‘Like a dream,’ Mr Sisodia said.
When the news was brought to Chamcha’s attic later that day by Anahita and Mishal Sufyan, he flew into the vilest rage either of them had ever witnessed, a fury under whose fearful influence his voice rose so high that it seemed to tear, as if his throat had grown knives and ripped his cries to shreds; his pestilential breath all but blasted them from the room, and with arms raised high and goat-legs dancing he looked, at last, like the very devil whose image he had become. ‘Liar,’ he shrieked at the absent Gibreel. ‘Traitor, deserter, scum. Missed the plane, did you? – Then whose head, in my own lap, with my own hands …? – who received caresses, spoke of nightmares, and fell at last singing from the sky?’
‘There, there,’ pleaded terrified Mishal. ‘Calm down. You’ll have Mum up here in a minute.’
Saladin subsided, a pathetic goaty heap once again, no threat to anyone. ‘It’s not true,’ he wailed. ‘What happened, happened to us both.’
‘Course it did,’ Anahita encouraged him. ‘Nobody believes those movie magazines, anyway. They’ll say anything, them.’
Sisters backed out of the room, holding their breath, leaving Chamcha to his misery, failing to observe something quite remarkable. For which they must not be blamed; Chamcha’s antics were sufficient to have distracted the keenest eyes. It should also, in fairness, be stated that Saladin failed to notice the change himself.
What happened? This: during Chamcha’s brief but violent outburst against Gibreel, the horns on his head (which, one may as well point out, had grown several inches while he languished in the attic of the Shaandaar B and B) definitely, unmistakably, – by about three-quarters of an inch, – diminished.
In the interest of the strictest accuracy, one should add that, lower down his transformed body, – inside borrowed pantaloons (delicacy forbids the publication of explicit details), – something else, let us leave it at that, got a little smaller, too.
Be that as it may: it transpired that the optimism of the report in the imported movie magazine had been ill founded, because within days of its publication the local papers carried news of Billy Battuta’s arrest, in a midtown New York sushi bar, along with a female companion, Mildred Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years of age. The story was that he had approached numbers of society matrons, ‘movers and shakers’, asking for ‘very substantial’ sums of money which he had claimed to need in order to buy his freedom from a sect of devil worshippers. Once a confidence man, always a confidence man: it was what Mimi Mamoulian would no doubt have described as a beautiful sting. Penetrating the heart of American religiosity, pleading to be saved – ‘when you sell your soul you can’t expect to buy back cheap’ – Billy had banked, the investigators alleged, ‘six figure sums’. The world community of the faithful longed, in the late 1980s, for direct contact with the supernal, and Billy, claiming to have raised (and therefore to need rescuing from) infernal fiends, was on to a winner, especially as the Devil he offered was so democratically responsive to the dictates of the Almighty Dollar. What Billy offered the West Side matrons in return for their fat cheques was verification: yes, there is a Devil; I’ve seen him with my own eyes – God, it was frightful! – and if Lucifer existed, so must Gabriel; if Hellfire had been seen to burn, then somewhere, over the rainbow, Paradise must surely shine. Mimi Mamoulian had, it was alleged, played a full part in the deceptions, weeping and pleading for all she was worth. They were undone by overconfidence, spotted at Takesushi (whooping it up and cracking jokes with the chef) by a Mrs Aileen Struwelpeter who had, only the previous afternoon, handed the then-distraught and terrified couple a five-thousand-dollar cheque. Mrs Struwelpeter was not without influence in the New York Police Department, and the boys in blue arrived before Mimi had finished her tempura. They both went quietly. Mimi was wearing, in the newspaper photographs, what Chamcha guessed was a forty-thousand-dollar mink coat, and an expression on her face that could only be read one way.
The hell with you all.
Nothing further was heard, for some while, about Farishta’s film.
