The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  When he walks with Waldo Crossley in the grounds of Methwold’s riverside estate, congratulating his son on the skill with which he has learned to spear leaves and other detritus, flattering him on the way he looks in the Methwold livery, and being rewarded by Waldo’s tear-jerkingly wide, happy, brainless smile—or when he keeps vigil by Ormus Cama’s bedside, seeing in the comatose singer the shadow of his own dead Hawthorne—then Standish’s back is straighter than ever, his jaw firmer, his eye less moist. But he has been poleaxed and no mistake. The danger is that if Ormus fails to awake, Standish may also fall into some final sleep. Their fates are joined. As the months and years go by, and Standish loses hope of an awakening, little threads of his cloak of discipline begin to fray. There’s a tic, sometimes, in the corner of an eye. There are days when a few stray hairs elude his formerly omnipotent brush. When he stands, Spenta notices the first signs of a stoop.

  If I was a little younger, she says, taking his arm while they walk on the parterre one late afternoon, I might give you a run for your money.

  He hears the loneliness, the echo of a woman standing in the empty room of her future, and decides he has no alternative but to be truthful.

  I am one of those, he says, almost tongue-tied for once, for whom the love of women was never really the point.

  Wonderful, she claps her hands. I also can see no point in such activity at our age. But companionship, isn’t it? That we can offer each other as twilight falls.

  At which Mull Standish finds himself at a loss for words.

  • • •

  Abruptly, Maria stops coming, perhaps despairing of Ormus’s prospects. Neither Spenta nor Standish says so, but both think her absence a bad omen.

  They begin to speak of the unspeakable: of the life support. For more than three years, Ormus Cama has needed monitors, drips, plasma. There have been moments when respiratory equipment has been necessary. His muscles have atrophied, he is weaker than a baby, and without the machines, the nursing staff, the orderlies, he could not possibly survive. Spenta asks Standish the unaskable.

  What do you think, honestly, will he wake up.

  And Standish is no longer able to offer a convincing Yes in reply.

  It would be possible to arrange a mishap, he says. A power cut, plus a failure of the back-up generator. Or a tube might accidentally fall out of the sleeping man’s nose, or a life-giving needle drop from a vein. It might be, what’s the word, stumbles Standish. Merciful.

  I still believe, Spenta obstinately wails. In I don’t know what, a miracle. In blessings from above. In, what to call it, higher love.

  When Colchis Records releases the double-A-side 45 “Beneath Her Feet” b/w “It Shouldn’t Be This Way” by the defunct band Rhythm Center, it is intended as a farewell gesture, a surrender to the inevitable. Ever since the accident Standish has been adamant: Ormus will recover, at that point he will resume his career, and until then it would be both macabre and bad business to put out any discs.

  Yul Singh has gone along with this in his equivocal way.

  If this is your wish Mr. Standish which I’m offering no opinion then so be it, it’s your call. You change your mind you come and see me. The industry moves on at high speed, you don’t need to be told, so we’ll see about it as and when. God willing I’m still in this seat, maybe I can help you out.

  The time comes when Standish and Spenta agree that they want Ormus to sing again, to sing one last time before the machinery ceases to support his life and he departs. Standish asks Yul Singh to set the music free; which request, for all his tough talk and caveats, the ferocious Colchis overlord—understanding that the request is a kind of death sentence—is unable to deny. Whereupon, to everyone’s amazement, the record is a hit. And Vina Apsara in a Bombay hotel room hears Ormus singing, and flies back into his life: and saves it.

  Here she is at his bedside, whispering into his ear. Here is Spenta, not knowing whether to fear her as another revenant demon, or to grieve with her for their mutual loss, or to hope. Here is Mull Standish holding his breath. Here, hovering like vultures, are a doctor, a nurse, an orderly.

  In the doorway, hat in hand, is blind Yul Singh.

  Ormus, she whispers. Ormus, it’s me.

