French Lover (25 page)

Benoir wiped the sweat off his brow and looked a little calmer.

Jean Jacques looked him in the eye keenly and said, ‘This evening, take one kilo of corn and scatter it in some woods. Two weeks later do the same with two kilos of corn. Are you thinking a wood in Paris will do? No, that won’t do; you’ll have to go outside the city.’

Benoir gave the man two thousand francs and came out of the place. Once at the stairs, Nila burst into laughter.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘You went to an astrologer?’

Benoir took the stairs quickly with Nila close on his heels.

‘Why were you giggling over there?’ Benoir was irritated.

Nila hid her smile and said, ‘You believe in all this?’

‘Of course.’ Benoir was solemn.

Nila laughed, ‘You are joking.’

‘No Nila. Many people have seen this man and they’ve had results.’

‘You believe that if you scatter corn to the winds, you won’t get sacked from Alcatel?’

‘Perhaps.’ Benoir began to walk.

Nila barred his way and asked again, ‘You are going to do this?’

Benoir sidestepped her. ‘Sure.’

Nila stood there as her scarf came loose and fell off her neck. Suddenly she realized that Benoir had walked on ahead. She ran up to him, took his hand and asked, ‘Where are you going?’

‘Come, I’ll show you the Panthéon.’

‘Fine. I thought you were off to scatter corn.’

Benoir didn’t answer. But he said, ‘You are so careless!’ when a man shouted ‘Mademoiselle, mademoiselle,’ and ran after her with her scarf held between two fingers.

Panthéon! In 1744, when Louis XV escaped death narrowly, he was so glad to be alive that he decided to build a church for Sainte Geneviève. The French architect Jacques Germain started the work twenty years later, in the neo-classical style and it took twenty-five years to complete the church. The revolutionists left this one intact and made it the Panthéon, where famous Frenchmen would be laid to rest. They dug up the graves of Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Madame and Pierre Curie. Napoleon declared it a church again in 1806. The Panthéon had to wait another eighty years to be a pantheon again. From the dome a huge pendulum dangled, to which the French physicist Leo Foucault had pointed to indicate that the earth moved in its orbit.

Nila stood beside Madame Curie’s coffin and said, ‘This is the pride of Poland, not France.’

Benoir said she was the pride of France because she had lived here and it didn’t matter where she was born.

Nila spoke slowly. ‘I live here. If I were to make a great discovery, would I be called a pride of France?’

Benoir didn’t answer.

Nila said instead, ‘Yes, I would. But until then, I’ll be an Indian, poor, starving, pauper, an immigrant here to destroy French culture.’

Nila laughed loudly. Benoir warned her that it wasn’t allowed to laugh so loudly here.

Loud, mock sobs: ‘Is it okay to cry here?’

‘No.’

Nila stood before Voltaire’s statue and said, ‘Does that coffin hold Voltaire’s remains?’

Benoir laughed. ‘It’ll be a few bones by now.’

Nila also laughed. ‘That’s true. But you know what I feel? I feel there’s nothing of Voltaire here.’

‘Of course there is.’

‘But as far as I know, Christian fundamentalists stole his body, and dumped it in the rubbish heap. Of course, they preserved the heart in the bibliothèque and the brain was auctioned many times over and has disappeared since.’

Benoir laughed her story off.

They came out of the Panthéon and he said, ‘I don’t think Voltaire was all that great.’

He didn’t go into why he thought that way, but he felt Descartes was really something. He reeled off stories about Descartes’s amazing mathematical prowess and his geometric theories. Nila still mused about Voltaire.

‘Cogito ergo sum.’ Benoir repeated it twice.

‘What’s that?’ Nila asked.

‘Descartes’s famous Latin phrase.’

Nila didn’t know it. Benoir explained, ‘I think therefore I am.’

Nila said, ‘Descartes believed in God, didn’t he?’

