Salman Rushdie - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Princess Dunia — or, to be precise, the princess who had adopted the name “Dunia,” the world, on her visits to the world of men — had gone further than most of her kind. So deep had her fascination with human beings become that she had found a way to discover human emotion in herself. She was a jinnia who could fall in love. Who had fallen in love once, and was now on the verge of doing so again, with the same man, reincarnated in a different time. What was more, if he had asked her, she would have told him that she loved him for his mind, not his body. He himself was the proof that the mind and body were two, not one: the extraordinary mind in, frankly, an unexceptional casing. Nobody could truly love Ibn Rushd for his physique, in which there were, to be blunt, elements of flabbiness, and, by the time she met him, other signs of the decrepitude of old age. She noted with some satisfaction that the body of this sleeping man, Geronimo Manezes, the reincarnation of the beloved, was a considerable improvement on the original. This body was strong and firm, even if it was also “old.” It was Ibn Rushd’s face placed in a better setting. Yes, she would love him, and maybe this time she could work some extra magic upon herself and acquire sensation. Maybe this time she would be able to receive as well as give. But what if his mind was idiotic? What if it was not the mind she had fallen in love with? Could she settle for the face and the body alone? Maybe, she thought. Nobody was perfect, and reincarnation was an inexact procedure. Maybe she could settle for less than everything. He looked right. That might well be enough.

One thing did not cross her mind. Geronimo Manezes was of the tribe of the Duniazát, which made him her descendant, very possibly his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, give or take a great or two. Technically, sex with Mr. Geronimo would be an incestuous union. But the jinn do not recognize an incest taboo. Childbearing is so rare in the jinn universe that it never seemed necessary to place descendants off-limits, so to speak. There were almost no descendants to speak of. But Dunia had descendants; many of them. However, in the matter of incest she followed the example of the camel. The camel will gladly have sex with its mother, daughter, brother, sister, father, uncle, or what you will. The camel observes no decencies and never thinks of propriety. He, or she, is motivated solely by desire. Dunia, like all her people, was of the same persuasion. What she wanted, she would have. And to her surprise she had found what she wanted here in this narrow house, in this narrow basement, where this sleeping man floated several inches above his bed.

She watched him sleeping, this mortal for whom his body was not a choice, who belonged to it and it to him, and she hesitated to wake him. After her awkwardly embarrassing intrusion into the apartment upstairs and the alarm of its occupant Blue Yasmeen, Dunia had made herself invisible, preferring, this time, to see before being seen. She moved slowly towards the recumbent form. He was sleeping poorly, on the edge of wakefulness, mumbling in his sleep. She would need to be careful. She needed him to stay asleep so that she could listen to his heart.

Something has already been said about the skill of the jinn at whispering, overpowering and controlling the will of human beings by murmuring words of power against their chests. Dunia was a consummate whisperer, but she possessed, additionally, a rarer skill: the gift of listening, of approaching a sleeping man and placing her ear very gently against his chest and, by deciphering the secret language that the self speaks only to itself, discovering his heart’s desire. As she listened to Geronimo Manezes, she heard first his most predictable wishes, please let me sink down towards the earth so that my feet touch solid ground again, and beneath that the sadder unfulfillable wishes of old age, let me be young again, give me back the strength of youth and the confidence that life is long, and beneath that the dreams of the displaced, let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of the story of those streets, even though it isn’t, it hasn’t been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so, let me see French cricket being played and listen to music at the bandstand and hear once more the children’s back-street rhymes. Still she listened and then she heard it, below everything else, the deepest note of his heart’s music, and she knew what she must do.

Mr. Geronimo awoke at dawn feeling the daily dull bone-ache that he was learning to think of as his new normal condition, the consequence of his body’s involuntary struggle against gravity. Gravity was still there, he could not at this point muster sufficient egotism to believe it had somehow diminished in his immediate vicinity. Gravity was gravity. But his body in the grip of an inexplicable and very slightly stronger counterforce was tugging against it, moving him slowly upwards, and it was exhausting. He thought of himself as a tough man, hardened by work, grief and time, a man not easily dismayed, but these days when he woke from his uneasy half-rest the first thoughts in his head were worn down worn out and not long to go. If he died before his condition subsided could he be buried, or would his corpse refuse the grave, push earth aside and, rising slowly, burst through the surface to hover above his final plot of ground while he decayed? If he was cremated would he be a small cloud of ash clustering obstinately in the air, ascending gravely like a swarm of indolent insects, until at some point it was dispersed by the winds or lost among the clouds? These were his morning concerns. But on this particular morning sleep’s heaviness was quickly dispelled because something felt wrong. The room was in darkness. He did not remember turning off the table lamp by his bed. He had always liked a dark room to sleep in but in these strange times he had started leaving a small light on. His blanket often fell off him while he slept and he needed to reach several inches down to find it and he hated groping for it in the dark. So, usually, a light, but this morning he woke in shadow. And as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he realized that he was not alone in the room. A woman was slowly materializing, his mind formed that impossible word, materializing in the darkness as he watched; a woman who was recognizable, even in the deep shadows where she was manifesting herself, as his dead wife.

Ella Elfenbein in the years since lightning took her from him at the old Bliss place, La Incoerenza, had not ceased to come to him in dreams, forever optimistic, forever gorgeous, forever young. In this time of his fear and melancholy she, who had gone before him into the great incoherence, came back to comfort and reassure. Awake, he had never been in any doubt that life was followed by nothingness. If pressed, he would have said that, in fact, life was a coming-into-being out of the great sea of nothingness from which we briefly emerged at birth and to which we must all return. His dreaming self, however, wanted nothing to do with such doctrinaire finality. His sleep was troubled and unsettled, but still she came, in all her loving physicality, her body swarming around his to enfold him in its warmth, her nose nuzzling into his neck, his arm encircling her head, his hand resting on her hair. She talked too much, as she always had, your nonstop chat-a-tat, he had called it in the good old days, Radio Ella, and there had been times when, laughing but just a little irritated, he had asked her to try being silent for sixty seconds, and she hadn’t been able to do it, not even once. She advised him on healthy eating, admonished him about drinking too much alcohol, worried that in his increasingly confined condition he was not getting the exercise to which he was accustomed, discussed the latest skin-friendly cosmetics (dreaming, he didn’t ask how she kept abreast of such matters), pontificated about politics, and, of course, had much to say about landscape gardening; talked about nothing, and everything, and nothing again, at length.