Salman Rushdie: Shalimar the Clown

“Let’s go home,” he murmured, kissing her on the cheek. “It’s getting chilly. Let’s not overdo it. I’m an old guy now.”

It was the first time she had heard him acknowledge his infirmity, the first time in her experience that he had conceded the power of time. And why had he kissed her then, spontaneously, when there was no need to do so. That, too, was an indication of weakness, a misjudgment, like the gift of the vulgar car. A sign of slipping control. They were no longer in the habit of demonstrating their affections to each other, except perfunctorily. By such samurai abstinence did they give each other proofs of their love.

“My time is being swept away,” the ambassador said. “Nothing will remain.” He foretold the Cold War’s accelerated ending, the Soviet Union’s house-of-cards collapse. He knew that the Wall would fall and that the reunification of Germany could not be held back and would happen more or less overnight. He foresaw the invasion of Western Europe by the elated job-hungry Ossis in their Trabants. Ceaus¸escu’s Mussoliniesque ending, and the elegiac presidencies of the writers, of Václav Havel and Arpad Goncz, these too he foresaw. He closed his mind to other, less palatable possibilities, however. He tried to believe that the global structures he had helped to build, the pathways of influence, money and power, the multinational associations, the treaty organizations, the frameworks of cooperation and law whose purpose had been to deal with a hot war turned cold, would still function in the future that lay beyond what he could foresee. She saw in him a desperate need to believe that the ending of his age would be happy, and that the new world which would come after would be better than the one that would die with him. Europe, free of the Soviet threat, and America, free of the need to remain permanently at battle stations, would build that new world in friendship, a world without walls, a frontierless newfound land of infinite possibility. The doomsday clock would no longer be set at seven seconds to midnight. The emerging economies of India, Brazil and a newly opened-up China would be the world’s new powerhouses, the counterweights to the American hegemony of which he had always, as an internationalist, disapproved. When she saw him surrender to the utopian fallacy, to the myth of the perfectibility of man, India knew he could not have long to live. He looked like a tightrope walker trying to keep his balance even though there was no longer a rope beneath his feet.

The weight of the inexorable bore down on her, as if the gravitational force of the earth had suddenly increased. When she was younger they had often touched. He could place his lips against any part of her body, her hand, her cheek, her back, and find a bird in there and make it speak. Birdsong burst from her skin under the magic pressure of his mouth, soaring, celebratory. Until the age of eight she would climb him like an Everest. She had learned the story of the Himalayas on his knee, the story of the giant proto-continents, of the moment when India broke off from Gondwanaland and moved across the proto-oceans toward Laurasia. She closed her eyes and saw the huge collision, the mighty mountains crumpling up into the sky. He taught her a lesson about time, about the slowness of the earth: the collision is still happening. So if he was a Himalaya, if he too had been caused by the smashing together of great forces, by a clash of worlds, then he, too, was growing still. The collision in him was also still taking place. He was her mountain-father and she his mountaineer. He held her hands in his and up she came until she was straddling his shoulders, her groin against his neck. He kissed her stomach and she somersaulted backward off his shoulders to the floor. One day he said, No more of that. She wanted to cry but controlled herself. Childhood was over? Very well, then, it was over. She would put aside childish things.

The freeway home was empty, shockingly empty, as if the world were ending, and while they were floating along in that asphalt void the ambassador again began to speak volubly, the words crowding out of him like traffic, trying to make up for the absence of the cars. Volubility came easily to Max Ophuls, but it was just one of his many techniques of concealment, and he was never more hidden than when he seemed most open. For the greater part of his life he had been a burrower, a man of secrets, whose job it was to uncover the mysteries of others while protecting his own, and when by choice or necessity he spoke the use of paradox had long been his preferred disguise. They moved down the empty freeway so swiftly that it seemed they were standing still, with the ocean to their right and the city beginning to twinkle to their left, and it was of the city that Max decided to speak because he knew he had already said too much about himself, shown too much, like an amateur. So now he praised the city, commended it precisely for the qualities that were commonly held to be its greatest faults. That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view outdated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe in such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing so to devalue. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future. As India navigated the hollow freeways her father lauded the city’s bizarre anatomy, which was fed and nourished by many such congealed and flowing arteries but needed no heart to drive its mighty flux. That it was a desert in disguise caused him to celebrate the genius of human beings, their ability to populate the earth with their imaginings, to bring water to the wilderness and bustle to the void; that the desert had its revenge on the complexions of its conquerors, drying them, ingraining lines and furrows, provided those triumphant mortals with the salutary lesson that no victory was absolute, that the struggle between earthlings and the earth could never be decided in favor of either combatant, but swung back and forth through all eternity. That it was a hidden city, a city of strangers, appealed to him most of all. In the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors, only royalty had the privilege of remaining occult. In this brilliant burg, however, secrecy was freely available to all comers. The modern obsession with intimacy, with the revelation of the self to the other, was not to Max’s taste. An open city was a naked whore, lying invitingly back and turning every trick; whereas this veiled and difficult place, this erotic capital of the obscure stratagem, knew precisely how to arouse and heighten our metropolitan desires.

She was used to such soliloquies, his fugues on themes of this or that; used, also, to his habit of half-humorous perversity. But now his praisesong seemed to cross a frontier and bear him away from her into a shadow. When he claimed to admire the city’s powerful gangs for the thrilling casual potency of their violence and the tag artists for their transient encrypted graffiti; when he praised the earthquakes for their majesty and the landslides for their reproof to human vanity; when with no apparent irony he celebrated the junk food of America and waxed lyrical about the new banality of diet cola; when he admired the strip malls for their neon and the chain stores for their ubiquity; when he declined to criticize the produce on sale in the farmers’ markets, the visually delightful apples that tasted like cotton puffs, the bananas made of pulped paper, the odorless flowers, calling them symbols of the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race; when he, who had been a model of probity in his own public (though not sexual) life, admitted to secret feelings of admiration for a corrupt local official because of the flamboyant daring of his corruption and, contradicting himself, cynically lauded a second corrupt local official for the sneaky, decade-long subtlety of his crimes, then India began to see that in the depths of the old age whose effects he had so heroically concealed, even from her, he had lost his hold on joy, and that failure had eaten at him from within, eroding his ability to discriminate and to make moral judgments, and if things continued to deteriorate along these lines, he would eventually become incapable of making any choices at all, restaurant menus would become mysteries to him, and even the choice between getting out of bed in the morning and spending the daylight hours between the sheets would become impossible to make. And when the final choice stymied him, the choice between breathing and not breathing, then he would surely die.