Benoir regurgitated, ‘Everything in this universe is created by
God. The human mind is like Him, it thinks. Man has form and God does not. Man dies, his brain stops thinking and God is eternal, His thoughts remain and He doesn’t depend on the creator for his existence.’

Benoir’s eyes went heavenward. He loosened his grip on Nila’s hand and asked, ‘Don’t you believe in God?’

Nila laughed and said, ‘I believe in François Marie Arouet.’

‘Who is that?’

‘A Frenchman, born in Paris.’

‘Are you in love with him?’

Nila laughed, ‘Yes, for a long time.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘Handsome, slim, lithe body.’

‘Have you slept with him?’

‘No, not yet.’ Nila slipped her fingers into his.

Benoir asked, ‘Is he older or younger than me?’

‘Older,’ she thought for a moment, ‘Not much, about two hundred and eighty-five years older than you.’

Benoir laughed. Nila joined him.

‘So, why do you believe in him?’ He was eager to know.

‘Many reasons. François suffered a lot in his lifetime. He critiqued the French government in his poetry and the government imprisoned him in the Bastille for eleven months. After his release, he began to write. Then once, he insulted someone, a powerful man in society. He had to be punished for it. Either the prison, or exile. François opted for exile. He went to a neighbouring country, I won’t say which one. He lived there for thirty years and came back to Paris and wrote a book in praise of that country. It was an old enemy of France . . .’

‘I know, England. Who is this man? Dreyfus? Alfred Dreyfus?’

‘If you were two hundred and eighty-five years younger than Dreyfus, you wouldn’t be born yet. And England doesn’t have an island, a penal one, where Dreyfus lived. Anyway, the French government wouldn’t take it. François was to be punished yet again. He went into exile again. This time he didn’t go too far from France. At least he didn’t cross an ocean.’

‘Did he go to Belgium?’

‘No.’

‘Italy?’

‘No.’

‘Spain?’

‘No. He wrote many books in his exile, against ignorance and for reason. When he returned home at the age of eighty-three, he received a grand welcome. He died in Paris. But he couldn’t be buried in a church because he was quite pronouncedly against religion. Eventually he was interned in an abbey of Chopin. He was brought back to Paris towards the end of the eighteenth century, with great honour of course.’

Nila noticed that Benoir’s attention had wandered. He pointed to a fairly large building and said, ‘Look at that building, it is my school, École normale supérieur. It’s the most famous school in France and it’s a great honour to study here. If you can get in here, you’d receive ninety thousand francs a year. I got it too. Many people have studied here and gone on to take the Nobel Prize. Have you heard of Louis Pasteur?’

Nila nodded.

‘Michel Foucault? Jean Paul Sartre? Romain Rolland? Henri Bergsson?’

Nila had heard of them too.

‘They were all graduates of this school.’ Benoir pulled her towards him. He looked very contented.

Benior wore a light green T-shirt and khaki shorts. Clothes were all the better if they were shorter in summer. Nila wore a short skirt, with half her thighs exposed, and a tight black top. She wore high heels and still felt short. Nila was always conscious of her slight paunch. But Benoir told her it looked good on women. These days women were so keen to reduce any flab, that they fell sick and didn’t have any breasts or thighs to speak of. His words gave her courage. Now she could wear such short clothes and go out quite comfortably. Nila noticed that French men looked at women’s heels and legs more often, if at all. Indian men would gaze at the breasts first. Women’s legs, however smooth and pretty, were not attractive to Indian men.
Nila found it very strange. In India Nila was considered too thin and in Paris she was seen as quite a healthy woman. In fact Catherine had told her she could reduce a few pounds.

They had lunch at a brasserie in Quartier Latar. Nila asked for a salad.

‘What’s the matter, do you want to be like those anaemic women?’

It wasn’t entirely untrue. She had seen obese women in the streets. Most of them, Nila noticed, were alone. Perhaps one day Benoir would say, ‘You’ve put on so much weight!’ Nila was sure Pascale weighed at least five kilos less than her.

