The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Okay, I was trying to work out if you’re a serial killer or just a rapist, but I’ve decided you’re cool, Mira Celano says, wiping her eyes. Now can we go, walk me home?, the kid needs to sleep.

  An old guy followed me one day, she tells me as we walk (I’m pushing the sleeping Tara in her orange stroller), he said he was Ormus Cama, if you please. It’s incredible that even someone like me gets followed around. What a town, right.

  Right, I say. I’m thinking: wrong, wrong, this whole thing is off the rails, I’m supposed to be helping the big O, speaking for him. But I’m feeling the rebirth of urges which I thought had died with Vina: attraction, desire. The interesting thing is that it’s not about the likeness, the impersonation, any more. It’s Mira Celano herself, Mira qua Mira, that’s responsible for these stirrings. Her long hair, as soft as Vina’s was wiry, the spring in her step, the happiness bursting from her smile and giving the lie to the tough-cookie act. This is a girl permanently high on hope, with plenty of that rare commodity to spare.

  I begin to feel my age, inhibiting me. If I say what I’m thinking she’ll probably just laugh. Yeah right granddad in your dreams.

  She’s talking about herself, I haven’t been paying attention, she talks fast and sometimes you get left behind, but when I do catch up with her I realize I’m being given an account of the false self she has chosen to inhabit since her disinheritance: That gig tonight, she’s saying, half the performers were like upper-middle-class private-school types, you know?, slumming, I mean I don’t understand those people, coming from the planet White Trash and all?, I’ve got tattoos, I’m subculture. Some kind of post-teen bag lady, that’s me.

  It’s time to let her know I’m not fooled by this. Mira, I say, that’s bullshit. I know where you’re from. Then I tell her the short version of what I read in Ormus Cama’s file. And all the time I’m thinking, under all that armor this is one very fragile person. Don’t fuck around with her, Rai. Don’t try for her heart unless you’re serious. She has already been hurt too much.

  We’re turning in to her street. She stops in her tracks and snatches the handles of the stroller away from me and puts it behind her and starts screaming. What is this, what do you want from me, you fucking peeper, you fucking spy, she yells, reaching into her shoulder bag. Okay, okay, you should be aware that I am able to handle guns.

  She shouts the warning with a harsh little hiss on the end: to handle gunss.

  People are looking. I stand my ground.

  Mira, I was sent to talk to you, I say. By Ormus Cama, the real one. He likes your act, had you checked out, what can I tell you, he wants to meet you, that’s all of it, that’s it.

  She’s calming down but she’s still angry. I can understand that. It is an angering thing to be fingered as the self you’re struggling to shuck off. To learn at twenty that the past goes on clinging to you, it bursts out of the grave when you least expect it and grabs your ankle in a stenchy decaying claw. She’s still backed away from me, adopting a high-tension stance, legs apart, her right hand in her bag, bending slightly forward at the waist, the left arm stretched straight out at me, palm up, fingers splayed. Keep away, fucking maniac, says her body. And she’s definitely trying to convince me she’s got a pistol in there.

  I put my arms up like a surrendering cowpoke. Don’t shoot the messenger, I say unoriginally, with a grin.

  Ormus Cama? she demands, still yelling. What’s his problem? I mean is this what he’s doing these days, he gets turned on by the impersonation industry? He sends out for look-alikes now? A pizza, some red Vina, maybe some jalapeños on the side, so what does that make you, mister, Domino’s delivery? Or his pimp.

  This is New York, late at night. Nobody makes a move towards us; Mira Celano’s performance has emptied the street. There’s just us now, and the sleeping infant, and the audience behind the darkened windows.

  Close, but no cigar, I say quietly. Mira, calm down. This isn’t a sex thing. It’s more that he’s dying, ever since Vina passed away he’s been killing himself with junk, and it’s my view that he urgently requires a reason to live.

  So you’re asking what? she says, quietening, her body relaxing, her mood swinging rapidly away from rage. I don’t really get it. You want me to do what?

