Red Earth and Pouring Rain (5 page)

‘My life has been a dream,’ Benoit de Boigne was often heard to say in Parisian drawing-rooms as his life drew to a close,
and was understood, by the fashionable, secretly-contemptuous inhabitants of those rooms, to mean that his adventures in the
far-away, unreal land of Hindustan now seemed fantastical and fictional. But when de Boigne, wiping his face and passing a
hand over his eyes, muttered ‘My life has been a dream,’ he meant that he had encountered, in that far-away, unreal land called
Hindustan, the unbearably real sensations and colours of a dream, had felt unknown forces moving him as if around a chess-board,
had felt the touch of mysteries impelling him from one town to the next, from one field to another.

Even as he grew up in Chambéry, in that part of Europe known as Savoy, a hot wind whistled through the soul of Benoit La Borgne,
later known as Benoit de Boigne, bringing with it fancies very much out of place in the simple priest’s home that he was born
in. In that quiet place of gentle candlelight and musty piety, La Borgne read, again and again, an ancient, tattered copy
of a book called The
Romance of Alexander, with Stories of Aristotle
, by a Prussian officer named Blunt. La Borgne read, and dreamt of hidden treasures, turbaned warriors and princesses in distress;
he played strange, wild music on an out-of-tune piano, took fencing lessons and surprised his master with the ferocity and
determination of his thrusts. He spent much of his time at a stream that ran through the family’s property, where a water-mill
rotated endlessly, grinding, crushing; he liked to go inside, to sit on old wood and watch the wheels spin, driving the faithful
machinery in predictable patterns. The workers in that mill grew used to the sight of Benoit La Borgne seated with his chin
cupped in a hand, hypnotized by the regularity of the click-click-clicking gears. In that even, metronomic motion, the boy
and then the man found a kind of peace; as the myriad grains, gritty and jostling against each other, descended into the hopper
to emerge as
finely-ground, white, even powder, La Borgne nurtured the other world within him, entertained and enthralled.

He was a somewhat listless and drowsy-looking boy who grew into a strapping young man with a large sloping forehead that belonged
on a marble bust of one of the ancient Greek philosophers. His stature, his features, his remoteness, a habit of staring into
the distance, as his heart stirred to inexplicable, abruptly-appearing internal images —all these things gave La Borgne an
unintentional air of conscious superiority; it was this distant stare that inadvertently rested on a Sardinian officer in
an inn in the European year of 1768.

The officer turned back to his food and felt La Borgne’s grey eyes burn into the back of his neck. The food was rough and
provincial, but good. The officer laid down his knife and turned slowly to look over his shoulder. La Borgne sat with an untouched
glass of wine in front of him, his hands on the table; his glance, filled with something that could have been mistaken for
hauteur, was unwavering. By making a physical effort, the officer was able to turn away again; he gestured to a waiter.

‘Who is that? Behind me.’

‘Benoit La Borgne. His father is a priest, and wants him to be a lawyer, but he does nothing.’

The Sardinian turned back to La Borgne, who was still lost in a waking dream, feeling vague unnameable tugs at his soul, pointing
him in some unspecified direction.

‘Why do you look at me, sir?’

La Borgne said nothing. The Sardinian pushed back his chair and stood up.

‘Why are you looking at me?’

La Borgne gradually became aware of a dark, mustachioed face glowering at him. Unbidden, the words sprang to his lips:

‘Your face: it reminds me of a pig’s behind.’

A quiver of rage passed through the Sardinian’s body; he patted his pockets, looking for his gloves. Remembering that he had
put them on the chair beside him, he turned, but Benoit La Borgne, seized by a wild purpose, had already sprung up and moved
around the table between them; the Sardinian felt a hand spin him around, and then he reeled back, his right cheek stinging.

‘Outside,’ said La Borgne, already turning away. Outside, behind the
inn, the Sardinian attempted to suppress the bewilderment that threatened to turn into fear; taking off his coat, he clenched
his teeth and looked at La Borgne, trying to hold on to his anger, but the other’s cold, blank face and relaxed movements
only served to increase his nervousness. The Sardinian had to look away, at the ground, at the yellow hay and brown soil,
at the insects crawling across the little yard, at the dung and the cat staring back at him with unmoving, flashing dark eyes.

