In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  It might be said about Leo that he cared far too much about himself to bother about anyone else; and it was true. But it was also true that he could look deeply into others and see what was going on there. It was an instinct he had, a skill, a gift, something almost extraneous to his own personality which he himself acknowledged to be that of a monster egotist.

  Another paradox about Leo: one could say—many did say—that he was vain, greedy, and worldly, but all the same he seemed positively to run away from his own success. Popularity, adulation bored him. He had always been very attractive to a certain type of high-strung, high-bred girls; with these he relished behaving in a very crude way, and then enjoying the pale, pained smile with which they pretended not to mind. When they were at their most soulful, he was at his most down-to-earth; he became a peasant and a simpleton; he was loud and vulgar and embarrassed them in public places; and when none of this worked—and it never did, on the contrary—he finally sent them packing by telling them they were the wrong type for him and were harmful to his work.

  It was not only people of whom Leo grew tired—or, he himself would have said, outgrew—but also his own ideas. In the past, just when his theater movement was beginning to attract wider attention, he was ready to abandon it. This was what really broke up his affair with Regi. For a while they had got on very well together. It was a relief for him to be with her, for unlike his other followers, she did not press him too closely, either physically or in any other way. On the contrary, she didn’t like him to come too close to her, and when he what she called “bothered” her, it was always either too hot, or time for her to have her nails done or her legs depilated. This amused him, he called her iceberg and shivered—“Brrr”—when he came near her. She was frank about it, she said she never cared much for that stuff; it was intellectually, she explained, that he attracted her. This amused him even more; he really enjoyed Regi for a time. And she adored the success his movement was beginning to generate. She constituted herself his general business manager and put up the students’ fees and cut down the theater owner’s. When both these affected parties complained to Leo, he shrugged them off—it was the time when he was losing interest anyway and was content to leave everything to Regi. What she enjoyed most was the publicity angle and really worked hard at it and was in seventh heaven when she managed to arrange an interview and photographs with the Herald Tribune. But although on the appointed day the students were all keyed up and stood tense and ready in toga and sandals to demonstrate their exercises, Leo refused to appear. When Regi knocked on the door of the escape hatch and fluted sweetly through it, “Leo, we’re ready!” all she got in reply were some loud, caricatured snoring noises.

  Well, she wasn’t the type to put up with this sort of behavior and it wasn’t long before she was declaring herself completely disgusted with him and all his ideas—and, moreover, with the intellectual life in general. She said it was all a lot of nonsense and rubbish and maybe all right for women who didn’t have any social life, but Regi herself had plenty of that, thank God, and other things too; and indeed, shortly afterward she married a rich fur dealer—it was her third marriage—and went on an African safari for her honeymoon. As for Leo, he disappeared for many months, and when he re-emerged it was with a new form of expression for his philosophy.

  During the many years of its formation, Leo’s philosophy passed through a variety of stages before reaching its culmination in The Point. One of these stages came out of his contact with Marietta’s Indian lover. Leo was in his fifties when he met Ahmed. No longer the large blond florid youth who had been introduced to Louise as an Adonis, he was already potbellied and short-breathed. He had not yet evolved his final costume—the monk’s robe—but he had by this time laid aside his sharp, pinstriped English suits in favor of bib overalls over a striped sweater. This somewhat childish mode of dress, combined with his huge head from which tufts of gray hair stuck out like a prophet’s halo, gave him a very odd appearance. And the followers by whom he was surrounded—or patients, depending on whether one regarded him as a guru or psychiatrist—were also very odd: they were the usual people he attracted, a motley crew with motley problems of sex, drugs, nerves, religion.

