According to my nurse, the old man was a potter in his younger days. After giving up that trade he kept only this one jar for himself and now he earned his living by peddling.
These were my links with the outside world. Of my private world all that was left to me were my nurse and my bitch of a wife. But Nanny was her nurse too; she was nurse to both of us. My wife and I were not only closely related but were suckled together by Nanny. Her mother was to all intents and purposes mine too because I never saw my parents but was brought up by her mother, a tall, grey-haired woman. I loved her as much as if she had been my real mother, and that was the reason why I married her daughter.
I have heard several different accounts of my father and mother. Only one of them, the one Nanny gave me, can, I imagine, be true. This is what Nanny told me:
My father and my uncle were twins. They resembled each other exactly in figure, face and disposition, and even their voices were identical. So it was no easy matter to tell them apart. Moreover, there existed between them a mental bond or sympathy as a result of which, to take an example, if one of them fell ill the other would fall ill also. In the common phrase, they were like two halves of the one apple.
In due course they both decided to go into commerce and, when they reached the age of twenty, they went off to India, where they opened up a business in Rey wares, including textiles of various kinds—shot silk, flowered stuffs, cotton piece-goods, jubbahs, shawls, needles, earthenware, fuller’s earth, and pen-case covers. My father settled in Benares and used to send my uncle on business trips to the other cities of India. After some time, my father fell in love with a girl called Bugam Dasi, a dancer in a lingam temple. Besides performing ritual dances before the great lingam idol she served as a temple attendant. She was a hot-blooded, olive-skinned girl, with lemon-shaped breasts, great, slanting eyes and slender eyebrows which met in the middle. On her forehead she wore a streak of red paint.
At this moment I can picture Bugam Dasi, my mother, wearing a gold-embroidered sari of coloured silk and around her head a fillet of brocade, her bosom bare, her heavy tresses, black as the dark night of eternity, gathered in a knot behind her head, bracelets on her wrists and ankles and a gold ring in her nostril, with great, dark, languid, slanting eyes and brilliantly white teeth, dancing with slow, measured movements to the music of the sitar,* the drum, the lute, the cymbal and the horn, a soft, monotonous music played by bare-bodied men in turbans, a music of mysterious significance, concentrating in itself all the secrets of wizardry, the legends, the passion and the sorrow of the men of India; and, as she performs her rhythmic evolutions, her voluptuous gestures, the consecrated movements of the temple dance, Bugam Dasi unfolds like the petals of a flower. A tremor passes across her shoulders and arms, she bends forward and again shrinks back. Each movement has its own precise meaning and speaks a language that is not of words. What an effect must all this have had upon my father! Above all, the voluptuous significance of the spectacle was intensified by the acrid, peppery smell of her sweat mingling with the perfume of champac and sandalwood oil, perfumes redolent of the essences of exotic trees and arousing sensations that slumbered hitherto in the depths of the consciousness. I imagine these perfumes as resembling the smell of the drug box, of the drugs which used to be kept in the nursery and which, we were told, came from India—unknown oils from a land of mystery, of ancient civilisation. I feel sure that the medicines I used to take had that smell.
All these things revived distant, dead memories in my father’s mind. He fell in love with Bugam Dasi, so deeply in love that he embraced the dancing-girl’s religion, the lingam cult.
After some time the girl became pregnant and was discharged from the service of the temple. Shortly after I was born my uncle returned to Benares from one of his trips. Apparently, in the matter of women as in all others, his reactions were identical with my father’s. He fell passionately in love with my mother and in the end he satisfied his desire, which, because of his physical and mental resemblance to my father, was not difficult for him to do. As soon as she learned the truth my mother said that she would never again have anything to do with either of them unless they agreed to undergo ‘trial by cobra’. In that case she would belong to whichever of the two came through alive.
The ‘trial’ consisted of the following. My father and my uncle would be enclosed together in a dark room like a dungeon in which a cobra had been let loose. The first of them to be bitten by the serpent would, naturally, cry out. Immediately a snake charmer would open the door of the room and bring the other out into safety. Bugam Dasi would belong to the survivor.
Before the two were shut up in the dark room my father asked Bugam Dasi if she would perform the sacred temple dance before him once more. She agreed to do so and, by torchlight, to the music of the snake charmer’s pipe, she danced, with her significant, measured, gliding movements, bending and twisting like a cobra. Then my father and uncle were shut up in the room with the serpent. Instead of a shriek of horror what the listeners heard was a groan blended with a wild, gooseflesh-raising peal of laughter. When the door was opened my uncle walked out of the dark room. His face was ravaged and old, and his hair—the terror aroused by the sound of the cobra’s body as it slid across the floor, by its furious hissing, by its glittering eyes, by the thought of its poisonous fangs and of its loathsome body shaped like a long neck terminating in a spoon-shaped protuberance and a tiny head, the horror of all this had changed my uncle, by the time he walked out of the room, into a white-haired old man.
