The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Page 1
Praise for THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
Commonwealth Writers Prize 2000,
Best Book for Eurasia
“The Ground Beneath Her Feet is an exceptional, sweeping novel by one of the most gifted writers of our time.… Those who have never read Rushdie should begin with this new novel; the immensity of Rushdie’s vision, his hilarious wordplay, his commentary on love and living, may just shake the very ground beneath your feet.”
—The Calgary Straight
“Beguiling.… [The Ground Beneath Her Feet] is probably Rushdie’s most accessible work and certainly his most joyful.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Rushdie weaves with skill the complex layers of such a harrowing myth that will touch you closely, reaching for the secret feelings you didn’t know you had.… Only a great writer like Rushdie can acknowledge the power of love which allows the soul to be free, overcoming all hardships and obstacles.”
—The Edmonton Sun
“Panoramic.… Replete with the surpluses of intellect and fancy that define Rushdie’s earlier fiction, The Ground Beneath Her Feet [is] a three-pound novel of exile that also manages to be an ode to literature, a satirical political commentary, and, of course, a love story. Swirling with puns and allusions … the work is sensate with the smells and noises and overload ambience of both Bombay and New York.… Rushdie has created a multilayered world of exile and dualism.… Epic.”
—Victoria Times Colonist
“Astonishing.… Ever willing to stir things up, Rushdie freely blends fiction into fact, turns metaphors into literal events, and transforms political and psychic states into physical ones. Those who have admired his verbal and imaginative pyrotechnics before will find his energy and skills fully intact.”
—New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal
“Brilliant.… Rushdie writes like a wizard … and the effect is out of this world.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Extraordinary.… The world these characters inhabit is pure Rushdie. The fabulous and magical mix with the sordid and the profane.… Plot is invariably advanced by catastrophe—bizarre deaths and unexplained fires, multiple earthquakes.… The writing is funny, silly, erudite, crude, precise, unbuttoned.… Daring.”
—The Montreal Gazette
“His exuberant and elegiac new novel … his best since Midnight’s Children … is full of music and murder.… What Rushdie is doing goes well beyond joke and whimsy. The world of this novel—several countries, East and West—exists at a wide angle to reality but also makes us wonder what would happen if the angle closed. Rushdie is demonstrating … the difficulty in telling where fiction begins and ends.… In this book he not only repairs much damage done to fiction and the world, [he] makes us laugh with the sheer proliferating energy of his call.”
—The New York Times
“The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a sprawling, epic novel spanning three continents and several generations. It is an ambitious examination of modern society, mythology and love. Rushdie’s novel is a fascinating perspective on fame, mythmaking and the toll it takes on the mind and spirit.… Rushdie is a master storyteller, effortlessly weaving popular music (real and imagined) with history (real and imagined), religion, culture, nature and the vagaries of human nature. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is proof of his vision and power as a master storyteller.”
—The St. John’s Telegram
“Time and space, understood conventionally, have never been enough for Rushdie’s antic imagination, and here he needs two parallel universes to contain this playful, highly allusive journey through the last 40 years of pop Culture.… Comic and dazzling [The Ground Beneath Her Feet is] a spirited, head-spinning entertainment from a writer of undeniable genius.”
—Publishers Weekly
“It’s the best thing ever written about rock and roll. It is rock and roll.… A book of profound affirmation, of indomitable humanity, of love. A book of greatness.”
—The Baltimore Sun
ALSO BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
FICTION
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
NON-FICTION
The Jaguar Smile
Imaginary Homelands
The Wizard of Oz
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork (co-editor)
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2000
Copyright © 1999 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2000. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, in 1999. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
“Jailhouse Rock” by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller
© 1957 (Renewed) Jerry Leiber Music, Mike Stoller Music;
All rights reserved; Used by permission.
“What a Wonderful World” by George David Weiss, Bob Thiele © 1967 (Renewed) Quartet Music, Inc.,
Range Road Music, Abilene Music;
All rights reserved; Used by permission.
“Rubber Ball,” words and music by Aaron Schroeder and Anne Orlowski; Published by Rachel’s Own Music and Dandy Dittys; Used by permission; International Copyright Secured.
“The Great Pretender” by Buck Ram
© 1955 (Renewed) by Panther Music Corporation;
All rights reserved; Used by permission;
International Copyright Secured.
“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” by Rainer Maria Rilke in Neue Gedichte: New Poems, trans. Stephen Cohn (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press). © 1992, 1997 Stephen Cohn;
All rights reserved.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rushdie, Salman
The ground beneath her feet
eISBN: 978-0-307-36779-2
I. Title.
PR9499.3.R8G7 2000 823′.914 C99-932765-8
v3.1
FOR MILAN
Set up no stone to his memory.
Just let the rose bloom each year for his sake.
