Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  Laila made the introductions, her hands fluttering about agitatedly, damp with nervousness. How did she know how to behave in this servile, humble, even abject way? It was not her way at all but it came to her now out of the air and she assumed it most naturally. Madame Lacan merely nodded and as for him, the dancer, he was looking at the poster of his dance performance, smiling at it in a pleased way as if looking into a mirror.

  ‘Ah, you came to my dance?’

  ‘Non,’ Madame Lacan told him, ‘but Laila did.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said and laid his hat on the counter. ‘She told you?’

  Madame Lacan gave a nod. She was never talkative but, Laila thought, could she not pretend to be just for once? So angrily did her eyes glare that Madame Lacan could not ignore them. Slipping stitches over the smooth knitting needles, she asked, ‘You are leaving Paris?’

  ‘Yes, we are going on a tour – to Marseilles, Lyon . . . One month we will tour. Then we will go to Venice. My friend there is giving us her house for practice. I will choreograph a new ballet for our American tour. She is a great admirer of India, of Gandhi and Tagore and Indian art and philosophy. She says, “Come to Venice, it will be an honour to have you. Come and stay in my house and practise there.” So we are going.’ Now, to Laila’s instant and intense joy, his eyes met hers in smiling complicity.

  Madame Lacan seemed aware of it even without looking. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘and then – America, you say?’

  ‘And then – America,’ he smiled. His smile was still directed at Laila who leant against the counter to still her trembling. ‘Your niece wishes to come with us and study dance in Venice.’

  Madame Lacan went on with her knitting. Laila was about to seize it from her hands and throw it on the floor when she said at last, ‘Laila can study dance here in Paris. Paris is the centre of the dance world. We have the ballet here, the opera, also the modern dance movements. Do you advise her to give up such fine possibilities and take up Indian dance instead?’ She pronounced the words with superb disdain.

  There was a moment of total silence while the dancer turned away from Laila to regard Madame Lacan, fully aware of the disdain. In that moment, the balance of things, till then hovering in the air in a tentative manner, with an almost audible sound of grinding and turning, reared about and established an entirely new balance. This one, unlike the old, was not tentative at all. It rang in the air as clearly as a bell.

  Taking his arm, and his fur cap, off the counter, the dancer stood before Madame Lacan and said, ‘I have seen ballet in Paris. I have been to the opera also. It is entertainment only. Not spiritual like Indian dance. No spiritual side at all.’ He was putting his cap on his head now, straightening it, and his face looked dark beneath it. ‘If Laila wishes to develop the spiritual side of dancing, she must learn Indian dance, not French ballet and opera and all that.’

  Madame Lacan put her knitting down where his cap had been earlier. She was staring at him with a kind of interest now, even regard, really staring and really taking his measure. She even seemed to be smiling, an almost indecipherable smile under her grey moustache.

  But as soon as she saw that Laila was watching her, she picked up her knitting again. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you think Laila should accompany you on your tour?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘she should come to Venice where I will hold classes, where she can learn. It is essential,’ he said, ‘for her spiritual development,’ and now he threw Laila a look that was not only authoritative and proprietorial but also, to her intense gratification, nakedly covetous.

  He was about to sweep out of the bookshop when Madame Lacan, remembering what Laila had told her, suddenly called out, ‘Please have a cigar.’

  He turned at the door and said to her, ‘Madame, in India a man who teaches dance is a guru, and a guru is not only a teacher, he is a spiritual teacher. I do not smoke or touch alcohol.’

  Afterwards Madame Lacan was in a thoroughly bad temper. Laila remained to hover around, to talk, longing to confide and be confided in, but Madame Lacan only snapped at her, threw away her knitting, held her head in her hands, said she had a headache, said she had to go home and rest, she was tired, tired of it all, she had seen everything, gone through everything before, what was the point of going on any more?