It was so, it was not, that as Saladin Chamcha’s incarceration in the body of a devil and the attic of the Shaandaar B and B lengthened into weeks and months, it became impossible not to notice that his condition was worsening steadily. His horns (notwithstanding their single, momentary and unobserved diminution) had grown both thicker and longer, twirling themselves into fanciful arabesques, wreathing his head in a turban of darkening bone. He had grown a thick, long beard, a disorienting development in one whose round, moony face had never boasted much hair before; indeed, he was growing hairier all over his body, and had even sprouted, from the base of his spine, a fine tail that lengthened by the day and had already obliged him to abandon the wearing of trousers; he tucked the new limb, instead, inside baggy salwar pantaloons filched by Anahita Sufyan from her mother’s generously tailored collection. The distress engendered in him by his continuing metamorphosis into some species of bottled djinn will readily be imagined. Even his appetites were altering. Always fussy about his food, he was appalled to find his palate coarsening, so that all foodstuffs began to taste much the same, and on occasion he would find himself nibbling absently at his bedsheets or old newspapers, and come to his senses with a start, guilty and shamefaced at this further evidence of his progress away from manhood and towards – yes – goatishness. Increasing quantities of green mouthwash were required to keep his breath within acceptable limits. It really was too grievous to be borne.
His presence in the house was a continual thorn in the side of Hind, in whom regret for the lost income mingled with the remnants of her initial terror, although it’s true to say that the soothing processes of habituation had worked their sorceries on her, helping her to see Saladin’s condition as some kind of Elephant Man illness, a thing to feel disgusted by but not necessarily to fear. ‘Let him keep out of my way and I’ll keep out of his,’ she told her daughters. ‘And you, the children of my despair, why you spend your time sitting up there with a sick person while your youth is flying by, who can say, but in this Vilayet it seems everything I used to know is a lie, such as the idea that young girls should help their mothers, think of marriage, attend to studies, and not go sitting with goats, whose throats, on Big Eid, it is our old custom to slit.’
Her husband remained solicitous, however, even after the strange incident that took place when he ascended to the attic and suggested to Saladin that the girls might not have been so wrong, that perhaps the, how could one put it, possession of his body could be terminated by the intercession of a mullah? At the mention of a priest Chamcha reared up on his feet, raising both arms above his head, and somehow or other the room filled up with dense and sulphurous smoke while a high-pitched vibrato screech with a kind of tearing quality pierced Sufyan’s hearing like a spike. The smoke cleared quickly enough, because Chamcha flung open a window and fanned feverishly at the fumes, while apologizing to Sufyan in tones of acute embarrassment: ‘I really can’t say what came over me, – but at times I fear I am changing into something, – something one must call bad.’
Sufyan, kindly fellow that he was, went over to where Chamcha sat clutching at his horns, patted him on the shoulder, and tried to bring what good cheer he could. ‘Question of mutability of the essence of the self,’ he began, awkwardly, ‘has long been subject of profound debate. For example, great Lucretius tells us, in De Rerum Natura, this following thing: quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante. Which being translated, forgive my clumsiness, is “Whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers,” – that is, bursts its banks, – or, maybe, breaks out of its limitations, – so to speak, disregards its own rules, but that is too free, I am thinking … “that thing”, at any rate, Lucretius holds, “by doing so brings immediate death to its old self”. However,’ up went the ex-schoolmaster’s finger, ‘poet Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: “As yiel
ding wax” – heated, you see, possibly for the sealing of documents or such, – “is stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet is indeed the same, even so our souls,” – you hear, good sir? Our spirits! Our immortal essences! – “Are still the same forever, but adopt In their migrations ever-varying forms.” ’
He was hopping, now, from foot to foot, full of the thrill of the old words. ‘For me it is always Ovid over Lucretius,’ he stated. ‘Your soul, my good poor dear sir, is the same. Only in its migration it has adopted this presently varying form.’
‘This is pretty cold comfort,’ Chamcha managed a trace of his old dryness. ‘Either I accept Lucretius and conclude that some demonic and irreversible mutation is taking place in my inmost depths, or I go with Ovid and concede that everything now emerging is no more than a manifestation of what was already there.’