For it is Orpheus. His metamorphosis
into this and that. We should not trouble
about other names. Once and for all
it’s Orpheus when there’s singing.
—R. M. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
translated by M. D. Herter Norton
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Keeper of Bees
2. Melodies and Silences
3. Legends of Thrace
4. The Invention of Music
5. Goat Songs
6. Disorientations
7. More Than Love
8. The Decisive Moment
9. Membrane
10. Season of the Witch
11. Higher Love
12. Transformer
13. On Pleasure Island
14. The Whole Catastrophe
15. Beneath Her Feet
16. Vina Divina
17. Mira on the Wall
18. Dies Irae
1
THE KEEPER OF BEES
On St. Valentine’s Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim. Bare-torsoed men resembling the actor Christopher Plummer had been gripping her by the wrists and ankles. Her body was splayed out, naked and writhing, over a polished stone bearing the graven image of the snakebird Quetzalcoatl. The open mouth of the plumed serpent surrounded a dark hollow scooped out of the stone, and although her own mouth was stretched wide by her screams the only noise she could hear was the popping of flashbulbs; but before they could slit her throat, before her lifeblood could bubble into that terrible cup, she awoke at noon in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, in an unfamiliar bed with a half-dead stranger by her side, a naked mestizo male in his early twenties, identified in the interminable press coverage that followed the catastrophe as Raúl Páramo, the playboy heir of a well-known local construction baron, one of whose corporations owned the hotel.
She had been perspiring heavily and the sodden bedsheets stank of the meaningless misery of the nocturnal encounter. Raúl Páramo was unconscious, white-lipped, and his body was galvanized, every few moments, by spasms which Vina recognized as being identical to her own dream writhings. After a few moments he began to make frightful noises deep in his windpipe, as if someone were slitting his throat, as if his blood were flowing out through the scarlet smile of an invisible wound into a phantom goblet. Vina, panicking, leapt from the bed, snatched up her clothes, the leather pants and gold-sequinned bustier in which she had made her final exit, the night before, from the stage of the city’s convention centre. Contemptuously, despairingly, she had surrendered herself to this nobody, this boy less than half her age, she had selected him more or less at random from the backstage throng, the lounge lizards, the slick, flower-bearing suitors, the industrial magnates, the aristotrash, the drug underlords, the tequila princes, all with limousines and champagne and cocaine and maybe even diamonds to bestow upon the evening’s star.
The man had begun to introduce himself, to preen and fawn, but she didn’t want to know his name or the size of his bank balance. She had picked him like a flower and now she wanted him between her teeth, she had ordered him like a take-home meal and now she alarmed him by the ferocity of her appetites, because she began to feast upon him the moment the door of the limo was closed, before the chauffeur had time to raise the partition that gave the passengers their privacy. Afterwards he, the chauffeur, spoke with reverence of her naked body, while the newspapermen plied him with tequila he whispered about her swarming and predatory nudity as if it were a miracle, who’d have thought she was way the wrong side of forty, I guess somebody upstairs wanted to keep her just the way she was. I would have done anything for such a woman, the chauffeur moaned, I would have driven at two hundred kilometres per hour for her if it were speed she wanted, I would have crashed into a concrete wall for her if it had been her desire to die.
Only when she lurched into the eleventh-floor corridor of the hotel, half dressed and confused, stumbling over the unclaimed newspapers, whose headlines about French nuclear tests in the Pacific and political unrest in the southern province of Chiapas smudged the bare soles of her feet with their shrieking ink, only then did she understand that the suite of rooms she had abandoned was her own, she had slammed the door and didn’t have the key, and it was lucky for her in that moment of vulnerability that the person she bumped into was me, Mr. Umeed Merchant, photographer, a.k.a. “Rai,” her so to speak chum ever since the old days in Bombay and the only shutterbug within one thousand and one miles who would not dream of photographing her in such delicious and scandalous disarray, her whole self momentarily out of focus and worst of all looking her age, the only image-stealer who would never have stolen from her that frayed and hunted look, that bleary and unarguably bag-eyed helplessness, her tangled fountain of wiry dyed red hair quivering above her head in a woodpeckerish topknot, her lovely mouth trembling and uncertain, with the tiny fjords of the pitiless years deepening at the edges of her lips, the very archetype of the wild rock goddess halfway down the road to desolation and ruin. She had decided to become a redhead for this tour because at the age of forty-four she was making a new start, a solo career without Him, for the first time in years she was on the road without Ormus, so it wasn’t really surprising that she was disoriented and off balance most of the time. And lonely. It has to be admitted. Public life or private life, makes no difference, that’s the truth: when she wasn’t with him, it didn’t matter who she was with, she was always alone.
Disorientation: loss of the East. And of Ormus Cama, her sun.
