By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin

The Little Foxes

The next day, we arrived at a village in the midst of the paddy-fields. The sun was already high, the air smelt of moist earth and new rice. There was a festival going on; an arch of banana trees adorned the first door; one could hear the drums. The village was like an island of leafy mango trees under a sky scattered with billowy white cumulus clouds; each house had its mango tree and high, mud walls which cast some cool shade on to the single dusty little lane.

My companion made a sound with his chimta.

—Shall we go in?

—There are too many people, let us go farther on.

He insisted:

—Farther on, the houses will be empty.

—Are you hungry?

I had no wish to enter that house; I felt a kind of repugnance—why? I do not know, but I had learned to trust my instinct... In fact, I really think events must have small fine tentacles which are projected into the invisible and we touch them before they close over us, as if the story were always played in two stages: the key-image above or around, and its precipitation into matter. And I have never been very sure that one could prevent that precipitation.

—Are you afraid?

I shrugged my shoulders. He entered. I followed. And it was there that I met Destiny. I have always wondered whether things are not rigorously interlinked, not only the dreams of the previous night and the accident of the following day, but from our first steps in the world, just as the tree and all its leaves are contained in the green mango seed.

We were in a fairly big courtyard. Women in colourful sarees were bustling about; children were running helter-skelter from every corner. Men were squatting in small groups under a mango tree. Nobody had seen us. Half a dozen rooms opened onto a pillared verandah; garlands of jasmin were hanging on the doors. The mridangam player was beating his drum.

—Try to cover your chest.

I blushed. He could go nude, but I had to cover myself... Some children approached the Nanga-Sannyasi. I went towards the left to the end of the courtyard; I wanted to be alone (I think I could beg for ten years without ever getting used to stretching out my bowl). There was a room there, at the end. Now, it was exactly because I wanted to avoid that crowd and sit down quietly in a corner that I fell right on the very spot that I ought never to have found.

There was a basil plant in front of the room. It was encircled by a carved stone basket which reminded me vaguely of something—but that morning, everything reminded me of something, or called out to me, I do not know, I was as though in a state of alert. I felt that the air was full of little signs and presences, or of threats perhaps. Mechanically, I plucked a basil leaf and put it to my lips... the odour of wild mint, a cortege of indistinct waves, and right at the end of that odour it was as if a little door opened and I could hear far, far away in the distance, as if from the other side of a curtain of vine-branches, a small voice: “You see, in my country, we call it tulsi; it is an auspicious plant...” And it was Mohini. A whole world re-emerging in an odour of basil, and so vivid, as if it were right there, in the next room: scattered bird feathers... the vines which climbed to the roof... the huge cage... the festive crystals... the broken ektara—there was even a peacock's feather on the ground. One opens the door inadvertently and nothing has moved... We have in us hundreds of dungeons and Atlantises which have never foundered.

I raised my eyes...

And I remained as if turned to stone.

A man was standing there with his back to me in that room at the end of the verandah, right in front of the basil plant. There was a woman in front of him—a white forehead. I could not see her face clearly; I saw only her forehead: a young peasant woman. She was dressed in red like a divinity, facing the man. A white forehead, so white. I saw the woman's hand lifting her veil and the black line of her hair on her forehead. Then the man raised his right hand slowly, he held something between his index finger and thumb; I saw him place his hand on that white forehead—that very white forehead above the black curve of the eyebrows. Then I felt dizzy. I understood nothing; all this had no visible meaning for me and yet I was petrified as if I were witnessing something known and lived, almost as though I were making the gesture.

Someone pulled me violently by the arm.

And I saw the man's hand slowly descending, and the red mark of a tilak on a white forehead.

—You're going to get out of here immediately.

I was crushed.

He pulled me by the arm, I heard murmuring. People were looking at me, I understood nothing. I was as if stupefied, like a man who awakens suddenly in a dead temple and sees the gods move. He dragged me out like a thief.

—You're mad, no! But you are mad!

He was grey with rage. The door banged behind me. We were in the street. There was a vault of mango trees and beyond... the sky... blue, dazzling.

