The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Our lives tear us in half. Ormus Cama the reluctant mystic, the surviving twin, lost the double in his head and discovered instead a doubling in the whole of existence. His two eyes, seeing different whatnesses, made his head and heart ache. Something of the same sort was my fate regarding this thing, America. Because the America in which I led my well-off, green-carded life, Orpheum-America in which love is the sign of our humanity, America below Fourteenth Street, loosey-goosey and free as air, gave me more of a sense of belonging than I’d ever felt back home. Also, with the dream America everyone carries round in his head, America the Beautiful, Langston Hughes’s country that never existed but needed to exist—with that, like everyone else, I was thoroughly in love. But ask the rest of the world what America meant and with one voice the rest of the world answered back, Might, it means Might. A power so great that it shapes our daily lives even though it barely knows we exist, it couldn’t point to us on a map. America is no finger-snapping bopster. It’s a fist.

  This, too, was like seeing double. This was where my heartaches began.

  In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth.

  I’d started getting into quarrels, even into fights. Yes, in bars, with strangers, that too, fights about nothing. Me. I heard myself boring and bullying in a thick drunk’s voice I barely recognized but I couldn’t stop myself. As if the violence I’d seen had ignited some answering violence deep within me. The fires at my center ascending through faults in my personality to pour out through the volcanoes of my eyes, my lips. One evening not long after Standish’s disappearance I escorted Vina to Xenon, then to 54. Ormus hated those places, so I could act as Vina’s walker without arousing his suspicions. She on the other hand couldn’t leave the clubs alone, it was an addiction, and anyway Vina never cared about what people might think. She wore black but it didn’t look much like mourning dress; there wasn’t quite enough of it for that. Well, anyhow, at 54 there was this slick-haired guy who made some wisecrack about it being too soon after Mull’s last exit … oh, never mind. Vina pulled me away just in time. She said what I was experiencing was male anger, gender-based, because you’re losing control. Meaning, men were. That felt like a shot so wide of the mark I didn’t even know where to look to retrieve the arrow, so I started bitching about Ormus instead. These otherworld songs of his, I said, shouting over the music, what does he think he’s doing, offering people a promised land or what. It makes me mad, I said, because even though if you listen to the small print he’s just saying it’s different, not better, that isn’t what the kids are hearing. Who hears the lyrics properly anyway, you said it yourself. Those fucking New Quaker lunatics, you think they’re hearing right? They’re aching for doomsday, praying for the end, bring on the dies irae, the day of wrath, because then the fucking kingdom will come. I can’t fucking stand it. Will you guys please stop.

  That was when she told me. We’re doing it, she shouted. We’re getting married. I hope you’ll cool down long enough to come.

  The music had stopped, and she’d yelled into the sudden silence. It was quite an announcement. Everybody in the joint started applauding and Vina just grinned and took her bows. In the end, having no option, I clapped too.

  Something unexpected was happening in the music world, the younger bands were failing, the glitter litter had lost its shine and the kids were looking to the older guys. As if the human race were to turn away from the present evolutionary moment and commence to reverence the dinosaurs who came before. It was disgraceful, in a way, but being older was getting to be an advantage. Ormus Cama was forty-four years old and this was working in his favor. The same age as the music, people kept repeating, the same age as the music, like a mantra, as if it meant anything, as if music didn’t cross frontiers of time as well as space. To be the same age as the music was suddenly to know it all, like the ancient Delta blues brothers, like Old Adam himself. Wisdom was the hot commodity now, and Ormus had that, the wisdom of the recluse, of the Delphic oracle, of, oh, let’s say Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. And in addition, in the eyes of the record-buying public he possessed something which was not to be found in Delphi or the California surf: viz., the wisdom of the East.

  VTO had a hit record again, and what a record it was, a jam-packed carnival of a double album, Doctor Love and the Whole Catastrophe. That was a phrase Ormus liked, he’d read or heard it someplace and it stuck. He used to say that music could be either about almost nothing, one tiny strand of sound plucked like a silver hair from the head of the Muse, or about everything there was, all of it, tutti tutti, life, marriage, otherworlds, earthquakes, uncertainties, warnings, rebukes, journeys, dreams, love, the whole ball of wax, the full nine yards, the whole catastrophe. The new album was a rich mosaic of all these: love songs and jeremiads, heart-stopping odes and visions of doom. It couldn’t miss.

  On the sleeve he and Vina posed in the fig-leafed nude, like classical statues wearing shades. Like mythical lovers, Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, Venus and Adonis. Or a modern pair. He was Doctor Love and she, in this reading, was the Whole Catastrophe. This sleeve was afterwards called a prophecy of death by the same people who believed Paul McCartney was dead because he was the only one walking barefoot across the zebra crossing on Abbey Road, the people who insisted that if you put your stereo needle on the grooves in the reject-zone of Sgt. Pepper and then turned the platter anti-clockwise with your finger you’d hear John Lennon saying I will fuck you like a superman. The world of popular music—the fans as well as the artistes—sometimes seemed to be populated exclusively by people with troubled minds.

