by Aashish Kaul
Before a month had passed, I had walked all the trails in all the mountains, I had discovered a tarn in the hills behind the settlement, I had stared at the heights. At other times, I would descend into a valley, where not infrequently I found a hamlet adjoining which men tilled small blocks of land, one below the other, that appeared to descend straight into the heart of earth. People lived in such hamlets frugally, content with their routine lives. The strong sun had browned their faces and shoulders, but their gaze reflected serenity of mind, having arrested life in its threadbare yet lovable form which the mountains had shielded for ages.
From time to time, I went to visit the librarian. Almost always he was to be found in the library, either sitting by the window listening to the stream that passed hundreds of feet below, or reading or tending to books. Occasionally, he agreed to take a walk through the garden of the abandoned church. Wild grass had all but covered the mud path that cut through the garden and ended at the edge of the precipice. There were lilacs and wild roses, and in patches where the grass had been unable to take root it was not difficult to pick out some old graves. The old man had an elfin step and I could keep pace with him only with slight effort. It reminded me of Achilles and the tortoise, a race where Achilles’ quickness has no match for the slowness of the tortoise.
One day I found him in the rear of the building contemplating the mountains, a hazy pink at that hour, through a small window. A cool wind was blowing in short sudden gusts as if it descended straight from those lofty summits, evading the deep valleys and the trees and spirits that peopled them. His attendant had just served lemon tea, and he asked me to join. It was pleasant to sit there and wait for the night to fall in the hills. Then I asked him about the paradox. So, am I the tortoise? he chuckled.
We discussed the paradox – rather he spoke and I listened. One by one he took apart the refutations put forth by Mill, Bergson, and Russell. He quoted from memory several passages (even a few lines in Latin he didn’t care to translate), and while he spoke, his voice grew excited and foreign by turn. Finally, he came back to Bergson, attempting to show the faults in his reasoning – something to do with divisibility of space and indivisibility of time or some such thing. From Bergson to Proust to Kazantzakis, the discussion went on for over two hours. By then the sky was a hazy violet and the evening star had appeared over the horizon. I said it was beginning to get dark, not realizing that his world had darkened already.
A hundred thoughts swirled in my head as I walked back to the cottage. In the growing dark, the silhouettes of trees appeared slightly diffused. I looked askance at them and increased my pace: a ghost could descend from one and trouble me with its lonesome tale. When the woods were behind me, I saw the stars enter the sky and make interesting designs. The dome of the club glowed softly. I thought of having a drink.
Days went on in much the same way. Time here was a pointless intrusion, and one would do all too well to stay clear of its awareness.
While writing one day an image grew on the page. Two forms wrestling on the floor, serpentwined, tearing and eating each other in a room luminous with heat. Now her warmth is entering me and so is the cold of the stone underneath and yet neither can fathom my depth. Later we are on the terrace. The sun is a useless orange disc over the horizon about to slide through the last chink in it. Nearby a kite flutters with wanton zeal. A tear has burst over my cheek. She is taking it on her tongue.
The image left me ill at ease. A longing had set in, a longing that grew with each moment, a longing that had traversed many a mountain and landscape, traversed the stretch of time, of life itself: a longing to touch her again. I had not thought of her in a while, but, for once, I felt she was close by. Perhaps this very moment she was wandering through the bazaar.
I walked out of the cottage into a slow wind. The sun had been anemic since morning, but now it was completely lost in the mist that clouded the sky and lingered over the mountaintops. From there it leisurely crawled down into the valley consuming all that obstructed its march. Soon I was climbing the hill that lay at the other end of the settlement. From there I could see but the last three cottages, for the mist had handsomely spread everywhere and chloroformed the pines.
Following a rough mountain track, I rounded that hill and the next. And after toiling for nearly an hour I came out into a clearing through which flowed a stream of crystalline water. It cascaded down the slope at the far end. At its bottom were very fine white pebbles. Tiny blue fish swam in it unaware of the happenings in another medium. They moved with a swiftness that excited the eye. The stream appeared to originate from under a huge rock covered in moss behind which swayed a few trees with purple flowers.
