VOICE 4 (pause): Their table's ready. The food here is excellent.
Michael Richardson used to say that once you knew the “Prince of Wales” you were never really satisfied anywhere else in the world.
VOICE 3 (low) : I can't quite remember . . . isn't she going to the French residency?
VOICE 4: She only used to sleep there.
She used to dine at the “Prince of Wales” when she stayed on the islands. (Hesitates.)
She'd had the servants at the residency sent back to Calcutta.
Pause.
Fear.
VOICE 3 (low): How long ago?
VOICE 4: A few weeks.
Bird cries, so loud they are almost unbearable.
VOICE 3: The birds . . . thousands of them.
VOICE 4: Prisoners on the islands. They couldn't fly back to the coast because of the storm.
VOICE 3: It's as if they were right inside the hotel . . .
VOICE 4: They're in the mango trees. They strip them. They'll fly away when it's light.
Noise of birds swamps everything else.
Silence.
VOICE 3: There's dancing at the other end of the lounge.
VOICE 4: Tourists from Ceylon.
Silence.
VOICE 4: During dinner . . . she asked them to raise the blind. She wants to see the sea, the sky, above the estuaries. They scarcely speak, they're very tired from last night.
Silence.
VOICE 3: She's not eating anything.
VOICE 4: Hardly anything. She's looking out of the window.
VOICE 3: I remember . . . A wall of mist is sweeping toward the islands . . .
VOICE 4: Yes. She's saying something about Venice. (Effort of memory.) Venice in the winter . . . yes, that's right . . .
Pause.
VOICE 3: Venice . . .
VOICE 4: Yes. Perhaps, some winter evenings in Venice, the same kind of mist . . .
VOICE 3: ... she's saying the name of ... (stops) of a color . . .
VOICE 4: Purple. The color of the mist in the Delta . . .
Silence.
Beyond the green windows of the hotel, disheveled, exhausted, his features contorted, still wearing his white dinner jacket, appears the French VICE-CONSUL. He goes through the garden of the hotel, searching.
Disappears.
Then reappears almost at once on the stage, now the lounge of the “Prince of Wales,” walks across the room, looks toward the left, stops short.
He has seen her.
He stands there looking at her.
VOICE 3: He came over by the last boat.
VOICE 4: Yes. The seven-o'clock.
Pause.
He hadn't been home all day. (Pause.) He never went back to Calcutta.
Silence.
The tune of “India Song” is played loudly for a few seconds, then fades.
VOICE 3: “India Song” . . .
VOICE 4: Yes.
Silence.
VOICE 4: Now that the mist has come the wind has dropped.
Silence.
Some tourists go by in the garden beyond the green windows. One can make out women fanning themselves with white fans. Light-colored dresses.
VOICE 4: They're talking about the beggar woman.
No answer.
Silence.
VOICE 4: George Crawn and the Stretters’ guest are talking about the beggar woman.
Silence.
FIRST VERSION: The conversation between GEORGE CRAWN and the Stretters’ GUEST is heard as from some distance. (Very light and ordinary.)
G. CRAWN : She doesn't know a word of Hindustani.
GUEST: Not a word. If she's from Savannakhet she must have come through Laos, Cambodia, Siam, and Burma, and then probably down through the Irrawaddy Valley . . . Mandalay . . . Prome . . . Bassein . . .
G. CRAWN: It must have been not just one journey, as we might think, but hundreds, thousands, every day, each one the last . . . Hunger always driving her on, farther and farther . . . She must have followed roads, railways, boats . . . but what's strange is that she always went toward the sunset . . .
GUEST: ... I suppose she traveled at night, and faced toward the light . . . She's bald . . . Because of hunger, do you think?
G. CRAWN: Yes.
Pause.
G. CRAWN : Sometimes she comes to the islands. Following the whites, probably: food . . . In Calcutta she lives by the Ganges, under the trees. She gets up at night and goes through the English quarter. Apparently she hunts for food at night along the Ganges.
Pause.
GUEST: And what's left of her in Calcutta? Not much . . . The song of Savannakhet, the laugh . . . and her native language is still there of course, but there's no use for it. The madness was there when she arrived . . . already too far gone . . .
Pause.
G. CRAWN: Why Calcutta? Why did her journey stop there?
GUEST: Perhaps because she can lose herself there. She's always been trying to lose herself, really, ever since her life began . . .
Pause.
G. CRAWN: She too.
GUEST: Yes . . .
Silence.
