The Grammarian (9 page)

I
N
P
ARIS HIS
family lived in the fifth arrondissement, near the university, and he walked to his office in an old medieval building. The architects of those buildings could scarcely have imagined the languages taught and studied in them now. Early in the day the sun poured down over the imposing, grey structures and they seemed briefly less serious than they otherwise did. The mornings had always been his—in Paris he woke early and walked to the small café on the corner, arriving with the first-shift waitstaff, who greeted him with the strange mix of gentle good humor and aloof familiarity. The cold metal of the chairs, the smooth tables of finished wood, ink stains on his fingers from an unwieldy newspaper—how great the quotidian and daily gift of morning. He could scarcely understand why anyone would choose sleep over sunrise, over an endless violet sky. But as he so dearly loved coffee in silent solitude, he was glad so many did.

He chose the day and the sun.

5

A
LEXANDRE WOKE UP
, feeling still dizzy and not entirely sure where he was; his body felt like a leaden weight and he tentatively stretched his fingers. The sun was out and he couldn’t tell what time it was, and though he knew he was in a home, when he closed his eyes he could still feel the rocking of the train. He heard wrestling in the trees and the sound of clinking dishes and footsteps. He smiled for a moment, feeling very anxious, understanding he was not at home, not his home anyway; he blinked away a haze of confusion and realized he was in India, in Adivi’s house, and he reached for his silver cigarette case and lighter. He sat up in bed and smoked, wondering if anyone else was awake, and if so, how exactly he should enter the main house. He looked through swirls of smoke, wondering exactly how to make his entrance, and wearily eyed his bags. After a few moments, he slowly stood up, his legs trembling slightly as he found his balance. He stood, realizing that he had a pounding headache like those he sometimes got from oversleeping. Touching his temples, he kneeled by his luggage, carefully loosening the buckles and zippers and pulling out a white shirt and dark trousers. He splashed his face in a basin of cool water left by his bedside; he undressed and noticed on his white chest and arms a few angry red mosquito bites. He dressed and raked back his dark hair with a wet comb. He grimaced: his stomach ached dully from all the travel.

Alexandre put out his cigarette and blinked into the mirror. He looked older than the last time he’d had a moment to examine his face.
The little lines around his eyes and mouth looked deeper. He had taken his beauty for granted most of his life. But as he disliked vanity in men, he tried not to pause in front of mirrors too often. Standing in front of the mirror, he felt embarrassed that he noticed his aging and even more so that it bothered him, making a small vague feeling of panic in his chest. Alexandre sighed and wondered if he should put on shoes—the family went barefoot in the home, but it made him feel awkward and informal to walk around that way. After a few moments’ consideration, Alexandre chose to defer to the native custom. Alexandre, feeling oddly vulnerable and childish in his bare feet, tentatively opened the door of his room.

In the courtyard, two female servants, with their tattered saris tied between their legs, swept the stones with twine brooms and soapy water, their bright white teeth gleaming in contrast with their sun-blackened faces, their cracked heels and spaced-out, almost simian toes. They chatted with each other, laughing, telling vulgar jokes and the gossip from the nearby villages they were from. The thin hair of one was coiled into a bun; the other wore a large, silver nose ring. They had a look about them, as if they smiled a lot. Seeing them, Alexandre hesitated for a moment, at once aware of the superiority of his station with regard to theirs and yet feeling like an invader. Noticing him, the servants turned and smiled silently; Alexandre smiled, feeling strange, and looked down at his hands. His eyes darted around, looking for any of the Adivis, until one of the maids pointed at the dining room and said, “Mr. Adivi.”

Alexandre nodded his thanks and smiled, relieved. He had long prided himself on his manners and his ability to say and do the right things, even at times when others didn’t, and he realized how irritated
he was in that strange moment. His education and comportment failed him—he wondered if the maids thought him a fool. But they—uneducated and lower class as they were—had no standing to judge him. He shrugged it off.

T
HAT MORNING
, A
LEXANDRE
had Subba Rao go into town to a store where last month’s European papers were sold. Adivi had put the servants at Alexandre’s disposal, and they catered to him while the house busied itself, not just with the normal daily tasks but with wedding preparations. The cook was preparing to go to the market and shyly addressed him in her lower-class Telugu, “Sir, Miss Mohini has asked for shrimp for dinner and Miss Anjali has asked for squash. Is there anything you would like?”

Alexandre smiled and told her he’d be happy with whatever she bought.

He read the newspapers in the evening: there was a September issue of
Le Journal
. On the cover was another story about Hiram Bingham’s discovery of that ancient South American town thousands of feet above sea level. Lautens closed his eyes, sipping coffee.