The Sardinian’s uneasiness mounted; in a few minutes he was actually trembling, but by then it was too late because he was
crossing swords with a stone-eyed La Borgne; panicking, the officer flung himself forward into a thrust at the other’s eyes
which was parried with a force that made his wrist numb, and then he was backing away, flinging up his blade to block a huge
hacking slash at his neck; the Sardinian’s fingers and forearm rang with the shock, and then his blood, deep red, spurted
over bright steel which protruded from his belly; blood which spurted, then, over La Borgne’s hand. As he slowly knelt (his
sabre already rolling away over the rough reddened earth) the Sardinian looked up at La Borgne, and saw, for the first time,
eyes blink and a lip twitch, and wanted to ask why, how, when, why, but the face was already lost in mist, unknown, unreal.

For La Borgne, then, there were witnesses, a furious magistrate and an outraged father. The magistrate threatened proceedings
and prison, but was pacified by repeated visits by the good père and a promise from La Borgne to leave the province. Filled
with a gratefully-felt sense of purpose, La Borgne set out for France and the famed mercenary ranks of the Irish Brigade.

He spent the next few years in Landrecies, Flanders and the Isle of France, learning the trade and craft of soldiering from
men from every nation in Europe. For a while, in the tramp of close-order drill and the eager reconstruction of past victories,
La Borgne’s mind was clear, unvisited by the glisten of blood and the smell of fantastical animals; he kept
The Romance of Alexander
hidden and locked in his trunk. In barracks, however, he became aware of certain stories that were heard at the time of the
setting of the sun, that perfumed the dreams of the rough, scarred men who slept, twitching, on wooden beds. There was a story
about a huge diamond that glittered, waiting to be taken, in the forehead
of a grotesque heathen idol. There was another story about a magical tree that, when shaken, showered rubies and pearls onto
the ground. There were swarthy magicians whose curses bit and mangled like war-dogs, beautiful women who twined and twisted
and teased and, always, wealth beyond imagining. These stories seduced La Borgne; despite himself, he found himself seeking
out the best of the story-tellers, the ones who constructed the most enchanting and the most grotesque of fictions; caught,
he struggled —he enjoyed the monotony of days defined by bugle calls and sweat-stained rule-books. For the first time in his
life, he was free; he sensed danger in the titillations of the seemingly innocent tales that webbed the twilight air.

Sure enough, one bright crisp morning, La Borgne found himself telling the story of Alexander and a giant knot. ‘Listen,’
he said, to the circle of scarred men, and even as he told the story, as he invented and changed and caressed with his words,
he felt the familiar, dangerous turbulence in his heart, like a storm of deep colours from a distant, unknown landscape. He
understood that he had learnt enough, that his time of peace was over, that for him there was no deliverance from the tyranny
of the future. The next day, he resigned his commission and began wandering through Europe until he was in Greece, where an
Admiral Orloff was commanding a Russian force against the Turks, in a war that has already passed out of memory and myth into
the deathly still of libraries.

Once again, La Borgne found time assuming a jagged, fragmented form, leaving him with sudden gasps of awareness and long periods
that passed in a daze; and so one morning, before dawn, with the sea lightening from a deep black to an opaque grey, he found
himself in a creaky boat crowded with Russian sailors and marines, moving slowly towards a dark mass called Tenedos. He clutched
a pistol butt in one hand and a sheathed sabre in the other; listening to the slow groaning of the oars, feeling the way the
brass arced smoothly across the polished wood of the pistol and the rough felt on the sheath that scraped across his thumb,
La Borgne thought of what was to follow in a few minutes, but could feel no fear. Around him, the staccato hiss of whispered
prayers rose to hang above the boat, but La Borgne could feel only an exhilarated wonder —the water lapped quietly against
aged wood —and a white calm; he tried to imagine what was to come, the tearing
boom of cannon fire and the blood. The wakening birds on shore twittered at the red tinge seeping over the horizon.

On shore, he crouched and ran, ahead of a line of men, towards the darkness massed under thickets of palm-trees and brush.
Hearing a soft cough behind him, a curious cough with liquid in it, La Borgne turned his head to the right to look; his legs
slid out and to the sides, his head seemed to slip back, sand swept up in a soft puff. He noticed that the sun had come up.
There were feet, huge feet, black and awkward, soundless, running past his eyes. A sea-gull wheeled overhead. The sky is huge;
it can swallow you up.

