The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Bullshit, she snarls abruptly. She’s wasted and more than half asleep but she’s arguing with herself. Always was a man pulling our strings. Ike Turner Berry Gordy Phil Spector Ormus Cama. Ike Spector Berry Turner. A man is for power and a woman is for pain. I’ll say it again. Orpheus lives, Eurydice dies, right?

  Yeah, but you’re Orpheus too, I start to tell her. It’s your voice that’s making the enchanted stones of the city rise deliriously into the blue, that causes the city’s banks of electrical images to dance. Oraia phone, the best voice, we all know to be yours, not his. And meanwhile he’s the one sinking into his otherworld-underworld, and who’s going to rescue him, I bite my tongue because this is the opposite of the line I have flown south to pursue: Who if not you. Instead I say, It’s time men like him started rescuing themselves.

  And I go on, Anyway, Orpheus dies too. And having said it, I want to rip out my tongue. Wrong, wrong! But what’s said is said.

  Vina’s sitting up in bed now, stone sober and suddenly, illogically, mad as hell. You think you can walk in his shoes, she says. You think you can sleep in his hollow. In your dreams, Rai baby. Never in a million. You came all this way to tell me you want him dead?, maybe you’ll want me dead too, if I don’t bow down before your will, before your fucking dick. You came down here to murder love and call the murder love.

  No, that’s not it, I say uselessly. Dionysiac Vina has risen up in wrath, goddess of pleasure and destruction. Go, she orders, and miserably I obey.

  The next day in Guadalajara—I’ve followed her there too, but I’m on my own, barred from backstage, unable to reach her by hook or crook or carrier pigeon—I wander wretchedly, with my thoughts shooting out all over the place, as Moses Herzog says. There’s a woman bishop now in the U.S.A., maybe I could call her, she could probably get through to Vina and I don’t know somehow on a sisterly basis intercede. Stroessner’s out in Paraguay, a coup, but the day they announce a world shortage of dictators will be a cold day in Hell. I see where they executed the Sikhs who carried out the Quadruple Assassination. Say hi to Cool Yul for me, guys, maybe he’s not so cool no more, not where he’s at.

  You’re changing, she said to me. Don’t stop.

  Metamorphosis, this is what I need to explain to her, is what supplants our need for the divine. This is what we can perform, our human magic. I’m talking now not about the ordinary, quotidian changes that are the stuff of modern life (in which, as someone said, only the temporary is contemporary); nor even about the adaptive, chameleon natures which have become so common during our migrant century; but about a deeper, more shocking capacity, which kicks in only under extreme pressure. When we are faced with the Immense. At such a hinge moment we can occasionally mutate into another, final form, a form beyond metamorphosis. A new fixed thing.

  Three of us passed through a membrane in the sky and were transformed by the experience. That’s true. But what is also true is that those transformations were not at that time completed. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that we entered a transit zone: the condition of transformation. A transitional phase in which we might have been trapped for ever, which only the imperative force of the Immense can force towards completion.

  The Immense has shown its face to Ormus Cama. He has become the agent of that revelation. For him, whatever the consequences, there can be no going back.

  For Vina and myself—this is what I need her to understand—the Immense has taken the form of our lifelong, intermittent but inescapable love. Thus, if she will only leave Ormus for me, our lives will change entirely, we will both be altered in astonishing ways, but the new form which then emerges—she and I, together, in love—this will last for ever. For ever and a fucking day.

  Putting the screws on her? You bet. I repeat: only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become. Lichas, hurled into the waters by Herakles, drained of life by fear, turned into a rock. Turned for ever into a rock, you can go and sit on it—on him—right now, in the Euboean Gulf, not far from Thermopylae.

  This is what people get wrong about transformation. We’re not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We’re not science fiction. It’s like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn’t afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won’t turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It’s done.

