But it was Ahmadabad, not Bombay, which was the first stop, for Jonas and his travelling companion had not come to India to see starving children sleeping on pavements with garish film posters plastered, like dreamscapes, on the walls above their heads. This was not to be yet another tour from which one returns with a head full of images of the ceaseless, claustrophobic crowds mixed with memories of one’s own painful attack of diarrhoea. They did not block out the noise and the stench and the shocking sights of Indian city life, but they wanted to see more than people doing their business in full view of everyone, more than the flies and the dirt, the funeral pyres and black exhaust fumes, the ragged beggars sheltering under temple roofs bedecked with a Disney-hued growth of obscure gods and swarming with monkeys. This was to be a visit that would leave some edifying imprint on them, preferably indelible impressions of buildings. Because they were both attending the College of Architecture, and this was in the nature of a study trip. While others went to Rome, Jonas and Inga V. went to India, but it was the modern India they had come to see, the new temples. And just as Benares was a holy place for Hindus, so Ahmadabad was a Mecca for architects, inasmuch as the city was home to masterpieces by both Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn – not for nothing did those two names call to mind a conjuror and a conqueror.
Inga V. and Jonas Wergeland had never really been close friends, even though they were in the same class and had known one another for some years. In fact Jonas would probably have said that he didn’t like her, particularly disliked her penchant for cigarillos and the way she meticulously noted down all her observations in work journals, as if knowing she would one day be famous. And he knew she had her reservations about him: more than once when they were talking he had caught her glancing at her watch. So he was surprised when she – the last person he had asked – said she would come with him. ‘On one condition,’ she said. ‘That you don’t go getting any ideas.’ Jonas found it hard not to laugh. As if it would ever have occurred to him to think of Inga V. in that way.
Now, as two colleagues with nothing in common but a professional interest, they explored Ahmadabad, armed with sketchbooks and cameras. And their focus was most definitely not on the dusty splendour of the old city, nor on the countless, ultra-picturesque drying racks hung with freshly dyed cottons from the local textile mills; instead they went to see – or rather, basically made a pilgrimage to – the Indian Institute of Management, designed by Louis Kahn: a college complex on the outskirts of the city, a campus where it was the overall picture which impressed the two students most of all, the way in which Kahn had juggled with the basic forms – circles, squares, diagonals, arcs. While Jonas – and this I hope you will now understand, Professor – extolled the sacral quality of light and shade in the shady walkways, Inga V. was more interested in the building materials and the sculptural attributes of the buildings. She loved stone, everything that had to do with stone, natural or fired, was almost brought to her knees by Kahn’s use of the local brick. ‘Not since the Romans, not since the master builders of the Caracallas, has anyone understood the nature of brick and its potential as Louis Kahn does,’ she said.
The following day, on the north side of the city, they took in Le Corbusier’s lovely – from a landscape-architecture point of view – Villa Sarabhai, as well as the three buildings by him which lay alongside one another on the left bank of the river: a museum, a private house and, possibly the most interesting, despite the weathered aspect of its concrete, the Mill-owners’ Association Building where the use, not least, of an open but deep and slanting brise-soleil drew cries of delight from them. After a look round the inside of the building, a space notable for the bold interplay of curves and lines, Jonas exclaimed blissfully: ‘It’s an absolute revelation! Those shadows are downright tangible!’ They revelled in the place, felt how the encounter with this piece of architecture, which was also a work of art, sparked off masses of ideas inside their own heads. It all boiled down to one thing: light and shade. This was the enigma of architecture, as it was in life.
In Udaipur, their next stop, they celebrated the success of their trip so far, by checking in to the Lake Palace Hotel – a couple of days with fountains and marble floors, rooms with chairs like thrones and peacock feathers in vases; so when they got to Jaipur, lying rose-coloured, almost cliché-like, between the mountain ridges, they opted for a somewhat cheaper hotel to save overstretching their budget. It didn’t worry them that they had to share a double room, but they soon realized they were going to miss the air conditioning. India quivered at its hottest, you could positively feel the pressure of the monsoon which was just around the corner. Jonas thought longingly of his first attempt at being an architect, the ice monument on Steinbruvannet.
