‘It’s a privilege,’ I said. ‘You are very kind, I would never have dared hope so much.’
‘We rarely receive outside visitors in this centre,’ he went on in his vaguely apologetic tone. ‘But from what I gather it seems that you are not simply a curious outsider.’
I realised that after my rather mysterious note, my telephone calls, the afternoon visit in which I had referred only to a ‘missing person’, I could hardly carry on in this cryptic and alarmist way. I would have to explain myself clearly, precisely. But what did I have to ask, after all? Only a remote piece of information, a hypothetical clue: a possible link to bring me closer to Xavier.
‘I am looking for someone,’ I said. ‘His name is Xavier Janata Pinto, he’s been missing almost a year. The last I heard of him he was in Bombay, but I have good reason to believe that he may have been in contact with the Theosophical Society, and that is what brings me here.’
‘Would it be indiscreet to ask you what reasons you have for believing this?’ my host asked.
A waiter came in with a tray and we served ourselves sparingly: I out of politeness, he no doubt out of habit.
‘I’d like to know if he was a member of the Theosophical Society,’ I said.
My host looked at me hard. ‘He was not,’ he stated softly.
‘But he was corresponding with you,’ I said.
‘He may have been,’ he said, ‘but in that case it would be a private correspondence and confidential.’
We began to eat vegetable rissoles with some totally tasteless rice. The waiter stood to one side, the tray in his hands. At a nod from my host he quietly disappeared.
‘We do have files, but they are reserved for our members. However, these files do not include private correspondence,’ he explained.
I nodded in silence, because I realised that he was manipulating the conversation as he chose and it was no good going on with requests that were too direct and explicit.
‘Are you familiar with India?’ he asked a moment later.
‘No,’ I answered, ‘this is the first time I’ve been here. I still haven’t really taken in where I am.’
‘I wasn’t referring so much to the geography,’ he explained. ‘I meant the culture. What books have you read?’
‘Very few,’ I answered. ‘At the moment I’m reading one called A Travel Survival Kit. It’s turning out to be quite useful.’
‘Very amusing,’ he said icily. ‘And nothing else?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘a few things, but I don’t remember them very well. I must confess to having come unprepared. The only thing I remember fairly well is a book by Schlegel, but not the famous one, his brother I think; it was called: On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians.’
He thought a moment and said: ‘It must be an old book.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘published in 1808.’
‘The Germans were very much attracted by our culture. They have often formulated interesting opinions about India, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘I’m not in a position to say with any confidence.’
‘What do you think of Hesse, for example?’
‘Hesse was Swiss,’ I said.
‘No, no,’ my host corrected, ‘he was German; he only took Swiss citizenship in 1921.’
‘But he died Swiss,’ I insisted.
‘You haven’t told me what you think of him yet,’ chided my host in a soft voice.
For the first time I sensed a strong feeling of irritation growing inside me. That heavy, dark, close room with its bronze busts along the walls and glass-covered bookcases; that pedantic, presumptuous Indian, manipulating the conversation as he chose; his manner, somewhere between the condescending and the crafty: all this was making me uneasy and that uneasiness was rapidly turning into anger, I could feel it. I had come here for quite other reasons and he had coolly ignored them, indifferent to the urgency which he must have appreciated from my phone calls and my note. And he was subjecting me to idiotic questions about Hermann Hesse. I felt I was being taken for a ride.
‘Are you familiar with rosolio?’ I asked him. ‘Have you ever tried it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
‘It’s an Italian liqueur, it’s rare now. They drank it in the bourgeois salons of the nineteenth century – a sweet, sticky liqueur. Hermann Hesse makes me think of rosolio. When I get back to Italy I’ll send you a bottle, if it’s still to be found, that is.’
He looked at me, uncertain as to whether this was ingenuousness or insolence. Naturally it was insolence: that was not what I thought of Hesse.
‘I don’t think I’d like it,’ he said drily. ‘I don’t drink, and what’s more I detest sweet things.’ He folded his napkin and said: ‘Shall we make ourselves comfortable for tea?’
We moved to the armchairs near the bookcase and the servant came in with a tray as if he’d been waiting behind the curtain. ‘Sugar?’ my host asked, pouring tea into my cup.
‘No, thanks,’ I answered, ‘I don’t like sweet things either.’
There followed a long and embarrassing silence. My host sat with his eyes closed, quite still; for a moment I thought he might have dozed off. I tried to work out his age, without success. He had an old but very smooth face. I noticed that he wore lace-up sandals on bare feet.
‘Are you a gnostic?’ he asked suddenly, still keeping his eyes closed.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. And then added: ‘No, I’m not, just a little curious.’
He opened his eyes and gave me a sly or ironic look: ‘And how far has your curiosity taken you?’
‘Swedenborg,’ I said, ‘Schelling, Annie Besant: something of everybody.’ He seemed interested and I explained: ‘I came to some of them in roundabout ways, Annie Besant, for example. She was translated by Fernando Pessoa, a great Portuguese poet. He died in obscurity in 1935.’
‘Pessoa,’ he said, ‘of course.’
‘You know him?’ I asked.
