The acrid, crusted Languedoc, did not have the rolling, self-assured sweetness of Provence. The Rhone divided them, blue green, mother Rhone. And where the Rhone met the Mediterranean rose the stub, collected Church of Ste Marie- de-la-Mer, where Marie-Madeleine had landed, and where the gypsies still come to crown their king. Farther away, where the Mediterranean turns inwards, withdraws with an intimate tenderness into the land, and curves again to make the castellated hilltops of Liguria, is Italy; there man believed himself to be whole, and so invented the Paradise where the acorn grows. I had shut myself in, and tried to isolate myself in the present of separated existence. Mother Rhone, sister to Ganga, flowed on the other side. Madeleine’s kingdom was not my world, her trees, virgins, Buddhist pigeons were not of my understanding. I lived among the unicorns. I wrote letters to Madeleine and I had no reply.
The days were filled with many splendid things. As the sunshine had given me an instinct to see, to discover, I went into libraries, families, monasteries and found manuscripts and stories of the Cathars, for Catharism is a very living tradition in the Languedoc; and I marvelled at the sheer magnanimity of their faith. I did not hear from Savithri for a very long time. Then came just a line, sent on by Cooks from Paris: ‘The radar, Rama, has landed the plane where it should. Forgive me. S.’ The Ligurian coast seemed to shine with a greener brilliance than I had ever known before. Paradise, I thought, does, does exist…
One very cold winter evening early in January, when the snow had fallen, and the whole world seemed re-created, I went back to Aix. It was moving to hear the long lamentations of the Marseille streetcars, to smell the rich, soap-like air of the city, and slowly, desperately seek back the hills, the mountains, from which so much sweetness, so much purity once had flowed. The Buddha might have passed there, so cool and tender the landscape looked, and it was as if the stones were but elephants that had knelt, as the Compassionate One passed by, offering their homage, kneeling with their trunks between their legs. The Buddha had touched them, and such was their love of the Lord that ‘Let his touch remain’, they said, and so became stone. And in between the legs of the elephants, where they laid their trunks, little altars were built by the Goths, and then by the Romans and the French, first in adoration of the sun and moon, Apollo, Zeus, and Diana; and then time turned them into chapels of the Virgin, the Mother of God. I could have knelt as the bus swung upwards. Holiness is wheresoever love is.
I entered the Cathedral of St Sauveur and wandered into myself. How such a structure seems to mirror one’s own mystery, the memory of one’s self, the picture of one’s being. The dead live in the towers, they say, and the dead speak in compassion to us. Father, mother, brother, husband, or son: speak, that we bear kindness to one another, that we revere one another, for in death there is no reverence. Death is a shadow, a despair of light.
I knelt, I do not know for what, and hid my eyes from myself. I did not weep, I did not sing, I did not know. I knelt that happiness might be. That the dead might pardon us for our mistakes, for we are poor fools, thinking that the Rhone divides mankind. Love was born on those garigues of Provence, and love lights us when we pray.
Love shines as the instinct in the step, where we move. The snow has fallen again. We leave our footsteps behind telling love we have loved. The post office may be there and may not take letters — for someone, they think, has cut the bridge on the Rhone— but where chevaliers have walked, and have conquered kingdoms for their ladies, why could not a Brahmin, a simple foolish soul, go up the steps and see the light on the second floor of Villa Ste Cécile? I go up the steps, I the husband of Madeleine.
There were irises on both sides of the pathway. The snow had bent them, the snow overflowing the orange trees. I rang, where my name still was, ‘K. R. Ramaswamy,’ and Madeleine came down the staircase. She was light of foot, though she was still round; her fat had not diminished. Like the moon in a theatre, there was a crescent somewhere in the sky, and an abundant purity about the stars. Madeleine opened the gate.
‘It is I,’ I said. ‘C’est moi, Madeleine.’ She did not seem surprised. She did not look happy: she did not look hesitant. ‘May I come in?’ I said, as she walked back up the garden. I closed the gate behind me. She held the door wide ajar, for me to come in.
It was a strange house, it was someone else’s house. There were wheel-barrows on the landing, and bottles and two bicycles. I went up the stairway. The rooms were bare. Almost all the furniture was gone, it seemed. There was the same low bed, covered with a yellow bed-cover. There were many chakras and mandalas on them, like one sees on Tibetan tanakas. The table was richer with a few more vajras, a few more demons, and a very beautiful big Avalokiteshwara. There were red hibiscus in the water, and at the foot of the Avalokiteshwara. I sat in the only chair in the room, still one of the plush chairs that had come from her mother. She sat on the floor, squat like a Hindu, and took the rosary from the table. The room smelt of something familiar — it smelt of sandalwood.
‘Why did you come?’
‘To see you.’
‘You cannot see anything but the eighteen aggregates.’
‘But eighteen aggregates can see eighteen aggregates,’ I said, laughing.
‘Then it is no business of mine,’ she said, and started counting her beads. I sat there, in the smell of sandalwood. In the inner picture, of Indra and Prajapathi, of the Buddha that was, and the Buddha to be, I saw mountains, rivers, and snows, animals and mankind walking backward through history, as in a film, as in some ancient story. I could see Madeleine kneeling before an ascetic and saying, ‘My Lord, are you a man or a divinity.’ And the yellow-robed one answered, ‘May I know what I am, lady? I am but a wanderer, a minstrel, a mendicant.’ And she gave him, she in the infinitude of her compassion, a home and a bowl, hot water to wash in and cold, cool water to drink. She rubbed him, did the lady, with many sweet-smelling unguents, and bathed him in the love of her tears; her hair grew long and curled and black, for her love was so simple in devotion, and she rose and she sat, as though love was a gesture, a genuflection, and she parodied herself out of existence, remembering the love she bore the ascetic. And she lived a long and intent life, in world after world, bathed herself and combed her hair, washed herself and prepared herself, as though for a wedding; but when the earth came and the light of trees and rivers, the intelligence of Plato, the directness of Descartes, she gave herself a name and a station, and prepared herself for a festival.
Festival is only the commemoration of what is not; you worship the non-existent to prove that you exist. You worship yourself in your birthdays, saying time is eternal. You worship your son knowing you will die. You worship your husband the Lord, knowing he is a fool, a thief, a non-existent Brahmin, ‘made of the eighteen aggregates of Nagarjuna.’ True, the snow is pure and white in the garden outside, true that the sun must shine some day on the footsteps that have been left behind; true, too, that the Buddha has passed this way, and that elephants have knelt; and that the Black Virgin of St Ouen still cures dread diseases — three circumambulations with a stick of oak, and four ‘OM — JRIMs’, and a draught of the juice of red dandelion with honey, and eight narrow nights on the white carpet asleep — and the next morning, what you give cures, what you say heals. But love, my love, cannot be healed, cannot be said. It must go as it came. It must not linger, it must not name, it must die; for it was made of the eighteen aggregates. Love that is love remains, like those hibiscus in the crystal; the water reflects them, as my eye reflects God. Look, look into it, my Brahmin, and see me. ‘Apri gli occhi e riguarda qual son io.’