by Anita Desai
Yvette and Claudette were horror-struck, their eyes widened at this disregard for the rules of the house. They reproached Laila, they reprimanded her, they picked up her things and showed her how the coverlet should be stretched over the bed, the dresses hung, the shoes placed. She smiled mockingly in silence as she watched them tidy the room, then carelessly combed the hair out of her brush and left it trailing over the lace runners.
The bathroom, after Laila had visited it, was in even greater turmoil – the amount of damp and steam and stains and puddles and smears and wastage of soap, shampoo, pastes and powders that she accomplished when locked inside it, often for the better part of an hour while Yvette, Claudette, Ninette and Babette stood complaining in the corridor outside, was stupendous, nothing less.
‘Now look, my girl,’ Aunt Françoise said to her, opening up a cupboard and taking out all the instruments of hygiene and cleanliness – mop and broom, duster and dustpan, cleaning fluids and powders – ‘if you wish to make such a disgusting mess in the house, then you must be taught to clean it,’ and she gave Laila a bravura performance as a lesson, whirling about the bathroom till it shone and dazzled, mirrors and tiles and porcelain all of blinding brightness.
It lasted only a day and then Laila had turned it into a washroom again, hanging dripping stockings on the rail, leaving pools of water on the floor, hair in the bathtub, grime in the sink, the soap melting in a tray of water, the shampoo trickling out of an open, fallen bottle and the towels, rugs and nighties all in a soaking heap on the floor.
Aunt Françoise, rolling her eyes heavenwards, cried, ‘What has that sister of mine been doing? Can she have forgotten entirely the ways of the civilised world? She has brought up a savage!’
Now the cousins had a word for what had left them speechless before: savage. ‘Sauvage,’ they whispered and mocked, and kept out of Laila’s way when she returned from her classes, covered their ears when she talked, and watched her eat with the wonder of children at the zoo watching the beasts devour their meals. It was true that Laila could not be bothered with the array of silverware beside her plate and preferred to pick up bits of bread or cheese or fruit to eat with her hands, sitting sideways at the table, her legs crossed, her feet carelessly waving, pretending to ignore her aunt’s harangues: ‘Babette, elbows off the table, elbows close to the side, please! Ninette, is that the way to eat your peas? It is abominable! And the napkin, please, the napkin!’ She restricted herself to throwing fierce looks in Laila’s direction at the table as if she could not tackle such barbarity at this ritual of civilised behaviour. Also, perhaps, she did not like to draw the attention of Uncle Bertrand to her savage niece too much or too often: it would upset his delicate nerves upon which his digestion depended, and Aunt Françoise was very concerned about Uncle Bertrand’s digestion; it was of importance equal to that of her daughters’ manners and upbringing, and the two preoccupations together caught her face up in a nest of wrinkles that the heaviest powdering and pinkest rouge could not efface.
‘Bertrand, my dear, did you find the chop tender? I bought the very best piece I saw at the butcher’s, but I don’t know . . . I did think of telling Edith to grill it fifteen minutes longer, but sometimes that has the effect of drying up the juices, and I know how much you like gravy with your meat . . .’ she went on nervously while Uncle Bertrand ate stolidly, paying the closest attention to his plate and avoiding any involvement in the twitching, sighing, muttering, murmuring world of females around him.
He was able to pursue this path only till the day when Laila, breaking and stuffing bread into her mouth in the coarse way she had adopted since entering this household, held up her plate of meat to Edith to be taken away uneaten.
‘Now, what is this?’ her aunt enquired, the nest of wrinkles drawing closer. ‘The meat that is so expensive and good enough for the rest of us – it is not good enough for you, a girl from Egypt?’
‘I hate it,’ Laila told her, ‘and will not eat it.’
This penetrated even Uncle Bertrand’s hearing, preoccupied as he may have seemed with the sounds of digestion deep inside him, ominously loud and alarming, and he too put down his knife and fork to stare at the girl who sat there with such an attitude of careless indifference amongst his daughters, each one so erect and obedient at table.
