The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Yeah, but if we’d listened to Ormus, what then? Like all Cassandras, he was short on remedies. In the end such prophecy is useless. You just have to live your life, make your choices, move forward until you can’t.

  In February 1989 Vina Apsara and her new band flew to Mexico for a series of arena concerts. Without telling her, I caught a flight to Mexico City too. I had her itinerary, the list of her hotels and so on. This time I would not let her escape.

  15

  BENEATH HER FEET

  When I show up at the Cattlemen’s Club in downtown Mexico City she shocks me, trumps my ace, by beginning instantly, abundantly, to weep. She’s slumped in a deep armchair and the liquid level in the bottle beside her confirms what I already know from the papers, i.e. that the first gig didn’t go too well. Her band is still learning to play together, the papers say, and she looked oddly ill at ease on stage without Ormus there for reassurance, Ormus Cama in his glass box. They find things to praise, her beauty and so on, but she knows when she’s being panned. She sniffs and snorts; the tears make it impossible for me to judge accurately the condition of her nose. How far do I have to run to get away from you, Rai, unfairly she sobs, fuck you, how deep a hole do I have to dig. Large men move menacingly in my direction but she waves them irritatedly away.

  I call it the Cattlemen’s Club because its fat-cat confidence is a Latin American echo of the establishment in Dallas, the soap not the city, where men in big hats clutched bourbon-and-branch and bitched about the price of oil. But this joint makes Dallas look like the boondocks, like any place where two roads cross and then make a low fast run for the horizon. It’s a mighty stone-clad pyramid set on the upper floors of a shining high-rise near the Zócalo and it looks like all the extinguished peoples of the region have been exhumed to construct it: Olmecs, Zapotecs, Mayas, Toltecs, Mixtecs, Purépechas, Aztecs. It is a temple, in its monied way: a place of power with added settees and liveried waiters. You suspect the covert presence of altars, of knife-wielding priests. Vina, the sacrifice du jour, has been given a suite of rooms, where publicists and journalists and photographers and hangers-on and heavies come and go. To get past security I have to send in my card. She keeps me waiting just long enough for me to start worrying about a humiliating rejection. Then I am led into her presence to be greeted by her waterworks display, also the shocking red hair, and the strange thing is that my mouth is dry, my heart’s pounding, I’m actually scared. I have come naked into this conference chamber, with, to paraphrase James Caan in The Godfather, nothing but my dick in my hand. I’ve got only my dumb love to offer, this love that is finally after all the second-fiddle decades insisting on taking over the orchestra. Take me or leave me, that’s what I’ve come to say, knowing that if she doesn’t want me I’m defenseless, a cap-in-hand schoolboy without even an apple for a bribe.

  Meanwhile, this being one of the earth’s buggier zones, I’m being bitten all over, scratching at my neck like Toshiro Mifune’s scummy samurai (but without the sword skills). I’m in a nightmare. It’s the beginning of the last act of the play and I’ve walked out on stage and there are no lines in my head, no prompter hissing from his box by the footlights. Vina, I say. She puts a finger across her lips, dries her eyes, waves me into a chair. Not that, she says. Let’s talk about something else. In these last Mexican days it’s a command she often gives.

  She wants to tell me about the hot political scandal that’s flaring up now, the President’s brother who is on the run after embezzling the equivalent of eighty-four million U.S. dollars, there isn’t a country prepared to give him asylum, not even Cuba, so he circles the globe like a ship carrying nuclear waste, unable to find a port. And this is supposed to be the new, clean régime! (The name of Piloo Doodhwala is on both our lips, so there is no need for it to be spoken.) She wants to talk also about the Argentinian footballer, Achilles Hector, who has been kidnapped by the revolutionists in the south. His amazing name, Greek and Trojan?, winner and loser?, a double hero, she says. His captors gave deadlines. They threatened to cut off his toes, one by one, if their demands were not met. But the deadlines passed, and so far no toe in the mail. The revolutionists are also football fanatics. It’s a question of which of their passions will prevail.

