Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

That was too much even for a man of Quichotte’s mild disposition. “We most certainly will not comply with that request,” he said, drawing himself up. “Now hand over the keys, my good man, and let’s have an end to this.”

“Of course, of course, my apologies,” said Jonésco, doing as Quichotte had asked. “I’m sure you haven’t noticed anything amiss in your dental structures recently. Nothing in the way of enlargements?”

“What on earth can you mean by enlargements ?” Sancho demanded. “Have you been drinking while your barista is away?”

“By no means did I say enlargements, ” Jonésco answered. “I said toothaches. A simple solicitous inquiry. In my family we suffer terribly from toothaches all the time.”

“What you said sounded nothing like toothaches, ” Sancho objected, “and it sounded exactly like enlargements. ”

“Never mind now, Sancho,” Quichotte tried to bring the discussion to a close. “Let us go to our room. I need a nap.”

Just then the trumpeting sound arose again, more than one trumpeter this time, and it wasn’t that far away. “What on earth is that awful noise?” Sancho asked.

The motel proprietor gave a little laugh which, it seemed to Sancho, contained more than a modicum of nervousness, even of fear. “Flügelhorns,” the fellow said. “In our town there are many avid flügelhorn players and they like, in the afternoons, to rehearse.”

“Well,” said Quichotte, “they don’t sound very expert to me. That’s a frightful din and I hope they don’t rehearse all night.”

ON THE ROAD TO BERENGER, Sancho had noticed that as Quichotte neared New York and what he believed would be the grand and happy culmination of his quest, the years seemed to drop away from him and a certain gaiety, a passion for life, was reborn in his breast. He was relentlessly cheerful, laughed a good deal, enjoyed engaging Sancho in heated discussions about music, politics, and art, and in general seemed to be getting younger in every respect, except that his knees gave him a deal of trouble, and he dragged his right leg. Old as he was, he appeared to be unconcerned by questions of mortality, of when the end might come and what might or might not lie beyond that great finality. “I saw an interview on TV,” he told Sancho, “with a famous filmmaker who was asked by the sycophantic interviewer if he was happy that he would always live on in his great cinematic masterpieces. ‘No,’ the filmmaker replied, ‘I would prefer to live on in my apartment.’ This is also my plan. If the choice is between a necessarily tedious death and immortality, I choose to live forever.”

He began, too, to tell Sancho stories of his salad days, when he had many friends, traveled the world, and was attractive to many women. “Oh, the girls, the girls!” he cried, tittering lasciviously. “Mine was a generation when frequent sexual intercourse was thought of as freedom, and like all the men of my time, I believed in that freedom with all my lustful heart.” Now at last he spoke about his old life. The “girls” began to blur together in Sancho’s thoughts. He noticed some common elements to the stories. The girls almost always left Quichotte after a short time, and they almost all had bland nondescript Western names, and Quichotte did not specify the cities in which he had known them or the languages they spoke or their religious affiliations or anything that would bring them to life as human beings. It was almost as if he hadn’t known them very well. It was almost as if…and then he understood that they were all precursors of Miss Salma R, all shadows in his life as she was a shadow, people not known but loved from a distance. Maybe they were real people glimpsed across a room or in a magazine. Maybe they were dreams. Maybe they were all characters in TV shows.

Or: were they all women he had pursued slash stalked?

Or worse?

Who was Quichotte anyway?

There was one woman about whom Quichotte spoke differently. This was the lady in New York to whom he affectionately referred as the Human Trampoline. She didn’t appear to be a past romantic liaison, but it sounded as if she did actually exist, and Quichotte was plainly uncertain of his welcome. “We will definitely look her up,” he told Sancho, “and if she wishes to see us, that will be delightful for us both.” He didn’t use her real name or provide any further details. But this was someone who mattered to him. Maybe if they did meet, some of the mysteries surrounding Quichotte might be solved.

Sancho began to think that Quichotte might be a virgin, just like himself. And sometimes he had a stranger thought: that just as Quichotte had invented him, so also somebody else had invented Quichotte.

THE NEXT MORNING, while Quichotte was still asleep, Sancho walked out into the streets of Berenger, looking for a coffee. In the Starbucks there were two men arguing, who seemed to be friends quarreling over the fact that one of them was drunk while the other wanted to discuss something important.

“The question is,” the sober one was saying, “are they the way things are going or is it just a temporary aberration? We need to know this before we buy.”

“They’re fucking monsters,” said the drunk one. “Shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Nobody’s going to buy a damn thing from them.”

“Of course we aren’t planning to buy from them, ” the sober one said. “For God’s sake. The question is, can we live with the situation or not?”

“You wan’ know how good the schools are is that it,” the drunk one replied. “How easy is the commute. Fucking monsters I’m saying and you wan’ know the crime rate.”

The Starbucks server suddenly jumped, literally jumped up off the ground. “Did you feel that?” she cried. Now everything on her counter was jumping too.

“A small earthquake,” said the sober man, trying to sound reassuring.

“That’s not an earthquake,” the drunk man said.

Sancho ran to the door and looked down the street. He saw that Mr. Jonésco had come out of the motel across the way and was staring in the same direction. Then around the corner thundered a large mastodon, a living specimen of M. americanum, last seen in North America perhaps ten thousand years ago. It rampaged down the road destroying parked cars and storefronts. Sancho stood still, rooted to the spot in horror.

“Oh my God!” shouted Mr. Jonésco. “Frankie, is that you?”

“NOTHING SO DIVISIVE HAS ever happened in Berenger since I came here from Romania to escape Communism,” Mr. Jonésco said. Quichotte and Sancho were sitting with him in the motel bar, and they all needed and were having stiff drinks, vodka for Mr. Jonésco, whiskey for Sancho and Quichotte. “I don’t know how it will end,” the motel proprietor went on. “Who will make the beds and vacuum the rooms? There is no logic to it. Perfectly okay people, people who were our neighbors and our staff and with whom our kids went to school, turning into mastodons overnight! Without warning! You don’t know who will be next. Now you understand why I wanted to inspect your ears and noses and teeth. For signs of mastodonitis, as I call it, though there is no evidence that it is a medical disease.”

“Was this a happy town before the mastodons?” Quichotte asked.

Jonésco shrugged. “Happy, who knows. People looked like they got along. But now we see that many were mastodons under the skin.”

“How many?” Sancho asked.

Jonésco spread his arms. “Hard to be certain,” he said. “Since they changed, they mostly bunch together near the river and we don’t go down there anymore, though once lovers walked there hand in hand, and you could buy a hot dog and a soda and watch the moon rise over the water. Sometimes one of them comes barreling through downtown, as Frankie did just now, looking for their old haunts, perhaps, wishing things were as they had been, or just hating the old haunts for refusing to accept them, and wanting to destroy whatever they can. Up here in the main part of town people are frozen by fear, and everyone watches everyone else for the first signs, the enlargements of the ears and noses, and the arrival of the tusks. Once one has turned into a mastodon he is utterly impervious to good sense. The mastodons refuse to believe that they have turned into horrible, surrealistic mutants, and they become hostile and aggressive, they take their children out of school, and have contempt for education. My belief is that many of them can still speak English, but they prefer to bellow like badly played flügelhorns. In the first days one or two of them insisted that they were the true Americans, and we were the dinosaurs and ought to be extinct. But after a short time they gave up on talking to us, and just yowled like flügelhorns instead.”