Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  “I heard Legion got broken up,” Ornella told her. “And Anonymous these days makes stupid messages about aliens coming to Earth, being here already, walking among us.”

  “Damn, they penetrated our cover,” Daughter said, and then, in a Dalek voice, “We are the aliens that you seek.”

  The truth was that she was wearing a disguise already, giving a phony performance every day of lighthearted competence, while secretly full of grief and fear. She had recently gone through a breakup with her lover and business partner, an older man, a Polish aristocrat and shrewd entrepreneur, whose cocaine habit had become a big problem. So now she was alone, looking for someone to manage the business end of things, trying to do it all herself, panicking a little, nursing her sadness, feeling close to an unhealthy edge. Yeah, she thought. I don’t need a mask. I’m already the mask of myself.

  “I need some fresh air,” she said to Ornella. “I won’t be long. Hold the fort.”

  She walked through the streets of stucco façades, some white, some brightly painted, past the church that was bombed in the Blitz and rebuilt after the war ended, and arrived at her mother’s place, which would be unoccupied at this time. Her mother and the judge would be away at work, and the housekeeper would have left. She had her own key and let herself in past the bouncers standing outside Sancho, who gave her unfriendly looks. Unsurprisingly, there was some residual resentment about the outcome of the recent court case. She didn’t respond to the dirty looks and went upstairs.

  Afterwards, she swore that she had not intended to do what she then did, that she had just wanted a quiet place to be in for a while, away from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of her workplace. Be that as it may: at some point that afternoon, she went into Sister’s home office on the upper floor of the duplex, sat down at her computer, entered the password, which she knew, and composed an email from her mother to her uncle in New York.

  One of us has to begin, and perhaps you’re too uncertain of your reception at this end, or too wrapped up in your own business, or just disinclined to renew this long-discontinued connection, so I’ll make the first move, using the old descriptive notation. 1. P-K4.

  Send.

  As soon as it was done she felt a surge of delicious terror. What had she started? What would her mother think? How would her uncle respond to what he would obviously assume was a message from Sister, not from her interfering Daughter? Would he respond, or would her radical, intrusive, borderline-dishonest gesture be in vain? A false move?

  Here I am, masked again, she thought. She sat staring at the screen for an hour, for ninety minutes, for two hours. Sister and the judge would be home soon. She should just shut down the computer and leave and explain it all to her mother later. Or maybe she should wait and face the music.

  Ding.

  There was a message in the inbox. He had replied. Her heart pounded.

  1….P-K4.

  It was her move.

  A key turned in the lock. She jumped up and went to look and there on the lower floor was her mother, home, holding a sheet of paper and staring up at her with an expression on her face which Daughter had never seen before. She’s onto me, Daughter thought. But how could she be? I don’t know, but she knows, and she’s really angry.

  “Come downstairs,” her mother said. “I have something to say to you.”

  “I have a confession to make,” Daughter replied.

  “Come downstairs,” her mother repeated. “You can go first.”

  So Daughter went first, and when she told her mother about the chess moves Sister lost her usual iron self-control and wept. Sister’s stoicism was well known. Few people had seen her cry. These huge, shoulder-shaking sobs were shocking to Daughter, greatly increasing her guilt, and her own tears soon mirrored her mother’s. After a few moments Sister took several deep breaths and said, laughing bitterly through yet more tears, “Honey, you don’t even know what I’m crying about.”

  In fact she had been immediately happy to hear the news about Brother, had already decided she would reply, and was clear about her next move in the chess opening. Daughter’s initiative had opened up a healing possibility that felt like a renewal of life. But it was also the day when a routine blood test had produced a result that was anything but routine. She had been right about the shadow within. The contrast between the news of Brother’s reentry into her story and the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness which seemed likely to bring that story to a close had been too much for her to bear. She handed the sheet of paper to her daughter and as Daughter read it her tears were replaced by dry-eyed shock and fear. She felt as if a grave had opened in the polished oak floor between them and a hand had reached out from that yawning pit and seized her mother by the ankle.