  Laila found it prudent to stay away for a few days, fearing Madame Lacan might regret the role she had played at Laila’s request and withdraw her acquiescence to their plan, their plot. But once Krishna and his troupe had left on their tour, she could not bear to be anywhere else but in the bookshop, sitting on a step, reading and studying. The female dancer’s laughing exposure of her ignorance about Radha, the beloved of the blue god Krishna, and about Lila which was the dance, the play of the gods, made her confront the vast area of her ignorance about the art and the country she was about to embrace. Now, instead of looking at beautiful pictures that might give her beautiful dreams, she read Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, Pierre Loti’s L’Inde, Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, went through Great Religions of the World, Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga, the Bhagavad Gita, Tagore’s The Gardener and Gitanjali – pouncing on every reference to Krishna, to Radha, seeing in their romance the model of her own affair, and yet clinging, secretly, to the name she had first chosen: Lila of Krishna Lila, because that contained the first impulse, the one that led the way.

  Returning to the house with an armful of books Madame Lacan had loaned her, her eyes tired with the strain of reading by dim light, Laila looked so worn by her studies that no one in the family could suspect her of neglecting them. They noted however that, tired as she seemed, she slept badly. Of this the two older cousins were of course the most aware, being the victims of Laila’s nocturnal restlessness. They would beg her to turn off the light, to go to sleep, only to have her sit crosslegged on her bed, her sleeplessness almost audible in the silence of the dark.

  She was already up when they awoke, again sitting on her bed, wild haired, and when they looked at her inquisitively, she laughed. ‘Oh I have had such a dream – it woke me up! Shall I tell you what I dreamt?’ and she would launch upon a story that they later described to their mother as being crazed, weird, even frightening.

  ‘She told us the story of a woman who gave birth to a serpent –’

  ‘And a serpent who had a ruby in the middle of its forehead and lived in a dark cave and attacked anyone who came to steal it –’

  ‘And a holy man who meditated night and day for three years and then turned into a tiger –’

  ‘And a witch who had her feet turned the wrong way and lived in a tree over the road where travellers would pass –’

  ‘And a princess who married a lion –’

  Aunt Françoise hushed them fiercely. ‘Let us not have such talk in this house,’ she cried, covering her ears. ‘Not a word. Silence!’

  Silenced, Laila turned even stranger. The cousins would wake to strange sounds in the night and see her, in the pale light filtering through the curtains, performing the most outlandish movements and gestures in the middle of the room, striking poses and weaving her arms about her head. When they hissed at her in fright, she jumped into her bed and pulled the covers over her head. Next morning she claimed to have no memory of the incident. ‘I must have been sleepwalking,’ she told the cousins, terrifying them out of their wits.

  In early spring Laila walked along the Seine where the willow trees were strung with the glass beads of their new leaves and the shopkeepers on the bank were unpacking boxes of books, rolling out racks of clothes and setting up gilt-framed pictures, but the air still blew chill as ice. In the Luxembourg Gardens she watched the gardeners carefully unwrapping straw from around the young, tender saplings; the plane trees were still bare, stark as amputated limbs in the transparent light that was another aspect of ice. On the tennis courts figures in white were already running about and the ping of balls on racquet strings were like cracks appearing in that ice.

  She wande
red down to the Fontaine de Médicis and sat there on the ledge; there were no garlands and no lotuses in that icy light, but when she leaned over the glassy blackness of the water she could see the reflection of her own face float in it like a pallid fish. She sat staring at it as if it were a face she might not see again and ought to memorise. Then she could leave it behind, in the Fontaine de Médicis, and go in search of a new one.

  On Sunday mornings in spring, Aunt Françoise’s exertions rose to their pitch. Since daybreak she would be flying in and out of her daughters’ rooms, exhorting them, watching over them as they washed and powdered themselves and dressed and had their hair done. The Sunday breakfast was no meal of repose or leisure. Instead, mother and daughters sat in partial undress, on the edges of their chairs, some in tears, all in a state of tense endeavour. Rolls crumbled and coffee half drunk, they went through the ultimate stages of their toilet till summoned to the front door by the father, in his grey coat and hat, a furled umbrella in his hand. He looked more melancholy than ever – perhaps he would have preferred to linger over breakfast and the newspapers but he was taking his family to church. Aunt Françoise appeared at her most painstakingly elegant, her hair pinned upon her head in curls, and topping them a frivolous hat, all bits of feathered net and berried twigs, a vision of soft and gleaming surfaces and textures, even her face an unnaturally floral pink and violet. She had a little smile of triumph upon her lips, a sense of her own achievement as she looked over her four daughters – Claudette and Yvette in pink, with white gloves and white hats and white shoes, and Ninette and Babette in sailor suits with straw hats, snowy stockings and jet patent-leather boots. All assembled, they were ready to march to church.

