Salman Rushdie - Grimus

Mayday, indeed.

Saturnday September 29th .

I am leaving K. It is a town made mad by a machine. Soldiers, policemen, actors, hunters, whores, drunks, wasters, philosophers, menials, morons, artisans, farmers, shoe-salesmen, artists, united by their common inability to cope with the world they have had imposed upon them, Especially as the whine grows worse, they say. I cannot hear it. It has driven some to distraction. It has led to what they now call the Way of K. Gribb’s way. Gribb and Mrs Gribb, who arrived recently. No doubt Grimus had a hand in their arrival, but now they deny him and his Effect. Obsessionalism is their defence. I cannot bear what is happening to K, place of erstwhile joy. If my mind is paralysed, at least my life is not.

Guilt. It must be someone’s fault. It is ours. It was our experiment. But the Rose… the Rose is a wonderful thing. How has it brought so much grief? It is a terrible thing, so much distortion caused by such a wonder. I must leave. I do not want to watch. The woman Dolores O’Toole is going down the mountain. I shall go with her.

As for you, my friend, I shall take my leave of you as well. I want no friends now. I shall sacrifice you to Liv in propitiation of the gods. I shall take you to her. She will probably rend you limb from limb or toss you casually aside, as she did me. That is your future. It may help me forget my past. It may help me forget K and the horrors that burnt my mind. You will be my means of self-immolation. Greater love hath no friend.

To your destroyer, I will say one last word. There was a moment, back in that fit-to-be-expunged past, when I thought she wanted me. The excellence of that moment is not dimmed by the discovery of my mistake. I thank her for it. Beginnings are always better than endings. Then, everything was possible. Now, nothing is.

Dark. The book shut, wrapped, replaced. The silent blackveiled woman rising to her feet, standing stiffly before him. A hen clucking, once. Outside, the frenzied padding of the diary’s author, searching for a door he knew he could not find or pass. And the hiding whore, crouching by the donkey, behind a tree, watching.

But she did not rend it limb from limb, thought Flapping Eagle.

– Fifty-four, said Liv in a flat, regular voice. He said it was a bond between us. His always-age, my name. He is a man who breaks his bond. I knew how he thought, knew how he felt, knew him. It was a bond beyond breaking and it was broken.

As she spoke she stooped over a group of candles on the floor and lit them with flints. Then she stood erect once more, the light yellowing upwards at her from the floor, casting great shadows on the wall. Flapping Eagle remembered: the goddess Axona had looked like this. Then. Ago. Before . And the recollection mingled with the revealed history of the island, losing itself in that gloom.

She had not been speaking to him. Again, the sense of ritual: the book recited, the candles lit, the litany spoken. This was how she lived her life, embalmed in the bitter formaldehyde of old hatreds and betrayals. Flapping Eagle felt sorry for her for an instant; then her eyes focused on him through the grill of her hood.

– Aaaaaah. It was a huge exhalation of air, sobbing out from her lungs.

– Of course, she said. Of course. You have returned. The Spectre of Grimus is here to make good the bond of Grimus. Of course. So it is.

She was different, Flapping Eagle realized. The recitation, the entire rite, had altered her. She spoke slowly now, distantly, as though in some kind of trance. The past had possessed her. And he, Flapping Eagle, had become a part of that past.

– Come, she said, backing towards the bed, beckoning. Come and consecrate your bond.

Flapping Eagle sat immobile in the chair, not knowing how to react.

– Look at my body, Spectre, said Liv. Is it not a suitable altar?

Her hands moved suddenly to the back of her neck, where they undid a fastening. The black robe fell to the floor. She stood unclothed before him, her face still hidden by the black veil, the eyes looking out at him, piercing, perhaps even mocking, the candles casting their upwards yellow glow.

– Look at my body, Spectre, repeated Liv. Flapping Eagle looked.

Liv, ice-peak of perfection . Virgil had overstated nothing.

His eyes described her to his unbelieving mind. The feet, a little too large, stained with intricate henna tracery like an Indian bride; the long, tapered legs, the right bearing her weight and the left relaxed, so that the swayed curve of her hips was accented, sinuously, consciously; the tight curls of hair beneath her navel, unshaven, untrained, pale, nestling curls; the deep, deep navel, a dark pool in the whiteness of her skin; the breasts, small, the right slightly larger than the left, the left nipple tilted a fraction higher than its partner, but both still child-rosy, soft; the narrow, straight shoulders pushed back a fraction to an almost military angle, challenging, confident; the arms hanging straight and loose, palms of the hands facing forwards, third fingers curled beneath the thumbs, a generous hint of hair shadowing the pits of the arms. The rest, the neck and face and head, unseen beneath their hood, only hinted at by those sharply quizzical eyes. He looked at her now in the whole, the black garment lying at her feet, a forgotten shroud, the dancing candles on the floor sending rich shadows to flirt with the naked body, the chaos and filth of the room forgotten in the perfection of this vision. She knew how to display her body, just enough emphasis to heighten its beauty without obtrusion. A headless venus in a slum museum.

– Is it not a suitable altar? she said.

He nodded, wordlessly, and with a sudden movement of the right arm she removed the windowed hood. It fluttered to the floor to join its companion-robe.

He had known she would be beautiful; but he had failed to anticipate how subjugating that beauty would be. Flapping Eagle had to wrestle with himself to look into that face without instantly lowering his eyes. It was the loveliness of sun on ice, too brilliant to watch. Blinding, imperious perfection. The firm, long, narrow jaw, set and tilted upwards, and the wide, wide mouth without the vestige of a smile; the nose, short and straight, flanked by cheekbones like blades or sharp white cliffs. A long face, the bones perfectly balanced by those vast lucent pools of eyes, deepest aquamarine, eyes you could almost see through, eyes that saw, effortlessly, through you. And framing the head of the ice-queen, an abundance of waving gold, rising a few inches from a central division and crashing effusively around the glitter-hard face with the sea-soft eyes, a niagara of falling hair. It was the face that did it .

Liv lying down on the bed.

– Come, she said. Come and consecrate your bond.

As Virgil Jones stumbled around in the night, Flapping Eagle moved towards the body of his wife, towards the clean bed, past the glowing candles and the spiders and the mould.

She could arouse him as Irina never had. Then, he had been in control, a part of him always detached, choosing his next course of action, watching her come to her peak, deriving most of his satisfaction from the giving of pleasure; now it was he who was driven, uncontrollably, by the touches and movements of her body. She spent a long, slow while discovering his preferences and taboos, whispering all the time: - Do you like that? Is that nice? Shall I do that harder or softer? Shall I lick or nibble or tickle or scratch? Is my hand good there? Shall I be like this, or this, or this? The new, quiet gentleness in her voice softened interrogation into intimacy, and it was only later that he realized he had never asked if she, too, liked what he chose.