‘A little,’ he said. ‘The way you know the others.’
‘Pessoa said he was a gnostic,’ I said. ‘He was a Rosicrucian. He wrote a series of esoteric poems called Passos da Cruz.’
‘I’ve never read them,’ said my host, ‘but I know something of his life.’
‘Do you know what his last words were?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘What were they?’
‘Give me my glasses,’ I said. ‘He was very shortsighted and he wanted to enter the other world with his glasses on.’
My host smiled and said nothing.
‘A few minutes before that he wrote a note in English: he often used English in his personal notes – it was his second language – he had grown up in South Africa. I managed to photocopy that note; the writing was very uncertain of course. Pessoa was in agony, but it is legible. You want me to tell you what it said?’
My host moved his head back and forth, as Indians do when they nod.
‘I know not what tomorrow will bring.’
‘What strange English,’ he said.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘what strange English.’
My host got up slowly, he gestured to me to stay where I was and crossed the room. ‘Please excuse me a minute,’ he said, going out of the door at the other end of the room. ‘Do make yourself comfortable.’
I sat in my armchair and looked at the ceiling. It must have been very late already, but my watch had stopped. The silence was total. I thought I heard the ticking of a clock in another room, but perhaps it was something wooden creaking, or my imagination. The servant came in without saying a word and took away the tray. I began to feel rather uneasy again, and this together with my tiredness generated a sense of discomfort, a kind of suffering almost. Finally my host came back and, before sitting down, handed me a small yellow envelope. I immediately recognised Xavier’s handwriting. I opened the envelope and read the following note: Dear Master and Friend, the circumstances of my life are not such as to permit me to
come back and walk along the banks of the Adyar. I have become a night bird and I prefer to think that my destiny wanted it this way. Remember me as you knew me. Your X. The note was dated: Calangute, Goa, September 23rd.
I looked at my host in amazement. He had sat down and was watching me with what seemed like curiosity. ‘So he isn’t in Bombay any more,’ I said. ‘He’s in Goa, at the end of September he was in Goa.’
He nodded and said nothing. ‘But why did he go to Goa?’ I asked. ‘If you know something, tell me.’
He clasped his hands together over his knees and spoke calmly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what your friend’s life is really like, I can’t help you, I’m sorry. Perhaps the circumstances of that life of his haven’t been propitious, or perhaps he himself wanted it that way; one must never know too much about the mere appearances of other people’s lives.’ He smiled coyly and gave me to understand that he had no more to say to me on the matter. ‘Are you staying on in Madras?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve been here three days, I’m going tonight, I already have a ticket for the long-distance bus.’
I thought I saw an expression of disapproval cross his face.
‘It’s the reason for my trip,’ I felt I ought to explain. ‘I’m going to consult some archives in Goa, I have to do some research. I would have gone anyway, even if the person I’m looking for had not been there.’
‘What have you seen here in our parts?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been to Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram,’ I said. ‘I’ve visited all the temples.’
‘Did you stay the night there?’
‘Yes, in a little government-run hotel, very cheap: it was what I found.’
‘I know it,’ he said. And then he asked: ‘What did you like most?’
‘Lots of things, but perhaps the Temple of Kailasantha. There’s something distressing and magical about it.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s a strange description,’ he said. Then he quietly got up and murmured: ‘I think it’s late, I still have a great deal of writing to do tonight. Allow me to show you out.’
I got up and he led me down the long corridor to the front door. I stopped a moment in the porch and we shook hands. Going out I thanked him briefly. He smiled and said nothing in reply. Then, before closing the door, he said, ‘Blind science tills vain clods, mad Faith lives the dream of its cult, a new God is only a word. Don’t believe or search: all is hidden.’ I went down the few steps and walked a little way along the gravel drive. Then all of a sudden I understood, and I turned quickly: they were lines from a poem by Pessoa, only he had said them in English, that was why I hadn’t immediately recognised them. The poem was called Christmas. But the door was already closed and the servant, at the end of the driveway, was waiting to close the gate after me.
VII
The bus crossed an empty plain with just the occasional sleeping village. After a stretch of road through the hills with hairpin bends that the driver had tackled with a nonchalance I felt was excessive, we were now speeding along enormously long straight quiet roads through the silence of the Indian night. I had the impression that we were going through a landscape of palm groves and paddy fields, but the darkness was too deep to be certain and the light of the headlamps only swept quickly across the landscape when the road made a bend or two. According to my calculations we ought to be quite close to Mangalore, if the bus was keeping to the schedule set out in the timetable. In Mangalore I had two alternatives: I could either wait seven hours for the bus to Goa, or stay for a day in a hotel and take the bus the following day.
It was difficult to decide. During the journey I had slept little and badly, and I felt quite tired; but a whole day in Mangalore was not a particularly attractive proposition. Of Mangalore my guidebook said: ‘Situated on the Arabian Sea, the city preserves practically nothing of its past. It is a modern industrial city, laid out on a straightforward urban grid and with an anonymous look about it. One of the few cities in India where there really is nothing to see.’