  At which he opens his eyes; it’s as simple as that. His mouth trembles. She bends down to hear him.

  The doctor swoops, shoulders her aside. Excuse, please. We must establish the degree of damage. Turning to Ormus with a glitter of bedside teeth, he asks: Who am I?

  A drug dealer.

  The voice surprises everyone by its strength, its sardonic note. The doctor points to Yul Singh in the doorway. And he, who is he?

  A commissar.

  Then the orderly, carrying clean sheets and towels.

  He isn’t important.

  And how about you, the doctor asks. Do you know who you are. Do you know what you want.

  Vina, he calls. She comes close, takes his hand. Yes, he answers. Now I know.

  How shall we sing of the coming together of long-parted lovers, separated by foolish mistrust for a sad decade, reunited at last by music? Shall we say (for in song we are set free from surly pedantry, and may hymn the soaring spirit, rather than the crumpled letter, of the truth): they ran singing through fields of asphodel and drank the nectar of the gods, and their kissing was as beauteous as the evening horizon, where the earth first touches and then becomes the sky? Shall we liken his sweeping caresses to the movement of the winds across the surface of the sea, now raging, now tender, and her arched responses, so eager, so potent, to the surging ocean waves? Shall we go so far as to speak of love divine, all loves excelling, and conclude that there must be a Great Lover looking down upon us from on high, to whose unconditional passion and openness of heart this earthly pair holds up its shining mirror?

  No, this is a story of a deep but unstable love, one of breakages and reunions; a love of endless overcoming, defined by the obstacles it must surmount, beyond which greater travails lie. A hurdlers love. The forking, fissured paths of uncertainty, the twisting mazes of suspicion and betrayal, the plunging low road of death itself: along these ways it goes. This is a human love.

  Let Vina speak. He in fact died that day, did you know that, she reveals, lying unclothed and overwhelming across my big brass bed one steaming summers day in the middle 1980s in New York. That’s right, she says with a twist of the mouth, he always did have fantastic timing. I come all the way across the world to find him and that’s when the bastard decides to cash in his chips. For one hundred and fifty seconds he genuinely checked out, kicked the bucket, bought the farm. Ormus the flatliner. He went down that tunnel towards the light. Then he turned right round and came on back. Afterwards he told me it was on account of me?, he heard my voice calling behind him?, he looked back, and it absolutely saved his life. Blip blippety blip not-fade-away on the monitor screen, the flatline starts jumping, oh doctor, doctor, he’s alive, it’s a blessing a miracle, he’s come back to us, heavens to Betsy, praise the Lawd. Dead for two minutes but in the third minute he rose again from the dead.

  He didn’t come back to us, Vina boasts, he came back to me. Didn’t wake up until I made my appearance, what was the point, right, because I wasn’t there. They’d always said there was nothing wrong with him, levels of electrical activity in the brain were normal, the strong probability being that there wasn’t any lasting damage, he was just perfect and dandy?, except that he wasn’t awake. No, Lady Methwold, there’s no explanation, in these cases they either wake up or they don’t and that’s the whole of it. He could sleep for years, the rest of his life, or he could open his eyes tomorrow. Or in twenty years’ time, not knowing he’s missed a day, those awakenings are the most difficult, they look at their hands and scream what’s this disease that’s shrivelling up my skin, you have to judge the moment when you show them a mirror?, and it’s a delicate judgement, believe me, there is the danger of suicide.

  Vina repeats, proudly: He waited for me, sleeping, all t
hose long years. Nothing in life was interesting any more unless I was by his side. Then I showed up and jeepers if those peepers didn’t pop open right on cue. If that’s not love then I don’t know what. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t give him a hard time later on. But that’s because he’s a man.