  All this was astonishing to Ahmed, but he reacted to it as he did to the many other astonishing features of American life (including Marietta): simply by laughing and shaking his head. And when he got to know him, he really liked Leo whom he found to be a jolly companion. Sometimes Leo sent all his retinue packing, and then he and Ahmed would just be two men together, drinking and talking about women. They both enjoyed that in their different ways. But most of all Leo loved Ahmed’s music. Ahmed practiced for many hours during the day, alone in Marietta’s apartment while she was in her showroom; and Leo would come and join him there to listen to him. They sat in her penthouse apartment—so lightly furnished that it seemed to have more flowers in it than objects—facing each other sitting on a rug on the floor. Leo listened with great attention; he had learned to sway his head like an Indian and also to exclaim at certain moments of high art. He loved the expression on Ahmed’s face while he played: Ahmed seemed to be listening to something beyond himself and trying to reproduce the celestial notes he heard there. He was a shriveled, aging, insignificant little man but when he played like that he was as tender and exquisite as a youth in love. And what to say of those moments when the music reached some point beyond human capacity or comprehension? Then Ahmed’s smile was a mixture of joy and pain as if it were a form of suffering to endure so much bliss.

  Leo tried afterward to recall, to analyze, to isolate and fix those moments. He asked questions which Ahmed couldn’t understand, let alone answer. They reminded Ahmed of Marietta in bed with him, asking “Do you like it? What do you feel? You must tell me, Ahmed, you have to.” He never did—he couldn’t—but it didn’t matter since she was so busy telling him what she felt (actually, she was rather frigid). He tried to say that it was wrong to talk so much, but she didn’t know what he meant, and he had no ability to explain anything in words. With Leo, he didn’t need to, Leo understood him through his silence. “You’re right,” Leo would say when Ahmed failed to answer him. “A hundred percent right. One shouldn’t think but be. Not talk but feel, feel, feel.” Ahmed thought that Leo himself was much better at feeling than other Westerners: in the way he enjoyed the music, or the way he ate—loudly, and grabbing right and left—and the hoard of dirty stories from several continents he knew and relished.

  When Leo asked Ahmed about his music: “Is it of the senses or of the spirit?” then Ahmed understood him less than ever. He had no conception of any division between the two, and if he had thought about it, he would have said, surely the one is there to express the other? That was what his music was for—he knew this so deeply that he had absolutely no thought or words for it. But Leo was fascinated by this question, and probing into it, he evolved a new theory which he tried out in practice, the way he did with all his theories, on his students. For his students were his test tubes. What he needed to carry out his experiments was the person; the personality. And by this he meant the whole of a person, all of him (or, more frequently, her). He tolerated no half measures.

  Ahmed’s music opened up Leo’s Tantric period. He taught in his lectures that there were ascending levels of being, and that each level had to be thoroughly explored and exploited before one was ready to rise to the next. In practice, what it came down to—later he modified this considerably—was that while one was on the level of the senses, one had to fulfill them to the brim: so that at this time, his students were encouraged to try out some very physical experiments on themselves. Although he had left the art of the theater behind him, Leo had retained the rehearsal space in the theater building: only now, instead of their dramatic exercises, his students could be seen to go through some more direct experiences with each other. Not all of them could rise to the rigors of these experiments; although willing to transcend themselves, for some of them—like thos
e pale, high-strung girls of good family—their limitations, or inhibitions, were too rigid to be overcome without severe psychological strain. These weaker students fell by the wayside, but Leo had expected that: it was one of the risks involved in his game of higher evolution.

  He himself took no part in these experiments. He didn’t have to, since he had never had any difficulty in living up to the full potential of his senses. As it happened, this was a relatively calm period in his personal life. Perhaps he was settling down. He still had his escape hatch in the theater building, but he also lived in several other places—rather grand places belonging to rich women students for whom it was a privilege to entertain him: there was a town house on Fifth and Eighty-first, another house in Vermont, a third in New Hampshire. He kept clean clothes and possessions in all of them, and went from one to the other as the spirit moved him. He turned up at Louise’s at intervals too, though by no means regular intervals.

