The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “It was my job at one time,” said Dismas, trying to sound humble. “I was an art critic with the Times of Bharat.”

  “Impressive!” Xavier said, in a tone that may have been admiring or ironic or both at the same time. “Then perhaps you can answer the first question his biography brings to mind. Why did he kill himself?”

  “Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this kind of, this level of interaction.”

  “An interview is a two-way process. The interviewer must open up too. Do you not think so? Answer the question.”

  He thought it would have something to do with linguistic isolation or the way the towers filled the viewfinder of the Czech’s camera and shut out the light. It would have to do with photographer’s light and the lack of it: the slow dying of light across many days and months.

  “Wrong!” said Xavier, though Dismas had not uttered a word. “Asking why someone killed himself is like asking why the demon chasing you has a pimple on its nose. The second question, how did he do it?”

  “He threw himself from the towers.”

  “Pish and codswallop. Suicide may be the obvious response to the intolerable but it doesn’t, you know, have to be unimaginative. Do you want to check that the tape recorder is working?”

  Dismas checked; it was. The palm-sized machine’s tiny cogs were in constant satisfying movement, the micro-cassette snug in its groove and the glass dot on the casing a deep electronic red.

  “Last question, did the meaning of the bird elude him or did it not?”

  But Xavier expected no answer.

  “We survived the Age of Woe thanks to efficient pharmaceuticals and the Age of Rage by the skin of our gnashed teeth,” he said. “But now we enter the Age of Indecency. This is the common resource of the two thousands, the fountain that will never run dry. After this Age there will be no other. Are you a native of Bombay?”

  “Yes,” said Dismas.

  “The lovely ruins of.”

  “Ruined, surely. I don’t know about lovely.”

  “Only Bombaymen feel obliged to run the city down. I feel obliged to disparage Goa and lately New York. It strikes me that other cities of the world are more New York than New York. London, say, or Hongkong or Melbourne or Berlin. Something has left this town.”

  Dismas had done his homework. He knew that Xavier had been born in the small village of Forgottem and he was its only famous son. He shared a birthday with Goa’s patron saint, Francis Xavier, and had taken the saint’s name: Newton Francis Xavier. He was expelled from school for drawing on the wall of the boys’ toilet a precisely enhanced female figure with a soul- or penis-shaped cavity in the inexact region of the belly. The drawing had been captioned with a quotation from Francis of Assisi, “Wherever we go we bring our cell with us. Our body is the cell and our soul the hermit living in it.” He signed it X. And even then the boy Xavier had thought of documentation. He had persuaded a friend to photograph the picture.

  “Why,” said Dismas, “did you name yourself after Saint Xavier?”

  Xavier examined his nails, which were chipped though not dirty.

  “I rather would like to offer coffee but the truth of the matter is there’s no one here to make it.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Quite. Do you want the long version or the short?”

  “The long.”

  “Francis Xavier achieved sainthood by unstinting aimless motion. His great wish was to be never at home. Never at Home – good title, do you think, for a memoir about professional exiles such as us? I can see by your terrifying stare that you do not think so. The point about saints is they understand the futility and beauty of movement for its own sake. The self-denying artist is a kind of saint and I allied myself to one I felt some affinity with.”

  Dismas pointed at the window. “May I take this off for a minute, the list?”

  Xavier did it himself and pulled the paper from the glass to reveal layered smears, a surface that had never come in contact with soap or water. Dismas could see nothing of the outside but rough fields of green and grey. He would have to stick his head out of the window to see if the street was safe. Where was the sanitation truck and its crazed driver?

  Somebody was at the door. A dapper turbanned man, moustache combed out into a walrus, a face Dismas took a minute to recognise.

  “You’re the guy who was attacked during Nine Eleven,” he said. “Amrik Singh Dhillon. My paper interviewed you. Front-page story, above the fold and boxed, written by my friend Shyam Pereira.”

  “Indian Angle,” Amrik said. “Interesting guy, Shyam. I don’t know how he heard about it but he was on the phone within hours and the article was out almost immediately.”

  “Right. And then the New York Times picked it up.”

  “My manager,” said Xavier, by way of introduction, “and friend, Amrik.”

  “Just a quick question,” said Amrik. “The ICCR festival in Delhi? They want you on a poetry panel. They’ll fly you and put you up and pay you an honorarium and a per diem.”

  “My last book of poems was more than thirty years ago. Nobody remembers.”

  “Not true. You won the Hawthornend Prize and you’re still the only non-white person who’s ever won.”

  “That would be the Hawthorn.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Tell him no. I have nothing to say, truly.”

  “I said you’d go. They’ll send an advance against expenses.”

  “To sweeten the sour.”

  “You were taking the show to India, I thought, anyway.”

  “Shall we discuss this outside?” he said, pointing at Dismas.

  The two men left the room.

