The Satanic Verses (22 page)

           
"So you are," said the popeyed officer. "And I am Kermit the
Frog."

           
What Saladin Chamcha never said, not even when it was clear that something had
gone badly wrong: "Here is a London number," he neglected to inform
the arresting policemen. "At the other end of the line you will find, to
vouch for me, for the truth of what I'm saying, my lovely, white, English
wife." No, sir.
What the hell
.

           
Rosa Diamond gathered her strength. "Just one moment, Frank Lime,"
she sang out. "You look here," but the three plain men had begun
their bizarre routine of hiss moan roll-eye once again, and in the sudden
silence of that room the eye-roller pointed a trembling finger at Chamcha and
said, "Lady, if it's proof you're after, you couldn't do better than
those
."

           
Saladin Chamcha, following the line of Popeye's pointing finger, raised his
hands to his forehead, and then he knew that he had woken into the most
fearsome of nightmares, a nightmare that had only just begun, because there at
his temples, growing longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were
two new, goaty, unarguable horns.

           
* * * * *

           
Before the army of policemen took Saladin Chamcha away into his new life, there
was one more unexpected occurrence. Gibreel Farishta, seeing the blaze of
lights and hearing the delirious laughter of the law-enforcement officers, came
downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket and jodhpurs, chosen from Henry Diamond's
wardrobe. Smelling faintly of mothballs, he stood on the first-floor landing
and observed the proceedings without comment. He stood there unnoticed until
Chamcha, handcuffed and on his way out to the Black Maria, barefoot, still
clutching his pyjamas, caught sight of him and cried out, "Gibreel, for
the love of God tell them what's what."

           
Hisser Moaner Popeye turned eagerly towards Gibreel. "And who might this
be?" inquired Inspector Lime. "Another skydiver?"

           
But the words died on his lips, because at that moment the floodlights were
switched off, the order to do so having been given when Chamcha was handcuffed
and taken in charge, and in the aftermath of the seven suns it became clear to
everyone there that a pale, golden light was emanating from the direction of
the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly outwards from a
point immediately behind his head. Inspector Lime never referred to that light
again, and if he had been asked about it would have denied ever having seen
such a thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century, pull the other one.

           
But at any rate, when Gibreel asked, "What do these men want?", every
man there was seized by the desire to answer his question in literal, detailed
terms, to reveal their secrets, as if he were, as if, but no, ridiculous, they
would shake their heads for weeks, until they had all persuaded themselves that
they had done as they did for purely logical reasons, he was Mrs. Diamond's old
friend, the two of them had found the rogue Chamcha halfdrowned on the beach
and taken him in for humanitarian reasons, no call to harass either Rosa or Mr.
Farishta any further, a more reputable looking gentleman you couldn't wish to
see, in his smoking jacket and his, his, well, eccentricity never was a crime,
anyhow.

           
"Gibreel," said Saladin Chamcha, "help."

           
But Gibreel's eye had been caught by Rosa Diamond. He looked at her, and could
not look away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No attempt was made to stop
him.

           
When Chamcha reached the Black Maria, he saw the traitor, Gibreel Farishta,
looking down at him from the little balcony outside Rosa's bedroom, and there
wasn't any light shining around the bastard's head.

           
1

           
Kan an ma kan/Fi qadim azzaman
. . . It was so, it was not, in a time
long forgot, that there lived in the silver-land of Argentina a certain Don
Enrique Diamond, who knew much about birds and little about women, and his
wife, Rosa, who knew nothing about men but a good deal about love. One day it
so happened that when the senora was out riding, sitting sidesaddle and wearing
a hat with a feather in it, she arrived at the Diamond estancia's great stone
gates, which stood insanely in the middle of the empty pampas, to find an
ostrich running at her as hard as it could, running for its life, with all the
tricks and variations it could think of; for the ostrich is a crafty bird,
difficult to catch. A little way behind the ostrich was a cloud of dust full of
the noises of hunting men, and when the ostrich was within six feet of her the
cloud sent bolas to wrap around its legs and bring it crashing to the ground at
her grey mare's feet. The man who dismounted to kill the bird never took his
eyes off Rosa's face. He took a silver-hafted knife from a scabbard at his belt
and plunged it into the bird's throat, all the way up to the hilt, and he did
it without once looking at the dying ostrich, staring into Rosa Diamond's eyes
while he knelt on the wide yellow earth. His name was Martin de la Cruz.

