The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Everywhere there are women sitting alone because of men who will not return, says Pat Kalamanja, thinking of Persis. And men also, he adds, longing for women who have gone. Life is a broken radio and there are no good songs.

  Go to Persis, says Spenta, kissing him on the cheek. Cling to love while you can. At least he has his daughter, she thinks. As for herself, a vegetarian immoralist, whose determination to succeed will now be twice as great, is planning to make off with her son.

  It’s been ten years, more than ten. Red Nichols is dead and the Five Pennies aren’t worth a nickel. When Ormus and Vina speak of love, they may be chasing phantoms. But though the body metamorphoses, it also remembers. They remember each other’s moves, each other’s need and smell and touch, each other’s extremeness.

  There’s forgetting, too. Her return, his awakening: they feel like they’ve journeyed to a city they’ve both visited in dreams. Everything’s familiar, there is much that tugs at the heart, but they don’t know their way around. And there are whole neighbourhoods they’ve never seen.

  They set out to learn each other again.

  I’ve been alone, she says. Even when there was a man in my bed; maybe particularly then. You don’t know, she says. You truly have no notion. A woman alone in this assassin’s business, this thief’s murderer’s rapist’s business. Sometimes you don’t get paid. And after they steal your money they bootleg your work, they dirty your reputation, they call you whore.

  You don’t want to know what I have done. I have danced in a G-string in dirty Midwest dives. Bums in Atlantic City bars have put their hands on me, but I always knew I was a queen in exile, I had that in me?, the waiting?, the knowing my kingdom would come. One day, I knew, the poor would beg me for money and I would say, no dice, jack, I did my hustling, go do yours. People. Always hitting you up, always hitching a ride.

  He says, weakly, you sound like you’ve lived a hundred years.

  Two hundred, she says. My heart broke open and history fell in. That, and the future too. I go back a century to ugly Ma Rainey preaching Trust No Man, and forward a century to some space kitty floating weightless round the moon and singing to a stadium in the sky. I sat at the feet of Memphis Minnie, who’s only just alive?, a fat balloon in a wheelchair now, she stopped crying just long enough to boast how she out-guitared Broonzy and to teach me the Minnie-Jitis. And what Holiday said about herself you know to be true of me. I was a woman when I was sixteen. Now I’m old as money, old as gold. Now I’m old as love.

  He staggers in the gardens, struggling for his lost strength, his storied grace.

  I want my man, she croons. I want my man. I don’t want a skinny man, and I don’t want a fat, and I don’t want a man who cares about such things as that. And I don’t want him angry, and I don’t want him mean, and I don’t want him sugar sweet or cute or peachy keen. And I found my man. I found my man.

  The blues is just another name for not having any place, she sings. The blues is looking down at planet earth when you’re stuck in outer space. Now that I’ve found you baby I can leave the blues behind. I can put my arms around you and ease my troubled mind. Rock and roll, she lets fly with the full force of her voice. My baby taught me how to rock and roll. I was half, he made me whole, if he’s the bridge I’ll pay his toll. Rock and roll. My baby taught me how to rock and roll.

  To restore his energy she gives him aloe vera juice to drink and teaches him yogic breathing. What worries her most are his vibrations. She makes him spread his hand out flat on a board and hangs a crystal pendant over it. At once the crystal begins to swing insanely around, describing intricate patterns in the air, as if in the grip of a force field of unimaginable strength. She gasps and catches at it, even though she’s not supposed to. I had to, she explains, it was about to shatter to bits. It couldn’t take the violence of what you’re putting out. I don’t know what you’ve got inside you?, but it’s stronger than a nuclear bomb.

  Three of us went west from Bombay. Of the three, it was Vina, for whom it was a return journey, who first got caught up in the gnaw and churning of the western world’s spiritual hunger, its chasms of uncertainty, and turned turtle: a tough shell over insides full of mush. Vina the radical, the word-hooligan, the outlaw, the woman on the edge: open her up and you found crystals and ether, you found someone who longed to be a disciple and be shewn the straight path. Which was a part of Ormus’s power over her, and India’s too. As for me, she found me anomalous, oxymoronic, an accusation she might profitably have levelled at herself (but never did). Rai, the un-Indian Indian, the easterner without a spiritual side: she needed to conquer me, to show me the truth about myself, which in her forcefully expressed view I was busily denying. So she kept coming back to me, bouncing between Ormus’s bed and mine.