She had her salad and said, ‘You have studied in such a good, modern school and you believe in the occult? The man is a fake.’

‘Don’t label someone without knowing anything, Nila. How did he know my age, Pascale’s name and about Jacqueline’s illness?’

‘He must have found out.’

‘No. The sister of a friend of my colleague’s brother went to see him. My colleague never went there. He just got the address for me. And his brother or his friend don’t know me from Adam.’

‘They must have given your name at the time of taking the appointment. So the man must have gathered information from your name.’

‘There must be a few thousand Benoir Duponts in Paris. Jean Jacques isn’t even from here. Didn’t you notice, he spoke French with the Marseilles accent?’ Benoir corrected her.

‘They have informers, don’t you know that? Those people find out everything about the people who come there. And speaking with an accent is no problem at all.’

Benoir shook his head, unconvinced. After leaving the restaurant, he surprised Nila by buying one kilo of ground corn, going to the Bois de Bologne outside Paris, and scattering it in the woods.

At home, Nila headed for the foamy bathtub, to get rid of the day’s surprises. Benoir joined her. There were two glasses of wine placed on the corner of the tub. The lights were switched off and the magic candles were lit. They soaked in the soft glow and sipped the wine. Benoir poured some liquid soap on the handtowel and brushed it
over Nila’s body. Nila began to enjoy it and the day’s events that were bothering her, began to recede into the background. Her body lay hidden by the foamy bubbles and only the cherries peeked out. Benoir leaned forward to lick the cherries, but they dipped down. His tongue and the cherries played hide and seek. Benoir’s body rose in response. It touched Nila all over, her breathing became shallower. He picked up her feet from the water and gazed at them in wonder—the smooth brown legs. Benoir’s body rose and fell on Nila’s body, keeping time with Beethoven’s music, until the demonic sound of the mobile pierced the tranquil haven.

Benoir left at eleven in the night. As he left he delivered the last surprise: he wasn’t coming back the next day or for the next ten days, for that matter. He was going to the Riviera with his wife and daughter, for a holiday, to sunbathe. What was Nila supposed to do here? She could think about him, think how much she loved him, think that wherever he was, Nila was always in his heart.

When Nila had shut the door, the windows, switched off the lights and the Beethoven, drowned herself in the silence and listened to her own sighs, there was a knock on the door.

Benoir had come back from the foot of the stairs to ask her a question.

‘Who was that François of yours?’

‘Voltaire.’

Benoir returned from his holiday and took Nila out. They went to the Versailles gardens. In the beautiful garden on two thousand acres, designed by La Notre, she sat down beside the grand canal, face towards the palace, half wet from the fountains.

‘Would you like to see the palace? The Sun King’s room, Queen Marie Thérèse’s room?’

Nila broke off a stalk of grass, bit it and asked, ‘Why did the king and queen have separate bedrooms?’

Benoir said, ‘It’s a huge palace. No point crowding into one room.’

Nila touched the grass to his lips and said, ‘Or was it because your Louis spent his time with his three mistresses?’

Benoir kissed Nila and said, ‘Our Louis also married his mistress.’

Nila lay sprawled on the grass, looked up at the sky and said, ‘After marrying her, he must have given that wife a separate bedroom too.’

‘Drop it. Now do you want to go inside the palace?’ Benoir rushed her.

Nila still lay there and said, ‘Forget it. I shudder when I see all that glittering, shimmering wealth.’

‘But why?’

‘I feel like a poor, distressed subject, like I’m being whipped by the kings, for no reason.’

Benoir leaned on his elbows, lay back and said, ‘Let me at least show you the Hall of Mirrors, famous for the Versailles Treaty.’

Nila took his left hand in hers and touched the fingers to her cheek. The gold ring on his ring finger, the symbol of his bond with Pascale, touched her cheek.

