Journey to Ithaca Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Anita Desai

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Like so many other young Westerners in the 60s and 70s, Matteo leaves home to search for spiritual enlightenment in the ashrams of India. He believes he finds it at the feet of ‘the Mother’, but down-to-earth Sophie, who accompanies him, does not find her inspiring so much as mysterious, and decides to trace the Mother’s own story – from her travels with an Indian dance troupe in Paris, Venice and New York, to her search for divine love in India.

  About the Author

  Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her published works include novels, children’s books and short stories. Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Village by the Sea won the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction in 1982. Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and of Girton College at the University of Cambridge. She teaches in the Writing Program at M.I.T. and divides her time between India, Boston, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. In Custody was recently filmed by Merchant Ivory Productions.

  ALSO BY ANITA DESAI

  Cry, the Peacock

  Voices in the City

  Bye-Bye, Blackbird

  Where Shall We Go This Summer?

  Games at Twilight

  Fire on the Mountain

  Clear Light of Day

  The Village by the Sea

  Baumgartner’s Bombay

  In Custody

  Fasting, Feasting

  Diamond Dust

  For

  Kiran, Tani, Arjun and Rahul

  Journey to Ithaca

  Anita Desai

  Then pray that the journey is long.

  That the summer mornings are many,

  that you will enter ports seen for the first time

  with such pleasure, with such joy!

  Stop at Phoenician markets

  and purchase fine merchandise,

  mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,

  and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,

  buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;

  visit hosts of Egyptian cities,

  to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

  Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.

  To arrive there is your ultimate goal.

  But do not hurry the voyage at all.

  It is better to let it last for long years;

  and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,

  rich with all you have gained on the way,

  not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

  Ithaca has given you a beautiful voyage.

  Without her you would never have taken the road.

  But she has nothing to give you now.

  And if you have found her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.

  With such great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience

  you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

  C.P. Cavafy, Ithaca (translated by Rae Dalven)

  . . . things exist in their essence even before they are materially realized and named.

  Milan Kundera, Immortality

  PROLOGUE

  She was taken up the stairs to the upper floor and shown into the room where he lay on an iron cot, clothed only in pyjamas and the upper half of his body emaciated and moist with perspiration. Sophie thought he must be dying.

  To begin with she bent over the cot and over him, then she sat on its edge and held his hand in hers, and although his eyes were open and looked in her direction, she could not tell if he recognised her.

  ‘Matteo, Matteo,’ she said again and again, her voice harsh with despair and accusation.

  He would not speak her name in return but she thought he saw her from the way he clutched at her hand. Then he closed his eyes and tears of distress slipped from beneath his lids.

  Later she set about making the room hers as well; she had a rucksack and she pulled out some clothes and a limp grey towel. In search of water, she found at the end of a corridor a communal washroom where she was able to bathe in lukewarm water from a tap. Squatting to soap herself, she remembered how she had first learnt to bathe from a bucket under a tap, so awkwardly. She remembered the ways of bathing publicly – the techniques of efficiency and modesty – and used them again. Everything came back, without her trying.

  At one point in the afternoon, when the flies dizzily knocking against the closed window and the heat accumulating under the ceiling of the room made staying awake almost impossible, a male nurse in dark green clothing brought a tall steel glass of tea and a plate of biscuits, small sweet biscuits of the kind one buys cheap in the bazaar. She devoured them, for Matteo was still asleep, only occasionally twitching if he felt a fly crawl upon him. She saw that his skin was scarred with boils and drew back her lip in a hiss of horror. When she brushed the biscuit crumbs off herself a swarm of ants immediately arrived as if out of the dark cement of the floor to carry them away.

  Later that evening when the harsh afternoon light was gone and it was possible to open the windows to the veranda where the air was cooler and the light darker, a doctor came to see Matteo, placed a dark square hand on his forehead with a large ring set with a square red stone just at the temple, felt his pulse with his other hand and made some notes on a paper clipped to a board.

  As he turned to go, she ran after him. ‘Doctor,’ she cried hoarsely, and he stopped at once and listened politely to her questions and spoke reassuringly. It took her a minute or two to accustom herself to his accent which belonged, stubbornly, to his own tongue, not the English he spoke. He said he had seen, and cured, worse cases, that Matteo would recover if he was nursed carefully and that her coming would greatly help the process, that there was no reason to fear a relapse or further deterioration if care was taken. She looked hard to see if she could detect a lie but he seemed straightforward if a little anxious to get away.

  ‘He came from the ashram?’ he asked finally, in the Indian way making a declarative sentence sound interrogative.

  Sophie noticed in that non-professional moment that his teeth were stained red with betel-juice. She nodded and turned away: the sight always sickened her slightly. She turned back, stopping at the veranda balustrade to look down into the central courtyard with its grassy square, its few palm trees, its benches on which families sat waiting or picnicking, the circular drive on which they descended from bicycle rickshaws and cars and tongas, and the big gates at the end opening onto a city road with its bus stop, its fruit barrows, its kiosks for soda water and cigarettes in bundles. She went back to the room, passing on the way other rooms to which doors and windows stood open now so that she could look in and see, without wanting to, patients lying or sitting on the edge of their beds in green cotton shifts, and families huddled around them in attitudes concerned, solicitous, tired or bored. It might have been an old, shabby hotel, only the strong smells of disinfectant and medication gave it away for what it was.