  Vina and Ormus were finally allowing themselves just to be in love, and their flowering happiness was the damnedest thing. Soon after their marriage they paid for full pages of advertising space in the world’s press to say how they felt: an idea that must have been Vina’s. Much of the text sounded like her work too. This is what they told the world: that they had learned to love each other fully, trusting each other totally, through their dreams. They had discovered that each was dreaming of the other, every single night, and they were the same dreams. We were actually, in reality, but without knowing it, leaving our bodies to enter the other’s dream. Our spirits made love and taught our waking bodies to trust.

  So their wet dreams had got them through ten years, that was how I saw it. They, however, now had rather loftier ideas about the power of love, and of music, which is the sound of love.

  Love is the relationship between levels of reality.

  Love produces harmony and is the ruler of the arts. As artists we seek to achieve, in our art, a state of love.

  Love is the attempt to impose order on chaos, meaning on absurdity.

  It is inventive, double-natured, holding the keys to everything.

  There is love in the cosmos.

  Love was born before, and is more potent than, the laws of nature.

  Love raises us above the limitations of our bodies and gives us free will.

  We assert the love of man for his fellows.

  We assert love as a cosmic force, bringing about creation.

  We transform constantly and we remain constant. Music is the bridge between our worlds. Music liberates and unifies.

  We are filled with the madness of love, which leads the mind beyond understanding towards a vision of beauty and joy.

>   Songs are love’s enchantment. They are everyday magic. The Sirens’ song drew men to their deaths. Calypso’s song kept Odysseus enchanted by her side. No man can resist the song of Aphrodite, or of Persuasion, her singing witch.

  Songs enchant away our pain.

  May we, who are full of desire, always have song, sweet song, sweeter than any drug.

  Love is harmony. Harmony is love.

  (We dedicate this record to the memory of our friend and savior, Mullens Standish the loving pirate. May your skull and crossbones always fly high.)

  The music was their real lovemaking. So much has been said and written about Vina’s big-mouth attitude, but what I want to hear is more about the way she used that big mouth in song, along with those lungs, that brain. I want to hear about that voice-of-the-century voice. How she improved her phrasing by studying film of violinists—Heifetz, Menuhin, Grappelli—and, impressed by the bowing that created an apparently continuous sound (all teeth and no gaps was the way she put it), how she set out to sing the same way. To sing like a violin. To give herself that famous long-line fluidity she also studied the way horn players breathe, and spent hours improving her lungs by swimming underwater laps at her health club. Then she just stood up and let rip with (in the bad old days) a bottle of bourbon in her hand and it was as if she’d been born that way. The art that conceals art: the most flamboyant rock star in the world was a devotee of the philosophy of artistic discretion. Never let ’em see how you do it, that was her creed. She once said to me: What do they want to know, how? That’s not for them to know. It’s my job to do it and theirs to applaud.

  The atom-splitter Oppenheimer, on beholding the power of his brainchild the Bomb, quoted the Bhagavad Gita. I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. Deaths magic mushroom, born of the marriage of fissile materials. In the eight years between Ormus and Vina’s marriage and her untimely end, there were some harsh, carping voices, notably those of their erstwhile admirers Rémy Auxerre and Marco Sangria, who alleged that both leading members of VTO were highly unstable personalities, permanently on the verge of coming apart, and that if they weren’t super-rich rock stars they’d be in the funny farm. I say only that if they were fissile, then at least the energy released by their union—love’s own Manhattan Project—was a brightness rather than a darkness, a source of pleasure, not pain, an aspect of Life-the-Creator rather than the Destroyer, Death.

  You must imagine me gritting my teeth as I write this.

  Love made them irresistible, unforgettable. As performers, as people, deferral’s end and the relief of consummation rendered them, if I may be permitted the pun, consummate. When they walked into rooms, hand in hand and glowing, people fell silent, in awe. They had been perfected by love. And there was plenty to spare. The long-dammed torrent of their joy poured over anyone within range, drowning strangers in unlooked-for happiness. Their stage act had been reinvented completely. Ormus turned round to face the audience. Legs planted wide apart, golden guitar sparkling in his hand, tall, thin, his face like a monument to his long wait and belated triumph, the golden eye patch adding to the power of the persona, lending it piratical overtones, he represented the danger and realism of the music as well as its underlying hope. Unfortunately, owing to his damaged, whistling eardrums, he needed protection against the decibels the band was pumping out, and so a soundproofed glass case had to be constructed for him, complete with air-conditioning and floor pedals which controlled and varied the sounds of his weeping guitar. At the focal point of the stage, brilliantly lit, was this object out of space opera or fairy tale, and Ormus Cama, who had once lain comatose in the glass coffin of a converted orangery, now sang and played, fully conscious, inside another glass box.

  While he stood still, encased in glass, Vina ran and leapt, pranced and whirled, a super-fit, super-charged Vina, a Vina who was taking care of business and of herself. If he was Being, she was Becoming, and behind them the rhythm section laid down a succession of righteous laws; the drums beat their message to the skies.

