The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  And Mira was there, of course, she was the woman he had come to rescue from the Prince of Darkness. Mira, dressed as herself now, singing her heart out, growing day by day into the stardom that was her destiny, stepping free of Vina’s shadow and playing the part of Love trapped in Hell and longing to be free.

  Look, it doesn’t matter any more, it’s not important how they behaved on stage, I understand that. I was jealous, all right?, let me admit that right up front, I was half mad with jealousy, and I was wrong. But boy, she turned out to be quite a performer, my Mira, you could see it in the way she leaned against Ormus’s curving bubble, pressing her body against it, first her breasts and thighs, then her arched back and her ass, rolling across it as if she was making love to the damn thing, I couldn’t watch. And at the end when she went inside it, when she was sealed in with Ormus and the bubble blazed with light and disappeared and then all of a sudden it was just Mira and Ormus back on the secondary stage, out of Hell, liberated from the bubble, and Ormus was playing his guitar as if it were sex itself and Mira was pouring herself over him like a free drink, well, hah!, I couldn’t stand it!, I had to turn my back. I had to fucking leave.

  I stopped going to the performances. I left the tour and went back to New York and got on with my work, I even went back to photojournalism for the first time in years and ended up dodging bullets in places whose names I couldn’t pronounce, Urgench-Turtkul on the Amu Darya, Târgul-Sačuesc in Transylvania, and the new post-Soviet hot spots of Altynaï-Asylmuratova and far-flung Nadezhda-Mandelstán; but still at night I dreamed pornographic dreams of Mira and Ormus. Sometimes my unconscious threw in lil dagover and a few Singhs to spice things up, and I’d wake up erect and sweating in some dirty murderous Cyrillic-scripted fleapit and understand that all human beings are capable of violence if they are sufficiently aroused, by the rape of their country, for example, or alternatively by the real or imagined seduction of their girl.

  I know it’s not the same thing, goddammit, I know the fucking difference between infidelity and genocide, but when you’re out in woopwoopsky in a roachy sleeping bag in the back of a stranger’s Jeep being bitten by Slavic and Asiatic insects, by Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox and Zionist and Islamist bugs, while all around you is an exploding universe of disintegrating frontiers and crumbling realities, when you’re in the midst of that kind of anarchy and mutability and you hope to make it back to East Fifth Street, New York, to read Page Six of the Post, just once more, while you’re served a blueberry muffin and a cup of steaming organic coffee by a tall smiling barefoot Buddhist blonde, oh yes, just one more time, please, and you swear you’ll never make a single joke about designer Buddhism ever again, you want that peace-loving Buddha right now, give him to me, O Rinpoche Ginsberg, O Richard Lama, O Steven Seagal, take me, I’m yours, and then you wake up with a head full of imaginary sex in which you were not personally involved, in which unspeakable acts are being performed on and by the body you recognize as pertaining to your beloved … let me assure you that at such a moment you don’t think così fan tutte, whistle a happy tune, and turn over and go back to dreamland, you sit up ready to murder not just your little Fiordiligi, your beloved Dorabella, but whoever the rutting hog was who tempted them off the straight and narrow, just bring the bastard to me and I’ll rip out his lecherous heart.

  And I was wrong, all right? Wrong, wrong.

  Once again I had misunderstood Ormus Cama. I’d allowed myself to forget that there was something so to speak superhuman about his love for Vina, something beyond the human capacity for loving. It was a love until the end of time, and after he failed to bring her back from the dead—after Mira made him see that Vina could not be restored to life—then women were finished for him for good. Now that Mira was just Mira he no longer wanted her to take Vina’s place; even if she had come to him oiled and naked and steaming with desire, he would have simply patted her absentmindedly on the head and advised her to put some clothes on before she caught a chill.