  He thinks you’re her, I say. He truly thinks she’s come back. Or, you could say, untruly thinks it. It’s like he half thinks it, wholly believes it while he’s half thinking it, and at other times, not. The point is he needs to deceive himself and he needs the rest of us to go along with the deception, and if we do—if you do—that just may motivate him to clean himself up, to survive. Do this for him. Go see him, in costume. Give him hope.

  Sounds like a sex thing to me, she says, back in charge of herself now, intrigued. This is a woman whose internal weather is unusually quick to change.

  Right now he’s too weak to even jerk off, I say. You know, we haven’t really been close in a long time, Ormus and me. This is a mercy mission. A favor I promised to a late mutual acquaintance. To turn Ormus’s face away from the gates of death.

  She moves on, until we reach the steps to her front door.

  So this must be some kind of incredible selflessness, she says in a new voice: playful, almost fond. You came to that terrible show, you waited in the corridor, and then you spent all this time with me just to speak up for another man.

  No, I’m no saint, I say, that’s not it. I mean, helping Ormus was part of it, but I would never have come if, if.

  If what, she asks, beginning to smile, but it’s not a laughing-at smile, it’s too happy for that, it wants me to say what I’m almost too scared to articulate.

  If I hadn’t wanted to, I manage lamely.

  And what’s your desire, your wanted-to, she says, stepping in close. Does it also come necro-themed? You want Vina, but not that old lady of forty-five: you want Vina twenty years old all over again, isn’t that it? You want her back from the grave, only younger?

  Maybe in the beginning, I say, hanging my head. But now it’s you, it’s just you.

  Do you read Longfellow? she asks suddenly, completely dropping the ignorant-white-trash pretense, staying very close, so that her breath fills my nostrils. No, I guess not. But there’s a poem he has about this tongue-tied soldier, Miles Standish, who begs his pal John Alden to go on his behalf to ask for Miss Priscilla’s hand, not knowing that John Alden loves her too. And good John Alden, for friendship’s sake, does as he is bid, but Miss Priscilla won’t go for it. You remember now?

  … And here all of a sudden, conjured up by this miraculous young woman, is the ghost of John Mullens Standish XII at my elbow, urging me on. But I’m in uncharted territory, I don’t know how to move forward, where to put my foot. The sidewalk has become unreliable, yielding. I can’t move.…

  Why don’t you speak for yourself John, Mira Celano softly quotes. That was what the lady said.

  Yes, I remember, I say. (What I actually remember is Vina in my bed, Vina in the midst of one of her interminable soliloquies, her Ormusiads, telling me about Ormus’s very first meeting with Mull Standish on the London plane.)

  Then come again tomorrow, Rai, Mira Celano says, kissing me. Come not as a messenger, but to speak for yourself.

  By the time I take her to meet Ormus I know some of her secrets and she knows all of mine. She lies in my arms, or I in hers, and I run off at the mouth for long periods (their actual length is determined by Tara’s constantly changing sleep patterns). I find myself telling Mira all about Vina, just as Vina would once tell me about Ormus. So we repeat in ourselves the faults of the ones we have loved. I also photograph Mira in a hundred ways, learning her through the cyclops eye, and she gives herself to the camera with an openness and freedom that shocks. In conversation, however, she expresses herself with terseness and caution. It quickly becomes plain that I’m going to have to pay attention, because she says things once and refuses to repeat. If I forget a detail of her biography she hits me with a wide-eyed, betrayed
look. You didn’t care enough to listen.

  At the very outset she tells me that she is interested only in that rarest of all emotional contracts between men and women: total engagement, total fidelity, instantly. All or nothing right away, the whole heart or else forget it. That’s what she is prepared to offer and if I can’t reciprocate, if I’m not in it for the long haul, then so long, it’s been good to know you, no hard feelings, goodbye. Her daughter, she says, deserves a little continuity in her life, not a procession of inadequate men through her mother’s bedroom; and so, she adds, does she.

  In this she reveals herself to be Vina’s polar opposite.

