The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Gayomart Cama skipped out of Ormus’s head and disappeared. The great man lost a twin brother, but (without knowing it) gained me. I’m his true Other, his living shadow self. I have shared his girl. She doesn’t tell him because this would matter to him. This would tear him apart. The people with whom you share a history: these are the people who can leave you shipwrecked and drowning.

  This is how Vina will one day leave both of us.

  If the Other cannot be named, the shadow self must also, by definition, be selfless. She gives me no rights over her, comes and goes as she pleases, summons and banishes me at her pharaonic whim. It’s not for me to mind about her cavalcade of playmates; certainly not to be jealous of Ormus himself. Yet each new sexual revelation comes as what I’m learning to call a zetz in the kishkes. And the fact of Ormus, of the love that can neither be nor cease to be, is a knife slowly twisted in the heart. She makes public sport of his celibacy; I’m counting differently. Every day that passes is one day closer to his goal, the day when he’ll ask her to keep her promise.

  There’s only one man for me, and I can’t have him, she shouts to the crowds. Listen and I’ll sing you his beautiful songs instead.

  He keeps his back to the audience. He can’t show them his pain.

  The breakdown of boundaries, what Erwin Panofsky called decompartmentalization, gave rise during the Renaissance to the modern idea of the genius. The fifteenth-century manifestos and treatises of Alberti, Leonardo and Cennini leave us in no doubt that this decompartmentalization is intimately connected to the urbanization of artistic sensibility, or, rather, to the artist’s conquest of the city. The Renaissance artist is no longer a worker bee, a mere craftsman dancing to a patron’s tune, but polymathic, a master of anatomy, philosophy, mythography, the laws of seeing and perception; an adept of the arcana of deep sight, able to penetrate the very essences of things. The achievements of modern artists, Alberti proclaimed, prove that the modern world is not exhausted. By crossing boundaries, uniting many kinds of knowledge, technical and intellectual, high and low, the modern artist legitimizes the whole project of society.

  Such is genius! Leonardo, Michelangelo: they claim kinship, even equality, with the gods. The opposed destinies of immortality and destruction are theirs.

  As for Ormus, at first, upon his helicoptered arrival in Manhattan, he enters a condition of worship, marveling at this new Rome, open-mouthed and slack-jawed, as did Alberti in Florence in the 1430s. Every chord he plays will be a paean to the sky-high city, he promises himself. If it can conquer the heights, so too will he.

  He should have been my mother’s son. I should have been his dad’s.

  One might suggest simply that Ormus Cama’s worship of the city has quickly been reciprocated; it has become the city’s worship of him. And where this city leads, this Rome, all the world’s cities quickly follow.

  Alas, this is an over-simplification. If Ormus lands in Manhattan as a provincial with stars in his eyes, circumstances quickly sour his joy. The rusting decadence of the city at ground level, its shoulder-barging vulgarity, its third-world feel (the poverty, the traffic, the slo-mo dereliction of the winos and the cracked-glass dereliction of too many of the buildings, the unplanned vistas of urban blight, the ugly street furniture), and the bizarreries to which Vina initially insists on exposing him, at such boho meccas as Sam’s Pleasure Island and the Slaughterhouse, these things fuel his celebrated moral disgust. Groovy Manhattan is plainly no better than Swinging London. He retreats into high-rise heaven and watches the city float in space. This celestial Manhattan is what he loves. Against this backcloth of noble silence he will set his pet sounds.

  He, too, is screaming inside. His agony will emerge as music.

  Give me a copper and I’ll tell you a golden story. Thus, according to Pliny, did the oral storytellers of old preface their fantastic tales of men transformed into beasts and back again, of visions and magic: tales told not in plain language but adorned with every kind of extravagant embellishment and curlicue, flamboyant, filled with the love of pyrotechnics and display. When writers adopted the mannerisms of these storytellers it was, says Robert Graves, because they “found that the popular tale gave them a wider field for their descriptions of contemporary morals and manners, punctuated by philosophical asides, than any more respectable literary form.”