  So I admit also that Ormus’s love for Vina Apsara was greater than mine, for while I had mourned Vina as I had never mourned any loss I had, after all, begun to love again. But his was a love which no other love could replace, and after Vina’s three deaths he had finally entered his last celibacy, from which only the carnal embrace of death would set him free. Death was the only lover he would now accept, the only lover he would share with Vina, because that lover would reunite them forever, in the wormwood forest of the forever dead.

  And lastly I admit—and I apologize to her now before the eyes of the world—that I should have trusted Mira. I was luckier than I knew: a new love had been born out of the ashes of the old. Mira wasn’t interested in Ormus, or only professionally, and maybe a little bit as a way of keeping me honest. I was too stupid to believe it, but at the end of this long sad-luck saga, I was the jackpot boy.

  Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon believed that Orpheus had to fail in his Underworld quest, that Eurydice could not be saved and that Orpheus himself had to be torn to pieces, because, for him, the Orpheus myth was the story of the failure not only of art but of civilization itself. Orpheus had to die, because culture must die. The barbarians are at the gates and cannot be resisted. Greece crumbles; Rome burns; brightness falls from the air.

  On their arrival in Delhi, India’s odorous high-volume importunate reality appalled Marco and Madonna Sangria, who had imagined it as being perhaps one or two steps downscale from Queens. India can be a tough country for Americans, who are seen as walking dollar signs and, what’s worse, as innocents abroad: legitimate targets, easy meat. Within hours of checking in at their five-star South Delhi hotel, they had been importuned, without leaving the grounds, by money changers offering them the best black rate in town for their greenbacks, vendors of semi-precious stones which could have been polished pebbles, taxi drivers whose cousins ran a marble factory just close by, hotel-lobby palmists, young men and women of quality offering serious negotiable currency for their cameras and clothes, older men inquiring of Marco whether Madonna was, in the first place, educated and, in the second place, available, and if so, for what fee; and an elevator pickpocket who was at once incompetent and unflappable, so that when Marco pointed out that his hand was in the wrong pocket, the fellow simply extracted the offending limb, smiled broadly and said with a disarming shrug, It is an overcrowded country, what to do, we are used to treating our neighbor’s pocket as our own.

  Tihar Jail was, unsurprisingly, much worse. The floor alone, never mind the rooms or the prison staff and let’s not even mention the inmates, just the floor was a whole horror movie, Scream Goes East, maybe, or A Nightmare on Delhi Street, the dirt, my dear, and when I say bugs, I do not refer to a famous cartoon bunny. No place, anyhow, for a high-maintenance dandy in Narciso pants to be wearing his Jimmy shoes, or for a class filly of Madonna’s pedigree to risk trailing her Isaac cheesecloth skirt or her new Manolo slingbacks. And gosh, Madonna noted, people seem to talk at the tops of their voices all the time, and not always in English, what’s that about?

  But when Cyrus came into the interview room, shackled and manacled, Madonna suddenly started to have a very good time indeed. As she afterwards told her circle, I just felt in the presence of wisdom, he had this like aura, and I was, I don’t know. Just blown away.

  To him she said, Well, you’re the sweetest jailbird I ever did see.

  By the time they left Tihar Jail the Sangrias had sworn to launch an international campaign—celebrity fund-raisers, embassy pickets, Washington lobbyists, the works—to secure the early release of an exceptional human being. Marco returned immediately to America to set up the pressure group’s HQ. Madonna remained in India, wore homespun and rope sandals, wiped the make-up off her face, pulled out her hair extensions, had henna patterns applied to the edges of her hands and the soles of her feet as if she were a bride, and visited Cyrus twice a week, which was the maximum allowable. She apologized to him for the way she looked at their first meeti
ng—gee, I guess I looked like a hooker, huh, but it’s my culture, but I so do not want to stay stuck in that like error, I’d like to learn your, what’s the word, okay okay I remember, your ways.

  We’ve been listening to the wrong Cama, she wrote to launch the Free Cyrus initiative in the first of her syndicated music columns to be filed after her arrival in India. Now let us turn from the ephemeral simplicities of Ormus’s has-been rock ’n’ roll to the profound contemplation of his elder brother’s perennial philosophy. If we are not too old to learn, Cyrus Cama has much to teach. P.S. He’s cute as a button, not that we love men for their steel buns, right? Yeah right.

