By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin

The Pretty Snake

I flew towards, her like a bird towards the spring; she was my freshness, my solidity. She was the sweetness of flowing like music. With her, I was sure that the world had two feet and seashells. It is curious, when I looked at her the world flowed differently; it flowed really differently, as if things arranged themselves, became harmonious, obeyed another rhythm, a different law, altogether charming and unexpected. When I was with Björn, everything went wrong: I would just miss breaking my head on the stairs, the glass would slip from my hands, the bucket fall into the well... There was a sort of strict sequence which caused one accident to lead to another; it was a kind of black logic which inclined life according to its pernicious theorem, exactly like a doctor who traces the graph of an illness. And suddenly, right in the middle of the street, I wondered if it were the graph which followed the illness or the illness which followed the graph?... For one moment, in that street, I had the sensation of a completely arbitrary world, of a formidable mental suggestion which had scientifically falsified the world according to its theorem and that everything could be per-fect-ly different. And there was no need to go far, it was enough to look at a bucket falling into a well... and to grasp an imperceptible gravitation which did not obey Newton's laws. Perhaps a psychic gravitation?

I turned into the temple street; Nisha came and literally bumped into me. She blushed under her gleaming black skin and looked at me with I know not what glimmer in her eyes, it burned its way through me. She ran away. I was as white as death. It was the third time I had met her that morning.

Then a cloud of microscopic incidents began to spring up on all sides—those “unimportant” things, precisely, which dart out at random like an eel from under a rock. One stares at Nisha for a minute too long and one is netted into Nisha's world, or Björn's world, and imperceptibly everything begins to slide in another direction: one meets her three times in the street where normally one would never meet her, one stumbles against all sorts of people who completely escaped one before, but who now seem to pass and repass across the stage and almost create the circumstances necessary for the making of another story, an accident: imperceptibly the decor has changed; one has entered another stage, one follows another law, and everything is as in a film, as inevitable as the producer of that particular scene has wanted it.

Things seemed to have begun to gravitate in another direction.

—O Moshaï...

I turned around. There were the two pilgrims from the “Japanese Hospital”.

—At what time, the train from the mainland?

I looked at them half bewildered. I stammered:

—Nine-thirty.

They turned away without even a word of thanks. I could have sworn that they had come deliberately to tell me: don't forget, above all don't forget, your train is at 9h 30.

This time I wanted to understand. What was impelling now in that direction? Thought?... But thought was only the residue at the end, the sign that something was already in motion. It taps on the window pane, then one leans out and catches the accident. Yes, exactly, one leans and then one catches. Thought is not what we think it is—it understands nothing, nor is it made for understanding! It simply translates. It is a translation after the event. The little lamp lights up—red, green, purple—but the current has already passed. We are the connectors, the wave-discoverers. We are a certain way of focussing, like Björn towards his ceiling. We pick up a fragment of music and call it “my” song, we hook onto a shadow and it becomes “our” distress, a vibration and it is our desire, a flake of light and it is a gospel—and all lights are there, and all shadows, all the little un-thinking notes which are waiting to pass through for creating a symphony, or a disaster. We know nothing of thought, we still handle it like primates; we know, as it were, only the kitchen of thought, a more or less lighted and hygienic penthouse; but there is another kind of thought: a tall, motionless aerial which pierces the blue crust,, which plunges into what is to come and gives form to the great wandering vibrations of the Future. There is another way of thinking, active, creative, a thought-vision, like the one Björn manipulated so effectively to attract death; a pictorial thought; silent, magical, like a great virgin canvas to captivate the divine vermilions of existence, its golden flares, its archangelic smiles; a subtle canvas to make life like a picture—oh! if one could always keep before one an image of beauty, a pure diagram, a great figure to bewitch the harmony and the beauty of the world, a gold net to capture the great birds of joy, what power! And to look only at that, want only that and pierce the darkness of life with that incorruptible vision.

—Nothing-at-all, Mr. nothing-at-all!

She came out of the water as I arrived.

She raised her eyes towards me and ran to me with outstretched arms, I could almost hear her song in my heart, or was it mine that was singing? There are beings who are like a song. But we are all like a song which waits—which does not know, which does not dare—and when that music flows, that mere little note, everything cracks, it is a general collapse, and the world is washed away as if one had never lived.

She was singing, that little peacock-girl, the beach was like a great snow-field edged with sapphire, the dunes glided into the blue sea like a swan-princess: rāni āmi...

I am the queen of the coral country
I have three golden fish and a silver one
I live all lives!
And my king...
Has caught a star
Of polished purple
He has caught seven
To make a garland for my neck
And three bubbles of my laughter
For his lovely diadem!

She was standing on the steps of the little sanctuary, dripping with water, framed by the tiny columns. She looked like a little queen in the Kangra paintings, she was laughing.

—I have seen a sea-snake! she announced triumphantly... big like that!

—But it is very wicked, that!

—Oh, but it was completely green, so pretty! with little yellow spots. We had a race.

—But, look, it is poisonous, it could have bitten you.

—But I tell you it was pret-ty!... Mais puisque je te dis qu'il était jo-li!

