Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  They were watching the sun set into the Pacific through the beautifully dirty air and the ambassador was mumbling verses under his breath. He had been an American for most of his life but French poetry was still where he went for sustenance.

  “Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir. . . .” After he saved her life, he had guided her reading; by now she knew what he had wanted her to know. She knew this. O free man, you will always love the sea. The sea’s your mirror; you contemplate your soul in its surges as it endlessly unrolls. So he was thinking about death, too. She returned him Baudelaire for Baudelaire. “Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir; Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.” And again: “Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige . . . Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!” The sky is sad and beautiful like a great, a great what, some sort of altar. The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood. The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood. Your memory shines in me like, damn it, ostensoir. Oh, right: a monstrance. Again with the religious imagery. New images urgently needed to be made. Images for a godless world. Until the language of irreligion caught up with the holy stuff, until there was a sufficient poetry and iconography of godlessness, these sainted echoes would never fade, would retain their problematic power, even over her.

  She said it again, in English: “Your memory shines in me.”

  “Let’s go home,” he murmured, kissing her on the cheek. “It’s getting chilly. Let’s not overdo it. I’m an old guy now.”

  It was the first time she had heard him acknowledge his infirmity, the first time in her experience that he had conceded the power of time. And why had he kissed her then, spontaneously, when there was no need to do so. That, too, was an indication of weakness, a misjudgment, like the gift of the vulgar car. A sign of slipping control. They were no longer in the habit of demonstrating their affections to each other, except perfunctorily. By such samurai abstinence did they give each other proofs of their love.

  “My time is being swept away,” the ambassador said. “Nothing will remain.” He foretold the Cold War’s accelerated ending, the Soviet Union’s house-of-cards collapse. He knew that the Wall would fall and that the reunification of Germany could not be held back and would happen more or less overnight. He foresaw the invasion of Western Europe by the elated job-hungry Ossis in their Trabants. Ceaus¸escu’s Mussoliniesque ending, and the elegiac presidencies of the writers, of Václav Havel and Arpad Goncz, these too he foresaw. He closed his mind to other, less palatable possibilities, however. He tried to believe that the global structures he had helped to build, the pathways of influence, money and power, the multinational associations, the treaty organizations, the frameworks of cooperation and law whose purpose had been to deal with a hot war turned cold, would still function in the future that lay beyond what he could foresee. She saw in him a desperate need to believe that the ending of his age would be happy, and that the new world which would come after would be better than the one that would die with him. Europe, free of the Soviet threat, and America, free of the need to remain permanently at battle stations, would build that new world in friendship, a world without walls, a frontierless newfound land of infinite possibility. The doomsday clock would no longer be set at seven seconds to midnight. The emerging economies of India, Brazil and a newly opened-up China would be the world’s new powerhouses, the counterweights to the American hegemony of which he had always, as an internationalist, disapproved. When she saw him surrender to the utopian fallacy, to the myth of the perfectibility of man, India knew he could not have long to live. He looked like a tightrope walker trying to keep his balance even though there was no longer a rope beneath his feet.

  The weight of the inexorable bore down on her, as if the gravitational force of the earth had suddenly increased. When she was younger they had often touched. He could place his lips against any part of her body, her hand, her cheek, her back, and find a bird in there and make it speak. Birdsong burst from her skin under the magic pressure of his mouth, soaring, celebratory. Until the age of eight she would climb him like an Everest. She had learned the story of the Himalayas on his knee, the story of the giant proto-continents, of the moment when India broke off from Gondwanaland and moved across the proto-oceans toward Laurasia. She closed her eyes and saw the huge collision, the mighty mountains crumpling up into the sky. He taught her a lesson about time, about the slowness of the earth: the collision is still happening. So if he was a Himalaya, if he too had been caused by the smashing together of great forces, by a clash of worlds, then he, too, was growing still. The collision in him was also still taking place. He was her mountain-father and she his mountaineer. He held her hands in his and up she came until she was straddling his shoulders, her groin against his neck. He kissed her stomach and she somersaulted backward off his shoulders to the floor. One day he said, No more of that. She wanted to cry but controlled herself. Childhood was over? Very well, then, it was over. She would put aside childish things.

