The Grammarian Read online

  INSIDE THE TRAIN car, hushed conversations carried on in the glow of reading lights; Alexandre could hear, from a neighboring car, the wail of an infant.

  It was autumn in Paris now, and Madeline took an umbrella with her, an overcoat to protect her from the grey skies, the ever-looming threat of rain, the early fall of night. She wore boots to arm herself against the slush of fallen foliage; she walked the children to school. She would wear a hat, hiding a tightly pinned bun. The cold air made her cheeks pink. Men looked at her—there was no one to escort her, to mark her as his own, to protect her from their leering. She was beautiful half because of true prettiness and half because she believed so deeply in her beauty.

  She made dinner in the evening. There was, in their home, in the evenings, the warm, quiet hum of happiness. Madeline drank wine while she cooked. She would turn her head back and kiss Alexandre while stirring stew. The children played, they grabbed her legs, required kisses when they fell, someone to cut their meat. Alexandre had been jealous when Matthieu was born, though he never said as much. Madeline put them to bed with stories and songs and lavish kisses. She undressed and slipped into the sheets next to him and Alexandre would breath in a garden of roses, clean linens drying in the sun, put his hand on her hip, touch the silk of her nightgown, close his eyes in the darkness, watch Paris sleep under the light weight of a blue and black night, daylight slipping away, the city growing quiet. Then Madeline would turn into his chest; he knew his children were asleep in their beds. His family was safe. The house was quiet. Tomorrow was promised. Alexandre could not, so long ago, imagine life any other way or have wished it differently.

  Now, Alexandre was lulled to sleep by the heat and the train’s incessant rocking, its rhythmic sounds and motion.

  LATE AFTERNOON, ON the fifth day of his train journey, the train was held in a village station outside of Dharwar. The remnants of a railway collision two days before had yet to be moved off the tracks. From the station platform, as Alexandre stretched his legs, he could see in the distance mangled black railcars on their sides. Loud, coffee-colored workmen pulled the steel remains of the train off the tracks and into a nearby field.

  Alexandre returned to his seat. Too distracted to read or write, he began to daydream. The previous summer, the Lautens family had spent a week at Madeline’s family home in Provençe. During the great flood that year, in January and February, many of Alexandre’s classes had to be canceled and he stayed home with Madeline and the children, and since then he had planned a summer holiday so the children could shake off any lingering feelings of their prolonged confinement and escape a city that was still in disrepair.

  The days in Provençe were active with endless cycling, and on the last day the heat was wonderful on their tired skin, and he lay in his bathing suit on the sand. The beach was nearly empty. His muscles ached. The water was clear and blue, and while the children giggled, building their sand castle, he leapt up suddenly, and grabbing Madeline, carried her to the water and threw her in. She gasped and laughed as the coldness swept over her boyish form, which was graceful in a skirted white swimsuit with pink flowers. He dove in after her. She climbed his body like a vine and he saw that feminine expression so long familiar to him: a woman ready to be seduced. His hair, which had only just begun to sprout silver at the temples, clung wet and black to his head. He kissed her mouth in the sea. The children ran in after them, and he caught Matthieu when he ran into the water; she, Catherine’s chubby, warm little body. They swam with the children and later walked along the water’s edge, looking for seashells. Alexandre’s was the throbbing heart of his home.

  Matthieu found a starfish, and when he did, Catherine cried. Alexandre held her and she pounded her head angrily into his chest as he and Madeline laughed. They ate freshly caught fish for dinner with white wine, local vegetables, and warm, crusty bread; the soil in that region, the closeness of the ocean, made everything taste better, more delicate. In the air: thyme and lavender. He put the children to bed, still in their swimsuits, Matthieu still holding his prized find, Catherine exhausted from her own rage. He fell asleep deliciously tired, with his fingers interlaced with Madeline’s. They left sand on the sheets. Her skin smelled like salt. He hadn’t remembered ever feeling so content.