           
After Chamcha had been taken away, Gibreel Farishta often wondered about his
own behaviour. In that dreamlike moment when he had been trapped by the eyes of
the old Englishwoman it had seemed to him that his will was no longer his own
to command, that somebody else's needs were in charge. Owing to the bewildering
nature of recent events, and also to his determination to stay awake as much as
possible, it was a few days before he connected what was going on to the world
behind his eyelids, and only then did he understand that he had to get away,
because the universe of his nightmares had begun to leak into his waking life,
and if he was not careful he would never manage to begin again, to be reborn
with her, through her, Alleluia, who had seen the roof of the world.

           
He was shocked to realize that he had made no attempt to contact Allie at all;
or to help Chamcha in his time of need. Nor had he been at all perturbed by the
appearance on Saladin's head of a pair of fine new horns, a thing that should
surely have occasioned some concern. He had been in some sort of trance, and
when he asked the old dame what she thought of it all she smiled weirdly and
told him that there was nothing new under the sun, she had seen things, the
apparitions of men with horned helmets, in an ancient land like England there
was no room for new stories, every blade of turf had already been walked over a
hundred thousand times. For long periods of the day her talk became rambling
and confused, but at other times she insisted on cooking him huge heavy meals,
shepherd's pies, rhubarb crumble with thick custard, thick-gravied hotpots, all
manner of weighty soups. And at all times she wore an air of inexplicable
contentment, as if his presence had satisfied her in some deep, unlooked-for
way. He went shopping in the village with her; people stared; she ignored them,
waving her imperious stick. The days passed. Gibreel did not leave.

           
"Blasted English mame," he told himself. "Some type of extinct
species. What the hell am I doing here?" But stayed, held by unseen
chains. While she, at every opportunity, sang an old song, in Spanish, he
couldn't understand a word. Some sorcery there? Some ancient Morgan Le Fay
singing a young Merlin into her crystal cave? Gibreel headed for the door; Rosa
piped up; he stopped in his tracks. "Why not, after all," he
shrugged. "The old woman needs company. Faded grandeur, I swear! Look what
she's come to here. Anyhow, I need the rest. Gather my forces. Just a coupla
days."

           
In the evenings they would sit in that drawing-room stuffed with silver
ornaments, including on the wall a certain silver-hafted knife, beneath the
plaster bust of Henry Diamond that stared down from the top of the corner
cabinet, and when the grandfather clock struck six he would pour two glasses of
sherry and she would begin to talk, but not before she said, as predictably as
clockwork,
Grandfather is always four minutes late, for good manners, he
doesn't like to be too punctual
. Then she began without bothering with
onceuponatime, and whether it was all true or all false he could see the fierce
energy that was going into the telling, the last desperate reserves of her will
that she was putting into her story,
the only bright time I can remember
,
she told him, so that he perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material
was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the
mirror when nobody else was in the room, and that the silver land of the past
was her preferred abode, not this dilapidated house in which she was constantly
bumping into things,―knocking over coffee-tables, bruising herself on
doorknobs―bursting into tears, and crying out:
Everything shrinks
.

           
When she sailed to Argentina in 1935 as the bride of the Anglo-Argentine Don
Enrique of Los Alamos, he pointed to the ocean and said, that's the pampa. You
can't tell how big it is by looking at it. You have to travel through it, the
unchangingness, day after day. In some parts the wind is strong as a fist, but
it's completely silent, it'll knock you flat but you'll never hear a thing. No
trees is why: not an ombŸ, not a poplar, nada. And you have to watch out for
ombŸ leaves, by the way. Deadly poison. The wind won't kill you but the
leaf-juice can. She clapped her hands like a child: Honestly, Henry, silent
winds, poisonous leaves. You make it sound like a fairy-story. Henry,
fair-haired, soft-bodied, wide-eyed and ponderous, looked appalled.
Oh, no
,
he said.
It's not so bad as that
.