Inga V. was more enamoured with actual Indian culture than Jonas, so on the day after their arrival they split up: she wanted to find a place to see classical Indian dancing. Jonas chose instead to take a walk through the old town’s network of broad, straight streets and visit the Hawa Mahal; on the way home from this Palace of the Winds – which had made him feel as if he were standing before an organ façade of pink sandstone – outside the city wall, he decided to take a shortcut between two streets and for a moment escaped the traffic, the sea of beeping scooters and overloaded lorries decorated like temples. He crossed a piece of open ground flanked by two tumbledown buildings, their walls blazoned with illegible inscriptions, and came suddenly face to face with a man and an elephant. Jonas was so taken aback that he just stood there gaping, simply staring at these two creatures, both of them chewing: the man on pan and the elephant on twigs. Again Jonas was struck by the intrinsic sense he had wherever he went in India: that he was in a zoo, or that he was a voyeur. The two were standing in a sort of stall, between an old Ambassador and a cart, as if the elephant was the third possible mode of transport. And as the Palace of the Winds had made Jonas think of the organ in the church, so the animal put him in mind of Grorud and his childhood, because of the exquisite patterns painted on the elephant’s forehead and trunk. They reminded him of the red letter day at school when the teacher brought out the wonderful, but seldom used, box of coloured chalks and they were allowed to cover the whole board with a Christmas picture, after which the teacher wrote ‘Do not remove!’ in the bottom corner, also perhaps as an order to the children’s memories not to forget this. If I stood here long enough, Jonas thought, I bet I could relive the whole of my life so far. As I say: for Jonas Wergeland all journeys, no matter how exotic, were journeys home.
Although warned by a faint contraction of his testicles, he could not bring himself to move on. Jonas had the definite impression that the elephant, not the man, was the central character in this tableau: that he was looking at a wise god and his dwarf. The man, a little older than himself, was clad in a grubby dhoti, the sort of loincloth with which Ghandi caused such a stir at Buckingham Palace, and on his head he wore one of the gaily coloured turbans seen everywhere in those parts. He smiled happily, didn’t mind Jonas stopping to look. ‘Isn’t he grand?’ he said, patting the elephant. A penetrating, sickly stench rose from the enormous droppings on the ground. ‘His name is Mohan, he has been in the circus, and now he is going to be a temple elephant, we have just taken part in a wedding.’ The elephant seemed, to Jonas, to be observing him, assessing him with eyes that nestled within whorls of wrinkles. ‘I too have worked in a circus,’ the man went on, motioning to Jonas to come closer. Jonas did not dare, branches crunched and snapped between the elephant’s jaws. ‘When I was a young man I had a chimpanzee,’ the man said. Jonas thought the Indian was pulling his leg, then he saw that there were tears in the man’s eyes. ‘Did you know that a chimpanzee costs more than a tiger? Li-Li was its name, you know. Called after Trygve Lie, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. I saw a picture of Mr Lie during the conflict in Kashmir; they looked like one another, those two – the ears. And he was a man who changed history. You know Hanuman the monkey god was a great warrior, he helped Rama…you
know our epic story?’ Jonas had not said where he came from, but he liked this comparison between Trygve Lie and the monkey god, suddenly he found himself taking a new, more relaxed, attitude to Grorud’s famous son.
The Indian shifted a bale of hay. Would Jonas like to see some tricks? Was Jonas a brave man? Come! Follow your dharma! The man drew Jonas over to the elephant; it really was huge, much taller than he remembered elephants as being. He mustn’t be afraid, the man said. Jonas felt its trunk nuzzling him; he stiffened. The man said something to the animal, then Jonas felt the trunk wrap itself round his waist, like a belt, before he was lifted up to dangle flat out in midair, face down, as if he were a log. At first Jonas was panic-stricken, abruptly reminded of something else, an encounter with another, a more malignant trunk, but then the fear left him; this was different, and bigger, bigger in all ways, truly an experience second to none. He was caught in a knot, the sort of knot his grandfather had taught him and Veronika when they were children. The scent of wild beasts filled his nostrils. The elephant could have shaken him to bits, but it didn’t, Jonas felt more as if it was caressing him, and he heard strange sounds coming from the creature, from its throat, a kind of thrum, almost like a cat purring, only deeper, stronger; he was encircled by a living force, one which endowed him with a crystal-clear insight, something to do with at long last being an active participant, not just a spectator, a voyeur; and then, when he was least expecting it, he was lifted through the air – no, not lifted: swung and somehow or other, by dint of mighty forces, he found himself sitting on the elephant’s back. Jonas always felt, later, that in that split-second when he was flying through the air, he was lifted out of himself – which is, by the way, the aim of Hindu meditation. When he dropped down onto the broad shoulders, it was as if he embraced the world anew, the way he had done with the globe of his boyhood; and although he could not explain it, he knew that his landing on that solid back, with his hands planted on skin rough as sandpaper, also marked a new beginning, that this sudden shift brought about a transformation, pure and simple. Because, and in case anyone should be in doubt: Jonas Wergeland did not travel in search of himself or his soul, as they said where he came from – Jonas Wergeland travelled in search of a different self. Jonas sat on the elephant’s back, stroking the coarse hide, the short, sparse hairs feeling more like pins pricking the palm of his hand. He wasn’t dreaming. He was wide-awake. He was alive. The animal knelt down, and he slid off. I am an enlightened one, he thought. I am a Buddha.
