Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  The night was full of noises, of pleasure, pain, and painful pleasure. Sancho slept soundly through it all, Quichotte less soundly. In the morning, after the storm, the city glistened like a new promise. Quichotte, waking up after a night spent tossing fitfully between fear and hope, saw Sancho sitting up in bed switching between the available video pornography, checking it out. “Older women are the best,” Sancho said. “But maybe I’m just saying that because I’m so young that most women are older than I am and the ones younger than me are illegal.”

  Quichotte realized that a moment came in all families when fathers and sons had to talk about these things. “Perhaps you get this from me,” he said, “because when I was your age watching TV, all the beautiful women were older than myself. There were no porno channels back then, I hasten to add. But, you know, Lucille Ball, and I-dream-of Jeannie. The first woman I loved who was approximately my own age was Victoria Principal as Pamela Ewing in Dallas. Now, however, such are my advanced years that all the older ladies, and many of the ladies of my own age, are deceased. Therefore, my last and greatest love, Miss Salma R, is my junior by some distance. Let us find a diner and eat a fine New York breakfast.”

  Sancho grew bored of the pornography (the participants on the screen looked bored too) and started hopping channels aimlessly. Then suddenly he gave a gasp and jumped to his feet. There was the woman he loved, right there on Headline News!, talking about the aftermath of the killing in Beautiful, Kansas, its impact on the community, the community’s desire to be accepted as American like anyone else. She mentioned the history of America, as when immigration issues arose it seemed compulsory to do, and she did not fail to refer to Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus.” Mother of Exiles, check. I lift my lamp beside the golden door, check. The caption to her talking head identified her as a lawyer, and the appointed spokesperson for the widow and family of the murdered Indian-American man.

  “Give me your laptop,” Sancho demanded, and after a few moments of feverish searching he scribbled something on a piece of paper and lifted his eyes in triumph, waving his prize in the air. “I found her,” he said. “Her office address, email, and number.” Then he deflated and sat down on his bed, looking unhappy. “Now I could call her,” he finished, much less confidently, “but probably she’d just hang up when she heard my voice.”

  Quichotte put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Television is the god that goes on giving,” he said. “This morning it has given you a big gift. You will know how to use it when the time comes.”

  At the diner Sancho stared morosely at a stack of pancakes soaked in maple syrup. Quichotte, eating a toasted cheese sandwich with extra bacon, perceived that further discussion was required. “In the fifth valley,” he began—but Sancho wasn’t in the mood for valley talk this morning, and rolled his eyes impatiently—“we must learn that everything is connected. Look: you turned on the TV to watch a series of obscenities and then you discovered important information about this girl of yours. By chance, you may say. I say not by chance. You found it because everything is connected, this channel to that channel, this button to that button, this choice to that choice.”

  He had Sancho’s attention now, and launched into a longer statement. “Once,” he said, “people believed that they lived in little boxes, boxes that contained their whole stories, and that there was no need to worry much about what other people were doing in their other little boxes, whether nearby or far away. Other people’s stories had nothing to do with ours. But then the world got smaller and all the boxes got pushed up against all the other boxes and opened up, and now that all the boxes are connected to all the other boxes, we have to understand what’s going on in all the boxes we aren’t in, otherwise we don’t know why the things happening in our boxes are happening. Everything is connected.”

  Sancho was eating, but still grouchily cynical. “You mean,” he said, “that the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the back bone, blah blah,” he said. “I believe there’s a song about that.”

  “I must confess to you,” Quichotte said, “that the statement I have made was not an easy statement for me to make. For much of my life I have been, one could say, a disconnected man, keeping my own counsel, living with the glowing company of my TV friends, but with little real human companionship. Then love came to town and everything changed. Love brought me to town and here I stand, therefore, surrounded by the million million connections between this one and that one, between near and far, between this language and that language, between everything that men are and everything else that they are, and I see that the Way requires me to reconnect with the great thronging crowd of life, to its multiplicity, and beyond its many disharmonies, to its deeper harmonies. It is not easy after so long and I must ask for your understanding. Just as you must take your slow steps toward your Beloved, so I must—gingerly, with great nervousness—make my tentative moves back into human company. Entering New York, I feel like a Catholic entering a confessional booth. Much that has long remained unsaid must now, in all probability, be said. I must circle slowly toward this goal. It may take a little time.”

  “What is it that’s unsaid that must be said?” Sancho was curious.

  “All in good time,” Quichotte replied.

  In the days that followed, Quichotte was pensive and said relatively little, leaving Sancho to wander the city streets alone while he stayed in the hotel room watching TV. He did not, for example, go to stand outside Miss Salma R’s apartment building, or outside her offices slash studio, in the hope of glimpsing the woman whose heart he had set out to win. “There is much to be done before I am worthy of her presence,” he told Sancho, and then, seemingly, did nothing.