  The freeway home was empty, shockingly empty, as if the world were ending, and while they were floating along in that asphalt void the ambassador again began to speak volubly, the words crowding out of him like traffic, trying to make up for the absence of the cars. Volubility came easily to Max Ophuls, but it was just one of his many techniques of concealment, and he was never more hidden than when he seemed most open. For the greater part of his life he had been a burrower, a man of secrets, whose job it was to uncover the mysteries of others while protecting his own, and when by choice or necessity he spoke the use of paradox had long been his preferred disguise. They moved down the empty freeway so swiftly that it seemed they were standing still, with the ocean to their right and the city beginning to twinkle to their left, and it was of the city that Max decided to speak because he knew he had already said too much about himself, shown too much, like an amateur. So now he praised the city, commended it precisely for the qualities that were commonly held to be its greatest faults. That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view outdated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe in such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing so to devalue. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future. As India navigated the hollow freeways her father lauded the city’s bizarre anatomy, which was fed and nourished by many such congealed and flowing arteries but needed no heart to drive its mighty flux. That it was a desert in disguise caused him to celebrate the genius of human beings, their ability to populate the earth with their imaginings, to bring water to the wilderness and bustle to the void; that the desert had its revenge on the complexions of its conquerors, drying them, ingraining lines and furrows, provided those triumphant mortals with the salutary lesson that no victory was absolute, that the struggle between earthlings and the earth could never be decided in favor of either combatant, but swung back and forth through all eternity. That it was a hidden city, a city of strangers, appealed to him most of all. In the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors, only royalty had the privilege of remaining occult. In this brilliant burg, however, secrecy was freely available to all comers. The modern obsession with intimacy, with the revelation of the self to the other, was not to Max’s taste. An open city was a naked whore, lying invitingly back and turning every trick; whereas this veiled and difficult place, this erotic capital of the obscure stratagem, knew precisely how to arouse and heighten our metropolitan desires.

  She was used to such soliloquies, his fugues on themes of this or that; used, also, to his habit of half-humorous perversity. But now his praisesong seemed to cross a frontier and bear him away from her into a shadow. When he claimed to admire the city’s powerful gangs for the thrilling casual potency of their violence and the tag artists for their transient encrypted graffiti; when he praised the earthquakes for their majesty an
d the landslides for their reproof to human vanity; when with no apparent irony he celebrated the junk food of America and waxed lyrical about the new banality of diet cola; when he admired the strip malls for their neon and the chain stores for their ubiquity; when he declined to criticize the produce on sale in the farmers’ markets, the visually delightful apples that tasted like cotton puffs, the bananas made of pulped paper, the odorless flowers, calling them symbols of the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race; when he, who had been a model of probity in his own public (though not sexual) life, admitted to secret feelings of admiration for a corrupt local official because of the flamboyant daring of his corruption and, contradicting himself, cynically lauded a second corrupt local official for the sneaky, decade-long subtlety of his crimes, then India began to see that in the depths of the old age whose effects he had so heroically concealed, even from her, he had lost his hold on joy, and that failure had eaten at him from within, eroding his ability to discriminate and to make moral judgments, and if things continued to deteriorate along these lines, he would eventually become incapable of making any choices at all, restaurant menus would become mysteries to him, and even the choice between getting out of bed in the morning and spending the daylight hours between the sheets would become impossible to make. And when the final choice stymied him, the choice between breathing and not breathing, then he would surely die.

  “I used to long for your good opinion,” she told him, to silence him. “But now that I’d have to share it with all this shit I’m not so sure I want it anymore.”

  They got back to her apartment building and the driver was waiting, eyes still ablaze, standing exactly where she had last seen him, as if he hadn’t moved all day. Flowers grew out of the concrete sidewalk at his feet and his hands and clothes were red with blood. What? What was that? She blinked and squinted and of course it was not so, he was flowerless, spotless, waiting patiently as a good employee should. Also, he had been busy in their absence. He had made his way up to Woodrow Wilson Drive and brought down the ambassador’s Bentley. Look: there it was, large as life. Why hadn’t she seen it right away? Why did such moments come to her; whence this hallucinatory curse? Had she done something to annoy Olga Simeonovna and been placed under a potato spell born in the Volga River delta centuries ago, when goblins walked the earth? But she didn’t believe in potato magic either. She was overtired, she thought. Things would settle down if she could just get a good, uninterrupted night’s sleep. She promised herself a pill at bedtime. She promised herself a clean, uncluttered life. She promised herself ease, an end to turbulence. She promised herself to be content with the humdrum reassurances of the everyday.

  “Where’d you find him, anyway, your Mughal gardener,” she asked her father, who didn’t seem to be listening. “Shalimar,” she insisted. “The driver with the phony name. His poor English. Did he pass the written test?”

  The ambassador waved a dismissive hand. “Stop worrying about it,” he said. That made her worry about it. “Happy birthday,” he added, dismissing her. “Un bisou.”