  She wants to talk about the villa on the Pacific coast, the one she stayed in for the first three days of her Mexican sojourn, to which she will shortly return. The Villa Huracán outside Aparajitos, caught between the jungle and the sea. From the jungle comes the singing of the obscene bird of night, perhaps Lowry’s Trogon ambiguus ambiguus, his wonderful ambiguous bird. Deep in the ocean echoes the roar of the huracán, the god of storms. The villa is actually not a villa at all but a row of pink-washed edifices—“rooms”—topped with palapas, high cones of thatch. It is jointly owned by the shockingly young new Colchis boss, Mo Mallick, and a Hollywood heavy hitter named Kahn. The death of Yul Singh and the retirement of VTO, his biggest act, has holed Colchis badly, but Mallick has pushed his leaking boat out for Vina on this tour, gambling that she can make it without Ormus. Hence the offer of the Huracán. Hence, also, one reason for Vina’s present depression. She has been heavily backed to come through and it looks as if she may not be able to deliver the required goods. Mallick, at twenty-eight already a Vegas high roller, can take a hit if he has to, like any player at the big tables he knows the money isn’t the point, it’s just a way of keeping score. But he cares about the score. To win the big ones gets to be a matter of pride. To lose? Let’s talk about something else.

  The other guests, she wants to tell me, were a famous Chilean novelist and his much younger, and strikingly attractive, Irish-American wife. There was a breakfast terrace halfway down the cliffside, where fruit and tortillas and champagne arrived in a picnic hamper that rattled through the air on ropes and pulleys. El desayunismo magical, the novelist called it. The Irish-American wife spoke of her close involvement with the republican movement “back home,” that is to say in Ulster, whose bitter earth she had never trodden, telling of her fund-raising efforts and the profound commitment with which the republican leadership was working for peace. Meanwhile the novelist ate and drank heartily, refused to comment on the Irish question and pronounced himself too frail to descend any further. Sea level will have to do without me. He sat on the terrace in an old polo shirt and khaki shorts. Vina kept him company while the entertainment executives gamboled at the ocean’s edge below, competing for the attention of the young Boston-Irish aristocrat-revolutionary wife, splashing around her in the shallows like great lumbering hounds, all eagerness and dangling tongues. Speaking of dangling, Vina on the breakfast terrace observed that the writers legs were wide apart and he wasn’t wearing any underwear. His balls were big and smooth and pink, the same pink as the villa walls, and his cock was big and gray, the dull gray of the stone slab on which he sat with the ocean at his rear. I couldn’t stop looking, Vina tells me, not bad for seventy-five, I thought. Afterwards I asked Mallick if the old gent had been trying to impress me, I mean, was this flirting?, or what?—but Mallick said no, he does it all the time, it’s just innocent display. That’s how I think of the Huracán now, she quips gaily. As a sacred place, the place where innocence is displayed.

  She doesn’t know how to make the choice I am obliging her to make.

  She is brittle, over-bright, stretched.

  She wants to talk about anything on earth except love.

  Vina, I say again. She glares at me, furious now. This is one thirsty city, she says. The sub-soil water levels are falling alarmingly?, and any day now the place will just subside, just drop out of sight. Now that’s what I call falling-down drunk. And then there’s the Pope, I’m supposed to follow his act, how’s that for lousy timing.

  The Pope has just played Mexico City and he even talked about rock ’n’ roll. Yes, my children, the answer is indeed blowing in the wind, not in the wind of godless desolation but in the harmonious breeze that fills the sails of the ship of faith and blows its passengers all th
e way to heaven. Vina, who couldn’t match his audiences but knows that VTO could probably have given him a run for his money, has to console herself by sneering at the over-extended metaphor and by retailing the latest papal gossip. His curt anger towards worker-priests, liberation theology, all that jazz. And there’s this story doing the rounds about his driver, she says. No, not the chauffeur of the Popemobile. I mean his driver back in the old days when he was plain Cardinal Wojtyla? Apparently this driver had been with him for years, and when it was time to elect a new Pope the two of them drove down from Cracow in some little beat-up Polish pollution-wagon. What a road movie, right?, the future Pope and his workingman sidekick strikin’ out for glory. Anyway, they get to the Vatican, the driver waits and waits, the smoke goes up, habemus Papain, and finally he hears the news, its his good buddy, his road pal, his boss. Then a messenger comes to see him. Drive the car back to Cracow and then find yourself another job, says the messenger. Your ass is fired.