The thrill of this was still singing in his limbs when he got back to the hotel room. Inga V. was not there, but she had obviously been in at some point and left behind a newly-purchased book on Indian sculpture. Jonas got himself a drink in a plastic bottle, his mouth and throat were thick with dust; he was forever thinking about ice and water here in Jaipur. He settled himself on the bed with some chapatis, got out his sketchbook and looked at the drawings he had done the day before. Just before dusk – the loveliest time of the day, when the colours were so limpid and luminous – nigh-on transparent – he had gone to Jantar Mantar, the largest of Jai Singh’s astronomical observatories. He had strolled around among those abstract, dreamlike, stone structures, thinking of Meccano sets or gigantic building blocks. There were tilting sundials, strange holes in the ground, ramps resembling truncated stairways to the sky, gangways to ships that had already sailed. Jonas sensed that he was standing at a personal crossroads, that he was particularly well equipped to understand this, since both his areas of study, astronomy and architecture, met and melded here, in Jai Singh’s observatory. He had always wanted to make a conquest, create something new, something no one would have thought possible. Maybe that was why he had stopped studying astrophysics – because he realized he was never going to discover a new celestial body, and nothing less could satisfy his ambitions: a totally new planet, called after him or a god of his choosing. But here, in these weird grounds, he walked about in a daze, making sketches, feeling promising ideas welling up, possibly because these two areas apparently so remote from one another – the firmament and the observatory buildings – cross-pollinated one another in his imagination. Maybe I can discover a new planet after all, he had thought – in the architectural universe.
But a day later when, sitting in a cheap hotel room onto the walls of which a rapidly sinking sun was casting shadow pictures, he examined the forms in his sketchbook, considered these rough ideas for a new type of building, he realized that they were as uninspired as the musical vision he had once had. He would always be a monkey, an imitator, at best a monkey god. His schemes would never be anything but pie in the sky. Like the monument of ice he had built as a boy, fragile and transparent, doomed to be short-lived. Sitting there, in Jaipur, in India, Jonas knew – perhaps because he had just been hurled through the air by an elephant – that he would never be an architect, that before too long he would have to give up this course of study too, because he would, as it were, be slung over into something else. I am tempted to go further, Professor: maybe even at this point, on his visit to Jantar Mantar, he had a suspicion that television represented a possible combination of the heavens and building styles, or an extension of same. That television was a kind of projection of architecture into space. That it was in this his talent lay. His only talent.
He had lost all notion of travelling on to Chandigarh in the Punjab, Le Corbusier’s great city. He ate some more chapatis, drank some water, flicked through the book Inga V. had bought, with its pictures of erotic sculptures from the temples of Khajuraho: bodies twining around one another or captured in the act of fellatio. The heat was almost unbearable. A fan on the ceiling spun ineffectually. It would soon be evening. Through the window drifted the reek of vegetable refuse mingled with the smell of fires and spices. The monsoon was in the offing. I’m sitting inside a transformer, he thought, at the moment before someone flicks a switch off, or on. He wriggled out of his damp clothes and took a shower, and when he came out of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped round his waist, Inga V. was sitting on the bed, glistening with perspiration and enveloped in the smoke from a cigarillo. She was trying on some slender bracelets she had bought in a market, loads of them, a whole orchestra. She kept them on, smiled at him, an odd smile, a different kind of smile, he thought. She wore her hair in a ponytail. Her neck was moist. Little wisps of hair coiled damply against her skin. She picked up her book, a mite distractedly, leafed through it, put it down, Jonas caught a glimpse of naked bodies in unusual positions. Darkness was falling fast outside. They chatted a little about their respective days. There was going to be dancing the following evening, she told him with a flourish of her arm. Jonas sensed that something had changed between them, felt something seize hold of his body, like a trunk wrapping itself around him, groping its way toward a point on his back, pressing. He told her about the elephant, tried to describe the feeling of being swung through the air. She laughed, told him about a little temple, described it in a way which perhaps revealed that, to the surprise of all her fellow students, she would one day be a world-class architect, with a host of awards to her name, best-known for her views on the setting of a building within its surroundings – some people actually compared them to sculptures in a landscape.