  After the assassination, India, watching television, would see Gorbachev getting off a plane in Moscow, having survived the attempted Communist coup against him. He looked shaken, imprecise, blurry at the edges, like a watercolor smudged by rain. Somebody asked him if he intended to abolish the Communist Party and in his shock at the question, his confusion, his indecision, she saw his weakness. The Party had been Gorbachev’s cradle, his life. And he was being asked to abolish it? No, his whole body said, trembling, fuzzy, how can I, I will not; and at that moment he became irrelevant, history swept past him, he turned into a bankrupt hitchhiker on the verges of the freeway he had built in his glory days, watching the wild cars, the Yeltsins, roaring past him into the future. For the man of power, too, the house of power can be a treacherous place. In the end he, too, must fight his way out of it, past the swooping bird-men. He emerges empty-handed and the crowd, the cruel crowd, laughs. Gorbachev looked like Moses, she thought, the prophet unable to enter the Promised Land. And that was when he began to look like her father watching the sunset.

  On another day, one of the timeless days after Max’s murder, she saw another vision of him. In South Africa a man walked out of prison after a lifetime sequestered from the public gaze. Nobody really knew what this Lazarus was going to look like. The only photograph the papers ever printed had been taken decades earlier. The man in that picture was heavy-set, a raging bull, a Mike Tyson look-alike. A flame-eyed revolutionary. But this man was tall and slender and walked with gentle grace. When she saw that silhouette, long and skinny as a Spielberg alien, walking to freedom with the klieg lights behind it, she knew she was seeing her father, raised from the dead. Emotion leapt up in her; but resurrections don’t happen, they really don’t, and it wasn’t her father. As the glare of the lights stopped flooding the camera lens India understood that she was looking at an allegory of the future, the future her father had not wanted to imagine. Mandela, metamorphosed from firebrand into peacemaker, with wicked Winnie at his side. Morality and immorality, the beatified and the corrupted, walked toward the cameras, hand in hand, and in love.

  In the capital city of the billion-dollar industries of film, television and recorded music Max Ophuls never went to the movies, detested television drama and comedy, owned no sound system, and happily foretold the coming end of these temporary perversions, which, he predicted, would shortly be abandoned by their devotees in favor of the infinitely superior appeal of the immediacy, spontaneity and continuity of live performance, the thrilling power of the physical presence of the performer. In spite of this melancholically purist position the ambassador frequently descended from his ivory tower on the mountaintop road named after the president who died dreaming of a league of united nations, and like the Assyrian in the poem who came down like a wolf on the fold, occupied, under cover of night, the penthouse suite he maintained in one of the city’s best hotels. It was widely held that many ladies with big careers in the despised forms had been entertained there. When they asked him why he refused to see their movies he replied devotedly that he was experiencing the thrilling power of their live performances instead, and nothing they could do on screen could equal what they were doing with such immediacy, spontaneity, continuity and presence right there in the famous hotel.

  On the day before Max’s death the first bad portent manifested itself in the form of a contretemps with an Indian movie star. In the beginning Max had had no idea she even was a film actress, this girl with the skin the color of scorched earth, the well-concealed body and the demure manner of a disciple walking in the footsteps of a great rishi. She began following him around the lobby of the great hotel day after day until he demanded to know her business and was told in the low voice of the deep fan, the heart fan, that she had been drawn into his gravitational field just as the planet Venus had been sucked into its orbit around the sun and she asked for nothing better than to be allowed to move around him at a respectful distance for, perhaps, the rest of her life. Her name, Zainab Azam, meant nothing to him, but at his age he had no wish to look so beautiful a gift horse in the mouth. In his suite after their first lovemaking she suddenly spoke with detailed knowledge and boundless admiration about his long-past ambassadorship to India, when he had coined the saying India is chaos making sense which was now to be found in all books of quotations and which was used on an almost weekly basis by some Indian public figure or other, always with pride. She told him that he was the Rudyard Kipling of ambassadors, the only one of all the envoys in all the embassies down all the years who had truly understood India, and she was his reward for that understanding. She asked for nothing, refused his gifts, disappeared into an inaccessible dimension of her own for most of every day but always returned, demure and self-effacing as ever until she undressed, after which she was a fire and he her slow but eager fuel. What are you doing with an old reprobate like
me, he asked her, shocked into self-deprecation by her beauty. Her reply was so obviously a lie that it was a good thing his vanity reasserted itself in the nick of time and whispered in his ear that he should accept it humbly as the unvarnished truth.

  “Worshipping you,” she said.

  She reminded him of a woman who had been dead to him for over twenty years. She reminded him of his daughter. She could only have been two or three years older than India, four or five years older than India’s mother when he saw her for the last time. Max Ophuls found himself imagining in an idle moment that the two young women, his daughter and his sexual partner, might meet and become friends, but that was a possibility he discarded with a swift shudder of revulsion. Zainab Azam was the last lover of his long life and fucked him as if she were trying to erase all the many women who had gone before. She told him nothing about herself and did not appear to mind that he never asked. This state of affairs, which the ambassador considered close to ideal, persisted splendidly until the evening before the last day, when Max made his brief, ill-advised return to public life.