Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Sent by a smile,” Miss Salma R murmured.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” she replied.

Labor Day. The journey to the Valley of Love had to wait, because first there was trouble to overcome at the camp. It was in Quichotte’s nature to assume that everyone who approached him came in friendship, and he greeted all strangers with his delightful and (usually) disarming smile; so when the wide-bodied young white lady in denim dungarees, her fair hair gathered behind her head in a loose bun, came bustling toward the trestle table at Lake Capote where he and Sancho were poring over the map of America just recently anointed by the osprey’s sign, Quichotte stood up courteously and even bowed slightly. In his formal way he was about to launch into a little speech of greeting when the lady went on the attack.

“What is that?” the white lady said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the map. “You hatching some kind of scheme?”

“We are travelers like yourself,” Quichotte replied mildly, “so it is not unreasonable that we should map out our route.”

“Where are your turbans and beards?” the white lady asked, her arm extended toward him, an angry finger pointing right at him. “You people wear beards and turbans, right? You shave your faces and take the headgear off to fool us? T u r b a n s,” she repeated slowly, making a swirling turban gesture around her head.

“I think I can say without fear of inaccuracy that I have never worn a turban in my life,” Quichotte replied, with a degree of puzzlement that displeased his interrogator.

“You got a bad foreign look to you,” the white lady said. “Sound foreign too.”

“I suspect few of the campers at Lake Capote are from around here,” Quichotte said, still smiling his increasingly inappropriate smile. “It’s a destination for visitors, is it not? You yourself must have driven some distance to get here?”

“That’s something. You asking me where I’m from? Imma tell you where I’m from. I’m from America . Who knows how you got here. This ain’t a place for you. You shouldn’t be allowed past the border controls. How’d you get in? You look like you come from a country on that no-entry list. You hitch a ride with a Mexican? What you lookin’ for in America? What’s your purpose? That map. I’m not loving the map.”

At this point Sancho, in his youthful, hotheaded way, intervened. “Ma’am,” he said (that part at least was polite). “Why don’t you do yourself a favor and don’t be in our business.”

That was fuel on the flame. She rounded on Sancho and stabbed her finger in his direction. “Imma tell you the word on you, ” she said. “Seems you keep showing up and vanishing but that car there, it don’t move. Where do you come from? Where do you go? Are there more of you holed up somewhere close, appearing, disappearing, hidin’ out, who the hell knows? You look shifty to me. You up to something. You can dress yourself out of J.Crew but you don’t fool me.”

A small crowd had gathered and it was getting bigger as the woman’s voice got louder. Two camp security guards came up. Uniforms, holstered guns, a judge-and-jury way with them. “You two are disturbing the peace,” one said. He wasn’t looking at the white lady. “You need to pack up and get gone,” the second guard said.

“What’s your religion?” the white lady asked.

“It is my good fortune,” Quichotte replied, no longer so courteously, “that having passed through the first valley, my son and I are both blessedly freed from doctrines of all sorts.”

“Say what?” said the white lady.

“I have cast aside all dogma, both of belief and unbelief,” Quichotte said. “I am embarked on a high spiritual quest for purification to be worthy of my Beloved.”

A man’s voice from the crowd: “He’s saying he’s godless scum.”

“He’s planning something for sure,” the white lady said. “He’s got a map. He could be ISIS.”

“He can’t be ISIS and godless scum at the same time,” the first security guard pointed out, displaying an admirable capacity for logical thinking, and trying to maintain order. “Let’s not get carried away, ladies and gents.”

“In ancient times,” Quichotte said, in a last appeal to reason, “when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the proofs were that she had a ‘familiar,’ usually a cat, plus a broomstick and a third nipple for the Devil to suck on. But almost all homes had cats and brooms and in those days many people’s bodies had warts. Thus the mere accusation, witch!, was all that was required. The proof was in every home and on every woman’s body and therefore all women so accused were automatically guilty.”

“You need to quit talking trash and leave,” the second security guard said. “These folks here are pretty uncomfortable about your presence at Capote and you talking that way is no help. We can’t guarantee your safety much longer and I’m not so sure we’re even inclined to do so.”

Sancho looked as if he wanted the fight. But in the end he and Quichotte packed their possessions into the Cruze. The crowd grumbled but slowly dispersed. The white lady, encouraged to back off by the security guards, stood a little way off, shaking her head.

“In the old days,” the white lady yelled as they drove away, “there’d have been some frontier justice done today.”

She was wearing some strange type of choker around her neck. It looked almost like a collar you’d put on your dog.

SANCHO, A SOMEWHAT LESS IMAGINARY being than before, considers his new situation.

After the business with the white lady everything changed. And FYI, if I accidentally said a little prayer a while ago it’s not because I suddenly got religion, it’s because it’s pretty scary being driven by him. “Daddy.” He drives the way he does everything, the way he sees it done on TV. He drove out of that camp at Lake Capote like he was Al or Bobby Unser at Indianapolis, and he hasn’t slowed down since. I sit in the back seat because it feels safer there, but he twists his head around and talks to me while he’s doing maybe fifty-five or sixty down a two-lane blacktop, because that happens all the time on the shows, only when that happens on the shows the car is attached to a truck offscreen that’s doing the real driving. Half a dozen times a day I think, I’m about to find out if there’s an afterlife five minutes after I got myself a life. If I’m real, I can really die, right? I’m leaning now against the side of the Cruze in a gas station drinking a Coke, wiping the cold sweat of passenger terror off of my forehead, and thinking about this Real thing, i.e., the question of being real, and I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that the question’s about to be answered thanks to an imminent fatal smashup on the road. I have to add that if, after I turn into roadkill and float up through the twisted metal, I find a God up there on the judgment seat, if that turns out to be what’s real, clouds, pearly gates, flights of angels, all that jazz, it’s going to be a shock. But I’m not wanting to get into a discussion about Paradise today. For now I just want to feel safe in the back seat of the car. That’s the only seat on my mind. Slow down, I tell him, watch the road. I even yell at him, but he just waves a hand in the air. I’ve been driving for a living, he tells me. I’ve been doing this since before you were born. Yeah, I tell him, but that wasn’t so long ago, was it.