The Satanic Verses (48 page)

           
After the news of his death in the plane crash reached her, she had tormented
herself by inventing him: by speculating, that is to say, about her lost lover.
He had been the first man she'd slept with in more than five years: no small
figure in her life. She had turned away from her sexuality, her instincts having
warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed by it; that it was for
her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark continent to map, and she
wasn't prepared to go that way, be that explorer, chart those shores: not any
more, or, maybe, not yet. But she'd never shaken off the feeling of being
damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might be like to be wholly
possessed by that archetypal, capitalized djinn, the yearning towards, the
blurring of the boundaries of the self, the unbuttoning, until you were open
from your adam's-apple to your crotch: just words, because she didn't know the
thing. Suppose he had come to me, she dreamed. I could have learned him, step
by step, climbed him to the very summit. Denied mountains by my weak-boned
feet, I'd have looked for the mountain in him: establishing base camp, sussing
out routes, negotiating ice-falls, crevasses, overhangs. I'd have assaulted the
peak and seen the angels dance. O, but he's dead, and at the bottom of the sea.

           
Then she found him.―And maybe he'd invented her, too, a little bit,
invented someone worth rushing out of one's old life to love.―Nothing so
remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing
the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding
imagination to actuality, learning how to be together: or not. It works out or
it doesn't. But to suppose that Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia Cone could have
gone along so familiar a path is to make the mistake of thinking their
relationship ordinary. It wasn't; didn't have so much as a shot at
ordinariness.

           
It was a relationship with serious flaws.

           
("The modern city," Otto Cone on his hobbyhorse had lectured his
bored family at table, "is the locus classicus of incompatible realities.
Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the
omnibus. One universe, on a zebra crossing, is caught for an instant, blinking
like a rabbit, in the headlamps of a motor-vehicle in which an entirely alien
and contradictory continuum is to be found. And as long as that's all, they
pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their hats in some hotel
corridor, it's not so bad. But if they meet! It's uranium and plutonium, each
makes the other decompose, boom."―"As a matter of fact,
dearest," Alicja said dryly, "I often feel a little incompatible
myself.")

           
The flaws in the grand passion of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta were as
follows: her secret fear of her secret desire, that is, love;―owing to
which she was wont to retreat from, even hit violently out at, the very person
whose devotion she sought most;―and the deeper the intimacy, the harder
she kicked;―so that the other, having been brought to a place of absolute
trust, and having lowered all his defences, received the full force of the
blow, and was devastated;―which, indeed, is what befell Gibreel Farishta,
when after three weeks of the most ecstatic lovemaking either of them had ever
known he was told without ceremony that he had better find himself somewhere to
live, pretty sharpish, because she, Allie, required more elbow-room than was
presently available; -

           
- and his overweening possessiveness and jealousy, of which he himself had been
wholly unaware, owing to his never previously having thought of a woman as a
treasure that had to be guarded at all costs against the piratical hordes who
would naturally be trying to purloin her;―and of which more will be said
almost instantly; -

           
- and the fatal flaw, namely, Gibreel Farishta's imminent realization―or,
if you will,
insane idea
,―that he truly was nothing less than an
archangel in human form, and not just any archangel, but the Angel of the
Recitation, the most exalted (now that Shaitan had fallen) of them all.

           
* * * * *

           
They had spent their days in such isolation, wrapped up in the sheets of their
desires, that his wild, uncontrollable jealousy, which, as Iago warned,
"doth mock the meat it feeds on", did not instantly come to light. It
first manifested itself in the absurd matter of the trio of cartoons which
Allie had hung in a group by her front door, mounted in cream and framed in old
gold, all bearing the same message, scrawled across the lower right-hand corner
of the cream mounts:
To A., in hopes, from Brunel
. When Gibreel noticed
these inscriptions he demanded an explanation, pointing furiously at the
cartoons with fully extended arm, while with his free hand he clutched a
bedsheet around him (he was attired in this informal manner because he'd
decided the time was ripe for him to make a full inspection of the premises,
can't
spend one's whole life on one's back, or even yours
, he'd said); Allie,
forgivably, laughed. "You look like Brutus, all murder and dignity,"
she teased him. "The picture of an honourable man." He shocked her by
shouting violently: "Tell me at once who the bastard is."