  A hole has appeared in downtown Mexico City, a chasm thirty metres across. It has swallowed buses, kiosks, children. For years water has been sucked out of the swampy sub-soil to sate the thirsty city, and this is the underworld’s revenge. The fabric of the surface is being unwoven from below. Right here in Manhattan the buildings themselves are beginning to stagger. Just a few blocks north of my brass bed, there’s a brownstone that’s started shedding bricks. A net has been erected to protect pedestrians. People have always jumped off buildings in New York, but this is something new. This building is jumping off itself.

  The papers are full of such new catastrophes but Vina wants to talk about old ones. In these years of their semi-retirement she has started coming to me more and more often, and as she removes her clothes she can’t help showing some resentment of the great Ormus Cama, of the prominence given to his talent in the burgeoning histories of the VTO phenomenon. This is the price I have to pay for enjoying her favours: this ceaseless Ormusic, her personal obsessive Camamania. She comes to me to let off summer steam. If I were to object, she’d stop coming. Sex is never the point with Vina. Sex is trivial, like blowing your nose. She comes to me because I know her story. She’s here to write new paragraphs: to complain. That, for Vina, is intimacy. That amuses and arouses her. Vina on the bed, stretching, turning, torments me, knowing I am happy—or at least willing—to be thus tormented. She is forty years old, and fabulous.

  So let’s never forget I was the one who fetched him out of the underworld, she boasts, like that Hindu goddess?, what’s her name, Mousie.

  Rati, I correct her.

  Yeah, right. Rati who saved Kama the god of love. When the god of love opened his eyes, by the way, the left eyeball was almost colourless. The doctors blamed a blow received in the car accident and regretted that as the pupil was “stuck” in its fully dilated state and could no longer contract?, the eye would see very little, and blurrily But I told the doctors it wasn’t the accident. He looked down the tunnel and the light poured into his eye. One-eyed death at the tunnel’s end glaring at Ormus Cama. He’s lucky the other eye survived.

  (And the left eye saw plenty, anyway. It saw too deeply, too far, too much.)

  I don’t interrupt. When Vina starts with her fanciful mysteries, all you can do is lie back and wait for her to lose interest, which never takes too long. Here she is, back again at the story of Kama and Rati. Anyhow, without me he’d be stir-fry, baby, she says, referring to the negative effects of Lord Shiva’s thunderbolt on the errant love god of Hinduism. Without me he’d be nothing, he’d be ash.

  Thus Vina on the great love of her life. When he awoke, I was his mirror, she says. He saw himself in my eyes and liked what he saw. And lived.

  When I want to provoke her, when the monologue about Ormus finally gets my goat, I raise the subject of Maria the phantom nymphomaniac. I do it by conjuring up the old show tune from West Side Story. Maria, I start humming, and at once Vina stiffens; her skin actually heats up—I feel her temperature rising—and her eyes begin to boil. Then she disguises her jealousy by transforming it into outrageous behaviour. Do you want me to show you, she asks, savagely. Shall I perform upon you those unnatural acts. Hers, the so-called spectre’s. You be Ormus, lie back and close your eyes just like you always wanted, and I’ll be her, the slavering succubus. Would you like that, Rai, hey. You’d love it, am I right. Her terrible rising voice, caught halfway between a tear and a shriek, makes my ear whistle.

  Keep it down, I say, a little frightened by this undressed ignoble savagery. Vina, come on. I don’t need this and neither do you.

  But perhaps she does need it, she feels injured by the very existence of this Other, it offends her. Other-hatred is for Vina the mirror image of self-love.

  • • •

  The young Indian woman, no longer posing as a nurse but still answering to the name of Maria, starts coming to Ormus again, the first manifestation being a few days after Vina awakens him from his big sleep. She is discreet, however; Vina’s presence guarantees Maria’s absence, as if this were a condition of her appearances, a law of her fantastic realm. Ormus begins both to dread and to desire solitude because of these secret visits.