  Also, of course, she liked illicit sex. I want more than what I want.

  When he was strong enough to make love it was our turn, his and mine, to circle round the bed, Vina remembers. (I’m in bed myself by this time, and I’ve had a bellyful of Vina’s Ormusings but I can’t shut her up, nobody ever could.) Like stringed magnets, she says. Like dancers at a masked ball, only undressed.

  Vina, for petesake. It’s late.

  Okay, but we did. At that moment which should have been a happy time, you know?, after everything?, we both you could say all of a sudden got to the point, a.k.a. our little deficiency in the department of trust.

  Now why would that be an issue between you, I wonder, applying my lips to her moderately interested nipple. Why would the two of you mmff have anything to discuss ffwp in that region whatsoever. Is that mmhm mmhm nice.

  Which murmured sarcasms, as I should have known, provoke a Vina tirade. Their unspoken sub-text—you were the broken promise, lady, the one who walked out on him, and as your presence within my bedroom walls goes some distance to proving, infidelity’s your middle name—brings her bolt upright in bed, pushing angry hands into the depths of her hair as if in search of a weapon. Vina can do five minutes—twenty minutes—on almost any topic under the sun, and I am now given, with many added expletives, which I shall delete, her impromptu but impressively polished riff on trust, argued as is her custom from the general—trust as an aspect of modernity, its possibility and necessity created by our release from the tribe into the self—to the particular, namely, that which existed or did not exist between herself and Ormus; and, peripherally, me.

  The allegedly permanent breakdown of trust between men and women: it’s a long time since this began to sound unoriginal, even though it has to be admitted she has a right to the subject, as one of the first women to make it her own, and to keep shouting until it became everybody else’s. Scarcely more interesting is her argument that women no longer see men purely as individuals, but think of them as repositories and products of the ignoble history of their sex. But then comes a neat twist. If men are not entirely individuals (and nor are women), then they can’t be held fully responsible for their actions, since responsibility is a concept that can exist only in the context of the modern idea of the auto-determinant self. As products of history, as mere culturally generated automata, we’re excluded from trusting and being trusted, because trust can exist only where responsibility can be—is—taken.

  Professor Vina. I seem to remember she did end up holding some sort of honorary chair in one of the newer disciplines at a small, chic liberal-arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson. I certainly remember her amazing years as a lecture tourist. (This was after VTO stopped performing in public and before she attempted that final, fatal solo comeback.) She went on the college circuit with her “chautauquas,” a word she stole from Robert Pirsig’s Zen best-seller and re-cycled to describe her otherwise impossible to categorize stand-up evenings mixing ideological harangues, comic cabaret turns, autobiographical self-exposure and overpowering songs. The original, authentic chau-tauqua was a Native American talk-gathering, but Vina was never big on discussion or, indeed, on authenticity, which she held to be a pernicious notion that n
eeded “deconstruction.” Her chautauquas were really improvised monologues, whose closest cousins were the oral narrative sessions of the great Indian storytellers, actually existing Indians from actually existing India, as she liked to say, pulling rank over the Red kind and meaning it, although it was a part of her magic, the thing that made her the colossal figure she became, that—publicly, at any rate—no Native Americans ever took offence.

  I remember, I photographed, the rapt upturned faces of the worshipful college young listening to this grand survivor of the heroic age who prowled the stage attired in wildly eclectic ethnic symbols, mojos, caftans, quetzal feathers, classical breastplates, tika marks, and held forth in shockingly explicit detail about her own life, its highs and lows, its sexual adventures and political encounters (sometimes these strands became deliciously entwined, as for example in her account of a long weekend in the private lodge of a Caribbean dictator with too much beard and not enough chin). Without warning, she’d electrify her young audiences by surging out of anecdote into heart-stopping a capella renderings of gospel songs, blues standards, jazz-scat Ella music, soft bossa nova shuffles and rock anthems, all in that voice, Our Mistress’s Voice, her true gift to us all, an instrument that was, literally, too good for this world. Literally, to die for.