The mist had – almost incredibly – left the place untouched. Close by was a bamboo grove through which jutted wild yellow flowers. It was here that I entirely exorcised the phantom that plagued me. Into a corner I receded, resting my back against the tall, slender stems and looked above at the piece of sky left me. About me, birds and squirrels filled the air with their timeless melodies, and nearby the tiny blue fish sent tiny, soundless ripples to the surface of the stream.
X
It was one of those days that take birth prematurely, that once born neither breathe in the light nor in the dark, hanging aimlessly between the two. All day long, damp, solemn winds had been descending from the clouds – that had thrown the city into a perpetual twilight – and hinting at rain. The streets were quiet and gloomy, and not many people walked them. Traffic was sparse, its noise muffled by the moisture in the air. All in all, it was a day soaked in melancholy.
By this time I had spent two months in London. My only regular outdoor trips were to the neighbourhood library. At times I accompanied my sister to the supermarket, while at other times I went with her for a drink to her favourite club off Tottenham Court Road.
I had neither money nor debts, and was quite content to idle away my days reading and listening to music. That is when I began to think that there was something going on between books and music, jazz music to be specific.
A book is an enigma. Words that fill its pages present a shifty, relative universe. Through a reader, they create constructs where the past attempts to meet the future, the present arranging the meeting. In this present, as the reader receives and breaks apart the text – revives the past, contemplates the future – he, unknowingly, merges the two and makes the present fluid, expansive, eternal: he defeats time.
But the author waits for the reader in the heart of his labyrinth. Should one go in search of the other? And how? Here, at last, music comes to his help. Through its notes, variations and cadences, through its silences held tightly between its rhythm, the reader at last can glance into that inferno which is the centre of the maze, which is the long dead and yet still palpable soul of the author, for they are one and the same. Never believe the profane talk that goes around in certain places.
I had read Flaubert till late the night before, and awoke unmindful to the murkiness outside. In my sleep, I had had a dream where I happened to meet the Master. He was sitting in the garden of his stone house, contemplating the river as dusk fell over Rouen. I went strolling by, humming softly to myself. Then Flaubert called my name, and bade me to come inside. He looked handsome even in his corpulence and his eyes burned with creative passion. Offering me coffee, which tasted like the ink he must have used to write, he turned away once more to watch the river. Now in his solitude, it seemed, he often remembered Emma Bovary. I had a suspicion that his days were like each other, filled with writing and masturbating, masturbating and writing. Life was one never-ending onanism between the bed and the desk. All of a sudden he looked at me. His eyes had turned on themselves, and his face resembled a sage in his moment of ecstasy. Had he been smoking something? I felt a distinct chill climb down my spine. I was shivering to tell the truth. Then, beneath the heavy moustache, his mouth twitched. Did I write? Somehow I took control of myself and said that I had felt the desire to write once or twice
, but hadn’t yet attempted it. Hearing this, he became excited: Don’t let this streak die in you, my boy. It can help a writer in more ways than you may imagine. Look how I labour here, away from the joys of everyday life, away from love, to produce a work dear to me. Each day I wait for this desire to fill me, but alas it avoids me. I’ve to make up by endless hard work. By God, I find it hell to write. So the next time it strikes you, seize it with both hands.
The dream lingered in my thoughts while I prepared and ate a late breakfast, listening to Ellington and Coltrane by turn. I went over to the window. The clouds appeared so low and heavy that a finger would have punctured them. Soon someone had touched them, for a drizzle had erupted. I don’t recall how long I’d stood there when I saw a girl walking in the street below, holding up a blue parasol to the heavens. She had a light step and swayed tenderly to some inner melody. I was overwhelmed by the image. Seize it with both hands, Flaubert’s voice emerged over the strains of the saxophone. I hurried to the desk and, switching on the lamp, turned the cover of my red notebook. For a moment, the infinity of the blank sheet nauseated me. Then it came out thick and fast, like bodies in a bad crime novel. Once I couldn’t go on anymore, I bent over my notebook and tried to touch the words fastened on the sheet. But they did not respond to my caress. All I felt was the smoothness of paper. My eyes grew moist. That night I slept well. A book had been born.