  Scientists get angry when laymen misunderstand, for example, the uncertainty principle. In an age of great uncertainties it is easy to mistake science for banality, to believe that Heisenberg is merely saying, gee, guys, we just can’t be sure of anything, it’s all so darn uncertain, but isn’t that, like, beautiful? Whereas actually he’s telling us the exact opposite: that if you know what you’re doing you can pin down the exact quantum of uncertainty in any experiment, any process. To knowledge and mystery we can now ascribe percentage points. A principle of uncertainty is also a measure of certainty. It’s not a lament about shifting sands but a gauge of the solidity of the ground.

  By the same token, as we say in Hug-me, I get annoyed when people misunderstand change. We’re not talking about the goddamn I Ching here. We’re talking about the deepest stirrings of our essential natures, of our secret hearts. Metamorphosis isn’t whimsy. It’s revelation.

  In various bars around the Plaza de Armas, the Calzada Independencia Sur, the Calle de Mariachis, I’m learning to tell the difference between tequilas. Sauza, Ángel, Cuervo, the three big distilleries. For me it’s between Sauza and Ángel, but then maybe I haven’t tasted enough of the other guy’s wares, hey, camarero, hit me again, hombre, muy pronto. The white tequila is the cheap hooch; then there’s reposado, that’s three months old; but for the good stuff you should stick with the tres generaciones, the name’s an exaggeration but six to twelve years of ageing are well worth the wait. At some point I check out Orozco’s Man in Flames mural. He’s a national institution now, a major brand name, but back in the thirties he had to flee to America, where he made his reputation, the familiar story, you’ve got to leave home and get the gringos to love you before you get the time of day in your old neighborhood. Five minutes later, usually, you’re called a sell-out, but Orozco is still in favor, lucky man.

  She has made her choice and I’m not it. She has chosen not to change.

  I wonder with the help of the three generations of the Ángel distillery how to make it through the rest of my life. I am only forty-two years old. Shit, she’s older than I am, what is this, have all the under-forty women in the world written me off? I don’t know. I guess if you drink down all these generations you get to be incredibly old. Three more generations, please, camarero. Here they come, begat begat begat. That’s better. The women look younger all the time. The busboy’s sprouting wings.

  If I had a soul I would sell it now and gain my heart’s desire. And another three generations, sir waiter, if you will.

  Señor I think perhaps it is already sufficient. Where is your hotel. If you wish it, I will call for you a taxi.

  On February 13, 1989, the last but one night of her life (we have been here before), the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara chooses the good-for-nothing greaseball playboy Raúl Páramo, a man given to the wearing of personal jewelry, to be the agent of my sexual humiliation. I’m waiting for her in the hotel lobby when she sweeps in, half naked, already oncefucked, in the arms of this pathetic nonentity who is grinning as dementedly as a village idiot who has won the lottery and whose doom, as things turn out, is even closer than her own. She pauses right in front of me, tongue-twistin’, clutching at him not three feet from where I stand. She is making her point. You’re nothing in my life, Rai, you mean even less than this punk, so do me a favor, fuck off and die.

  I, however, have received from the lady a lifetime’s instruction in the art of waiting for whatever scraps of herself she may care to throw in my direction. Surrendering the torn remnants of my pride, I bribe the floor security officer and a
m therefore allowed to spend the night in the corridor outside her suite, sitting on a small folding stool—every photographer has one, along with a nose for trouble and a light stepladder—and preparing to throw myself at her feet and beg to be allowed back into some dirty back room of her life.

  As Vina once sat outside tormented Ormus’s locked door, waiting to be let in, so that she could care for him, so I now wait for her. We are one another’s echoes. We are the ringing in one another’s ears.

  Now it’s noon on Valentine’s Day. We have been here before. Here is Vina in the hotel corridor, panicky and uncertain, locked out of her suite, in flight from her dying lover; and here is doglike Rai, her faithful retainer, ready as ever to offer his abject, panting services.

  We have been here before. It’s two hours later and a helicopter is flying over blue agave. My brief exile is at an end; her feelings dictated by her needs, Vina again sees me as an essential ally, at present her onliest help and stay. I am a rock, like Lichas hurled into the sea. And a rock feels no pain.

