Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  Her mother wanted too much of the children, took them over so completely. Sophie found it difficult enough to have her choose what the chidren were to eat, what clothes they would wear to the playground, what medication was best for their coughs and colds, but when it came to demanding that they be baptised, and baptised in the same church that Sophie had been, then Sophie rebelled.

  ‘No, I did not leave India and all its superstitions and rituals to come here and submit to the tribal rites of Europe,’ she stormed. ‘You talk of Indians as if they were barbarians because they cremate the dead and toss them in the river. But what about you? You believe a baby should be dumped in a basin of water by a priest and have some mumbo-jumbo said over its head or it won’t go to heaven, eh?’

  They were shocked. ‘Where did she learn to speak like that?’ they asked each other.

  Holding hands as they lay in bed in the dark, Sophie’s mother sighed ‘We should never have permitted them to live in India, never supported them in that,’ to which her father rumbled in reply, ‘They would do that anyway. The young find ways to do what they wish.’

  ‘What can you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean drugs, guns, the Red Brigade –’ at which she covered her mouth to stop herself from shrieking.

  The next day she was especially patient and gentle with Sophie and the children, allowing herself only once to sigh, ‘How you have changed, child! And we thought you would be happy to be back in Europe.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Sophie said crossly, ‘but no one need think that by coming back to Europe I have come back to the church. I haven’t. Oh, the hypocrisy!’

  Quite soon she packed up and moved with the children to Matteo’s home. Larger, warmer, in Italy, in the countryside, it would surely prove more relaxed, a place where they could live and breathe in spite of the old people’s censure and disapproval. Sophie would not talk to them about India, or try to explain their years there; she was silent about that entire time, that past, and they were grateful to have her back and part of the family; Matteo would surely follow, they thought, and in the meanwhile they had the children.

  Sophie, taking a straw hat, dark glasses and a book out into the garden, stretched herself on the grass and sunbathed through a broiling summer, only half-listening to the conversation of the children and the grandparents at the bottom of the grassy slope where the camellias indefatigably produced their coral pink blossoms.

  In a way she felt she was convalescing and allowing the sweetness of the air to recuperate her. After so much tension and so much fighting, she now became torpid, a motionless lizard on a ledge. The more happily the children settled into the life of their grandparents’ home, the more safe and secure and contented they became, the more she felt able to relax her fierce hold on them. It was as if the lioness who had guarded them so passionately earlier had now delivered them into a safe haven so that the need for that zealous protectiveness dwindled. Listening to their voices as they picked camellias off the grass and climbed over their grandparents’ knees, she felt them recede from her.

  Then it was Matteo who came surging back in a way she had not imagined would happen. To have left him behind in the ashram, with the Mother – that tormented her now. The Mother, the ashram – images of them rose to haunt her. She saw the ring of dancing peacocks, the old woman in their centre. She heard that memorable voice ring out in the dusk, under the great looming tree, and she saw the light in the eyes of her devotees as they listened, thirstily, Matteo amongst them.

  Matteo. The thought of him made her turn her face to the grass and burrow into it to stop herself from moaning aloud, it hurt so shockingly. He had been the cause of pain all the years in India, and she believed to remove him would be to remove the pain. Now it seemed one half was ripped from her side, and she pressed her hand where it hurt so fiercely that it felt like a wound, a flow of blood.

  Her face acquired a constantly preoccupied expression in place of the old watchful and suspicious one. She spoke little, she read and brooded but there was no stillness and no calm in her inactivity. In fact, she was consumed by restlessness.