  “Cheer up. It doesn’t mean I’ll die tomorrow,” Sister said. “There’s treatment. In some cases the treatment keeps people going for the length of their natural lives. My view is, why shouldn’t one of those people be me?”

  The judge had come in, unnoticed by either of the women. He walked over to Daughter and took the paper from her hand.

  “If you die now, Jack,” he said to his wife, “that will be the most unforgivable thing of all.”

  Sister was calm now, back in charge of herself. She opened a bottle of the good Bordeaux. “This thing is supposed to be a disease of white people,” Sister said with a glass in her hand. “Or people who have been exposed to Agent Orange or other unpleasant chemicals. Or, it’s hereditary, but that’s not the case in my case. It’s as if it accidentally climbed into the wrong body, but it’s here in my blood, no question of that, and the bone marrow too, as you see. The white count is high. A malfunction in the DNA of the cells that make the blood. Malfunctioning DNA! It’s like discovering you’re a Friday car. The workers who made me wanted to knock off for the weekend and did a hurried, botched job. But I’ve been so damn healthy all my life. People have complimented me on my good health. And I got used to replying, ‘Your good health is the thing you have until the day your doctor tells you you don’t have it anymore.’ And so here we are.”

  “There’s a doctor in America,” Daughter said, looking up from her phone. “Indian doctor. Brown person. He’s the top man. Even the stages of the illness are named after him. Here’s the hospital where he works. I can call for an appointment.”

  “London is fine,” Sister said. “The same care is available here. No need to go flying off across an ocean.”

  “Make the call,” the judge said. He looked older all of a sudden, Daughter thought. The news had knocked some of the life out of him. Maybe they would both be gone soon, maybe this thing would kill them both. Maybe it would be a repeat of Ma and Pa, the grandparents she had never met. Ma died and Pa couldn’t bear to live another day.

  And after that the next person for whom the hand reached up would be herself.

  “If you two will excuse me,” Sister said, “there’s an email I have to send.” At her desk, she took a deep breath and wrote to Brother. 2. P-KB4.

  This time the reply came quickly. 2….PxP. The pawn sacrifice was accepted, as she had thought it would be. The sadness fell away from her and she smiled.

  Do you remember? she wrote.

  Allgaier-Kieseritzky Gambit, he replied. You always liked it. But I’ll tell you something about chess. It’s not like riding a bicycle. It doesn’t all come flooding back.

  Let’s see how much you’ve forgotten, she wrote. 3. N-KB3.

  …P-KN4. How am I doing?

  4. P-KR4.

  4….P-N5.

  5 N-K5.

  And here, he wrote, is where my head starts hurting. Can we try something else?

  What would you like to try?

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Brother.”

  Time, that lethal chamber of horrors whose walls close slowly in upon the luckless inhabitant until the
y crush the life out of him, pressed in on Quichotte as he stood gazing up at his half sister’s apartment building. He felt a tightness clutching at his chest, a band of pain like a message from the Reaper. How poetic it would be, he thought, if he were to fall down dead on her very doorstep, offering up his life itself on the altar of her temple, by way of making amends. The Gould Industries building (Brother wrote, housing the Trampoline in the apartment of his fantasies), one hundred years old and formerly a printing house and steel wool manufactory, stood at the corner of Greenwich and Beach with the arrogance of its double affluence, the history of past industrial successes within its walls yoked to the two-thousand-dollars-per-square-foot eminence of its desirable present. The Human Trampoline owned five thousand of those square feet, with high ceilings and exposed beams, high up at the penthouse level. A liveried doorman stood at that portal, eyeing Quichotte and Sancho suspiciously. Quichotte less than warm in his worn suit and Sancho in distressed denim and the coat that needed dry-cleaning made an unimpressive pair. They faced one another in a motionless standoff, Quichotte and the doorman, the traveler’s dilapidated pride offering a silent repudiation of the uniformed flunky’s sneer. Then there was a commotion in the lobby, and in a flurry of flying fabric and waving arms a woman with wild black hair—still black, defying the years!—burst out of the building and spread her arms in welcome. It was the Trampoline. She was tall, could perhaps even be called gangling, with a long, bony face, and if it wasn’t for the hair and the expensive hoop earrings it would have been like looking in a mirror, thought Quichotte.

