by Anita Desai
People saw Matteo fleeing like a hare through the white dust of the oleander-lined promenade by the lake, round the corner by the lido and the gardens of the Villa Melzi, or – in the other direction – through the lanes of Pescallo out onto the wide grassy swath from the Villa Giulia to Loppia, pausing to get his breath in the cobblestoned square of Guggiate where he stared up at the fresco of San Andrea bowed under the weight of the cross on the whitewashed wall of the church, and then, with a scatter of stones under his heels, swinging uphill and out of sight. No one saw him as he climbed above the hamlets of Perlo and Brogna and the isolated, windswept farmyards with their scraggy chickens, their barking dogs, manure heaps and lines of washing, into the beech woods where the wind rustled in the leaves and the stream over the stones. No one was there to see where he flung himself on his knees in the damp leaves or clung to the tree trunks, beating his head fiercely against them and crying, ‘Dove sei? Dove sei? Where are you?’
He no longer heeded the dinner bell or mealtimes. When Fabian had been there, he had made a pretence of eating meals for the pleasure of his tutor’s company, but that was gone now. He would eat nothing, he told them, but bread, and that he could eat by himself at any time, preferably in hunks out of his pocket. His mother would scream about disease and illness resulting from such a diet and threaten him with visits from the doctor, but he was adamant: most people in the world lived on just such a diet, and he wanted no more – in fact, he would prefer less.
He grew painfully thin and haggard and still seemed to wish to reduce further his contact with the family and household and all its rites. He no longer slept in his bed but stretched himself oh a worn rug on the floor. Once the maid came to open the front door in the pale milky mist of early morning and found him asleep in front of it. She told the cook, ‘Just like a tomcat who wants to escape from the house and go on the tiles.’
He stayed away even at night, slept in silent abbeys or in ruined chapels on a pew with a book he had brought to read in the flickering light of votive candles. A woman coming in to clean and tidy before a service might come upon him and rouse him; then he would go and sit in the pale sun with his sandalled feet in the dried grasses, his breath coming out in clouds in the cold air and looking out over the lake with the eyes of a man who is planning a long voyage.
But when he emerged at last from what Mama called ‘that phase’, he appeared calm, gentle, detached – no longer defiant and no longer impelled to fight. It was arranged for him to take lessons in Latin and history from old Father Pirrone, who had retired from most parish duties, and in addition to study mathematics and logic with the sister of the village schoolteacher; she was crippled, bound to a wheelchair, and could not go out to work. Between them, they filled the gaps in Matteo’s education; they made up a patchwork, not very exacting, in some parts even pleasing. In any event, they found it desirable not to put him to any test: this satisfied all parties. Anyone watching Matteo go downhill through the thin drizzle or the lake mist with a satchel of books to Father Pirrone’s rooms behind the high walls of San Giorgio, or up the narrow walled lanes to the schoolteacher’s small house in Aureggio, would not have thought him a reluctant student. The truth was he did not care at all what he did. When Papa spoke of his future in banking in Turin or the silk business in Como with his uncle Filippo – he was fortunate, he was born to both, Papa pointed out – Matteo looked at him with the faintest smile as at something so absurd it merited no more than that – a smile. If he had taken it seriously, he might have struggled but he gave no grounds for complaint.
In the event, it was Mama who released him.
When Papa announced he needed to meet a German banker who was visiting Bellagio and staying at the Hotel de la Grande Bretagne for Easter, Mama arranged for him to come to lunch, with his wife and daughter. Caroline, on finding out the guest list, preferred to go out and play tennis with her friends. Since it was a dazzling spring day of liquid summery light that poured from blue sky to blue lake, lunch was served outdoors under the camellia trees, looking onto the slope of the hill where pear and cherry trees bloomed like bouquets amidst the quiet grey olive trees. The banker did not take off his dark glasses once, the glare was too much for his northern eyes – ‘One might be beside the Mediterranean here,’ he marvelled – and his wife scarcely stopped exclaiming, ‘Ah, the camellias! How lovely! Look, Sophie. Look, Klaus – the camellias!’ Papa seemed to find it difficult to discuss business in these circumstances, the light and the camellias were too powerful a distraction. Mama had gone to great trouble over the lunch but was disappointed by their lack of attention to it: was the lasagna too drowned in its béchamel sauce? Were the little grilled fishes too bony? The salad of fresh spring herbs too exotic for her guests’ taste? No one seemed to do more than pick at the dishes.
