The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  He is, additionally, recently deceased, at the age of eighty-one.

  Mira’s mother was not Italian. Surprisingly for such a conservative man, Celano, who remained single long enough to disappoint more than a generation of young Italian-American women, fell hard at the end of his sixth decade for an Indian woman doctor whom he “met cute,” as they say in the movies, when her taxi’s Ibo driver deliberately rammed his cabs Hausa wheel jockey on Central Park South. The two cab drivers, passionate supporters of the opposing sides in the bloody, escalating conflict over the attempted secession of Biafra from Nigeria, initially identified one another as enemies by their prominently displayed rear- and side-window flag decals and aggressive bumper stickers. They then wound down their windows and engaged in a stop-go exchange of insults—Tree swinger! Oil slime! Gowon goon! Ojukwu oaf!—as their cabs inched forward through the thick rush-hour traffic; until at length the young Ibo, hot for secession, or perhaps just plain overheated on that steamy summer afternoon, swung his wheels and smashed into the taunting Hausa’s vehicle in a shower of breaking glass. The drivers were unhurt, but the passengers in the two rear seats were sent flying within their confined spaces, so they took some knocks.

  Tomaso Celano, always the gallant gent, insisted on ensuring that the lady in the other cab had not been injured, but then confessed to having double vision himself and sat down on the parkside curb with a bad case, as he put it, of the tweet-tweet-tweets. Fortunately the lady was a qualified doctor. Mehra Umrigar Celano was born in Bombay (still no escaping these Bombay Parsis), came West to attend medical school, stayed on, married Tommy just nine weeks after the Biafran Taxi War, named their daughter Mira because it’s a name in India as well as Italy, plus it’s easy to say, and in spite of becoming a consultant oncologist at New York Hospital died of a perniciously aggressive breast cancer before her fortieth birthday, when her daughter was still only four years old. Old man Celano, declaring himself too antique to care for the infant, farmed Mira out to a series of relatives whom the little girl quickly discovered to be untypical Italians: that is, resentful of their extended-family obligations towards her, deficient in the provision of love, and unwilling to have her around for very long. In spite of this uncertain, peripatetic home environment, and the difficult discontinuities of an education spread across the high schools of three boroughs, Mira became a straight-? student, a model of diligence, who was accepted by Columbia University’s School of Journalism and immediately ran wild, as if all her hard work and good behavior up to that moment had been a prisoner’s ruse, a way of hastening the date of her release. She had hidden her wings all her life, and now she intended to fly.

  In her freshman year she unfurled a singing voice that made her an instant campus star, ran with a fast crowd and got herself pregnant, all in a single semester. She decided to keep the baby, dropped out of college, and was instantly disowned by her father, after which he thoughtlessly dropped dead playing tennis in Cape Porpoise, Maine, thus making a reconciliation impossible. He’d been crouching to receive serve when he was murdered—aced—by a huge heart seizure, and fell face first on to the hard cement court, still holding his racquet, but unfortunately defaulting the game. He died before his arms had time to come up and defend his face, which consequently suffered a broken nose that sorely impaired his gravitas, making him seem, in death, far coarser than he’d ever looked in life. With that eminent nose squashed over to the right he wasn’t a big shot any more but a plug-ugly boxer who’d lost the last in a series of losing battles. It was a quick end, but it didn’t come fast enough to keep Mira in his will. Not a red cent to my daughter Mira who has been the disappointment of my old age.

  The money was divided. Some went to charitable Italian community projects in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, the rest to the same relatives who had blighted Mira’s early life. The lucky heirs made no move to assist their disinherited relation and even snubbed her at her father’s funeral, as if to say, forget about it, darling, don’t call, don’t write, you’re out on your own. Mira accepted their challenge. After failing to break into journalism, even of the lowliest sort, she started singing for her supper in dingy piano bars, taking her baby daughter along in a carry cot and hiding her behind the stage-area drapes, or under the piano, or in the women’s room, or anywhere, just praying she’d sleep through the set, bribing busboys and waitresses to take care of her if she woke up.

  The girl is now a little over one year old. Her name is Tara, meaning—in Hug-me—star.