  Since she had made herself so irrelevant, no one objected when she started borrowing the car and driving off to Milan. She said she wanted to see Matteo’s sister Caroline, do some shopping, listen to some music. It was not entirely untrue: she knew she must fill the huge emptiness of Matteo’s absence and that this required some effort on her part. At one of the parties Caroline threw as part of her job in public relations, she met the young man Paolo who found this older woman quite fascinating; that she was wealthy, bore a distinguished name, dressed like a poor student, used no make-up, had a plain face and hair that she cut herself, and had lived in India, made her the opposite of all the young women he knew who were poor, with unknown names, dressed like mannequins, were deeply attached to the big cities of the West and wished only to travel to America. She was not particularly interested in him but took him as he was: he was like the young men she had known as a girl; he put her in touch with her pre-Matteo and pre-India days that had grown so dim arid so distant: perhaps he could revive it. She imagined it coming to life again when she visited him in his small apartment on the avenue Ritter, mocking at its designer sparseness, its uncompromising black-and-white decor, but finding it pleasing, seeing it as an arena of possibility that had been offered to her before and that she had left unexplored.

  She soon discovered why he was so fascinated by India: he connected it with the drugs he took. These proved not to be the ones she knew – though they did smoke marijuana together, he craved cocaine, heroin, the harder drugs she had herself never tried. She was not so young as to find this exciting in itself; she found the times when he was taking them very boring, very empty, and drove back to the lake, lay in the sun again with the babies crawling over her as if they were lizards, and she a stone, nothing more.

  Before the summer was over she had had enough of Paolo. She found both his drug habit and his insistent questioning about India tiresome. When he tried to probe deeper into what she knew of India, wanting to hear about arcane practices of Hinduism and in particular Tantric Hinduism which he had heard involved acrobatic sex between trained yogis, she found herself hating him. Her life with Matteo had spoilt her for life with men like this Paolo; it was no longer possible. The day he suggested they travel together to India – ‘We could visit your husband at the ashram, give him a surprise – think of it!’ – she spat at him, ‘You? You are not fit to even enter his presence. He – he is a god –’ and got into her car, aghast at what she had blurted out, drove off and did not return.

  Before she left Milan and drove towards Como, she stopped her car briefly on the Corso Garibaldi and quickly slipped into San Simpliciano. Walking under its brick arches and across the echoing emptiness of its chambers and the scatter of boxes and caskets, crosses and relics, she made her way to the great da Fassano fresco that soared up into the dome. Here a radiant rainbow arched over the benign head of God the Father, holding the white dove of the Holy Spirit in his breast, and blessing a Madonna who knelt at his feet while being crowned by another figure, perhaps God the Son. Around them hosts of angels hovered in all the hues that made up the rainbow glowing around and over them.

  Sophie stood under it, craning her head to look up at the furthest reaches of the huge Romanesque dome and arches, as if searching in it for a glimpse of something she had left behind there, or remembered encountering there.

  Then she turned abruptly and walked out, her heels sounding loudly on the bare brick floor.

  She returned to the children. This was to be her life now: the villa, the lake and the children. She began teaching Giacomo and Isabel their lessons; she went down to the village to arrange for them to go to school. She took them to the mountains to teach them to ski; she took them to Frankfurt for Christmas. She wrote to the editor of the magazine she had once worked for, asking for assignments. The children watched her. They said nothing, not even to each other, but they held
hands and watched, wondering: would she stay? Or would she go away again? She never spoke of India, although sometimes a letter arrived from one of the devotees at the ashram with news of the Mother who was now in great pain and sinking slowly, of the great sadness in the ashram, and sometimes small gifts to remind them of it – incense sticks or rose petals. Sometimes the grandparents broke out in anger and recrimination. She listened to their outbursts without replying. She might have put India behind her completely, but when the telegram arrived to say Matteo had been taken to the hospital, she grasped the news and reacted to it with such swiftness that it was clear her mind had been with Matteo all this time, her senses alert to receive any message from him. Now she packed her bag, bought her ticket and left with such speed it seemed nothing mattered to her but to be with him.

  Death

  To Isidoro de Blas

  How hard they try!

  How hard the horse tries

  to become a dog!

  How hard the dog tries to become a swallow!

  How hard the swallow tries to become a bee!

