What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was that he had been living in a state of phoney peace, that the change in him was irreversible. A new, dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky; no matter how assiduously he attempted to re-create his old existence, this was, he now saw, a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left-hand path.
2
The temperature continued to rise; and when the heatwave reached its highest point, and stayed up there so long that the whole city, its edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil, – then Mr Billy Battuta and his companion Mimi Mamoulian, recently returned to the metropolis after a period as guests of the penal authority of New York, announced their ‘grand coming-out’ party. Billy’s business connections downtown had arranged for his case to be heard by a well-disposed judge; his personal charm had persuaded every one of the wealthy female ‘marks’ from whom he’d extracted such generous amounts for the purpose of the re-purchase of his soul from the Devil (including Mrs Struwelpeter) to sign a clemency petition, in which the matrons stated their conviction that Mr Battuta had honestly repented him of his error, and asked, in the light of his vow to concentrate henceforth on his startlingly brilliant entrepreneurial career (whose social usefulness in terms of wealth creation and the provision of employment to many persons, they suggested, should also be considered by the court in mitigation of his offences), and his further vow to undergo a full course of psychiatric treatment to help him overcome his weakness for criminal capers, – that the worthy judge settle upon some lighter punishment than a prison sentence, ‘the deterrent purpose underlying such incarceration being better served here,’ in the ladies’ opinion, ‘by a judgment of a more Christian sort’. Mimi, adjudged to be no more than Billy’s love-duped underling, was given a suspended sentence; for Billy it was deportation, and a stiff fine, but even this was rendered considerably less severe by the judge’s consent to Billy’s attorney’s plea that his client be allowed to leave the country voluntarily, without having the stigma of a deportation order stamped into his passport, a thing that would do great damage to his many business interests. Twenty-four hours after the judgment Billy and Mimi were back in London, whooping it up at Crockford’s, and sending out fancy invitation cards to what promised to be the party of that strangely sweltering season. One of these cards found its way, with the assistance of Mr S. S. Sisodia, to the residence of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta; another arrived, a little belatedly, at Saladin Chamcha’s den, slipped under the door by the solicitous Jumpy. (Mimi had called Pamela to invite her, adding, with her usual directness: ‘Any notion where that husband of yours has gotten to?’ – Which Pamela answered, with English awkwardness, yes er but. Mimi got the whole story out of her in less than half an hour, which wasn’t bad, and concluded triumphantly: ‘Sounds like your life is looking up, Pam. Bring ’em both; bring anyone. It’s going to be quite a circus.’)
The location for the party was another of Sisodia’s inexplicable triumphs: the giant sound stage at the Shepperton film studios had been procured, apparently at no cost, and the guests would be able, therefore, to take their pleasures in the huge re-creation of Dickensian London that stood within. A musical adaptation of the great writer’s last completed novel, renamed Friend!, with book and lyrics by the celebrated genius of the musical stage, Mr Jeremy Bentham, had proved a mammoth hit in the West End and on Broadway, in spite of the macabre nature of some of its scenes; now, accordingly, The Chums, as it was known in the business, was receiving the accolade of a big-budget movie production. ‘The pipi PR people,’ Sisodia told Gibreel on the phone, ‘think that such a fufufuck, function, which is to be most ista ista istar ista ista istudded, will be good for their bibuild up cacampaign.’
The appointed night arrived: a night of dreadful heat.
Shepperton! – Pamela and Jumpy are already here, borne on the wings of Pamela’s MG, when Chamcha, having disdained their company, arrives in one of the fleet of coaches the evening’s hosts have made available to those guests wishing for whatever reason to be driven rather than to drive. – And someone else, too, – the one with whom our Saladin fell to earth, – has come; is wandering within. – Chamcha enters the arena; and is amazed. – Here London has been altered – no, condensed, – according to the imperatives of film. – Why, here’s the Stucconia of the Veneerings, those bran-new, spick and span new people, lying shockingly adjacent to Portman Square, and the shady angle containing various Podsnaps. – And worse: behold the dustman’s mounds of Boffin’s Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in this abridged metropolis over Fascination Fledgeby’s rooms in the Albany, the West End’s very heart! – But the guests are not disposed to grumble; the reborn city, even rearranged, still takes the breath away; most particularly in that part of the immense studio through which the river winds, the river with its fogs and Gaffer Hexam’s boat, the ebbing Thames flowing beneath two bridges, one of iron, one of stone. – Upon its cobbled banks the guests’ gay footsteps fall; and there sound mournful, misty, footfalls of ominous note. A dry ice pea-souper lifts across the set.
Society grandees, fashion models, film stars, corporation bigwigs, a brace of minor royal Personages, useful politicians and suchlike riff-raff perspire and mingle in these counterfeit streets with numbers of men and women as sweat-glistened as the ‘real’ guests and as counterfeit as the city: hired extras in period costume, as well as a selection of the movie’s leading players. Chamcha, who realizes in the moment of sighting him that this encounter has been the whole purpose of his journey, – which fact he has succeeded in keeping from himself until this instant, – spots Gibreel in the increasingly riotous crowd.