  While I’m reading the file, Ormus hobbles off to the bathroom and takes his time there. I should be intervening but I don’t know how to, not yet, anyway. Also, I’m reading. Also, I’m not too sure where the bathroom is.

  Easy to see where this Mira Celano’s interest in Vina comes from, I reflect. In spite of all the differences of community, opportunity and class, she has plenty in common with her idol: the mixed-race family, the early orphaning, the loveless childhood years, the outcast’s deep-seated sense of rejection and exile. That thing about feeling out on the perimeter line and being pushed, by a powerful centripetal force, towards the heart of the game. And she’s penniless now, just as Vina was when she started out.

  And there’s her voice, of course, the voice she kept under wraps for so long. Maybe, like Vina, she had secret places where she went to sing. Her own Jefferson Lick somewhere in the park.

  I can readily imagine that when she started singing, during her solitary semester at Columbia, she was at once surrounded by admirers calling her the new Vina Apsara, or even better than that, and telling her to cut a demo, to forget journalism and reach for the stars. But then suddenly she was broke, the fair-weather college friends were gone and demos and producers and stardom seemed very far away. The repro-Vina business, however, was thriving. So, as she afterwards tells me: If I couldn’t be the new Vina, then I’d be the old one. That was the way I looked at it. I taped the picture you took—you know, Vina in the quake—on the wall of my room and decided, Okay, for now I’m her.

  Ormus is back from the John, looking both better and worse. I have other tapes, he says, and starts pushing buttons.

  Here on three hundred screens is Mira Celano with her sleeping baby, watched by a spy camera high in a corner. She’s in a tiny, unhappy dressing room, wearing a thin kimono-style dressing gown and preparing to take off her stage make-up. When she pulls off the red wig and the hairnet below it, I let out a small cry. Waist-length dark hair tumbles down her back. She shakes it loose, picks up a comb, bends forward so that the hair hangs over her face and all the way to the floor, and combs out her tangles. Then, at her mirror, she starts on her face. Once again, I’m amazed. Much of the dark skin color is coming off on the tissues. This girl has actually been blacking up to play dark Vina, crossing, in her own way, the heavily mined color line. Her own complexion—although the tape quality makes it hard to be certain—looks to be a light olive.

  She’s finished. Now in the mirror is a beautiful if kind of slutty young girl, more Latin-than Indian-looking, a young single mother fighting for survival in the badness of the city, and really pretty unlike her meal ticket, barren Vina, Mrs. Ormus Cama, my dead love. To realize this is like waking from a dream.

  You shouldn’t have done this, I tell Ormus, trying to work out the number of people downtown who have had to be paid off to allow us our uptown voyeurism. This is wrong, I say.

  Look, he whispers, ignoring my qualms. On the monitors, Mira Celano is taking off her kimono. Underneath it is Vina’s naked body. Vina with lighter skin, but Vina nevertheless, in every last detail, the weight and angle of the breasts, the jaunty sling of the hips, the full, the incomparable Vina ass, the thick unshaven bush. I am standing behind Ormus and push my fist into my mouth and bite down hard. If I were to gasp, it would reveal my secret, and now, more than ever, I want to keep that secret to myself.

  Now that she’s back, I hear myself madly thinking. Now that she has returned from the grave.

  Orm
us hits more buttons. Here is Mira Celano walking home alone with little Tara in a stroller. With another leap of the heart I recognize the Bowery, Cooper Union, St. Mark’s. This girl is practically my neighbor. She waves at the mooching dope peddlers, works the stroller up half a dozen steps, unlocks a door. She’s calling out something as she goes inside, but the sound quality is poor, I can’t hear what she’s saying.

  Okay, wait a minute, Ormus murmurs, and I realize I’ve spoken aloud. In the next thirty seconds he performs a miracle of audio engineering, isolating her voice, cleaning out the background, compensating for the distorting effects of magnifying her faint words. Okay, here we go, he whispers. This is so good.

  Yo, homes, I’m in the house! Yo yo yo homie-o!

  If there’s a man in there, I think, if she’s calling out to a lover rather than a couple of girlfriends, it’s possible I may have to kill him.

  You understand what she’s telling us, Ormus says, freezing the frame, trapping Mira Celano on her doorstep in mid-yo. She’s saying she’s come back. She’s saying hi, honey, I’m home.

