The Enchantress of Florence

by Salman Rushdie

  The magical issues regarding the foreigner Niccolò Vespucci, the self-styled Mughal of Love, could be stated as follows: was his presence among them a blessing or a curse? Would his elevation to high rank result in the empire being blessed, or would it, by offending against some dark law of Fortune, bring down disaster upon the realm? Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalizing force bestowing bounty and success upon its adherents, or did it adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole, did it initiate a process of decay which would end in an alienated, inauthentic death? The emperor had taken advice from the guardians of the unseen realms, the palmists, astrologers, soothsayers, mystics, and assorted divines who were in plentiful supply in the capital, particularly in the vicinity of Salim Chishti’s tomb, but their advice had been contradictory. He had not asked the foreigner’s fellow Europeans Fathers Acquaviva and Monserrate for their opinions, for their hostility to the storyteller was well known. And Birbal, oh, his beloved, wise Birbal was gone.

  He was left, in the end, with himself. Only he could choose.

  The day ended. He had not decided. He was meditating at midnight beneath a crescent moon. She came to him, all in silver, silently, and shone.

  Things had reached the point at which Jodha had become invisible to many people. The household staff allocated to her service could see her, naturally, because their livelihoods depended upon it, but the other queens, who had always resented her presence, could no longer make her out. She knew something bad was happening to her, and was filled with fear. She felt fainter, and even, from time to time, intermittent, as if she came and went, as if the candle of her being were being snuffed out, relit, then snuffed out and relit again. Birbal was dead, and she was fading, she thought. The world was changing for the worse. The emperor visited her much less these days and when he did he seemed distracted. When he made love to her she had the impression that he was thinking about somebody else.

  The spying eunuch, Umar the Ayyar, who could see everything, including some things that hadn’t happened yet, found her resting in the heat of the afternoon in the Chamber of the Winds, the breezy second-story room which had jalis, stone filigree-work screens, filling three of the four walls. It was the day after the emperor’s birthday and there was a curious urgency about his movements. Normally he was all languid grace and fluid gestures. Today, however, he was almost flustered, as if the news he had to impart was bouncing around inside him and knocking him off balance. “Okay,” he announced, “a big moment for you. Mary of Eternity and Mary of the Mansion—the wife and mother of the Divine Caliph, the Unique Jewel, and the Khedive of the Age—are personally coming to call.”

  Mary of Eternity was Mariam-uz-Zamani, Prince Salim’s real mother, Rajkumari Hira Kunwari, a Kachhwaha Rajput princess of Amer. Mary of the Mansion, Mariam Makani, was the emperor’s mother Hamida Bano. (The Caliph, the Jewel, and the Khedive were all the emperor himself.) If these two great ladies, who had never given the nonexistent queen the time of day before, were coming to see her in her private rooms, something of great significance was afoot. Jodha gathered herself and stood in the position of humility, with folded hands and downcast eyes, to await their arrival.

  Minutes later they swept in, their faces expressing both amazement and contempt. Bibi Fatima, the queen mother’s echo of a lady-in-waiting, was absent on this occasion, having recently died, and in any case the ladies had intentionally come unaccompanied by courtiers, except for Umar the Ayyar, whose ability to keep secrets was not in doubt. They looked around in confusion and then turned to the Ayyar for assistance. “Where is she?” Hamida Bano hissed. “Has she left the room?” Umar inclined his head in Jodha’s direction. The queen mother looked perplexed, while the younger royal lady snorted crossly and turned to face in the general direction indicated by the spy.

  “I am here, to my considerable astonishment,” said Queen Mariam-uz-Zamani, speaking too loud and too slowly, as if conversing with a stupid child, “talking to a woman who does not exist, whose image cannot be reflected by any mirror, who looks to me like an empty space on a carpet. I am here with the emperor’s mother, Widow of the Cupola of Absolution, Beloved Former Consort to the emperor Humayun, Guardian of the World, whose Nest is Paradise, because we fear that something worse than you may be about to possess the emperor, my august husband, her illustrious son. It is our view that an enchantment has been cast upon him by the foreigner Vespucci, who has been sent here as a black-hearted functionary of the Infidel or the Devil, to destroy our tranquillity and bring us low, and that this enchantment has ensnared the emperor’s manhood, thus endangering his sanity, which in turn imperils the entire kingdom, and therefore, it follows, all of us as well. It is an enchantment of which you will have heard—it seems everyone in Sikri knows about it already! It takes the form of an apparition of the so-called hidden princess, Qara Köz.