And it wasn’t just dumb luck, her bumping into me. I was always there for her. Always looking out for her, always waiting for her call. If she’d wanted it, there could have been dozens of us, hundreds, thousands. But I believe there was only me. And the last time she called for help, I couldn’t give it, and she died. She ended in the middle of the story of her life, she was an unfinished song abandoned at the bridge, deprived of the right to follow her life’s verses to their final, fulfilling rhyme.
Two hours after I rescued her from the unfathomable chasm of her hotel corridor, a helicopter flew us to Tequila, where Don Ángel Cruz, the owner of one of the largest plantations of blue agave cactus and of the celebrated Ángel distillery, a gentleman fabled for the sweet amplitude of his countertenor voice, the great rotunda of his belly and the lavishness of his hospitality, was scheduled to hold a banquet in her honour. Meanwhile, Vina’s playboy lover had been taken to hospital, in the grip of drug-induced seizures so extreme that they eventually proved fatal, and for days afterwards, because of what happened to Vina, the world was treated to detailed analyses of the contents of the dead man’s bloodstream, his stomach, his intestines, his scrotum, his eye sockets, his appendix, his hair, in fact everything except his brain, which was not thought to contain anything of interest, and had been so thoroughly scrambled by narcotics that nobody could understand his last words, spoken during his final, comatose delirium. Some days later, however, when the information had found its way on to the Internet, a fantasy-fiction wonk hailing from the Castro district of San Francisco and nicknamed
One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. I sat next to Vina Apsara in the helicopter to Tequila, and I saw no ring on her finger, except for the talismanic moonstone she always wore, her link to Ormus Cama, her reminder of his love.
She had sent her entourage by road, selecting me as her only aerial companion, “of all of you bastards he’s the only one I can trust,” she’d snarled. They had set off an hour ahead of us, the whole damn zoo, her serpentine manager, her hyena of a personal assistant, the security gorillas, the peacock of a hairdresser, the publicity dragon, but now, as the chopper swooped over their motorcade, the darkness that had enveloped her since our departure seemed to lift, and she ordered the pilot to make a series of low passes over the cars below, lower and lower, I saw his eyes widen with fear, the pupils were black pinpricks, but he was under her spell like all of us, and did her bidding. I was the one yelling higher, get higher into the microphone attached to o
ur ear-defender headsets, while her laughter clattered in my ears like a door banging in the wind, and when I looked across at her to tell her I was scared I saw that she was weeping. The police had been surprisingly gentle with her when they arrived at the scene of Raúl Páramo’s overdose, contenting themselves with cautioning her that she might become the subject of an investigation herself. Her lawyers had terminated the encounter at that point, but afterwards she looked stretched, unstable, too bright, as if she were on the point of flying apart like an exploding lightbulb, like a supernova, like the universe.
Then we were past the vehicles and flying over the hills and valleys turned smoky blue by the agave plantations, and her mood swung again, she began to giggle into her microphone and to insist that we were taking her to a place that did not exist, a fantasy location, a wonderland, because how was it possible that there could be a place called Tequila, “it’s like saying that whisky comes from Whisky, or gin is made in Gin,” she cried. “Is the Vodka a river in Russia? Do they make rum in Rúm?” And then a sudden darkening, her voice dropping low, becoming almost inaudible beneath the noise of the rotors, “And heroin comes from heroes, and crack from the Crack of Doom.” It was possible that I was hearing the birth of a song. Afterwards, when the captain and copilot were interviewed about her helicopter ride, they loyally refused to divulge any details of that in-flight monologue in which she swung moment by moment between elation and despair. “She was in high spirits,” they said, “and spoke in English, so we did not understand.”
Not only in English. Because it was only me, she could prattle on in Bombay’s garbage argot, Mumbai ki kachrapati baat-cheet, in which a sentence could begin in one language, swoop through a second and even a third and then swing back round to the first. Our acronymic name for it was Hug-me. Hindi Urdu Gujarati Marathi English. Bombayites like me were people who spoke five languages badly and no language well.
Separated from Ormus Cama on this tour, Vina had discovered the limitations, musical and verbal, of her own material. She had written new songs to show off that celestial voice of hers, that multiple-octave, Yma Sumac stairway to heaven of an instrument which, she now claimed, had never been sufficiently stretched by Ormus’s compositions; but in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Guadalajara she heard for herself the publics tepid responses to these songs, in spite of the presence of her three demented Brazilian percussionists and her pair of duelling Argentine guitarists who threatened to end each performance with a knife fight. Even the guest appearance of the veteran Mexican superstar Chico Estefan had failed to enthuse her audiences; instead, his surgery-smoothed face with its mouthful of unreal teeth only drew attention to her own fading youth, which was mirrored in the average age of the crowds. The kids had not come, or not enough of them, not nearly enough.