by Anita Desai
‘A raja, a raja,’ the Signora laughed back, delighted. ‘That is what he is, is he not?’
‘And where did you find him, in a palazzo, in India?’
‘Oh no, Magdalena. It was I who was staying in a palazzo, with my friends the Raja and Rani of Begumpura; they arranged a tiger hunt for my Gaetano, you know, in the days when poor Gaetano was up to such things. And Krishna came to a party they gave in their palazzo for us. That is how I met him. He himself lived in a poor, poor quarter of the city of Benares – you will not believe how poor, not even a bed or a table, just the bare floor on which they slept and ate. But when he came to the palazzo to dance, bearing himself like a prince, he was much more a prince than my poor Gaetano or the Raja of Begumpura who was only this high and not too beautiful.’
Signora Celli gave Gabriella a little tap with her fan which she carried about in her plump pink hand as if she were still a young belle of another century. ‘Then ask him to dance for us as he did for you. Let us all see him dance.’
The Signora looked alarmed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I don’t know if he wishes to do that. He is so sensitive, you know, to people, and the atmosphere – but if he wishes, he will, Magdalena,’ and she darted sideways to receive another guest. ‘Dear Ambrose! Here is Ambrose!’ she cried, opening her arms to a small dapper man in black who stood by the door with his eyebrows raised quizzically at the scene. ‘My oldest friend,’ she burbled, perhaps not tactfully, planting a kiss on his cheek. ‘And always the perfect English gentleman,’ she added, surveying the perfection of his dress and toilette while he fingered his cravat and began to play the role asked of him in Venice of the English dilletante, a painter of watercolours, instructor of dozens of hopeful English watercolourists who filled the city in the spring and summer, and above all that of a perfect guest at all the best Venetian homes.
Trusting him to perform that, she led him up to be introduced to Krishna, but the meeting turned out to be cool, quite noticeably chilly in fact. The Englishman did not seem to find the Indian dancer quite so wonderfully exotic as the Venetians did, and the Indian dancer seemed no more enthusiastic at meeting the Englishman. They turned away from each other quite soon, and Ambrose was heard crying ‘Gianni, my dear fellow, have you one of those lovely little fishes from the lagoon for me to try? I’m feeling peckish, you know,’ when one of his former pupils suddenly appeared and greeted him effusively: ‘Ah, you are still here! I’m so relieved! Everyone is leaving Italy in droves, I was so afraid you, too –’ ‘Leave Italy? leave Venice? Why, what nonsense!’ he replied.
The party might have swirled around in a circle without a centre but Krishna now clapped his hands, imperiously, and with a glint in his eyes announced he would present to them a new dancer and a new dance especially choreographed for her here at the Casa Rosa itself. He even threw a generous look in the direction of the Signora as if offering it to her, and she leant back against the wall, crimson and damp with delight.
At his signal, Laila stepped forward, and she was in the costume the Signora had designed for her, the peacock’s costume of green lamé and gold feathers and blue lapis lazuli jewellery. Her appearance was so striking that silence fell even before the drums began to beat or the cymbals to ring. Then, with Krishna calling out the tala, she took up her stance under the chandelier and began to move first her eyes, then her neck, then the arms and shoulders and hands, till finally her feet took up the beat and moved to his command.
The guests formed a ring, watching, and as she shimmered and sparkled before their eyes like some creature of the tropical forests and exotic lands, they could not be sure if what they marvelled at was this human creature transforming herself into an inhuman apparition, or at her assuming a wholly Indian art and culture and making it uncannily her own, or at something altogether inexplicable and subtle for which they had no words, only applause.
Krishna too stood watching, clapping, and now and then casting a look around to see the effect on the audience, when Signora Celli cried out, ‘You, too, beautiful prince, you too must dance,’ whereupon he stepped forward, slipped into the rhythm of the music and began to dance with Laila under the chandelier, lifting his arms till he encircled her, turning back his head as if basking in her glory.