  On stage or in my bed, Professor Vina was one of Vina’s most awesome alter egos, it was some performance, but even as I listened quietly to the battlefield thunder of her arguments, I found myself noticing the cracks and rifts she was trying to cover up, the divisions in her soul, and thinking that Maria the disappearing nympho had a point when she spoke of our inner irreconcilability, the tectonic contradictoriness that has gotten into us all and has commenced to rip us to pieces like the unstable earth itself.

  Professor Vina and Crystal Vina, Holy Vina and Profane Vina, Junkie Vina and Veggie Vina, Women’s Vina and Vina the Sex Machine, Barren-Childless-Tragic Vina and Traumatized-Childhood-Tragedy Vina, Leader Vina who blazed a trail for a generation of women and Disciple Vina who came to think of Ormus as the One she had always sought. She was all of these and more, and everything she was, she pitched uncompromisingly high. There was no Self-Effacing Vina to set against Vina of the Screamingly Stretched Extremes.

  That’s why people loved her, remember: for making herself the exaggerated avatar of their own jumbled selves, but pushed to the edge or, better, driven to the heights: of talent and articulacy and outra-geousness and promiscuity and self-destructiveness and intellect and passion and life. Higher Vina, engendering in the multitude a reciprocally higher, though entirely earthly, love.

  As for the particular, the matter of trust between Ormus Cama and herself, an issue in which I myself have been a significant if ultimately peripheral factor, Vina uses her cockeyed theories of the externally determined self to bring in a not-guilty verdict on her many infidelities and desertions. The girl can’t help it, that’s what her position comes down to, when you strip away all the long words. What’s in her nature is just there, generated by history or genes or sexual politics, it doesn’t finally matter which. It’s as if Olive Oyl were to usurp the catchphrase of Popeye the Sailor Man. I yam what I yam an’ that’s what I yam. It’s like all the justifications of infidelity which men have used since time began.

  Take it or leave it, she said; and Ormus took it—irresistible Ormus, for love of whom so many women pined, for whom the saintly beauty Persis Kalamanja had sacrificed all her hopes of joy.

  Can there be a great love without trust?

  Sho’ thing, Rai, honey, she says, doing her panther stretch and ghetto drawl, sho’ nuff they can. An’ Ormus and me, we is the ever-livin’ proof.

  (Ever-living, I find myself thinking. Vina, don’t tempt fate.)

  Aloud I say, You know, Vina, I don’t really get it. I never have. The way you two are together. How does that work exactly?

  She laughs. Higher love, she answers. Love on a higher level. Just think of it like that. Like, exaltation.

  She’s relaxing now, having talked herself back into a good mood. When she isn’t spaced out or blazing mad she can take a joke. Where was I, she says, settling back, her head on my stomach. Oh, right. We were circling the bed. He was out of the orangery by then?, I should mention that. Adios to that goddamn glass box. Instead this dusty bedroom full of disapproving clubmen frowning off the walls and above them if you believe plaster copies of classical friezes. And on Corinthian pedestals, marble busts. Persons in togas with laurel wreaths sitting on their ears. It’s the seventies and the world’s falling apart?, but we’re given the fucking Parthenon to sleep in. The curtains by the way you would otherwise find only in old movie theatres, that dark sea of cloth, I expected them at some point to lift?, and for there to be I don’t know trailers, commercials, our feature presentation. But okay, guess what?, the main attraction was us.

  When Vina settles in for one of these all-night marathons, once she’s started running on her personal movie screen a selection from her library of personal lifetime classics—and it might turn out to be a double or even triple bill—you just pass the popcorn and diet cola and go with the sleep option, having no other. Sleep for me has not for many years been a thing to look forward to. There are pictures in my head too, and at most of them I’d rather not take a second look.