  This is insane, I say, snapping out of it once more. Ormus, you have to stop this. It’s like you’re stalking her. You are stalking her.

  Mary Virgin has a stalker who actually says that, he murmurs absently. Can you believe? The guy comes up to her house every night and calls into the entry system, making like he’s her little hubby back from the old nine to five. Hi, honey, I’m home.

  Yeah, I say, wiping cold sweat from my brow, I can believe it, and this time that nut is you.

  More obstinate button pushing. Here on a long telephoto lens is Mira Celano in her room, it’s a third-floor walk-up at the front, she has the lights on but is leaving the shade up. She’s prowling around in a cream slip worn over a nursing brassière, making phone calls, putting things in her mouth that aren’t chocolates or nachos, washing them down with gulps from a bottle that isn’t Evian or Pellegrino, flopping down on her bed—she’s got a brass bedstead!—zapping on the tv, watching basketball or maybe just stargazing, moondancing, planet-waving, while Tara, the little star in her arms, suckles contentedly. If Mira weren’t still milk-heavy, I muse, her bosom would be less ample than Vina’s. She’d have to pad out her bustier to get the right effect. On the other hand, Vina also liked to watch sports, especially hoop, so they have that in common. Vina knew her Magic from her Kareem and Bird and when the new kid arrived on the block she said to me, half seriously, Let’s all move to Chicago so we can go watch Mike.

  I think: There’s no man in that room. This inordinately pleases me.

  And I think: I’m thinking about this young woman as if she were my lover.

  Abruptly, Ormus shuts the system down. Mira Celano vanishes and I miss her, so help me, I do. This total stranger into whose intimacy I have pried. This nobody with—if only temporarily—the only body that I truly loved. I’m pathetic, I tell myself, and Ormus is beyond that. Ormus Cama is a graybeard loon.

  Ormus, you need help, I make myself say it. Now that you’ve asked me over here I have to tell you. If you don’t get help you’ll be dead inside a year, tops.

  He’s still staring at the darkened monitors. If it is her, he whispers, then anything’s possible. If it’s her then there’s hope.

  It’s not her, I say. The likeness is incredible, but it’s someone else. It’s a Mira Celano, whoever that is. A person you don’t know, whose privacy you have criminally invaded. A person less than half Vina’s age, and able to have a child. And you saw the make-up tape. Come on.

  He softly says, If she chose to come back this way, low key, sub rosa, incognito, step by step, I can understand that, tell her. Tell her, I’m waiting.

  My own unexpected arousal makes me snappish. You require that I go into this woman’s life and say what?, I demand. What, that a dying addict in rock-star heaven has been watching her every move, that he wants her to play his dead wife not only on stage for money but in his bed for the rest of her life?, or I should say his life?, it’s sick, Ormus, don’t look to me for this.

  You have to go, he whispers, openly pleading now. It has to be you. I can’t go. Look at me. I can’t.

  Skeedley-ooh, I’m remembering. Mop! A-lop-a-doo!

  Even if I did go, I say, and we both know I’m surrendering, we both know that Mira Celano—that’s Selayno, by the way, Americanized from the Italian Chelahno—is someone I too now need to meet, even just supposing I did go over there and take this crazy meeting, what the fuck is it for? Tell me why I’d be doing it, what you want me to offer her. Tell me the deal.

  Just, come home, he whispers, so softly now that I have to lean right in to his cracked, dying-junkie lips. Just, Vina, my darling, come home.

  The new places are Izvestia, a couple of blocks up from the Orpheum on the Bowery, which plays mostly trance music, ambient techno for the new acidheads (LSD is back), the grungy Soundgarten in the meat-packing district, and the post-CBGB’s Voodoo Dollhouse at East Tenth Street and Avenue A, where bubbling-under indie bands play to an audience of sharp industry bloodhounds in search of the next big thing. None of these venues would ordinarily book a tribute act like Mira’s Vina, but the spirals of postmodern irony twist tight and fast, and for five minutes that year they twist to Mira’s advantage. Somebody at the Dolls decides that a “necro-themed” night—the crowd as well as the performers to arrive as their favorite dead icon—would be a fabulous one-off kitsch-camp event and perhaps even a celebration of the life of the music in what industry people are calling the year of death. So it’s at the Voodoo Dollhouse, transformed for the occasion into a kind of neon graveyard, a necropolis with rhythm, and on the night of the biggest break of her musical life, that I first see Mira in person.