The performance, although brief, brought forth such a storm of applause that it drowned out Ambrose’s voice, saying plaintively ‘Oh not that tired old peacock dance again! They can scarcely pass that off as classical, can they? Why, it’s what street performers put on in India.’ The others were crying ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ and if there had been roses around, they would have certainly rained them upon the dancers.
Instead Gianni doffed his chef’s hat and crying ‘Ole!’ leapt into their midst. He had fetched his guitar from the kitchen where it always hung by the onions and the peppers, and tied a red napkin around his neck, and now he struck it loudly, stamped his feet and standing before Laila, called ‘Dance! Dance!’ The Signora’s hands flew to her mouth in horror, and she looked to see how Krishna took this intrusion. As she feared, his face darkened, a storm cloud settled low on his brow, but the irrepressible Gianni had seized Laila around the waist and the girl did not break away from his grasp. Instead, she gave a light laugh, stamped her feet in their anklets a few times in keeping with his, but within a minute she had danced out of the circle the younger guests now formed, responding to the Spanish music Gianni beat upon his guitar. Signora Celli’s daughter Dora was stamping her high-heeled shoes and clapping her bangled hands while her friend Pietro, a clown of a man, rotund and bald and gold-toothed, began to swing and prance too. The salon was beginning to swirl with dancers; everyone was turning into a dancer.
The Signora, transfixed with horror, watched Krishna fold his arms about him and turn into a stone statue, even the bronze glint faded from him. How was she to distract him from this mood? She hurried away, thinking in her desperation of dear old Tatiana Bronowska, where was she? Tatiana went to every dance performance in Venice, entertained every dance troupe in her splendid salon, and knew Krishna; she would help, with all her enchanting gossip about Diaghilev, about Nijinsky and Pavlova . . . As the Signora searched for her, she heard voices around her she had been able earlier to ignore.
‘Say what you like, my dear, but a man like Mussolini is needed if we are to recover, and as for the squadristi, why should you fear them? They are here to protect us, and have they not brought the strikes to an end? Do you remember what one went through? But they have things under control now. Without them, we should be taken over by the Bolsheviks –’
‘Oh, what fantasies! Are we not a democracy? have we not elections?’
‘You wish to leave such matters to the populace? What gives you such confidence?’
The Signora raised her hands to her ears; she could not bear such talk in the midst of what was to have been a celebration, a festival of beauty. She looked guiltily towards Krishna to see if he had heard them too, and then saw Laila, stepping forwards from the dancing swirl, holding a small glass of orange juice in her hand and offering it to Krishna as prettily as if it were a flower, smiling in that way both flirtatious and serene that the Signora found so breathtaking. It was a totally Indian gesture and Indian expression, and yet Laila was not Indian: what was she? The Signora stared and watched as she coaxed Krishna into accepting the glass, into smiling even, caressingly, in a way that perfectly complemented hers.
The following morning she sent for Laila – Gianni brought the message to her as she sat on the parquet floor of the salon, untying her anklets after an hour of solitary exercises amidst the debris of the party. The Signora waited for her up in the small room on the top floor. She was seated on the bed, holding in her lap a little box. She looked at Laila with the face of a child trying very hard to be brave and not cry. She must have been crying earlier: her face was pinker than ever.
‘Oh, thank you for coming, my dear,’ she said to Laila, ‘thank you. You are so sweet. What will I do when you all
leave –’ She began to search for a handkerchief but she did not want to release the box and so was not successful. Her face seemed to dissolve.
Laila stood at the foot of the bed, holding the anklets in her hand, waiting. She shifted on her bare feet, she hoped not too evidently with impatience: if only the leavetakings were done with and they could go.
