Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“I have heard a flügelhorn played,” Quichotte said mildly, “and I do not believe it sounds the way you think it sounds.”

Jonésco didn’t care. “To me the word flügelhorn and the word mastodon go together,” he said. “And that’s all that needs to be said about that.”

“When we arrived,” Sancho asked him, “you said something about barricades and then pretended you hadn’t.”

“It’s supposed to be a quarantine zone,” Jonésco said. “Because of the mastodonitis. To prevent the whole of the United States from becoming a land of mastodons. This is what we were assured, on local radio, from the megaphones mounted on the vans of the local authority, on the websites of power. But here you are, so plainly the barricades were not erected. Already, perhaps, the mastodons are in the Lincoln Tunnel and then all will be lost, perhaps all has already been lost.”

“Not all metamorphoses are capable of being reversed,” Quichotte reflected. “At a certain point, a tipping point, if you will, we may have to accept that these mastodons are citizens just like us, and we will have to find a way to bridge the gap between us, however hostile toward us, however ignorant and prejudiced, they may appear. But we have been traveling far and wide and have heard nothing of these creatures in other places, so the problem may still be contained here in this microcosm of Berenger, and if so, may be containable, and America can go on being what it always was.”

“But what is to be done?” Jonésco wailed. “My business, like so many others, is ruined.”

Quichotte rose swaying to his feet, whiskey glass in hand. “I see now that we are at the very end of the fourth valley,” he declared, “for here reality as we believed it to be has truly ceased to exist, and our eyes are opened to this new and dark revelation of how things may actually be. I understand that this has been shown to me because it is an essential part of the Way. I will go through this veil and as a result may come to the place where the path to the Beloved is revealed.”

“What is he talking about?” Jonésco asked Sancho. “What veil? Here we are confronted by a terrifying insanity, and he sits with us spouting a foolishness of his own.”

“He talks like this,” Sancho said good-naturedly. “Don’t mind him.”

“The veil is maya, ” Quichotte said. “It is the veil of illusion which prevents our eyes from seeing clearly. That which we previously believed to be reality was an error of perception caused by being forced to see through that veil. Now the veil is ripped from our eyes and we perceive the truth.”

“And the truth is mastodons?” Jonésco asked.

“The truth is whatever is put before us to overcome,” Quichotte replied, “so that the Beloved may be attained.”

AN UNEASY NIGHT’S SLEEP FOLLOWED, for Sancho at least; Quichotte, calm and resolute, slept fairly soundly, although he did get up early and dressed with the care of a soldier going to war. Jonésco met them in the motel’s simple dining area. “My cook Alfie didn’t show today,” he said. “I’m afraid he may have joined forces with the tuskers. You’ll have to put up with the eggs I cooked personally.” Quichotte ate heartily; Sancho, less so.

“Is there a newspaper in Berenger?” Quichotte asked Mr. Jonésco. “ The Berenger Eagle ? The Berenger Star-Tribune ? The Berenger Globe ? The Berenger Mercury ? The Berenger Plain Dealer ? The Berenger Times-Picayune ? And has it reported on the mastodons?”

“The print edition of The Berenger Gazetto died several years ago,” Jonésco told him, “and I don’t think the web page has been updated lately. Maybe the Editor is having the same staffing problems as myself. The office is right down the street.”

“Then,” cried Quichotte, leaping to his feet and stabbing at the air with an upraised index finger, “the Gazetto is where the resistance must begin.”

Outside the Gazetto office building, which was actually an ice cream parlor with a couple of rooms upstairs where the paper was located, a small crowd had gathered, licking ice creams while they protested and argued in the manner of old friends who have suddenly stopped trusting one another. “It’s an outrage!” cried a bow-tied gentleman with a briefcase. “These mastodons are riding roughshod over everything we hold sacred, and that includes your barista Frankie, Jonésco, and we’re holding you responsible for the damage he has caused.” A lady in a floral-print dress who might have been Frankie’s mother shouted back at him, “It’s because people like you behaved so patronizingly to my Frankie that he defected. You think you can go on being snooty at people for years without facing the consequences? Well, you have sown the wind. Now we are all reaping the whirlwind.” The hubbub increased, the crowd grew larger, and people took sides, anti-mastodon like Mr. Bow Tie, sympathetic to mastodons like Mrs. Floral Print, and even a few distinctly pro-mastodon voices. “The system is corrupt,” a young man on a bicycle shouted, “and if it cannot be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.”

“Has anybody seen the mastodons in the green suits?” asked a man in a brown suit. “It’s said they can walk on their hind legs, like human beings. I haven’t seen one myself but I’m reliably informed they exist. It’s my opinion that these are the moderate mastodons, the ones who want to make an accommodation with human beings, and we need to negotiate terms with them. Has anyone seen one?”

“Yes, from a distance,” shouted the town drunk, already well advanced in his drunkenness at breakfast time. “But I thought it was my mother-in-law and ignored it.” This comment was greeted with hisses, boos, cries of “shame,” etc., and the town drunk subsided to the sidewalk, propped up against a lamppost.

The Editor, a flustered young woman who had only recently taken over the position when her formidably competent aunt decided to retire, came downstairs to calm things down, but her presence only increased the level of excitement.

“Why is there nothing on your page about this crisis?” Mr. Bow Tie demanded. “It’s an outrage.”

The Editor looked at him sternly. “It is the practice of all responsible media outlets,” she said, “not to provide terrorists with the oxygen of publicity.”

The use of the word terrorists inflamed everyone, above all the young man on, or now, in fact, off his bicycle. “These are not terrorists, you fool,” he yelled. “These are American patriots.”

“Things are getting out of hand,” Quichotte said to Mr. Jonésco. “I must take charge and lead the people toward a solution. But what that solution might be, I confess, is a question that presently defeats me utterly.”

All this while Sancho had been deep in conversation with a studious-looking, young, bespectacled woman in a white lab coat. Now, to Quichotte’s surprise, it was not himself but Sancho who took the lead, raising a hand and silencing the crowd with an unexpected air of command, and getting up onto a bench with White Lab Coat Woman at his side.

“Mastodons are creatures from the faraway past,” he said, “and I don’t think many of us, especially the younger people, are interested in a return to the Stone Age. Back then the mastodons became extinct—this young woman in the lab coat tells me—because early humans hunted them down. So that’s one solution. Hunt them down.”

There were some nodding heads in the crowd and a chant of “Hunt—them—down!” began, then petered out for lack of widespread support.