The Satanic Verses (61 page)

           
(One year, the government had introduced admission charges at museums, and
groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of culture. When he saw this,
Chamcha had wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man
counter-protest. Didn't these people know what the stuff inside was
worth?
There they were, cheerfully rotting their lungs with cigarettes worth more per
packet than the charges they were protesting against; what they were demonstrating
to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural heritage. . .
Pamela put her foot down. "Don't you dare," she said. She held the
then-correct view: that the museums were
too valuable
to charge for. So:
"Don't you dare," and to his surprise he found he did not. He had not
meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have given,
maybe, in the right circumstances, his
life
for what was in those
museums. So he could not take seriously these objections to a charge of a few
pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure and ill-defended
position.)

           
--
And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you
.--

           
Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to
nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once
a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms,
whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the
sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect
imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw
himself, accompanied by a small boy of about five, whom he was teaching to ride
a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly at first, made heroic efforts to gain
and maintain his balance, with the ferocity of one who wishes his father to be
proud of him. The dream-Chamcha ran along behind his imagined son, holding the
bike upright by gripping the parcelrack over the rear wheel. Then he released
it, and the boy (not knowing himself to be unsupported) kept going: balance
came like a gift of flight, and the two of them were gliding down the avenue,
Chamcha running, the boy pedalling harder and harder. "You did it!"
Saladin rejoiced, and the equally elated child shouted back: "Look at me!
See how quickly I learned! Aren't you pleased with me? Aren't you
pleased?" It was a dream to weep at; for when he awoke, there was no
bicycle and no child.

           
"What will you do now?" Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage of the
Hot Wax nightclub, and he'd answered, too lightly: "Me? I think I'll come
back to life." Easier said than done; it was life, after all, that had
rewarded his love of a dream-child with childlessness; his love of a woman,
with her estrangement from him and her insemination by his old college friend;
his love of a city, by hurling him down towards it from Himalayan heights; and
his love of a civilization, by having him bedevilled, humiliated, broken upon
its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he was whole again, and there
was, too, the example of Niccol™Machiavelli to consider (a wronged man, his
name, like that of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a synonym for evil; whereas in fact
his staunch republicanism had earned him the rack, upon which he survived, was
it three turns of the wheel?―enough, at any rate, to make most men
confess to raping their grandmothers, or anything else, just to make the pain
go away;―yet he had confessed to nothing, having committed no crimes
while serving the Florentine republic, that all-too-brief interruption in the
power of the Medici family); if Niccol™could survive such tribulation and live
to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic
mirror-of-princes literature then so much in vogue,
Il Principe
,
following it with the magisterial
Discorsi
, then he, Chamcha, need
certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then;
roll back that boulder from the cave's dark mouth, and to hell with the legal
problems.

           
Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla―in whose eyes Chamcha's metamorphoses
had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of special-effects
fantasy-movies (
Labyrinth
,
Legend,Howard the Duck
) entered the
Real―drove Saladin over to Pamela's place in the DJ's van; this time,
though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was
early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. "Good
luck," said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. "No,
thanks," Saladin replied. "When you've fallen from the sky, been
abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat,
lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained
human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it,
demand your rights?" He waved goodbye. "Good for you," Mishal
said, and they had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids,
with whom his relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a
lamp-post. One of them, an evil-looking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed
an imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: "Fast
forward!" His was a generation that believed in skipping life's boring,
troublesome, unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax
to the next.
Welcome home
, Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.

           
Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. "I didn't think
people did that any more," he said. "Not since
Dr. Strangelove
."
Her pregnancy wasn't visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but
confirmed that it was going well. "So far so good." She was naturally
off balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late
(she "stuck with" her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby);
but in point of fact Chamcha felt one down (there had been a period in which
he'd been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter's amusing little books) throughout
this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad
position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had denied
him at least thrice; but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so that they
seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason for
Chamcha's discomfiture―and he had not, let's recall, arrived in this
awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood―was that he had realized,
on seeing Pamela, with her too-bright brightness, her face like a saintly mask
behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was alarmed by
the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious), her shaven
head under its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard thing that had
entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite simply fallen out
of love, and would not want her back even should she want (which was improbable
but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he became aware of this he
commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a result, at a conversational
disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling at him, too. He recalled that
he'd never really cared for pets.