In accordance with the terms of the contract Bugam Dasi belonged henceforth to my uncle. The frightful thing was that it was not certain that the survivor actually was my uncle. The ‘trial’ had deranged his mind and he had completely lost his memory. He did not recognise the infant and it was this that made them decide he must be my uncle. May it not be that this story has some strange bearing upon my personal history and that that gooseflesh-raising peal of laughter and the horror of the ‘trial by cobra’ have left their imprint upon me and are somehow pertinent to my destiny?
From this time on I was nothing more than an intruder, an extra mouth to feed. In the end my uncle (or my father, whichever it was), accompanied by Bugam Dasi, returned to the city of Rey on business. They brought me with them and left me with his sister, my aunt.
My nurse told me that my mother, when saying goodbye, handed my aunt a bottle of wine to keep for me. It was a deep red wine, and it contained a portion of the venom of the cobra, the Indian serpent. What more suitable keepsake could such a woman as Bugam Dasi have found to leave to her child? Deep red wine, an elixir of death which would bestow everlasting peace. Perhaps she also had pressed out her life like a cluster of grapes and was now giving me the wine which it had yielded, that same venom which had killed my father. I understand now how precious was the gift she gave me.
Is my mother still alive? Perhaps at this moment as I write she is bending and twisting like a serpent, as though it were she whom the cobra had bitten, dancing by torchlight in an open space in some far-off city of India, while women and children and intent, bare-bodied men stand around her and my father (or my uncle), white-haired and bent, sits somewhere on the edge of the circle watching her and remembers the dungeon and the hissing of the angry cobra as it glided forward, its head raised high, its neck swelling like a scoop and the spectacle-shaped lines on the back of its hood steadily expanding and deepening in colour.
At all events I was a little baby when I was entrusted to the care of my nurse. Nanny also suckled my aunt’s daughter, the bitch my wife. I grew up in the family of my aunt, the tall woman with the grey hair around her temples, in the same house as the bitch, her daughter.
Ever since I can remember I looked upon my aunt as a mother and loved her deeply. I loved her so deeply that later on I married her daughter, my foster sister, simply because she looked like her.
Or rather, I was forced to marry her. She gave herself to me only once. I shall never forg
et it. It happened by the bedside of her dead mother. Late at night, after everyone had gone to bed, I got up in my nightshirt and drawers and went into the dead woman’s room to say goodbye to her for the last time. Two camphor candles were burning at her head. A Koran had been laid on her stomach to prevent the Devil from entering her body. I drew back the sheet which covered her and saw my aunt again, with her dignified, pleasant face, from which, it seemed, all traces of earthly concerns had been effaced. She wore an expression before which I involuntarily bowed my head and at the same time I felt that death was a normal, natural thing. The corners of her lips were fixed in a faintly ironical smile. I was about to kiss her hand and go out when, turning my head, I saw with a start that the bitch who is now my wife had come into the room. There in the presence of her dead mother she pressed herself hard against me, held me close and kissed me long and passionately on the lips. I could have sunk into the ground with shame, but I had not the strength of mind to do what I should have done. The dead woman, her teeth visible, looked as though she was mocking us—I had the impression that her expression had changed from the quiet smile she had been wearing before. Mechanically I held the girl in my arms and returned her kiss, when suddenly the curtain draped across the doorway leading to the next room was drawn aside and my aunt’s husband, the bitch’s father, came into the room. He was a bent old man, and he was wearing a scarf wrapped around his neck.
He burst into a hollow, grating, gooseflesh-raising peal of laughter, of a quality to make the hairs on one’s body stand on end. His shoulders were shaking. And yet he did not look in our direction. I could have sunk into the ground with shame. If I had had the strength I should have slapped the dead face which was gazing mockingly at us. I was overcome with shame and fled blindly from the room. And I had the bitch to thank! The chances are that she had arranged the whole thing in advance so as to put me into a position where I should be forced to marry her.
And in fact, foster brother and sister though we were, I was obliged to marry her to save her reputation. She was not a virgin, but I was unaware of the fact, and indeed was in no position to know of it; I only learnt it later from people’s gossip. When we were alone together in the bridal chamber on the first night she refused to undress, despite all my begging and praying, and would only say, ‘It’s the wrong time of the month’. She would not let me come near her but put out the light and lay down to sleep on the other side of the room from me. She was trembling like a willow tree. Anyone might have thought she had been shut up in a dungeon with a dragon. I shall probably not be believed—and indeed the thing passes belief—when I say that she did not once allow me to kiss her on the lips.
The next night also I slept on the floor as I had done the night before, and similarly on the night that followed. I could not work up the courage to do anything else. And so a considerable period went by, during which I slept on the floor on the other side of the room from my wife. Who would believe it? For two months—no, for two months and four days—I slept apart from her on the floor and could not work up the courage to come near her.
She had prepared her virginity token beforehand. I don’t know—perhaps she had sprinkled the cloth with the blood of a partridge or perhaps it was a cloth she had kept from the first night of her gallantries in order to make a bigger fool of me. At the time everyone was congratulating me. They were winking at one another and I suppose they were saying to one another, ‘The lad took the fortress by storm last night’, while I put the best face on it that I could and pretended I noticed nothing. They were laughing at me, at my blindness. I made a resolution to write the whole story down some day.