‘I have put my argument badly,’ Sufyan miserably apologized. ‘I meant only to reassure.’
‘What consolation can there be,’ Chamcha answered with bitter rhetoric, his irony crumbling beneath the weight of his unhappiness, ‘for a man whose old friend and rescuer is also the nightly lover of his wife, thus encouraging – as your old books would doubtless affirm – the growth of cuckold’s horns?’
The old friend, Jumpy Joshi, was unable for a single moment of his waking hours to rid himself of the knowledge that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he had lost the will to lead his life according to his own standards of morality. At the sports centre where he taught martial arts techniques to ever-greater numbers of students, emphasizing the spiritual aspects of the disciplines, much to their amusement (‘Ah so, Grasshopper,’ his star pupil Mishal Sufyan would tease him, ‘when honolable fascist swine jump at you flom dark alleyway, offer him teaching of Buddha before you kick him in honolable balls’), – he began to display such passionate intensity that his pupils, realizing that some inner anguish was being expressed, grew alarmed. When Mishal asked him about it at the end of a session that had left them both bruised and panting for breath, in which the two of them, teacher and star, had hurled themselves at one another like the hungriest of lovers, he threw her question back at her with an uncharacteristic lack of openness. ‘Talk about pot and kettle,’ he said. ‘Question of mote and beam.’ They were standing by the vending machines. She shrugged. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I confess, but keep the secret.’ He reached for his Coke: ‘What secret?’ Innocent Jumpy. Mishal whispered in his ear: ‘I’m getting laid. By your friend: Mister Hanif Johnson, Bar At Law.’
He was shocked, which irritated her. ‘O, come on. It’s not like I’m fifteen.’ He replied, weakly, ‘If your mother ever,’ and once again she was impatient. ‘If you want to know,’ petulantly, ‘the one I’m worried about is Anahita. She wants whatever I’ve got. And she, by the way, really is fifteen.’ Jumpy noticed that he’d knocked over his paper-cup and there was Coke on his shoes. ‘Out with it,’ Mishal was insisting. ‘I owned up. Your turn.’ But Jumpy couldn’t say; was still shaking his head about Hanif. ‘It’d be the finish of him,’ he said. That did it. Mishal put her nose in the air. ‘O, I get it,’ she said. ‘Not good enough for him, you reckon.’ And over her departing shoulder: ‘Here, Grasshopper. Don’t holy men ever fuck?’
Not so holy. He wasn’t cut out for sainthood, any more than the David Carradine character in the old Kung Fu programmes: like Grasshopper, like Jumpy. Every day he wore himself out trying to stay away from the big house in Notting Hill, and every evening he ended up at Pamela’s door, thumb in mouth, biting the skin around the edges of the nail, fending off the dog and his own guilt, heading without wasting any time for the bedroom. Where they would fall upon one another, mouths searching out the places in which they had chosen, or learned, to begin: first his lips around her nipples, then hers moving along his lower thumb.
She had come to love in him this quality of impatience, because it was followed by a patience such as she had never experienced, the patience of a man who had never been ‘attractive’ and was therefore prepared to value what was offered, or so she had thought at first; but then she learned to appreciate his consciousness of and solicitude for her own internal tensions, his sense of the difficulty with which her slender, bony, small-breasted body found, learned and finally surrendered to a rhythm, his knowledge of time. She loved in him, too, his overcoming of himself; loved, knowing it to be a wrong reason, his willingness to overcome his scruples so that they might be together: loved the desire in him that rode over all that had been imperative in him. Loved it, without being willing to see, in this love, the beginning of an end.
Near the end of their lovemaking, she became noisy. ‘Yow!’ she shouted, all the aristocracy in her voice crowding into the meaningless syllables of her abandonment. ‘Whoop! Hi! Hah.’