  How hard the bee tries to become a horse!

  And the horse,

  what a sharp arrow it yanks from the rose,

  what a pale rose rising from its lips!

  And the rose,

  what a flock of lights and cries

  knotted in the living sugar of its trunk!

  And the sugar,

  what daggers it dreams in its vigils!

  And the daggers,

  what a moon without stables, what nakedness,

  eternal and blushing flesh they seek out!

  And I, on the roof’s edge,

  what a burning angel I look for and am!

  But the plaster arch,

  how vast, how invisible, how minute,

  without even trying!

  Federico García Lorca

  CHAPTER THREE

  SOPHIE’S LAST CONVERSATION with Matteo in hospital began quietly. He had slept all afternoon while she sat up and read the small, badly written and cheaply printed booklet on the Mother that he had bought so long ago at a railway station on the way to her. When he stirred and she saw that he was awake, she went and sat by him and held his hand; it was so thin she felt she must be very gentle and not hurt it.

  ‘Matteo,’ she said, ‘I have been reading again the life of the Mother.’

  He sighed. ‘Again. Why? What do you think you will find in her life?’

  ‘I must find whatever there is to find. The book only gives you the legend. I want to go behind that, find out who she really is, how she came here, why. I want to know her. Then I can show you, too, who she really is.’

  ‘But I know who she really is, it is you who do not. You cannot know her while you pursue these facts you love so much. I know her greatness and her power. It is not necessary that there is a connection between that and her life.’

  ‘I think it is, Matteo,’ Sophie insisted in a low voice. It was not to persuade only him that she spoke. ‘I will make a connection between what you believe and what I know. It is the only way I will ever be able to understand you, what you have done to yourself.’ She turned his hand over in hers; it seemed so fine it was almost transparent. The fingers were long and tapering, the veins blue.

  He too spoke in nearly a whisper. ‘I have given myself to her. Why do you want to keep me, Sophie, from pursuing my beliefs?’

  ‘Because what you believe in is – nothing!’ Involuntarily her hand rolled into a fist, squeezing his roughly.

  He winced and withdrew it. His eyes moved from her face to some point beyond her, fixedly, and he clenched his jaw when she argued, refusing to answer.

  ‘You have turned into a stone,’ Sophie said at last, in despair. ‘The power she has over you, it has turned you to stone.’

  He sighed slightly, shaking his head on the pillow. His face was almost the same colour and texture as that washed and faded piece of cotton. He clutched at the sheet across his chest as if to shield himself from her anger. ‘I will break that spell,’ she went on, ‘that stone – and I will make you see, see her, what she is –’

  He turned his face slightly towards her, in a kind of appeal, but now Sophie could not stop, she went raging on. ‘I am going to find out – I will write the true account – not all that nonsense you publish – but the truth, for you to read. I will have it published – circulated – and then you’ll see, everyone will see –’

  The moment for communication disappeared under the flood of her anger. She stopped only when she saw the light darkening in the doorway and heard the nurses clicking past the door, ordering their patients’ visitors to leave for the night, and bringing in trays with medicines and meals.

  One of them entered Matteo’s room. Sophie rose, picked up her rucksack and swung out of the room without looking back at the still image on the bed.

  As she walked down the veranda to the stairs at the end, she saw Matteo’s doctor coming up for his evening round. He hesitated, ready to be questioned by her and to answer. But she merely raised her hand and walked past. He looked slightly puzzled by her silence and turned to see her go down the stairs with her rucksack and make her way down the drive to the gate.

  Cairo, rising out of the warm ochre sand, its buildings sand-coloured but vaguely Mediterranean, their flat façades marked with cornices and decorative flourishes, little balconies of wrought iron and long green shutters, and the palm-lined avenues grave and straight. But in the train to Alexandria, the flat grey landscape, the stands of date palms and orange groves, the fields of wheat and mustard interspersed with brick kilns and sand quarries, fill Sophie with the sense of being in India again, on another of those interminable train journeys, travelling on and on, dusty and tired, too tired to think or feel, all because of Matteo, that fool, that idiot Matteo . . .