  During the long VTO world tour the Cyrus campaign gathered momentum. In New York, Goddess-Ma, always a trend spotter, moved out of the Rhodopé Building and denounced Ormus Cama in distinctly Cyrusian terms. His suppression of race and skin modalities in the interests of the untenable Western dogma of universals is in reality a flight from self into the arms of the desired, admired Other. Prominent lawyers in both New York and India took up the Cyrus case; the Indian authorities, embarrassed by the attention, indicated their willingness to be flexible; and at length Madonna Sangria proposed an attractive way forward. Hear me out, okay, she told Cyrus, all of an uncharacteristic fluster. I know this sounds like too forward and women in your culture just don’t act this way but I guess I’m just, no, no, this is coming out all wrong, I’m saying that if I were to marry you, okay, Cyrus?, then you could get a U.S. passport, big thrill!, and we could put you on a plane and take care of you back home.

  It was late in 1995, and the VTO tour was in South America, completing its last leg, when, after five months of thought, Cyrus Cama gave his reply.

  Miss Madonna, when you and your brother first offered me help, I accepted, out of what I now see was weakness. You were so beautiful and persuasive and I thought, very well, if they believe in me then I am ready, I will place myself in their care and come out of my beloved Tihar. But I have also known all the time that if I came with you then soon I would feel obliged to kill you, yes, and your brother, too, and maybe also my mother who disowned me and my twin brother Ardaviraf and many other people along the way, and at the end of my journey, its only real destination and purpose, would lie the sweet murder of my younger brother Ormus, for hatred of whom I have ruined my life.

  Now please see that this was most tempting. However, after due reflection, I have found it in myself to refuse. I thank you again for your interest, your declaration of love, your most generous offer of marriage, your gifts. Most particularly I thank you for providing as requested the video equipment and the tape of my brother’s concert and for persuading the jail authorities to let me keep the same in my humble cell, contrary to regulations. On the video I watched my brother closely, and observed that he has already departed this life. Look in his eyes. He is dead and in Hell. So you see there is no longer any requirement for me to kill him, I am set free from the imperative of a lifetime. For me to commit other murders in this changed circumstance would be the height of bad taste, and so I will remain happily here in jail. Thanking you, Miss Madonna, and goodbye.

  Now I am remembering the last things.

  That winter after the end of the Underworld tour was the cruelest any of us could recall. Mira and I didn’t see anything of Ormus, who was holed up in the Rhodopé as usual, but showed no inclination to get in touch. When I thought of him at all, I pictured him as an Indian chief who decides it’s a good day to die, heads for the ground he has chosen and then just sits there waiting for the angel. But most of the time my attention was elsewhere. I had a relationship to repair. At the best of times it is hard for musicians to come home from tour. They get used to their own company, to killer schedules, nights without sleep and tearing up the floor at hot clubs around the world, to being the traveling center of the world’s attention, to the coiling tension before the show, the rush of performance, the abandon and exhaustion of afterwards, the boredom with the music, the rediscovery of the music, the ups and downs with the other band members, the omnipresent sexual charge, the shipboard romances, the sense of playing hooky, of being outlaws on the run with raindrops falling on your head.

  It is even harder for musicians who have taken their small children on tour. Tara Celano was old enough to go to school now, she had a place at Little Red, but while other little girls her age didn’t even know the exact shape of Manhattan, Tara had circumnavigated the globe more than once and had seen more action than she was prepared to divulge, being afraid of offending her teachers’ idealistic liberal sensibilities.

  And the hardest return of all is the return to a steady relationship, because after the rootless years the very idea of steadiness seems like a fantasy, and in this particular case I had blotted my copybook and Mira knew it. I hadn’t trusted her (hah!) with another man. In the midst of that maelstrom of infidelity I hadn’t believed she could be true. There was trouble here, a problem we had to address.

