Salman Rushdie: Shalimar the Clown

The car was a surprise. Max customarily went in for big classic English vehicles but this was something else entirely, a silver luxury speedmobile with batwing doors, the same futuristic machine in which people were time-traveling in the movies that year. To be chauffeur-driven in a sports car was an affectation unworthy of a great man, she thought, disappointed.

“There’s no room for three people in this rocket ship,” she said aloud. The ambassador dropped the keys into her hand. The car closed round the two of them, ostentatious, potent, wrong. The handsome driver, Shalimar from Kashmir, remained on the sidewalk, diminished into an insect in her wing mirror, his eyes like shining swords. He was a silverfish, a locust. Olga Volga the potato witch stood beside him and their dwindling bodies looked like numerals. Together they made the number 10.

She had felt the driver wanting to touch her in the elevator, felt his tearful yearning. That was puzzling. No, it was not puzzling. What was puzzling was that the need did not feel sexually charged. She felt herself transformed into an abstraction. As if by wanting to put his hand on her he hoped to reach out to someone else, across unknown dimensions of sad memory and lost event. As if she were just a representative, a sign. She wanted to be the kind of woman who could ask a driver, who do you want to touch when you want to touch me. Who, when you abstain from touching me, is not being touched by you? Touch me, she wanted to say to his uncomprehending smile, I’ll be your conduit, your crystal ball. We can have sex in elevators and never mention it. Sex in transit zones, in places like elevators that are between one place and the next. Sex in cars. The transit zones traditionally associated with sex. When you fuck me you’ll be fucking her, whoever she is or was, I don’t want to know. I won’t even be here I’ll be the channel, the medium. And the rest of the time, forget it, you’re my father’s employee. It’ll be a Last Tango kind of thing without obviously butter. She said nothing to the aching man, who would not have understood anyway unless of course he would, she really had no knowledge of the level of his language skills, why was she making assumptions, why was she making this stuff up, she sounded ridiculous. She exited the elevator and let her hair down and went outside.

This was the last day she and her father would ever spend together. The next time she saw him it would be different. This was the last time.

“It’s for you,” he said, “the car, you can’t be such a puritan that you don’t want it.” Space-time was like butter, she thought, driving fast, and this car the warm knife slicing through it. She didn’t want it. She wanted to feel more than she felt. She wanted somebody to shake her, scream in her face, strike her. She was already numb, as if Troy had fallen. Yet things were good. She was twenty-four years old. There was a man who wanted to marry her and other men who did not, who wanted less. She had her first subject for a documentary film and there was money, enough to begin work. And her father was right beside her in the passenger seat as the DeLorean flew up the canyon. It was the first day of something. It was the last day of something else.

They ate hungrily in a high canyon lodge watched over by rows of antlered heads. Father and daughter, alike in their appetites, their high metabolic rates, their love of meat, their slender high-toned bodies. She chose venison to defy the watching heads of dead stags.

“O beast, I eat your ass.”

This invocation she offered up aloud, to make him smile. He chose venison also but as an act of respect, he said, to give their absent bodies meaning. “This flesh whereof we eat is not their true flesh but the flesh of others like them, through whom their own lost forms may be conjured up and honored.” More proxies, she thought. My body in the elevator and now this meat on my plate.

“I’m a little freaked out by your driver,” she said. “He looks at me as if I’m someone else. Are you sure about him? He checked out okay? What sort of name is that, Shalimar. Sounds like a club on La Brea with exotic dancers. Sounds like a cheap beach resort, or a trapeze artist in a circus. Oh, please,” she raised an impatient hand before he condescendingly attempted to tell her the obvious, “spare me the horticultural explanation.” She pictured the other Shalimar, the great Mughal garden of Kashmir, descending in verdant liquid terraces to a shining lake that she had never seen. The name meant “abode of joy.” She set her jaw. “It still sounds like a candy bar to me. Also, by the way, speaking of names, I wanted to finally tell you, mine is pretty much a burden. This foreign country you made me carry around on my shoulders. I want to be some other name and smell as sweet. Maybe I’ll use yours,” she decided before he could reply. “Max, Maxine, Maxie. Perfect. Call me Maxie from now on.”

He shook his head dismissively and ate his meat, not understanding that it was her way of begging him to stop mourning the male child he’d never had, to give up that old-fashioned sadness which he carried everywhere he went and which both wounded and offended her, because how could he allow his shoulders to sag beneath the weight of the unborn son sitting up there jeering at his failure, how could he permit himself to be tormented by that malicious incubus when she was standing right in front of him filled with love, and was she not his living image, was she not an altogether finer and worthier creature than any nonexistent boy? Her coloring and her green eyes might be her mother’s, and her breasts certainly were, but almost everything else, she told herself, was the ambassador’s legacy. When she spoke she failed to hear her other inheritance, the other, unknown cadences, and heard only her father’s voice, its rise and fall, its mannerisms and pitch. When she looked in the mirror she blinded herself to the shadow of the unknown and saw only Max’s face, his body type, his languid elegance of manner and form. All along one wall of her bedroom were mirrored, sliding closet doors and when she lay on her bed and admired her naked body, turning and turning it, striking attitudes for her own delight, she was frequently aroused, actually turned on, by the notion that this was the body her father would have had if he had been a woman. This firm jawline, this stalk of a neck. She was a tall young woman and her height was his gift, too, given in his own proportions; the relatively short upper body, the long legs. The spinal scoliosis, the slight curvature which hooked her head forward, giving her a hawklike, predatory air: that, too, came from him.

After he died she went on seeing him in her mirror. She was her father’s ghost.

She did not mention the matter of the name again. The ambassador by his demeanor gave her to understand that he was doing her a favor by forgetting a piece of embarrassing behavior, forgiving her by forgetting it, the way one forgives a urinating baby or a teenager who lurches home drunk and vomitous after passing an exam. Such forgiveness was irritating; but she in her turn let it go, making her behavior the mirror of his. She mentioned nothing that mattered or rankled, not the childhood years in England during which thanks to him she had not known her own story, nor the woman who had not been her mother, the buttoned woman who had raised her in the aftermath of scandal, nor the woman who had been her mother, and of whom it was forbidden to speak.

They finished lunch and walked for a spell in the mountains, hiking like gods across the sky. It was not necessary to say anything. The world was speaking. She was the child of his old age. He was almost eighty years old, ten years younger than the wicked century. She admired him for the way he walked, without a hint of frailty in his gait. He could be a bastard, had in fact been a bastard more often than not, but he possessed, was possessed by, the will to transcendence, the interior power that enabled mountaineers to climb eight-thousand-meter peaks without oxygen, or monks to enter suspended animation for implausible numbers of months. He walked like a man in his prime; in, for example, his fifties. If the hornet of death were buzzing nearby right now, this demonstration of clock-stopping physical prowess would surely draw its sting. He had been fifty-seven when she was born. He walked as if he were younger than that now. She loved him for that will, felt it like a sword within herself, sheathed in her body, waiting. He had been a bastard as long as she could remember. He was not built to be a father. He was the high priest of the golden bough. He inhabited his enchanted grove and was adored, until he was assassinated by his successor. To become the priest, however, he also had had to murder his predecessor. Maybe she was a bastard too. Maybe she, too, could kill.