She was still drinking heavily, scotch bourbon rye, a stripe of redness spreading across the centre of her face. Under the influence of alcohol her right eye narrowed to half the size of the left, and she began, to his horror, to disgust him. No discussion of her boozing was permitted, however: the one time he tried he found himself on the street with his shoes clutched in his right hand and his overcoat over his left arm. Even after that he came back: and she opened the door and went straight upstairs as though nothing had happened. Pamela’s taboos: jokes about her background, mentions of whisky-bottle ‘dead soldiers’, and any suggestion that her late husband, the actor Saladin Chamcha, was still alive, living across town in a bed and breakfast joint, in the shape of a supernatural beast.
These days, Jumpy – who had, at first, badgered her incessantly about Saladin, telling her she should go ahead and divorce him, but this pretence of widowhood was intolerable: what about the man’s assets, his rights to a share of the property, and so forth? Surely she would not leave him destitute? – no longer protested about her unreasonable behaviour. ‘I’ve got a confirmed report of his death,’ she told him on the only occasion on which she was prepared to say anything at all. ‘And what have you got? A billy-goat, a circus freak, nothing to do with me.’ And this, too, like her drinking, had begun to come between them. Jumpy’s martial arts sessions increased in vehemence as these problems loomed larger in his mind.
Ironically, while Pamela refused point-blank to face the facts about her estranged husband, she had become embroiled, through her job at the community relations committee, in an investigation into allegations of the spread of witchcraft among the officers at the local police station. Various stations did from time to time gain the reputation of being ‘Out of control’ – Notting Hill, Kentish Town, Islington – but witchcraft? Jumpy was sceptical. ‘The trouble with you,’ Pamela told him in her loftiest shooting-stick voice, ‘is that you still think of normality as being normal. My God: look at what’s happening in this country. A few bent coppers taking their clothes off and drinking urine out of helmets isn’t so weird. Call it working-class Freemasonry, if you want. I’ve got black people coming in every day, scared out of their heads, talking about obeah, chicken entrails, the lot. The goddamn bastards are enjoying this: scare the coons with their own ooga booga and have a few naughty nights into the bargain. Unlikely? Bloody wake up.’ Witchfinding, it seemed, ran in the family: from Matthew Hopkins to Pamela Lovelace. In Pamela’s voice, speaking at public meetings, on local radio, even on regional news programmes on television, could be heard all the zeal and authority of the old Witchfinder-General, and it was only on account of that voice of a twentieth-century Gloriana that her campaign was not laughed instantly into extinction. New Broomstick Needed to Sweep Out Witches. There was talk of an official inquiry. What drove Jumpy wild, however, was Pamela’s refusal to connect her arguments in the question of the occult policemen to the matter of her own husband: because, after all, the transformation of Saladin Chamcha had precisely to do with the idea that normality was no longer composed (if it had ever been) of banal, ‘normal’ elements. ‘Nothing to do with it,’ she said flatly when he tried to make the po
int: imperious, he thought, as any hanging judge.
After Mishal Sufyan told him about her illegal sexual relations with Hanif Johnson, Jumpy on his way over to Pamela Chamcha’s had to stifle a number of bigoted thoughts, such as if his father hadn’t been white he’d never have done it; Hanif, he raged, that immature bastard who probably cut notches in his cock to keep count of his conquests, this Johnson with aspirations to represent his people who couldn’t wait until they were of age before he started shafting them! … couldn’t he see that Mishal with her omniscient body was just a, just a, child? – No she wasn’t. – Damn him, then, damn him for (and here Jumpy shocked himself) being the first.
Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his resentments of Hanif, his friend Hanif were primarily – how to put it? – linguistic. Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power. But you bastard you rummage in my drawers and laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven’t got a clue. How hard that struggle, how inevitable the defeat. Nobody’s going to elect me to anything. No power-base, no constituency: just the battle with the words. But he, Jumpy, also had to admit that his envy of Hanif was as much as anything rooted in the other’s greater control of the languages of desire. Mishal Sufyan was quite something, an elongated, tubular beauty, but he wouldn’t have known how, even if he’d thought of, he’d never have dared. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
The Satanic Verses: A Novel Page 30