B
INGHAM HAD
,
BETWEEN
schooling at Yale and a research post in Bolivia, heard of Vilcabamba—a mythic town of the South Americas—mentioned in the yellowing originals of the first European diaries written on that southern continent. It was said to be the last foothold of the old empire, at once so vast it had had in its hold all that is Ecuador, Peru, Chile . . . it ended only when the sea began. Pizarro’s men had killed in a fraction of an hour all Emperor Atahualpa’s mightiest men—men whose bodies had generations before adapted to the place’s thin
air and could, without great effort, run the endless, rugged coastline of the empire. Atahualpa crushed underfoot the Bible offered him by Pizarro. He and his men would not convert even under threat of Spanish swords. He cried, “I am no man’s tributary!” and moments later, his men around him dead and dying, the weary emperor was imprisoned by the Spaniards and bargained for the mercy of strangulation with roomfuls of gold and silver. The last of his few living soldiers raced up the treacherous South American hills carrying their wives and children where European legs could not go. They went to Vilcabamba, and there lived out the last years of empire unmolested and undiscovered by Pizarro’s men.

Bingham’s colleagues in Incan and Mayan studies in North America had humored him, had heard the name in passing. But they were men of science, and the quest for this South American Atlantis was of little interest to them. Years passed, but Bingham soon found himself again in Bolivia and Peru. Wandering the ancient Bolivian back roads, short of breath for the sheer altitude of the place, he saw it, shrouded in grass and vines, as if nature had conspired to hide it. He and his men were eight thousand feet above sea level and in front of his eyes was a seamless meeting of the red earth and blue sky. Vilcabamba—Machu Picchu, as it would be called. The city in the sky. Bingham and his team hacked at plants. But before doing so marveled at the patience of grass—how the tenacious growth of hundreds of years could conceal all the glory of man’s great achievement of the city. Monuments of stone and cement emerged—the stubborn vines clinging to them like jealous lovers, the sun showing on buildings it hadn’t touched in hundreds of years. The buildings were so austere, as if no humans had ever inhabited them. There were none of the human signs—no bones, no
tools or etchings on walls. The sky was so clear, like only a mirror that may shatter and fall into the ancient city.

Bingham had family money and a European education; he had seen the ruins of Greece and Italy, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids of Giza. And yet, under the vast blue sky, gasping for breath in the under-oxygenated air, sweating under the South American heat, Bingham was at a loss for words, and, mouth agape, he took in the marvel in silence, his European eyes the first in four hundred years to set sight upon the great old metropolis.

Alexandre wondered: how many lost cities were there, nations buried or sunken? How many languages died up there in the mountains of Peru, or drowned under the torrents of terrestrial tide, our ancestors ill equipped against the sudden crashing down of water walls?

A
DIVI ASKED THE
cook to make some coffee and later remarked that he would like to have
gulab jamun
for dessert. Dinner was Adivi’s favorite meal, a time for him to assert that paternal force as the head of the family that he felt his due and right. He liked the ritual of it, and the formality—that the whole family ate together, unlike the casual and scattered breakfasts and lunches. He liked the line made by his daughters and wife and mother from his position at the head of the table. He sat smiling at the table, calling to the cook to ensure that she was able to get good shrimp at the fish market. The cook called back, assuring him she had gotten to the market early and had gotten the best pick.

“Good,” said Adivi, contentedly waiting for his family as he skimmed through the paper.

The familiar feeling of his heart being squeezed set in when Adivi saw his daughter Anjali. The feelings of pity and fear aroused in him by
his daughter’s sickness and that absurd limp and the lack of beauty had his paternal love in a clawed grip. He tried to approach her again and again with love, after feeling awash in the guilt that his disgust aroused, but it always failed. His love was aroused always by pride, the kind of pride he felt in his wife’s grace and elegance or in Mohini’s beauty and that virtue that wore itself so proudly on her person. He felt it not vain but honorable that his clothes and family should all reflect a sort of virtuous propriety, and though he couldn’t fault Anjali for her deformity, any disruption in that appearance grieved him deeply, and this was an affliction he could not rid himself of, not even for his daughter.

And Alexandre felt ashamed of Adivi, because Adivi reminded him of himself. Because when his daughter was a baby, she too had been very sick, and Alexandre had that thought that horrible thought that he was sure might keep him from heaven: when it was quite uncertain that Catherine would live, he thought simply, “We could still have another baby.” And he felt such shame that he had thought his baby replaceable. He might be able to have another child, and perhaps even another daughter, but if she had died, he’d never have Catherine back.

A
LEXANDRE CONTINUED TO
write about Telugu nouns with a quick guide on forming the possessive:

A
T NIGHT
,
THE
home was like an island. From the outside in, it seemed as if it might have been the last salvation of a dying race, a sort of Hindu-Mughal Noah’s Ark; lights and guards with lamps illuminated it, a floating Atlantis in a sea of the dark roads and unlit alleys that surrounded it. Inside, it was safe. The marble floors cooled in the evening, the stucco walls remained warm, fireflies flickered in the garden.