  “We, we recognize”—and here Mary of Eternity faltered, for what she had to say was offensive to her pride—“that for reasons of his own the emperor prefers you to any other female companion”—she refused to say queen—“and it is our hope that, understanding the peril he is in, you will see where your duty lies. To be plain, we wish you to exert all your powers over him so that he can be rescued from his hexed condition—from his lust for this hell-demon in female form—and we are therefore here to assist you, by teaching you every means by which any woman has ever retained her power over any man, things the emperor, as a man, could not know, and therefore was unable to impart to you, his somewhat absurd and now, it seems, almost imperceptible creation. We know you have read many books and, I have no doubt, learned well what they have to teach. But there are things that have never been written down in books, but preserved only in the oral lore of women, passed in whispers from mother to daughter since the beginning of time. Do these things, and he will be your slave once more, and the demon’s victory over the master of Fatehpur Sikri may be prevented. For she is, we are certain, a malicious ghost from the past, a vengeful ghost that resents its long exile and that seeks to suck the emperor back in time to possess and unmake him, to the detriment of all. And in any case it would be better to be spared, if at all possible, the spectacle of the Emperor of Hindustan, the King of Manifestation and Reality, Inhabiter of the Untainted Body, Master of the Faith and the Firmament, becoming infatuated with the phantom of his renegade, and also deceased, great-aunt.”

  “Remember what happened to the painter Dashwanth,” the queen mother said.

  “Quite so,” Mariam-uz-Zamani concurred. “We may find it acceptable to mislay an artist in that way, but the Shelter of the World we cannot lose.”

  They genuinely couldn’t see the woman to whom they were speaking, yet they were willing to arrange themselves on her carpets, lounge against her bolsters, drink the wine her servants offered, and tell the sexual secrets of women throughout history to the empty air. After a while they stopped feeling that they had lost their minds, and acted as if they were alone, just the two of them talking to each other, speaking openly about what had always been closed, laughing helplessly at the shocking comedy of desire, the absurd things men wanted and the equally absurd things women would do to please them, until the years dropped away from them and they remembered their own youth, and recalled how they had been told these secrets by other stern, ferocious women, who had also dissolved, after a time, into guffaws of joy, remembering, in their turn, how the knowledge had been given to them, and by the end of it the laughter in the room was the laughter of the generations, of all women, and of history.

  They spoke in this fashion for five and a half hours and when they finished they thought it had been one of the happiest days of their lives. They began to have kinder thoughts toward Jodha than ever before. She was one of them now, part of the women’s relay; she was no longer the emperor’s creation alone. In part, she was theirs as well.

  Dusk was falling. The palace candle-maids came in with camphor candles in silver candlestick
s. Iron flambeaux on the room’s rear wall were lit, and the cottonseed and oil inside them burned merrily, so that the two ladies’ shadows danced over the red stone jalis. Then in another part of Sikri the emperor’s fancy, his khayal, changed finally and forever, and consequently in the Chamber of the Winds Umar the Ayyar caught his breath, and a moment later Mary of Eternity and Mary of the Mansion saw what he had seen: not only the shadow of a third woman among the jalis, but the solid outline of a woman forming in thin air, becoming sharper, clearer, filling in, until the woman stood facing them with a curious smile on her lips. “You’re not Jodha,” the queen mother faintly said. “No,” said the apparition, whose black eyes were sparkling. “Jodhabai has gone, because the emperor no longer has need of her. I will be his companion from now on.” They were the phantom’s first spoken words.

  In spite of the two queens’ precautions, news of the replacement of the imaginary queen Jodhabai by the phantom of Qara Köz spread through the city at high speed. For some this was the final proof that the hidden princess had really existed, that she belonged to the realm of fact not fable, because no woman who had never lived and died could end up having a ghost. For others it gave further credence to Abul Fazl’s claim of divine status for the emperor, since now he had to his credit not only the creation of an entirely imaginary woman who could walk, talk, and make love in spite of not existing, but also the return of a real woman from the dead. The many families who had been entranced by the stories of the hidden princess, which had rapidly become tales that parents liked to tell their children at night, were exhilarated at the possibility that she might actually be seen in public. A few scandalized conservative voices were heard insisting that on all occasions when she left the royal women’s quarters she must wear the veil; the kind of bare-faced shamelessness in which she had indulged in Western streets would not be acceptable among the decent folk of the Mughal capital.