  We pass her retinue on the road below. Of all you bastards he’s the only one I can trust. Vina, who thinks of trust as a prison, has declared her trust in me.

  She’s badly jolted by the Raúl Páramo business. In my headphones I hear the nostalgic sound of Hug-me, the argot of our youth. It’s been a long time. Afterwards, remembering, I will be powerfully moved by the thought that Vina near her end circled back to our beginning. Of course the private language was useful, to shield our talk from the headphoned ears of the pilot and co-pilot, but for that purpose even English would probably have sufficed. She went further than she needed, resurrecting old Bombay in the hot dry Mexican air. Remembering, I can’t help thinking of her decision as an earnest of our intimacy; as a promise of things to come.

  We have been here before. We know that this promise won’t, can’t, be kept.

  She is a worried woman: the police, Páramo, the drugs. She is even—astonishingly—concerned about me. Can I ever forgive her awful behavior et cetera, sometimes she just lashes out and hurts the people she cares for most, and how strong I was to still be there for her?, not to walk away?, to give her another chance. But can she please please take a rain check in the matter of love, because right now she can’t think straight?, the tour, everything?, she owes it to me to wait until her head is clear. Rai, you’ve waited this long, honey, you can wait do-teen more days.

  In the language of love’s childhood I hear the words that thrill my still-besotted adult heart. Okay, I’ll wait, I say. I’ll hang on, Vina, but not for long.

  Hug me honey honey hug me. Hang on Sloopy, come on come on.

  The fierce heat of the day, the cheering crowd in the football field, the two silver Bentleys of Don Ángel Cruz, the frightened animals, the mariachis, and Vina singing: Trionfi Amore, the last song anyone ever heard her sing.

  … il cor tormenta

  Al fin diventa

  Felicità.

  Then the earthquake. I take up my cameras and shoot, and for me there are no more sounds, only the silence of event, the silence of the photographic image.

  Tequila! We have been here before.

  In the time of Voltaire it was believed that underground seams of sulfur connected the sites of earthquakes. Sulfur, with its stench of Hell.

  Faced with the blazing magnificence of the everyday, the artist is both humbled and provoked. There are photographs now of events on an unimaginable scale: the death of stars, the birth of galaxies, soup-stirrings near the dawn of Time. Bright crowds of suns gather in the wildernesses of the sky. Magellanic clouds of glory, heavenly Pisan towers set in a celestial Campo dei Miracoli, lean across the frame. When we look at these images, there is, yes, legitimate wonderment at our own lengthening reach and grasp. But it would be vain indeed to praise our puny handiwork—the mastery of the Hubble wielders, the computer enhancers, the colorizers, all the true-life-fantasist counterparts of Hollywood’s techno-wizards and imagineers—when the universe is putting on so utterly unanswerable a show. Before the majesty of being, what is there to do but hang our heads?

  This is irksome. This, naturally, pisses us off.

  There is that within us which believes us worthy of the stars. Turn right on this forking path and you find god; turn left and there is art, its uncowed ambition, its glorious irreverent over-reach. In our hearts we believe—we know—that our images are capable of being the equals of their subjects. Our creations can go the distance with Creation; more than that, our imagining—our imagemaking—is an indispensable part of the great work of making real. Yes, I will even assert as much as that. (Usually I make such assertions when I’m alone in the sealed privacy of the bathroom, but today all bathroom truths must come out to play.)

  For example: nobody has yet successfully photographed the gashes in the cosmos which, if Ormus Cama is to be believed, are responsible for the present rash of catastrophes. To get such a picture would be to effect a profound reality shift, a first-magnitude change in our understanding of what is.

  However, there is a new picture of an earthquake on the sun. It made all the world’s front pages in full, enhanced color. The earthquake looks like a heat bubble exploding through the surface of a hot thick golden porridge. But the seismic solar porridge ripples we see are apparently more than seven Everests high—over forty miles.

