Prem had envied him for that.
Pascal wrote about the raw and crude human stuff, his own, fearlessly. Prem took his raw and crude human stuff till he had absorbed it all and then wrote about other things using the poison in his body as the ink. Pascal didn’t stake everything within. He didn’t write dangerously or love dangerously. He merely exposed his demons, whereas Prem fed his demons with his own soul.
On his first long visit to Paris, recuperating from the loss of Vedika, Prem had so fallen in love with the city that he believed—by devoting himself to recording the light of its rooftops and the faces of its people—the city would become bigger than his imagination. But Paris, like Bombay, like New York, like London, was a city. It was not a self or a soul, even if the unbearable beauty of Paris suggested that Paris was beau, a man, or as in une belle ville, a woman. The flow of its river, the wide stone of its houses, the occasional raw exposed Haussmannian facade resplendent with magic, glowing luminous in the light of late May afternoons, seductively suggested a human consciousness. Its language plugged the holes in Prem’s soul, a soul that he had scooped out like a melon for the sake of his own literature. French filled him with new words, words he had yet to dissect and master, words that reinvented his concepts of l’amour and of the self. Talking to Pascal over their first hundred coffees in bars around the Left Bank, Prem was renewed by ideas of chez moi, soi-même, amour propre. No doubt these ideas about existence were universal, but their flavor was French and could not be translated into English; it could not even be lived in English. The Francophone world saved Prem from completely emptying his insides of himself by replenishing him.
But in the end Paris—no doubt the most beautiful and special one in the world—was but a city. Even Prem’s imagination could not make Paris a person, could not make it himself. He had to take his time after Vedika to move on to love affairs less mystérieuses but more puissantes. Prem divorced himself from his guilt. When he pursued the best friends of his ex-lovers, his Indian publisher’s wife, or the barely legal French filles, he did so with the absolute conviction of a man who believes in the uses of sex for everyday life, in its necessity and in its amorality. With age, the large holes he drilled into himself with his fiction came to be about things even more intimate than sex and love, they involved his own fears and the universe that could not be shared with others.
Jean-Pierre called Maya, asking if she had settled in the apartment and offering her a tour of her new neighborhood.
When they crossed the boulevard de Clichy, he pointed to a freshly painted white building. “Do you know the famous Toulouse-Lautrec poster? This used to be the Divan Japonais in the early nineteen-hundreds.”
“It’s graduated from being Japonais to du Monde.” Maya looked at the sign.
“Or regressed. Now everything is the same. Tokyo-Paris-New York. All one world.”
“‘We are the world, we are the people,’” Maya sang.
“You’re in good humor today, aren’t you?” Jean-Pierre grabbed her hand as they climbed up the hill.
“I’m happy to be living here. I’m happy to be walking with you just now.”
“Here,” he said, pointing to the earth, and stooped down to kiss her. A quick kiss.
“Yes. Here. Now,” she said releasing his mouth and pointing to the ground.
“Here”—he pointed to the earth again for emphasis with his free hand—“there was a convent. When Henri IV seized it, he corrupted the nuns and was linked with the woman he named the Abbesse. Rue Gabrielle is named after her.
“This way,” Jean-Pierre said, pulling Maya’s hand and her up a steep set of stairs. “This is one of my favorite cafés. It’s very sympa and historic. Let’s have a drink.”
They sat at one of the tables on the sidewalk at Au Rendez-vous des Amis. The table had a colorful top that made it look like a van Gogh rendition of an Etruscan wall mosaic.
It was low key. Maya took a quick look into the darkened interior, where hundreds of photographs were tacked to the wooden beams running across the ceiling.
“Do you have a favorite café in New York?”
“There is a diner I go to, and there’s an old woman who comes there everyday.”
“You don’t talk very much about your past. Your boyfriends, the loves in your life,” Jean-Pierre said as he handed Maya his sugar.
“Nor do you.”
“You haven’t asked me.” He smiled.
“And you haven’t asked me!”
“I didn’t want to pry.”
“The last time I was in love was more than a year ago. And he said he left me because my mother was diagnosed with an illness that could be genetic. He said, ‘With the medical history in your family, who knows?’”
“That is low. They have men like that in New York?”
“They have men like that everywhere. When was the last time you were in love?”
“Six month ago.”
“Months. If it refers to more than one, it’s plural. Do you want me to correct you?”
“Yes, I do. How long were you with him?”