  The familiarity with which the supernatural occurrence was received was of course the consequence of such occurrences being normal at that time, before the real and unreal were segregated forever and doomed to live apart under different monarchs and separate legal systems. More surprising was the lack of sympathy for the unfortunate Jodhabai, so unceremoniously discarded by the emperor, so humiliatingly supplanted in the Chamber of the Winds under the eyes of the queen mother and the senior queen. Many citizens had formed an unfavorable impression of Jodha because of her refusal ever to leave the palace. To these people her dematerialization was a well-deserved punishment for being excessively arrogant and lacking the common touch. Qara Köz had quickly become the people’s princess, whereas Jodha had always been an aloof and distant queen.

  Umar the Ayyar reported all this to the emperor, but added a note of warning. By no means all reactions to the news were positive. In the Turani colony, in the Persian sector, and in the quarter where the Indian Muslims lived, there was a degree of restlessness. Among the non-Islamic polytheists whose gods were too numerous to count, the arrival of one more miraculous being was of little concern, because the divine population was already too big a crowd to comprehend, everything contained gods, trees contained spirits, and so did rivers, and heaven alone knew what else, there was probably even a god of garbage and a god of the toilet, so if a new spirit was abroad it was scarcely worth discussing. In the streets of monotheism, however, there was some shock. A low murmur had begun, a murmur that only the most finely tuned ears could detect, concerning the emperor’s mental well-being. In the secret journal of Badauni which Umar was still memorizing nightly while the leader of the manqul party was asleep the question of blasphemy had been raised, for while it might just possibly be argued that if men could turn their dreams into reality there was no divine law against it, so that the creation of Jodha could just possibly be exempted from opprobrium, but only the Almighty had power over the living and the dead, and to bring a woman back from the afterlife just for one’s personal enjoyment was to go much, much too far, and there was no excuse for it.

  What Badauni wrote in private his followers were beginning to mumble to each other. This mumbling was being conducted at a very low level because, as the old saying had it, in the court of the Grand Mughal only the humble did not stumble. Nevertheless there was, in the Ayyar’s opinion, some cause for concern, because underneath the low-level mumble, at an even lower level, he had heard a darker rumble, a deeper condemnation of the new relationship between Akbar and Qara Köz. At this deep level Umar had picked up some faint sounds, sounds that hardly dared to be sounds, spoken by lips that barely moved and were terrified at the notion of a listening ear. These almost pre-aural vibrations contained a word so powerful that it could severely damage the esteem in which the emperor was held, and maybe even rock his throne.

  The word was incest. And Umar’s warning was timely, because a short time after the appearance of Qara Köz in Fatehpur Sikri the Crown Prince Salim left the capital and raised the standard of rebellion in Allahabad, and blasphemy and incest were the accusations with which he justified his revolt. The rebellion was a feeble affair, even though Salim had managed to raise an army of thirty thousand men. For several years he galloped around northern Hindustan claiming to desire his father’s overthrow without ever daring to engage the great king in an actual battle. But he did achieve one terrible triumph, when he successfully arranged for the murder of the emperor’s closest remaining adviser, whom he blamed for perverting his father’s mind, encouraging him to perform blasphemous acts, and making him turn his love away both from God and his Holy Prophet, and also, by always making snide remarks, turning the emperor against the Crown Prince, his heir, his son. Abul Fazl died in an ambush, as Birbal had. Prince Salim had sent word to an ally, Raja Bir Singh Deo Bundela of Orchha, through whose territory the Jewel of Sikri was traveling, to dispatch him to nonexistence, with which request the Raja readily complied, decapitating the unarmed minister and sending his head to Salim in Allahabad, where Salim, displaying his usual sense of taste and appropriate behavior, threw it into a field latrine.

