Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“No.”

“I know, it’s a previous lover who’s now with someone else but keeps sending you messages saying she isn’t satisfied. Maybe she texts you hot photographs of herself to encourage you to come back.”

“No.”

“It would be amazing, at your age, if you had all these women after you, right? And all you want is one woman, but these others go on circling around you like helicopters shining their beams down at you. Am I right?”

“No.”

“I know,” Sancho said with sudden clarity. “It’s the Human Trampoline.”

“Yes,” Quichotte said. His face remained impassive, expressionless.

Sancho clapped his hands. “I knew it!” he cried. “I knew it all along. She’s the only other woman you ever loved, and she broke your heart, and that’s why you ran away from everything for all these years, and now you have to see her so you can put the old love away and open your heart fully to the new one.”

“No.”

“Then what? If she’s not your old girlfriend, who is she? Your old college roommate? Your dentist? Your therapist? Your bank manager? Your drug dealer? Your parole officer? Your chess instructor? Your priest?”

“She’s my sister,” Quichotte said, “and a long time ago, I did her wrong. I think that’s the right way around.”

SANCHO PONDERS THIS REVELATION.

I knew it, I guess. I knew he had secrets in the part of his head I can’t get into. But a whole sister! That’s a lot. That’s a lot he just said right there. God from the machine, this is kinda like an ancient Roman theater trick, I’m finding the Latin in his storehouse now. Dea ex machina. Poof! Here’s a sister I’ve got you didn’t know about, he tells me, and she has been here all the time.

It’s a half sister. The father remarried, there was a child, the father died, the mother, who knows what became of her. I don’t know and either he doesn’t either or he isn’t saying or it’s still locked away somewhere deep inside him, still hidden inside that cloud I can’t blow away. How well do they know each other? Not very well, not anymore anyway, they haven’t met in many years, they don’t call, they don’t text, they don’t write. Or do they? What do I know, but I’m guessing hardly at all. But once they must have known each other, otherwise why this nickname, which I’m surmising is discourteous. A trampoline, it’s a thing people bounce up and down on, no? So he’s basically calling her a whore.

Not very nice.

But no, no, he’s telling me, it’s the song, it means she’s bouncing into Graceland. It’s a way of saying she’s a person of grace. Well, excuse me for misunderstanding. I’d excuse her for misunderstanding too. But he’s telling me about her now and she sounds like a goddamn saint. Made a stack of money on Wall Street when she was still in her twenties, a high stack, higher than the jumbo stack of pancakes in the diner down the street, if you take my meaning: I mean high… and then one day she said, this is not the life I need, and walked out past the charging bull and never worked for the finance bros again. Now she’s running her own organization, facing toward India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, creating a second micro-banking operation alongside Grameen Bank, generating global funding to offer small loans to women in South Asia trying to start up their own enterprises, beauty parlors, food catering, child daycare centers; also fighting sex trafficking, campaigning against sexual violence toward women in India, you get the idea. A noble, selfless individual, giving her life to the betterment of others. A good woman of this type is a kind of trampoline. People bounce on her and fly. And if they fall they bounce on her again and rise again. She doesn’t seek flight for herself but she spreads herself wide and people use her to climb as high as they can go.

All this, he’s telling me, and I go, okay, great, but (a) what happened between you and (b) what’s she really like? I mean, without the halo? He answers the second question first, to keep me hanging on, drawing it out, so annoying. Well, he hasn’t seen her for a long time, he says, so the picture in his mind must be horribly out of date. In his mind’s eye she’s tall with loose, flowing black hair, flashing eyes, and a long face like his own. In his memory she’s warm and funny and smart and has the worst bad temper he ever encountered on any woman or for that matter any man. Also in his memory she wasn’t quite so politically advanced as she now is, she would tell Polish jokes, jokes that only Jews should tell about Jewish people, and jokes about black people, too, which if someone had recorded them on an iPhone would destroy her career now, but nobody had iPhones back then, and after she left Wall Street where that was the way people laughed over drinks, she became a reformed character, and now her only jokes were innocent, like drummer jokes.—Drummer jokes?—What do you call a drummer whose girlfriend leaves him? Homeless. What do you call an unemployed drummer? Ringo.

Ha ha ha.

He’s clearly more than a little frightened of calling her, of seeing her again, white-haired, with those long tresses long gone, her hair shaved close to the scalp. He’s afraid she’ll slam her door in his face— No, that’s the past, like Nastassja Kinski in one version of the Paris, Texas screenplay—but maybe he’s even more afraid of the opposite: that when she sees him her face will break into a long, slow smile, a smile she has denied herself all these years, and then she’ll take him in her arms, and she’ll cry, and caress his cheek, and say, “How stupid we were, to lose each other for most of our lives,” and she’ll greet me with great affection, too, and cook a fabulous dinner for us, and they’ll sit hand in hand late into the night, telling each other their stories, apologizing to each other, expressing their sibling love. And then within twenty-four hours he’ll step on some invisible land mine and the monster will come out of her, and she’ll yell at him, scream abuse at him, and tell him to get out and never darken her doorstep again, and he’ll end up broken into pieces in the gutter outside her building. He’s afraid of her half-sisterly half-love.

She’s a cancer survivor, he did hear that, breast cancer, around ten years ago, double mastectomy, looks like she beat it, she has been in full remission for a long time. He’s frightened of seeing the marks of her life on her face and of her seeing the marks of his life on his. After their father died they were briefly close. She called him Smile-Smile, he called her H.T. or Trampoline. They shared an interest in good food and they went out dining together. But there would be fights. At the end of all the warmth and laughter something he said, some innuendo she thought she heard in his voice, something that hadn’t been there at all, would get her goat and she would start shouting. In public places, yes. It shocked him and made him retreat. So there were fewer dinners together, and then none. And at one of them he had done the unforgivable thing.

Did you hit her? I asked him. Is that it? You hit her across the face with an open hand and a trickle of blood came down from her ear, and she spent the rest of her life campaigning against violent men?

No.

The memory came out of him with difficulty. The chronology was a particular problem. There were parts of their story that were lost to him now. He had accused her of having swindled him out of his inheritance. That was it. She had been the one dealing with lawyers on probate issues after their father’s death, and he told her he knew that she had taken far more than her share. He went further and accused her of falsifying or even forging the will. He threatened her with public denunciation, a press conference. What he couldn’t explain, because of the holes in his memory which were like rifts in the universe, areas of nonexistence in the middle of existence, was why he had done it, and he had done it, he thought he remembered, years after the event. She had retaliated against his threats, sending him a lawyer’s letter saying that he should be in no doubt that she would do everything in her power to defend her good name. She pointed out that he had signed off on their father’s will, and there were legal documents in the public record which proved his acceptance of it. His accusation was a major defamation, and if he made it public she would sue him for every penny he possessed. It was a letter designed to scare him into silence and it succeeded. They stopped talking and since then years had passed and both of them had gone through many changes: her sainthood, his increasingly isolated personality, her public persona, his private slide toward what he’s become, which I prefer not to put into words right now.