“Two and a half years,” Maya sighed. “It could have lasted forever if he hadn’t left. I think he used my mother’s illness as an excuse. He had met someone else.”
“Did he think the excuse would make it easier?”
“It destroyed my respect for him and made me question my judgment.”
“Do you think he said it so that you could hate him?”
“He knew I wasn’t that weak. I would have been upset by the truth, but I would have got over it. Now I keep thinking he must have meant what he said.”
“Come, let’s see the little museum nearby. There is a painting of this bar there,” Jean-Pierre said, getting up from the table.
They walked to the Musée de Montmartre, where an authentic bar from before the war was preserved. It was made of metal. Above the bar hung a painting from 1920 of Madame Vaures, the manager of Au Rendez-vous des Amis. The fingers of her left hand were painted with a dark outline, each digit delineated to emphasize the beauty of her long fingers. If someone ever did a portrait of Prem, his hands deserved to be painted in the same kind of dark highlight.
“You like this painting?” Jean-Pierre asked.
“I like it very much.”
“There is something else you should see. Let’s go upstairs.” He bounded up a flight of stairs. Maya climbed up, taking in the atmosphere of the old building in which the museum was located and the view from its various windows. Jean-Pierre was waiting for her by a maquette of Montmartre. She bent over the covered glass that protected it and tried to locate rue des Abbesses to orient herself.
“Look, this is where we walked up just now from my apartment. And this is the street where your apartment is located.” Jean-Pierre pointed to the small street starting from the Place des Abbesses.
“You’re right. That is in fact my building,” Maya said excitedly. She recognized the independent gîte structure on the side of the building and its odd entrance. The miniature replica was so perfect that she could even see the windows of her apartment and the chimney that rose one floor above her bedroom.
Jean-Pierre pulled Maya toward one of the windows. A part of the estate around the museum was a vineyard. Maya could see row upon row of orderly vine trees.
“Do they make wine here?”
“Yes. And they sell it once a year. It’s not the best wine. After all, it’s the wine of Paris! What do you expect?” Jean-Pierre laughed.
They left the museum and continued walking.
“How is your novel coming along?”
“Not very well. I keep thinking of all the great novels that have been written in the past and wonder why I’m even trying to write. How is your screenplay?”
“The paralysis phase! I went through it too. Me, I really want to write about love. I want to lay it open directly like a book rather than talk about all these people and their daily lives that are merely touched by love on the side,” he said. He pronounced love as if the o were round like an orange.
“Have you read Prem Rustum’s books? Do you think he has been touched by love on the side, or has he been burned by it?”
“I like his work a lot. Writers are always burned, always scarred, aren’t they?”
“I think I’m marked by his work. I feel like one of those cattle in a farm with a big number branded on the side. I don’t know how to even think about writing without reference to his work.”
“That’s the second phase, the influence phase. You’re afraid he will show up on every page you write.”
“And what is the solution to that?”
“I spent last year watching films made by my three favorite directors. It’s just like love. To get over it you have to get into it fully. I was thinking that if I fell in love today, then I would do everything to realize that love, even if I knew she was going to go away in a week and I could never see her again. I don’t think it would be futile or wasted.”
As they descended rue Ravignan, Jean-Pierre tugged her hand and pointed his head in the direction of a second-floor window. A woman of indeterminate old age was standing in the window, her head covered tightly in a turban. She seemed to be speaking. A pigeon hovering in the window came and fed directly from the woman’s mouth. Maya and Jean-Pierre stood still and watched. The pigeon flew away. The woman said something else, and another pigeon flew to her and fed directly from her mouth. They resumed their descent.
“She does this every day,” Jean-Pierre said, then added, “I like talking to you. It makes me feel like writing.”
“What am I supposed to do now that you’ve diagnosed my phases?”
“You’ll find a solution. Bon courage!” Jean-Pierre kissed her on her lips and left.
Maya climbed up to her fourth-floor apartment and unrolled her yoga mat to practice. As she lunged back with her left foot—her arms folded in prayer behind her to stretch her tight writer’s shoulders—the woman who lived on the floor below looked up into her window and waved at Maya with a bon yoga!