XI
Rest a moment dear storyteller, move with caution, else the thread may slip past your fingers and defile that which you have persevered to present with a restrained elegance. So take my advice and inhale deeply. Allow yourself for once to think of that night in Paris when the moonshine entered the two fastened bodies and cast its spell.
We reach the room in half unconsciousness. I totter about to the balcony. As I open the windows, the light filters in; on the wall behind her a Monet replica shimmers in its caress. A pleasant draught is blowing into the room. I know I must not let this moment pass. It will haunt me forever, I will feel its throbs far into time, it will break me bit by bit. But I let it pass, I touch that skin, I raise the hem.
Inside her is a desert and I slither like a snake in it. I look into her eyes; there is no life in them. She is staring through me straight into the void. A sudden panic makes me retreat. But she cuts it off halfway, tightening her legs around me. I am in her like a sword in its sheath. She moves and she takes me with her. I feel her hot breath on my brow and at last I fall into the sea.
When I awake, she is in the balcony, silhouetted against those facades, each a twin of the other. When she turns to look at me, the rays break into smithereens at her shoulder.
We went to Montparnasse to eat in a restaurant located in an alley off Boulevard Raspail. The sun did not reach into it and the shade emphasized the sky above. Somebody had hung out underwear to dry, and we had to duck quite low to cross to the other side. In times past the place had been frequented by not a few writers and artists. As was expected it was popular with both students and tourists, and attracted them in large numbers. Although full at that hour, we somehow managed to find a table near the counter. Behind it was a painting and a calendar. The painting was the work of some Cubist – a triangular face with both eyes on the same side, one below the other. The calendar was a few months behind. Waiters crisscrossed past the tables and the air was full of voices and the clatter of knives and forks. It was also full with the smell of buns and coffee.
Later we went to the library at Sorbonne. From its central courtyard, the dome glowed a bright purple in the noon sun. My task there was simple but exhausting: I wished to collect all of Sartre’s love letters! And do what with them? I wasn’t sure of that. Yet I busied myself with this absurd project. In two hours I had amassed nearly sixty. I was tired and further prospecting didn’t excite me very much. I left it at that.
I join her. She has been reading from Proust. Outside in the street she tells me why she named me so: It’s your eyes. The same round, slightly protuberant eyes.
That evening Amelio is playing at the jazz bar in St-Germain. He is on a trumpet, and a woman is lilting out words in a deep coppery voice. The song goes on for a while. After it is over, Amelio walks up to us and asks us to follow. With a glass of wine swinging between his fingers, he takes us up on the terrace. In a corner against the parapet, his knees fold and he sinks to the ground. Then he removes from his pocket a pack of cannabis that makes his eyes twinkle.
XII
How during those days the city spread its arms and how gladly we ran into them. We walked past those tombs in Père Lachaise. We lunched beneath the modern high-rises at the Grande Arche. We dined in Place Vendôme. We went to the Louvre. Under a chestnut in Bois we lay watching an airplane dash off the name ‘L O L A’ in the sky.
On one such evening, lost like a dream, we were walking up the Champs-Elysées when my sight fell on a beautiful silk scarf in a shop window. At once, I made a present of it to her and she wore it round her neck with something of an imperial air. We took the metro to Trocadéro and, walking through the complex, soon reached Pont d’léna from where you could see the ivory dome of Sacré-Coeur towering above the city at the far end. Below, the pier was brimming with activity as tourists embarked and disembarked the many ferries that took them along the river.
Bateaux Parisiens? I point to the boat. She nods her pretty head.