  As the black steam engine continued southward, great and roaring, the smell of salt grew greater, and he was often overcome by the memory of his son sleeping, his taut pink fingers clutching a starfish.

  The light grew low in India now, as evening came, yet again. The debris of the accident up ahead and been removed from the tracks, and Alexandre’s train lurched cautiously forward. He opened the cumbersome window of his car, unhinging the metal fasteners, and happily breathed in the warm, floral air, opening the top of his shirt to feel the breeze against his chest. Alexandre lit a cigarette. He could hear the black-suited dining steward making his rounds, the clinking of the dishes as they knocked into each other with the movement of the train. He could smell the hot food. It was pleasant but predictable. Tonight he would not join his fellow passengers; around him he saw them moving down to the dining car. A few upper-class Indians with children at Cambridge and Oxford, Anglo-Indians who would never be at home in that land of Shakespeare and Chaucer, the English military men and administrators, their families, all changed into their best suits and dresses to dine. He wished rather to eat alone with his daydreaming. At times like this, he found it hard to maintain a polite amount of curiosity about strangers; they were merely partners in this journey, and he saw no need to make more of what amounted to a coincidence of no particular importance.

  He wasn’t typically a recluse—Alexandre liked the company of others. But this train ride had been ruined for him on the second day when, as he was unconsciously muttering to himself while writing, a man in a bowler hat in the neighboring seat raised an eyebrow and, looking at him with icy coldness, said, “Please keep your thoughts to yourself. Your ramblings are disturbing my reading. No one else is interested in what you are writing there.” The man then disappeared behind his newspaper.

  Alexandre had been too surprised to respond beyond a lamely raised eyebrow and “Excuse me?” before returning once again to his notebook. Alexandre’s mind went reeling—that that man, that wretched man probably went to church, and sat there every Sunday, superior and loathsome. An hour of piety each week but so lacking in compassion for his fellow man, this fellow rider along this journey, how ridiculous it seemed to Alexandre. That small, nasty exchange had colored his whole trip, and the night that it happened he fantasized about slitting the man’s throat.

  After dinner, it was routine for the men to gather in the gentlemen’s lounge car for drinks and cigars. There they could wear their shirtsleeves and loosen their ties. Alexandre had joined them the night before, but their talk bored him endlessly—it was all the same—a cousin to the Parisian parlor room conversation that he had always tried so hard to avoid: gossip about the upper-class English families they all knew or at least knew of—the Hawleys, the Bakers, the Austins. Their estates and summer homes in Simla and Dharamsāla and other hill stations and their relations back home, and the various details and luck of their financial interests at home and abroad, complaining without self-regard of the ridiculousness of the native Indians. The English talked with the glee of gossiping schoolgirls about their fallen countrymen who had taken up with native women. They were able to maintain an exterior of manners around natives of high standing—doctors, lawyers and academics—but when no native was in sight, even those Indians were often referred to as coolies and darkies. Full from dinner, Alexandre made his excuses to the crowd heading toward the lounge car, and pulled from his attaché case his Pierre Loti.

  Alone in the train car now, Alexandre opened the window, lacing his fingers through the protective iron bars. Alongside the train, a band of pretty, painted hijras in bright, colorful saris winked at him, blowing kisses and holding out their large, masculine hands for change. Their eyes were lined in black c
oal and fluttered seductively. Alexandre smiled drowsily; flashes of gold and pink and red and blue went by. He felt the wind blowing through his thick hair, and closed his eyes.

  THE TRAIN AT long last entered the southern provinces.

  This was a part of India that, while ruled by the British, was more meagerly populated by them than was the north of the country, and a degree of the native chaos in politics and culture remained. The men were darker, the women thicker, and very few of the North Indians with their Mediterranean coloring were to be found here. When they were in the South, they too, and perhaps more markedly, held their southern brothers in contempt. To the European, these shades of brown and black were less distinct. Alexandre was hundreds of miles west of Bombay, a thousand miles southwest of Calcutta, a light-year, a bout of daydreaming, the better part of a hemisphere from Paris.

