Part 1 of 4
Epistle to . .
At the sunset of his life and sitting in the solitude of Guatemala City, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who was Herman Cortez’s right-hand lietennat throughout the conquest of Mexico during 1519 – 21, wrote: “My eyesight has failed. I can not see what lies in front of me”.
Then he began his narrative, in meticulous order, of the momentus events that remain to this day one of the most improbable and daring feats in the annals of diplomacy and military history. So vividly vibrant is his recall that he adds: “It seems it all happened but yesterday”. The minute detail that Bernal Diaz describes in his THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF NEW SPAIN happened sixty years before.
When I first read Bernal Diaz’s book in original Spanish, I was struck by the unvarnished, unadorned simplicity of style and unbuttoned candour of the content. I sat by the river that gently meanders through the university campus and read in exited reverie the whole book in one go.
On me its effect was hypnotic: I walked about as one possessed. With twenty four horses and six muskets and four hundred soldiers, Herman Cortez, a medieval peasant from Estremadura of Spain, had toppled the mighty Aztec empire of Montezuma who had at his command a standing army of one million. But for the tact, diplomacy, charm and beauty of a 14 year old Aztec princess, whom Cortex called Dona Marina; Cortez would have met a gruesome fate. Bernal Diaz describes Dona Marina as “Hermosa come diosa”, beautiful as a goddess.
In my imagination I travelled back five centuries; I became a companion of Bernal Diaz and re-lived the conquest and the consequent carnage of the native population. I died in the person of a hanged Aztec, and saw in an expiring glimpse the frightened captives gathered about me. I wept for them in the silence of my heart.
Thus began my voracious readings of every noteworthy document of the time in Spanish and of the Spanish conquest of the rest of the continent. It was not my subject, but I read on undeterred. It had the magic, marvel and menace of a forbidden love. It also set aflame what was to become my lifelong love affair with Mexicans. This love has taken me all over Mexico and beyond, to those places which stand as a silent sentinel to the many-splendoured cultures of the unfortunate land, and found in fiery, tempestuous Mexican girls a resting place for my restless imagination. Living among them, imbibing through passionate reading and love making, the triumph and tragedy of the races, I have reciprocated the incendiary intensity that runs through the blood, imagination and intellect of every Mexican of substance.
Today, in my life the evening comes with slow steps. A myriad of infirmities and illnesses are battering the once-invulnerable body, though the facade looks in bloom. I too, can leap over the wide chasm of time and place. In my mind’s eyes the vanished days and nights of the dim and distant past appear bathed in a celestial light, in the freshness of a dream.
I see standing before myself the frail child and the frisky adolescent that I was. My world was peopled with birds, animals and dreams of places I read about. I went far beyond the straight-jacketed syllabus of the school. That limitless inner world of my trembling imagination found its fulfilment by creating in my actual little world a miniature animal kingdom whose citizens were ducks, chickens, parrots and other birds. They composed my universe of wonder.
The sense of wonder of everything unseen and unknown, everything distant – people, places, flora and fauna – ignited my fecund imagination. This sense of wonder has remained undimmed throughout the years, through all the ups and downs, sorrows and tears that life invariably meets out to the living. It is this sense of awe and wonder – reverential curiosity – that has enabled me to look at the things from an original vantage point. It has saved me from the boredom and fossilisation into which people fall in droves. In the hour of my mental and emotional need, when syphilitic jealousy, corrosive envy and venomous backbiting from those who are bound to me by blood made me wish never to see their faces again. It is this power of love, this sense of beauty charged with wonder that provided me with the consolation, and inspired me to look forward to a morning after. There had been days when the morning painfully reminded me of the French aphorist Chamfort’s words: “A man must swallow a toad every morning before breakfast if he wishes to make sure of finding nothing more disgusting before the day is over”. But then, I got lost in my world of wonder and found myself anew.
Even from this early stage, two types of love, pure and simple, guided my universe: love of learning and love of beauty.
To this was added love of love. In all three loves, I found beauty that no words can describe, no colours can paint, no sounds can sing. I found beauty that abides. At moments I was so mastered by this sense of beauty that everything I looked upon was beautiful. This was also the time when I discovered girls. Of all the girls I came to know – from a distance – at the time, one kindled my imagination, one whose picture all the years of splendour, success, temptation and gratification of the senses have not been able to erase from my mind. She could have been the subject of Collette’s dainty novelette, THE RIPENING SEED.