Then I had to go to Frankfurt to attend a writers’ fair. It is important to be there, my publisher had told me. What could my books say to a reader in Germany, I thought, when they had said nothing elsewhere? I didn’t have a good feeling from the start. The weather would only confirm this.
Heavy, bituminous clouds trailed low over Frankfurt and it rained almost all the time of my stay. When it didn’t, a dense mist descended over the city. At night the sky over my hotel in Sachsenhausen was dark and luminous by turn. I longed to get back to Paris. And so I was only too glad when my plane landed there after two sombre days.
Finally I got to my place. Climbing up to my room, I began to wonder why the concierge had handed me the keys. Maybe she went out for a walk, I said to myself. The room had a stale air. The French windows were shut fast. I opened them and went out into the balcony. I stood there awhile watching the activity in the street. Slowly a suspicion had been taking hold of me, and its full blow turned me to stone for a moment. I ran into the room and leapt towards the cupboard. The tinkling of empty hangers resonated through my fast-hollowing heart.
The concierge was unable to help. He seemed even more baffled than me to be questioned like this. What else could I do, I set out to find her.
Once in the street, I knew not where to look. I began walking hurriedly but aimlessly. Spiders of anxiety were crawling down from the sky and weaving a frosty, oppressive web round me.
Amelio had told me in passing that he often played chess in the afternoon at a certain café on Rue de Lappe. I located it without much difficulty (instinctive faculties, it seems, were working with a miraculous lucidity). What relief the sight of him gave me! Sitting in one corner of the café, he was lost in an empty chessboard in front of him. Next to it, from a mahogany box, a black bishop was struggling to escape. A dense concoction of pain and anxiety had completely filled me up by then. I sank in the seat opposite, sweat collected on my temples and on the nape of my neck. My voice sounded not my own. He looked at me, but did not see my anguish. He was lost to some conundrum. I was beside myself, yet I asked him about it. It turned out that he had lost a game after months and was now pursuing the pieces in his mind’s eye to their imminent doom. All along he kept caressing the bishop’s crown that jutted out of the box. After this he rolled his eyes and broke into a soliloquy of sorts that, given my state, threw me into delirium: The game is a labyrinth…of unfathomable depths…It is a mirror of our lives…like chessmen, we move through days and nights…forever prisoners of glowing passions and dark reflections…
I didn’t know how to interrupt him. When I got my chance, I said so
mething. The words felt heavy against my tongue and seemed to burn holes in it. My mouth was dry, as if glazed with sand. At first, he absently stared at me, but then asked me where we had met before and if I’d not like a cup of coffee, for he was surely ordering one for himself.
By that time my head was throbbing madly and my face was flushed. A lone tear had burst on my cheek. The wind took it away leaving behind a prickling sensation. A sudden drowsiness overwhelmed me, forcing me to halt at a stall for a sip of water. From a billboard across the road, a model in a white blouse and a short skirt wearing a most distasteful shade of lipstick smiled at me.
I reached my room and, tired and depressed, sank into a deep sleep. I woke up late next morning. I hadn’t eaten in a long time, yet felt only a slight hunger. I took a shower and had some soup at a restaurant. I retraced our movements of the previous days but she was nowhere. Slowly the anguish I had felt the day before changed into a mere heaviness of the heart.
A few days later I was walking up the Montparnasse cemetery when I saw an old man collecting dead leaves in a wheelbarrow. Watching him I could barely breathe. A terrible pain rose from the pit of my stomach. Tears of which I was unaware stretched over my eyes to form a film so dense that the world appeared nebulous, throwing me into a sort of white blindness.
At eight in the evening, the early September sun was a smudge in the sky and the Seine shimmered in its dying light. I had been sitting on a bench lost in the infinite ephemeral folds of water. The din of automobiles behind me did not trouble me. To my left, the Tower stretched its legs and watched over the city. I knew that Paris had nothing further to give me, that my stay was at an end.