Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

He asked her one night if she had seen the horns growing on Chamcha's head, but she went deaf and, instead of answering, told him how she would sit on a camp stool by the galpon or bull-pen at Los Alamos and the prize bulls would come up and lay their horned heads in her lap. One afternoon a girl named Aurora del Sol, who was the fiancee of Martin de la Cruz, let fall a saucy remark: I thought they only did that in the laps of virgins, she stage-whispered to her giggling friends, and Rosa turned to her sweetly and replied, Then perhaps, my dear, you would like to try? From that time Aurora del Sol, the best dancer at the estancia and the most desirable of all the peon women, became the deadly enemy of the too-tall, too-bony woman from over the sea.

‘You look just like him,’ Rosa Diamond said as they stood at her night-time window, side by side, looking out to sea. ‘His double. Martin de la Cruz.’ At the mention of the cowboy's name Gibreel felt so violent a pain in his navel, a pulling pain, as if somebody had stuck a hook in his stomach, that a cry escaped his lips. Rosa Diamond appeared not to hear. ‘Look,’ she cried happily, ‘over there.’

Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower and the holiday camp, – running along the water's edge so that the incoming tide washed away its footprints, – swerving and feinting, running for its life, there came a full-grown, large-as-life ostrich. Down the beach it fled, and Gibreel's eyes followed it in wonder, until he could no longer make it out in the dark.

The next thing that happened took place in the village. They had gone into town to collect a cake and a bottle of champagne, because Rosa had remembered that it was her eighty-ninth birthday. Her family had been expelled from her life, so there had been no cards or telephone calls. Gibreel insisted that they should hold some sort of celebration, and showed her the secret inside his shirt, a fat money-belt full of pounds sterling acquired on the black market before leaving Bombay. ‘Also credit cards galore,’ he said. ‘I am no indigent fellow. Come, let us go. My treat.’ He was now so deeply in thrall to Rosa's narrative sorcery that he hardly remembered from day to day that he had a life to go to, a woman to surprise by the simple fact of his being alive, or any such thing. Trailing behind her meekly, he carried Mrs Diamond's shopping-bags.

He was loafing around on a street corner while Rosa chatted to the baker when he felt, once again, that dragging hook in his stomach, and he fell against a lamp-post and gasped for air. He heard a clip-clopping noise, and then around the corner came an archaic pony-trap, full of young people in what seemed at first sight to be fancy dress: the men in tight black trousers studded at the calf with silver buttons, their white shirts open almost to the waist; the women in wide skirts of frills and layers and bright colours, scarlet, emerald, gold. They were singing in a foreign language and their gaiety made the street look dim and tawdry, but Gibreel realized that something weird was afoot, because nobody else in the street took the slightest notice of the pony-trap. Then Rosa emerged from the baker's with the cake-box dangling by its ribbon from the index finger of her left hand, and exclaimed: ‘Oh, there they are, arriving for the dance. We always had dances, you know, they like it, it's in their blood.’ And, after a pause: ‘That was the dance at which he killed the vulture.’

That was the dance at which a certain Juan Julia, nicknamed The Vulture on account of his cadaverous appearance, drank too much and insulted the honour of Aurora del Sol, and didn't stop until Martín had no option but to fight, hey Martín, why you enjoy fucking with this one, I thought she was pretty dull . ‘Let us go away from the dancing,’ Martin said, and in the darkness, silhouetted against the fairy-lights hung from the trees around the dance-floor, the two men wrapped ponchas around their forearms, drew their knives, circled, fought. Juan died. Martin de la Cruz picked up the dead man's hat and threw it at the feet of Aurora del Sol. She picked up the hat and watched him walk away.

Rosa Diamond at eighty-nine in a long silver sheath dress with a cigarette holder in one gloved hand and a silver turban on her head drank gin-and-sin from a green glass triangle and told stories of the good old days. ‘I want to dance,’ she announced suddenly. ‘It's my birthday and I haven't danced once.’

The exertions of that night on which Rosa and Gibreel danced until dawn proved too much for the old lady, who collapsed into bed the next day with a low fever that induced ever more delirious apparitions: Gibreel saw Martin de la Cruz and Aurora del Sol dancing flamenco on the tiled and gabled roof of the Diamond house, and Peronistas in white suits stood on the boat-house to address a gathering of peons about the future: ‘Under Peron these lands will be expropriated and distributed among the people. The British railroads also will become the property of the state. Let's chuck them out, these brigands, these privateers...’ The plaster bust of Henry Diamond hung in mid-air, observing the scene, and a white-suited agitator pointed a finger at him and cried, That's him, your oppressor; there is the enemy. Gibreel's stomach ached so badly that he feared for his life, but at the very moment that his rational mind was considering the possibility of an ulcer or appendicitis, the rest of his brain whispered the truth, which was that he was being held prisoner and manipulated by the force of Rosa's will, just as the Angel Gibreel had been obliged to speak by the overwhelming need of the Prophet, Mahound.

‘She's dying,’ he realized. ‘Not long to go, either.’ Tossing in her bed in the fever's grip Rosa Diamond muttered about ombu poison and the enmity of her neighbour Doctor Babington, who asked Henry, is your wife perhaps quiet enough for the pastoral life, and who gave her (as a present for recovering from typhus) a copy of Amerigo Vespucci's account of his voyages. ‘The man was a notorious fantasist, of course,’ Babington smiled, ‘but fantasy can be stronger than fact; after all, he had continents named after him.’ As she grew weaker she poured more and more of her remaining strength into her own dream of Argentina, and Gibreel's navel felt as if it had been set on fire. He lay slumped in an armchair at her bedside and the apparitions multiplied by the hour. Woodwind music filled the air, and, most wonderful of all, a small white island appeared just off the shore, bobbing on the waves like a raft; it was white as snow, with white sand sloping up to a clump of albino trees, which were white, chalk-white, paper-white, to the very tips of their leaves.

After the arrival of the white island Gibreel was overcome by a deep lethargy. Slumped in an armchair in the bedroom of the dying woman, his eyelids drooping, he felt the weight of his body increase until all movement became impossible. Then he was in another bedroom, in tight black trousers, with silver buttons along the calves and a heavy silver buckle at the waist. You sent for me, Don Enrique , he was saying to the soft, heavy man with a face like a white plaster bust, but he knew who had asked for him, and he never took his eyes from her face, even when he saw the colour rising from the white frill around her neck.

Henry Diamond had refused to permit the authorities to become involved in the matter of Martín de la Cruz, these people are my responsibility , he told Rosa, it is a question of honour . Instead he had gone to some lengths to demonstrate his continuing trust in the killer, de la Cruz, for example by making him the captain of the estancia polo team. But Don Enrique was never really the same once Martín had killed the Vulture. He was more and more easily exhausted, and became listless, uninterested even in birds. Things began to come apart at Los Alamos, imperceptibly at first, then more obviously. The men in the white suits returned and were not chased away. When Rosa Diamond contracted typhus, there were many at the estancia who took it for an allegory of the old estate's decline.