I found out later that she had lovers right and left. It may be that the reason she hated me was that a preacher, by the process of reciting a few words in Arabic over us, had placed her under my authority; perhaps she simply wanted to be free. Finally, one night I made up my mind to share her bed by force, and I carried out my resolve. After a tussle she got out of the bed and left me and the only satisfaction I had was that I was able to curl up and sleep the rest of the night in her bed, which was impregnated with the warmth and the odour of her body. The only time I enjoyed peaceful sleep was that night. After that she slept in a different room from me.
When I came back to the house after dark she would still be out. Or rather, I would not know whether she had returned home or not and I did not care to know, since solitude and death were my destiny. I desired at all costs to establish contact with her lovers—this is another thing that will seem incredible—and sought out everyone who I heard had caught her fancy. I put up with every sort of humiliation in order to strike up an acquaintance with them. I toadied to them, urged them to visit my wife, even brought them to the house. And what people she chose! A tripepedlar, an interpreter of the Law, a cooked-meat vendor, the police superintendent, a shady mufti, a philosopher—their names and titles varied, but none of them was fit to be anything better than assistant to the man who sells boiled sheep’s heads. And she preferred all of them to me. No one would believe me if I were to describe the abject self-abasement with which I cringed and grovelled to her and them. The reason why I behaved like this was that I was afraid my wife might leave me. I wanted my wife’s lovers to teach me deportment, manners, the technique of seduction! However, as a pimp I was not a success, and the fools all laughed in my face. After all, how ever could I have learnt manners and deportment from the rabble? I know now that she loved them precisely because they were shameless, stupid and rotten. Her love was inseparable from filth and death. Did I really want to sleep with her? Was it her looks that had made me fall in love with her, or was it her aversion to me or her general behaviour or the deep affection I had felt for her mother since my early childhood, or was it all of these things combined? I simply do not know. One thing I do know: my wife, the bitch, the sorceress, had poured into my soul some poison which not only made me want her but made every single atom in my body desire the atoms of hers and shriek aloud its desire. I yearned to be with her on some lost island where there would be nobody but us two. I wished that an earthquake, a great storm or a thunderbolt from the sky might blast all the rabble-humanity that was there breathing, bustling and enjoying life on the far side of the wall of my room and that only she and I might remain.
But even then would she not have preferred any other living creature—an Indian serpent, a dragon—to me? I longed to spend one night with her and to die together with her, locked in her arms. I felt that this would be the sublime culmination of my existence.
While I wasted away in agony the bitch for her part seemed to derive an exquisite pleasure from torturing me. In the end I abandoned all the activities and interests that I had and remained confined to my room like a living corpse. No one knew the secret which existed between us. Even my old nurse, who was a witness of my slow death, used to reproach me—on account of the bitch! Behind my back, around me, I heard people whispering, ‘How can that poor woman put up with that crazy husband of hers?’ And they were right, for my abasement had gone beyond all conceivable limits.
I wasted away from day to day. When I looked at myself in the mirror my cheeks were crimson like the meat that hangs outside butchers’ shops. My body was glowing with heat and the expression of my eyes was languid and depressed.
I was pleased with the change in my appearance. I had seen the dust of death sprinkled over my eyes, I had seen that I must go.
At last they sent word to the doctor, the rabble doctor, the family doctor who, in his own words, had ‘brought us all up’. He came into the room in an embroidered turban and with a beard three handsbreadths long. It was his boast that he had in his time given my grandfather drugs to restore his virility, administered grey powders to me and forced cassia down the throat of my aunt. He sat down by my bedside and, after feeling my pulse and inspecting my tongue, gave his professional advice: I was to go onto a diet of ass’s milk and barley water and to have my room fumigated twice a day with mastic and arsenic. He also g
ave my nurse a number of lengthy prescriptions consisting of herbal extracts and weird and wonderful oils—hyssop, olive oil, extract of liquorice, camphor, maidenhair, camomile oil, oil of bay, linseed, fir-tree nuts and such-like trash.
My condition grew worse. Only my old grey-haired nurse, who was her nurse also, attended me, bringing me my medicine or sitting beside my bed, dabbing cold water on my forehead. She would talk about the time when the bitch and I were children. For example, she told me how my wife from early childhood had a habit of biting the nails of her left hand and would sometimes gnaw them to the quick. Sometimes she would tell me stories and then I would feel that my life had reversed its course and I had become a child again, for the stories were intimately associated with my memories of those days. I remember quite plainly that when I was very little and my wife and I used to sleep together in the one cradle, a big double cradle, my nurse used to tell the same stories. Some things in these stories which then used to strike me as far-fetched now seem perfectly natural and credible to me.
My morbid condition had created within me a new world, a strange indistinct world of shapes and colours and desires of which a healthy person could have no conception. In these circumstances the crowding incidents of my nurse’s tales struck an echo which filled me with indescribable delight and agitation. I felt that I had become a child again. At this very moment as I write I experience those sensations. They belong, all of them, to the present. They are not an element of the past.