I was still weighing up the pros and cons when the bus stopped. It couldn’t be Mangalore; we were in open country. The driver turned off the engine and a few passengers got out. At first I thought it was a brief stop to give the travellers a chance to relieve themselves, but after about a quarter of an hour I felt that the stop was unusually protracted. What’s more, the driver had calmly sunk down against the back of his seat and looked as if he had gone to sleep. I waited another quarter of an hour. The passengers who had stayed on board were sleeping quietly. In front of me an old man with a turban had taken a long strip of material from a basket and was rolling it up with patience, carefully smoothing out the folds at every turn of the cloth. I whispered a question in his ear, but he turned round and looked at me with an empty smile to show he hadn’t understood. I looked out of the window and saw that near the edge of the road, in a large sandy clearing, was a sort of dimly lit warehouse. It looked like a garage made of boards. There was a woman at the door. I saw someone go in.
I decided to ask the driver what was going on. I didn’t want to wake him, he’d been driving for a long time, but perhaps it was as well to find out. He was a fat man, sleeping with his mouth open; I touched his shoulder and he looked at me confused.
‘Why have we stopped?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t Mangalore.’
He pulled himself up and smoothed his hair. ‘No, sir, it isn’t.’
‘So why have we stopped?’
‘This is a bus-stop,’ he said, ‘we’re waiting for a connection.’
The stop wasn’t indicated on the timetable on my ticket, but by now I had got used to this kind of Indian surprise. So I asked him about it without any show of being taken aback, out of pure curiosity. It was the bus for Mudabiri and Karkala, I discovered. I made a suggestion that seemed logical to me. ‘And can’t the passengers going to Mudabiri and Karkala wait on their own, without us waiting with them?’
‘There are people on that bus who will get on our bus to go to Mangalore,’ the driver replied calmly. ‘That’s why we’re waiting.’
He stretched out on the seat again to let me know that he would like to go back to sleep. I spoke to him again in the tone of one who is resigned: ‘How long will we be here?’
‘Eighty-five minutes,’ he replied, with an exactness that I didn’t know whether to interpret as British politeness or a form of refined irony. And then he said: ‘Anyway, if you’re tired of waiting in the bus, you can get out. There’s a waiting room at the side here.’
I decided it might be wise to stretch my legs a little to make the time pass faster. The night was soft and damp with a strong scent of herbs. I took a turn round the bus, smoked a cigarette leaning on the steps at the back, and then headed for the ‘waiting room’. It was a long low shed with an oil lamp hanging at the door. On the door jamb someone had stuck a picture of a divinity unknown to me, done in coloured chalk. Inside were a dozen or so people, sitting on the benches along the walls. Two women standing by the door were talking busily to each other. The few passengers who had got off the bus were scattered round the circular bench in the middle around a support post to which were attached leaflets of various colours and a yellowing notice that might have been a timetable or a government directive. Sitting on the bench at the far end was a boy of about ten with short trousers and sandals. He had a monkey with him, hanging onto his shoulders, its head hidden in his hair and its little hands clasped together round the neck of its master in an attitude of affection and fear. Apart from the oil lamp on the door, there were two candles on a packing case: the light was very dim and the corners of the shed were in darkness. I stood a few moments looking at these people who appeared to take no notice of me at all. I thought it strange, this boy alone in this place with his monkey, even if it is common to see children alone with animals in India; and immediately I thought of a child who was dear to me, and of his way of cuddling a teddy-bear before going to sleep. Perhaps it was that associa
tion that led me toward the boy, and I sat down next to him. He looked at me with two beautiful eyes and smiled, and I smiled back at him; and only then did I realise with a sense of horror that the tiny creature he was carrying on his shoulders was not a monkey but a human being. It was a monster. Some atrocity of nature or terrible disease had shrivelled up his body, distorting shape and size. The limbs were twisted and deformed with no proportion or sense other than that of an appalling grotesque. The face too, which I now glimpsed amid the hair of his carrier, had not escaped the devastation of the disease. The rough skin and wound-like wrinkles gave him that monkeyish look which together with his features had prompted my mistake. The only thing that was still human about that face were the eyes: two very small, sharp, intelligent eyes, which darted uneasily in every direction as if terrified by a great and imminent danger, wild with fear.
The boy said hello in a friendly way. I said good evening to him and found myself unable to get up and go away.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked him.
‘We’re going to Mudabiri,’ he said smiling, ‘to the temple of Chandranath.’
He spoke fairly good English, without hestitations. ‘Your English is good,’ I said, ‘who taught you?’
‘I learnt at school,’ said the boy proudly. ‘I went for three years.’ Then he made a gesture, turning his head slightly, his face taking on an expression of apology. ‘He doesn’t understand English, he wasn’t able to go to school.’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I understand.’
The boy stroked the hands clinging together over his chest. ‘He’s my brother,’ he said affectionately, ‘he’s twenty.’ Then assuming an expression of pride again, he said: ‘But he knows the Scriptures, he knows them off by heart, he’s very intelligent.’
I tried to look casual, as if a little distracted and immersed in my own thoughts, so as to disguise the fact that I lacked the courage to look at the person he was talking about. ‘What are you going to Mudabiri for?’ I asked.