  2

  THE DAYS BEGAN a clear grey—the light almost white—before sliding gently into blue and yellow, the morning sun pushing at first gently and then forcefully into the windows of his train car. The station hands in the villages shouted in Kannada. In the afternoons, the air and land became gold, and everything was colored by this strong sun, at once beautiful and dangerous to the European constitution. English women, at risk of heatstroke and fainting, retired at this time of day to the safety of the ladies’ cars, away from the sweltering heat.

  India was a green place: jackfruit trees, coconuts and bananas, jasmines, roses, moonflowers, grasses the colors of the sea, or like blades of silver; tomato, aubergine, okra, fruits and vegetables for which no English or French names existed, hyacinth, mangoes the lyrical shape of a woman’s breast, rice and wheat, bougainvillea. This part of India sprawled out great and wide, in shades of brown and green, before melting into a peerless line of seawater that crashed in waves like diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. The view moved somehow seamlessly from buildings in the grand style of London, Amsterdam and Paris, to magnificent Hindu temples and Mughal mansions, to shantytowns and water-filled rice paddies and barren fields of brown made sterile by enforced indigo, opium and tobacco production. As the train rolled along the eastern coastline of the continent, Alexandre watched the ocean melt into the sand, which pulled at the water and surrendered it like a woman’s fickle hand, opening and closing and at long last submitting to the water’s departure as the evening came in, and the tide fell low under the silvery light of the moon.

  And then the Indian night. Quiet, blue and black and clear, the dark eyes of the Indians sparkling in the omnipresent light of candles and oil lamps outside the train’s windows. The strong smells of fried street foods, of evening blossoming flowers, the stringent rules of English society letting loose under the slow departure of the fatiguing heat whilst retaining something sultry and sensual in the dark alleys and secret doorways lending protection from a receding sun. Most of Indian life, it seemed, was lived after hours; as a Parisian, Alexandre found this very familiar.

  Alexandre found himself wildly sentimental. India had made him sensitive to life in a way he hadn’t been for so long. His life back in Paris had grown so routine, and the comfort in that routine had made way for a dreary, sleepy monotony. Going day to day as if sleepwalking—sometimes happily and rarely sadly.

  In 1889, Alexandre had felt that peculiar dream of flight, there, on the Ferris wheel at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was his first memory of that particular feeling of being alive so different from simply being awake. He was very young then, still wearing short pants and made to watch over his sisters as they ate chocolates while walking up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower. As he got older, he realized that that state of vitality was not only impossible day to day, but inadvisable. How could anyone go about like that all the time? So sensitive, always striving and learning and listening, always seeing beauty and horror, how terrifying it all seemed. Adulthood, it seemed to Alexandre a somber and sober expanse—that long stretch between a winged youth and the eccentricities and frailty of old age.

  MADELINE WAS SEVENTEEN months older than Alexandre. He had met her when she was twenty-one; he was nineteen, and an arrogant young man of the sort that in his adulthood he was weary of. There was little to be said for his younger self beyond that he possessed a keen intellect and a quiet ambition. His physical beauty was more girlish then; all else was unremarkable, and not different from other young men of his generation. He was sometimes brutish and coarse. He thought too much of himself and too little of the minds of his parents and teachers.

  He was a student at the Sorbonne back then; he met her ankles first. He met those perfectly sculpted ankles, which led to perfectly sculpted calves as Madeline balanced herself on a rolling ladder in the philology department’s library. He had for some days made a habit of asking for hard-to-reach books so that he might admire her without her knowing. Though (as she later told him) she had grown suspicious of his eclectic book requests, she obligingly smiled and went to retrieve the ladder. More often than not, they were not books he needed, and they rested for hours on his desk at the library while he studied morphology and Madeline. She had then, and still had now, wonderful taste in shoes and stockings. One day, he followed the single black seam up the back of her legs and up her skirt, and he cocked his neck to sneak a look at the slip he would sometimes catch a glimpse of. She kicked him in the face.

