Rongili Biswas

The Chartreuse Grass

 

It was inside him for years together, buried deep, beneath layers of inconsequentialities. He remembers how he roared with laughter when the devil’s puppet tail invariably caught fire in the show of St. Anthony at the St. Romain fair in Rouen.  He would wait for this small act of pyrotechnic to take place amid his cold, damp collège days. He was only ten then, and was living in the collège dormitory, where the dank air reminded him of bare oak benches lying in empty classrooms. A lone cast-iron stove tried to spew heat only a few meters ahead of itself, leaving the inhabitants of the corners untouched. For most boys, even the ink froze in winter. And everyone was supposed to write their class-work using the knee as a bench. At five in the morning, they would be awakened by the drum-roll. Springing up from the beds, they would wash and dress themselves, form a line, and after being inspected, would walk downstairs in silence. Punishment for any deviation was harsh enough to be remembered — standing outside on a frosty day without stirring, kneeling on a wooden rod, or holding out heavy books in two hands.

 

They were happy, though. Those boys. Coming back from a long walk, they would sit around the stove, their teeth clattering from the cold and the rain, water dripping from their heads.  The chimney would be humming in a low tone, and they would toast their slices of bread on their rulers. And talk about love.  About love, about betrayals, about the women they had met, and the plays they had seen. Then deep in the night, wide awake, listening to the clock’s chiming, they would perhaps ponder over a night of freedom, enjoyed in the absence of the housemaster, who throughout the year wore a long grey coat with big, oversized buttons, and in the night walked up and down the corridor, peeking at the white beds occupied by shivering boys. 

 

They had endless dreams that they hid with delight. Those boys. Like that warm bird that was holed up in their bosom whose wings never ceased to flutter. And they dared to dream the wildest. The kind that only the troubadour, the insurrectionary, and the exotic dream. Then, one day one of the boys shot himself in the head. He was disgusted with life, he said. ‘You have hardly begun it’, someone told him. ‘All the same, I know how it tastes, I want to taste death instead’, he replied. Their dreams were superb examples of extravagance, of uncanny boiling in their brains. But they were above all artists. Artists who can ruin their eyes reading novels in the dormitory, or can shoot themselves in the head with a pistol, or carry a dagger in their pockets like Anthony.

 

The curious lot of boys in the collège thus alternated between madness and suicide — a group of young madcaps who lived in a strange world. Someone else in Gustave’s class had strangled himself with his necktie, while many others ruined themselves with debauchery out of sheer boredom, and many more died in their beds for reasons unknown, perhaps out of a yearning for grandeur, and a hatred for platitude. They bore vestiges of the last flowering of romanticism in a provincial setting, as one bears the insignia of deep wounds from a war won ages ago. 

 

The feeling of chill and frost prevailed eternally within the collège. But beyond the enormous baroque chapel and the grandiose portico, the generous courtyard and the high walls, seasons had their usual movements. Autumn arrived with its own dosage of the damp and the carnival, for with it came the fair of St. Romain. Streets became replete with marons grilles, and the smell of roasted chestnuts accompanied by those of grilled Herrings and cinnamon gingerbreads hung perpetually in the air. Gustave would sometimes go out to have a walk towards the river. At his back would be the neo-classical church of La Madelaine with its great pillars, and a gable with the symbol of Sun etched on it. The road over which trees formed a leafy canopy led to the Seine with a gentle slope. There was a little island in the middle of the river, l’ille du Petit-Guay. Adjacent to it was a pool where he spent many an afternoon under the little avenue of poplars, with the smell of nets and tar and the sight of sails. In between, crossing the gates of the wine and cider market, Le Champ de Foire aux Boisson, he would step into the world of brewers, barrel-makers and wine-merchants, into their raucous abuses and endearments hurled in a tongue that barely sounded like French, into barrels and cargos loading and unloading on the quay, and into the men bustles of the men with huge draft horses and heavy boots. 

 

The St. Romain fairground had a fairy- tale air about it.  In it were the tents made of painted cloth and chunks of wood where circus acrobats, buffoons and animals stayed together, chewed spiced bread, and danced to the sound of the drums and the trumpets. Gustave loved seeing peasants with huge baskets on their backs drinking cider, whores and thieves roaming around for prospective prey, precocious boys smoking and playing billiards out in the open. He was enamoured by the carnivalesque flavor where wrestlers and weightlifters showed their strength under the night sky, pierced by the magic lanterns, mountebanks rode their bedecked horses with the lackeys in coloured attires, and fair ladies walked dangerously on high ropes in cherry-hued costumes. He gluttonously relished the sopranos of the amateur singers, the sound of all the Molières and melodramas coming out of the impromptu playhouses, and the cries of the performing dogs in the menageries. 