  The more I learn about her the more I begin to think of her absolutism as heroic. The fearless courage of the innocent—the child who extends her trusting hand towards the fire, the student prankster who places a clown’s hat on a tyrant’s statue, the youth in his new uniform dreaming shiny dreams of derring-do, or the Beauty at the moment of her first plunge into the pit of love—this has never impressed me. Life’s raw recruits go to the edge and over it because of the blinding immensity of what they do not know. But Mira’s is the courage of experience, open-eyed, bruised and fearful. Rejected by her father and family, abandoned by the father of her child, bearing the unclosed wounds of her broken loves, she is nevertheless prepared to risk her heart once more. To try for the best in spite of being terrified of the worst. This is brave.

  Mira has lost a lover too. She, too, has a ghost in her head, though she is trying hard not to act bereaved, pretending not to mourn. Tara’s father Luis Heinrich killed himself, shot himself in the head and took three days to die, he even made a mess of that, Mira snarls, the tough-bitch accents back in evidence. Luis was a musician too, a troubled spirit, fronting an East Coast grunge outfit called Wallstreet. New York influenced by Seattle: how times change. The old idea of the periphery and the center, of music as a ticket from the sticks to the bright lights, seemingly no longer applies. Luis had been a Manhattan street-and-subway musician for years, he was a late starter, but it was the beginning of success that did him in, the acclaim at Soundgarten, the first record, all of that. The closer the album’s release date came the more often he talked about killing himself. I told you we liked guns, she said, he had five or six, handguns, rifles, he took good care of them. When the death talk started I got somebody to take them all away but then one of his old street compadres brought him another, go figure, okay?, and a couple of days later he did it, plugged himself right in the record company lobby, so I guess he made his point, whatever it was.

  Handgunss. Rifless. Compadress.

  I half remember the incident. It made the papers in a small way at the time. Then she shows me his picture and I realize I’ve met him. The street band was the Mall in those days, I can see why they changed it, why they turned the M upside down. I remember Luis red-eyed and shabbily goateed, playing the hybrid guisitar and abusing Doorman Shetty as he was shooed away from the Rhodopé. One day when we’re big, I mean when we’re monster big, I’m gonna come back here ’n’fucking buy this fucking building. What, Mira is asking. No, nothing, I say, it’s just that I heard about his death but I didn’t know about you and him, that he was Tara’s, so she’s called Tara Heinrich, right.

  No, she snaps, her lips thin and white with anger. Tara Celano, and don’t you fucking forget it, I mean fuck that snake Luis, okay?, that coward and his fucking Latino-Teuton name. He’s in the stupid club now along with Del Shannon and Gram Parsons and Johnny Ace and the Singing Nun. I’m the parent that stayed.

  After he died she fell apart for a while, did every drug invented, had her stomach pumped once, so I know how your Ormus feels, she tells me, I’ve been there; almost stayed. In the ambulance two paramedics played hard man, soft man, one going come on honey stay awake you can make it look at you you’re a great big beautiful doll so stay awake baby you can make it baby baby we need you to live do it for me baby oh yeah yeah like a fucking dirty phone call, she says, and the other guy was snarling fuck you trash bitch cunt you want our fucking attention you fucking got it there’s people in this city getting shot and sick for real but we gotta come here and take care of you fucking self-centered bitch slit we should put you out right here in the street and let you fucking die. He was the one who saved me, the bad guy, she confesses. I kept thinking man, I’m gonna live to slug that bastard right in the mouth if it’s the last thing I do.

  After the stomach pump she discovered she was pregnant and then came the disinheritance et cetera, the triple whammy, but this time instead of cracking up she went to work. You never saw me when I was Pregnant Vina, she says, suddenly unleashing a wild cackle of laughter. Man, that was off the wall.

  She won’t say much about her family. I get the basic information and then the subject’s permanently off-limits. I remember Vina’s long silence about the bad childhood days in Chickaboom, and I want to tell Mira, honey, you don’t know how like Vina you are, but I intuit that this would not go down well. Ever since we’ve started sleeping together it has become important for her to dissociate herself from her predecessor. She lists all the things Vina liked which she can’t stand. I hate Tolkien, you know?, and the fucking Faraway Tree, they should chop it down, and I really hate vegetarians, I’m a meat woman, give me meat. As I listen to her I have to work to keep the smile off my face because she sounds exactly the way Vina did on the beach at Juhu, in the days when she was hating the hell out of India, before she discovered its good points, which included Ormus Cama and me.

