The Satanic Verses (42 page)

           
His presence in the house was a continual thorn in the side of Hind, in whom
regret for the lost income mingled with the remnants of her initial terror,
although it's true to say that the soothing processes of habituation had worked
their sorceries on her, helping her to see Saladin's condition as some kind of
Elephant Man illness, a thing to feel disgusted by but not necessarily to fear.
"Let him keep out of my way and I'll keep out of his," she told her
daughters. "And you, the children of my despair, why you spend your time
sitting up there with a sick person while your youth is flying by, who can say,
but in this Vilayet it seems everything I used to know is a lie, such as the
idea that young girls should help their mothers, think of marriage, attend to
studies, and not go sitting with goats, whose throats, on Big Eid, it is our
old custom to slit."

           
Her husband remained solicitous, however, even after the strange incident that
took place when he ascended to the attic and suggested to Saladin that the
girls might not have been so wrong, that perhaps the, how could one put it, possession
of his body could be terminated by the intercession of a mullah? At the mention
of a priest Chamcha reared up on his feet, raising both arms above his head,
and somehow or other the room filled up with dense and sulphurous smoke while a
highpitched vibrato screech with a kind of tearing quality pierced Sufyan's
hearing like a spike. The smoke cleared quickly enough, because Chamcha flung
open a window and fanned feverishly at the fumes, while apologizing to Sufyan
in tones of acute embarrassment: "I really can't say what came over
me,―but at times I fear I am changing into something,―something one
must call bad."

           
Sufyan, kindly fellow that he was, went over to where Chamcha sat clutching at
his horns, patted him on the shoulder, and tried to bring what good cheer he
could. "Question of mutability of the essence of the self," he began,
awkwardly, "has long been subject of profound debate. For example, great
Lucretius tells us, in
De Rerum Natura
, this following thing:
quodcumque
suis mutatumfinibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quodfuit ante
. Which
being translated, forgive my clumsiness, is 'Whatever by its changing goes out
of its frontiers,' -that is, bursts its banks,―or, maybe, breaks out of
its limitations,―so to speak, disregards its own rules, but that is too
free, I am thinking . . 'that thing', at any rate, Lucretius holds, 'by doing
so brings immediate death to its old self'. However," up went the ex-
schoolmaster's finger, "poet Ovid, in the
Metamorphoses
, takes
diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: 'As yielding wax'―heated, you
see, possibly for the sealing of documents or such,―'is stamped with new
designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet is indeed the same,
even so our souls,'―you hear, good sir? Our spirits! Our immortal
essences!―'Are still the same forever, but adopt In their migrations
ever-varying forms.'"

           
He was hopping, now, from foot to foot, full of the thrill of the old words.
"For me it is always Ovid over Lucretius," he stated. "Your
soul, my good poor dear sir, is the same. Only in its migration it has adopted
this presently varying form."

           
"This is pretty cold comfort," Chamcha managed a trace of his old
dryness. "Either I accept Lucretius and conclude that some demonic and
irreversible mutation is taking place in my inmost depths, or I go with Ovid
and concede that everything now emerging is no more than a manifestation of
what was already there."

           
"I have put my argument badly," Sufyan miserably apologized. "I
meant only to reassure."

           
"What consolation can there be," Chamcha answered with bitter
rhetoric, his irony crumbling beneath the weight of his unhappiness, "for
a man whose old friend and rescuer is also the nightly lover of his wife, thus
encouraging―as your old books would doubtless affirm―the growth of
cuckold's horns?"

           
* * * * *

           
The old friend, Jumpy Joshi, was unable for a single moment of his waking hours
to rid himself of the knowledge that, for the first time in as long as he could
remember, he had lost the will to lead his life according to his own standards
of morality. At the sports centre where he taught martial arts techniques to
ever- greater numbers of students, emphasizing the spiritual aspects of the
disciplines, much to their amusement ("Ah so, Grasshopper," his star
pupil Mishal Sufyan would tease him, "when honolable fascist swine jump at
you flom dark alleyway, offer him teaching of Buddha before you kick him in
honolable balls"),―he began to display such
passionate intensity
that his pupils, realizing that some inner anguish was being expressed, grew
alarmed. When Mishal asked him about it at the end of a session that had left
them both bruised and panting for breath, in which the two of them, teacher and
star, had hurled themselves at one another like the hungriest of lovers, he
threw her question back at her with an uncharacteristic lack of openness.
"Talk about pot and kettle," he said. "Question of mote and
beam." They were standing by the vending machines. She shrugged.
"Okay," she said. "I confess, but keep the secret." He
reached for his Coke: "What secret?" Innocent Jumpy. Mishal whispered
in his ear: "I'm getting laid. By your friend: Mister Hanif Johnson, Bar
At Law."

           
He was shocked, which irritated her. "O, come on. It's not like I'm
fifteen
."
He replied, weakly, "If your mother ever," and once again she was
impatient. "If you want to know," petulantly, "the one I'm worried
about is Anahita. She wants whatever I've got. And she, by the way, really is
fifteen." Jumpy noticed that he'd knocked over his paper-cup and there was
Coke on his shoes. "Out with it," Mishal was insisting. "I owned
up. Your turn." But Jumpy couldn't say; was still shaking his head about
Hanif. "It'd be the finish of him," he said. That did it. Mishal put
her nose in the air. "O, I get it," she said. "Not good enough
for him, you reckon." And over her departing shoulder: "Here,
Grasshopper. Don't holy men ever fuck?"

