Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

The night was full of noises, of pleasure, pain, and painful pleasure. Sancho slept soundly through it all, Quichotte less soundly. In the morning, after the storm, the city glistened like a new promise. Quichotte, waking up after a night spent tossing fitfully between fear and hope, saw Sancho sitting up in bed switching between the available video pornography, checking it out. “Older women are the best,” Sancho said. “But maybe I’m just saying that because I’m so young that most women are older than I am and the ones younger than me are illegal.”

Quichotte realized that a moment came in all families when fathers and sons had to talk about these things. “Perhaps you get this from me,” he said, “because when I was your age watching TV, all the beautiful women were older than myself. There were no porno channels back then, I hasten to add. But, you know, Lucille Ball, and I-dream-of Jeannie. The first woman I loved who was approximately my own age was Victoria Principal as Pamela Ewing in Dallas . Now, however, such are my advanced years that all the older ladies, and many of the ladies of my own age, are deceased. Therefore, my last and greatest love, Miss Salma R, is my junior by some distance. Let us find a diner and eat a fine New York breakfast.”

Sancho grew bored of the pornography (the participants on the screen looked bored too) and started hopping channels aimlessly. Then suddenly he gave a gasp and jumped to his feet. There was the woman he loved, right there on Headline News!, talking about the aftermath of the killing in Beautiful, Kansas, its impact on the community, the community’s desire to be accepted as American like anyone else. She mentioned the history of America, as when immigration issues arose it seemed compulsory to do, and she did not fail to refer to Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus.” Mother of Exiles, check. I lift my lamp beside the golden door, check. The caption to her talking head identified her as a lawyer, and the appointed spokesperson for the widow and family of the murdered Indian-American man.

“Give me your laptop,” Sancho demanded, and after a few moments of feverish searching he scribbled something on a piece of paper and lifted his eyes in triumph, waving his prize in the air. “I found her,” he said. “Her office address, email, and number.” Then he deflated and sat down on his bed, looking unhappy. “Now I could call her,” he finished, much less confidently, “but probably she’d just hang up when she heard my voice.”

Quichotte put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Television is the god that goes on giving,” he said. “This morning it has given you a big gift. You will know how to use it when the time comes.”

At the diner Sancho stared morosely at a stack of pancakes soaked in maple syrup. Quichotte, eating a toasted cheese sandwich with extra bacon, perceived that further discussion was required. “In the fifth valley,” he began—but Sancho wasn’t in the mood for valley talk this morning, and rolled his eyes impatiently—“we must learn that everything is connected. Look: you turned on the TV to watch a series of obscenities and then you discovered important information about this girl of yours. By chance, you may say. I say not by chance. You found it because everything is connected, this channel to that channel, this button to that button, this choice to that choice.”

He had Sancho’s attention now, and launched into a longer statement. “Once,” he said, “people believed that they lived in little boxes, boxes that contained their whole stories, and that there was no need to worry much about what other people were doing in their other little boxes, whether nearby or far away. Other people’s stories had nothing to do with ours. But then the world got smaller and all the boxes got pushed up against all the other boxes and opened up, and now that all the boxes are connected to all the other boxes, we have to understand what’s going on in all the boxes we aren’t in, otherwise we don’t know why the things happening in our boxes are happening. Everything is connected.”

Sancho was eating, but still grouchily cynical. “You mean,” he said, “that the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the back bone, blah blah,” he said. “I believe there’s a song about that.”

“I must confess to you,” Quichotte said, “that the statement I have made was not an easy statement for me to make. For much of my life I have been, one could say, a disconnected man, keeping my own counsel, living with the glowing company of my TV friends, but with little real human companionship. Then love came to town and everything changed. Love brought me to town and here I stand, therefore, surrounded by the million million connections between this one and that one, between near and far, between this language and that language, between everything that men are and everything else that they are, and I see that the Way requires me to reconnect with the great thronging crowd of life, to its multiplicity, and beyond its many disharmonies, to its deeper harmonies. It is not easy after so long and I must ask for your understanding. Just as you must take your slow steps toward your Beloved, so I must—gingerly, with great nervousness—make my tentative moves back into human company. Entering New York, I feel like a Catholic entering a confessional booth. Much that has long remained unsaid must now, in all probability, be said. I must circle slowly toward this goal. It may take a little time.”

“What is it that’s unsaid that must be said?” Sancho was curious.

“All in good time,” Quichotte replied.

In the days that followed, Quichotte was pensive and said relatively little, leaving Sancho to wander the city streets alone while he stayed in the hotel room watching TV. He did not, for example, go to stand outside Miss Salma R’s apartment building, or outside her offices slash studio, in the hope of glimpsing the woman whose heart he had set out to win. “There is much to be done before I am worthy of her presence,” he told Sancho, and then, seemingly, did nothing.

Sancho approached the city methodically, setting himself the task of walking around a different neighborhood each day. And there were moments when Quichotte shook off his apparent torpor and came out as well. It turned out that in the course of their travels he had taken the time to arrange a program of activities to ease himself and Sancho into city life, obtaining audience tickets for 50 Central, The $100,000 Pyramid, The Chew, The Dr. Oz Show, and Good Morning America, and on these outings into the world he knew best he seemed more like his usual self.

But wasn’t he supposed to have given up his addictions in the fourth valley, as he called it? Was he backsliding? Would that delay things? Sancho didn’t care about the valleys and by now strongly suspected that they were to be numbered among Quichotte’s delusions that had no meaning or effect in the real world, so that it made no difference whether he played by his own rules or not. But when, Sancho wondered, would the old man make his move? And how?

“There’s someone I have to see before this goes any further,” Quichotte said at breakfast, after one week had passed. “Nothing can happen until this matter has been straightened out. The Path will remain closed.”

“Is it a woman?” Sancho asked.

“Yes.”

“I know, it’s a previous lover you still have a soft spot for, but you don’t know if she’s still carrying the torch, too, and she’s kind of crazy so you think it’s probably a bad idea to start up with her again anyway, but you have to see her to put your mind at rest.”

“No.”

“I know, it’s a previous lover who treated you like shit but now she wants your forgiveness and maybe more than that, maybe she’s hinting that she wants you back and until you see her you won’t be able to clear her out of your mind.”