  Sancho approached the city methodically, setting himself the task of walking around a different neighborhood each day. And there were moments when Quichotte shook off his apparent torpor and came out as well. It turned out that in the course of their travels he had taken the time to arrange a program of activities to ease himself and Sancho into city life, obtaining audience tickets for 50 Central, The $100,000 Pyramid, The Chew, The Dr. Oz Show, and Good Morning America, and on these outings into the world he knew best he seemed more like his usual self.

  But wasn’t he supposed to have given up his addictions in the fourth valley, as he called it? Was he backsliding? Would that delay things? Sancho didn’t care about the valleys and by now strongly suspected that they were to be numbered among Quichotte’s delusions that had no meaning or effect in the real world, so that it made no difference whether he played by his own rules or not. But when, Sancho wondered, would the old man make his move? And how?

  “There’s someone I have to see before this goes any further,” Quichotte said at breakfast, after one week had passed. “Nothing can happen until this matter has been straightened out. The Path will remain closed.”

  “Is it a woman?” Sancho asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I know, it’s a previous lover you still have a soft spot for, but you don’t know if she’s still carrying the torch, too, and she’s kind of crazy so you think it’s probably a bad idea to start up with her again anyway, but you have to see her to put your mind at rest.”

  “No.”

  “I know, it’s a previous lover who treated you like shit but now she wants your forgiveness and maybe more than that, maybe she’s hinting that she wants you back and until you see her you won’t be able to clear her out of your mind.”

  “No.”

  “I know, it’s a previous lover who’s now with someone else but keeps sending you messages saying she isn’t satisfied. Maybe she texts you hot photographs of herself to encourage you to come back.”

  “No.”

  “It would be amazing, at your age, if you had all these women after you, right? And all you want is one woman, but these others go on circling around you like helicopters shini
ng their beams down at you. Am I right?”

  “No.”

  “I know,” Sancho said with sudden clarity. “It’s the Human Trampoline.”

  “Yes,” Quichotte said. His face remained impassive, expressionless.

  Sancho clapped his hands. “I knew it!” he cried. “I knew it all along. She’s the only other woman you ever loved, and she broke your heart, and that’s why you ran away from everything for all these years, and now you have to see her so you can put the old love away and open your heart fully to the new one.”

  “No.”

  “Then what? If she’s not your old girlfriend, who is she? Your old college roommate? Your dentist? Your therapist? Your bank manager? Your drug dealer? Your parole officer? Your chess instructor? Your priest?”

  “She’s my sister,” Quichotte said, “and a long time ago, I did her wrong. I think that’s the right way around.”

  * * *

  —

  SANCHO PONDERS THIS REVELATION.

  I knew it, I guess. I knew he had secrets in the part of his head I can’t get into. But a whole sister! That’s a lot. That’s a lot he just said right there. God from the machine, this is kinda like an ancient Roman theater trick, I’m finding the Latin in his storehouse now. Dea ex machina. Poof! Here’s a sister I’ve got you didn’t know about, he tells me, and she has been here all the time.

  It’s a half sister. The father remarried, there was a child, the father died, the mother, who knows what became of her. I don’t know and either he doesn’t either or he isn’t saying or it’s still locked away somewhere deep inside him, still hidden inside that cloud I can’t blow away. How well do they know each other? Not very well, not anymore anyway, they haven’t met in many years, they don’t call, they don’t text, they don’t write. Or do they? What do I know, but I’m guessing hardly at all. But once they must have known each other, otherwise why this nickname, which I’m surmising is discourteous. A trampoline, it’s a thing people bounce up and down on, no? So he’s basically calling her a whore.

  Not very nice.

  But no, no, he’s telling me, it’s the song, it means she’s bouncing into Graceland. It’s a way of saying she’s a person of grace. Well, excuse me for misunderstanding. I’d excuse her for misunderstanding too. But he’s telling me about her now and she sounds like a goddamn saint. Made a stack of money on Wall Street when she was still in her twenties, a high stack, higher than the jumbo stack of pancakes in the diner down the street, if you take my meaning: I mean high…and then one day she said, this is not the life I need, and walked out past the charging bull and never worked for the finance bros again. Now she’s running her own organization, facing toward India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, creating a second micro-banking operation alongside Grameen Bank, generating global funding to offer small loans to women in South Asia trying to start up their own enterprises, beauty parlors, food catering, child daycare centers; also fighting sex trafficking, campaigning against sexual violence toward women in India, you get the idea. A noble, selfless individual, giving her life to the betterment of others. A good woman of this type is a kind of trampoline. People bounce on her and fly. And if they fall they bounce on her again and rise again. She doesn’t seek flight for herself but she spreads herself wide and people use her to climb as high as they can go.