           
"You can't be serious," she said. Jack Brunel worked as an animator,
was in his late fifties and had known her father. She had never had the
faintest interest in him, but he had taken to courting her by the strangulated,
wordless method of sending her, from time to time, these graphic gifts.

           
"Why you didn't throw them in the wpb?" Gibreel howled. Allie, still
not fully understanding the size of his rage, continued lightly. She had kept
the pictures because she liked them. The first was an old Punch cartoon in
which Leonardo da Vinci stood in his atelier, surrounded by pupils, and hurled
the Mona Lisa like a frisbee across the room. "
Mark my words
,"
he said in the caption, "
one day men shall fly to Padua in such as
these
." In the second frame there was a page from
Toff
, a
British boys' comic dating from World War II. It had been thought necessary in
a time when so many children became evacuees to create, by way of explanation,
a comic-strip version of events in the adult world. Here, therefore, was one of
the weekly encounters between the home team―the Toff (an appalling
monocled child in Etonian bum-freezer and pin-striped trousers) and
cloth-capped, scuffkneed Bert―and the dastardly foe, Hawful Hadolf and
the Nastiparts (a bunch of thuggish fiends, each of whom had one extremely
nasty part, e.g. a steel hook instead of a hand, feet like claws, teeth that
could bite through your arm). The British team invariably came out on top.
Gibreel, glancing at the framed comic, was scornful. "You bloody
Angrez
.
You really think like this; this is what the war was really like for you."
Allie decided not to mention her father, or to tell Gibreel that one of the
Toff
artists, a virulently anti-Nazi Berlin man named Wolf, had been arrested one
day and led away for internment along with all the other Germans in Britain,
and, according to Brunel, his colleagues hadn't lifted a finger to save him.
"Heartlessness," Jack had reflected. "Only thing a cartoonist
really needs. What an artist Disney would have been if he hadn't had a heart.
It was his fatal flaw." Brunel ran a small animation studio named
Scarecrow Productions, after the character in
The Wizard of Oz
.

           
The third frame contained the last drawing from one of the films of the great
Japanese animator Yoji Kuri, whose uniquely cynical output perfectly
exemplified Brunel's unsentimental view of the cartoonist's art. In this film,
a man fell off a skyscraper; a fire engine rushed to the scene and positioned
itself beneath the falling man. The roof slid back, permitting a huge steel
spike to emerge, and, in the still on Allie's wall, the man arrived head first
and the spike rammed into his brain. "Sick," Gibreel Farishta
pronounced.

           
These lavish gifts having failed to get results, Brunel was obliged to break
cover and show up in person. He presented himself at Allie's apartment one
night, unannounced and already considerably the worse for alcohol, and produced
a bottle of dark rum from his battered briefcase. At three the next morning he
had drunk the rum but showed no signs of leaving. Allie, going ostentatiously
off to the bathroom to brush her teeth, returned to find the animator standing
stark naked in the centre of her living-room rug, revealing a surprisingly
shapely body covered by an inordinate amount of thick grey hair. When he saw
her he spread his arms and cried: "Take me! Do what you will!" She
made him dress, as kindly as she could, and put him and his briefcase gently
out of the door. He never returned.