She gets up. It is dark in the room. Her bracelets smoulder, the brass and copper. The odour of tobacco and sweat comes at him in waves from her. Without thinking about it he too gets up, stands motionless in the centre of the room. They crash into one another, collide in a fierce embrace, as if each means to press their body through the other. For a long time they stand there, kissing as though each kiss provokes a still more ardent kiss. The way Jonas saw it – this, at least, is how he rationalized it later – it may have been the danger he had been in, or thought he had been in, which had heightened his libido, the way war was said to do.
Jonas let the towel fall to the floor as she pulled off her clothes. They plunged straight into mad, passionate lovemaking, clinging to one another,
Jonas did not know if he was standing or sitting or lying, felt like part of a giant knot of erect flesh and soft muscle, that together they became something greater, mirroring the ornamentation they saw all around them. The little flashes of light from her bracelets accentuated her nakedness, made her seem seductively foreign. And there was something about the combination of the street smells filtering through the open window and the pungent scent of her body, not least from her crotch, which made him think of the oracle at Delphi, imagine that he too was sitting above a deep cleft, breathing in fumes which put him into a trance, induced visions. Suddenly they were on the bed, where she threw herself on top of him, but she didn’t bounce up and down, she slid back and forth on him, so damp, so oily, that it could hardly be called friction, just warmth, a warmth which generated light; she rolled about on top of him, crumpling the sheets, pulled him down onto the floor where they wrapped themselves around one another, wrestling, while the sweat poured off them – not that they noticed; they tore at one another, almost coming to blows, to the music of jingling metal and the moist slap of limb on limb. They were like two irreconcilable ideas, unexpectedly juxtaposed, like a silver brooch and a puck, a union that set sparks flying; Jonas felt his thoughts crackling, flowing along unwonted lines, and he concentrated, with one part of his mind, on following them, giving them room, believed that he noticed a difference in the images in his head, depending on whether he thrust deep inside her or only a little way in, began to feel his way forward, alternating between slow and rapid strokes, growing more and more urgent, as if this was a search of some sort, as if he was rummaging frantically in a drawer, until all at once the thought of athletics came into his mind, perhaps prompted by their strenuous exertions, the heat, the sweat: either that or the fact that a few of the brickwork circles at Jantar Mantar – the memory simply floated to the surface – had reminded him of something for throwing: a reflection which led him to think of the elephant, something about the way in which the trunk had hurled him through the air, a recollection which, as he lay there, whipped up to bursting point by Inga V.’s movements, set him thinking about rotation and not only that, but feeling that something lay at the end of this, a story, an extremely important perception which held the key to some future event, a story about a device, an instrument; an occurrence which would say something about who he could be, someone he had not yet become – a persona which had nothing to do with astronomy, nothing to do with architecture. Underlying the pleasure he was now conscious of anger, or a desire to use the powers he felt inside him in some way; he would suddenly grab her by the hair, throw her over his shoulder or lift her up, hold her over his head, and it may have been these urges that caused something to happen to her, because she seemed to lift off, they both appeared to be floating in the air, and all at once she looked at him with eyes which did not really seem to see him; from the pit of her stomach there came a moan, stop, she said, stop, stop, I can’t take any more, she said, stop stop stop, she said, struck him, lashing out into thin air, oh, god, she said, grrr, the rest was drowned in gurgles that culminated in a little scream, a howl almost, as if she really had crossed over to the other side, propelled by a violent physical reaction, a surge spreading from her vagina outwards, and this made him feel proud, proud that together, through the combination of their inner fantasies and a few simple movements, two people could experience such pleasure, take themselves to such heights of ecstasy; and at the same time, this he knew, she might have been faking it, and he could never have told the difference, he would still have believed it to be an orgasm, and this did not depress him, on the contrary, he had always liked the thought of how little it took to persuade someone to make up their version of things, their own story, turn something small into something great.
The Conqueror Page 44