Yes: there, on London Bridge Which Is Of Stone, without a doubt, Gibreel! – And that must be his Alleluia, his Icequeen Cone! – What a distant expression he seems to be wearing, how he lists a few degrees to the left; and how she seems to dote on him – how everyone adores him: for he is among the very greatest at the party, Battuta to his left, Sisodia at Allie’s right, and all about a host of faces that would be recognized from Peru to Timbuctoo! – Chamcha struggles through the crowd, which grows ever more dense as he nears the bridge; – but he is resolved – Gibreel, he will reach Gibreel! – when with a clash of cymbals loud music strikes up, one of Mr Bentham’s immortal, show-stopping tunes, and the crowd parts like the Red Sea before the children of Israel. – Chamcha, off-balance, staggers back, is crushed by the parting crowd against a fake half-timbered edifice – what else? – a Curiosity Shop; and, to save himself, retreats within, while a great singing throng of bosomy ladies in mobcaps and frilly blouses, accompanied by an over-sufficiency of stovepipehatted gents, comes rollicking down the riverside street, singing for all they’re worth.
What kind of fellow is Our Mutual Friend?
What does he intend?
Is he the kind of fellow on whom we may depend?
&c. &c. &c.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ a woman’s voice says behind him, ‘but when we were doing the show at the C—— Theatre, there was an outbreak of lust among the cast; quite unparalleled, in my experience. People started missing their cues because of the shenanigans in the wings.’
The speaker, he observes, is young, small, buxom, far from unattractive, damp from the heat, flushed with wine, and evidently in the grip of the libidinous fever of which she speaks. – The ‘room’ has little light, but he can make out the glint in her eye. ‘We’ve got time,’ she continues matter-of-factly. ‘After this lot finish there’s Mr Podsnap’s solo.’ Whereupon, arranging herself in an expert parody of the Marine Insurance agent’s self-important posture, she launches into her own version of the scheduled musical Podsnappery:
Ours is a Copious Language,
A Language Trying to Strangers;
Ours is the Favoured Nation,
Now, in Rex-Harrisonian speech-song, she addresses an invisible Foreigner. ‘And How Do You Like London? – “Aynormaymong rich?” – Enormously Rich, we say. Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong. – And Do You Find, Sir, Many Evidences of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London? – I would say,’ she adds, still Podsnapping, ‘that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.’
The creature has been approaching Chamcha while delivering herself of these lines; – unfastening, the while, her blouse; – and he, mongoose to her cobra, stands there transfixed; while she, exposing a shapely right breast, and offering it to him, points out that she has drawn upon it, – as an act of civic pride, – the map of London, no less, in red magic-marker, with the river all in blue. The metropolis summons him; – but he, giving an entirely Dickensian cry, pushes his way out of the Curiosity Shop into the madness of the street.
Gibreel is looking directly at him from London Bridge; their eyes – or so it seems to Chamcha – meet. Yes: Gibreel lifts, and waves, an unexcited arm.
What follows is tragedy. – Or, at the least the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it’s said. – A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns re-enact what was first done by heroes and by kings. – Well, then, so be it. – The question that’s asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it’s born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul. Or, let’s say: the enigma of Iago.
It’s not unknown for literary-theatrical exegetes, defeated by the character, to ascribe his actions to ‘motiveless malignity’. Evil is evil and will do evil, and that’s that; the serpent’s poison is his very definition. – Well, such shruggings-off will not pass muster here. My Chamcha may be no Ancient of Venice, my Allie no smothered Desdemona, Farishta no match for the Moor, but they will, at least, be costumed in such explanations as my understanding will allow. – And so, now, Gibreel waves in greeting; Chamcha approaches; the curtain rises on a darkening stage.
Let’s observe, first, how isolated this Saladin is; his only willing companion an inebriated and cartographically bosomed stranger, he struggles alone through that partying throng in which all persons appear to be (and are not) one another’s friends; – while there on London Bridge stands Farishta, beset by admirers, at the very centre of the crowd;
and, next, let us appreciate the effect on Chamcha, who loved England in the form of his lost English wife, – of the golden, pale and glacial presence by Farishta’s side of Alleluia Cone; he snatches a glass from a passing waiter’s tray, drinks the wine fast, takes another; and seems to see, in distant Allie, the entirety of his loss;
and in other ways, as well, Gibreel is fast becoming the sum of Saladin’s defeats; – there with him now, at this very moment, is another traitor; mutton dressed as lamb, fifty plus and batting her eyelashes like an eighteen-year-old, is Chamcha’s agent, the redoubtable Charlie Sellers; – you wouldn’t liken him to a Transylvanian bloodsucker, would you, Charlie, the irate watcher inwardly cries; – and grabs another glass; – and sees, at its bottom, his own anonymity, the other’s equal celebrity, and the great injustice of the division;
most especially – he bitterly reflects – because Gibreel, London’s conqueror, can see no value in the world now falling at his feet! – why, the bastard always sneered at the place, Proper London, Vilayet, the English, Spoono, what cold fish they are, I swear; – Chamcha, moving inexorably towards him through the crowd, seems to see, right now, that same sneer upon Farishta’s face, that scorn of an inverted Podsnap, for whom all things English are worthy of derision instead of praise; – O God, the cruelty of it, that he, Saladin, whose goal and crusade it was to make this town his own, should have to see it kneeling before his contemptuous rival! – so there is also this: that Chamcha longs to stand in Farishta’s shoes, while his own footwear is of no interest whatsoever to Gibreel.
What is unforgivable?
Chamcha, looking upon Farishta’s face for the first time since their rough parting in Rosa Diamond’s hall, seeing the strange blankness in the other’s eyes, recalls with overwhelming force the earlier blankness, Gibreel standing on the stairs and doing nothing while he, Chamcha, horned and captive, was dragged into the night; and feels the return of hatred, feels it filling him bottom-to-top with fresh green bile, never mind about excuses, it cries, to hell with mitigations and what-could-he-have-dones; what’s beyond forgiveness is beyond. You can’t judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
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, howeve
r, 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, anti-social, 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.
The Satanic Verses: A Novel Page 46
