Sun After Dark (19 page)
When you stumble into a bookshop in Calcutta (the proprietor hands you his business card—“V. L. Chatterjee, B.A., A.B.F.,” or “Bachelor of Arts, Appeared but Failed”)—you begin to see that the best-selling author of the day is one P. G. Wodehouse, and the faded glory of his diction somehow confers a gay Edwardian tilt on even the most everyday of transactions in India. (“I’m sorry,” I was told when I called up the editor of a movie magazine, “Miss Sonaya is not in her cabin just now,” which made me imagine her, perhaps not incorrectly, on a cruise ship.) The young these days “air-dash” to what the newspapers typically call a “Mega Exhibition Showcase of Ideal Lifestyle,” but everything else proceeds as if nothing had ever changed; as if, in fact, everything is in the hands of some far-off gods who cannot always be relied upon. (The sign that every foreigner comes to know and dread in India, diligently posted up in every airport, train station, and hotel lobby, is INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED.) As it says without compunction in a public phone center, ANY EXCHANGE FAULT OR COMMUNICATION ERROR IS ON CUSTOMER’S ACCOUNT. THANKS.
Anyone who is tempted to laugh at all this—as who would not be?—is well advised to recall that in reality the literature of English these days is ever more in the hands of those who may be regretting the inconvenience. They took the words that Empire brought to them, and somehow kept them going, much like those coughing Morris Oxfords in the street, and even made them new. More deeply, they infused the words with a hopeful-ness and sincerity that are elsewhere just a memory. “Devotees are warned,” said the sign in Bombay’s most famous Hindu temple, “that to sit on the rocks much deep in the sea water away from the sea shore is not only encroachment on government property but is also dangerous to their lives, including valuable ornaments.”
We start, perhaps, by laughing at the follies of another culture’s misappropriations. We move towards bewilderment, as we sense that we’re not quite in the culture we left, and yet not in the one we think we’re going to. And we end up somewhere completely different, not quite irony and not quite romance. As I prepared to fly out of New Delhi last year—BE LIKE VENUS: UNARMED, instructed the sign at the airport beside me—I began to wonder how far I was really going. “Blighty,” after all, is the Hindi word for “foreign.”
1997
THE PEBBLE IN THE SHOE
Leaving the miraculous out of life is rather like leaving out the lavatory or dreams or breakfast.
—Graham Greene
The thing is, the one thing you must never forget,” the Frenchman was saying, calmly, but with a lucid passion behind him, “this place, it is not Cartesian.” The five of us were sitting in his restaurant in the hills around Pétionville; the suburbs of Port-au-Prince climb the hills, as in Southern California or the Côte d’Azur, and from behind the trees, or in one of the lavish courtyards set against its fairy lights, it’s hard to see the contours of the poorest country in the hemisphere down below. BMWs purr past and there are swimming pools in the hotels, beside the villas; at restaurants like the Frenchman’s you can dine well on coq au vin and imagine yourself in one of the finer places above Nice. A few days later, on New Year’s Eve, we would find ourselves at a $100-a-plate dinner, where all the favored souls of Haiti, in backless dresses and diaphanous scarves, to show off their tans, would feast as if they were in a boîte in Le Marais. Some were white, many were black, but all were honorary Frenchmen.
The French were perched, though, on the edge of wilderness. In Port-au-Prince itself it is dangerous to go out of the hotels. Men walk around the central square with bloodshot eyes, and it is easy to feel that all of them, at some level, are armed and ready to kill. Haiti is often known as the first country of the Fourth World because it enjoys the rare distinction of having gone backwards since its independence, achieved through the efforts of the released slave Toussaint-Louverture. It is a poetic truth that AIDS was first imagined to come up from this ill-starred island two hours from New York; Haiti’s most famous gift is for possessions of the soul, what we call voodoo and zombies (two of the few words it’s given to English).
The Frenchman’s restaurant was a stylish place, full of nostalgia, and not only
nostalgie de la boue;
lizards ran up and down its walls, and a rat was visible scurrying under one of the outdoor tables, but the man, resident here for twenty-seven years, with a Haitian wife, was doing what he could to push back darkness and claim a little space, a small victory for order. He had realized, however, at what price it came. “It is what you learn here,” he was saying, an exile philosopher, over coffee, as the dinner stretched into the early hours. “It is what you must accept. The place is not Cartesian.” In Nicaragua, ten years before, during the war, I’d been taken to a restaurant upon arrival where fine lobster was available for sixty dollars a plate (and for dessert to the Café Lennon, where we could play at being Che); the center of the capital was a huge crater still empty from an earthquake many years before.
