The Grammarian (23 page)

Sitting on that small bed in Anthony’s house, thinking of that time, Alexandre’s body flinched with need. His thoughts turned back to the plain waitress. He sucked his teeth, tasting tobacco in his gums and on his tongue. He felt his muscles tense as suddenly it seemed that all the banked desire of his many months here overcame him. He stood, walking about the room.

He felt now the guilt of harboring a secret but was unsure what it was. In France, his wife and his children knew him, and the neighbors and his colleagues and friends. He knew the streets and where they would lead and the shops that lined them and for once since coming to India, Alexandre was unsure he wanted to go back to Paris. But then he wondered if he
should
just go home—if he should forget the book and India and go back home. After all, who would this grammar help? Whose life would it change? What good would it bring to the world? Was he writing it only for his own vanity?

He had just met Anthony, and though the man was friendly and gregarious to a fault, Alexandre still did not know him well. And Alexandre, alone that night in that room in a country more foreign than he had estimated, clasped his hands in prayer as he had not for
more than twenty-five years, and spoke not to his mother’s silently listening Virgin in blue but rather to some warm-spirited conjuring of his very own, a fatherly figure who would intercede on Alexandre’s behalf to speak to those from whom Alexandre had been banished and whom he would never see again. His hands together, Alexandre knelt, in that manner of his childhood, and prayed—a prayer that was not his custom; all alone, Alexandre attempted to convene with the divine.

T
WO WEEKS AFTER
leaving the Adivis, Kanakadurga sent Prithu to Anthony’s home with a letter from Madeline that had come in the mail for Alexandre. Seeing Prithu, Alexandre smiled and went to greet the boy, but the child greeted him with the same fear and formality that Alexandre had felt from him the day they met. Excited, Alexandre didn’t think to dismiss the boy and tore open the note.

He hoped that Madeline had sent him pictures of his children, but was disappointed to find only a short note. She told him she missed him and that the children were sad to be celebrating Christmas without him. His sister Claudine had had her baby, a wrinkled, pink little girl named Celine. Madeline asked for a silk shawl if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, and the children wanted Indian toys. She asked him when he would be coming back.

He sighed and folded the letter again. Alexandre missed his children, not for the ways in which they were changing and growing without him, but in spite of this. He missed his children as younger children, as toddlers and swaddled infants. He missed this most in Matthieu; the world would allow for some softness in girls. But he feared his dear boy, the sweetest boy, was already becoming hardened in response to the world—that horrible machine. His little, weird, inquisitive blond boy,
his shy baby, how Alexandre missed him. He missed Catherine also, his tiny girl with curls who would brush his cheeks with a whisper of love beyond articulation. There were times when, watching her play, he could swear his daughter was made of flowers. Daffodil hands and a miniature rose mouth. Hair of snapdragons and skin of tuberose and lilies and bluebell eyes. Her growing was like petals falling through his hands.

He asked Prithu in Telugu how Kanakadurga and Anjali were. The boy answered that Kanakadurga was well and that Anjali was no longer in the home. Alexandre asked him where she had gone, but Prithu simply shook his head, “
Teeledhu babu garu
.” He didn’t know.

T
HERE IS A
town named Rumigny on the French side of the Franco-Belgian border, in the Champagne-Ardennes region, where wheat and rapeseed are grown and in the dry season one can find pale yellow bales of hay in great desolate fields. Rumigny was where the never-ordained Abbey Nicholas de la Caille was born in 1713. Thirty-eight years later he washed up on the South African shores of the cape and catalogued nearly ten thousand stars between Capricorn and the South Pole and made the case for fifteen new constellations; he wrote the calendar for eighteen hundred years of eclipses. The Cape of Good Hope was named as such by John the Second, a Portuguese king, who thought the rocky tip of Africa portended great things, like a sea route to India and China. The Cabo da Boa Esperança, despite its rocky shores, was in truth a trying, African Ithaca. When Alexandre was a child, a biography of de la Caille was always on his father’s desk. A small tattered paperback. Every now and then, his father would wearily thumb the pages of the book and glance sidelong at his sons, saying sternly, “This man did real work. He served mankind with his discovery.”