  As if to prove the doctor’s prognosis, Matteo had propped himself up on his grimy grey pillow when she returned. He looked at her with an expression she recognised: humble, pleading, begging to be understood. It had always irritated her.

  ‘So, Matteo,’ she said, more drily than she had meant. ‘If the
Mother is ill, it seems the devotees must fall ill too. Is she some pharaoh to take you all to the tomb with her?’ She could say such things and people listened: she was a big, strong woman, square-shouldered; she wore her hair cut short and her eyes were a level grey. ‘If you stay, you will kill yourself.’

  He twitched a little and scratched at his arm. ‘I fell ill,’ he whined. ‘One can fall ill, Sophie – one can fall ill anywhere.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she mocked, ‘with hepatitis. Yes, anywhere,’ she said sarcastically. ‘In Europe. At home on the lake, I suppose.’

  ‘If not this, then something else,’ he said with a sudden show of spirit. But he looked beaten, his shoulders began to sink against the pillow. The whine entered his voice again as he complained, ‘You left me. I was alone.’

  ‘Oh, I left you, was that it?’ She could not repress the anger. ‘And did you want me? Did you even notice if I stayed or left?’

  He lifted his hand as if to ward off her anger, then dropped it to his forehead and kept it clasped there – she thought theatrically.

  ‘All you wanted was the Mother,’ she reminded him passionately. ‘You told me that. You said you needed the Mother – not me, not the children.’

  He made a small sound like a sob. She had to remind herself he had been very ill and was very weak. She made herself lift a glass of sweet lime juice the nurse had left on the table and hold it to his lips. ‘Drink,’ she told him sternly, but she knew she would have to be stern with herself too. She must not tire him by talking, or distress him by her accusations till he had recovered. Till then, she would have to be more patient, more tolerant, as if he were a child, not a man.

  Late at night, when the other patients slept, Sophie ran her fingers through his hair, spreading it out on the flat pillow, to soothe him. He lay still and let her comb his hair over and over, with her fingers. When he seemed entirely at peace, possibly even asleep, she leant closer to him and murmured, ‘When you are well, Matteo, we will leave.’

  She should have been prepared but she was startled by the jerk he gave, stiffening his neck and twisting his head away from her touch. She had thought only a healthy person could react so strongly. She had overestimated his weakness, and compliance, not for the first time.

  ‘You will leave, Sophie,’ he hissed fiercely, ‘but not I,’ and he covered his eyes with his arm. Now she could see only his mouth in the dim light from the veranda, very pale and trembling, with a growth of beard around it like a brush, or thorns.

  ‘Why, Matteo, why?’ she begged very softly, keeping her hand near his cheek, on the pillow. ‘Why can we not be together again, at home with the children?’

  He did not trouble to answer her. He shook his head very slightly, as if he were shaking off a fly that bothered him. The gesture said plainly: they did not count, they were what he had left behind.

  *

  ‘Isabel! Isabel!’ A short pause and then, again, ‘Isabel! Isabel!’

  The child looks up at the insistence of the voice, reluctantly surrendering her occupation of watering a bed of pinks. She forgets to lift up the watering can as well and it continues to spout, onto her shoe. She stands in her white pinafore, holding the dripping can, and lifts her face up to the open window where her grandmother stands, full of rebuke.

  ‘Isabel, don’t get yourself wet!’

  Now Isabel remembers to right the watering can but it is too late – her shoe is wet, her sock is soaking. She looks down at them in dismay, and lets the watering can drop onto the gravel. There it lies, under the glint of waxy magnolia leaves. The bed of pinks has been half watered, and half is white with dust. Their clove-like fragrance, too, is partly released by the watering can and partly obliterated by the dust.

  ‘Isabel! Where is Giacomo? Have you seen Giacomo?’ Grandmother persists in pursuing her.

  ‘I’ll go and look for him, Nonna,’ Isabel responds. She walks down the gravelled path, away from the house. The whole garden stretches, falls away, retrieves itself on another level, and another. Giacomo might be anywhere. She can wander in search of him down a pergola of wistaria, past an urn at the end of it that holds marble pineapples and marble grapes, around box-edged beds of artemisia and rosemary, into the empty hothouse where the sun thrums upon the dust-filmed glass and rouses invisible crickets to audible ecstasy. Beyond it is the compost heap, a territory fiercely guarded by the gardener. So Isabel turns back and climbs flight after flight of stairs to the upper terrace where, on the gravel beneath the camellia tree, her grandfather sits on a canvas chair, his face covered by a newspaper and a bottle of mineral water and a glass beside him, while Giacomo, on a stool, sits stitching, on a square of cardboard, a sunflower in bright yellow wool.