           
She arrived in that immensity, beneath that infinite blue vault of sky, because
Henry popped the question and she gave the only answer that a forty-year-old
spinster could. But when she arrived she asked herself a bigger question: of
what was she capable in all that space? What did she have the courage for, how
could she
expand?
To be good or bad, she told herself: but to be
new
.
Our neighbour Doctor Jorge Babington, she told Gibreel, never liked me, you
know, he would tell me tales of the British in South America, always such gay
blades, he said contemptuously, spies and brigands and looters.
Are you such
exotics in your cold England?
he asked her, and answered his own question,
senora,
I don't think so. Crammed into that coffin of an island, you must find wider
horizons to express these secret selves
.

           
Rosa Diamond's secret was a capacity for love so great that it soon became
plain that her poor prosaic Henry would never fulfill it, because whatever
romance there was in that jellied frame was reserved for birds. Marsh hawks,
screamers, snipe. In a small rowing boat on the local lagunas he spent his
happiest days amid the bulrushes with his field-glasses to his eyes. Once on
the train to Buenos Aires he embarrassed Rosa by demonstrating his favourite
bird-calls in the dining-car, cupping his hands around his mouth: sleepyhead
bird, vanduria ibis, trupial. Why can't you love me this way, she wanted to
ask. But never did, because for Henry she was a good sort, and passion was an
eccentricity of other races. She became the generalissimo of the homestead, and
tried to stifle her wicked longings. At night she took to walking out into the
pampa and lying on her back to look at the galaxy above, and sometimes, under the
influence of that bright flow of beauty, she would begin to tremble all over,
to shudder with a deep delight, and to hum an unknown tune, and this star-music
was as close as she came to joy.

           
Gibreel Farishta: felt her stories winding round him like a web, holding him in
that lost world where
fifty sat down to dinner every day, what men they
were, our gauchos, nothing servile there, very fierce and proud, very. Pure
carnivores; you can see it in the pictures
. During the long nights of their
insomnia she told him about the heat-haze that would come over the pampa so
that the few trees stood out like islands and a rider looked like a
mythological being, galloping across the surface of the ocean.
It was like
the ghost of the sea
. She told him campfire stories, for example about the
atheist gaucho who disproved Paradise, when his mother died, by calling upon
her spirit to return, every night for seven nights. On the eighth night he
announced that she had obviously not heard him, or she would certainly have
come to console her beloved son; therefore, death must be the end. She snared
him in descriptions of the days when the Peron people came in their white suits
and slicked down hair and the peons chased them off, she told him how the
railroads were built by the Anglos to service their estancias, and the dams,
too, the story, for example, of her friend Claudette, "a real
heartbreaker, my dear, married an engineer chap name of Granger, disappointed
half the Hurlingham. Off they went to some dam he was building, and next thing
they heard, the rebels were coming to blow it up. Granger went with the men to
guard the dam, leaving Claudette alone with the maid, and wouldn't you know, a
few hours later, the maid came running, senora, ees one hombre at the door, ees
as beeg as a house. What else? A rebel captain.―"And your spouse,
madame?"―"Waiting for you at the dam, as he should
be."―"Then since he has not seen fit to protect you, the
revolution will." And he left guards outside the house, my dear, quite a
thing. But in the fighting both men were killed, husband and captain and
Claudette insisted on a joint funeral, watched the two coffins going side by
side into the ground, mourned for them both. After that we knew she was a
dangerous lot,
trop fatale
, eh? What?
Trop
jolly
fatale
."
In the tall story of the beautiful Claudette, Gibreel heard the music of Rosa's
own longings. At such moments he would catch sight of her looking at him from
the corners of her eyes, and he would feel a tugging in the region of his navel,
as if something were trying to come out. Then she looked away, and the
sensation faded. Perhaps it was only a side-effect of stress.