We were staying now in the Oloffson Hotel, the famous playground of the international set, where Charles Addams had designed his drawings for the Addams Family, and Graham Greene had set
The Comedians;
one of Greene’s ambiguous pieces of local color, Aubelin Jolicoeur, still flitted through the lobby at the cocktail hour, and rooms were named after Anne Bancroft and Noël Coward. The present owner, an exile from America, was the son of a Puritan professor from Yale (and of a Haitian dancer).
He had a band, and we (a schoolfriend and I) followed the band wherever it went; it became our way into the darkness all around. We went with the fifteen musicians to the beach on New Year’s Day, a big expedition for local men who lived in the notorious slum known as Cité Soleil. That night we went to a concert held up in the hills, towards Kenscoff; the moon passed in and out of clouds—a voodoo night, as we visitors could imagine it— and at 2:15 a.m. we were the only guests who had shown up so early for the concert. The next day, it was a new nightclub opening on the edge of town, very black men in suits, old men who’d grown fat off various governments, dancing with their wives, while coffee-colored girls in cocktail dresses passed this way and that. We were doing what many in the privileged world seek to do—get a taste of the other side, the place across the mountains, before returning, with sun-browned skins and useful reminders of poverty, to our usual lives.
On arrival—this seemed part of what Haiti was about—a four-piece band greeted my American Airlines flight on the tarmac (the American flight attendants so traumatized that they never stepped off the plane: it was the only place they flew to, a frightened stewardess told me, where they were not allowed to overnight in a hotel). The chaos had begun in the plane itself, the large man next to me pulling out a flask of something potent as soon as we were in the air, while other of his fellows began running hands up any cabin attendants who walked past. (In fact, it had begun even earlier, in JFK, where all the passengers seemed to be carrying all their goods onto the plane with them. I, too, fearing what would happen to my bags if they left my sight, had tried to carry everything onto the plane, and been forced to check in luggage as I boarded.)
Once I walked past the four-piece band into the terminal, I was truly in the wilderness. Thirteen, fourteen baggage carts unloaded their booty onto the belt, people grabbed and pushed, they laughed, my hand, in the melee, began to bleed. But my confiscated case was not in sight. Maybe later, said the harried American Airlines man at the desk; the company could not be responsible for anything. The car taking me into town, once I walked out of the caged terminal (all Haiti, it seemed, gathered in the sun), gave out; the car that would bring me back the next day, in search of my baggage, would get rear-ended, as it stalled on a hill.
The Oloffson was a refuge, of course: its friendly owner had been to prep school in America and the Ivy League; he hardly seemed perturbed when people got possessed at his band’s concerts, and started rolling their eyes. Sometimes mobs came into the hotel grounds with flaming torches, wanting to burn the place down; he resisted them almost single-handedly. He did not recommend we go out of the hotel, though, even as far as the Sexy Photocopie shop, or the nearest bar; the bush began outside the hotel gates. It was not Cartesian.
I had a four-room suite (the Lillian Hellman suite, in fact), with a terrace overlooking the garden. There was CNN on the TV, and on the tables were glossy magazines from New York. The magazines, in which I might easily have found an article of mine, spoke of the prosperity and promise of the new Information Age; they spoke of a digital world and man’s capacity to get the better of everything around him. The ads were full of jewels and expensive clothes, apt for the pop stars and film directors who stayed here. The people lined up near the Rue des Miracles, outside the Wonderful Semi-Lycée, were relieving themselves in mountains of trash.
It was, I think, the same dialogue the Puritans had known when they arrived in America (and the protagonists of their dramas were two: God and the Wilderness). It was, though the terms would have been different, the dialogue the British entered into when they went to Africa and India. It was a dialogue that takes place inside every being—“redskin” and “pale-face,” as the literary critics used to say, the genteel tradition and the barbaric yawp—but it was one that it was convenient to describe in terms of Descartes, the round hole and the square peg. The British Empire—or any empire, including the French one here—stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable. As if one could lay down a perfect grid on a teeming polymorphous swarm (in India, say, in Haiti), which has outlasted all systems and ideologies (and, in India, sometime in its adolescence, had given us, some say, the very symbol we use for zero). It is a dialogue between sense—the forces of progress and order, and understanding—and everything that stands far beyond our apprehension: mystery.
“ ‘I do so hate mysteries,’ ” says Adela, the young English visitor who has recently arrived in India and been invited to dine with Dr. Aziz, a little before her soul-emptying trip to the Marabar Caves, in
A Passage to India.
“ ‘We English do,’ ” says her older, wiser friend, Mrs. Moore.
“ ‘I dislike them not because I’m English but from my own personal point of view,’ ” she goes on, as a good Forsterian character might.