  Except on her birthday—he was always to be counted on for that. She had her sixtieth birthday around the time of his Tantric period. By now she was no longer one of his disciples—although he had returned to her after the scene at the Old Vienna, he had never invited her back to his workshops. She was his private, domestic life to be kept apart from his professional activities; and it was as a family member—an uncle to Marietta, a great-uncle to Mark and Natasha—that he turned up for the sixtieth birthday party. He was the only male left in this family group of women and children. Bruno and Tim were dead; Ahmed had recently gone back to India. Regi was one of the celebrants that year; she and Louise were on speaking terms.

  By this time, on account of Mark and Natasha, it had turned into a children’s party. Louise had extended the dining table to its full length to hold the array of gateaux and pastries she had ordered from Blauberg’s. Mark and Natasha sat there with napkins tucked under their chins, stuffing themselves on everything within reach in between bouncing balloons up to the chandelier. It was the same long dining table, the same dark, over-furnished dining room where those exciting evening talks had taken place at the beginning of Leo’s career. Now the only grown-up sitting at the table was Leo himself, for he was the only one who loved cakes as much as the children did.

  The sliding doors between the dining room and the salon were open. Regi, who was unfortunately suffering from a migraine, lay on the high crimson velvet sofa in the salon, piled around with cushions made in fine needlepoint by various generations of Bruno’s female relatives. Louise tried to massage her temples with eau de cologne, but Regi said she didn’t do it right and pushed her hand away. Actually, Regi’s migraine was psychological as much as it was physical. She felt the weight of too many birthday parties, and altogether too much that had been and gone. Two years earlier, her third husband—the fur dealer—had died, leaving her rich but restless. For the first time she was finding it difficult to make new relationships and was beginning to have to pay for them.

  “My God, how fat he’s become—and no wonder,” she said, squinting toward Leo at the dining table. His cheeks were bulging with cake and he was reaching out for more. To Louise she said ill-naturedly: “I suppose you’re still gaga about him . . . I don’t know how you can, Louise, a fat ugly old man like that. One has to be a little bit aesthetic.” She looked up at Louise standing over her sofa: “I don’t like the way you do your hair.”

  “But Regi! Darling! It’s been this way for thirty years!” Louise pushed at the knot into which her hair was wound. It was completely gray and straggled in every direction.

  “Why don’t you take care of yourself like a decent person?” Regi admonished her. She herself was still a redhead though a very lacquered one, her hair sitting on her like a metal cap. She would be keeping it another five years, then it would be superseded by a wig more splendid and flaming than anything that had crowned her in her youth. “Ridiculous,” she said, watching Leo bounce balloons across the table with Mark and Natasha. “He doesn’t even like children.”

  “But he’s so wonderful with them,” Louise said. But it was true that he was only wonderful with them when he felt like it; on the whole children bored him, though he didn’t go as far as Regi who actively disliked them. She had not had any of her own and had never felt the lack.

  And what she simply couldn’t understand was why Marietta should have gone out of her way to adopt one. Moreover, if one had to adopt a baby, at least it should be a pretty one and not Natasha.

  “Are you sure that child’s all right?” she asked Louise not for the first time, looking across at Natasha in the dining room. At that time of her life—she was four—Natasha’s head was too big for her body, and—unlike Mark who hadn’t been able to get started soon enough—she had learned to walk and talk very late.

  For answer, Louise rushed off to the table to hug and kiss Natasha who went on eating cake; she was used to these attentions from both Louise and Marietta. Of course, it had been a long time since they had been able to take such liberties with Mark.

  He didn’t like them taken with Natasha either; he frowned and said, “Leave her alone, Gran, can’t you see she’s enjoying her cake.”

  His wise, admonitory air made her laugh; she even dared ruffle his hair and laughed even more to see the way he rebuked her by smoothing it down again. “Look how cross he is,” she said to Leo on the other side of the table.

  “Take no notice,” Leo aligned himself with Mark. “She’s crazy. All women are crazy. You have to look out for them.” He jerked his head toward Regi on the sofa: “What’s the matter with her? Why is she not joining us? Madam!” he called. “Won’t you give us the exquisite pleasure of your enchanting company?” He and Mark exchanged looks of amusement.

