Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Miss Salma R loved the letters of America. In most of the letters women confessed their secrets to her, their worries about their weight, their husbands, their lecherous bosses, their illnesses, their children, and their loss of faith in a future in which things would be better than they were; and men, too, whispered to her in their emotionally uneducated manner about their inadequacies, both sexual and professional, their fears for themselves and their families, their hostility toward other Americans who did not share their views, and their dreams of glamorous women and new cars. It fell to her to comfort America’s anguish, to calm its rages, to celebrate its loves. She had a special soft spot for the stories of recent immigrants and showcased them, from time to time, in a special feature called “Immigreat!”

Her audiences were the letters made flesh. She caressed their pets, ate their cuisine, congratulated them on their successful gender reassignments and exam results, praised their gods with them, and introduced them to the celebrities who came smiling and telling funny stories through all her studio days. The letters showed her that the material success of America had impoverished the spiritual lives of Americans, but she also saw that that success was by no means evenly distributed across the broad populous nation, and the absence of material well-being was spiritually impoverishing also. She was a hugger and a kisser and in spite of her youth she quickly came to be thought of as wise, and the America of the letters was a place in constant search of a wise woman to listen to, always looking for the new voice that would make its lives feel rich once again. Times were hard all over, and she was the bringer of joy. The avalanche of the letters gave her a belief in her own bounty. There was enough love and care in her to encompass them all. Her arms would reach out to soothe the totality of America’s pain. Her bosom would be America’s pillow. The letters allowed her to become the most that she had it in her to be. (She had her own demons to deal with, of course, but when she was preoccupied with the demons of America, her own seemed to recede, at least for a while. About her demons there will be more to say presently.)

The two categories of letters which were unlike all the others were the love letters and the letters of hate. Of these, the poison-pen letters were more straightforward and bothered her less. Crazy people, religious nuts, envious people, people who made her the incarnation of their discontents, racists, misogynists, the usual crew. She passed them on to her security team and put them out of her mind. Her distant lovers were more upsetting. Many of them were actually in love with themselves and gave her to understand that they were doing her a kindness by bestowing their love upon her. Others simply assumed their approach would be met with a favorable response. And then there were those who begged. When photographs were included, it was usually an unwise move. When the pictures were pornographic, it was especially unwise. The cascades of boasts, assumptions, and hopeless pleas depressed her because of the image of herself she saw reflected in these obsessive gazes. Was she so shallow that these nonswimmers thought they could paddle their feet in her waters? Was she so two-dimensional that they thought they could fold her up and put her in their pockets? She wanted to know how she was seen by others, but this aspect of the knowledge she acquired gave her a heavy heart.

Some of the love letters were still addressed to her Five Eyes character, Salma C. These were the letters whose authors seemed to have sunk most deeply into fantasy, identifying themselves as secret, double, or triple agents, or would-be members of the secret world, offering, as their qualifications, details of their patriotism, their skills with guns, and their ability to pass unnoticed in a crowd. She should love them, the Five Eyes guys (and women) said, because who could understand her the way they could? “We are the same,” these lovers declared. “I am just like you.”

The messages arriving via her Twitter feed were mostly pseudonymous, the work of pimply fifteen- or forty-five-year-old male virgins living with their parents in Woop Woop, Arkansas, or Podunk, Illinois. All of them were on or over the edge of illiteracy. America no longer taught its lovers how to spell. Nor did it teach joined-up writing. Cursive script was becoming obsolete, like typewriters and carbon paper. These lovers who wrote in block capitals would not be able to read the love letters of earlier generations. Cursive might as well be Martian, or Greek. For such correspondents Miss Salma R, whose stock-in-trade was empathy, was guilty of feeling just a scintilla of contempt.

Very, very occasionally, a letter arrived which was not like the others, like an odd-one-out category on Sesame Street. When this happened, Miss Salma R (perhaps only for a moment) gave the thing her full attention. The first letter from the person signing himself “Quichotte” was one such missive. The thing that leapt out at Miss Salma R immediately was the beautiful penmanship. The pen that wrote these words was a thick-nibbed instrument, a pen to respect, which allowed the author to create perfect copperplate lettering, as if he were making a wedding announcement or inviting her to a debutante ball. The text, too, was unusual. It was one of the rare love letters that were neither bombastic nor wheedling, and it made no assumptions about her.

My dear Miss Salma R,

With this note I introduce myself to you. With this hand I declare my love. In time to come as I move ever closer you will come to see that I am true and that you must be mine. You are my Grail and this is my quest. I bow my head before your beauty. I am and will ever remain your knight.

Sent by a smile,

Quichotte

The paper on which this message was written in such a fine hand was the vulgar antithesis of the writing, a cheap motel-room scrap with the address torn off. From these few clues Miss Salma R deduced that this was an older man, a man from the age of handwriting, the owner of a good fountain pen, who had fallen upon hard times and, being lonely, watched too much TV. From his choice of alias she further deduced an education, which in all probability, judging by the phrasing, had not been an American schooling. She even went so far as to surmise that the writer had this in common with herself: that English had not been his mother tongue, not something heard in the cradle but something learned afterwards. This was suggested by both the syntax (American English was far more informal in its construction) and the spelling (which was improbably perfect). The only puzzlement was the sign-off, sent by a smile, with its imperfect command of English grammar. It would have both gratified and shocked our fool of a protagonist to know that these seventy-two words, seventy-three including his pseudonymous signature, which he believed preserved around him the cloak of invisibility within which, for the moment, he preferred to remain concealed, had revealed so much about him. She had noticed him and was focused on his letter: that was good. But it was as if she saw him standing naked and scrawny before her: not so good. At any rate, he had no knowledge of any of this, and so we may leave him for now in his state of innocence, hoping for favor and believing himself unknown. We can also protect him from the knowledge of what Miss Salma R said next.

“Keep this where we can get at it,” she said to the intern on whose desk the Quichotte letter had landed. “I’ve got a bad feeling about it. Let me know if he writes again.”

Then Monday was over, and she walked out of the building into the waiting Maybach, sank down into the back seat, raised to her lips the dirty martini (up, with olives) waiting for her on the armrest, and forgot Quichotte completely.