—Don't you know that such a thing is not done? Are you a sannyasi or what?

He brandished his chimta. I was as though mad.

—But what were they doing...

I stammered, I had completely lost my senses.

—What were they doing?

—Don't you know that one must not look?

—But what were they doing?

I could only stammer out my question, I was struck with idiocy, with Batcha's face before me, her white forehead, her eyes full of tears and that red tilak I had put on her forehead.

—What was happening... but what were they doing?

—Didn't you see? It was his wife.

—His wife...

I felt a kind of dizziness.

—Don't you know that it is sacred?...

He dropped my arm abruptly.

—You are a strange sannyasi and your words are strange. He spat on the ground.

—I think it is better that we separate here.

He tightened the string round his loins and looked at me once more.

—The night is upon you.

And he turned his back on me.

I followed him in a stupor; I saw his naked silhouette going down the little street... all erect, all bathed in sunlight... towards that dazzling blue sky in the distance where the mango trees ended.

He disappeared.

I remained there, standing in front of that door for a long time, incapable of moving or thinking. The mridangam player was beating his drum frenziedly. I came out of the village.

There were paddy-fields as far as the eye could see, luminous, intense, emerald green, relieved in the distance by one island of glaucous mango trees and the limpid, cerulean sky in which a cloud drifted slowly like a ball of white cotton.

I was in utter chaos.

I no longer understood anything, my head was ringing like an empty calabash. I understood only Batcha, Batcha, Batcha... She was my lifebuoy, my luminous island: Batcha, Batcha—why Batcha? I don't know. I had not thought of her for a second since... oh! for years, which were perhaps lives, and then she was inexplicably there, she, she alone, as if she had never ceased to be there—I had only closed the door and now the door was opening. It was like a bursting dam, a green invasion, everything was carried away, swept away: the light up there, the peace, the white expanse—what did I care! But what had I done, what had I really done during all these years... what? Where had I disappeared to?... I was planted there in front of those paddy-fields, in a state of aberration: I looked at that green deluge in front of me like Jonah in the jaws of the whale.

Abruptly everything stopped.

A complete void.

I saw all those paddy-fields expand and swell like a sea—almost stalk by stalk, microscopically and all together... and that enormous cloud of white cotton overhead casting a greenish shadow. One second's pause. It was fixed, photographed, nothing moved any longer: it is that. And this that did not correspond to anything—to no thought, no plan, no will: it was simply seen. And what was seen in that second became true—a creative glance. The glance of the future: that will be. The whole world may well collapse, men may bar the way: that will be, it is decreed. And I knew well that second: it was empty and yet it contained everything, like that second aboard the Aalesund when I had said “no”, like that second in a port when I had followed the Sannyasi. Indeed, there is a field of creative force up there, an expanse of vision where the whole future is like a ball of light, and when one can see there, think there, it becomes true: ten years or ten days later it becomes true. One catches the vibration, one hooks into it, one pulls the thread and it unwinds like a cocoon—it becomes a creative thought, a bubble of luminous power which goes infallibly to the goal. All my life I have pulled that thread: a stroke of light on a Boulevard and I became a gold-seeker; a lightning flash on a creak in Guiana and I dropped my gold. I have made myself new lives in five minutes and I have torn through continents at a gallop, forward, always forward, pulling that luminous substance, like a magic to mould life; and when it was finished, another, yet another, always another—something else, something else, something else always... autre chose—as if one must hack into it, snatch the flash, invent new lives, until the indubitable life. emerges,—that—then one stops. But I have always begun again. And that same second was coming now, clear, dazzling... I pulled the thread—I was leaving for the south. I was going to find Batcha again, it was obvious. I was going immediately.

I got up. I picked up my begging-bowl, my staff, tightened my belt.

Then the sweet fragrance of young rice-fields entered into me with a humming of elytra and the raucous croaking of bull-frogs and the dull beat of the mridangam. I came back into my body as if I had been absent for ten years.