The Signora did not miss the impatience. She opened the box hurriedly and held out something that shone on the palm of her hand. ‘It is an opal. The setting is Venetian, in silver. I wanted – I tried to give it to Krishna-ji, but he would not take it from me. He said he could not. Why? I wanted him so much to have it. It belonged to my family – to my grandmother – and is what you call an heirloom.’ She turned it over and over with trembling fingers. ‘It really belongs here, in the Casa Rosa. But I thought it would be, for Krishna-ji, a nice – a nice memento.’ She looked at Laila in appeal for understanding but Laila’s face betrayed no feeling whatever. ‘No, Krishna-ji will not take it from me. So please, my dear, will you let me give it to you? And I will ask you please, when you have left Venice, to give it to him. He will not be able to return it to me then, you see,’ she explained when Laila frowned, puzzled by the Signora’s plan. ‘I want him to have a memento of his time in the Casa Rosa. Perhaps he will wear it sometimes? On his hand, you know, the opal will look – ah, bellissimo!’ she ended and began to cry, holding out the ring so piteously that Laila stepped forward, plucked the ring from her hand and marched out, wanting only to bring the curtain down on the scene.
That night Laila was woken by a dream so vivid that it broke through her sleep. She saw Krishna lying in the water of the canal, a few feet below the surface, his silk shawl and his long hair spread out around him, floating with the weeds. She was stooping over him in terror when a long black gondola sped up and slid right over him, its whole black length like a hearse covering him. When it had passed, there was no sign left of Krishna but a great trail of bright red blood instead, flowing river-like through the canal between the palazzi.
She shot up in bed with the horror of that bright blood washing against the stones, lapping even at her bare feet. She sat clutching her knees to her and panting for a normal, waking breath and saw, at the window, the moon so bright that it must have been that that woke her.
The Signora came down the steps to see them into the gondola although it was so early that the dim light tinged everyone’s faces green and made tempers short. She was sending Gianni along to see them onto the train at the station; she would not come herself: it was not clear if Krishna had forbidden her to and she was obeying orders, or if she was staying back to see to Sonali who was to be sent on her way to India later in the day; the Signora had booked a passage for her. ‘You must not worry about her,’ the Signora assured them as Gianni helped them onto their seats. ‘I will take such good care of her, she will be safe, and when you reach India – there she will be, waiting –’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Krishna snapped in annoyance, wrapping his shawl about him against the damp of early morning. ‘She will be safe, you will be safe, all will be safe. But now we must leave or we will miss our train and then we will not be so safe.’
The Signora stepped back as if slapped. For a moment shock wiped every expression off her face so that it seemed a part of the stones of the wall behind her.
The gondolier was bending at the waist to exert every effort upon the pole and cast off from the steps. The water swirled as the boat veered about and Gianni’s voice rang out in the silence like a gull’s: ‘Damn! I have water in my shoe!’ Shanta and Chandra tittered behind their hands. Laila craned to see the early sun light up the gulls that swooped along the length of the canal, crying, and the tops of the palazzi, bits of gold pricked out in the grey and beginning to gleam. Krishna touched her hand and said, ‘My princess, my rani.’
While the others watched the scene slide by, bemused by the light and the silence, she opened the box she held in her hand and took out the Signora’s ring. It looked pretty, even moon-like in the half light. She held it out to Krishna. ‘The Signora gave me this,’ she said, ‘to give you. She wanted you to wear it.’
He was looking at her hand, at the delicacy and slimness of her fingers, and their pallor. He only glanced at the ring and it seemed to fill him with disgust. ‘That? That is only silver, and an opal. How can I wear such a thing?’ He gestured it away. Laila was left with the ring in the palm of her hand.
*
Sophie arrives at the courtyard by way of a small wooden door in the lane at the back of the house. This is not a grand entrance, in fact it is mean, but the courtyard is the same that can be entered through a great doorway that opens onto a flight of stone stairs that leads down to the canal. For such an entrance, however, a gondola would be necessary and Sophie has not engaged one. The courtyard is cobbled but there is one camellia tree, not in bloom, and in the corners some tall uncut grass, quick movements and rustling to indicate a family of felines that lives there invisibly, but there are none of the torches, or the sudden and striking exits and entrances that might be imagined as within the history of such a house and of which she knows only one slight chapter.
She has written ahead to announce her visit – or, rather, to request it, and she is expected, so she climbs the stairs to where she thinks is the salon where Laila first danced in public, the Venetian public, if such a word can be used for that galaxy of Italian society as had once been guests here.