  I’ve seen her in all kinds of moods before, but never so desperate. She’s flying to Guadalajara in the morning—Guadalajara, where Pancho Villa shot the clock and stopped time, she says—and she knows the show isn’t right, her life isn’t right, and she doesn’t know how to fix either one. She looks at my face and all she sees there is leave him, Vina, come live with me and be my love, and she can’t handle that at present, let’s talk about something else, she starts cracking Orpheus jokes. This is an old riff of hers, one she first laid down when she heard I was moving into an Orpheum; me, Rai, scion of the clan with the worst voices in Indian musical history. You should change the name, she said, out of respect you should name it after a different fucking god. Maybe Morpheus, the god of sleep. I played along: How about Metamorpheus, god of change. It went downhill from there. We came up with Endomorpheus and Ectomorpheus, the twinned gods of body type. Waldorpheus Astorpheus, god of hotels. Motorpheus, the biker god. Hans Castorpheus, the magic mountaineer. Shortpheus, god of anger. Conpheus, the head-scratching, puzzled god.

  She wants to talk about gods because death-worshipping Mexico has startled her. Compared to the deities they’ve got here, she says, Apollo’s just a theater, Poseidon’s an adventure, Hermes is a fucking silk scarf.

  She comes to a halt, looks at me. Vina doesn’t often implore, but I see that right now she needs me to take up the chit-chat baton and run with it. She needs me not to force her to face what must be faced. Mutely, she pleads for compassion; even for mercy.

  Incredible violence is the gods’ stock-in-trade, I therefore commence obligingly to improvise. Rape, murder, terrible revenges. You go to them with open arms, but these are fatal embraces. The old gods, Hindu Norse Greek, laid down no moral laws, requiring nothing of us except worship. Reverence, the deified Herakles tells Philoctetes in Sophocles’ play, is what Olympus digs above all else. On the surface this sounds preferable to the newer guys, no sermons on the mount, no Islamic how- to manuals, but watch out, there’s an elephant trap. To revere the gods is to fear their wrath and therefore to seek constantly to propitiate them. Natural disasters are proofs of the gods’ displeasure, because the world is our fault. Therefore incessant expiations. Therefore human sacrifice, et cetera.

  That’s what I love about you, Vina says, relief and gratitude concealed beneath her sardonic accents. Wind you up and you’ll run off at the mouth for a good half hour; which allows a girl to tune out and get some rest.

  It is at this point that I mention earthquakes.

  Which isn’t so surprising, given our location in notoriously quake-prone Mexico, not to mention the subject of VTO’s biggest hit album and Ormus Cama’s recent warnings about the coming apocalypse. I am not a superstitious man or, as I hope I have made plain, a religious one. I do not believe that by speaking of earthquakes I called down on our heads the anger of the gods. But for the record I note the fact that I so spoke.

  Also, to be precise: not on my head. On Vina’s.

  Earthquakes, I point out, have always made men eager to placate the gods. After the great Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755—that catastrophe which Voltaire saw as an irrefutable argument for the tragic view of life and against Leibnizian optimism—the locals decided on a propitiatory auto-da-fé. The celebrated philosopher Pangloss was hanged (the more conventionally approved bonfire wouldn’t light). His associate, Herr Candide of Thunder-ten-tronckh, a name like an occult incantation, likely to provoke earthquakes where none had previously occurred, was flogged rhythmically and for a long while upon his bloodied buttocks. Immediately after this auto-da-fé there was an even bigger earthquake, and that part of the city which remained standing instantly fell down. That’s the trouble with human sacrifice, the heroin of the gods. It’s highly addictive. And who will save us from deities with major habits to feed?

  So god’s a junkie now, Vina says.

  The gods, I correct her. Monotheism sucks, like all despotisms. The species is naturally, democratically polytheistic, apart from that evolutionary élite which has dispensed with the divine requirement entirely. You instinctively want the gods to be many because you are One.

  And the stories, she says, her mood improving. She’s just kidding around now, shooting the breeze, getting her mind off her troubles. I’ve managed to put a faint smile back on her face. What about the stories, she repeats. Does a damned heathen such as you not even find pleasure there?