“ ‘I like mysteries,’ ” pronounces Mrs. Moore, “ ‘but I rather dislike muddles.’ ”
A little earlier, the English visitors have trembled to the happier side of the ineffable, as the Brahmin Dr. Godbole suddenly breaks into a haunting, inexplicable Hindu song; it is, perhaps, a large part of what they can cherish in India—the imminence of the unknown. The Marabar Caves round out the equation, though, with the other side of the unsayable, and the comfortable sightseer in the poorer, wilder areas of the globe finds she’s in deeper than she knows, in all senses. She can try to rise to the questions mystery raises (as in Melville), but more often she will get swallowed up in them (like the characters in Bowles).
The quester (Adela’s last name is Quested) goes out in search of something outside the range of her experience, far from the imprisoning comfort of her life; and she ends up, very often, with some disease, inward or external, from which she will never recover. In the novel in which Adela finds herself, the section called “Caves” is sandwiched between one called “Mosque” and another called “Temple.” It is as if some grain of the unknowable, some piece of what is beyond us, gets inside the soul the way a pebble may get inside one’s shoe, and after that there is no way of finding the calm one knew before.
The pebble we call mystery, horror, the shadow-world; we call the primitive or the jungle, whatever lies at the very back of us, deep down, in the caves reserved for spirits not of the flesh. The part that comes before cognition, and goes on long after cognition has taken its place on the Cartesian terrace.
My parents (in British India) grew up, I think, in the middle of this dialogue, taught with one part of their beings, the daylight side, to sing of a “green hill far away” and to memorize the verses of Tennyson and Shelley, while with the other they were mumbling ancient prayers, and tying pieces of string around their limbs. Never eating meat or touching a piece of food that anyone else had touched, even if that someone was the one who was teaching them about Locke and Plato and Spinoza.
What was alien to them, in fact, and ravenous, was a world without shadow, where everything was smiling and people had no “side,” as the English might have said; the California they came to where there were no Marabar Caves, as such, and yet people wore their lives, their souls, their tremulous destinies upon their sleeves, to be smudged and abraded by everything that passes. To someone who comes from a society of rites, of purdah, it is explicitness, and the elimination of all veils, that can feel unsettling.
This is an obvious point, but it becomes urgent in a world where so many people live in the middle of the Other; each of us is unprotected in different ways, and alienness inheres not in a place or object, but in our relation to it. Our fears—of course— are as private, as unrational as our dreams. For the American Indians, the Puritans were the wilderness, with their figure bleeding on the cross, their hanging of witches from the gallows, their morbid attentiveness to the dark forces all around; for my parents, California was the place where suddenly Plato meant nothing, and Wordsworth didn’t scan—all that Britain and India had given them could get no purchase in a world without a sense of history, or center, or direction.
And so they were colonized, in a way, by randomness, the vacuum of a place without society or community, where the old lessons had no meaning; while I, who grew up in the midst of it, had to travel far in search of a more ancestral kind of anarchy and the wild. Which is why, with an old British friend, and a lifelong Christian, I was bouncing now through the wastes of Haiti, gravestones beside the Route National 1, and shadows stealing through the overgrowth of our hotel to take drinks at the cocktail hour under a folk-art depiction of the Last Supper.
“It’s why I read the Bible,” my friend said, as we lurched along pockmarked roads till we came to a very old building haunted by pictures of its vanished French occupants, topless in the sun. “Because I fail. Because I’m never the person I would like to be.” The town in which we arrived was famous for its murders, and the people were now praying for the next U.S. invasion.
On New Year’s Day we went to a small church near the Oloffson, and at the Catholic mass young women in their Sunday best played voodoo drums instead of an organ, and parishioners stood among great pillars on which had been written single words in French: PIETY . . . FORCE . . . FEAR. Something that had existed long before Christ’s arrival, and far outside his domain, had come into this building that was itself, I thought, a hopeful, perhaps naive attempt to draw lines around the dark and make a kind of order.
Back in the hotel, on the sunlit terrace, the owner was talking about how he had bought the place for twenty dollars, his partner having left because there were all these people killed in the street. A woman from New York, head of her own P.R. agency, was talking about the time she’d gone out with Warren Beatty, the time she’d met Bob Dylan at Al Kooper’s house; when her husband called with a question, she took the call in the hotel manager’s office, and her voice rose and cracked as she began tapping her fingers on the desk. The owner’s Haitian mother-in-law lay flat out on a bench beside the reception desk as if she were now stuffed.
“Cartesian” was a word I’d never heard in casual conversation before, the Frenchman sipping at his wine, the rats scurrying outside; as we got up in the dark and took the taxi back to the hotel, it didn’t really translate to the dark men outside the College René Descartes and the hospital with its sign in two languages, ARMS PROHIBITED INSIDE. At the Oloffson, as the hotel manager and his band played (in the lobby, silent Chaplin films were projected over the painting of the Last Supper), excited fans pulled out their Uzis, and security men sat guard over the fifty or so weapons they’d confiscated that evening. The lines in the maps in my guidebook were all straight and clear; the opening hours were listed for every café.