She was petite, with luxuriant curly hair and radiant golden complexion. She used to walk past my window with a skip in her steps. She still wore frocks. Through the window I would catch in bated breath a glimpse of her walking by; occasionally she would stop to say a few words to me. Suddenly, as if in a dream, I became alive to her gradual ripening: she trembled on the threshold of womanhood’s burdensome beauty; her cheeks took on the downy bloom of a peach and her laughter-lit eyes appeared as slumberous as those of Botticelli’s Venus. Later in life, when I fell in love with Florence and re-lived in my imagination the world of Botticelli, when I spent hours looking from different angles and under varied lights Botticelli’s painting, when I walked at a leisurely pace through the long, memory-encrusted corridors of the Uffizi and summoned up the smell and touch, sight and sound of the world of Lorenzo di Medici, when I knew that Botticelli’s model was the stately Simonetta Vespucci, tall in body and long in chiselled limbs that could have been fashioned by the hands of a Phidias or a Praxiteles. Simonetta who died young, I still thought
Despite all the differences between Simonetta and my first love, that my girl’s eyes were those of Venus of the painting. Looking back upon those days, I can resuscitate in my mind those moments and hear my heart throbbing faster as I stole a glimpse of her gliding figure which seems to suggest inarticulately: Ecce ancilla domini (Behold the little girl of God). She was not entirely beautiful, nor she was possessed of the tormentingly voluptuous plentitude of the figures arrested in the sculptures of Khajuraho. But she inhabited the days and nights of my inner world and made that world throb with life – the life of a dense tropical forest. She was the Bird of Paradise, rarely seen, but which, when seen, sends shivers of colour across the very air around. Because of her suggestive unattainability, I could almost smell in her presence the enchanting aroma of flowers that bloomed behind the high walls of her father’s property which stretched along the railway line. The mere thought of her touch precipitated me into a painful erotic fantasy.
In the midst of the stench and squalor of Bengali life, inwardly suffocated by the toxic jealousies raging at home, I sought for an antidote. In the world represented by my reading of English poetry and literature I found the antidote. More than an antidote: the tormented and unguided spirit of a boy, who had no one to look up to, found in it an asylum, a walled-in garden of his own which no assault and battery of circumstances could defile.
I longed for actual contact with Englishmen, for I thought they would open up to me the treasures of their language and literature. The whole of European culture lay undiscovered before me. In the naiveté of my adolescent thinking, I took to bicycling up and down the Riverside Road, on which stood bungalows where lived British managers of jute mills. I only managed to see them at a distance. Little did I know at the time that those British expatriates were as much representatives of the English culture as a French poodle represents the French culture or the shabbily dressed Indians exhaling raw animal odour which they claim to be their spiritual fragrance represent the ancient culture of India.
Whatever their pedigree, regardless of how they measured up against the cultured British lifestyle, their houses, their clothing and their surroundings exuded measurement, proportion, harmony and beauty that no Bengali could match. The Bengali revelled in shabbiness in his clothing, griminess and squalor in his surroundings. In Greek mythology, everything that Midas touched turned into heartless gold. It could be said to the eternal credit of the Bengali that everything he touches turns into a living example of leaden vulgarity. Deceitfulness, jealousy, envy, self-destructive, spitefulness in every aspect of his behaviour relentlessly attends his passage through life. In St. Pau’s cathedral in London, there is a slab of stone above which, on the wall, is an inscription in Latin, “Lector, si monumentum requires, circumspice”. That is, “visitor, if you are looking for his monument, just look around”.
This is the humble and proud wish of the greatest of English architect. In the same vain one could say of Bengalis: “Visitor, if you are looking for the glory of this race, look around and luxuriate in the immense panorama of futility and chaos they have created”.
The painful awareness of the power of maggots made me choose St. Stephens against Presidency of Calcutta. St. Stephens was directly under administration of Cambridge Mission. In those days, St. Stephens had on its faculty more than fifteen Englishmen at any given time. They were all Cambridge educated and carried about them an effortless air of dignity and loftiness. But to me they were easily accessible: some of them were my tutors; others I came to know at close quarters because of my leading role in magazines and fortnightlies published by the college, and my record of one of the two top debaters. One of them, Sinclair Goodlad, told me “You’ve a princely command of English Language. Your place is in England or America”. William Jarvis initiated me into savouring the intricacies of Old English, while David Summerscale’s production of European plays created in me an avid interest in London theatre. SCF Pierson extended me a standing invitation to his home in England. And then we had one of the most notable professors of English, Professor B. Rajan. Rajan, a product of Cambridge, is held in high esteem as a scholar in England, America and Canada.
(To be continued)
About the author
Pradip Moitro (1939 – 2012) was born in Bangladesh. The family migrated to West Bengal, post partition, in 1947. He had his education in St. Stephen’s, Delhi and then Oxford. He became the speech writer of an US President.