  He stops stitching when he sees her approach and says immediately, ‘You’ve wet your shoe, Isabel.’

  ‘I know,’ she says miserably. She has been squelching up and down the garden in that wetness. She sits on the edge of another canvas chair, too large for her, hazardously.

  Grandfather lifts the newspaper from his head and looks at her with eyes so pale they do not seem properly equipped for sight. ‘You have wet your shoe, Isabel?’ he asks.

  She is tired of it suddenly – the wet shoe, the accusation, the guilt. She pulls it off her foot, and then the sock, and flings them down on the gravel. For good measure she pulls off the other sock and shoe as well. Her feet emerge, plump and brightly pink. She kicks them up and down in the air, hilariously. The cold air on her feet tingles and refreshes.

  ‘Nonna will see,’ Giacomo warns her.

  ‘Nonna will be angry,’ Grandfather agrees.

  But Isabel has slipped off the canvas chair and is running over the gravel. It cuts into her feet painfully but the pain is exhilarating. She likes it much better than the sock and shoe, dry or wet.

  When Grandmother comes down to join the group under the camellias, Isabel has already climbed the grassy slope that rises to the top of the hill where the stones of a ruined folly lie under a clump of pine trees. She is flapping her white pinafore with her hands, trying to catch two butterflies – one white, one yellow, like the primulas in the grass. Grandmother does not notice; she has forgotten that she wanted Giacomo. Instead, she is holding out a letter to Grandfather, one of those soggy, limp Indian aerogrammes that look as if they have travelled a long and difficult way over the Indian plains and across the oceans.

  Giacomo has noticed; he wants to ask, ‘Is it from Mama?’ but stops himself because it is unnecessary. Instead, he stares steadfastly at the letter, watching as it passes to his grandfather’s long, dry fingers. As he had hoped, Grandfather complains, ‘I haven’t my spectacles with me. Read it, Livia.’ Grandmother gives a meaning look at Giacomo and he drops his gaze, embarrassed to be present. But he does not get up and follow Isabel: he will stay and hear what he can.

  ‘Is it from Mama?’ he asks after all, unable to stop.

  ‘Of course,’ she replies. ‘Who else will write from that benighted country? Your father?’

  Giacomo picks at the wool stitching on the cardboard square, considering taking it up as a safe alternative to Grandmother’s temper when aroused by news from his parents. But she snaps at him, ‘Sewing again, like a girl. Is that for you to do, or should it be for Isabel?’ and he guiltily puts it down. She does not notice, she is holding the letter under Grandfather’s nose accusingly and he thinks it wiser to escape after all. Slipping off the stool, he slides away sideways. Once around the geranium pots and over the gravel, he makes a run for it up the slope of the hill, towards Isabel who has vanished into its higher reaches. Down below Grandmother is shouting, ‘Now it is a round-the-world trip she is going on! How long will her parents indulge her? Eh? They have only to stop sending them money and those two will come home straight away. But whatever she wants, she is given. Isn’t it time for them to grow up and take responsibility? Eh?’ The rest Giacomo knows by heart already.

  He finds Isabel behind the tumbled stones of the folly, sitting und
er a cluster of pines beside the stone basin of water in a clump of rushes from which a trickle falls by way of a dolphin’s mouth into a narrow stream. He had known he would find her there: for Isabel the basin is an ocean, and the two aged goldfish that live concealed beneath the waterweeds, a fleet of whales. He has never been able to prove to her her naiveté.

  ‘I saw the heron by the pond below,’ he tells her threateningly: something in her placid contentment stirs in him the desire to wreck it.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ she replies stoutly.

  ‘I did. It’s looking for your goldfish, you know.’

  ‘But it won’t find them,’ she says, still more spiritedly, although with an effort. ‘They hide.’

  ‘The heron’s eye is sharper than you know.’

  ‘Not like mine,’ she says, putting her hands around her eyes to make binoculars through which she peers at him.

  ‘Much better than yours,’ he tells her. ‘Much, much better.’ But he is arguing aimlessly, only for the sake of not saying what he needs to say. Suddenly he forgets why he is arguing with her, and sits down on the grass beside her. ‘I think Nonna wants us to leave,’ he says miserably.

  She turns on him. ‘No, she doesn’t. She won’t. She won’t let us go to Mama and Papa.’

  ‘I know she won’t. But she doesn’t like us here.’

  Isabel is quiet, separating two ideas and then putting them together again: Grandmother does not want them to go to their parents, and Grandmother does not want them here. ‘Then where can we go?’ she asks, not knowing a third place for themselves.

  Giacomo can’t say. He knows about herons, about goldfish, about cross-stitch, but not about themselves. He tears up tufts of grass which come away easily from the damp earth by the trickling water. Primulas and hepaticas come away with it; he is managing considerable havoc, however miniature the scale.

  So Isabel pulls herself together. She sets her jaw and it gives her an elderly look (she looks, in fact, not unlike her grandmother). ‘We can run away,’ she says hoarsely, speaking the words she has heard in fairytales, testing them for their possibilities.