He woke in a creaking cart filled with blood and groaning, wounded Russians. He felt cord biting into his wrists, behind his
back; a long, thin explosion of pain grew at the back of his head with each motion of the cart and drifted into his eyes.
He raised his head, his cheeks brushing over wet cloth and stained flesh, then struggled to sit up. A bearded face bared teeth
at him from the front of the cart, screaming invective in a foreign tongue; dizzy, his head rocking, La Borgne watched as
an arm curled behind the face and swung back, as a black length of leather curved around and disappeared in a blur to crack,
with a sound like dry wood breaking, along his temple. He fell back to the filthy bottom of the cart and wept.

A month later, La Borgne and the other survivors of the disastrous Russian attack on Tenedos were sold as slaves. Dressed
in rags, ashamed of the manacles on their wrists and shamed by the vociferous bargaining, the prisoners avoided each other’s
eyes and did not care to say good-bye as they were led away. La Borgne was again possessed by an unnatural calm. The manacles
around his wrists and his status as a draught animal had released him from his visions; he therefore took to the life of a
slave with enthusiasm. In the household of a Turkish noble of middle rank, he hewed wood and drew water with relief and a
kind of love; the children of the household soon clustered around the burly pale man and attempted to teach him their language,
often scolding him and even cuffing him when he proved slow to learn. La Borgne smiled and shook his head like a bear, like
a trapped animal glad to be in captivity and out of the jungle.

The Turk, meanwhile, conducted negotiations with La Borgne’s father
the priest through letters and couriers; two years after the battle of Tenedos fat sacks of gold arrived at the Turk’s house
on mules. Told that he was free, that he was supposed to leave, that he had to leave, La Borgne sat on his haunches in the
fashion of the East and raised his hands to his face and wept, a nine-year-old Turkish boy by his right knee and a four-year-old
girl to the left.

In Constantinople, then, he awaited a visitation, a direction, waited for some mad phantom poet to take hold of the strings
again and fill him with purpose, with envy, lust, greed, anger and love. When nothing came, when no ghost horses wheeled about
him and when no mysterious daggers beckoned, La Borgne felt a great disappointment grow within him. He stumbled through the
crowded streets, pushing aside orange-sellers and potters and mullahs; slowly, he became aware that one word seemed to float
on top of the buzzing murmur in the bazaars and cafes, a word that he heard even when it was spoken on the far side of a crowded
room, a word that sounded like a distant drum in his ears:
Hindustan
.

La Borgne understood. Armed with letters of introduction from various European noblemen whom he had met in his wanderings,
he made his way to St. Petersburg and presented himself at the court of Catherine. There was no reason, no reason that is
comprehensible now, so many years later, no reason why that woman, that queen, should have agreed to finance a stranger’s
trip to Hindustan. It could have been that she remembered the czar Peter’s greed, his intention of sending armies through
the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas to acquire the fabled riches of Hindustan, to extend the borders of the monolith
that he envisioned till they disappeared into the warm depths of the Indian Ocean. Or perhaps it was just that Catherine saw
a kindred soul, another far-eyed face hiding internal hauntings. Or perhaps Catherine thought it inadvisable to detain one
who strained towards the future, who was called by what-was-to-come as some men and women are beckoned by religion; a week
after his first audience with the queen, La Borgne rode to the south.

In Aleppo, he found a caravan bound for Baghdad; harassed by wandering bands of horsemen from a Persian army scattered by
the Turks, the long line of carts turned around a quarter of the way out and slowly made its way back. But La Borgne had seen
his visions and heard voices
speak to him; he found a ship bound for Alexandria. A storm picked up the boat near the delta of the Nile and flung it about
like a toy, splitting it from end to end and scattering its passengers over the steel-grey water. La Borgne was found vomiting
yellow and green bile onto a white beach by a group of Arab traders mounted on camels; the Arabs were bound by a code of honour
bred in the desert, a code which forbade them from mistreating the weak and the sick. The Arabs picked up the unbeliever and
tied him to a camel-saddle. Three days later, they dropped him, face down, into the mud on the outskirts of Cairo and disappeared
into the heat-waves.