  What hope can I, a mere journeyman shutterbug, a harvester of quotidian images from the abundance of what is, have of literary respectability? Like Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, a Moroccan colonial of Greek ancestry aspiring to the ranks of the Latin colossi of Rome, I should (belatedly) excuse my (post) colonial clumsinesses and hope that you are not put off by the oddness of my tale. Just as Apuleius did not fully “Romanize” his language and style, thinking it better to find an idiolect that permitted him to express himself in the fashion of his Greek ancestors, so also I … but look here, there is an important difference between myself and the author of The Transformations of Lucius, better known as The Golden Ass. Yes, you will say, there is the small matter of talent, and you’ll hear no argument from me on that score; but I’m driving at something else: viz., that while Apuleius happily admits to the fictionality of his fiction, I continue to insist that what I tell you is true. In his work he makes an easy separation between the realms of fancy and of fact; in my own poor effort, I am trying to set down the true-life account of the life of a man who saw, long before the rest of us, the artificiality of such a separation; who witnessed the demolition of that iron curtain with his own eyes and courageously went forth to dance on its remains.

  Thus:

  When he is by himself in his gigantic empty apartment Ormus removes his eye patch and the double vision returns. He looks into the heart of the otherness, the streaming. The barriers between the world of dreams and the waking world, between the spheres of the actual and the imagined, are breaking down. There is a progression. Something is changing. Instead of the gashes through which he formerly saw these visions, the windows to the other quiddity now have blurry edges. Sometimes they grow very large; it’s difficult to tell where this world ends and that begins. His apartment here looks exactly like his apartment there.

  The frontiers are softening. The time may not be far off when they disappear entirely. This notion, which ought to excite him, instead fills him with terrible dread. If the forking paths are coming together, if a point of confluence is ahead, what does this mean for life on the earth he knows? If such a decompartmentalization were to occur, and all verities suddenly failed, could we survive the force of the event? Ought we to be building bunkers, arming ourselves, donning badges that identify us as fellow members of this reality and not the feared (perhaps soon the hated) other?

  If each of us has alternative existences in the other continuum, which of our possibilities will live on, which will disappear?

  If we are all twins, which twin must die?

  Once she is convinced of the immutability of his self-denying oath, the wraithish Maria visits him less often. When she does come she’s usually sulky, protesting Ormus’s use of the eye patch to shut her out, to say nothing of the oath itself. She doesn’t stay long, but never fails to remind him of what he’s missing.

  He notices that she often arrives out of breath, perspiring. She seems tired. Is it possible that as the two whatnesses join and meld it’s getting harder for her to slide back and forth in her unsettlingly supernatural way? Could it be that when the blending is complete, the two worlds will obey the same natural laws, and Maria will have to enter and leave through the door just like anyone else?

  If so, will there be an apartment—her apartment—awaiting him in Bombay? Will the Cosmic Dancer Hotel possess, in its ledgers, a record of the suite they booked for that supposed night of passion long ago?

  How will he ever know fact from fiction again?

  The headache begins. He replaces the eye patch and lies back on his bed.

  That’s enough for now.

  It’s not up to you no
more, you can’t choose if it’s peace or war, just can’t make choices any more, your nightmare has come true; and when the day becomes the night, and when you don’t know wrong from right, or blind from sight or who to fight, don’t tell me you feel blue.

  For Jack and Jill will tumble down, the king will lose his hollow crown, the jesters all are leaving town, the queen has lost her shoe; the cat has lost his fiddling stick, so Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, as all the clocks refuse to tick, the end of history is in view.

  The earth begins to rock and roll, its music dooms your mortal soul, and there’s nothing baby nothing you can do. ’Cause it’s not up to it’s not up to it’s not up to you.

  The earthquake songs of Ormus Cama are rants in praise of the approach of chaos, paradoxically composed by an artist working at the highest levels of musical sophistication. The songs are about the collapse of all walls, boundaries, restraints. They describe worlds in collision, two universes tearing into each other, striving to become one, destroying each other in the effort. Dreams invade the day, while waking’s humdrums beat in our dreams.