  Before they exited, however, Aunt Françoise sighed. ‘Now, where is she? Where is that one gone, that Laila?’

  The girls tittered as they informed her, ‘She’s out, she said not to wait.’

  Aunt and uncle exchanged looks of mutual helplessness, outrage and offence, then they set off and, once outdoors, Sunday shone upon their heads like blessings upon the good.

  What was unforgivable, what was really not to be endured, was that when they came out of church, there was Laila sitting quite calmly in the spring sunshine in place Saint-Sulpice itself – she had not thought of taking herself elsewhere so they would not come upon her. No, she was sprawled out on a bench, holding a paper bag on her lap and her legs stretched out before her. Her head was tilted up to the trees with their fine new greenery, lit by the sun to a pale yellow sheen, her eyes half closed to their dazzle. She held a croissant to her mouth and was nibbling at it slowly, clearly enjoying every crumb.

  While the family stood transfixed on the flight of stone steps, staring, the entire flock of pigeons that inhabited the square swooped down on Laila, and in a moment she was covered by pullulating feathers and pecking beaks and grasping pink claws. Laila’s arms flailed, scattering them, but they were Parisian pigeons, a tough and not too timid breed, and they only rose a little in the air and then descended again onto her head, her shoulders, and the bench. Finally, with a shout of exasperation – making the family on the steps start – she flung the remaining croissant half across the square, and sent the pigeons swooping and seething and hustling after it like a mad mob of rainbow-tinted grey harpies. She was revealed upon the bench again, in the spring sun, defiant.

  *

  The pigeons have risen in a cloud, the girl is revealed in the sun, and now stands up, brushing the crumbs from her silk shirt. Sophie watches her as she slowly crosses the square, stops by the fountain where the small boy is trying to get back the sailing boat that has moved beyond his reach, and then looks up, across the square directly at Sophie. Between them the sun is blazing with its summer violence, stones and walls and water are all lit to incandescence. Sophie is dazzled. She raises her hand to shield her eyes and as if the girl were an apparition, or made of drops of water, she evaporates.

  Sophie has drawn her chair under the striped canvas awning of the café on the Zattere, her eyes shaded by huge dark glasses, her cup of cappuccino and her Venice guide on the table beside her.

  Up and down the length of the Zattere young people lie as though they were on a beach, and the sun is pouring out of the cloudless sky onto them to further the illusion. Pale blond hair, tender pink flesh, all stretched out and exposed as in some pagan salutation to the sun.

  The milky green water, a pale opalescent jade, of the canal is churned up by the water traffic – the traghetti, the vaporetti, the gondole, the cargo boats ply it continuously, and in the distance there is some indication of larger ships on larger waters, belonging to the world of trade and enterprise that is here rendered obsolescent by art.

  Across the lagoon looms the marvellously geometric mass of San Giorgio in a pink solidity magically rendered into an abstraction of lines and globes, and the houses that line the Giudecca in their own simpler, smaller perfection of ochre, sepia, burnt siena and terracotta rose.

  Sophie, her head tilted back and her legs stretched out before her, drinks in the liquid colours of the scene as if she were drinking sweet, syrupy sherbets. She feels within her a suffusing warmth. It is enough to lull one first into a dream, and then sleep.

  But she twitches herself into wakefulness, pays for the cappuccino, collects her guide book, feels in her purse to make sure she has her address- and her notebook, and then strolls past San Gesuati which is shut, with people sitting in contented indolence on its steps, awash in sunlight, and then turns away from the lagoon, down a lane which is shadowed and silent and where she becomes aware of the sound of her sandals on the stones, into a stony campo that is chill with shadows.