  When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure, the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn’t be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving belief of the reader in the well-told tale.

  The myths, you may have noticed, require their protagonists to be stupid. To walk blithely into mortal danger, blind to the most obvious traps.

  (All this and probably more, I permit myself to say. I have not spoken like this, so exhaustively, so unrestrainedly, in a long time. And I repeat, I do not believe in hubris, the crime of thumbing your nose at the gods, and therefore I also do not believe in the coming of Nemesis. But I have sworn to tell everything and so I must also say that before what happened happened I made these, in the eyes of believers, no doubt injudicious remarks.)

  Let’s go to my hotel room and get fucked up, Vina briskly proposes. A snort of soma, a sip of ambrosia. Sure, I’m up for that. Lead on, my queen. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I am in the position of a mortal man petitioning a so to speak goddess for love. Vina and Adonis: like that. I am aware that humans do not usually come well out of these encounters.

  But the non-existent gods, too, can fall.

  Her style, these days, is late-eighties ultraglamour; no more hippie (or radical) chic. Très movie star, with an extra shock ’n’ roll twist of out-rageousness. Tyler, Gaultier, Alaïa, Léger, Wang, but most often Santo Medusa: his all-in-one technicolor-beaded catsuits, his shocking-pink smokings worn double-breasted over a shirtless torso, his chain-mail mini-dresses slit to the waist. Vina and Tina, people say, are slugging it out for the ageless-diva crown.

  This is the hotel room. This is the woman I love. These are some of the last moments of her life on earth, her life above ground. Every stupid thing she says, every crack she makes, every heart she breaks, these are things I will forever hug to myself, to save them from the barranco, the abyss. This is the CD she plays: Raindogs, the honky-tonk blues as reinvented and growled out by Lee Baby Simms. She starts singing along with Simms, low and slow, and the hair rises on my neck. Will I see you again / on a downtown train. The walls seem to be swaying to the music. It’s like Valéry, I remark. Le roc marche, et trébuche; et chaque pierre fée / se sent un poids nouveau qui vers l’azur délire! Valerie who, she shrugs, not caring, lost in music and smoke.

  She�
��s on her way to Guadalajara, the city where time stops. To Guadalajara and beyond.

  This is us, making love. She always made love as if it were for the last time, that was how she did everything, how she led her life; but for us, though neither of us knows it, this in fact is the last time. The last time for these breasts. The breasts of Helen of Troy were so astonishing that when she bared them to her husband at the fall of Troy, Menelaus was unable to do her harm. The sword fell from his nerveless hand. This is the woman I love and these are her breasts. I run this tape over and over in my head. Did you show the earthquake your breasts, Vina, did you bare them to the god of storms, why didn’t you, if you did you might, you surely would, have survived.

  These are the breasts of the woman I love. I place my nose between them and inhale their pungency, their ripeness. I place my cock between them and feel their swollen caress.

  This is Vina, talky as always after sex. She wants to beef about the problem of age for female singers: Diana, Joni, Tina, Nina, herself. Look at Sinatra, she says. He can hardly stand up, there are notes he can’t even dream about any more, and somebody should kill that animal sitting on his head, but he’s a guy, therefore these are not career problems. (Yes, she puts herself up there with the Voice. She’s a Voice too. She has no false modesty. She knows her artistic worth. Tina and me, she says, we’re re-writing the book. Not Fade Away, that’s the new title, honey. We’re telling you how it’s gonna be.)

  She’s on to the younger generation, its inadequacies, its complaints. Here’s Madonna Sangria again, still obsessing in Rolling Stone about the female body. Not its uses but its abuses. Not sex but gender. Will you listen to the low-grade grumpiness in this grouchy kid, Vina growls, talking mostly to herself. Man, we had high octane. We had rage. To whine about guys?, to complain about mom ’n’ pop?, just wasn’t in it. We had the generals and the universe to fight. My boyfriend left me, men are assholes? Give me a break. I’ll take the good-time girls any day. Bop she bop. She bop shewaddywaddy. (She’s singing now.) She’s so fine …