Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

I’m not dying, she had said. Also, I’ll live. She hoped that wasn’t dangerously overconfident, hubristic, of her. Maybe she should have crossed her fingers for luck when she defied the exterminating angel. Some nights she dreamed of Nemesis coming for her in a chariot drawn by griffins, wielding her punishing whip.

And then there was the other subject that never completely went away. Brother. The slap on the ear, the accusation, the threat. Whenever his name came up, so did the subject of his unforgivability, if indeed he was unforgivable, and slash or she unwilling to forgive. Now that Jack and Daughter were talking about other matters being unforgivable, her thoughts tended back, yet again, to her lost sibling, whom Daughter, so implacably unyielding in her fury about the way her mother had been treated, wanted Sister finally to make up with. Daughter even bought a paperback copy of his novel Reverse Rendition (cheaply, at the secondhand bookstore on Notting Hill Gate) and urged Sister to read it. “These CIA agents go to an unnamed Eastern country—maybe Pakistan?—to kidnap a man. He might be innocent or he might be the son of Osama bin Laden or some other terrorist. You don’t know until the last page. It’s so contemporary. You should totally read it.”

Being his sister felt like a sort of life sentence too.

ON THE DAY SISTER got her bad news, Daughter was trying to imagine herself as a mask. Her next runway show, she was thinking, would feature models in many different kinds of mask: animal masks including antlered deer, lionesses, roaring she-bears; Caribbean masks all feathers and sequins; hand-painted Venetian commedia dell’arte masks—Arlecchino, Pantalone, Capitan Scaramouche—men’s masks all inhabited, taken over, transformed, by the tallest, most beautiful girls she could hire. If your atelier was just off the route of the carnival, you couldn’t help having masks on your mind. Somebody brought her an old recording, VHS transferred to CD, of the National Theatre’s 1980s production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in which the whole cast wore masks throughout. Watching all four and a half hours of the trilogy showed her the truth of something she had heard said but never witnessed: the masks acted. The masks became human and were capable of expressing all the great emotions of tragedy. The masks lived. This was what she wanted to achieve in the twenty-minute length of a runway show. It was impossible, but the impossible was the only thing worth trying to do. She was drawing masks for herself. What would be the mask that she would become, the mask that would become her?

“Take a look at this,” her assistant Ornella said. This was a set of YouTube videos, the first group put up by Anonymous hacktivists, featuring men (and women?) in Guy Fawkes masks, as originally seen in the graphic novel V for Vendetta and the Wachowskis’ film of it. The second was a video by the rival group Legion, a straight-to-camera speech by a man using a voice-changer device and wearing a Don Quixote mask, vintage merch from Man of La Mancha on Broadway back in the day . “So derivative, both of them,” Daughter said. “Maybe we should try to contact them. I could make them much cooler things to wear.”

“I heard Legion got broken up,” Ornella told her. “And Anonymous these days makes stupid messages about aliens coming to Earth, being here already, walking among us.”

“Damn, they penetrated our cover,” Daughter said, and then, in a Dalek voice, “We are the aliens that you seek.”

The truth was that she was wearing a disguise already, giving a phony performance every day of lighthearted competence, while secretly full of grief and fear. She had recently gone through a breakup with her lover and business partner, an older man, a Polish aristocrat and shrewd entrepreneur, whose cocaine habit had become a big problem. So now she was alone, looking for someone to manage the business end of things, trying to do it all herself, panicking a little, nursing her sadness, feeling close to an unhealthy edge. Yeah, she thought. I don’t need a mask. I’m already the mask of myself.

“I need some fresh air,” she said to Ornella. “I won’t be long. Hold the fort.”

She walked through the streets of stucco façades, some white, some brightly painted, past the church that was bombed in the Blitz and rebuilt after the war ended, and arrived at her mother’s place, which would be unoccupied at this time. Her mother and the judge would be away at work, and the housekeeper would have left. She had her own key and let herself in past the bouncers standing outside Sancho, who gave her unfriendly looks. Unsurprisingly, there was some residual resentment about the outcome of the recent court case. She didn’t respond to the dirty looks and went upstairs.

Afterwards, she swore that she had not intended to do what she then did, that she had just wanted a quiet place to be in for a while, away from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of her workplace. Be that as it may: at some point that afternoon, she went into Sister’s home office on the upper floor of the duplex, sat down at her computer, entered the password, which she knew, and composed an email from her mother to her uncle in New York.

One of us has to begin, and perhaps you’re too uncertain of your reception at this end, or too wrapped up in your own business, or just disinclined to renew this long-discontinued connection, so I’ll make the first move, using the old descriptive notation. 1. P-K4.

Send.

As soon as it was done she felt a surge of delicious terror. What had she started? What would her mother think? How would her uncle respond to what he would obviously assume was a message from Sister, not from her interfering Daughter? Would he respond, or would her radical, intrusive, borderline-dishonest gesture be in vain? A false move?

Here I am, masked again, she thought. She sat staring at the screen for an hour, for ninety minutes, for two hours. Sister and the judge would be home soon. She should just shut down the computer and leave and explain it all to her mother later. Or maybe she should wait and face the music.

Ding.

There was a message in the inbox. He had replied. Her heart pounded.

1….P-K4.

It was her move.

A key turned in the lock. She jumped up and went to look and there on the lower floor was her mother, home, holding a sheet of paper and staring up at her with an expression on her face which Daughter had never seen before. She’s onto me, Daughter thought. But how could she be? I don’t know, but she knows, and she’s really angry.

“Come downstairs,” her mother said. “I have something to say to you.”

“I have a confession to make,” Daughter replied.

“Come downstairs,” her mother repeated. “You can go first.”

So Daughter went first, and when she told her mother about the chess moves Sister lost her usual iron self-control and wept. Sister’s stoicism was well known. Few people had seen her cry. These huge, shoulder-shaking sobs were shocking to Daughter, greatly increasing her guilt, and her own tears soon mirrored her mother’s. After a few moments Sister took several deep breaths and said, laughing bitterly through yet more tears, “Honey, you don’t even know what I’m crying about.”

In fact she had been immediately happy to hear the news about Brother, had already decided she would reply, and was clear about her next move in the chess opening. Daughter’s initiative had opened up a healing possibility that felt like a renewal of life. But it was also the day when a routine blood test had produced a result that was anything but routine. She had been right about the shadow within. The contrast between the news of Brother’s reentry into her story and the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness which seemed likely to bring that story to a close had been too much for her to bear. She handed the sheet of paper to her daughter and as Daughter read it her tears were replaced by dry-eyed shock and fear. She felt as if a grave had opened in the polished oak floor between them and a hand had reached out from that yawning pit and seized her mother by the ankle.