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

Mr. Geronimo was a down-to-earth man, and so it did not occur to him that a new age of the irrational had begun, in which the gravitational aberration to which he had fallen victim would be only one of many outré manifestations. Further bizarreries in his own narrative were beyond his comprehension. It did not enter his mind, for example, that in the near future he might make love to a fairy princess. Nor did the transformation of global reality preoccupy him. He drew no broader conclusions from his plight. He did not imagine the imminent reappearance in the oceans of sea-monsters large enough to swallow ships in a single gulp, or the emergence of men strong enough to lift fully grown elephants, or the appearance in the skies over the earth of wizards traveling through the air at super-speed on magically propelled flying urns. He did not surmise that he could have fallen under the spell of a mighty and malevolent jinn.

However, he was methodical by nature, and so, undeniably concerned by his new condition, he reached into a pocket of his battered gardening jacket and found a folded sheet of paper, a bill from the power utility company. The power had been shut down but the bills continued to insist on prompt settlement. That was the natural order of things. He unfolded the bill and spread it out on the mud. Then he stood on it, stamped and jumped some more, tried to rub the document with his feet. It remained untouched. He reached down and tugged at it, and at once it slid out from beneath his feet. No trace of a footprint. He tried a second time, and was able to pass the utility bill cleanly under both boots. The gap between himself and the earth was tiny but unarguable. He was now permanently located at least a sheet of paper’s thickness above the planet’s surface. Mr. Geronimo straightened with the piece of paper in his hand. Giant trees lay dead around him, sinking into the mud. The Lady Philosopher, his employer the fodder heiress Miss Alexandra Bliss Fariña, was watching him through ground-floor French windows with tears streaming down her beautiful young face and something else flowing from her eyes that he couldn’t make out. It might have been fear or shock. It might even have been desire.

Mr. Geronimo’s life up to this point had been a journey of a type that was no longer uncommon in our ancestors’ peripatetic world, in which people easily became detached from places, beliefs, communities, countries, languages, and from even more important things, such as honor, morality, good judgment, and truth; in which, we may say, they splintered away from the authentic narratives of their life stories and spent the rest of their days trying to discover, or forge, new, synthetic narratives of their own. He had been born Raphael Hieronymus Manezes in Bandra, Bombay, the illegitimate son of a firebrand Catholic priest, more than sixty summers before the events that concern us now, named on another continent in another age of the world by a man (long deceased) who had come to seem as alien to him as Martians or reptiles, but was also as close as blood could make him. His holy father, Father Jerry, the Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza, was in his own words a “huge orson of a man,” a “whale-sized moby,” lacking earlobes but possessing, by way of compensation, the bellow of Stentor, the herald of the Greek army in the war against Troy, whose voice was as strong as fifty men. He was the neighborhood’s leading matchmaker and its benevolent tyrant, a conservative of the right type, everyone agreed. Aut Caesar aut nullus was his personal motto as it had been Cesare Borgia’s, either a Caesar or a nobody, and as Father Jerry was definitely not a nobody it followed that he must be Caesar, and in fact so complete was his authority that nobody made a fuss when he surreptitiously (meaning that everyone knew about it) made a match for himself with a grave-faced stenographer, a slip of a thing named Magda Manezes who looked like a fragile little twig next to the spreading banyan of the Father’s body. The Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza soon became a little less than perfectly celibate, and fathered a fine male child, instantly recognizable as his son by his distinctive ears. “The Hapsburgs and the D’Nizas are both lobeless,” Father Jerry liked to say. “Unfortunately, the wrong lot became emperors.” (The rude street boys of Bandra knew nothing of Hapsburgs. They said that Raphael’s lack of earlobes was a sign that he was not to be trusted, a sign of insanity, of being an exciting long word, a psychopath. But that was ignorant superstition, obviously. He went to the movies like everyone else and saw that psychopaths — mad killers, mad scientists, mad Mughal princes — had perfectly normal ears.)

Father Jerry’s son could not be given his father’s surname, of course, the decencies had to be observed, so he received his mother’s instead. For Christian names the good pastor named him Raphael after the patron saint of Córdoba, Spain, and Hieronymus after Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus of the city of Stridon, a.k.a. Saint Jerome. “Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus” he was among the rude boys playing French cricket in Bandra’s sainted Catholic streets — St. Leo St. Alexiou St. Joseph St. Andrew St. John St. Roques St. Sebestian St. Martin — until he grew too big and strong to be teased; but to his father he was always Young Raphael Hieronymus Manezes grandly and in full. He lived with his mother Magda in East Bandra but was permitted to go over to the tonier west side on Sundays to sing in his father’s church choir and to listen to Father Jerry preach without any apparent awareness of his own hypocrisy about the fiery damnation that was the inevitable consequence of sin.

The truth was that Mr. Geronimo in later life had a poor memory, and so, much of his childhood was lost. Fragments of his father, however, remained. He remembered singing in church. Mr. Geronimo had a bit of the Latin as a child, at Christmas in song bidding the faithful come in the ancient Roman tongue, w -ing his v ’s as his father commanded. Wenite, wenite in Bethlehem. Natum widete regem angelorum. But it was Genesis that got him, the Vulgate that was his namesake Saint Jerome’s work. Genesis, especially chapter one, verse three. Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay “Wulgate”: And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn’t he make the car? And why not a better car, Daddy? He could’ve asked for a Jesus Chrysler, no? Which brought down upon him a predictable jeremiad from Jeremiah D’Niza, plus a thunderous reminder of his wrong-side-of-the-blanketness, Don’t call me Daddy, call me Father like everyone else, and he skipping with a giggle out of reach of the pastor’s vengeful hand, singing cheap Italian motor car beauty soap of the film star.

That was his whole childhood right there. He always knew that church wasn’t for him but he liked the songs. And on Sundays all the local Sandras came to church and he liked their flipped-up hairdos and their cheeky flouncing. Hark the herald angels sing, he taught them at Christmas, Beecham’s pills are just the thing. If you want to go to heaven, take a dose of six or seven. If you want to go to Hell, take the whole damn box as well. The Sandras liked that and let him kiss them secretly on the lips behind the choir stall. His father so apocalyptic in the pulpit hardly ever hit him, mostly just let his son’s mouth run out of blasphemous steam, understanding that bastards have their resentments and must be allowed to air them in whatever form they come out, and after Magda’s death — she was a polio victim in those olden days when not everyone had access to the Salk vaccine — he sent Hieronymus to learn a trade from his architect uncle Charles in the capital of the world, but that didn’t work either. Later, when the young man closed the architectural office on Greenwich Avenue and started the gardening business, his father wrote him a letter. You’ll never amount to anything if you can’t stick to anything. Mr. Geronimo unstuck in the grounds of La Incoerenza remembered his father’s warning. The old man knew what he was talking about.