And at the very moment I crossed the first paddy-field, on that little mound there, which cut through the field, the vision of Batcha came back to me. It was clear, I understood everything: “Three times I called you... three times. It was a light like sand, and you were going away, you had become smaller and smaller as if you were going to fade away and I called you, I called you, and you did not answer; and that hurt me so much, here, it was as if I were going to die...” And she was there, alive, smiling, at the end of the thread: she was pulling. She had never stopped pulling! She had brought me back into my body. Without her, I would disappear, be completely digested inside the white whale.

And at the same moment anguish overwhelmed me: what was she doing, was she alive?... I was in a fever. I thought I would never reach the end of that road.

Now, that same night, I had a dream.

I have had many dreams in my life, strange or diabolical, sometimes divine, but none tore me like that one because of its poignant simplicity. It was evidently not a “dream”, for I had gone into a world as real as Peru or China. And I wondered with terrible anguish whether what I had seen was an image out of the past or a premonition of the future. Oh! everything is already there, and we pull down here a few glimmerings from elsewhere, we struggle against shadows older than ourselves and try to change dark decrees with an insufficient light. But perhaps, the shadows hound us to force us towards more light?

I was in a “foreign country”, far, far away, in the countries of the west and I absolutely had to find her again. It was of supreme importance, a question of life or death. And there were all kinds of obstacles between us, enormous distances, guarded frontiers, ruthless officials who would assassinate you with a rubber stamp. At last, I saw myself in a train: the corridor of a train. But it was not like the trains here: it was immense, with a corridor spanning the whole length like a thread of light. And I was running along that corridor, I was running like a madman, as if the train were not going fast enough! I jumped over luggage, jostled people, bounded over ropes—I ran, maddened by anguish, towards a light at the end which was Her. And at the end, I suddenly tipped over into another country which was unlike anything I knew. A world of silence. Everything was muffled, padded, soundless. And the air also had a strange quality, it seemed pearl-grey; a kind of thin, transparent mist, not thick enough to be a mist really, but substantial enough to form a veil, like a vaporous tulle which enveloped everything. Everything moved or rather glided behind that “veil” in an absolute silence. People were strolling about there. They were alone or in pairs, but never more than two together, and most often alone. It was a kind of garden, or a park perhaps, an immense cinder-grey park, with avenues, lawns, shrubs, but everything was merged in that pearl-grey, vaporous light; the beings of that place seemed to be made of the same substance as that light, but slightly more compact: they moved slowly with great suppleness, hardly touching the ground and without the least sound. I had the impression that they were all plunged in deep meditation, rather like strolling monks. And I asked each one: “Where is she, where is she?” and I felt the anguish of my question, I was the only one making a noise there, I was heavy and uncouth: “Where is she...?” And it's curious, but I do not remember searching particularly for Batcha: it was “her” and she was perhaps Batcha also, but not especially with that particular face, or perhaps a “her” of many times and many faces but always “her”, the same “her”. And they did not know. They did not reply. Or they vaguely stretched out a hand in a gesture which seemed to lift centuries. The more I advanced, the more my anguish rose, rose, became intolerable, like a death-stone in my heart: “Where is she? Where is she?... Où est-elle? I was the only one to call in an echoless world. There was not a sound in that park, not even a flower. Then, for the last time, I approached one of those strollers, and it was like a cry in my heart, so intense that the man stopped: “Où est-elle?” He raised his arm slowly and pointed to a corner of the park which went down to another level.

I descended there. They were like terraced gardens, pearl-grey also, and the one I was seeking was right at the bottom. There was a wood on the left. I entered into the wood. There were trees, but they were unknown to me, with very delicate, slightly ash-coloured leaves, and high ferns. Everything was absolutely silent. But silent like nothing here on this earth: a total absence of vibrations, as if the world had stopped. And I knew she was there... I arrived in front of a tree. There was grass and small leaves on the ground like lucerne, and a mound. And suddenly, without my knowing how or from where they came, I saw some very small russet foxes come out of that grass and flee in all directions. And that was where she was. Just some very small russet foxes fleeing in all directions, without a sound, without a trace... And Batcha no longer ex-is-ted.

It was dreadful. More dreadful than seeing her dead in front of me.

I woke up. My body was ice-cold like a corpse.