 

Gustave would walk around alone – completely dazed. A man would be ready to lift an enormous weight on his back, with a banner scrolling from his mouth that said : I am the Hercules of the north. A prattling quack would be standing on top of a barrel, in a spectacular green coat laced with gold, a broad scrubby wig, imitation diamonds on his fingers, breeches of worn black satin and shoes with enormous buckles. He would show Gustave a seven-legged calf or a hydrocephalic foetus kept in a jar. In the middle of the light and the shade, Gustave would get to read the Schmidt Menagerie’s advertisement bragging about its dozen lions, a Bengal tiger, leopards, hyenas, elephants, snakes, crocodiles and bears. From the northeast corner where a singer thundered from under a huge red umbrella, he would take the right turn, and reach an area that was perennially kept dark. Women would be standing naked behind a screen there, and only show themselves to people who paid. 

 

Beyond the dilapidated cart with faded flowers where Mangin, a pencil- seller dressed as an army officer sharpened the edges of huge pencils with blunt swords, stood old Legrain’s puppet-show booth. Where he would stage the show of St. Anthony year after year. It was hard to tell if Legrain’s fame lay more in his ability to transform the tortured Egyptian St. Anthony into a beautiful candle, while the goblins sang about threateningly, or in stitching up a long-tailed devil whose appendage was convenient for catching fire, or in the very fact of his eternal and undaunted rendering of the same mystery that every Rouenaise knew he would never get tired of. 

 

*

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Now standing in front of Callot’s engraving of St. Anthony, Gustave’s own words about Brueghel’s painting come back to him.

 

I remember the details rather well. I remember Saint Anthony with three women, turning away to avoid their caresses. They are naked, white, smiling, about to put their arms around him...the whole composition is swarming, crawling, sniggering, in a quite grotesque and frenzied fashion.

 

Beneath everything, the individual details were genial. That made the impact strong and confused, altogether strange in point of fact, to the extent that all the Titians and the Ruebens at the Palazzo Balbi gallery got obliterated from Gustave’s view. He stood still without taking his eyes off even for a moment. He would have remained so for eternity, if Caroline did not touch his shoulder in such an anxious manner.

 

Gustave knew at once that this hallucinatory, dream-like quality of frenzy in the painting could only be brought to life by the structural devices of a stage. A stage at whose centre would be the hermit’s cell, where temptations kept visiting him in every possible form. Like Old Legrain’s booth, where the hooded saint sat in a corner, stock-still, against the flat, coloured cardboard backdrops, making up for his chapel, and for the characters that would soon haunt his vision. Gustave never got over those slap-stick, jerky marionette movements. 

 

Tactile and disembodied. Stilted. Acquiescent. All at the same time. 

 

*

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The third century anchorite’s story keeps unfolding before his eyes almost instantaneously. Saint Anthony, practicing asceticism in the inner Egyptian mountains, moved to the outer mountains for furthering his spiritual quest. There he was visited by besieging demons for as long as twenty full years. But fame tracked him down, and forced him to move into further isolation in the desert surrounding the red sea. He never achieved full seclusion, and if the demons ever let him be, his disciples did not. He inspired long journeys in the depth of the mountains by commoners and acolytes alike, who believed one visit to him would bring about deliverance from suffering. 

 

With the night comes rain. When it stops, and the moon passes behind the great tulip tree – a black silhouette against the deep blue sky – he thinks about his letter to Louise. Writing to her about Callot’s work makes Gustave relive the experience at Palazzo Balbi in its minutest detail:

 

The painting first seems confusing, then it is perceived as foreign by most people, strange by some, something out of the ordinary by others; everything else in the gallery fades in comparison... it made me think of arranging the subject for the theatre. But that would need someone very different from me…

 

Would it? Can one not think in terms of a dramatic structure where sins and heresies stalk the saint in a protracted night of agony? Sins cannot be allowed to take the floor alone. There will be virtues waging wars against sins for the saint’s attention. In the midst of this cataclysm, the saint’s vision will allow the irresistible Queen of Sheba to appear on stage. Amid wraiths of desire engulfing the poor saint, the sphinx, the chimera and the monsters will deign to parade. Finally, the Devil will appear to take the saint on a cosmic flight and Anthony’s wish to be part of a scintillating Nature will now be countered by the argument that nothing is real. Not even what is making him rapturous about the void and the matter around him. Once Anthony comes back to earth, Death and Lechery, monsters and ancient gods will fight for his attention. While the dark night gives in to the dawn, and the saint tries to concentrate on prayers, the Devil will have the last derisive laugh.