Except for Sophie. She alone was totally unaffected by the surroundings and the company. She was said to be a journalist, to have contributed articles to German journals, but did not refer to them at all. Sitting up at table, knees together, elbows lowered, she concentrated on the dishes before her. Matteo was transfixed: such concentration, he had not seen its like. Mama noticed him staring from under his brows and was irritated. The girl’s hair was cut as short as a boy’s and she was dressed like one too, in blue jeans, of which Mama disapproved, and clearly nothing on under her loose, faded cotton shirt. She had taken so much trouble over the lunch, could her guests not take the trouble to dress appropriately? It was of course for the mother to point that out but she, silly woman, waved her pudgy pink hands about and cried yet again, ‘Ah, the camellias! Do you see, Sophie? Do you see, Klaus? How lovely, lovely, lovely.’
It was Matteo who interrupted, quite uncharacteristically. No sooner had Sophie put down her knife and fork than he asked if she would like to walk uphill to see the folly. Mama felt a pang and cried out, ‘So soon after eating? Is that wise?’ and looked at the other mother for support only to find the lady lifting a waxy pink and white camellia to her nose and sipping, as it were, the non-existent fragrance with her eyes closed. Neither Matteo nor Sophie bothered to answer Mama’s cry which hung in the air till it fell soundlessly to the table for lack of support, which Matteo and Sophie took as permission to leave, and walked away, their big sports shoes crunching on the gravel and emphasising their solidarity against the others.
When Papa determinedly roused himself from the Sunday torpor into which he was sinking and remembered to ask the questions he needed to put to the banker regarding international finance and a possible career for Matteo in banking, unfortunately at that very moment the banker closed his eyes behind the dark glasses and let sleep overcome him. Mama smiled tightly over the camellia extended to her by a plump pink hand and watched the two walking slowly up the gravelled path that led between the wistaria, coiled with its clusters of tight grey buds around the wooden rail, and the hillside where hepaticas and primulas bloomed in the grass, then disappearing behind the stones of the ruined folly at the top of the hill.
In that summer of 1975, Sophie and Matteo, having first married to pacify their tearful and lamenting parents, left for India, dressed in identical blue jeans and T-shirts and sports shoes, carrying identical rucksacks on their backs, as did so many of their generation in Europe. Only Sophie still wore her hair very short and Matteo was growing his long. They left on foot. In Matteo’s pocket was the copy Fabian had left him of Hesse’s The Journey to the East.
CHAPTER ONE
SMOKING A CIGARETTE while she leaned over the balustrade in the veranda, Sophie watched darkness fall in the courtyard, its square, the driveway, the city outside the gates. Crows were settling into the trees, cawing with that piercing intensity peculiar to evening. Lights were going on in the kiosks and shops out on the streets and smoke was rising from the coal dust and cowdung fires everywhere. Rickshaws and cars wheeled around and drove out.
She stubbed out the cigarette, let it fall into the drain, and went back to the room. Matteo was sitting up in bed
, writing in his diary. She sat down on the upright chair and watched him.
‘When will we leave, Matteo?’ she asked sharply, out of a wish to interrupt more than anything else, and break into his privacy, his maddening privacy. ‘Must we wait till the Mother’s death?’
He looked at her sorrowfully, not closing his book or putting down his pen. ‘You are free to leave when you like, Sophie,’ he said, trying to sound cool and controlled. She hated it when he made this effort to seem controlled.
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I know I am free. But you? What I want to know about is you. Are you free?’
‘I am free, Sophie,’ he said in the same infuriating tone. ‘But I am waiting – for a sign. I have always waited for signs. And then followed them.’ He shifted his legs in their threadbare pyjamas: they were still pathetically thin and weak. ‘I must follow the signs. There is a design.’
