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

And that might have been an end to it all, except that Geronimo Manezes noticed that one of them was missing, and Where’s Teresa Saca? he cried out, and then they saw that she had taken the last of the flying urns, Zumurrud’s own urn, and was riding it up into the sky, into the wormhole that joined the upper world to the lower, and if they had been able to look upon her face they would have seen that in her eyes there rose an awful tide of blood.

If your world was devastated the way you have ruined ours, Mr. Geronimo remembered.

She has gone to attack Fairyland, he said aloud, and to destroy it if she can.

There are many kinds of casualty in battle, the invisible ones, the injuries to the mind, rivaling in number the fatalities and the physical wounds. As we look back at these events we remember Teresa Saca Cuartos as one of the heroes of that war, the electricity in her fingers responsible for many successes against the jinn armies; but also as a tragic victim of the conflict, her mind broken not only by the calamity she saw around her but also by the violence with which she had been bidden by the Lightning Queen to respond to the disaster of war. In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate. At the end of the climactic battle of the War of the Worlds, with Zumurrud the Great in his bottle prison, held tightly in Jimmy Kapoor’s fist, and Dunia slowly emerging from unconsciousness, it was Teresa who cracked and headed for the hole in the sky.

She must have known it was a suicide mission. What did she expect? That she would pass unchallenged into the upper world and that those perfumed gardens, those cloud-capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces, would dissolve before her wrath and leave not a rack behind? That all that was solid there would melt into air, into thin air, before her avenging fury? And then what? That she would return to earth an even greater hero for having brought about the ruin of the fairy world?

We don’t know, and perhaps should not speculate. Let us simply remember with grief the madness of Teresa Saca, and the inevitability of her last moment. For of course she did not make it into Peristan. The giant urn was not an easy vehicle, as hard to ride as an untamed stallion, obedient only to its fallen jinn master. As Mr. Geronimo and the others watched her rocket into the air — the wind had died down, and the rain also, and a full moon brightly lit her ascent, or so the story goes — they saw that she was having trouble keeping her seat. And as she approached the stormy edges of the wormhole, the slit between the worlds, the air became more turbulent, and then even more turbulent, and she lost her grip on her enchanted steed, and those below watched in horror and she slid first this way and then that; and fell. To land like a broken wing on La Incoerenza’s sodden lawn.

We worry, sometimes, about the idea of heroism, especially after the passage of such a long time. If the protagonists of this account had been asked who they considered to be heroes from a thousand years earlier, who would they have chosen? Charlemagne? The unknown author or authors of the Arabian Nights ? The Lady Murasaki? A millennium is a long time for a reputation to survive. Writing this chronicle, (we repeat) we are keenly aware that much of it has degenerated from the status of a factual account towards the condition of legend, speculation or fiction. Yet we have persisted, because the figures in our story are among the very few to whom the idea of heroism still attaches itself, a millennium after they lived and died, even though we know that the gaps in the record are immense, that there were undoubtedly others who resisted the attack of the dark jinn as worthily as those we have named: that the names we hold in such reverence have been randomly selected by the broken record, and that maybe others unknown to us would have more richly deserved our awe had history troubled to remember them.

Yet we have to say it: these are our heroes, for by winning the War of the Worlds they set in motion the process by which our new and, we believe, better time came into being. That was the hinge moment, when the door from the past, where lay what we used to be, swung shut once and for all, and the door to the present, leading to what we have become, opened like the stone gateway to a treasure cave, perhaps even Sesame itself.

So we mourn Teresa Saca Cuartos, in spite of all her faults, for she had what it took when it was needed, she was as flamboyantly tough and brave as she had to be, and a breeze of fearless glamour wafts around her memory. And we celebrate Storm Fast, the baby of truth, who grew up to be the most feared and fair of judges, in whose court no falsehood could be uttered, no matter how minor. And Jimmy Kapoor — well, everyone knows his name, it’s one of the few whose popularity has survived an entire millennium, because not only did he get his Bat-Signal after all, the image of the dancing multi-limbed god projected on the sky stabbing the hearts of evildoers with fear, but long after he grew old and gray and then departed this life he was the hero of a myriad entertainments, a multi-platform hero of screen and game, of song and dance, and even of that ancient and stubbornly persistent form, hard-copy books. The failed graphic novelist became the hero of one of the longest-running series of graphic novels, and novels made of words as well, a corpus which we now number among the great classics, the mythos from which our present pleasures derive, our “Iliad,” let us say, using an antique comparison, or our “Odyssey.” Present-day visitors to the Library look wide-eyed at these relics as once their ancestors would have gawped at a Gutenberg Bible or First Folio. “Natraj Hero,” a.k.a. Jimmy Kapoor, is one of our true legends, and only one man from the time of the strangenesses is held in higher regard than he.

The figure of Geronimo Manezes, Mr. Geronimo the Gardener, has come to mean most of all to us — the man who came unstuck from the world, then returned to it to rescue so many of his contemporaries suffering from the dual curses of the rising and the crushing, of frightening and potentially fatal detachment from, or oppressively excessive attachment to, our enigmatic earth. We are happy that he and his Lady Philosopher, Alexandra Bliss Fariña, found a happy ending in each other’s arms, watched over by the protective eye of Oliver Oldcastle; we walk with them in the grounds of La Incoerenza, sit silently with them as they hold hands in the sunset and watch the great river flow forward and back beneath a gibbous moon, bow our heads as they do when they stand on the estate’s hill by the grave of Mr. Geronimo’s lost wife, silently asking her permission for their love, silently receiving it; and we hover above the partners’ desk at which, seated on opposite sides, they wrote the book — in their own language, in spite of Alexandra’s suggestion that it might sound better in Esperanto — which has become our most admired text from antiquity, In Coherence, a plea for a world ruled by reason, tolerance, magnanimity, knowledge, and restraint.

That is the world in which we now live, in which we have disproved the assertion made by Ghazali to Zumurrud the Great. Fear did not, finally, drive people into the arms of God. Instead, fear was overcome, and with its defeat men and women were able to set God aside, as boys and girls put down their childhood toys, or as young men and women leave their parents’ home to make new homes for themselves, elsewhere, in the sun. For hundreds of years now, this has been our good fortune, to inhabit the possibility for which Mr. Geronimo and Miss Alexandra yearned: a peaceful, civilized world, of hard work and respect for the land. A gardener’s world, in which we all must cultivate our garden, understanding that to do so is not a defeat, as it was for foolish Dr. Pangloss, but the victory of our better natures over the darkness within.