‘Do you hear that?’ the aunt cried, and the girls all nodded solemnly. ‘Did you hear her call the steak hateful? A steak so succulent, so excellently done as she can never have had, in Egypt?’
‘Oh, it is not the cooking,’ Laila assured her lazily, ‘it is the meat itself. It is disgusting to eat meat, and from now on I shall eat only bread, fruit and vegetables. And,’ she added, slyly looking around at her awestruck cousins from under her black brows, ‘chocolate if I get very hungry.’
The girls opened their mouths to exclaim ‘O-oh’ in unison, and Aunt Françoise and Uncle Bertrand exchanged stunned looks. Laila smiled as if pleased with the effect of her words, and picked up a small spoon and slid it into the crème caramel Edith had placed before her in the glass dish. ‘This is delicious,’ she told them after tasting it, ‘and does not run with blood or expose bones.’
Aunt Françoise rose from her seat and marched down the length of the table to where Laila was seated to snatch up the glass dish from under her chin. ‘No sweet for whoever does not first finish the meat,’ she declared and carried away the dish to the kitchen where she was heard to pour out her outraged feelings to Edith. Uncle Bertrand, who had never witnessed such a scene at his table before, did not seem to understand what had happened: he frowned, he muttered, he looked about him – it was all inexplicable.
However, it was only the first in a series of such confrontations over the table. Meat was cooked and cut and placed before Laila as before everyone else every night, and every night she refused adamantly to touch it, carefully picking the carrots and potatoes away from the slab of pink flesh lying in its pool of dark gravy, and instead ate a basketful of bread hungrily and untidily. Aunt Françoise refused to let Edith serve her any sweet because she must be punished for not eating the meat, and Laila looked across at her aunt and her cousins with eyes that grew ever stonier.
She told her cousins, ‘I am a vegetarian. No one will make me eat the flesh of slaughtered animals. Do you know what you are eating? Have you been into a butcher’s shop to see it when it is raw? Or into an abattoir to see how they slaughter the bulls and the calves and lambs and pigs and rabbits and ducks and chickens and all else that you eat?’
They covered their ears and shrieked, ‘Don’t, don’t!’ and no longer ate their meals with such neat expressions of satisfaction or obedience. Instead, they pinched their mouths, set their jaws, cut the meat into the smallest shreds and bit into them as if they expected to be bitten back. Laila looked and watched, pleased. Aunt Françoise was nearly in tears.
‘Look what you have done! You have spoilt our meals for us all, the meals Edith has prepared and I have planned with such effort. See how the girls have taken to wasting it,’ she lamented as Edith carried away the unfinished platefuls.
Goaded beyond endurance by these laments one evening, Laila electrified them by suddenly picking up her knife and fork and attacking the meat with such ferocity that gobs and strips of it flew around, spotting the snowy table linen with bloodied gravy.
‘What are you doing, you mad, wild beast?’ cried her aunt.
‘Killing the ox, killing the ox!’ Laila shouted back, then flung down her knife and fork and put her hands to her face which was hot and flushed and tear-streaked.
‘If you were not such a big girl, I would send you to sit in a corner until you came around to behaving yourself,’ her aunt scolded, getting up to clear the table.
‘If you did that, I should tell my father and mother who have never punished me once in my life,’ Laila replied, ‘and would not believe that punishments are carried out in civilised homes.’
Then Aunt Françoise reached her own breaking point and scre
amed, ‘Bertrand, did you hear? Do you hear how my own sister’s daughter speaks to me?’
Uncle Bertrand put his hand up to his head. It was a completely bald head, pink and shining as if polished, between two tufts of soft brown hair like a pair of brushes. He closed his eyes behind his spectacles and said ‘Françoise, bring me some digestive powders. I really cannot endure this nightly fracas.’
The aunt immediately recovered herself and scurried away to do as she was bid, but Laila said calmly, ‘And have you thought of what the animal endures under the knife?’
No truce seemed possible and Laila revealed a certain prudence, or instinct for self-defence, in keeping away from the house as much as possible and avoiding aggravation of the situation by constant proximity and friction.