She threw back her head, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. ‘A design? You mean, your destiny?’ It made her laugh. ‘Your great and glorious destiny? Look, just look – how glorious!’ She swept her arm to indicate the sick room, its enamel pan, its steel furniture, its metal tumbler of water and tray for pills, and the patients slowly shuffling down the veranda outside the door.
He closed his diary and held his head in his hands. Moments passed and then he looked at her again. ‘You are trying to tell me I have failed. You are trying to tell me that this scene –’ and he too gestured at the sick room and its trappings – ‘is a scene of failure. I am not claiming it is glorious, Sophie, or that it is what I want. But it is not what you think it is.’
‘Oh, it is not a hospital room? And you are not sick? And I am mad, the crazy one who imagines it all?’ Sophie tapped her head with a finger, hard.
‘It is not what you think it is,’ he repeated, biting his lip. Then he stammered, ‘If you read a little bit, Sophie, you would see . . . I will tell you what I read in the Katha Upanishad.
‘“There is the path of joy and the path of pleasure. The two paths lie in front of one. Pondering on them, the wise one chooses the path of joy; the fool takes the path of pleasure.”’
There was a silence. Both sat listening to the sounds of the hospital outside the room: the patients shuffling, the nurses clicking past in their quick shoes, the crows giving the last caws before dark. The room was murky: someone needed to switch on a light but no one did.
Sophie’s lips felt dry, and she spoke through those dry lips, hoarsely. ‘I can’t understand what you mean. The path of pleasure, the path of joy. To me, they are the same, they are not separate. But I see that you are saying I am the fool, the one who takes the path of pleasure, and that you are the wise one. Yes, the wise one who takes the path ofjoy. This is where it has brought you, and you tell me it is the wise choice?’
‘Yes, Sophie, yes!’
‘Then you are the fool, not I,’ she snapped and got up to switch on the light abruptly.
It was true, though: from the beginning it had been as though there were a design, a pattern, to their wanderings. At every turn they seemed to be shown signs, given directions, drawn further, taken deeper. Of that Matteo was convinced, and he never ceased to try and convince the scoffing Sophie.
‘Was meeting Pierre Eduard a sign?’
‘Meeting Pierre Eduard was most certainly a sign, and Mr Pandey also,’ he assured her.
She covered her face with her hands and laughed. ‘Mr Pandey! You make me laugh, Matteo.’ She tapped her head with a finger. ‘And Pierre Eduard, that madman!’
*
They had been sitting in the restaurant below their hotel room, drinking tepid lemonade and looking out onto the street where a man was spreading his merchandise – rubber slippers, small mirrors, plastic buckets – on the pavement by the bus stop, placing them strategically so passengers would stumble on them as they got off the buses, when a fellow inhabitant whom they had befriended at the Hotel Monaco dropped onto the bench beside them and mopped his flushed face with the cotton scarf he wore across his shoulders. He called loudly for chai and, while he waited for the cook to bring it from the sooty corner at the back where the kettle was kept going day and night, he told them, ‘While you two were sitting here, so lazy, I have been out, searching. And do you know what I found?’
‘We will try to guess, Pierre Eduard,’ Matteo said languidly, mocking his activity and excitement. ‘An elephant?’
‘A maharaja?’ Sophie volunteered.
‘Elephants, maharajas – my God, you two, is that what India is to you?’ Pierre Eduard rolled his eyes. ‘When will people from the West free themselves from Hollywood? Can you think of nothing that is not concrete, material, an entertainment?’
‘Oh, please,’ Sophie protested, and Matteo said, ‘Why can we not have Hollywood dreams in the Hotel Monaco in Bombay?’
The tea arrived, in a tin mug, and spilt across the table. Instantly flies settled where it spilt for it was sticky with sugar. Pierre Eduard swept them away with his fist. ‘No, but seriously, you two, you must break out of this –’
‘Yes? And go where? Tell us, please, we are waiting.’
‘And find the India that lies outside. Shall I tell you what I have just seen on the beach, this morning?’
‘Film stars!’
‘Dolphins!’