  I remember a Sunday in the park. It had begun to snow around Christmas and hadn’t stopped. Tara loved the whiteness, space and stillness after two years of garish environments, backstage trailers and constant movement. That Sunday making snowballs she was happy being home, happy with us, and her happiness helped draw us back together, we became conscious of our joint importance in her life, of her overarching need. Such are the families of the modern epoch: elective alliances against terror or despair. This girl, this dead stranger’s child, was the closest thing to a future I had found for myself anywhere in the world.

  Mira took my mittened hand in hers and after that things were better between us. We went to a movie, some monsters or aliens were destroying New York as usual (this is L.A.’s way of telling Manhattan it cares), and when we got home there was a message from Clea on my voicemail.

  Spenta was dead. It was cold in England too, and in a white house on a hill overlooking the Thames the octogenarian old lady had been huddling in her parlor with her “boys” around an antiquated gas fire. (Virus was sixty-three, Waldo in his mid-forties, and although they had both forgotten long ago that they weren’t blood brothers, here, in truth, was another family relationship forged by circumstance rather than biology.) The heating system hadn’t been serviced in years, and that night a slow leak developed under the exposed and gappy old floorboards, releasing a flow of gas which first put the three residents peacefully to sleep and then ignited, burning the great mansion to the ground and setting fire, also, to several beautiful oak trees which had stood in those grounds for over two hundred years. Ever since Spenta sequestered herself and left the details of daily life to Waldo and Virus to arrange, the house had gone into decline, and in the nearby villages after the fire people shook their heads and turned their mouths down disapprovingly. It was an accident waiting to happen, that place, was the general consensus. Those sons of hers were never up to it. She should’ve had better sense. The loss of the trees was, everybody agreed, a real country tragedy.

  Clea’s message said nothing about getting together to mourn the dead, nothing about a meeting of any kind. He just thought you’d want to know, she concluded, because of the old days. It was the last communication from Ormus I ever received.

  Ormus didn’t go to England for the funerals. He did send a couple of legal Singhs over for the reading of Spenta’s will. When it was discovered that Spenta’s only named heirs had perished with her, the assembled Methwold cousins girded themselves for battle. The house had gone, but the grounds and financial holdings were well worth a war. The Methwolds eyed the American Singh lawyers with open fear and distaste: more Indians! Will there be no end of them? Then the Singhs announced gravely that Ormus Cama wished to renounce all rights to the Methwold estate, rose to their feet, bowed courteously and left the other claimants open-mouthed, and free to fight their parochial, irrelevant, bloody, savage wars.

  Although he maintained his distance from his mother’s grave, her death had shaken Ormus. On the day after the reading of the will he told Cl
ea that he was going out to walk in the frozen park alone. When she saw that it would be impossible to dissuade him she made him put on a pair of good snow boots, dressed him in his warmest coat, a navy-blue cashmere, wound his soft pashmina shawl around his neck, placed kid gloves upon his meekly extended old man’s hands, and crowned him with his favorite cold-weather hat, a sixteen-dollar Chinese rabbit fur with ear flaps which Vina had bought for him in Canal Street long ago. Clea fastened the flaps with a bow knot under his chin, stood up on her tippytoes and kissed him on both cheeks. You’re a good man, she told him. Your mother would be proud. Meaning that she thought of herself as his mother, had done so for years, but had never felt able to speak while Spenta lived. Meaning that she loved him and was as proud of him as any mother could ever be.

  He smiled faintly and went down in the elevator and crossed the street and went into the park.

  Of course she sent Will to follow him, but at a distance, she enjoined Will, don’t you dare let him see. Which was not easy on that day of all days, the day when the snow and ice had forced all motor vehicles off the road and people were skiing down the city’s empty avenues to work. New York was like the loveliest of ghost towns on that day and we were its shivering ghosts. It was a movie set and we were only actors. Reality seemed elsewhere, someplace that had not been blessed by this faery fall of snow.