  “You have the most horrible hideous loud voice, did you know that?” Regi complained from her sickbed. “You always sound as if you’re addressing an audience. I suppose you do it so often it’s impossible for you to speak like a normal human being anymore.”

  “A normal human being,” Leo repeated. “That’s an ambiguous, not to say a tricky, concept.”

  “There, now we’re going to have a clever lecture for free,” Regi said from the other room. Getting into the old game of sparring with Leo, she seemed for the moment to forget her headache.

  “Would you call yourself a normal human being?” Leo inquired of Mark. “If so, where do you set up your standards? And what about her?” He pointed at Natasha and glanced at her too, but only for a moment: there was something in the way Natasha was staring at him—was it in fear? in fascination? She often looked at him like that. He turned away and said irritably, “She has chocolate in her hair.”

  Mark found this to be true and wiped it off, taking the opportunity of wiping the rest of her face too.

  “Do you think your grandmother’s normal?” Leo continued his discussion with Mark. “And your mother—where is she, by the way?—and Regi over there—”

  “Come in here so I can hear all your wonderful philosophy!” Regi called in challenge.

  “Yes, where is Mother?” Mark said with the frown that, even at that early age, characterized the sense of responsibility he felt toward the women in his family. “It’s time to cut the cake. May I leave the table, Gran? Thank you,” he answered himself while Louise was still crying out, “Bless you, little worm!”

  Mark searched for his mother in various rooms—the apartment was as spacious as a house—and found her in Louise’s bedroom. Marietta was on the flowered chaise longue which stood at the foot of the bed. This bed was the marital one Louise had shared with Bruno, and also Bruno’s mother with his father, so it was old and heavy with primal scenes.

  “We’re supposed to be celebrating Gran’s birthday,” Mark said, looking at his mother where she lay on the chaise longue, smoking and thinking. “Everyone’s waiting for you. We’re going to cut the cake.”

  “Go away,” Marietta said but corrected herself at once, calling out, “Come here, come here, darling!”

  Mark continued
to stand at the door: “Natasha’s covered with chocolate. Someone will have to clean her up.”

  “I’ll do it. Only just sit with me for one moment, darling.”

  “I haven’t got time.”

  “Mark, give Mother a kiss.”

  At this familiar line, his frown deepened. “Not now,” he said and retreated before any demands could be made of him. He was anxious to have the sixty candles lit—the birthday party had to be conducted along its proper lines, and he felt himself to be the only one there responsible enough to do so.

  But—wouldn’t you know it—by the time he returned to the dining room, Leo and Louise had wandered away from the table, leaving the cake unlit and uncut and Natasha smearing herself with the remains of her own plate as well as Mark’s. No one heard his protests, for they were busy talking around the sofa on which Regi lay. In complete disgust, he made Natasha get down from her chair and led her away to wash her in the bathroom.

  Regi had really forgotten her headache now. Although her affair with Leo had ended long ago, there was still something very potent to her in his presence; or perhaps this stemmed from the weight of all their past together, hers and Louise’s and his, and all their feelings for each other.

  And especially Louise’s for Leo: this was her sixtieth birthday; she was a tall, dignified, gray-haired figure in a burgundy silk gown and black pumps, but when he was there she still trembled. The air vibrated with her feelings for him. It astonished Regi, irritated her, and as always she couldn’t keep off the subject: “What do you see in him?” she asked for the thousandth time. “It’s because you never meet anyone new. You need to get out among people instead of sitting here with grandchildren—and him,” she said, pointing at Leo comfortable in the deepest chair in the house. “You look terrible,” she told him. “You’ve aged a hundred years. And what are these ridiculous baby clothes you wear?” she said, referring to his pastel-colored bib overalls. “As if it isn’t perfectly obvious that you’re in your second childhood.”