  Akbar was reclining on a bolster in the Chamber of the Winds, having drunk perhaps too much wine, listening to the evening phantom of Qara Köz singing sad love songs while accompanying herself on a dilruba, when Umar the Ayyar came in with the news of Abul Fazl’s death. This awful information served to bring the emperor to his senses. He rose to his feet and left Qara Köz’s rooms at once. “From now on, Umar,” he vowed, “we are going to go back to acting like the ruler of the universe and stop behaving like a spotty, infatuated boy.”

  The laws by which a prince was bound were not those of friendship or revenge. A prince had to consider the good of the kingdom. Akbar knew that two of his three sons were unfit to succeed to the throne, as they were so deep in drink and disease that they might actually die. So there was only Salim; no matter what he had done the continuity of the line must be assured. Akbar therefore sent messengers to Salim promising not to be avenged upon him for Abul Fazl’s death and declaring his undying love for his firstborn child. Salim took this to mean that his murder of Abul Fazl had been justified. Now that that fat weasel had been dispatched his father had opened his arms once again. Salim sent Akbar a gift of elephants, three hundred and fifty of them to pacify the Elephant King. Then he agreed to go to Sikri, and at the house of his grandmother Hamida Bano he fell at the emperor’s feet. The emperor raised Salim up, took off his own turban, and put it on the Crown Prince’s head to show there were no hard feelings. Salim wept. He really was a pathetic young man.

  As for Salim’s mentor Badauni, however, he was thrown into the dirtiest cell of the deepest dungeon of Fatehpur Sikri, and no man or woman except his jailers ever saw him alive again.

  After the death of Abul Fazl the emperor became stern. It fell to him to define how his people should live and for too long he had been derelict in carrying out that duty. He banned the sale of liquor to the common people unless it was prescribed by a doctor. He moved against the great prostitute swarms buz
zing around the capital like locusts and had them all taken to an encampment called Deviltown some distance away and ordered that any man going to the devil should be obliged to write down his name and home address before entering that zone. He discouraged the eating of cow meat, onions, and garlic, but recommended that people eat tiger to gain courage from its flesh. He declared that religious observance was to be free of persecution irrespective of the religion being observed, temples could be built and lingams washed, but he was less tolerant of beards, because beards drew their nourishment from the testicles, which was why eunuchs didn’t have them. He forbade child marriages and disapproved of widow-burning and slavery. He told people not to bathe after having sex. And he summoned the foreigner to the Anup Talao, whose waters had grown choppy and uncalm even though there was no breeze, an augury which meant that things that should have been at peace had become disturbed.

  “There are still too many mysteries around you,” the emperor said, irritably. “We can’t rely on a man whose life story doesn’t add up. So tell us everything, let’s have it all out in the open right now, and then we can decide what’s to be done with you, and which way your destiny leads, up to the stars or down into the dust. Clearly, now. Leave nothing out. Today is judgment day.”

  “It may be that what I have to say will not find favor, sire,” Mogor dell’Amore replied, “because it concerns Mundus Novus, the New World, and the erratic nature, in that half-uncharted territory, of Time.”

  Across the Ocean Sea in Mundus Novus the ordinary laws of space and time did not apply. As to space, it was capable of expanding violently one day and then shrinking the next, so that the size of the earth seemed either to double or halve. Different explorers brought back radically different accounts of the proportions of the new world, the nature of its inhabitants, and the way in which this new quadrant of the cosmos was prone to behave. There were accounts of flying monkeys and snakes as long as rivers. As for time, it was completely out of control. Not only did it accelerate and slow down in utterly wanton fashion, there were periods—though the word “periods” could not properly be used to describe such phenomena—when it did not move at all. The locals, those few who mastered European languages, confirmed that theirs was a world without change, a place of stasis, outside time, they said, and that was the way they preferred it to be. It was possible, and there were philosophers who argued the point vociferously, that time had been brought to Mundus Novus by the European voyagers and settlers, along with various diseases. This was why it didn’t work properly. It had not yet adapted to the new situation. “In time,” people in Mundus Novus said, “there will be time.” For the present, however, the fluctuating nature of new world clocks simply had to be accepted. The most alarming effect of this chronological uncertainty was that time could run at different speeds for different people, even within families and households. Children would age faster than their parents until they looked older than their progenitors. For some of the conquerors, sailors, and settlers there never seemed to be enough time in the day. For others, there was all the time in the world.