Had Maurice Lautens, the father of Alexandre—Alexandre, who would become an important figure in the disciplines of comparative grammar and psycholinguistics—not had the familial expectations of continuing his father’s trade of banking, he would have liked to become an astronomer. He liked very much to make out constellations in the Swiss sky and would sometimes creep out of bed, not seeing Agathe’s eyelids twitch, her eyes opening in the dark, looking out the window at the starlight that her husband found more alluring than her. This despite her blond pin curls and long legs. Maurice liked the quiet of the purple night sky, and not without some ambivalence would occasionally take his boys out into the garden in Geneva and later in Paris, waking them from sleep to share a truly beautiful and clear night sky.

His son Matthieu, to Maurice’s chagrin, seemed to resent being woken up and made to go outside in his blue pajamas and robe, but his little Alex delighted in the interruption, holding the small, layman’s telescope. Maurice would kneel behind his son, pointing out stars and bright planets, painting the heavens with mythological heroes and astrological lore. It was his time with his boys, and Matthieu and Alexandre never heard their father speak more than on those nights when he would tell his secret compendium of stories. Agathe would struggle to find sleep again, hearing the lightness in her husband’s voice, the love and the laughter among him and her sons from outside. It wasn’t the voice he used with her.

So Alexandre grew up with a love for the sky. He had once found Anjali sitting outside in the middle of the night, eating sweets quietly, and the girl turned to see him when she smelled amber and oak. Alexandre stooped as he bent to sit next to her. He nodded his head,
acknowledging the sky, “Do you see that, Anjali, that very bright constellation? You are lucky to see it. Half of the world can’t. France is part of the Northern Hemisphere, so I’ve had the recent joy of seeing a whole new night sky. Some of your constellations here are so rarely visible in France. The priest who comes around from time to time, Guru Hanumanth Rao, was helping me map the Indian sky. He is very good . . . very helpful. In Europe we call this one Ursa Major . . . ”

Anjali had been tutored in Latin by one of her father’s sycophantic hires. “Ah . . . the Great Bear. We call it Saptarishi Mandal, the constellation of the seven sages.”

Alexandre’s inherited knowledge of the celestial map comforted him about certain things like death and regret. Knowing that light could show from a star billions of light-years away reassured him of some sort of some divine calculus.

But moment to moment Alexandre felt small. He felt that he lacked direction in his life, and seeing the washerwomen on their way to the river or the fishmonger weighing his daily catch, he felt that the hard labor of the lower classes gave their lot a purpose that he in his intellectual sphere envied. It was not asked of him daily that he lay bricks or sweep homes or cook for some rich family. It was only asked of him that he think each day, deeply and profoundly, that he think of the questions of language and of speech and of thought itself. Even teaching was done not only to impart information as a series of facts but to inspire his students to take the discipline further than he would be able to in his own lifetime. He taught not in spite of his impending death but because of it.

And then sometimes he would think that poets and philosophers, intellectuals and artists would do well for themselves to pick
up brooms and buckets and washrags and weary themselves from the sheer exhaustion of living the day rather than falling into fitful sleep, burdened by wondering if their minds were good enough, if the intelligence and inspiration that started on a paper or sculpture would be enough to carry them through to follow through on the promise.

There were things he liked to do with his hands. He liked to cook and to wash dishes. There was a satisfaction in those things because the result was so plainly seen. He liked squeezing lemons and cutting carrots and cleaning burned grease off pots and pans. It felt good to him to put his arm muscles to scrubbing in warm, soapy water and lifting a dripping and glistening dish from it.

