Shalimar the Clown (4 page)

She was used to such soliloquies, his fugues on themes of this or that; used, also, to his habit of half-humorous perversity. But now his praisesong seemed to cross a frontier and bear him away from her into a shadow. When he claimed to admire the city’s powerful gangs for the thrilling casual potency of their violence and the tag artists for their transient encrypted graffiti; when he praised the earthquakes for their majesty and the landslides for their reproof to human vanity; when with no apparent irony he celebrated the junk food of America and waxed lyrical about the new banality of diet cola; when he admired the strip malls for their neon and the chain stores for their ubiquity; when he declined to criticize the produce on sale in the farmers’ markets, the visually delightful apples that tasted like cotton puffs, the bananas made of pulped paper, the odorless flowers, calling them symbols of the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race; when he, who had been a model of probity in his own public (though not sexual) life, admitted to secret feelings of admiration for a corrupt local official because of the flamboyant daring of his corruption and, contradicting himself, cynically lauded a second corrupt local official for the sneaky, decade-long subtlety of his crimes, then India began to see that in the depths of the old age whose effects he had so heroically concealed, even from her, he had lost his hold on joy, and that failure had eaten at him from within, eroding his ability to discriminate and to make moral judgments, and if things continued to deteriorate along these lines, he would eventually become incapable of making any choices at all, restaurant menus would become mysteries to him, and even the choice between getting out of bed in the morning and spending the daylight hours between the sheets would become impossible to make. And when the final choice stymied him, the choice between breathing and not breathing, then he would surely die.

“I used to long for your good opinion,” she told him, to silence him. “But now that I’d have to share it with all this shit I’m not so sure I want it anymore.”

They got back to her apartment building and the driver was waiting, eyes still ablaze, standing exactly where she had last seen him, as if he hadn’t moved all day. Flowers grew out of the concrete sidewalk at his feet and his hands and clothes were red with blood. What? What was that? She blinked and squinted and of course it was not so, he was flowerless, spotless, waiting patiently as a good employee should. Also, he had been busy in their absence. He had made his way up to Woodrow Wilson Drive and brought down the ambassador’s Bentley. Look: there it was, large as life. Why hadn’t she seen it right away? Why did such moments come to her; whence this hallucinatory curse? Had she done something to annoy Olga Simeonovna and been placed under a potato spell born in the Volga River delta centuries ago, when goblins walked the earth? But she didn’t believe in potato magic either. She was overtired, she thought. Things would settle down if she could just get a good, uninterrupted night’s sleep. She promised herself a pill at bedtime. She promised herself a clean, uncluttered life. She promised herself ease, an end to turbulence. She promised herself to be content with the humdrum reassurances of the everyday.

“Where’d you find him, anyway, your Mughal gardener,” she asked her father, who didn’t seem to be listening. “Shalimar,” she insisted. “The driver with the phony name. His poor English. Did he pass the written test?”

The ambassador waved a dismissive hand. “Stop worrying about it,” he said. That made her worry about it. “Happy birthday,” he added, dismissing her.
“Un bisou.”

After the assassination, India, watching television, would see Gorbachev getting off a plane in Moscow, having survived the attempted Communist coup against him. He looked shaken, imprecise, blurry at the edges, like a watercolor smudged by rain. Somebody asked him if he intended to abolish the Communist Party and in his shock at the question, his confusion, his indecision, she saw his weakness. The Party had been Gorbachev’s cradle, his life. And he was being asked to abolish it? No, his whole body said, trembling, fuzzy, how can I, I will not; and at that moment he became irrelevant, history swept past him, he turned into a bankrupt hitchhiker on the verges of the freeway he had built in his glory days, watching the wild cars, the Yeltsins, roaring past him into the future. For the man of power, too, the house of power can be a treacherous place. In the end he, too, must fight his way out of it, past the swooping bird-men. He emerges empty-handed and the crowd, the cruel crowd, laughs. Gorbachev looked like Moses, she thought, the prophet unable to enter the Promised Land. And that was when he began to look like her father watching the sunset.

