Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The question that nobody could answer in the days after the assassination was why, after the long years of the self-denying ordinance that had removed him from the banalizing, hollowing-out effects of the public eye, Max Ophuls chose to go on television to denounce the destruction of paradise in the florid language of a fading age. On an impulse he had telephoned an acquaintance, the West Coast’s most celebrated late-night talk-show host, to ask if he might appear on the program as soon as possible. The great media celebrity was both astonished and delighted to accommodate him. The talk-show host had long wanted Max on his show because of his fabled gifts as a raconteur. Once at the home of Marlon Brando the famous television personality had been entranced by Max Ophuls’s anecdotal genius-by his stories of how Orson Welles would arrive at and depart from restaurants through their kitchens, to ensure that while he was amazing his dining companions by ordering nothing but a plain green salad the kitchen staff were filling his waiting limousine with boxes full of profiteroles and chocolate cake; and of Chaplin’s Christmas dinner for the Hispanics of Hollywood, at which Luis Buñuel had solemnly, in the spirit of surrealism, completely dismantled Chaplin’s Christmas tree; and of a visit to Thomas Mann, exiled in Santa Monica with the air of a man guarding the crown jewel of himself; and of a drunken night’s carousing with William Faulkner; and of Fitzgerald’s despairing transformation into the hack scenarist Pat Hobby; and of the improbable liaison between Warren Beatty and Susan Sontag, which allegedly took place on an unspecified date in the parking lot at the In-N-Out Burger eatery on Sunset and Orange.

By the time the ambassador, an amateur of local history, had launched into an account of the subterranean lives of the mysterious lizard people who supposedly dwelt in tunnels below Los Angeles, the talk-show host had become possessed by the idea of getting this reclusive extrovert to reveal himself on television, and had pursued him down the years with a fidelity that bore a close resemblance to unrequited love. That a man who despised the movies was also an encyclopedia of Hollywood lore was enjoyably odd; when the man in question had also lived a life as rich as Max Ophuls’s-Max, the Resistance hero, the philosopher prince, the billionaire power-broker, the maker of the world!-this made him irresistible.

The talk show had been recorded in the late afternoon, and things did not go as the famous host had planned. Ignoring all invitations to repeat his most enjoyable anecdotes, Max Ophuls launched instead into a political diatribe on the so-called Kashmir issue, a monologue whose excessive vehemence and total lack of wit distressed his interlocutor more than he was able to express. That Ophuls of all men, this brilliant storyteller of infinite charm, should finally emerge from the shadows into the redemptive and validating light of television, but then turn at once into a ratings-sapping current-affairs bore, was unimaginable, unbearable, and yet it was happening right before the studio audience’s suddenly soporific eyes. The talk-show host had the feeling that he was watching the drowning of one reality, the reality in which he lived, by a sudden flood from the other side of the world, an alien deluge in response to which his beloved viewers would form a flood of their own, pouring over in the midnight hour of the show’s transmission to the channel where his bitter rival, the other talk-show host, the tall bony gap-toothed one from New York, would be dancing in a rain of gold.

“We who live in these luxury limbos, the privileged purgatories of the earth, have set aside thoughts of paradise,” Max was roaring into the camera in a series of high-flown locutions, “yet I tell you that I have seen it and walked by its fish-rich lakes. If thoughts of paradise do occur to us, we think of Adam’s fall, of the expulsion from Eden of the parents of humanity. However, I have not come to speak of the fall of man, but the collapse of paradise itself. In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell.” Thus, in the unambassadorial language of a gospel-pulpit fire-eater, which was a world away from the veiled verbiage of diplomacy and came as a shock to everyone who knew and admired the habitual suavity of his speech, Max ranted about fanaticism and bombs at a time when the world was briefly full of hope and had little interest in his killjoy news. He lamented the drowning of blue-eyed women and the murder of their golden children. He railed against the coming of cruel flames to a distant city made of wood. He spoke too of the tragedy of the pandits, the Brahmins of Kashmir, who were being driven from their homeland by the assassins of Islam. The rapes of young girls, the fathers set alight, burning like beacons prophesying doom. Max Ophuls could not stop speaking. Once he had begun it was plain that a great tide had risen in him which would not be denied. Across the face of the celebrated talk-show host on whose program this diatribe was delivered, and for whom the legendarily media-shy Ambassador Ophuls’s agreement to be interviewed had represented the culmination of a decade-long pursuit, there now spread a red choleric glow, in which the fury of a disappointed lover mingled with the panic of an entertainer who could hear the future, the sound of channels being changed all over America round about midnight.

After Max’s host finally managed to break into his guest’s soliloquy and terminate the interview, he briefly considered both suicide and murder. He committed neither solecism, contenting himself, instead, with television’s best revenge. He thanked Max for his fascinating views, guided him courteously to the exit, and then personally supervised the editing of the Ophuls interview; which he cut, to shreds, to the bone.

That night in Max’s hotel suite the ambassador and Zainab Azam watched a greatly abbreviated version of the paradise monologue, and it was probably true that the heavy cuts had changed the sense of what was said, that this truncated remnant had tilted the balance of the argument and distorted the ambassador’s meaning, but at any rate when Max’s image faded from the screen his lover rose from their bed for the last time in her life, quivering with anger, cured of both worship and desire. “I didn’t mind that you didn’t know a damn thing about me,” she told him, “but it’s too bad you had to prove you were dumb about something that really matters.” Then she let fly a fusillade of dirty words that earned Max Ophuls’s respect, so much so that he forbore to mention that it was strange that someone suddenly claiming to be speaking as an outraged Muslim should have so foul a mouth; nor did he argue that her behavior in recent weeks had not indicated that matters devotional often featured prominently in her thoughts. He understood that the cause of her anger was his “bias” toward the Hindus, and that it would do him no good to explain that his equal and fervently expressed horror at the slaughter of innocent Muslims had been deleted from the program by the vindictive scissors of the network apparatchiks, because the rage of religion had risen up in her and the very rarity of her ardor made it impossible to quell.

As to the truth about herself, which she believed she had so carefully concealed from him, he knew it all, had discovered her identity weeks ago from the chauffeur who went by the name of Shalimar. Back home in India there were tens of millions of men who would have cut off their right ears or little fingers for the privilege of five minutes of Zainab Azam’s company. She was the hottest box-office star in that distant firmament, a sex goddess such as the Indian cinema had never seen, and was consequently unable to leave her design-magazine home in the Pali Hill district of Bombay without a phalanx of bodyguards and a convoy of armored limousines. In America, where nobody then knew that the Indian movies existed, she had found her freedom, and during the affair with Max Ophuls she had reveled in her luxurious anonymity, in his beautiful unknowing, which was why he had never revealed to her that he knew everything there was to know, for example about the broken heart she was nursing and for which he was no more than a temporary palliative, and about the gangsterish movie-star boyfriend who had broken that heart as insouciantly as he crashed and wrote off vintage American motorcars, Stutz Bearcats, Duesenbergs, Cords. Even now at the end of the affair old Max Ophuls in his generosity allowed her to go on believing in the cloak of secrecy beneath which she had permitted herself to do so much that had been so pleasurable in his bed.