Excluded from so many of the thinking professions, he wondered if women too contemplated the questions of life and death. He couldn’t ask Madeline for fear of condescending to her, and even if she did think of those things, he imagined they did not bother her greatly because she had a way of ordering her life into small duties: washing her face, making coffee, warming bread for breakfast and dressing the children. The progress in her days could be measured by finite chores like preparing a roast. That the chore would be repeated the next day, Alexandre, suspected, did not prevent women from feeling satisfaction at each subsequent completion. He could measure Madeline’s satisfaction by how it grieved her when these duties were not complete; how she would fuss and curse if she burned a pot of coffee or forgot an item on her shopping list; what a racket their morning household was if Matthieu or Catherine refused to get out of bed or comb their hair.

Sometimes Alexandre felt that he’d gladly trade her duties for his; his world consisted of languages of the Orient, hers of their home, and to his mind only hers was a manageable one, one where finishing was
possible. And anyways, if he didn’t write more of his book or have some sort of breakthrough in theory, a handful of specialists might be disappointed—but given the competitive climate of academia, this was unlikely—but if Madeline were to stay in bed all day, the children would go unwashed and unfed.

The problem, he supposed, was that his wasn’t a great mind. It was a good one, a very good one even, but the distance between good and great was vast. He wasn’t like some of his contemporaries, who could pore over a book for hours with little need for food or sleep. He’d had spells of that behavior, when he felt as if he’d pushed past some sort of mental block, but it wasn’t usual for him. He liked to think about other things too, like food and women’s bodies and perfume. He liked also to think of the stars and his father feeling small underneath them, not just his physical life but his life as a whole, that to live his life as a banker in a world in which planets spun in orbits and all of life lived by a rhythm of the moon and seas was a small life indeed, and Alexandre felt his father’s angst too.

Alexandre thought that life was the hardest with a good mind; to be productive, he needed discipline. Had he had a great mind he would simply be a vehicle for his science, for his work. And though that kind of life seemed to be one exclusive of a woman’s love or friends or children, he thought it must be easy to surrender to the demands of one’s genius. A poor mind too would manage to dictate the terms of one’s life easily. There was always plenty of work in the world for the physically hearty and mentally meager. Only the good but not great had to work hard to create the life their minds were capable of envisioning but not fulfilling.

There were times when Alexandre’s mind would work with crystalline clarity, his thought nearly as liquid and as effortless as desire,
and in those rare moments thinking seemed terribly easy, as if for a brief time all the parts of his brain were working under the direction of a single conductor. These moments weighed on him at all the other times, when his mind felt lumbering and mediocre.

I
N THE EVENING
, Anthony returned home from the garden of a friend he had been visiting and bicycled up the slight hill to the house. Alexandre was writing in the sitting room and saw through the hallway as Madhuri greeted Anthony with kisses. Alexandre heard her squeal with delight and then Anthony’s footsteps and the
clink-clink
of her anklets as they approached the sitting room.

He held a bag of tomatoes. “These are delicious, Alexandre—fresh from my friend’s garden . . . a new variety of green tomato.” He held one silky skinned, heavy fruit in his hand and took a hearty bite out of the pale green flesh. He ate it with relish and handed the bag to Madhuri and asked her to use them for dinner.

“Nothing better than
russam
made with fresh tomatoes,” he smiled at Alexandre. “How are we this evening, Alex?”

“Well, thank you. I received a letter from Madeline.”

“Oh, lovely. Anything interesting?”

“No, not really. She asked for some things . . . she reminded me about Christmas! I had almost forgotten!”

“Ah yes . . . your first Christmas away from home?” Anthony smiled, “nothing here to remind one to have a Joyeux Noël, eh?”

“No, I’m afraid not . . . the Adivis’ servant boy brought the letter over . . . he said Anjali isn’t at the home anymore.”

“Poor girl! Her father’s probably sent her away to . . . ” Anthony sat down, heavily, lighting a cigarette, “some sort of school for wayward
Hindu girls who disgrace themselves with handsome Frenchmen on the beach!” Anthony laughed and handed Alexandre a cigarette.

Alexandre smiled uncomfortably, speaking through lips pursed around the cigarette, his head inclined toward Anthony’s lighter. “I hope she is alright . . . ”