On another day, one of the timeless days after Max’s murder, she saw another vision of him. In South Africa a man walked out of prison after a lifetime sequestered from the public gaze. Nobody really knew what this Lazarus was going to look like. The only photograph the papers ever printed had been taken decades earlier. The man in that picture was heavy-set, a raging bull, a Mike Tyson look-alike. A flame-eyed revolutionary. But this man was tall and slender and walked with gentle grace. When she saw that silhouette, long and skinny as a Spielberg alien, walking to freedom with the klieg lights behind it, she knew she was seeing her father, raised from the dead. Emotion leapt up in her; but resurrections don’t happen, they really don’t, and it wasn’t her father. As the glare of the lights stopped flooding the camera lens India understood that she was looking at an allegory of the future, the future her father had not wanted to imagine. Mandela, metamorphosed from firebrand into peacemaker, with wicked Winnie at his side. Morality and immorality, the beatified and the corrupted, walked toward the cameras, hand in hand, and in love.

In the capital city of the billion-dollar industries of film, television and recorded music Max Ophuls never went to the movies, detested television drama and comedy, owned no sound system, and happily foretold the coming end of these temporary perversions, which, he predicted, would shortly be abandoned by their devotees in favor of the infinitely superior appeal of the immediacy, spontaneity and continuity of live performance, the thrilling power of the physical presence of the performer. In spite of this melancholically purist position the ambassador frequently descended from his ivory tower on the mountaintop road named after the president who died dreaming of a league of united nations, and like the Assyrian in the poem who came down like a wolf on the fold, occupied, under cover of night, the penthouse suite he maintained in one of the city’s best hotels. It was widely held that many ladies with big careers in the despised forms had been entertained there. When they asked him why he refused to see their movies he replied devotedly that he was experiencing the thrilling power of their live performances instead, and nothing they could do on screen could equal what they were doing with such immediacy, spontaneity, continuity and presence right there in the famous hotel.

On the day before Max’s death the first bad portent manifested itself in the form of a contretemps with an Indian movie star. In the beginning Max had had no idea she even was a film actress, this girl with the skin the color of scorched earth, the well-concealed body and the demure manner of a disciple walking in the footsteps of a great
rishi.
She began following him around the lobby of the great hotel day after day until he demanded to know her business and was told in the low voice of the deep fan, the heart fan, that she had been drawn into his gravitational field just as the planet Venus had been sucked into its orbit around the sun and she asked for nothing better than to be allowed to move around him at a respectful distance for, perhaps, the rest of her life. Her name, Zainab Azam, meant nothing to him, but at his age he had no wish to look so beautiful a gift horse in the mouth. In his suite after their first lovemaking she suddenly spoke with detailed knowledge and boundless admiration about his long-past ambassadorship to India, when he had coined the saying
India is chaos making sense
which was now to be found in all books of quotations and which was used on an almost weekly basis by some Indian public figure or other, always with pride. She told him that he was the Rudyard Kipling of ambassadors, the only one of all the envoys in all the embassies down all the years who had truly understood India, and she was his reward for that understanding. She asked for nothing, refused his gifts, disappeared into an inaccessible dimension of her own for most of every day but always returned, demure and self-effacing as ever until she undressed, after which she was a fire and he her slow but eager fuel. What are you doing with an old reprobate like me, he asked her, shocked into self-deprecation by her beauty. Her reply was so obviously a lie that it was a good thing his vanity reasserted itself in the nick of time and whispered in his ear that he should accept it humbly as the unvarnished truth.

“Worshipping you,” she said.

She reminded him of a woman who had been dead to him for over twenty years. She reminded him of his daughter. She could only have been two or three years older than India, four or five years older than India’s mother when he saw her for the last time. Max Ophuls found himself imagining in an idle moment that the two young women, his daughter and his sexual partner, might meet and become friends, but that was a possibility he discarded with a swift shudder of revulsion. Zainab Azam was the last lover of his long life and fucked him as if she were trying to erase all the many women who had gone before. She told him nothing about herself and did not appear to mind that he never asked. This state of affairs, which the ambassador considered close to ideal, persisted splendidly until the evening before the last day, when Max made his brief, ill-advised return to public life.