SECOND VERSION: (VOICES 3 and 4 relate the conversation between GEORGE CRAWN and the STRETTERS’ GUEST. (VOICE 4 is the one that hears it.)
VOICE 4: They've seen her.
She must have crossed the Delta on the roof of a bus. She stowed away on the last boat.
They met her by the lagoon, a few hundred yards from the French residency.
Pause.
VOICE 3: She must have been following Anne-Marie Stretter . . .
VOICE 4: The guest says she followed him to the gate. She frightened him.
He said: “That eternal smile is frightening . . .”
VOICE 3: That too . . .
VOICE 4: Yes. (Pause.) You remember?
The first attempt . . . (stops) at Savannakhet, because of a dead child . . .
VOICE 3: ... sold by its mother, a beggar from the North . . . very young . . . ?
VOICE 4: Yes. Seventeen . . . (Pause.) A few days before Stretter arrived.
Silence.
Suddenly the VICE-CONSUL goes toward the right, and disappears: he has seen them.
Here they are, coming out from dinner. There are now only three of them: ANNE-MARIE STRETTER, MICHAEL RICHARDSON, the YOUNG ATTACHÉ.
They walk across the lounge, making for the garden through the middle door.
In the garden they separate.
ANNE-MARIE STRETTER goes to the right.
The others go straight on through the garden and disappear.
The VICE-CONSUL begins to go after ANNE-MARIE STRETTER.
He halts.
She has stopped too.
She looks around her at the sea, the palms.
She hasn't seen the VICE-CONSUL.
VOICE 4: She wanted to walk back on her own.
Silence.
VOICE 4: The other two went for a sail . . .
Silence.
VOICE 4: The Young Attaché and Michael Richardson went back to the French residency the other way, along the beach.
Pause.
VOICE 4: It was as hot again as it had been in Calcutta.
ANNE-MARIE STRETTER walks slowly away.
Behind her, the VICE-CONSUL. He is following her.
They disappear.
Blackout.
During the blackout, the 14th Beethoven-Diabelli Variation in the distance:
Blackout fades.
V
The same as before, but it is now the French residency.
The light is different. It seems to come from outside. It is blue, like moonlight.
The fan is still there. Still going around.
The garden of the Embassy and the garden of the hotel have both gone. There is just an empty space. A path, and at the end of it a white gate.
Everything is enveloped in endless, fathomless emptiness. But it has a sound: the sea.
After a while, MICHAEL RI
CHARDSON and the YOUNG ATTACHÉ come in through the white gate.
Simultaneously, she enters, from the left of the house.
She is barefoot. Her hair is loose. She wears the short black cotton wrap.
She joins them on the path, they go toward one another, meet in the half-light.
They look at the sea.
VOICE 4: She's supposed to have said she was worried about George Crawn and the Guest. The sea was rough.
Sound of a rowing boat in the distance. They all look toward something out at sea.
VOICE 4: She didn't have to worry any more. George Crawn and the Guest went straight back to the hotel without calling in at the residency.
Silence.
They slowly walk back into the house.
VOICE 3 (pause; stricken) : She didn't say anything that evening that might have made anyone think . . . (Stops.)
VOICE 4: No. Nothing.
Terrific tension. But nothing breaks the quiet spell of death.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON goes over to the piano.
She goes out of the room.
The two men are left there alone. They look at each other.
Outside, in the distance, at the end of the path, the white shape of the VICE-CONSUL comes through the open gate.
They don't see him.
She comes back, bringing glasses and champagne. She smiles at them.
She puts the bottle and glasses down on a low table and pours out the champagne.
She takes it to them.
They drink.
She sits down on a sofa.
There is still the fixed smile on ANNE-MARIE STRETTER’s face.
Outside, the VICE-CONSUL watches.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON plays.
He plays the 14th Beethoven-Diabelli Variation. Complete stillness.
Suddenly the stillness is shattered:
The YOUNG ATTACHÉ goes over to ANNE-MARIE STRETTER, puts his arms around her, then falls at her feet, and stays there with his arms around her legs.
He stays there, riveted to her.
She doesn't prevent him.
Strokes his hair.
Still the smile. The fixed smile.
He gets up. Draws her to her feet, flings his arms around her body, naked under the wrap. A gesture of supplication. Vain.
They kiss. A long kiss.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON watches. Plays the piano and watches them. His face is as we have always known it.
The white shape from Lahore gazes in avidly from outside.