           
Allie told Gibreel the story, in an open, giggling manner that suggested she
was entirely unprepared for the storm it would unleash. It is possible, however
(things had been rather strained between them in recent days) that her innocent
air was a little disingenuous, that she was almost hoping for him to begin the
bad behaviour, so that what followed would be his responsibility, not hers . .
. at any rate, Gibreel blew sky-high, accusing Allie of having falsified the
story's ending, suggesting that poor Brunel was still waiting by his telephone
and that she intended to ring him the moment his, Farishta's, back was turned.
Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all. As this
terrible emotion took charge of him, he found himself improvising a whole
series of lovers for her, imagining them to be waiting around every corner. She
had used the Brunel story to taunt him, he shouted, it was a deliberate and
cruel threat. "You want men down on their knees," he screamed, every
scrap of his self-control long gone. "Me, I do not kneel."

           
"That's it," she said. "Out."

           
His anger redoubled. Clutching his toga around him, he stalked into the bedroom
to dress, putting on the only clothes he possessed, including the scarlet-lined
gabardine overcoat and grey felt trilby of Don Enriquc Diamond; Allie stood in
the doorway and watched. "Don't think I'm coming back," he yelled,
knowing his rage was more than sufficient to get him out of the door, waiting
for her to begin to calm him down, to speak softly, to give him a way of
staying. But she shrugged and walked away, and it was then, at that precise
moment of his greatest wrath, that the boundaries of the earth broke, he heard
a noise like the bursting of a dam, and as the spirits of the world of dreams
flooded through the breach into the universe of the quotidian, Gibreel Farishta
saw God.

           
For Blake's Isaiah, God had simply been an immanence, an incorporeal
indignation; but Gibreel's vision of the Supreme Being was not abstract in the
least. He saw, sitting on the bed, a man of about the same age as himself, of
medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard cropped close
to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the apparition was
balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and wore glasses. This was not the
Almighty he had expected. "Who are you?" he asked with interest. (Of
no interest to him now was Alleluia Cone, who had stopped in her tracks on
hearing him begin to talk to himself, and who was now observing him with an
expression of genuine panic.)

           
"Ooparvala," the apparition answered. "The Fellow Upstairs."

           
"How do I know you're not the other One," Gibreel asked craftily,
"Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath?"

           
A daring question, eliciting a snappish reply. This Deity might look like a
myopic scrivener, but It could certainly mobilize the traditional apparatus of
divine rage. Clouds massed outside the window; wind and thunder shook the room.
Trees fell in the Fields. "We're losing patience with you, Gibreel
Farishta. You've doubted Us just about long enough." Gibreel hung his
head, blasted by the wrath of God. "We are not obliged to explain Our
nature to you," the dressing-down continued. "Whether We be
multiform, plural, representing the union-by-hybridization of such opposites as
Oopar
and
Neechay
, or whether We be pure, stark, extreme, will
not be resolved here." The disarranged bed on which his Visitor had rested
Its posterior (which, Gibreel now observed, was glowing faintly, like the rest
of the Person) was granted a highly disapproving glance. "The point is,
there will be no more dilly-dallying. You wanted clear signs of Our existence?
We sent Revelation to fill your dreams: in which not only Our nature, but yours
also, was clarified. But you fought against it, struggling against the very
sleep in which We were awakening you. Your fear of the truth has finally
obliged Us to expose Ourself, at some personal inconvenience, in this woman's
residence at an advanced hour of the night. It is time, now, to shape up. Did
We pluck you from the skies so that you could boff and spat with some (no doubt
remarkable) flatfoot blonde? There's work to be done."

           
"I am ready," Gibreel said humbly. "I was just going,
anyway."

           
"Look," Allie Cone was saying, "Gibreel, goddamn it, never mind
the fight. Listen: I love you."

           
There were only the two of them in the apartment now. "I have to go,"
Gibreel said, quietly. She hung upon his arm. "Truly, I don't think you're
really well." He stood upon his dignity. "Having commanded my exit,
you no longer have jurisdiction re my health." He made his escape.
Alleluia, trying to follow him, was afflicted by such piercing pains in both
feet that, having no option, she fell weeping to the floor: like an actress in
a masala movie; or Rekha Merchant on the day Gibreel walked out on her for the
last time. Like, anyhow, a character in a story of a kind in which she could
never have imagined she belonged.