           
"I suppose," she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table
in the spacious kitchen, "that what I did was unforgivable, huh?"

           
That little Americanizing
huh
was new: another of her infinite series of
blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip little
acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling violence again: down with
it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely inappropriate to the
situation.) "I don't think I can say what I'm capable of forgiving,"
he replied. "That particular response seems to be out of my control; it
either operates or it doesn't and I find out in due course. So let's say, for
the moment, that the jury's out." She didn't like that, she wanted him to
defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted coffee. Pamela had
always made vile coffee: still, that wasn't his problem now. "I'm moving
back in," he said. "It's a big house and there's plenty of room. I'll
take the den, and the rooms on the floor below, including the spare bathroom,
so I'll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen very sparingly. I'm
assuming that, as my body was never found, I'm still officially
missing-presumed-dead, that you haven't gone to court to have me wiped off the
slate. In which case it shouldn't take too long to resuscitate me, once I alert
Bentine, Milligan and Sellers." (Respectively, their lawyer, their
accountant and Chamcha's agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her posture informing
him that she wouldn't be offering any counter-arguments, that whatever he
wanted was okay: making amends with body language. "After that," he
concluded, "we sell up and you get your divorce." He swept out,
making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just before
they hit him. Pamela, downstairs, would be weeping; he had never found crying
easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too: boom
badoom doodoodoom.

           
To be born again, first you have to die
.

           
* * * * *

           
Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they
disagreed on everything, on a short-story they'd both read, whose theme was precisely
the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came
back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for
all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the
time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she
could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later,
when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled
with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel
her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his
sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to
the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when
she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her
funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her
dearest wishes. "Tell her," he said to the emissaries, "that she
never knew how much I valued what she broke." The emissaries argued,
pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the
trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless
attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for
heaven's sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last?
They had lost a lifetime's friendship; could they not even say goodbye?
"No," said the unforgiving man.―"Really because of the
vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?"―"It was
the vase," he answered, "the vase, and nothing but." Pamela
thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the
curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. "Nobody can
judge an internal injury," he had said, "by the size of the
superficial wound, of the hole."

           
Sunt lacrimae rerum
, as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said, and
Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears in
things. He remained at first virtually immobile in his den, allowing it to grow
back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something of the
solid comforting quality of its old self, as it had been before the altering of
the universe. He watched a good deal of television with half an eye,
channel-hopping compulsively, for he was a member of the remote-control culture
of the present as much as the piggy boy on the street corner; he, too, could
comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the composite
video monster his button-pushing brought into being ... what a leveller this
remote-control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth century; it
chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's
emissions, commercials, murders, game- shows, the thousand and one varying joys
and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight;―and
whereas the original Procrustes, citizen of what could now be termed a
"hands-on" culture, had to exercise both brain and brawn, he,
Chamcha, could lounge back in his Parker-Knoll recliner chair and let his
fingers do the chopping. It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels,
that the box was full of freaks: there were
mutants―"Mutts"―on
Dr. Who
, bizarre creatures who
appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery:
forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel
priest-chieftains were called
Mutilasians
; children's television
appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and creatures with
metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of
the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and
its accomplices, modern disease and war. A hospital in Guyana had apparently
preserved the body of a fully formed merman, complete with gills and scales.
Lycanthropy was on the increase in the Scottish Highlands. The genetic
possibility of centaurs was being seriously discussed. A sex-change operation
was shown.―He was reminded of an execrable piece of poetry which Jumpy
Joshi had hesitantly shown him at the Shaandaar B and B. Its name, "I Sing
the Body Eclectic", was fully representative of the whole.―But the
fellow has a whole body, after all, Saladin thought bitterly. He made Pamela's
baby with no trouble at all: no broken sticks on his damn chromosomes. . . he
caught sight of himself in a rerun of an old
Aliens Show
"classic". (In the fast-forward culture, classic status could be
achieved in as little as six months; sometimes even overnight.) The effect of
all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in what remained of his idea of
the normal, average quality of the real; but there were also countervailing
forces at work.