The question that nobody could answer in the days after the assassination was why, after the long years of the self-denying ordinance that had removed him from the banalizing, hollowing-out effects of the public eye, Max Ophuls chose to go on television to denounce the destruction of paradise in the florid language of a fading age. On an impulse he had telephoned an acquaintance, the West Coast’s most celebrated late-night talk-show host, to ask if he might appear on the program as soon as possible. The great media celebrity was both astonished and delighted to accommodate him. The talk-show host had long wanted Max on his show because of his fabled gifts as a raconteur. Once at the home of Marlon Brando the famous television personality had been entranced by Max Ophuls’s anecdotal genius—by his stories of how Orson Welles would arrive at and depart from restaurants through their kitchens, to ensure that while he was amazing his dining companions by ordering nothing but a plain green salad the kitchen staff were filling his waiting limousine with boxes full of profiteroles and chocolate cake; and of Chaplin’s Christmas dinner for the Hispanics of Hollywood, at which Luis Buñuel had solemnly, in the spirit of surrealism, completely dismantled Chaplin’s Christmas tree; and of a visit to Thomas Mann, exiled in Santa Monica with the air of a man guarding the crown jewel of himself; and of a drunken night’s carousing with William Faulkner; and of Fitzgerald’s despairing transformation into the hack scenarist Pat Hobby; and of the improbable liaison between Warren Beatty and Susan Sontag, which allegedly took place on an unspecified date in the parking lot at the In-N-Out Burger eatery on Sunset and Orange.

By the time the ambassador, an amateur of local history, had launched into an account of the subterranean lives of the mysterious lizard people who supposedly dwelt in tunnels below Los Angeles, the talk-show host had become possessed by the idea of getting this reclusive extrovert to reveal himself on television, and had pursued him down the years with a fidelity that bore a close resemblance to unrequited love. That a man who despised the movies was also an encyclopedia of Hollywood lore was enjoyably odd; when the man in question had also lived a life as rich as Max Ophuls’s—Max, the Resistance hero, the philosopher prince, the billionaire power-broker, the maker of the world!—this made him irresistible.

The talk show had been recorded in the late afternoon, and things did not go as the famous host had planned. Ignoring all invitations to repeat his most enjoyable anecdotes, Max Ophuls launched instead into a political diatribe on the so-called Kashmir issue, a monologue whose excessive vehemence and total lack of wit distressed his interlocutor more than he was able to express. That Ophuls of all men, this brilliant storyteller of infinite charm, should finally emerge from the shadows into the redemptive and validating light of television, but then turn at once into a ratings-sapping current-affairs bore, was unimaginable, unbearable, and yet it was happening right before the studio audience’s suddenly soporific eyes. The talk-show host had the feeling that he was watching the drowning of one reality, the reality in which he lived, by a sudden flood from the other side of the world, an alien deluge in response to which his beloved viewers would form a flood of their own, pouring over in the midnight hour of the show’s transmission to the channel where his bitter rival, the other talk-show host, the tall bony gap-toothed one from New York, would be dancing in a rain of gold.

“We who live in these luxury limbos, the privileged purgatories of the earth, have set aside thoughts of paradise,” Max was roaring into the camera in a series of high-flown locutions, “yet I tell you that I have seen it and walked by its fish-rich lakes. If thoughts of paradise do occur to us, we think of Adam’s fall, of the expulsion from Eden of the parents of humanity. However, I have not come to speak of the fall of man, but the collapse of paradise itself. In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell.” Thus, in the unambassadorial language of a gospel-pulpit fire-eater, which was a world away from the veiled verbiage of diplomacy and came as a shock to everyone who knew and admired the habitual suavity of his speech, Max ranted about fanaticism and bombs at a time when the world was briefly full of hope and had little interest in his killjoy news. He lamented the drowning of blue-eyed women and the murder of their golden children. He railed against the coming of cruel flames to a distant city made of wood. He spoke too of the tragedy of the
pandits,
the Brahmins of Kashmir, who were being driven from their homeland by the assassins of Islam. The rapes of young girls, the fathers set alight, burning like beacons prophesying doom. Max Ophuls could not stop speaking. Once he had begun it was plain that a great tide had risen in him which would not be denied. Across the face of the celebrated talk-show host on whose program this diatribe was delivered, and for whom the legendarily media-shy Ambassador Ophuls’s agreement to be interviewed had represented the culmination of a decade-long pursuit, there now spread a red choleric glow, in which the fury of a disappointed lover mingled with the panic of an entertainer who could hear the future, the sound of channels being changed all over America round about midnight.