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*

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The iconography of the saint has told him as much – in paintings, scriptures, puppetry and prevalent stories of popular belief.  And in the only hagiography available. Of the desert saint who fended his demons off with gripping serenity. Only Gustave needs to know how to render the saint’s life anew, so that the popular turns into the prophetic, the familiar into the sublime, the farce into the encyclopedic. Does he not believe that there are no higher or lower forms of art? There are no noble or ignoble subjects? From the standpoint of Art might one not almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject – style in itself is an absolute manner of seeing things?  

 

I have to write the colossal with my saint, so that leaving nothing out of its ambit, it becomes the book of books, the ultimate book –  ready to devour the cosmos. Faust could be a model for the form of closet drama capable of containing the infinite within the covers of a book. Boundless in content. And visionary in scope.

 

He read Faust one Easter eve. Gustave already knew the influence of puppets and marionettes on young Goethe’s mind, and had read about how stage sorceries of Mozart’s Magic Flute went deep into the making of the masterpiece. Didn’t Goethe borrow conjuring tricks of stage-shows to bring the effects of shifting tableaus, morphed forms, and phantasmagoria in Faust? One day Gustave was coming back home from school, thinking about all this, and lost his way without having any idea how. All he remembers is a beautiful walk with an avenue of big trees on the left bank of the river. Maybe, there was a shooting gallery, he cannot tell exactly. Perhaps it was raining. He thinks he fell asleep, and walked in his sleep. When he came to, the river was stretching calmly before him. Behind, the avenue lined with tall, graceful trees almost smiled at him through the feeble sunlight. The church bells on the other side of the Seine suddenly chimed in unison. And he could not hear anything else but Goethe ringing unceasingly in his ears: 

 

Christ is risen, Christ is risen…Christ the Lord is risen from Corruption’s womb.

 

 He went back home all numb, befuddled, as if he had just touched divinity.

 

*

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It is an unreasonably cold day in May when Gustave stretches out on the white bearskin in his study. The tulip rustles in the wind amid ceaseless drizzles. A cat passes stealthily under. The weather is ghastly, Gustave thinks, and he keeps a big fire going. When daylight ends, an enormous white moon wrapped in the vestigial mist greets him. 

 

He performs the long ritual of shaping his goose-quill, then scribbles the two-line epigraph from Père Legrain’s show:

 

Messieurs les demons / Laissez- moi donc!

Messieurs les demons / Laissez- moi donc!

 

Oh dear demons, leave me alone — a smile crosses his face when he remembers how Legrain’s Anthony tried to defend himself from seductions of all kinds, often asking the imps and the pixies to leave him alone in his cave. But when the queen arrived with all her puppet jewellery and her own platter of sugar-plum smile, he had no one to turn to, and had to clutch the small stage lanterns scattered all around to kill his desire.

 

They were not lanterns perhaps, but footlights. 

 

Rongili Biswas is a bilingual writer and musician based in Kolkata, India. She writes in English and Bengali (her mother tongue). She has published a novel and a collection of short stories and has edited three books. She has also published fiction, creative non-fiction, memoirs, travelogues, features and reviews in journals, literary magazines and periodicals including The Telegraph, RIC Journal, Potato Soup Journal, Down in the Dirt, Café Dissensus, Raiot, thespace.ink, Mad in India (Tendance Floue Editions), Humanities Underground, Yawp Journal, Muse India, and Wion.

 

Rongili has recently finished writing a novel on nineteenth-century French literature and Gustave Flaubert. She is the winner of two literary awards. Her novel ‘That Jahangir who disappeared from custody’ has won the prestigious 'Bangla Academy' award (2015) and one of her stories, ‘The Ballad of the Palm Trees’ has won the 'Katha' award (2005) (the best story of a year in a language in India). An economist by profession, Rongili has published widely in development and public and political economics.

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