She crossed her arms over her breast as if she were cold, or perhaps a little ashamed. There were tiny beads of translucent water on her cheeks and on the tip of her nose; her skirt had become the colour of mulberries in the month of May. I looked at her and I do not know why I was so happy: we laughed and laughed, we were two children, she and I, who had been playing together for a long time; or always perhaps, on a little white beach which was sometimes on the edge of this world.

—And your monsoon, it's asleep?

She turned her nose up towards the sky, pouting:

—Oh! it's gathering water. Besides the curlews have not yet arrived, Shikhi is not yet settled in the kitchen, so... And Björn's big petrels are not yet on the lagoon.

—You know...

—I know everything! It's in your left hand.

—My left hand?

She opened her mouth, made a face, and blew some water onto the tip of her nose:

—Yes, the conch that you have forgotten to bring me.

—Oh!

—You promised.

Nothing-at-all
Who forgets everything...

—What have you done with your tilak?

—My tilak...

She raised her hand to her forehead.

—Oh! It has all gone away with the sea.

She shook out her skirt.

—It's all gone away.

—Wait.

I bounded towards the sanctuary, I took the little bowl of red powder at the feet of the, god; there was some incense still burning and fresh flowers. I took a pinch of the powder.

—There.

And I put a red mark on her forehead... Et j'ai mis une marque rouge sur son front.

She looked at me aghast. Her arms fell. She became as pale as death; then tears sprang from her eyes.

—But Batcha, what's the matter?

She looked at me so heart-rendingly... and then those tears which flowed. I was shattered.

—But what's the matter, Batcha, speak, look here, what happened, what have I done?

She would not speak, she was like a piece of marble.

Then a mad anguish seized me. Lord! never, never have I wanted to show disrespect towards her god! But what had I done, what sacrilege?

—But speak, Batcha!... What's the matter? He's nice, your god, I assure you Batcha, I like him, he is nice.

She remained petrified, her arms hanging at the side of her body. And then those eyes which did not leave me, which looked and looked at me, searing, full of light, from the depths of her soul, with the intensity of a wounded bird. Oh! if only I had been able to read what was in those eyes at that moment, if only I could have understood...

Suddenly she regained her control; She gathered her skirt in her hands and fled across the beach.

It was the end.

I was appalled.

I remained there, on the steps of that little temple, watching her disappear. It was as if something had been rent deep down inside me, something which suddenly broke. But what had I done? What? And there I was, all alone... That was the feeling; I was all alone. Never, never had I the feeling of being alone, I had always been borne by something; and then, all at once, I was no longer borne; I was a person—concrete, separate—me. It was as if she had slammed the door in my face, stuck my passport in my hands: “There, you are the foreigner,” and once more I found myself like an imbecile, all alone in a country where indeed I had thought I was at home. But what in Hades could all their gods do to me! I couldn't care less for them, I asked nothing of them! I just wanted to be happy, that was all!

I was confounded.

I was divided between pain and revolt, like a child who has thrown itself into a friend's arms and then discovers that she was looking beyond him at somebody else.

Sick at heart, I took the road to the caravanserai again, towards Björn, my brother—my brother?... I stopped dead in the middle of the beach: were things not beginning to turn badly for me also?... And at the very second that thought fell upon me, simultaneously, like two sparks shooting up together, I felt: “It's done—it's that, I am there.” Everything around me was fixed in a lightning flash; “I am there, I am holding my second,” that wretched little second when everything is reversed. And as quickly as I perceived it, almost at the same moment, there was a sort of voice—a neutral dry voice, as sharp as a guillotine-knife—which said simply, evenly, as one would pronounce a sentence: “Now you have looked at your second, it is done with. And instantly, I knew—it was a trap laid on all sides at once, the least thought was set with mines—I knew that it was done with. Now I could shout, revolt, say no, blow on it, do what I would, the thought was there, and the more I blew on it, the more strongly it was there, hard, concrete and clearly perceived, almost forced to be... And suddenly I had the impression that the circle was closing in. An imperceptible mess, a general decay. And whatever I could do or say—look at or not look at—only added to the mess: I was strangling myself with both arms.

I continued on my way.

Then something in me said, simply, quietly, like a statement of fact: “This is destiny.” Everything was the same and everything poisoned... Tout était pareil et tout était empoisonné.

—Three rupees the conch, three rupees for the pretty conch!

I stopped unconsciously in front of the coral-merchant's shop. And I clearly heard Batcha's small voice: “But I tell you it was pret-ty!”

—But look, Batcha, I tell you it's poisonous.

And it was that. I could shout, deny, laugh in my own face if I wanted to: but I had said that it was poisonous, so it was poisonous.

I had performed some nasty magic, I had poisoned everything.

And I suddenly perceived that everything had happened before I knew it, even before the catastrophe happened. Because five minutes before, when I did not even know what was going to happen, when I had not even touched that cursed tilak and was laughing there on that beach with her, I had already caught the poison—I had willed the poison, spoiled the story: “But it's poisonous, I tell you, it could have bitten you.” And everything was already done with, contained in that futile word or gesture, in that minuscule symbol of a second, that little breathing of which one did not even know the meaning, as if the sword were already there, ready to lunge, waiting only for us to find the snake pretty... or wicked.

And now it was Bhaskar-Nath who came and thundered into my ears: it is as you will.

I was in front of the coral-merchant's shop, a conch.in my hand.

Then I gripped my conch and smashed it on the ground.