The Satanic Verses (65 page)

           
So: Gibreel Farishta, put on trial by Chamcha, gets a rougher ride than Mimi
and Billy in New York, and is declared guilty, for all perpetuity, of the
Inexcusable Thing. From which what follows, follows.―But we may permit
ourselves to speculate a while about the true nature of this Ultimate, this
Inexpiable Offence.―Is it really, can it be, simply his silence on Rosa's
stairs?―Or are there deeper resentments here, gripes for which this
so-called Primary Cause is, in truth, no more than a substitute, a
front?―For are they not conjoined opposites, these two, each man the
other's shadow?―One seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he
admires, the other preferring, contemptuously, to transform; one, a hapless
fellow who seems to be continually punished for uncommitted crimes, the other,
called angelic by one and all, the type of man who gets away with
everything.―We may describe Chamcha as being somewhat less than life-size;
but loud, vulgar Gibreel is, without question, a good deal larger than life, a
disparity which might easily inspire neo-Procrustean lusts in Chamcha: to
stretch himself by cutting Farishta down to size.

           
What is unforgivable?

           
What if not the shivering nakedness of being
wholly known
to a person
one does not trust?―And has not Gibreel seen Saladin Chamcha in
circumstances―hijack, fall, arrest―in which the secrets of the self
were utterly exposed?

           
Well, then.―Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these are
two fundamentally-different
types
of self? Might we not agree that
Gibreel, for all his stage-name and performances; and in spite of born-again
slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses;―has wished to remain, to a large
degree,
continuous
―that is, joined to and arising from his
past;―that he chose neither near-fatal illness nor transmuting fall;
that, in point of fact, he fears above all things the altered states in which
his dreams leak into, and overwhelm, his waking self, making him that angelic
Gibreel he has no desire to be;―so that his is still a self which, for
our present purposes, we may describe as "true" . . . whereas Saladin
Chamcha is a creature of
selected
discontinuities, a
willing
re-invention; his
preferred
revolt against history being what makes him,
in our chosen idiom, "false"? And might we then not go on to say that
it is this falsity of self that makes possible in Chamcha a worse and deeper
falsity―call this "evil"―and that this is the truth, the door,
that was opened in him by his fall?―While Gibreel, to follow the logic of
our established terminology, is to be considered "good" by virtue of
wishing
to remain
, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man.

           
- But, and again but: this sounds, does it not, dangerously like an
intentionalist fallacy?―Such distinctions, resting as they must on an
idea of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid,
"pure",―an utterly fantastic notion!―cannot, must not,
suffice. No! Let's rather say an even harder thing: that evil may not be as far
beneath our surfaces as we like to say it is.―That, in fact, we fall
towards it
naturally
, that is,
not against our natures
.―And
that Saladin Chamcha set out to destroy Gibreel Farishta because, finally, it
proved so easy to do; the true appeal of evil being the seductive ease with
which one may embark upon that road. (And, let us add in conclusion, the later
impossibility of return.)

           
Saladin Chamcha, however, insists on a simpler line. "It was his treason
at Rosa Diamond's house; his silence, nothing more."

           
He sets foot upon the counterfeit London Bridge. From a nearby
red-and-white-striped puppeteer's booth, Mr. Punch―whacking
Judy―calls out to him:
That's the way to do it!
After which
Gibreel, too, speaks a greeting, the enthusiasm of the words undone by the
incongruous listlessness of the voice: "Spoono, is it you. You bloody
devil. There you are, big as life. Come here, you Salad baba, old Chumch."

           
* * * * *

           
This happened:

           
The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be transfixed, and
somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel
extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell look, her air of being
privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also, her quality of what
he would afterwards think of as
wilderness
, a hard, sparse thing,
antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why,
before she'd even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the
enemy?

           
Perhaps because he desired her; and desired, even more, what he took to be that
inner certainty of hers; lacking which, he envied it, and sought to damage what
he envied. If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then
hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot
be fulfilled.

           
This happened: Chamcha invented an Allie, and became his fiction's antagonist.
. . he showed none of this. He smiled, shook hands, was pleased to meet her;
and embraced Gibreel.
I follow him to serve my turn upon him
. Allie,
suspecting nothing, excused herself. The two of them must have so much to catch
up on, she said; and, promising to return soon, departed: off, as she put it,
to explore. He noticed that she hobbled slightly for a step or two; then
paused, and strode off strongly. Among the things he did not know about her was
her pain.