  All this, he’s telling me, and I go, okay, great, but (a) what happened between you and (b) what’s she really like? I mean, without the halo? He answers the second question first, to keep me hanging on, drawing it out, so annoying. Well, he hasn’t seen her for a long time, he says, so the picture in his mind must be horribly out of date. In his mind’s eye she’s tall with loose, flowing black hair, flashing eyes, and a long face like his own. In his memory she’s warm and funny and smart and has the worst bad temper he ever encountered on any woman or for that matter any man. Also in his memory she wasn’t quite so politically advanced as she now is, she would tell Polish jokes, jokes that only Jews should tell about Jewish people, and jokes about black people, too, which if someone had recorded them on an iPhone would destroy her career now, but nobody had iPhones back then, and after she left Wall Street where that was the way people laughed over drinks, she became a reformed character, and now her only jokes were innocent, like drummer jokes.—Drummer jokes?—What do you call a drummer whose girlfriend leaves him? Homeless. What do you call an unemployed drummer? Ringo.

  Ha ha ha.

  He’s clearly more than a little frightened of calling her, of seeing her again, white-haired, with those long tresses long gone, her hair shaved close to the scalp. He’s afraid she’ll slam her door in his face—No, that’s the past, like Nastassja Kinski in one version of the Paris, Texas screenplay—but maybe he’s even more afraid of the opposite: that when she sees him her face will break into a long, slow smile, a smile she has denied herself all these years, and then she’ll take him in her arms, and she’ll cry, and caress his cheek, and say, “How stupid we were, to lose each other for most of our lives,” and she’ll greet me with great affection, too, and cook a fabulous dinner for us, and they’ll sit hand in hand late into the night, telling each other their stories, apologizing to each other, expressing their sibling love. And then within twenty-four hours he’ll step on some invisible land mine and the monster will come out of her, and she’ll yell at him, scream abuse at him, and tell him to get out and never darken her doorstep again, and he’ll end up broken into pieces in the gutter outside her building. He’s afraid of her half-sisterly half-love.

  She’s a cancer survivor, he did hear that, breast cancer, around ten years ago, double mastectomy, looks like she beat it, she has been in full remission for a long time. He’s frightened of seeing the marks of her life on her face and of her seeing the marks of his life on his. After their father died they were briefly close. She called him Smile-Smile, he called her H.T. or Trampoline. They shared an interest in good food and they went out dining together. But there would be fights. At the end of all the warmth and laughter something he said, some innuendo she thought she heard in his voice, something that hadn’t been there at all, would get her goat and she would start shouting. In public places, yes. It shocked him and made him retreat. So there were fewer dinners together, and then none. And at one of them he had done the unforgivable thing.

  Did you hit her? I asked him. Is that it? You hit her across the face with an open hand and a trickle of blood came down from her ear, and she spent the rest of her life campaigning against violent men?

  No.

  The memory came out of him with difficulty. The chronology was a particular problem. There were parts of their story that were lost to him now. He had accused her of having swindled him out of his inheritance. That was it. She had been the one dealing with lawyers on probate issues after their father’s death, and he told her he knew that she had taken far more than her share. He went further and accused her of falsifying or even forging the will. He threatened her with public denunciation, a press conference. What he couldn’t explain, because of the holes in his memory which were like rifts in the universe, areas of nonexistence in the middle of existence, was why he had done it, and he had done it, he thought he remembered, years after the event. She had retaliated against his threats, sending him a lawyer’s letter saying that he should be in no doubt that she would do everything in her power to defend her good name. She pointed out that he had signed off on their father’s will, and there were legal documents in the public record which proved his acceptance of it. His accusation was a major defamation, and if he made it public she would sue him for every penny he possessed. It was a letter designed to scare him into silence and it succeeded. They stopped talking and since then years had passed and both of them had gone through many changes: her sainthood, his increasingly isolated personality, her public persona, his private slide toward what he’s become, which I prefer not to put into words right now.

  But whoa
, this is what I said to him. Inheritance? You have an actual inheritance?

  Yes.

  All this time, you’ve actually had—what—a lot of money in the bank?

  Some money, yes.

  But we still end up sharing a room in the Blue Yorker motel? That’s fucked up.

  This was our dialogue. He tells me for the one millionth time that he’s going through these valleys of purification so that he can “merit the love of the Beloved,” and that extravagance and love of material things is the opposite of the Way. And I say, would it be too much of a fucking extravagance for me to get my own fucking room?

  He says, don’t use language like that when you’re talking to me. So now we’re on bad terms too.

  And so here’s what I need help with. Are there unforgivable things? Unforgivable acts, unforgivable words, unforgivable bits of behavior? As the new kid on the block I have my share of moodiness and maybe brattishness, but is there anything I could say that he, “Dad,” couldn’t forgive? Or this girl I dream about. Have I already been unforgivable with her, hitting on her when she was grieving? Is it already too late and thirty years from now, forty years from now, we’ll maybe run into each other somewhere and she’ll say, you know, I liked you, and if only you hadn’t done that thing then maybe we could have had something together, but you did that thing and I couldn’t forgive it. I’m looking at Daddy Q filled with uncertainty about calling his sister, staring at his phone, not calling the number, trying to decide if he should write first, or go the other way and just show up at her door and fall on his knees and ask to be forgiven. I don’t see it. Half a lifetime or more away from your own flesh and blood because of what? Some bad words that didn’t even have any bad effects? Surely that can’t be right?