Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“My father thinks that immigrants like us have identity crises and try to fix them by buying art and hanging our identity on the wall.”

“I don’t think that,” Quichotte said, startled. “I’ve never said anything of that sort. Where did you get such a discourteous idea?”

“I don’t know,” Sancho said, backing off, genuinely puzzled. “I guess somebody else, something else, put the notion in my head.”

“Let’s start over,” said the Human Trampoline. “I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

The bar was a long, freestanding piece made of dark, intricately carved teak, and behind it hung a painting of four women with shorn hair, wearing white saris, sitting in a room with an ornately patterned rug within whose patterning the family car, the family cat, and the dead husband could all be seen, in miniature. The women’s faces looked exactly like the Trampoline’s. White was the color of mourning and there was a tiny dead man on the rug. Once again she answered the unasked question. “Yes, I commissioned it and sat for it after our father died. His father and mine. I mourned him in quadruplicate, in the north, south, east, and west, in the past, present, future, and in the time beyond time. Don’t think you understand me because you have looked at this for two minutes. You have no idea who I am.”

Sancho tried to placate her. “No, I just liked it,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I have no idea who you are, either. Salut. ”

This was the way family reunions went on TV, Sancho thought. People bickered and sniped and there was usually an explosion at the end of the episode, after which everyone wept and everyone said how much they loved everyone else. So now he found himself in one of those episodes. He knew how to play his part.

Quichotte in his sister’s home wore a distant, abstracted, absent manner, fading in and out of the encounter like a ghost. For the most part he looked lost, as if unsure of his right to be there, and bewildered about how to achieve what he had come to achieve, which was the restoration of family harmony and peace. As the Trampoline spoke, it was almost as if there were two Quichottes in the room, a version from the past as well as the present one, and that as the past was superimposed on the present it caused a sort of blurring, because the two versions were so unlike each other that it became difficult to see the Quichotte in the room clearly, as he now was, and he himself was a victim of the same confusion, not able with any degree of ease to free himself from the trap of what he had once been. At first he stood by the sliding doors to the terrace as the glamor of the night city began to wrap itself around the ugly-beautiful daytime streets. Once it grew dark he moved to a corner of the room and sat upright on a hard chair and, for the most part, held his tongue.

“I’m going to tell you everything,” said the Trampoline, addressing her remarks to Sancho, “including all the things he no longer knows, or says he doesn’t, or says he isn’t sure if it’s what he did to me or I did to him, or whatever. I do this because you’re family now, or so he says, even if he won’t say how or why, or what happened to your mother. We’ll get to that. I don’t know what he has told you but I’m betting there are some pretty large gaps.”

Yes, that was so, Sancho agreed. “He told me he did you wrong,” the youth said. “And he wants to set things right. At least he thinks that’s what happened.”

“He’s talking about the money business, I assume,” the Trampoline said, waving a dismissive hand. “That’s the least of it. The most of it is, he was always careless with people’s hearts. He never took any responsibility for what he broke. And now, what, he’s a mystic? There are seven valleys of purification and we’re where, in the fifth? And this is all because he’s in love with a woman he has never met? That’s perfect, really. The withdrawal from reality into mumbo jumbo. And then the pursuit of a fantasy. He might as well wear a T-shirt that says, I am incapable of living a real life. I am incapable of love. ”

Quichotte had turned to face them now. He continued to say nothing. He wore the air of someone about to be told a strange story for the first time. He folded his arms and remained silent, ready to hear her out.

“Once upon a time, Sancho,” the Trampoline began, “he was charming and selfish. You look at him now and you see a gaunt scarecrow, a skin-and-bone relic. He thinks he’s questing for love, but you know better, you know what’s waiting for him at the end of his road. But why should I say what you see? Maybe you’re just the loyal squire to the gallant knight.”

“To be fair,” Sancho said, coming to Quichotte’s defense, “he still has the charming smile and old-school good manners. And he doesn’t seem that selfish to me.”

“You’re loyal to him,” the Trampoline said. “I see that. That’s a good characteristic, but what follows will therefore sadden you, because what I have to tell is a story of disloyalty, even of betrayal. You want to hear it all? Well, even if you don’t. I’m here to reunite your father with his mislaid past.

“The truth is, I’m the one who is supposed to be dead. Let’s start there. I was a young woman then. I was supposed to die but my body made a different decision. However, it had to accept a number of consequences of that decision. It accepted them and defeated the crab in my breasts. The consequences included a double mastectomy, the removal of a part of my armpit and some of my chest wall muscles too. Also, chemotherapy. By the time you’ve been through that you no longer think of yourself as alive. You think, I’m lucky not to be dead. That’s what I’ve been ever since: lucky not to be dead, living in the aftermath of an escape. You no longer think of yourself as having gender or sexuality. You think of yourself as an undead thing that is unaccountably continuing to live. In this state of aftermath one craves simple things: sympathy and love. Your father was not good at providing either.

“He was some sort of journalist,” the Trampoline said, turning back to Sancho. “Freelance. Investigative. He used words like that. Specialist in intelligence. At least in his own opinion. I don’t think he did particularly well. But he was a good talker. He said he was delving into the hidden reality of the world, the truth that exists but is buried very deep so that most of us can live among more palatable fictions. The ladies, enough of them, listened. Then they saw through him and walked away. Maybe what’s left of him believes he can make this television Salma listen too.

“People called him paranoiac and he accepted the label. He had a whole theory of paranoia. I don’t think he remembers that now. He said paranoia was to be understood as essentially optimistic, because the paranoid believed that there was a meaning to events, that the world made sense, even though that sense was concealed. Did he ever talk to you about that? No, he has lost that part of himself along with the rest. The opposite of paranoia, he said, was entropy, which was tragic, because it indicated that the universe was absurd. It was good talk. It didn’t work so well in print. He had to go on living in that small apartment in Kips Bay. I had already made my money and so there was between us the question of envy. He didn’t come here much because he envied me for living here. How ridiculous that was! There was nothing to envy about me at that time. The mutilation, the chemo, the transformation of a woman into an undead entity, a trickster who had somehow gotten away with cheating death. I guess you could envy me for my luck, but he envied me for my apartment. This is the kind of brother he was. Half brother. He wasn’t even half a brother to me.