           
Not knowing that the Gibreel standing before him, remote of eye and perfunctory
in his greeting, was under the most attentive medical supervision;―or
that he was obliged to take, on a daily basis, certain drugs that dulled his
senses, because of the very real possibility of a recurrence of his
no-longer-nameless illness, that is to say, paranoid schizophrenia;―or
that he had long been kept away, at Allie's absolute insistence, from the movie
people whom she had come strongly to distrust, ever since his last
rampage;―or that their presence at the Battuta-Mamoulian party was a
thing to which she had been whole-heartedly opposed, acquiescing only after a
terrible scene in which Gibreel had roared that he would be kept a prisoner no
longer, and that he was determined to make a further effort to re-enter his
"real life";―or that the effort of looking after a disturbed
lover who was capable of seeing small bat-like imps hanging upside down in the
refrigerator had worn Allie thin as a worn-out shirt, forcing upon her the
roles of nurse, scapegoat and crutch―requiring her, in sum, to act
against her own complex and troubled nature;―not knowing any of this,
failing to comprehend that the Gibreel at whom he was looking, and believed he
saw, Gibreel the embodiment of all the good fortune that the Fury-haunted
Chamcha so signally lacked, was as much the creature of his fancy, as much a
fiction, as his invented-resented Allie, that classic drop-dead blonde or femme
fatale conjured up by his envious, tormented, Oresteian
imagination,―Saladin in his ignorance nevertheless penetrated, by the
merest chance, the chink in Gibreel's (admittedly somewhat quixotic) armour,
and understood how his hated Other might most swiftly be unmade.

           
Gibreel's banal question made the opening. Limited by sedatives to small-talk,
he asked vaguely: "And how, tell me, is your goodwife?" At which
Chamcha, his tongue loosened by alcohol, blurted out: "How? Knocked up.
Enceinte. Great with fucking child." Soporific Gibreel missed the violence
in this speech, beamed absently, placed an arm around Saladin's shoulders.
"Shabash, mubarak," he offered congratulations. "Spoono! Damn
speedy work."

           
"Congratulate her lover," Saladin thickly raged. "My old friend,
Jumpy Joshi. Now there, I admit it, is a man. Women go wild, it seems. God
knows why. They want his goddamn babies and they don't even wait to ask his
leave."

           
"For instance who?" Gibreel yelled, making heads turn and Chamcha
recoil in surprise. "Who who who?" he hooted, causing tipsy giggles.
Saladin Chamcha laughed, too: but without pleasure. "I'll tell you who for
instance. My wife for instance, that's who. That is no lady, mister Farishta,
Gibreel. Pamela, my nolady wife."

           
At this very moment, as luck would have it,―while Saladin in his cups was
quite ignorant of the effect his words were having on Gibreel,―for whom
two images had explosively combined, the first being his sudden memory of Rekha
Merchant on a flying carpet warning him of Allie's secret wish to have a baby
without informing the father,
who asks the seed for permission to plant,
and the second being an envisioning of the body of the martial arts instructor
conjoined in high-kicking carnality with the same Miss Alleluia Cone,―the
figure of Jumpy Joshi was seen crossing "Southwark Bridge" in a state
of some agitation,―hunting, in fact, for Pamela, from whom he had become
separated during the same rush of singing Dickensians which had pushed Saladin
towards the metropolitan breasts of the young woman in the Curiosity Shop.
"Talk of the devil," Saladin pointed. "There the bastard
goes." He turned towards Gibreel: but Gibreel had gone.

           
Allie Cone reappeared, angry, frantic. "Where is he? Jesus! Can't I even
leave him for a fucking
second?
Couldn't you have kept your sodding
eyes
on him?"

           
"Why, what's the matter?" But now Allie had plunged into the crowd,
so that when Chamcha saw Gibreel crossing "Southwark Bridge" she was
out of earshot.―And here was Pamela, demanding: "Have you seen
Jumpy?"―And he pointed, "That way," whereupon she, too,
vanished without a word of courtesy; and now Jumpy was seen, crossing
"Southwark Bridge" in the opposite direction, curly hair wilder than
ever, coathanger shoulders hunched inside the greatcoat he had refused to
remove, eyes searching, thumb homing in on mouth;―and, a little later,
Gibreel headed across the simulacrum of that bridge Which Is Of Iron, going the
same way as Jumpy went.