‘What’s the point of seeing that room? The Versailles Treaty didn’t bring any peace. On the contrary it paved the way for another world war.’

Benoir sat up and said, ‘Don’t talk rubbish. Just say you don’t feel like getting up from here.’

Nila’s hair blew in the wind. It covered her face, her breasts. She sat up, swiftly wound her hand through it and tied it into a bun as she said she wanted to go to number twelve, Rue de Châtiere instead.

‘What is that?’

‘It’s not a palace. It’s a hovel where a poet once lived. A great poet.’

‘What is his name?’

‘Madhusudan Dutta.’

‘What kind of a name is that? It’s not a French name?’

‘Neither is Oscar Wilde, or Gertrude Stein or Henrik Ibsen. Do you find these names strange?’ she asked. Then she said, ‘No you don’t. Madhusudan Dutta was a Bengali.’

‘Oh, so that’s it. A Bengali.’

Benoir heaved a sigh of relief. Not knowing a Bengali poet’s name and not knowing the name of a tiny insect in the Amazon was the same. It didn’t really matter. Why should he know of Madhusudan, one of the greatest poets of Bengali literature? Instead he knew of Sai Baba, Deepak Chopra, Swami Prabhupada!

Although Benoir showed no interest in Madhusudan, Nila told him his story: Madhusudan was the son of a zamindar and he felt terribly drawn to European art and culture from a very young age. He wore European clothes, wrote poetry in English, converted to Christianity. He hated his own race so much that he said, ‘God has sent the Anglo-Saxons to this world to save the Hindus, to civilize them and to convert them.’ When he was in Madras, he married Henrietta, French girl. His father threw him out. Madhusudan came to England and became a lawyer. He spent his days in great hardship here in Versailles. Friends sent money from Calcutta to keep him going. At first he was happy in France because here he wasn’t called a damn nigger, like in England. Instead, if he saluted the French emperor and empress, they saluted back. Gradually his dream of becoming a
great writer in a European language dwindled, his infatuation waned. He remembered his past, the banyan tree by the river, the legends and tales, epics of ancient India. When he was in Versailles, he wrote some sonnets, inspired by Petrarch, the Italian poet. Petrarch and Madhusudan had a few things in common: Petrarch’s father too was a lawyer and he made his son become one, but Petrarch gave it all up and dived into the world of art and letters. Madhusudan was the same. The difference was that Madhusudan didn’t write sonnets only about his lover. He and Baudelaire also shared some traits: they were both bohemians and given to liquor and other addictive pleasures. Madhusudan went back to Calcutta from Versailles and thank god for that or Bengali literature would have been deprived of some of its grandest poetry. Nila stood in front of the house at number twelve, Rue de Châtiere and looked at the stone slab:

She went down on her knees and touched a bit of the dust to her brow. Benoir laughed, ‘Why did you do that?’

‘I saluted Madhusudan.’

‘Was that to Madhusudan or the soil of France?’

‘I did it because Madhusudan had once walked upon this soil.’ Nila walked indifferently as she answered.

‘But since then so many others have walked upon it, so many Louis, Phillipe, Valerie . . .’

Nila took the words from his mouth and said, ‘So many Benoir, Pascale, Jacqueline . . .’

She changed the subject and said, ‘So how was your holiday?’

Benoir didn’t answer. He sighed when he got into the car, and said, ‘You have changed a lot, Nila.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You always walked holding my hand. Today you didn’t.’

Nila denied his allegation and reminded him that she took his hand as they sat in the Versailles gardens and she had noticed how snugly the gold ring fit his lovely white finger.

Benoir’s voice was faint, ‘Nila, you are fooling me.’

How can I fool you, I am weak, poor, common and feeble!