But the white-haired but still upright woman who meets her at the top of the stairs takes her down a narrow hall to a small room that carpets, chairs, framed photographs, boxes and a tea tray contrive to make even smaller. Box-like, it is clearly a compartment of a larger room that has been divided, as great houses so often are. A glance upwards shows the mouldings on the ceiling disappear behind a wooden partition to spread elsewhere.
Sophie feels disappointed but she is asked, ‘You will have tea?’ with perfect politeness, if with the chill of caution, or suspicion even.
She feels tea can only help, not hinder, the questioning she must embark on, and accepts. She tries not to be too open in her searching of the woman’s face, dress, hair, hands. Although she has found photographs of the Signora, she has never seen any of her daughter or the rest of the family. What strikes her now is the total absence of silks, jewels, flamboyance and colour that she has naively expected. Here is only plainness, economy, sobriety; not poverty, but not wealth either: the shoes are square and brown, the stockings cotton, the dress no designer’s.
‘Will you mind,’ she asks when the silence is first broken into by the tinkling and clattering of tea things and then is empty again, ‘if I ask you a little about your mother’s friendship with the Indian dancer Krishna and the time he spent here in this house?’
As she had feared, the woman shrinks back a visible inch or two and her face is clenched with dislike. There is a yellow tinge to her skin, unhealthy. She holds her hands on her knees, tightly. How could the laughing, loving, rich and colourful Signora have mothered this daughter? But it was often so, the daughter recoiling from the mother even in the matter of physical resemblance. Doubtlessly she herself has a daughter who loves party frocks and trinkets –
‘Is it necessary?’ the woman queries with distaste.
‘For a book I am writing,’ Sophie apologises, drawing out a yellow notepad in an effort to look professional. The tea stays undrunk.
‘And the book is about –?’
‘Ah, I see – so many characters. No, it is not about the dancer Krishna. Nor about your mother,’ Sophie assures her. ‘It is about a young girl who was with him – she was called Laila then.’
‘Oh! And what is she called now?’ asks the woman, raising her eyebrows very high.
Sophie laughs: the sarcasm is unexpected, and welcome. She settles back in the old leather of the chair, more at ease. ‘She lives in India,’ she informs the woman. ‘She has become famous there. She is known as the Mother.’
&nb
sp; ‘And whose mother is she?’ the woman queries.
Again Sophie finds herself laughing at the tone, so sharply sarcastic. ‘No one’s! She has, I believe, no children. Perhaps no husband either. But she is the Mother in – in the religious sense.’
‘A Mother of God?’
Sophie explodes into a giggle: she is enjoying this. ‘A Mother in an ashram in India. Mother to the devotees there –’ she tries to explain, and finds she must explain on and on. The clock against the wall strikes five with a loud, ringing whirr and much clatter, making her stop short. ‘It’s already five! And I had wanted to ask you – do you remember her?’
‘I never saw this Mother,’ the woman replies promptly and emphatically, ‘and no one like her. As a child I saw the dancer Krishna often in our house. That was enough.’
‘Do you have any letters of your mother’s regarding this person? Or photographs that I might see?’
For a moment it seems that Sophie has gone too far, intruding too much. The woman seems to withdraw again, hold herself in tightly, as if checked. But she undoes her fist, gets to her feet and goes to the desk that stands under the clock and, opening a drawer, brings out a box. ‘When you wrote you were coming,’ she says, ‘I brought these down from my mother’s room. For you to see.’
Sophie is on her feet too, her hands eager to receive. ‘Oh, how kind. Thank you. You can’t imagine what this means –’
‘It is nothing,’ the woman says shortly. ‘They are just old photos. They mean nothing to me. Those dancers – they were an obsession of my mother’s, unfortunately. An expensive one. You can look through them if you like. I can’t promise what you are looking for.’ Spilling them out of the box onto the sofa, she leaves the room with the tea tray.
Sophie thinks she is alone now with the photographs but something she had taken for a lump, a piece of knitting or a cushion, heaves up on a corner of the sofa and leaps to the ground to follow the woman out of the room as though the photographs are the final insult.