  He went to the window, which opened with a moderate struggle. The air was cold and almost fresh. When was the last time fresh air had entered this room? He considered telling Amrik about the Revenge, still out there on the streets of Manhattan, hunting for darkies. But on the street no sanitation truck was to be seen, only taxis, a mob of jaywalkers, and a lone jogger. He pulled the window shut and saw some lines near the sill written in pencil. The old soothsayer, however, danced with delight, & though he was then, as some narrators suppose, full of sweet wine, he was certainly still fuller of sweet life, and had renounced all weariness. He took a closer look at the painting of the burkha-clad opium smoker and her penis pipe. It was dated 1982.

  When Xavier returned and claimed his chair Dismas pointed at the scribbles.

  “Oh, that would be Goody quoting the syphilitic German horse lover.” At Dismas’s look of incomprehension Xavier said, “Posthumously coopted by the Nazis? The man with the magnificent flying moustaches? For god’s good sake what do they teach you in school these days? It appears to be a message courtesy of Goody and I am somewhat pleased to say that I have no idea what it signifies. You might ask her.”

  “Let’s talk about the Hawthorn,” said Dismas. “They call it the most English of prizes. You won for your first book. After the second you abandoned poetry altogether. I know you’ve been asked this before but could you talk about what happened?”

  “I don’t know, don’t know … unpredictable master or mistress.” He lit a cigarette and took a deep first drag. “I didn’t abandon it. If anything it was the other way around. I think it visited me as a young man and left me when I got older. It happens to poets and musicians. You’re on fire for a minute and then nothing but embers. If I had known then that the future was a bereft old age without poems.”

  “Right,” said Dismas, “I think you said that once, pretty much in those words.”

  “If you ask the same question you get the same answer. Everybody wants to know about writer’s block and how terrible it is. They love the idea of the tortured artist. Nobody talks about how super it is. How much like a paid vacation. You are giving yourself permission to not work.”

  “No poems, but the paintings are plentiful,” said Dismas.

  “One can only imagine how much worse it could be.”

  “Sor
ry?”

  “Imagine when both stop and you are left with nothing but your own used-up self.”

  “Is that going to happen?”

  “I started to paint because the poems would not come. I thought of it as left-handed work. Automatic. I didn’t put much into it and they loved it. They missed the point. The poetry is the point.”

  “The buyers and critics missed the point?”

  “When you are on nothing exists but your working hand. When you are done doubt returns rather quickly. The death of God is unbearable when he is all you’ve got. What can fill that hole? No amount of fame or love.”

  “Money? An apartment on Central Park West?”

  Dismas wrote in his notebook: “A hint of a smile appears on X’s handsomely lined face.”

  “Art makes nothing happen but it survives. We’ve known that since 1939 at the very—” Xavier didn’t finish. “It survives in the valley of its making. It finds a way of happening and a mouth.”

  He reached for a glass placed by the leg of his armchair and stubbed out the cigarette. It continued to smoulder.

  “Once I thought you could change the world or some small part of the world with a book, a painting, a poem – I was younger and given to arrogance. The suicide knows better, and the terrorist. The only poem that matters is the poem that picks up a gun.”

  He tugged at his laces and kicked off his shoes, hand-made red leather Oxfords. The beautiful shoes had been treated badly, the leather scuffed, drops of wax melted on the wingtips. Dismas made a note, “Red leather wingtips.”

  “And knows how to use it.”

  Dismas said, “In retrospect, did the Hung Realist anthology and your association with Narayan Doss change the world of Indian poetry in any way?”

  “I prefer not to live in the past. How long have you been in the United States of Émigrekah?”

  “The United States of Amnesia,” said Dismas. “The United States of Amurka.”

  “I got here in 1998. My first address was Queens.”

  Xavier said, “Of course. One must be true to one’s cliché.”

  “I don’t know. It could have been Delhi or Dacca. I was in a city inside a city.”

  “The moveable ghetto.”

  Dismas remembered the frigid Sunday in January when he first caught a glimmer of the immigrant life. Walking home from the subway he’d stopped by Patel Brothers, a fragrant grocery operation on Roosevelt Avenue. Inside the store a Sardar with a flowing white beard and faded turban held a sun-ripened Alphonso to his nose, his pleasure plain to see. When the old man caught Dismas looking he sheepishly put the mango away. Just then a family of five appeared on the sidewalk carrying plastic bags full of provisions, even the small children loaded with vegetables and spices and rice. Mom and Dad were hard to tell apart, their identical hooded parkas tied so tight all you could see were slits for eyes and pursed mouths. One of the children dropped a bag and three red onions rolled to the sidewalk and Dismas picked them up. The child just stood there bundled in too many layers, too cold to accept the onions or say anything. And that was when it hit him, the pitiful half-life of ‘South Asians’ in New York City.

  “Bad timing,” Xavier said, crossing his legs, “you are in Amurka at the end of the Amurkan Empire. You left one kind of poverty for another. A dozen apostles of the new apocalypse take down the tallest buildings in the world and the predicament presents itself in the form of a chant or a jingle” – and then he said a mocking phrase that Dismas would hear again – “The beast of the east eats the best of the west.”