They stopped at a roadside café for some coffee. Benoir was grumbling about the thirty per cent of one’s income which had to be given to the French government as tax, and how happy the people in Monaco were because they didn’t have to pay tax. If he were in Monaco he’d have saved that money. They parked near the Pont-Neuf and walked towards the Notre-Dame, towards the bridge, which gave a clear view of all of Paris. Nila wanted to stand on that bridge and look at the Seine. Whenever she did that, she saw Joan d’Arc’s ashes floating in the water. She was sure she caught a fleeting glimpse of Joan d’Arc’s image in the water. Suddenly a question flew into her mind like a feather: did the Ganga and the Seine have anything in common? The water in the Ganga was also muddy. Then she looked at the bridge instead and her mind flew back to the Ganga. No! The Ganga was unbridled and the Seine was like an aquarium; one couldn’t spend one’s life with the Seine. All the waters in the world were not the same. Her mind drifted to Catherine Grand who had also stood here once, just like Nila. She was also from Calcutta, the daughter of a French official in Chandannagar. She was breathtakingly beautiful and the youth of Calcutta lost their night’s sleep because of her. Such a beauty was married off to an elderly English officer, Francis Grand. The French Revolution was still in the future. A French youth, Phillippe, fell madly in love with her, scaled the walls of her house and went into her bedroom at night. Everyone came to know of it. Francis sued him and made him pay a heavy fine. It was a huge scandal and Catherine had to become the mistress of her French lover. She changed hands and her fate didn’t improve when she came from Calcutta to London and then to Paris as his mistress. She must have been as old as Nila when she came there. She stayed in the Hôtel de Ville and one day she walked to this very bridge and stood there like Nila. A lout pulled at her clothes and a few others stood and laughed. Catherine changed hands again and again and finally rolled into the
lap of Talleyrand as his mistress. At the time Talleyrand was the foreign secretary. But it was Catherine who conducted most of his business with the foreign ambassadors. That too became a scandal in Paris and finally Napoleon pulled him up. Then Catherine pulled a fast one over her lover. She bowed to Napoleon and declared that she was carrying Talleyrand’s child in her womb. Napoleon was crazy for an heir then and he was even considering giving a divorce to Josephine, his dear wife, and marrying Marie Louise. Immediately he commanded Talleyrand to marry his mistress and his command had to be obeyed. Eventually, the girl who spoke French with a Calcutta accent became a minister’s wife at a ripe age, after spending many years as different men’s mistress. But if she hadn’t played that little trick, she’d have died a mistress. Nila felt that after two hundred years it was Catherine again who was standing with her on the bridge.

Benoir’s touch brought Nila back to her senses. He said, ‘It looks like bad weather. Let’s go home.’

Nila looked at the storm clouds in the sky and danced for joy. ‘This is great weather. Why do you call it bad? Let’s get wet in the rain.’

Nila wanted to get drenched but Benoir wasn’t born under the scalding hot sun and rain was no welcome shower to him. When they reached home, Benoir wanted sex and Nila poetry. She picked up Baudelaire’s
Fleur du Mal
, sat on the sofa and asked, ‘Why did Baudelaire write about the Malabar woman?’

Benoir took the book away, hugged Nila and looked into her eyes lovingly as he said, ‘Because Baudelaire fell in love with her. Do you know what he did to her?’ A hot kiss fell on her lips. Benoir had brought warmth from the south, all the heat of the sun so that he could burn her up.

She picked up the book again and said, ‘But Baudelaire never went to Malabar.’

Benoir snatched the book away again, smiled sweetly and said, ‘Who has told you that?’

‘Did he go there?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded.

‘No, he didn’t. In 1841, on the 9th of June Baudelaire’s stepfather forced him into a ship bound for India. When the ship was near Mauritius, Baudelaire jumped off; he didn’t want to go to India. The following year, in February, he came back to Paris. He never set foot in Malabar.’

‘You seem to know a lot about our Baudelaire.’

Nila spread out her silky black hair and lay down. Perfume wafted from her body and it was driving Benoir crazy; he wanted to write restless, manic love poems deep inside her. Nila took the book from his hands and began to turn the pages. Benoir asked, ‘Is Malabar in India?’