  Fearing quick rejection, Maria has evolved a new strategy of volubility. Instead of tearing off her clothes and jumping on him, she seduces him with talk, fast, interesting talk, and he listens, because ever since he re-opened his pale left eye he has started seeing things he can’t understand, things he needs to understand. It’s as if his two eyes are looking into slightly different worlds, or rather two variations of the same world, almost the same and yet utterly separate. Double vision: he gets a lot of headaches.

  Your eyes have been opened now, Maria murmurs, massaging his temples. He lets her do it. Now I can come to you like this, it’s so much easier, whenever I want. Your eye knows, it remembers. Worli, the Cosmic Dancer, our life in the otherworld. These places feel like dreams et cetera, but they are places you have been and so on. I know it’s hard for you. You have to live here for now. I understand. You have to blot certain things out to retain your ability to function and so forth. As for her, she’s not good enough for you, but even this I can bear. I will never leave you. This is what you were sent to do. You slipped into your mother’s womb behind your dead brother and they believed you belonged to them. Your songs will change this world. This is your fate. You will open their eyes and they will follow you towards the light et cetera et cetera. Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way. See how they shine.

  Is it possible that such an otherworld exists, he marvels.

  And if it exists, he wonders privately, might it not also be possible that in that otherworld this strange girl might still be considered insane?

  Her visits to his bedroom are necessarily brief. He is weak, convalescent, rarely left alone. She talks fast, continues to restrain her passions, seeking to present herself as an intelligent and educated person, a person worthy of his love.

  Realities are in conflict, she tells him. Your right eye, your left eye, stare into different versions and so on. At such a moment the frontier between right and wrong action also dissolves. I myself have suspended moral judgement and live according to the more profound imperatives of my appetites et cetera.

  He closes his left eye, experimentally. Maria disappears, as if someone had thrown a switch.

  On her next visit she complains about her abrupt dismissal, insists on being treated with respect. I am here for you in any way you want, she says, but I don’t care to be treated meanly and so forth. Just be a little polite.

  What she wants to talk about most is earthquakes. There are going to be more of these, she prophesies. There are always earthquakes, Ormus answers. Yes, she says, but these are different. Two worlds in collision. Only one can survive and so on. In the end this world will crumble and fall et cetera and we will be together at home for ever and I will make you mad with joy et cetera et cetera et cetera as you must already know.

  When she is not with him, she says, she visits past and present earthquake zones, in China, northern California, Japan, Tajikistan and elsewhere; all those places where the fabric of the earth has put itself in question. To Ormus, there is something ghoulish about this hobby, and about the lyricism with which she describes these high tragedies. She speaks of the earth beginning to sing, and rocking people’s houses as if they were swinging cradles. The earth’s pounding lullaby, not soothing but turbulent, coaxing human beings and their creations towards not sleep but death. She has spent a lot of time in Turkey, travelling to remote regions—Tochangri, Van—and India, too, gives her plenty to talk about: the devastation of Dharmsala and Palampur in the century’s early years, and th
e narrow escape in Simla of Lady Curzon, the Viceroy’s wife, who was just missed by a chimney that fell into her bedroom; also the Monghyr earthquake of 1934, when sulfurous mud and water bubbled up from great apertures in the earth like proofs of the existence of Hell, and Captain Barnard’s Flying Circus was hired by the local authorities to overfly the area and assess the damage.

  The great cracks in the streets of Orléansville, Algeria, the tidal wave that engulfed Agadir, the tidal wave that drowned Messina, the collapse of Managua and the escape of Howard Hughes, the Tokyo-Yokohama catastrophe of 1933, the endemic instability of Iran, and the strange behaviour of Sir J.A. Sweetenham, British governor of Jamaica, who refused the aid of the American navy after much of Kingston was flattened in the year 1907: about all these she painstakingly informs her bewildered beloved, in rather too much grue-somely relished detail.

  Underlying all earthquakes is the idea of Fault, she says. The earth has many faults, of course. Literally millions have been mapped et cetera. But human Faults cause earthquakes too. What is coming is a judgement.