  There she stands and opens her guide and studies it alternately with the scene. The door in front of her is heavy, ancient and shut.

  *

  Signora Durante stood at the head of the great flight of stairs that curved up in two semicircles from the stone courtyard, a single camellia tree in bloom between them. As the gondola arrived, she let out a cry and spread out her arms in welcome to the little band of Indians slowly and with difficulty disem-barking onto the stones that were lapped by the water of the narrow canal at high tide. The gondolier was gallant, offered the ladies a crooked arm, but they ignored it and struggled out, clutching at the saris and shawls that dipped into the rising water. Signora Durante gave cries of warning and advice and eventually they managed to lift themselves free of the gondola and the water and into the courtyard. Lifting up their hems, heavy with water, they came up the steps, gazing up at her and the façade of the great house behind her, and for a moment Signora Durante was able to imagine her home in the time of her ancestors, for so they must have looked, in silk gowns and embroidered shawls, arriving in Venice at the end of a voyage.

  Alas, she had no troop of servants to rush down and help them with their luggage. There were only she and faithful Gianni in the whole echoing palazzo. But she flung open her arms and let out a deep and throaty cry of ‘Kr-rish-naa!’ that stopped the small band in its approach and made them stare at her as she stood, her hair wrapped in a tall turban of green silk stitched with gold, wearing pyjamas of purple silk and her feet bare on the stones with a gold chain looped over one ankle. Behind her were the tall shuttered windows, the sagging doors, the carved balconies and the waterlogged silence.

  They smiled tentatively and she came rushing down the stairs to meet them halfway, fleet as a girl in her delight, laughter bubbling up in her throat. She drew herself short of embracing Krishna. In fact, she seemed overcome with uncertainty over whether to embrace him or fall at his feet, and so collapsed in an attitude that suggested both and accomplished neither. It was an attitude expressive of the shyness of a young girl in the presence of the adored. Her lined and heavy face blushed as pink as a rose or a peony.

  He, not shy, not embarrassed, put out one hand to touch her in blessing, but she was taller than he, and he touched only her shoulder and said, ‘See, we have come. I have brought everyone.’


  She tore her eyes away from his face on which she had been feasting, and looked at the others. She knew them and greeted them by name: ‘Ah,Vijaya. And Sonali. Ah, I am so happy –’ and then she noticed Laila standing on the bottom step, hanging back, looking away in embarrassment, her hair in a long black pigtail down her back. There was a little silence and then Signora Durante asked, ‘And this – this little one? A new one, my Krishna?’ and her voice seemed to have a crack in it. Out of curiosity, then, Laila looked up at her.

  Signora Durante had been hostess to Krishna’s dance troupe in Rome, in Paris, in Lausanne. They had already visited the various outposts of her family’s empire; they remembered the apartment in Rome, its immense shuttered windows opening onto tiled roofs where cats prowled and quarrelled at night and the nearby river gave off a muddy effusion; the apartment in Paris with the equally immense but glassier windows that looked onto the Eiffel Tower piercing the sky in its theatrical fashion; and the house in Lausanne where they held aside the curtains to see purple crocuses emerge from the snow and there had been goosedown quilts and a prevailing smell of freshly ground coffee. In each she had appeared in a suitable costume – chic black suits and feathered hats, flowing Fortuny gowns, embroidered dirndl skirts – and fabricated an enthusiastic welcome and maintained her generous hospitality, throwing parties at which she might introduce Krishna to likely impresarios or supporters of Oriental art and mysticism, without allowing him or his troupe a glimpse of the tensions and tantrums that lay behind the graceful façade – the fights with her children, the arguments with lawyers, the warnings of friends, the spiteful gossip of neighbours and the complicated dealings with bankers and tradesmen . . .

  But now, in Venice, these were beginning to show. Making sly, mocking appearances in the cracks and rents in the old, decrepit house in unguarded corners and moments, they began to intrude in a way the guests could scarcely fail to notice. If they had been guests, that is, and not a dance troupe that had come to perform and establish itself even though others might have told them that Italy after the War was hardly a dance stage; their leader might not have listened even then, he could not conceive of anything hindering such a divine aspiration.