  Some of the songs are intricate tapestries of driving, woven sound. In other pieces, however, Ormus with great deliberation abandons the juggling fantasies that come to him naturally and adopts a bare, discordant manner, demanding of Vina a raucous aggression to which she adds a terrifying intensity of her own. This is something entirely new in Ormus: this purposive disharmony. This is celibate misery speaking, the Miltonic pain of unconsummated love.

  Untwisting all the chains that tie / the hidden soul of harmony.

  Many of these raw songs are jeremiads addressed directly to Vina, so that when she sings them it’s weirdly disorienting because he’s putting into her mouth—that is, she’s spitting out of her mouth—the words he needs to say to her. He isn’t reclusive in his art. Music is his nakedness. This excites us. Watching them on stage, listening to them on our records and tapes, we can see and hear the tension in their strangely obstructed love. Their huge, rotten love, which they insist on denying themselves for so long, so long. It makes them the only lovers whose news we can’t wait to hear.

  Sung in Vina’s swooping, belting voice, certain songs release something primal, even animal, in the listener. Though their message could be called nihilistic, their musical clothing is potent enough to captivate the world’s disenfranchised, idolatrous young. Ormus, his own youthful excesses forgotten, a sensualist rendered simon-pure by a mighty promise of abstinence, a devotee of the flesh transformed into a preacher of the spirit by his horror at the profligacy with which the New World squanders its privileges, now berates his admirers for their wantonness, for the licentious debauchery of their ways; and though from the virtuous heights of his chastity he thunders about a generation mired in hedonism, lost in the archipelagoes of indulgence and desire, the objects of his fury love him for his wrath. Prophesying doom, he is the best beloved of the allegedly doomed. Vina in her magic voice sings Ormus’s musical anathemas, and the anathematized young of the Western world are enchanted. They rush out to their rhythm centers and buy.

  Whenever the Quakershaker songs are performed a wildness bursts out of the audience. There is a loud howling as of wolves. As floodlights rake the crowd, they reveal abandoned, Dionysiac scenes. The fans, possessed by the music, tear at their garments, at one another, at the air. Young women’s arms snake upwards, entwined, their hands moving like wings. They sit astride their lovers’ shoulders. The men’s faces are turned inwards, towards their partners’ splayed and naked groins, and there is much snuffling and slavering and many porcine grunts. When the crowd roars it is like a lion and beneath the roar there is sometimes heard a hissing, as of serpents.

  There are disappearances. Young people fail to return home and are eventually marked down as runaways. There is loose talk of bestial metamorphoses: snakes in the urban gutters, wild pigs in city parks, strange birds with fabulous plumages perching on skyscrapers like gargoyles, or angels.

  The laws of the universe may be changing. Such transformations may—incredibly, horrifyingly—become normal.

  We may be losing our grip on our humanity. When we finally let go, what’s to stop us from turning into dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, jackals, hyenas, wolves?

  What’s to stop us from sliding, as darkness falls and (as in the Orphic hymn to Night) terrible necessity rules over all?

  There is much conservative condemnation of the new supergroup and its adherents, who are variously censured as neurotics, parasites, plunderers, libertines and cheats. At a concert in Toronto a thinly perspiring police chief with glasses like side-view mirrors warns Vina about certain explicit gestures she has been making during performances. Keep it clean. No funny stuff. No grabbing yourself, okay? Seeing that there’s a tv camera present Vina gives the hapless police chief five minutes on the First Amendment and artistic freedom, and when she gets on stage she grabs herself so hard and so often there’s a danger she might come off in her own hands. The police chief, faced with the likelihood of a riot, fails to intervene.

  The cult of VTO—its adherents have started calling themselves New Quakers, a case of the wild stealing a name from the mild—grows larger every day, fueled by the rhapsodic exegeses of Ormus’s lyrics and Vina’s singing provided, in a series of landmark critiques, by the keepers of the flame of rock music, the Italian-American Marco Sangria and the Francophone Martinican Rémy Auxerre.

  It is a characteristic of rock music that it drives otherwise reasonable men to rapture, to excess. Even by the gushing standards of music journalism, however, Marco and Rémy are extreme. They have access to levels of rhapsody that make them the envy of their peers.

