Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

“Yes, your mother is dead,” he told India when she asked him. He had his own reasons for confirming his ex-wife’s untruth. “Yes, it’s just as Margaret said.” Then he said no more.

These were the confusions inside which India Ophuls grew up in the 1970s. She held herself together for a few years, she went hungry for three hundred and sixty-three days of the year and made do with the two days of feasting, but as she neared thirteen she wore the stricken look of a storm-tossed ship heading toward jagged inescapable rocks. When puberty struck, she went dramatically off the rails. There followed a delinquent descent into hell. Hell seemed preferable to the overworld of lying mothers and absent fathers in which she was trapped, and from which, during her ruined adolescence, she consequently tried to escape down all the various self-destructive routes available to her. The downward spiral had been fast, and she had been lucky to survive the smash at the end of it. By the age of fifteen she had been a truant, a liar, a cheat, a dropout, a thief, a teenage runaway, a junkie and even, briefly, a tart plying for trade in the shadow of the giant gas cylinders behind King’s Cross Station. Waking up in her L.A. bedroom to find the woman she loathed looking down at her with eager Olga by her side, she felt her repressed fifteenth year boiling back into her head, like the high tide churning through a breach in a vellard. She fought the memories down but they insisted on rising. She remembered a sweating, febrile room with stains on the walls and a stranger unzipping his pants. She remembered the drugs, the hallucinogens putting reason to sleep and bringing forth monsters, the hard brightness of white powder, the needle’s deadly bliss, the white fedora of the Jamaican pimp. She remembered violence done to her and by her, she remembered retching, and shivering in the heat, and a face in the mirror so pale and blue it made her scream. She remembered slashing her wrists and swallowing pills. She remembered stomach pumps. She remembered a judge’s harsh words for the woman whose name she would never use again, You have been, madam, an abject failure as a parent, and she remembered that it had been Max who saved her, Max who swooped down from the sky like an eagle and scooped her out of the gutter, who told the woman she loathed that he would no longer stand silently by, who asked the judge for judgment and prised that woman’s clutching fingers off his child’s wounded arms and spirited his daughter away to be healed, first at a Swiss clinic high up on what she would always think of as the Magic Mountain, and then by sunshine, palm trees and the cobalt blue of the Pacific. She imagined his last conversation with the woman she hated, You had your chance with her but you’ll never have another one, she heard him saying, and saw in fancy’s eye the bitter features of the Grey Rat contort like Rumplestiltskin’s into a mask of defeat.

Take her then, she said.

Outside the realm of India’s imagination, however, Max Ophuls went on refusing to criticize his former wife, perhaps because of his feelings of guilt about his old betrayal. Once or twice, in tones of sorrow, he spoke about the power of life’s violent blows and slow agonies to divert a good person from his or her natural path, just as dynamite or erosion can-dramatically or gradually-change the course of a river, and in these speeches he might have been talking about Margaret, but he might also have been describing himself. And his secretiveness was a trait he shared with his ex-wife, they were both citizens of the underworld, they both had things to hide. But at least he understood about underworlds and followed India all the way down into her own private inferno and stayed by her side for months on end, until the dark god released her and let her follow him up into the light, and the Swiss doctors pronounced her well enough to reenter the overworld of ordinary life and he brought her down from the mountain in the back of a new Bentley driven by a new liveried chauffeur, cradling her in his arms as if she were the Ten Commandments, and restored her, if not to ordinary life, then to Los Angeles, at least.

The house on Mulholland Drive was sprawling, with staff quarters, stables, a tennis court, a guest cottage and a pool, and built in the Spanish Mission style, white walled, with barrel-tiled roofs and a bell tower that reminded her of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and gave the place an inappropriately ecclesiastical air. She thought of Kim Novak falling from the tower of the San Juan Bautista Mission at the end of the movie and shuddered and refused her father’s offer to take her up to the top of the tower to show her the carillon. For a while, when she first arrived in L.A., she stayed indoors, curled up in chairs and corners, grateful to be alive, but taking her time to make sure she was safe. She preferred to keep her feet on the ground and a roof over her head. The stone floors felt cool beneath her unshod feet and the stained glass in the living-room windows poured colors over her every day. Kim Novak had played an impostor, a woman called Judy, hired to impersonate a woman named Madeleine Elster whose husband had murdered her. There were days when India felt like an impostor too, when she felt as if she’d been hired by Max to impersonate a daughter who had died.

Max’s study was a somber anomaly in this house of color and light: wood paneled, with heavy European couches and mahogany tables, its shelves lined with books printed long ago by Art & Aventure, a Belle Époque movie set of a room designed to echo another long-lost room, his father’s library in Strasbourg: more a memory than a place. He did not allow himself the open sentimentality of hanging his parents’ pictures on the wall. The room itself was their portrait. He spent much of his day in this room, reading and remembering, and allowed his daughter the run of the rest of the big, empty old place. One day, rummaging through the closets in the guesthouse, she found a hatbox containing a short blond wig, a castoff of one of her father’s long-forgotten lovers, and she backed away from it, terrified, as if it were a death sentence. There was something of James Stewart’s slow grace in Max and when the shadows fell across his face in a certain way he scared her. He had to remind her that Jimmy Stewart hadn’t been the murderer in Vertigo, he was the good guy. She had been a little crazy in those days too, clean but skittish, but he had waited her out. Which is not to say he was kindly. Kind, yes, in his way, good in a crisis, expecting no thanks for doing what he saw as his duty, but not kindly. When she brought up Kim Novak and the blond wig in the closet he did not restrain his tongue. “Be so good,” he said at the conclusion of an eloquent tirade, “as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that’s what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.”

Then for a time she was sane and happy in the house on Mulholland Drive and surprised herself by becoming a proficient athlete and a brilliant student with a strong interest in history and biography and, more particularly, in fact-based films. After leaving high school she traveled alone to London to study the work of the British documentary film movement of the thirties and forties and-though she mentioned this to nobody-to do a little documentary research of her own. During these months she lived in a poorly lit but spacious and high-ceilinged room in furnished student digs near Coram’s Fields and made no attempt to contact the Grey Rat. She never traveled south to Lower Belgrave Street but she did make her way up the Northern Line to Colindale, where she unearthed the frustratingly patchy newspaper records of the events surrounding her birth. She returned to Los Angeles and kept the trip to the newspaper library to herself but volubly informed her father of her newfound reverence for the British documentarists John Grierson and Jill Craigie, and her determination to turn away from the dangers of the imagination and make a career in the world of the nonfictional, to make films that insisted, as he had insisted, on the absolute paramountcy of the truth. This is real life. In the late eighties she studied documentary filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory and graduated with flying colors and moved into her own apartment on Kings Road and was ready to make her father proud of her when his killer cheated her of the chance.