Her classes, in French, were few and she could not extend them, nor did she wish to: they were taught to unhappy lots of foreigners by teachers bored by going over elementary lessons in classrooms devoid of any cheer or hospitality. Even if Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Musset had invited them into this world once, the invitation had lost its warmth, leaving nothing, not even a scrap. Anxious to avoid each other’s homesickness and melancholy, the students separated at the door after classes and drifted in different directions, following their own odysseys of exile. Laila found she had hours to spend alone, wandering through museums, browsing at book stalls, walking down stony streets in the heat of early summer that was already grey with dust and the foliage yellow in the parks. She wore holes through the thin soles of her sandals that she insisted on wearing, having refused, with scorn, her aunt’s offers to choose her a pair of ‘good shoes’. Nor would she touch the clothes the cousins offered her, stubbornly sticking to those bits and pieces she had brought from Egypt – her brocade waistcoat and a cap with sequins and gold embroidery that she either wore on her head or held clutched in her hands as if it were the insignia of a separate existence and her allegiance to another land.
Drifting through the alien city, she stopped once to let pass a bevy of young girls who stepped out of a large silvery automobile and slipped through a doorway, short white muslin tunics fluttering about their legs. That was an unusual form of dress, and she looked to see where they went. A signboard informed her it was L’Institut d’Eurythmie à E. Dalcroze and underneath, in small letters, was the name Mme Beaunier, As Laila stood studying it, she heard a piano played somewhere upstairs, behind closed doors, but whenever the doors were opened the music intensified and floated down like a voice addressed to her. She did not go up or in that day but walked past the door several times. One day she took with her a bag containing a veil and a tambourine she had brought with her from Egypt, and that day she climbed the stairs and went in. She had waited till the students had left, streaming past her in their short skirts and long cloaks, and then slipped in before the doors were locked, to place herself in front of a woman she took to be the instructress, a large, heavily built and pale woman in a grey dress who still sat at the piano with a look of exhaustion.
Laila made her speech, holding her hands clutched before her in appeal. The woman did not seem very interested but agreed tiredly to play a little piece to which she asked Laila to dance. She did open her eyes wide when she saw Laila draw out of a bag a gaudy veil stitched with sequins that she draped about her head, and nearly protested when Laila whipped out the tambourine, but then turned to the piano to play a few bars while Laila, throwing back her head and raising the tambourine in the air, struck a pose she had seen dancers assume in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. Then, totally ignoring the music being played for her, she began to leap and twirl about the room. Madame Beaunier brought her hands down on the keyboard with a crash, crying, ‘No, no, no! Oh, do you not hear the music? Can you not feel the music? It is the music you must express – the music!’
Laila stopped and stood panting, holding the tambourine against her skirt. ‘Show me how,’ she ordered the woman, and there was in her voice that tone of complete authority that few who heard it ever resisted. Whether it was that tone, or the proselytiser’s zeal that moved Madame Beaunier it is hard to tell, but she rose from her seat to seize Laila’s arms, manipulate her stance, force her into assuming the first position and then instruct her to listen to the music she would now play.
Perhaps she saw promise in the exotic figure of the girl from the East, or she decided to civilise the savage with Dalcroze’s theories of marrying rhythmic movement to musical elements, but she did not send Laila away.
Nothing was said about it in the house on the rue des Bernardins; Laila was aware of how the news that she had abandoned her French studies for eurhythmic exercises would be received there, and how it would carry across the Mediterranean to her parents. She obtained the money from her father by means of a plea for funds for extra books and clothing, and kept the secret to herself. Only her cousins saw her swaying and twirling in her nightgown in the bedroom and thought it further proof of her craziness. ‘That’s not dance!’ they cried. ‘Ooh, you should come with us to our dancing classes!’ and they linked arms and showed Laila the steps they learnt there, giggling. Laila threw them looks of scorn.