The YOUNG ATTACHÉ roughly releases ANNE-MARIE STRETTER, staggers over to the piano and leans on it with his head in his hands. The Beethoven continues: MICHAEL RICHARDSON goes on playing. Stillness. Stillness enveloped in music.
The YOUNG ATTACHÉ remains leaning on the piano, motionless. The attitude of despair itself.
For the last time, one of the women's voices:
VOICE 2 (terrified): Where are you? (Waits. No answer.)
You're so far away . . . I'm frightened . . .
VOICE 1 doesn't answer any more.
Silence.
ANNE-MARIE STRETTER turns toward outside, toward the sea.
Shows no surprise when she sees the VICE-CONSUL.
He doesn't move, makes no attempt to conceal him-self. Gazes fixedly at her.
She turns and bares her body to the fan.
Perhaps her naked body is visible to everyone.
To the VICE-CONSUL also—the body already separate from her.
She stands there motionless under the fan.
Silence.
VOICE 3 (low, almost a murmur): Michael Richardson left her alone that evening?
VOICE 4 (hesitating): It had been agreed between the lovers of the Ganges that they'd leave each other free if ever either of them decided . . . (Stops.)
Silence.
VOICE 3 (suffering, terror): But he doesn't know, it isn't possible . . .
No answer.
VOICE 3: What does he know?
VOICE 4 (pause): Ever since the servants were sent away, Michael Richardson had been living with this possibility.
Silence.
ANNE-MARIE STRETTER has lain down under the fan.
She has closed her eyes.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON and the YOUNG ATTACHÉ slowly tear themselves away, as if she had actually ordered them to leave her alone there.
They cross the empty space outside. Shadows.
The VICE-CONSUL is there. He doesn't hide as they go past.
It is as if they do not see him.
They disappear from sight.
ANNE-MARIE STRETTER and the VICE-CONSUL from Lahore are the only ones left in the French residency.
Silence.
She gets up, goes out, slowly walks through the empty space toward the white gate.
It is as if she doesn't see anything. She doesn't see the VICE-CONSUL.
And he makes not the slightest gesture toward her.
VOICE 3 (scarcely breathed): Is he the only one who saw . . . ?
VOICE 4: He didn't say.
VOICE 3 (as before): ... he didn't do anything to stop . . .
No answer.
VOICE 4: The Young Attaché came back to the residency in the course of the night. He saw her. She was lying on the path, resting on her elbow. He said: “She laid her arm out straight and leaned her head on it. The Vice-consul from Lahore was sitting ten yards away. They didn't speak to each other.”
Silence.
What has just been related is what ANNE-MARIE STRETTER does. She lays her face on her arm. Stays like that. The VICE-CONSUL looks at her, riveted to the distance between them.
VOICE 4: She must have stayed there a long while, till daylight—and then she must have gone along the path . . . (Stops.) They found the wrap on the beach.
Silence.
The fan stops.
Rest a few seconds on the stopping of the fan.
Blackout.
Summary
This summary is the only one which should accompany productions of India Song.
This is the story of a love affair which takes place in India in the thirties, in an overpopulated city on the banks of the Ganges. Two days in this love story are presented. It is the season of the summer monsoon.
Four voices—faceless—speak of the story. Two of the voices are those of young women, two are men's.
The voices do not address the spectator or reader. They are totally independent. They speak among themselves, and do not know they are being heard.
The voices have known or read of this love story long ago. Some of them remember it better than others. But none of them remembers it completely. And none of them has completely forgotten it.
We never know who the voices are. But just by the way each of them has forgotten or remembers, we get to know them more deeply than through their identity.
The story is a love story immobilized in the culmination of passion. Around it is another story, a story of horror—famine and leprosy mingled in the pestilential humidity of the monsoon—which is also immobilized, in a daily paroxysm.
The woman, Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of a French Ambassador to India and now dead—her grave is in the English cemetery in Calcutta—might be said to be born of this horror. She stands in the midst of it with a grace which engulfs everything, in unfailing silence—a grace which the voices try to see again, a grace which is porous and dangerous, dangerous also for some of them.
Besides the woman, in the same city, there is a man, the French Vice-consul in Lahore, in Calcutta in disgrace. It is by anger and murder that he is connected to the horror of India.
There is a reception at the French Embassy, in the course of which the outcast Vice-consul cries out his love to Anne-Marie Stretter, as white India looks on.
After the reception she drives along the straight roads of the Delta to the islands in the estuary.
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