  She took him by the shoulders and leaned in for a kiss. Then she asked him what Sancho thought was an odd question: “What do you remember?”

  Quichotte seemed bemused all of a sudden. “I remember some of it,” he said, defensively. “I remember climbing with our father among the rocks at Scandal Point to look for little crabs in the rock pools. And the sleeping berths in the Frontier Mail to Delhi, me on the top, he below. And the metal tub with the big ice block in it he bought to keep us cool on the train. I remember the little wooden Ferris wheel, just four seats, he hired for my birthdays. The charrakh-choo.” His face was full of sadness. He put a hand up to his head as if to soothe an ache. “You weren’t there for any of that. You came later. You don’t know any of this.”

  “So you don’t remember,” she told him. “About us.”

  “I remember long ago better,” he said. “Back then, before everything, before he remarried, before you. More recently…it’s patchy.”

  “And you,” the Trampoline said, looking hard at Sancho. “You’re quite a mystery. I need to hear all about you.”

  Sancho was surprised by the presence, in the Trampoline’s penthouse, of much religious imagery. There were two bronze guardians at her front door, greenish centaurlike demigods the size of bull terriers, with human heads and animal bodies that had both leonine paws and cloven bull-like hoofs. Inside the door was a six-foot-high wooden figure, lionlike, its face almost demonic. This was a yali, a threshold god. Once it had stood at the door of a palace on the Malabar Coast, and courtiers entering or leaving, or embarking upon some new enterprise, or princes going to war, would ask for its blessings. There was a modern painting of the Buddha, sleeping, covered by a white sheet, beneath a black tree set against a red ground. This was the tree of enlightenment, and it usefully came with a blue electrical cord attached to it, with a plug at the end. The cord was not plugged in. Enlightenment had evidently not yet occurred.

  She answered the question Sancho hadn’t worked out how to ask. “No,” she said, “I’m not religious, but I find these works to be beautiful and powerful and moving. Also, the women we work with, the poor women we are lifting up, whom we are enabling to lift themselves up, all of these women believe in something, and sometimes I think their lives are richer than mine because of that.”

  “My father thinks that immigrants like us have identity crises and try to fix them by buying art and hanging our identity on the wall.”

  “I don’t think that,” Quichotte said, startled. “I’ve never said anything of that sort. Where did you get such a discourteous idea?”

  “I don’t know,” Sancho said, backing off, genuinely puzzled. “I guess somebody else, something else, put the notion in my head.”

  “Let’s start over,” said the Human Trampoline. “I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

  The bar was a long, freestanding piece made of dark, intricately carved teak, and behind it hung a painting of four women with shorn hair, wearing white saris, sitting in a room with an ornately patterned rug within whose patterning the family car, the family cat, and the dead husband could all be seen, in miniature. The women’s faces looked exactly like the Trampoline’s. White was the color of mourning and there was a tiny dead man on the rug. Once again she answered the unasked question. “Yes, I commissioned it and sat for it after our father died. His father and mine. I mourned him in quadruplicate, in the north, south, east, and west, in the past, present, future, and in the time beyond time. Don’t think you understand me because you have looked at this for two minutes. You have no idea who I am.”

  Sancho tried to placate her. “No, I just liked it,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “I have no idea who you are, either. Salut.”

  This was the way family reunions went on TV, Sancho thought. People bickered and sniped and there was usually an explosion at the end of the episode, after which everyone wept and everyone said how much they loved everyone else. So now he found himself in one of those episodes. He knew how to play his part.