  And around and about them—perhaps to deflect attention from his own enforced static rôle—Ormus began to devise great spectacles, hyperbolic feats of showmanship that showed him to be a Bombay lad at heart, turning naturally to the mythic vulgarity of the Bollywood musical. Yes, showtime; science fiction dystopias, fabulated dragon-worlds, seraglio visions featuring platoons of harem-panted, rhinestoned-naveled belly dancers, black-magic rings of fire o’ertowered by Baron Samedi inflatables, and the whole multiple-image videorama which is now the staple fare of stadium rock but in those days gave people the kind of shock Bob Dylan did when he went electric. (What could once be achieved by plugging a guitar into the wall now requires a military operation. We are not as easily shockable, not as innocent as we were.)

  The addition of showmanship, of spectacle, gained VTO new legions of admirers. They entered that zone of celebrity in which everything except celebrity ceases to signify. Camamania, Vinamania were in full swooning, screaming swing, but some early exegetes jumped off the bus. Sangria and Auxerre attacked VTO for having betrayed their old fans, for selling out. Perspiration instead of inspiration, light shows instead of enlightenment, greed instead of need, wrote Marco Sangria, accusing the band of becoming little more than the biggest stick of bubble gum on earth. Ormus, that golden eye patch, that giant glass ear-muff, Sangria scoffed: why not just put your whole head in a fucking bag?

  Later, when Vina and Ormus “went political,” organizing the Rock the World charity concerts, meeting world leaders to demand action on global famine, protesting the cynicism of international oil companies in Africa, joining the campaign for third-world debt relief, demonstrating against health hazards at nuclear processing plants, documenting the growing invasion of personal privacy in America by the spreading tentacles of the secret state, highlighting the abuse of human rights in China, proselytizing the vegetarian message, the same commentators who had abused them for their superficiality now berated them for pomposity, for stepping out of their playpen to argue with the grown-ups.

  Ormus Cama’s second full-page press advertisement, What Is the Whole Catastrophe?, in which he publicly expressed his fear that some sort of apocalypse might be imminent, some sort of science fiction encounter between variant and incompatible versions of the world, was the last straw.

  To be given the world as a toy must be pleasant, Rémy Auxerre wrote. But then one must have a certain aptitude for playing the worlds big games. To be given the world as a stage is also a great privilege, he added. But on the world’s stage there are only a few heroes and many babbling fools.

  In a way they had ceased to be real. To Auxerre and Sangria, they had become little more than signs of the times, lacking true autonomy, to be decoded according to one’s own inclination and need. Marco Sangria, whose most profound conviction was that the truth of the twentieth century is a secret truth, the century’s history a secret history of antichrists and outcasts, announced that the VTO super-phenomenon was now too one-dimensionally overt, too vulgarly apparent. Their success was therefore a metaphor of the flatness, the one-dimensionality, of the culture. It was a rebuke to its own fans. The Martinican Auxerre, champion of racial and cultural admixture, of the Creolization of the soul, made it his task to expose Ormus and Vina—Vina, the honorary Panther!—as deracinated, even Tomist. After long researches he published a thousand-page hatchet job bringing all Ormus’s family’s skeletons out of their closets, the colonialist Anglophilia and examination fraud of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, the braining of Ardaviraf, Cyrus the serial killer, Spenta playing the British milady by the Thames; and Vina’s too, her murderer-suicide mother, her “willingness” to travel on school buses from which black kids were banned, and so on. From this work we learned that Marion Egiptus had “died in poverty” without so much as a phone call from the little girl she raised, but we did not learn of Vina’s youthful miseries in Chickaboom, N.Y., or that she had paid all Marion’s medical bills for years. We learned, too, that V
ina’s father, the disgraced Indian lawyer and ex-butcher Shetty, having filed for bankruptcy many years previously, was now a bum, a panhandler, living rough in an insalubrious quarter of Miami. What sort of debased beings are these, Auxerre demanded, these great lovers who can love only themselves, but spurn their own family, their own people?

  One skeleton was not dragged out of the shadows to dance its hideous bone-clicking dance in the public eye.

  One year and one day after their marriage, Vina had returned to my bed. Not often, not for long, but she came back. She came back to me.

  I’ll tell you why those poison-pen attacks flopped, Vina murmured in my arms. It’s because everybody loves a lover. I’m a lover; everybody loves me.

  Then what are you doing here, I asked.

  It’s that Amos dance pattern, she said. If you want to solve the riddle, you’ve got to step out of the frame.

  But that was just a clever answer. There were others. One of these was that Vina wanted to save me. Look at your life, Rai, where you go, what you do. You dive with your camera into the cesspit of the human race, so obviously you think we’re all made of shit. Then back home with the flat-chested knickerless clothes-ponies, that’s hardly an improvement, is it. Those girls only open their mouths for one reason and it’s not to fucking eat or speak. Look at your pathetic life. There was that girl who loved you, you left her behind, what was her name. (She knew the name. This scolding was a ritual. She wanted to make me say it.) Anita, I said. Anita Dharkar. She chose to stay home.