  Her pale green satin shoe landed squarely on his nose. She did not say anything, just stared at him with her large green eyes, demanding an apology, which he gave her, stumbling over his quickly sought words. He asked her her name.

  “Madeline.”

  And he knew her name and felt now he knew her. Madeline, like a sylph, and again and again Madeline. In the library and later, waiting for him in cafés, always Madeline. And now, knowing her name, he felt he knew all he needed to know about her, her name like a ribbon enveloping that body—softer than a boy’s but not quite womanly. It was that same peculiar feeling of possession he felt when his children were born and he would look into their blue eyes and say their names and feel them become what they were called. Now Matthieu, now Catherine, gazing back at their father’s too-handsome face and becoming his children under that quotidian but astonishing feat: that baptism of being named.

  The next day he returned to the library with gauze on his face, and a bunch of fresh yellow tulips with a note of apology, and a request that she meet him later in a nearby café on the street Monsieur le Prince. He remembered feeling a wonderful sensation of being some beautiful woman’s lover as he ran up the library’s stairs with flowers, his overcoat flapping against his back, a light rain making the air wet. Another librarian, matronly and disapproving, snorted and crossed her arms over her chest when he handed Madeline the tulips.

  She laughed at him when he tried to kiss her outside the café. Then, those dismissive reactions made her more alluring; Alexandre, with his archangel face, was rarely rejected by women. Later in life he would find her smugness withering.

  “You cannot kiss a girl with a bandage on your nose, and plus, I don’t want to be kissed—not by you, not now.”

  He was indignant. “When?!” He was a beautiful boy, and the reluctance on the part of any woman he was making advances on only amounted in his mind to a show of propriety. Real disdain he was not prepared for.

  “You’ll have to wait . . . anyhow . . . I feel I would be taking advantage of a mere boy . . . and one stupid enough to get caught looking up a woman’s skirt.”

  Some months later, when her guard had dropped and the bandages on his nose had long come off, she showed him the library after hours. Years later, he could still see her pale hand agitating the formidable library lock on its heavy door. They went in to the dark, and with only small panes of moonlight and streetlight making their squares on the floor, she climbed the ladder and let him make his way up her legs guided by the seam on the back of her stockings. She giggled and clutched the ladder. He knew he wanted to marry her when she stopped giggling and at long last sighed.

 
A dark native steward in an English butler’s costume walked the aisles of the train. His hands, in immaculate white gloves, were striking against the black of his uniform, the bluish hue of his impossibly dark skin.

  “Coffee or tea, Sir?” he asked, his timbre affected, his bored eyes heavily lashed. The tips of his full mustache had been waxed, and his thick hair had been combed in the manner of a matinee idol’s waves. He carried two silver pitchers with an ease that did not suggest their weight.

  “Coffee, please,” Lautens said, offering him his emptied cup. The steward filled the cup gracefully, his other arm bent behind his back.

  THE TRAIN HAD stopped many times since leaving Bombay. Usually, Alexandre would wander the platform, trying Indian street food and buying fruit. He would stretch his legs, his back, his neck, before long lastly reboarding the train as the conductor, with all the flourish of his English and American counterparts, cried, waving his handkerchief, “Alll aboarrrd!”

  But this stop was his. At last Waltair was declared in red lettering on signboards. He slowly and carefully read the Telugu signage. His body felt exhausted; the final few minutes of waiting as the train slowed into the station were the longest moments of the entire journey. Finally it happened and the train stopped, pulling the passengers’ bodies forward before throwing them back against their seats. Men found their briefcases, women their parasols, children were ushered out by tired governesses. They nodded politely at those fellow passengers who would remain on for destinations farther south. And then suddenly his heart began to pound wildly in his chest. He pulled his attaché case from beneath his chair, and with legs that moved at first uneasily beneath him he disembarked.