  One day Mira starts talking about sacred music. It seems that although her father’s people were originally from Assisi they weren’t all totally peace-loving St. Francis types. The original Tomaso di Celano (died circa 1255) was, Mira says, probably St. Francis’s first biographer, but he also composed one of the great blood-and-thunder hymns of apocalypse, the Dies Irae. Not very love and peace and animals and birdies, is it, I reflect. Where there is discord may we bring harmony, that was the St. Francis angle, if I recall, but this Tomaso di Celano was apparently more interested in divine wrath than divine love.

  She ignores my teasing. I can do the whole thing in Latin, she says proudly, and I actually let her. Such is new love.

  Rex tremendae maiestatis,

  qui salvandos salvas gratis,

  salva me, fons pietatis.

  It ends, finally, with this remarkably financial burst of praise for the king of tremendous majesty, who saves those who are fit to be saved, free of charge. Mira’s eyes are shining now. There’s a new worldwide appetite for a spiritual approach, she preaches, I guess it’s all the earthquakes and catastrophes, the sense of an ending, people are looking for meaning, you know what I mean?

  Think about it, I say sardonically, there must be higher love. (I’m thinking, I hope she isn’t about to rip off her mask and turn into the early Ifredis Wing.)

  That’s it, she says, missing my meaning entirely—irony is what people miss—and suddenly she’s any bright, super-intense twenty-year-old, that’s so it, she repeats, and have you heard this stuff? Sufi music, for example, it could be Azerbaijani or Uzbek or Moroccan, I mean I’m not au courant with the belief system, okay?, but there’s this incredible drumming, and amazing layered syncopation, and trumpets, and dancing like you’re possessed. But it’s not just Sufi, there’s so much of this music crossing frontiers now, music from all over, Yoruba drumming, the old songs of the expelled Jews of Spain, Persian-Iraqi maqam concerts using mystical poems, Shinto drumming, gospel, Buddhist chants, and do you know the work of Arvo Pärt, sort of minimalist meets New Age? Have you heard Fatty Ahmed, he’s played with the Ruby Goo?

  Yeah, him I’ve heard of, I say, laughing openly now. He just died weighing three hundred and eighty pounds, which is bad news for that finagling retinue of his, they were going for every dollar they could grab while the poor man, unworldly, unaware, sat singing his devotional songs at the Hollywood Bowl like a spider trapped in his own web. That’s sacred music all right.

>   What’s funny, she wants to know. People really want this, they want the magic and the security, the idea that there’s something beyond, something greater, something more. Meditation, celebration, supplication, that’s … fuck you, Rai, why is this making you laugh?

  No, it’s really okay, I say. I’m sorry, it’s only nostalgia. I knew someone else who talked like this once.

  Oh, shit, she says. My people were doing this stuff in the fucking thirteenth century but I should have guessed she’d still have gotten in first.

  Here is seventeen-month-old Tara Celano on my roof terrace, wearing a furry pink bomber jacket and lime-green tights, serenading the watching Chrysler Building and World Trade Center towers with a lyric-free approximation of, I’m guessing, Da Doo Ron Ron. Mira, meanwhile, lounges on a rug, smoking, apparently ignoring her daughter completely. Left to her own devices, Tara is growing up as a strange mixture of precocious adult and lucky survivor. On the one hand, she can now wait in the wings during her mother’s performances without complaining; she can do the twist, the stomp, the mashed potato too, and the wah-watusi and the hitchhiker and the locomotion, and if you don’t know how to do it, she’ll show you how to walk the dog; and she knows her way around the backstage areas and women’s rooms of dozens of Manhattan clubs and bars, both salubrious and unhealthy. On the other, she picks pebbles off the tops of graveled cactus pots and tries to swallow them. My apartment’s electric wall sockets exert upon her a potent magnetic attraction. I have the feeling I’m saving her life a dozen times a day, but she’s come this far without me, so Mira must have been keeping an eye on her while pretending to turn her loose. That’s what I choose to think, anyhow, while continuing to make sure Tara doesn’t succeed in mounting the wall at the edge of the roof terrace and swallow-dive to an untimely death in East Fifth Street below.