Later in her living room Maya tried to work. She wondered when it might be polite to hassle Prem for a date at the Musée d’Orsay. She envied Jean-Pierre his screenplay. Seeing him didn’t put her in a mood to write. In fact, seeing him was an escape from writing. Going over her India notes, she could conjure up no descriptions of the country that had not already been mined, illuminated, exhumed, illustrated, violated, and exploded by Prem’s pen.
p a r t i i i
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
—OSCAR WILDE, PREFACE TO THE PICTURE
OF DORIAN GRAY
When Prem left the room with the Latours, he found Maya staring at a painting in the next room. Her lips were parted, and she stood in a kind of half turn, as if the painting had cast a spell on her. Prem observed her from the corner of the room as she absorbed the energy of the painting and pivoted on her feet to look at three workmen who were shaving and polishing the wooden floor of a typical Parisian room. The pattern of light and dark on the floor underscored the strips that had already been shaved. In the far corner the design of the metal balcony railing was visible, a pool of light collected over a rectangle section of raw, unpolished wood just to the left center of the painting. The wiry upper bodies of the workmen glowed in the light, and a wine bottle sat in the dark corner.
Having observed its details, Maya whipped around. Prem saw her eyes scanning the room for him. He walked to her.
“Caillebotte. You like him?”
“I love this.”
“They’re young, dynamic men. It’s natural that their energy appeals to you.”
“Look at all the browns, Prem. The two browns of the strips of floor, the brown of their arms, the browns of the bags or whatever we don’t see in the corner by the wall there.” She pointed to the upper right side. She had moved very close to it and was moving even closer. Prem stepped up to her swiftly and pulled her by the arm.
“We’ll have security upon us if you try to install yourself in the painting.”
She stepped back, squeezed his hand tightly, and smiled. Her happiness was infectious and uncontainable; he felt she would jump up and do a pirouette like the Degas sculptures on the other side of the wall. Prem knew Orsay well enough, though he needed a map to find the escaliers and ascenseurs. Once he started seeing the art, one painting led to the anticipation of another. Rousseau’s magnificent blades of grass in the forest made him anticipate Gauguin, whose Tahitian faces prepared him for Seurat’s Cirque to diffuse the saturation of Gauguin. The memory of the paintings was integrated with the layout of the museum itself in Prem’s mind. When a Gauguin exposition was held at the Met, he felt as if he had been cheated at the end. To finish without Seurat was like eating lunch without a café afterward.
“Don’t you have a favorite? Show me something that you love,” Maya said.
“Do you think anything I can show you could move you after those Raboteurs?”
“Yes, the colors in this room—the blue always touches me,” Maya said. They were in front of L’Église d’Auvers-sur-Oise: the intense van Gogh sky reflected in the windows of the church, the shape of the building all wavy, dynamic, on the edge of madness. It was a small painting compared to the Caillebotte, and yet had a density and a force so completely different that there was no fruitful comparison to be made.
Maya was wearing a loose, full-sleeved white linen shirt that
fell easily around her body, its shape hiding her petite frame, its transparency revealing just that. The light streaming in from the huge doors that led to the terrace lit up the golden down on the back of her neck. She was wearing lapis lazuli earrings set in silver.
“I’m suddenly impatient for Degas’ pastels,” Prem said.
They walked down the couple of steps into the darkened room where the pastels hung. Prem found Le tub. Maya came and stood beside him. He saw her on the edge of a small round basin, her back and neck exposed. Degas’ gaze was intimate but nonintrusive, and Prem wanted Maya to see herself in the painting being watched by him in the same manner.
“Is this the one you wanted to see?” she asked.
Prem sensed the closeness of Maya’s flesh as she stared at the pastel, but at the same time in his mind’s eye he saw the pastel in its altered imaginary form. It’s the same problem when I create a character inspired by someone and then want the real-life person to be the character just as much as the other way round.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“I’m interested in it because it means something to you.”
Prem sighed. He wasn’t greedy—age had made him realistic. All he wanted was some period of time, however short, where his own state and that of someone else’s matched. Exactly. It had never happened outside of sex, and even in intercourse rarely. He knew he had written things in books that elicited a kind of recognition from his readers. People sent him letters saying that something he had written had made them feel understood for the first time in their lives. It was his business to take readers to a certain emotional state with the aid of his stories and his words. Just the way every single painter who had been installed in the old Gare d’Orsay had painted a slice of time that could be tasted for eternity. Transcendence was possible, yes. But sharing, no. In his own calling the very act of fictionalizing—which made the transcendence possible—ensured that there would be no sharing. He couldn’t feel what he made the readers feel, he could feel only its artifice.