  Waiting for her to come on, I sit through a series of—to me, at least—entirely forgettable acts, an electronica re-think of the Beach Boys doing the Monster Mash, a group of synchronized but soulless Temptations clones, a competent Mama Cass Elliot wearing a tent and drinking tea, even a no-holds-barred, utterly irony-deficient Liberace. Then Mira’s up, and the moment she opens her mouth the mood of the night changes. This is no longer merely a fancy-dress ball. People are listening. She’s good.

  I haven’t dressed up, but a word from Ormus’s people—from Clea—has ensured my admission. I opt to listen from the bar, and as I drink my third margarita—the tequila is my own private tribute to Vina’s memory—I wonder at the ease with which I’ve fallen back into an old routine. Once again, I’m Ormus’s obedient “kid brother.” Once again I’m playing Joe Cotten to his Citizen Welles, doing his dirty work. Help Ormus. I’ve come to plead his cause with this unknown woman, because I think it could save his life.

  Up there on the Dollhouse stage, Mira Celano’s Vina is sticking knives in my heart. I’m using the margaritas to ease the pain.

  Success breeds excess. After the show it takes a while to get to Mira. There’s a crowd of well-wishers and A&R men and would-be seducers in the way. I lean back in a narrow corridor outside the women’s dressing-room door, waiting for the fan club and the other performers to leave: the Lady Day, the Bessie, the Judy, the Janis, the Patsy Cline, the Tammi Terrell, the Mamas Cass and Thornton, the upsettingly skinny Karen Carpenter, the pseudo-Icon whose “I’ll be your mirror” was the only performance to come anywhere close to Mira’s. By the time it’s my turn Mira Celano is keen to leave. The wig and color are off, she’s tired and wired—she seems fuzzy, fazed—and little Tara is beyond exhausted and cranky. So, what’s your label, Abel, Mira drones, too wrecked to be polite. I’m not in the business, I answer, but you were wonderful, wonderful. (The margaritas have made me emotional.) Don’t tell me, she shrugs, you were a huge Vina fan, she was the biggest thing in your life, left one hell of a heart-shaped hole, until I touched your soul. She turns her back on me and lights a cigarette with practiced, wasted cynicism, ignoring the squalling little girl, who has started throwing things on the floor, including a full glass ashtray. It smashes, there’s glass an
d dead-cigarette detritus everywhere. Mira Celano doesn’t jump. Feeling better now? Then relax, she says, and I’m interested to note that the little girl buys it, she slumps down on a cushion in a corner, sighs resignedly, calms down. Her mother rounds on me. What?, she demands, you have maybe an opinion? No opinion, I say. She nods, not really caring, then frowns. This is for an autograph, right? No, I say, it’s not an autograph. It’s important. I need you to come down off whatever you’re on and pay attention.

  I’m being intense, I’ve scared her a little. She puts herself between me and her daughter and says, Two minutes, then you’re out. I point over her shoulder, to where Vina tottering in Tequila is taped to the wall. I’m Rai, I say, a photographer. She’s a dropout journalist wannabe and a Vina student too, so she knows my name. Her eyes widen and suddenly the hardass crust cracks, she’s a young girl again, just starting out and still able to be impressed.

  You’re Rai? You’re Rai? My God, that’s right. You really are Rai.

  What you’re acting out tonight, I tell her unnecessarily, it was my life, the love of, I loved her, I held her in my arms, she was going to, she would’ve, we would’ve, never mind, she got into a helicopter and I never, nobody ever. I just looked around and she was gone.

  Gohohone. At this point, to my great discomfiture, I begin to cry. Again with the tears! What can she think of me, this man twice her age who took That Picture and who’s now bawling like a baby in front of her with his hands over his face. I try to control myself. The girl and her mother are staring at me, genuinely astonished. I want to see you, I blurt out, I really need to see you again, and even I can hear how ridiculous I sound, how naked and premature. A few seconds later we’re all laughing, the ice is broken, and the little girl is laughing loudest of all.