  I have much to say about myself, I have my own stories to tell. Mostly they’ll wait. (While the gods are occupying centre stage, we mortals must hang about in the wings. But after the stars have finished all their tragic dying, the extras come on stage—it’s the end of the big banquet scene—and we get to eat up all the fucking food.) But the pictures are here now. I can’t put them back in their box.

  A photographer has a second portfolio that he can’t show because he never got the images on to film. If he’s a photo-journalist many of these pictures visit him in dreams and ruin his fitful nights. Bobby Flow, the control-freak genius of the Nebuchadnezzar Agency, had three words that he said taught you all you needed to be good at the job. Get up close. Which he brilliantly did until somebody blew his head off in a swamp in Indochina, that being an occupational hazard. And the other one is when they don’t blow your head off, because then it fills up with the actually existing world, the big picture of the world as it is when somebody peels the skin off. Flayed. Red in tooth and claw. Earthrise re-shot as a bleeding broken skull hanging in exploding space.

  I got up close enough times, too many, and I have my battle tales, my tall stories, like everyone else. Photographs taken while sheltering from bullets behind the dead bodies of other photographers. Walleyed toothless lunatics with Uzis shoving their guns’ noses into my stomach, and even, once, into my mouth. The day I was pushed up against an ochre wall and made the subject of a mock execution, a Slav warlord’s little joke. Listen: it’s nothing. I seek neither to brag nor to complain. I went because it was my thing, my need. Some go because it’s their need to die, some to see death, some to boast when they get back alive. (Everyone’s a philosopher.) I could say guilt’s got nothing to do with it, that film removed from a dead man’s shoe is ancient history, but I’d be lying. That is, up to a point I’d be lying, because while I admit, okay, sure, every time I stand up in front of a screaming child with a bazooka I’m trying to prove I deserve to be there, I have the right to be carrying that camera, that accreditation—if you want ten-cent Lucy van Pelt psychoanalysis, there it is. What really interests and scares me is that the drive goes deeper than that, deeper even than the picture of a man hanging from a slowly rotating fan.

  Something in me wants the dreadful, wants to stare down the human race’s worst-case scenarios.

  I need to know that evil exists and how to recognize it if I pass it in the street. I need it not to be abstract; to understand it by feeling its effect on me, the corrosion, the burn. Once in a chemistry exam I dropped concentrated acid on my hand, and the speed with which the brown stain spread across my skin was even more frightening than the acid itself. Science-fictional speed. But the poin
t is I recovered, I’m fine, my hand works. Does this sound like self-justification? That every time I come away from my chicken game against evil, it’s like proving at least to myself that the bad guys still lose a few, they can even have a really long loser streak?

  It does?

  Okay, so I’m just a violence junkie and one day I’ll OD. Like Bobby Flow. Hulot’s the clever one. He gave up taking pictures and paints watercolours instead. His paintings are truly dreadful, the worst type of petit-maître banality. He has discovered sentimentality and good taste in his old age and these two elderly nursemaids will keep him alive.

  I don’t need to tell you where I’ve been. You know already. This Southeast Asian swamp burning with eerie napalm fire, that casual pile of heads by the side of a dusty African road, this terrorist attack on a Mideast market square, that Latin American village mourning its busload of land-mined kids. Sure you do. You’ve seen my work. We all do this work. It’s what’s wanted.

  And when I can’t stand hell any more I change my clothes, I put on some of the best casualwear Seventh Avenue has to offer, head for the studio and drop in on pussy heaven: fashion photography, when you can make beautiful women in expensive clothes behave as if they were in a war zone. They stare, leap, spin, gasp, duck, arch, jerk. I’ve seen machine-gun fire take a body that way.

  That’s not all I do with them. It depends on the girl. Some of them are calm and I go with that, I create seas of calm around them, oceans of light and shadow. I drown them in peace until it scares them, and then they come alive. Others know something of my more brutal work and want to show me how real they are, how much they know of harshness, of the street. The contrast between harshness and couture usually works, until it becomes a cliché. Then for a while I go with beauty, piling beauty on beauty, making it overwhelming, almost indecent, like a ravishment.