  She rises to her feet in a panic, her head swirling because she feels she has been turned around and is travelling backwards into India again, and the past. She must get off the train, she must not allow the journey to continue . . .

  Then a man comes along the aisle with a trolley full of orange and lemon drinks, tea and coffee. He is smartly dressed and smiling. Other passengers buy from him and Sophie sees that two are large women in brilliant green and purple dresses who sit sprawled with beautifully dressed babies playing on their laps, and one is a man in a business suit who is scribbling on a pad of paper taken from his briefcase. They glance up at her. She rocks on her feet and feels the landscape trundle past – palm trees, buffaloes, a small village of brick and clay – and then sinks back into her seat, perspiring, reminding herself that this is precisely her intention: to travel back, back in time, although not her own time now but the Mother’s.

  It is dusk in Alexandria. The light is filtered through fine clay dust and sand. In Mazarita a little girl plays by herself. She wears a bright yellow dress with black velvet trimmings that are torn and she has left her sandals on the steps of an apartment building so that she can hop and skip freely on the sandy pavement. Her long hair hangs down to her waist and grows more and more wildly tumbled as she hops and skips and Sophie watches. Her eyes are like embers, charred and black but brilliant, on fire. There is a faint look of surprise on her face when she sees Sophie but she quickly turns around to play. She is conscious, though, of being watched, and she moves more lightly and gracefully than before.

  The door at the top of the stairs opens and a woman comes out, holding a baby in one arm, shouts, ‘Ferial! Get in, quick!’

  The child flushes, glances again at Sophie, then recovers her poise and goes up the stairs with her head tossed back proudly.

  *

  Alma was searching for her daughter. Everything was ready, the food in the oven, the table laid. The soup was hot, the bread warmed. It was evening, the sky had lost its light and out beyond the harbour bar the sea reflected its dullness. The child should not be out at this hour. What if Hamid came to know? Alma hit the side of her head with her fist. Shou
ld she call Hamid in for his supper? But what if he found the child was not back?

  In agitation, she shuffled up the whole length of the curving passage that ran from end to end of the large apartment. She went out onto the balcony and looked up and down Mazarita. There were still children playing there, but they were all boys, rough loud boys kicking about a football. There were some office workers hurrying home. There was the seller of dates and nuts lighting up the lamp on his barrow. But Laila would have been visible amongst them all, in her bright clothes, with her vivid face and dancer’s movements. Alma held her fists to her chin and moaned, ‘Laila, Laila.’

  Then she shuffled back into the apartment, making her way past the florid pieces of furniture that held the polished silver, the framed photographs, the shells and china vases that were the souvenirs of her and Hamid’s families. She stopped at the front door, unlocked it and looked down the stairwell. The great spiral staircase was dark but at the bottom the concierge’s family sat talking in the light from their small, suffocating room that stood open to catch the evening air; the heavy scent of incense they had lit billowed out in a cloud. The women were chattering as they passed an invisible baby from arm to arm, folded like a toffee in a pink wrapper. The children hopped on and off the steps like little lively goats. If Laila were there, her voice would be raised above all the others, bullying them, making herself heard and felt. She was not – it was too peaceful. ‘Oh, Laila, Laila,’ Alma mourned.

  Out on the small terrace at the back she had made herself a garden – a fig tree in a pot that never grew very high, a grape vine on which grapes would not ripen because it was always in the shade of the other buildings, tubs of artemisia that the cat scratched up, and a jasmine that flowered and flowered as though it thought itself to be in paradise. Alma pottered there, searching for some herbs to put in the soup while Clio the cat, who had seen her from the ledge where she slept, leapt down and followed her about, crying for her supper. It was too dark to tell a blade of grass from a leaf of mint, and Alma went in with Clio.