For some months she persuaded herself that she was at last doing what she wished most to do. It was not easy to maintain that conviction in the face of Madame Beaunier’s almost military system of drill – separating the elements of music into tempo, dynamics, metrical patterns and pitch, then putting the girls through exercises to go with each. The repetitiveness of these exercises, and the sight of the young girls marching, stamping, running, skipping, bending and bowing in unison, began to bore her so much that she ached. Very soon she started to defy Madame Beaunier and her young assistants, refusing to obey the music. This was a sin that could not be overlooked. ‘Use your body to translate into movement the rhythm, the melody and the harmony you hear!’ was Madame Beaunier’s dictum, and it became clear that this was not dance to Laila.
Coming to a standstill, her hands on her hips, while everyone else continued to run, tiptoe, skip, walk and march to the piano, she demanded to know, ‘But why? Why must we do this?’ Madame Beaunier’s hands came to halt on the keyboard. She swung slowly around to stare at Laila. ‘You ask why? And what do you mean by this why?’ The girls had all come to a stop like puppets whose strings had been cut, abruptly. ‘Yes, why?’ Laila called out. ‘What is the purpose? What is the meaning of these movements? Why do we perform them? For what reason? What cause?’ and everyone began to titter or whisper or exclaim till Madame Beaunier banged down the lid of the piano and rose, towering above them. ‘And what is it you wish to express, mademoiselle?’ she asked crisply.
‘Whatever it is the music expresses,’ Laila replied, crossing her arms over her chest, ‘and that is sometimes joy, sometimes grief, sometimes desire –’ and here everyone burst openly into laughter, and Laila flushed. ‘It is not about nothing – not just to make us jump and skip. It has some meaning surely? It must be about something?’
‘Perhaps you can enlighten us then, mademoiselle,’ Madame Beaunier responded with great dignity. ‘Pray interpret this piece of music for us that I will play,’ she requested and seated herself at the piano and began to play a piece of music that Laila, who had no musical education, could not identify. She stood listening, her arms folded about her and her head bowed, and the music seemed to her a puzzle that was being worked out on the keys, a problem that was set and then worked through and solved. She could not find in her body any response to it; it was cerebral and devoid of emotion. Her arms remained folded, her feet remained still. The students watched, holding their breaths, but she could do nothing to meet their expectations. It appeared that she met Madame Beaunier’s, however, for that woman threw her a triumphant look at the end of the piece that she came to with great precision and certainty. ‘So,’ she challenged her rebellious pupil, ‘and will you now enlighten us as to what this music expresses? Does it perhaps tell a story? If so, would you like to interpret it to us? A la Isadora Duncan, perhaps?�
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This was the cue for everyone to start laughing which they did, with great relief, and Laila turned to leave the room, pack up her sequinned veil and put on her sandals. In the streets, she found her eyes blurred not with humiliation but with anger and frustration, so that she nearly ran into a bus.
It was a defeat but Laila was stubborn; she returned to the studio, and worked at submitting her body to the precepts set before her, partly because she needed to show Madame Beaunier that it was something she could do and partly because she had not found something that might replace such a method. That she was the most lithe and graceful student in the class helped her to retain her place in it, but she felt herself isolated, the only one who had questions and felt the need for something else, different. She prepared herself to be the one who was misunderstood, who would be solitary.
In this manner she drifted through the Jardin des Plantes, seeking the shade of great trees along the narrow gravel paths on which children rolled their hoops and balls and maids and mothers pushed perambulators. She avoided looking into the cages; it distressed her to see cockatoos dropping onto leafless branches, baboons squatting desolately on squares of concrete, scratching at their sore red patches and rummaging through empty peanut shells, and her nose wrinkled in revulsion at the reek of urine, faeces and decayed food in the rabbit houses. The loops of a somnolent python sent shudders through her and she reared away from it as much as from the crowds that gathered around it, trying to prod it into wakefulness.
In trying to get as far away as possible, she found herself one day brought up short at the cage of an animal altogether different.
Instead of sinking with the others into late summer torpor, and the lassitude of the watched beast, the black panther still prowled the jungles of its memory, still inhabited an unpopulated wilderness of the past that it paced and paced with a kind of restrained frenzy, demanding of the barred square of concrete some reminder of freedom, or danger, or challenge, or beauty that it would not yield. Refusing to be refused, it paced and paced – its great paws treading into the unyielding surface, its senses alert to pick up the faintest response should it come.