  Literally, Sangria screams, Vina Apsara’s voice is music; music in its most profound essentials. The relationship of Vina and Ormus expresses the tension between wisdom and eloquence. And the intervals of the Ormic guitar may well be, mathematically speaking, the structural basis not only of the whole universe but of the human soul as well. When we explore our inner space, as both Buddhists and subatomic physicists agree, we find a microcosm there which is identical with the macrocosmos: Ormus’s music reveals to our hearts the identity of the little and the large.

  It spreads the music of the soul to our other limbs, and so, when we dance, we dance the dance not of the body but of the soul.

  Rémy amplifies these claims in his own esoteric way.

  This is the struggle of the great musician, Rémy writes: that he seeks not only to sing Apollo’s pure, clean song but also to move to Dionysus’s dirty rhythm. The reconciliation of the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac we may call harmonia. Where reason and light meet madness and darkness, where science meets art and peace meets battle; where the adult meets the child, where life faces death and scorns it, make your music there.

  The singer uses the frenzy of the gods, Rémy says. The frontier between the empires of Apollo and Dionysus breaks down under the pressure of this divine fury. There are four levels of furor divinus. Poetic furor calms the soul, sacerdotal furor prepares the spirit for exaltation, prophetic furor lifts us to the level of the angels, erotic furor unites the soul with God. Ormus’s music possesses them all in the highest degree.

  There are two great spirits, Rémy writes: Spiritus Humanus, that links body and soul, and Spiritus Mundi, linking the sublunary and translunary worlds. These lunatic terms are Auxerre’s version of Ormus’s doctrine of the two realities, world and otherworld. In VTO’s music these two spirits are united. This, Rémy concedes modestly, is perhaps a grand unified theory of the soul: at certain unimaginably high levels of heat and compression—that is to say, genius—we and the cosmos are one. Ormus Cama is the proof incarnate of this theory.

  Starving for soul food, the stadium-filling legions swallow large gobbets of the above effusions. What really excites them, however, is catastrophe: Marco Sangria’s line-by-line, image-by-image exposition of Ormus’s eschatological world-view. The Quake is coming, the Big One th
at will swallow us all. Dance to the music, for tomorrow, suckers, we die.

  Eschatology and gossip: the uranium and plutonium of the late twentieth century. Vina has made the story of her life, and Ormus’s, into the world’s soap opera. Such is the frisson engendered by the famous celibacy oath that half the world’s women line up to offer Ormus what they hope will be irresistible temptation. These appled Eves are not unlike male bar-room boasters who back their improbable charms against the resistances of all forbidden women—movie stars, lesbians, their best friends’ wives. Ormus, holding himself aloof from all blandishments, even engenders violence in some women who think it unreasonable of him to deny himself, who espy in his rejection of them an insult to red-blooded women everywhere. Threats are received, and the policing of VTO concerts, as well as security at the Rhodopé Building, is stepped up as a result. Such bacchic fury is one part of the temper of the times.

  Vina has her own booth at Sam’s these days. There, surrounded by lovers and disciples—Marco, Rémy, whoever’s in town—she holds forth. She has wisdom of her own to impart, and wants the world to know her views on, for example, the latest quasi-sciences. Biofeedback and cognitive behavioral therapy, orthomolecularism and macrobiotics. She praises the beneficial effects of Jamaica dogwood, of cabbage rubbed against the skin, of the therapeutic use of sound waves. While her crusading vegetarianism prevents her from drinking the blood of lizards and bats, she graciously concedes that the beneficial effects of such beverages have been proven beyond much doubt.

  Her diet book and her health and fitness régime will become worldwide best-sellers. Later, she will successfully pioneer the celebrity exercise video and license a range of organic vegetarian meals, which, under the name Vina’s Vege Table(r), will also succeed. (In the commercials, healthy young consumers make the tripartite gesture of her rock fans, the two-finger peace V, the time-out T with its connotations of sporty leisure, and the approbatory thumb-and-forefinger O. Vege Table Organics is what we are asked to believe the sign language recommends, but that’s just standard adland doublespeak.)