‘A yogi who lay in the sand with his head buried underneath it. Completely. I checked. For forty minutes. And people did nothing – stood and watched, he could have been dead. They threw a few coins on the sand and went away. I talked to a man – his name was Mr Pandey – who told me it is the study of yoga that makes such a thing possible. I waited for forty minutes and then he rose. He was alive. That is what I saw, I promise. A few paces further, an old sage. Ancient, with a white beard. Please do not laugh. He read from the Gita – Mr Pandey told me it was the Gita – and people sat by and listened to him. Oh, his voice was like the ocean. You should have heard!’
‘Perhaps he was the Sage of the Sea,’ Matteo laughed, ‘the Ancient Mariner. Did he lament the albatross?’
‘What?’ Pierre Eduard put down his mug. ‘He was a sage, expounding a holy book, not natural history. Please tell me, on what beach in the West will you meet such a one, or hear such a thing? I tell you, it is the spiritual experience for which you must search in India, nothing less.’
‘Oh, please,’ groaned Sophie again, ‘what is spiritual about sticking one’s head into the sand? Is an ostrich holy, Pierre Eduard?’
Nevertheless, for lack of anything else to do, and for the sake of getting out of the Hotel Monaco, which was admittedly neither relaxing nor exciting but merely squalid, one evening they let Pierre Eduard’s newfound friend, Mr Pandey, take them to visit a saint. Pierre Eduard was busily collecting saints as earlier travellers had collected gold, spices or shawls.
The saint lived in a suburb at the other end of Bombay and they had to take a train. At the station they nearly lost Pierre Eduard in the crowds: he was small and had taken to wearing Indian clothes, pyjamas and slippers. Pressed forward by the people behind them and somehow lifted up through the door in spite of the crowd that was escaping from it with equal ferocity, they found themselves, to their surprise, in the same compartment as Pierre Eduard: he had been propelled into it ahead of them. There seemed no question of sitting down, there was no seat visible, but several women tugged at Sophie’s clothes and dragged her into a space they made for her between, or on, their knees. Matteo and Pierre Eduard stood over her, protectively, but actually they would not have been able to move a finger in that solid human mass of which they had become a part.
As they had entered, so they were extruded from the train – like an excrescence – onto the platform of a suburban railway station. Here they were met by Pierre Eduard’s friend, a small man in white trousers and a blue bush-shirt.
‘Oh, you have come, you have come,’ he beamed at them welcomingly, and at once turned and led them up the road which was lined with warehouses and bins and barrels where ca
ttle stood munching the straw and cardboard of packing cases, and then down lanes where the commerce of that area was being carried out even at that late hour – bales of cloth, canvas and rubber sheeting spilling out of the small shops that hung out over open drains. The merchants’ families lived on the upper floors and cheerfully emptied their garbage out of their windows into the lanes. Although it was evening, it was oppressively hot, the air bottled in by the high buildings and the life that boiled inside them.
Sophie, limping, plucked at Matteo’s sleeve and complained, ‘I can’t go on,’ but just then Pierre Eduard’s friend stopped at a staircase that led up from the side of a cigarette and soda water stall to the top of a building at the end of the lane. There was a blue door on the uppermost landing, hung with marigold garlands, and Mr Pandey stopped to take off his sandals, gesturing to them to do the same. Leaving their rubber slippers amongst dozens of others on the landing, they followed him in barefoot.
There, in a surprisingly large room painted a bright pink, under a tube of blue fluorescent light and a framed oleograph of a god with a snake around his neck and a crescent moon in his matted locks, there sat an elderly woman in a purple cotton sari with a green border, her greying hair open on her stooping shoulders. She was surrounded by a throng of men and women all seated crosslegged on the white sheets spread across the floor and they were all silent. In some embarrassment, Sophie and Matteo lowered themselves to the floor, keeping close to the wall at the back so they could lean against it, not having much confidence in their ability to sit crosslegged for long. The silence continued, and it had the effect of making them very conscious of the sounds other than speech – the breathing, the snuffling, the very frequent burping and eructating, as well as the shouts and automobile horns and amplified music in the lane below. Equally intrusive and clamorous of attention were the smells – of people, of perspiration, of hair oil, of food being fried in hot oil and stirred with spices in kitchens all around them, as well as the shoes and slippers they had left outside, and of course the city itself, thick and cloudy and oppressive.