           
Not so holy. He wasn't cut out for sainthood, any more than the David Carradine
character in the old
Kung Fu
programmes: like Grasshopper, like Jumpy.
Every day he wore himself out trying to stay away from the big house in Notting
Hill, and every evening he ended up at Pamela's door, thumb in mouth, biting
the skin around the edges of the nail, fending off the dog and his own guilt,
heading without wasting any time for the bedroom. Where they would fall upon
one another, mouths searching out the places in which they had chosen, or
learned, to begin: first his lips around her nipples, then hers moving along
his lower thumb.

           
She had come to love in him this quality of impatience, because it was followed
by a patience such as she had never experienced, the patience of a man who had
never been "attractive" and was therefore prepared to value what was
offered, or so she had thought at first; but then she learned to appreciate his
consciousness of and solicitude for her own internal tensions, his sense of the
difficulty with which her slender, bony, small-breasted body found, learned and
finally surrendered to a rhythm, his knowledge of time. She loved in him, too,
his overcoming of himself; loved, knowing it to be a wrong reason, his
willingness to overcome his scruples so that they might be together: loved the
desire in him that rode over all that had been imperative in him. Loved it,
without being willing to see, in this love, the beginning of an end.

           
Near the end of their lovemaking, she became noisy. "Yow!" she
shouted, all the aristocracy in her voice crowding into the meaningless
syllables of her abandonment. "Whoop! Hi!
Hah
."

           
She was still drinking heavily, scotch bourbon rye, a stripe of redness
spreading across the centre of her face. Under the influence of alcohol her
right eye narrowed to half the size of the left, and she began, to his horror,
to disgust him. No discussion of her boozing was permitted, however: the one
time he tried he found himself on the street with his shoes clutched in his
right hand and his overcoat over his left arm. Even after that he came back:
and she opened the door and went straight upstairs as though nothing had
happened. Pamela's taboos: jokes about her background, mentions of
whisky-bottle "dead soldiers", and any suggestion that her late
husband, the actor Saladin Chamcha, was still alive, living across town in a
bed and breakfast joint, in the shape of a supernatural beast.

           
These days, Jumpy―who had, at first, badgered her incessantly about
Saladin, telling her she should go ahead and divorce him, but this pretence of
widowhood was intolerable: what about the man's assets, his rights to a share
of the property, and so forth? Surely she would not leave him
destitute?―no longer protested about her unreasonable behaviour.
"I've got a confirmed report of his death," she told him on the only
occasion on which she was prepared to say anything at all. "And what have
you got? A billy-goat, a circus freak, nothing to do with me." And this,
too, like her drinking, had begun to come between them. Jumpy's martial arts
sessions increased in vehemence as these problems loomed larger in his mind.

           
Ironically, while Pamela refused point-blank to face the facts about her
estranged husband, she had become embroiled, through her job at the community
relations committee, in an investigation into allegations of the spread of
witchcraft among the officers at the local police station. Various stations did
from time to time gain the reputation of being "out of
control"―Notting Hill, Kentish Town, Islington―but witchcraft?
Jumpy was sceptical. "The trouble with you," Pamela told him in her
loftiest shootingstick voice, "is that you still think of normality as being
normal. My God: look at what's happening in this country. A few bent coppers
taking their clothes off and drinking urine out of helmets isn't so weird. Call
it working-class Freemasonry, if you want. I've got black people coming in
every day, scared out of their heads, talking about obeah, chicken entrails,
the lot. The goddamn bastards are
enjoying
this: scare the coons with
their own ooga booga and have a few naughty nights into the bargain. Unlikely?
Bloody
wake up
." Witchfinding, it seemed, ran in the family: from
Matthew Hopkins to Pamela Lovelace. In Pamela's voice, speaking at public
meetings, on local radio, even on regional news programmes on television, could
be heard all the zeal and authority of the old Witchfinder-General, and it was
only on account of that voice of a twentieth-century Gloriana that her campaign
was not laughed instantly into extinction.
New Broomstick Needed to Sweep
Out Witches
. There was talk of an official inquiry. What drove Jumpy wild,
however, was Pamela's refusal to connect her arguments in the question of the
occult policemen to the matter of her own husband: because, after all, the
transformation of Saladin Chamcha had precisely to do with the idea that
normality was no longer composed (if it had ever been) of banal,
"normal" elements. "Nothing to do with it," she said flatly
when he tried to make the point: imperious, he thought, as any hanging judge.

           
* * * * *

           
After Mishal Sufyan told him about her illegal sexual relations with Hanif Johnson,
Jumpy on his way over to Pamela Chamcha's had to stifle a number of bigoted
thoughts, such as
his father hadn't been white he'd never have done it
;
Hanif, he raged, that immature bastard who probably cut notches in his cock to
keep count of his conquests, this Johnson with aspirations to represent his
people who couldn't wait until they were of age before he started shafting
them! . . . couldn't he see that Mishal with her omniscient body was just a,
just a, child?―No she wasn't.―Damn him, then, damn him for (and
here Jumpy shocked himself) being the first.

           
Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his resentments
of Hanif,
his friend Hanif
, were primarily―how to put it?―
linguistic
.
Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological,
socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti- anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical,
sermonic: the vocabularies of power.
But you bastard you rummage in my
drawers and laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how to bend it
shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells,
how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven't
got a clue
. How hard that struggle, how inevitable the defeat.
Nobody's
going to elect me to anything. No power-base, no constituency: just the battle
with the words
. But he, Jumpy, also had to admit that his envy of Hanif was
as much as anything rooted in the other's greater control of the languages of
desire. Mishal Sufyan was quite something, an elongated, tubular beauty, but he
wouldn't have known how, even if he'd thought of, he'd never have dared.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by
doing so to make it true.

           
When Pamela Chamcha answered the door he found that her hair had gone
snow-white overnight, and that her response to this inexplicable calamity had
been to shave her head right down to the scalp and then conceal it inside an
absurd burgundy turban which she refused to remove.