  Quichotte in his sister’s home wore a distant, abstracted, absent manner, fading in and out of the encounter like a ghost. For the most part he looked lost, as if unsure of his right to be there, and bewildered about how to achieve what he had come to achieve, which was the restoration of family harmony and peace. As the Trampoline spoke, it was almost as if there were two Quichottes in the room, a version from the past as well as the present one, and that as the past was superimposed on the present it caused a sort of blurring, because the two versions were so unlike each other that it became difficult to see the Quichotte in the room clearly, as he now was, and he himself was a victim of the same confusion, not able with any degree of ease to free himself from the trap of what he had once been. At first he stood by the sliding doors to the terrace as the glamor of the night city began to wrap itself around the ugly-beautiful daytime streets. Once it grew dark he moved to a corner of the room and sat upright on a hard chair and, for the most part, held his tongue.

  “I’m going to tell you everything,” said the Trampoline, addressing her remarks to Sancho, “including all the things he no longer knows, or says he doesn’t, or says he isn’t sure if it’s what he did to me or I did to him, or whatever. I do this because you’re family now, or so he says, even if he won’t say how or why, or what happened to your mother. We’ll get to that. I don’t know what he has told you but I’m betting there are some pretty large gaps.”

  Yes, that was so, Sancho agreed. “He told me he did you wrong,” the youth said. “And he wants to set things right. At least he thinks that’s what happened.”

  “He’s talking about the money business, I assume,” the Trampoline said, waving a dismissive hand. “That’s the least of it. The most of it is, he was always careless with people’s hearts. He never took any responsibility for what he broke. And now, what, he’s a mystic? There are seven valleys of purification and we’re where, in the fifth? And this is all because he’s in love with a woman he has never met? That’s perfect, really. The withdrawal from reality into mumbo jumbo. And then the pursuit of a fantasy. He might as well wear a T-shirt that says, I am incapable of living a real life. I am incapable of love.”

  Quichotte had turned to face them now. He continued to say nothing. He wore the air of someone about to be told a strange stor
y for the first time. He folded his arms and remained silent, ready to hear her out.

  “Once upon a time, Sancho,” the Trampoline began, “he was charming and selfish. You look at him now and you see a gaunt scarecrow, a skin-and-bone relic. He thinks he’s questing for love, but you know better, you know what’s waiting for him at the end of his road. But why should I say what you see? Maybe you’re just the loyal squire to the gallant knight.”

  “To be fair,” Sancho said, coming to Quichotte’s defense, “he still has the charming smile and old-school good manners. And he doesn’t seem that selfish to me.”

  “You’re loyal to him,” the Trampoline said. “I see that. That’s a good characteristic, but what follows will therefore sadden you, because what I have to tell is a story of disloyalty, even of betrayal. You want to hear it all? Well, even if you don’t. I’m here to reunite your father with his mislaid past.

  “The truth is, I’m the one who is supposed to be dead. Let’s start there. I was a young woman then. I was supposed to die but my body made a different decision. However, it had to accept a number of consequences of that decision. It accepted them and defeated the crab in my breasts. The consequences included a double mastectomy, the removal of a part of my armpit and some of my chest wall muscles too. Also, chemotherapy. By the time you’ve been through that you no longer think of yourself as alive. You think, I’m lucky not to be dead. That’s what I’ve been ever since: lucky not to be dead, living in the aftermath of an escape. You no longer think of yourself as having gender or sexuality. You think of yourself as an undead thing that is unaccountably continuing to live. In this state of aftermath one craves simple things: sympathy and love. Your father was not good at providing either.

  “He was some sort of journalist,” the Trampoline said, turning back to Sancho. “Freelance. Investigative. He used words like that. Specialist in intelligence. At least in his own opinion. I don’t think he did particularly well. But he was a good talker. He said he was delving into the hidden reality of the world, the truth that exists but is buried very deep so that most of us can live among more palatable fictions. The ladies, enough of them, listened. Then they saw through him and walked away. Maybe what’s left of him believes he can make this television Salma listen too.