  Dismas consulted his notebook for a bit of breathing space. The conversation was hard and distinctly personal labour. Xavier demanded your complete attention. If he looked away the man would stop talking until Dismas’s eyes returned to him, motionless in his ancient armchair, a wax figure animated only by intelligence. He spoke softly but in violent non-sequiturs. It struck Dismas that he slept in the chair, which explained the number of sketches in the vicinity.

  “Mr T on the phone,” Amrik said as he ducked into the room. He pulled up the antennae on one of the hinged cell phones that people were wearing in holsters clipped to their belts. Dismas hoped to get one too. Unlike Amrik, who didn’t have a holster, Dismas would wear his at the small of the back. It would be discreet and noticeable at the same time. “They’ll pay a one-time appearance fee of two and a half thousand plus two business class tickets and five-star accommodation. Is it a yes?”

  “Perhaps a maybe,” said Xavier. “Perhaps he might make it a round five thousand dollars?”

  “You heard the man,” Amrik said into the phone as he left the room. “Oh, you didn’t?”

  Dismas was taking the paintings out of their newspaper packing when his pager beeped. Mrs Merchant. He would have to keep her waiting and this was never a good idea. He placed the pictures against the foot of the bed. The glass in one of the frames had cracked but the nudes were as lurid as ever, shaky lines in black marker on the glossy covers of a British men’s magazine. In both paintings swim-suited feathery blondes were partially visible under the blurry blue wash of chemical solvents. You could make out some of the headlines, Melinda Returns and (Something) Dogs the Cockney Mafia and Giant Poster Inside. Against the washed blue the fleshy Marys were crudely drawn. Something in the lines suggested the Willendorf Venus.

  He may not have been expecting a fanfare when he unveiled the paintings but he had hoped for some kind of reaction. Xavier lit a cigarette and examined the coal. When he had determined that it was burning to his satisfaction he brushed at an ashy stain on his trousered knee. He fidgeted. He snuffled. Then he turned to the canvases and appraised them with the eye of a pathologist gathering data for a medical journal. He may have been about to rouse himself to say a word, or even two, when the doorbell rang.

  “Goody,” Xavier said, and left the room.

  Dismas wandered into a hallway packed with video equipment and televisions, heavy box sets that resembled pieces of furniture, clunky and panelled and studded with looped aerials and oversized dials. On a tidy rolltop in a room at the end of the hall he saw a work-in-progress, a Polaroid that Xavier was working on with pen and ink. A rope-bound woman in a chiffon sari lay on a sidewalk as if felled, her face tiny and detailed like a miniature and made up in the style of a fifties Bollywood star. A magnifying glass lay beside the photo and Dismas picked it up to take a closer look. Then he thought better of it and put the glass down.

  He was looking at the Two Marys when she came in, the fur coat and yellow T-shirt mostly hidden by paper bags of dry cleaning. The coolant-coloured hair had lost its sheen in indoor lighting. If she recognised him she gave no indication.

  Xavier made a gesture. “Goody, meet the Bombayman.”

  “Dismas, I’m interviewing.”

  “I know,” said Goody. “I know, I know.”

  She spoke with an accent from the north of England, some place made knowable by twentieth-century British pop. The tone was intimate and oddly reassuring, markedly different from Xavier’s Oxbridge accent redolent of high tea and sherry and buggery in the staff quarters.

  “We need to be at the gallery immediately if not sooner,” she told Xavier, “some vital decisions about seating must be made.”

  “Must I come?” he asked, in his almost-but-not-quite-inaudible voice as Goody left the room.

  They were like actors in a sitcom. British Indians in New York who looked and sounded alike. Her fur and Xavier’s overcoat made him conscious of his own clothes. The shapeless Indian jacket struck him as an embarrassment: not warm enough for winter or light enough for spring: unstylish, incorrect, inappropriate for a New Yorker.

  He nodded at the paintings. “I’ve been calling them the Two Marys. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Yeah, no,” Xavier mumbled. “I mean they are mine but I wouldn’t swear to it in a court of law, if you see what I mean?”

  Was this meant as a cryptic sideways clue? Dismas didn’t get a chance to ask. A phone was ring
ing in the hall and it was a commotion in the quiet, not to say spookily silent apartment. Xavier made no move to get up. Instead he said, “Goody?”

  She came in with an open bottle of wine and two glasses on a breakfast tray she placed on the floor.

  She said, “New doesn’t drink but he won’t mind if we do.”

  Then she unhurriedly left the room in the direction of the ringing phone. Xavier looked at the wine and Dismas looked at his watch. It was not yet noon. At least in this house the cliché about artists was true: red wine in the morning and disorder everywhere. He decided to chance his hand and reached into his breast pocket for a small sheaf of typewritten pages.

  “Whenever you have the time,” he said. “I’d be grateful for an opinion, even a hurried one.”

  The poems had been folded lengthways. Xavier took the sheaf reluctantly and began to read. He flipped back and forth across the pages. It took him all of three or four minutes.