           
In short, events had begun to border on the farcical; but when, some minutes
later, the actor playing the role of "Gaffer Hexam", who kept watch
over that stretch of the Dickensian Thames for floating corpses, to relieve
them of their valuables before handing them over to the police,―came
rowing rapidly down the studio river with his stipulated ragged, grizzled hair
standing straight up on end, the farce was instantly terminated; for there in
his disreputable boat lay the insensate body of Jumpy Joshi in his waterlogged
greatcoat. "Knocked cold," the boatman cried, pointing to the huge
lump rising up at the back of Jumpy's skull, "and being unconscious in the
water it's a miracle he never drowned."

           
* * * * *

           
One week after that, in response to an impassioned telephone call from Allie
Cone, who had tracked him down via Sisodia, Battuta and finally Mimi, and who
appeared to have defrosted quite a bit, Saladin Chamcha found himself in the
passenger seat of a three-year-old silver Citro‘n station wagon which the
future Alicja Boniek had presented to her daughter before leaving for an
extended Californian stay. Allie had met him at Carlisle station, repeating her
earlier telephonic apologies―"I'd no right to speak to you like
that; you knew nothing, I mean about his, well, thank heavens nobody saw the
attack, and it seems to have been hushed up, but that poor man, an oar on the
head from behind, it's too bad; the point is, we've taken a place up north,
friends of mine are away, it just seemed best to get out of range of human beings,
and, well, he's been asking for you; you could really help him, I think, and to
be frank I could do with the help myself," which left Saladin little the
wiser but consumed by curiosity―and now Scotland was rushing past the
Citro‘n windows at alarming speed: an edge of Hadrian's Wall, the old elopers'
haven Gretna Green, and then inland towards the Southern Uplands; Ecclefechan,
Lockerbie, Beattock, Elvanfoot. Chamcha tended to think of all non-metropolitan
locales as the deeps of interstellar space, and journeys into them as fraught
with peril: for to break down in such emptiness would surely be to die alone
and undiscovered. He had noted warily that one of the Citro‘n's headlamps was
broken, that the fuel gauge was in the red (it turned out to be broken, too),
the daylight was failing, and Allie was driving as if the A74 were the track at
Silverstone on a sunny day. "He can't get far without transport, but you
never know," she explained grimly. "Three days ago he stole the car
keys and they found him heading the wrong way up an exit road on the Mo,
shouting about damnation.
Prepare for the vengeance of the Lord
, he told
the motorway cops,
for I shall soon summon my lieutenant, Azraeel
. They
wrote it all down in their little books." Chamcha, his heart still filled
with his own vengeful lusts, affected sympathy and shock. "And
Jumpy?" he inquired. Allie took both hands off the wheel and spread them
in an I-give-up gesture, while the car wobbled terrifyingly across the bendy
road. "The doctors say the possessive jealousy could be part of the same
thing; at least, it can set the madness off, like a fuse."

           
She was glad of the chance to talk; and Chamcha lent her a willing ear. If she
trusted him, it was because Gibreel did, too; he had no intention of damaging
that trust.
Once he betrayed my trust; now let him,for a time, have
confidence in me
. He was a tyro puppeteer; it was necessary to study the
strings, to find out what was connected to what . . . "I can't help
it," Allie was saying. "I feel in some obscure way to blame for him.
Our life isn't working out and it's my fault. My mother gets angry when I talk
like this." Alicja, on the verge of catching the plane west, berated her
daughter at Terminal Three. "I don't understand where you get these notions
from," she cried amid backpackers, briefcases and weeping Asian mums.
"You could say your father's life didn't go according to plan, either. So
he should be blamed for the camps? Study history, Alleluia. In this century
history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of
reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is
destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas
chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and
your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to
suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to
you." She had returned, without warning, to the grand style of wardrobe
preferred by Otto Cone, and, it seemed, to an oratorical manner that suited the
big black hats and frilly suits. "Enjoy California, Mother," Allie
said sharply. "One of us is happy," Alicja said. "Why shouldn't
it be me?" And before her daughter could answer, she swept off past the
passengers-only barrier, flourishing passport, boarding-pass, ticket, heading
for the duty-free bottles of Opium and Gordon's Gin, which were on sale beneath
an illuminated sign reading SAY HELLO TO THE GOOD BUYS.