  If we didn’t have the photograph the news of the earthquake would lack felt reality. As it is, every newspaper reader on the planet is now asking the same tremulous question.

  Is the sun in trouble too?

  Thus, a photograph can create the meaning of an event.

  Sometimes even when it’s a fake.

  In my last photograph of Vina the ground beneath her feet is cracked like crazy paving and there’s liquid everywhere. She’s standing on a slab of street that’s tilting to the right; she’s bending left to compensate. Her arms are spread wide, her hair’s flying, the expression on her face is halfway between anger and fear. Behind her the world is out of focus. There is a sense of eruptions all around her lurching body: great releases of water, terror, fire, tequila, dust. This last Vina is calamity incarnate, a woman in extremis, who is also by chance one of the most famous women in the world.

  After the disappearance of Vina Apsara at the Villa Huracán, my earthquake picture will join that small stock of photographic images—Monroe’s flying skirt, the burning girl in Indochina, Earthrise—which actually become experiences, part of the collective memory of the human race. Like every photographer, I have hoped to end my days with my name attached to a few powerful images, but the Vina picture will outstrip even my most ambitious, self-glorifying aspirations. The Lady Vanishes, as it will come to be known, will surely be my bitter posterity. If I am remembered at all, it can only be for this. So in one sense at least, Vina and I will be joined together for ever, in spite of everything, a consummation for which I’ve wished, all my life, even more devoutly than I’ve wished for professional success. Yes, we’re linked for all time, beyond hope, beyond life: metamorphosed by the Immense into the Eternal. But I was wrong about the nature of the metamorphic force working its marvels upon us. In our case, it was not love but death.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  At the beginning of my life in photography I was guilty of an inglorious fraud: a dead man’s pictures were passed off as my own. Ever since then—as I have sometimes admitted to myself, though at other points I have temporarily managed to suppress the memory of that twisted boot heel, of the other hanged man in my life—I have needed whatever is the godless equivalent of redemption; call it self-respect. Here’s an irony: when at last I do create one of the iconic images of the age, I can only wish I hadn’t, I at once and for ever concede that she, the subject, was of a worth far greater than any photo I could take of her; I cannot bear to be left with this single mute reflection of her infinite variety.

  You can have the fucking photo. I want her back.

  Also, because the picture will first
appear alongside news reports of what I keep calling her disappearance because I’m finding it hard to use the other word, it will be permanently associated in the public mind with that final moment of terror. This is how people are. Even though we all know there could not have been a photographer present at Vina’s end, we accept the authenticity of the image without much trouble. My picture of Vina in a heaving Tequila street mutates under the pressure of the world’s need for last things, under the pressure of this global manifestation of the Immense, into a portrait of the star at the moment of her, say it, death.

  So it’s a sort of unintentional fake. Another fraud. And though I will try to set the record straight, telling the story of the photograph over and over again, nobody will really be listening. They will already know all they need to know. The Lady Vanishes. The world has made up its mind.

  We have been here before.

  This is a helicopter, hovering just above the broken ground. This is the woman I love, calling to me through the open door. I’m going, then. And I’m shouting back, I can’t go. What? Go. Fuck you. What? Goodbye, Hope.

  And this is what people are saying when they aren’t saying what they mean.

  I’m going, then. (Come with me, please, I need you, I can’t believe you won’t come with me.) I can’t go. (My darling, I want never to let you out of my sight again, but goddamn it, you kick me around, you know that?, do you want to see the bruises?, and just this once I’m not putting you first. I’ll be there soon enough, this time you can wait for me. If you want me, you’ll wait. That’s right, a test. Yeah. Maybe it really is.) What? (You bastard?, you think you can hold out on me? Oh Jesus, Rai, don’t play games, not now, not today.) Go. (Okay, no games. I love you forever and beyond. But this is my work. I’ll be there sooner than blinking. Go. I’m right behind you. I love you. Go.)