‘You don’t know where Malabar is?’

‘No.’ Benoir’s answer came without a trace of regret, almost with a sense of pride at his ignorance.

Nila said, ‘Strange!’

‘Why strange?’

‘Strange because you have never wondered where this Malabar is, about which your poet has written, or wondered if he saw the Malabar woman in Malabar or in his dreams?’

Benoir got up and sat on the other sofa. He hadn’t thought of all this because he had other things to think of.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, ‘Pascale, Jacqueline?’

Suddenly, without any preamble, Benoir asked, ‘Do you know when the Notre-Dame was built?’

‘In 1334.’

‘No, even before that.’

‘The work started in the twelfth century and ended in 1334.’

‘When in the twelfth century?’

‘I don’t know.’

Benoir flashed a smile and said, ‘You only have that one Taj Mahal. I didn’t see anything really ancient in India. There’s the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, but that was built by the British.’

Nila sat up and asked, ‘Have you heard of Mohenjodaro and Harappa?’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a civilization. It flourished in India, two thousand five
hundred years before the birth of your Christ.’

Benoir shrugged. He wasn’t supposed to know all this.

Nila said, ‘Don’t think because it’s about India you don’t have to know it. This is history.’

‘And why do I have to know history?’ Benoir got up from the sofa noisily, walked around, heaved a loud sigh and shouted, ‘Do you think everyone has to know everything? I know about things which interest me. You think you know it all. You are very arrogant, Nila.’

Nila laughed and spoke softly, ‘Is that a bad thing? If you have the knowledge, why should you cower? You should proudly say yes, I know.’

Benoir pulled her up from the sofa, threw the book on the floor, dragged her to the study, slapped the computer and said, ‘The world revolves around computers now. If you are so proud of your knowledge, then tell me the true value of ten base two terminator? You don’t know? It’s five hundred Ohms. How many i and q are there on the keyboard? You don’t know, it’s five. How many bytes in the Mac address? I know you don’t know; your knowledge is useless. There are six bytes.’

He held her in a tight grip, dragged her back to the drawing room and threw her on to the sofa again.

Nila laughed. As she laughed, she said, ‘Please pick up that book for me?’

Benoir was breathing heavily. He wouldn’t do it.

Nila asked, ‘Who threw it, me or you?’

Benoir said, ‘I did.’

‘Then pick it up like a good boy. You are not a naughty boy that you have a God-given right to throw things around, or are you?’ Nila was laughing.

Benoir screamed, ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Because I have the God-given right to laugh.’ Nila lay down on the sofa as before, spreading her hair and perfume around. Benoir sat on the sofa behind her. He lowered his voice and said, ‘Nila turn around and look at me. I have to talk to you; it’s urgent.’

Nila spoke slowly, gently, ‘First, please pick up my book for me; I feel like reading a poem and it is urgent.’

‘More urgent than listening to me?’ Benoir sounded surprised.

Nila said, ‘Yes, much more.’

‘You just want to show off! This is what happens. People come into our country and they become obsessed with our art and culture.’

Nila looked out into the sunny evening and said, ‘I am obsessed because poetry is in my blood.’

‘In your blood, ha, ha, ha.’ Benoir laughed strangely.

‘Our poets wrote poetry even when your France was a land under snow. Just imagine, while your ancestors were fighting over a piece of raw flesh, my forefathers were spouting poetry.’

Benoir moved like lightning, picked up the book and threw it outside the window, ‘You and your blood and your pride. Read, for all I care.’

He left. The tranquil woman laughed sweetly and shut her eyes. A dream flew in and perched on her eyes. She saw herself on the Malabar coast, the wind blowing in her hair, in her sari, as she laughed with all the colours of the sunset on her body. She ran barefoot and played hide and seek with the water as it touched her beautiful body and the wind whispered in her ears, ‘
O Malabar woman . . .
’