The Ground Beneath Her Feet (51 page)

So let’s never forget I was the one who fetched him out of the underworld, she boasts, like that Hindu goddess?, what’s her name, Mousie.

Rati, I correct her.

Yeah, right. Rati who saved Kama the god of love. When the god of love opened his eyes, by the way, the left eyeball was almost colourless. The doctors blamed a blow received in the car accident and regretted that as the pupil was “stuck” in its fully dilated state and could no longer contract?, the eye would see very little, and blurrily But I told the doctors it wasn’t the accident. He looked down the tunnel and the light poured into his eye. One-eyed death at the tunnel’s end glaring at Ormus Cama. He’s lucky the other eye survived.

(And the left eye saw plenty, anyway. It saw too deeply, too far, too much.)

I don’t interrupt. When Vina starts with her fanciful mysteries, all you can do is lie back and wait for her to lose interest, which never takes too long. Here she is, back again at the story of Kama and Rati. Anyhow, without me he’d be stir-fry, baby, she says, referring to the negative effects of Lord Shiva’s thunderbolt on the errant love god of Hinduism. Without me he’d be nothing, he’d be ash.

Thus Vina on the great love of her life. When he awoke, I was his mirror, she says. He saw himself in my eyes and liked what he saw. And lived.

When I want to provoke her, when the monologue about Ormus finally gets my goat, I raise the subject of Maria the phantom nymphomaniac. I do it by conjuring up the old show tune from
West Side Story
. Maria, I start humming, and at once Vina stiffens; her skin actually heats up—I feel her temperature rising—and her eyes begin to boil. Then she disguises her jealousy by transforming it into outrageous behaviour. Do you want me to show you, she asks, savagely. Shall I perform upon you those unnatural acts. Hers, the so-called spectre’s. You be Ormus, lie back and close your eyes just like you always wanted, and I’ll be her, the slavering succubus. Would you like that, Rai, hey. You’d love it, am I right. Her terrible rising voice, caught halfway between a tear and a shriek, makes my ear whistle.

Keep it down, I say, a little frightened by this undressed ignoble savagery. Vina, come on. I don’t need this and neither do you.

But perhaps she does need it, she feels injured by the very existence of this Other, it offends her. Other-hatred is for Vina the mirror image of self-love.

•  •  •

The young Indian woman, no longer posing as a nurse but still answering to the name of Maria, starts coming to Ormus again, the first manifestation being a few days after Vina awakens him from his big sleep. She is discreet, however; Vina’s presence guarantees Maria’s absence, as if this were a condition of her appearances, a law of her fantastic realm. Ormus begins both to dread and to desire solitude because of these secret visits
.

Fearing quick rejection, Maria has evolved a new strategy of volubility. Instead of tearing off her clothes and jumping on him, she seduces him with talk, fast, interesting talk, and he listens, because ever since he re-opened his pale left eye he has started seeing things he can’t understand, things he needs to understand. It’s as if his two eyes are looking into slightly different worlds, or rather two variations of the same world, almost the same and yet utterly separate. Double vision: he gets a lot of headaches
.

Your eyes have been opened now, Maria murmurs, massaging his temples. He lets her do it. Now I can come to you like this, it’s so much easier, whenever I want. Your eye knows, it remembers. Worli, the Cosmic Dancer, our life in the otherworld. These places feel like dreams et cetera, but they are places you have been and so on. I know it’s hard for you. You have to live here for now. I understand. You have to blot certain things out to retain your ability to function and so forth. As for her, she’s not good enough for you, but even this I can bear. I will never leave you. This is what you were sent to do. You slipped into your mother’s womb behind your dead brother and they believed you belonged to them. Your songs will change this world. This is your fate. You will open their eyes and they will follow you towards the light et cetera et cetera. Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way. See how they shine
.

Is it possible that such an otherworld exists, he marvels
.

And if it exists, he wonders privately, might it not also be possible that in that otherworld this strange girl might still be considered insane?

Her visits to his bedroom are necessarily brief. He is weak, convalescent, rarely left alone. She talks fast, continues to restrain her passions, seeking to present herself as an intelligent and educated person, a person worthy of his love
.

Realities are in conflict, she tells him. Your right eye, your left eye, stare into different versions and so on. At such a moment the frontier between right and
wrong action also dissolves. I myself have suspended moral judgement and live according to the more profound imperatives of my appetites et cetera
.

He closes his left eye, experimentally. Maria disappears, as if someone had thrown a switch
.

On her next visit she complains about her abrupt dismissal, insists on being treated with respect. I am here for you in any way you want, she says, but I don’t care to be treated meanly and so forth. Just be a little polite
.

What she wants to talk about most is earthquakes. There are going to be more of these, she prophesies. There are always earthquakes, Ormus answers. Yes, she says, but these are different. Two worlds in collision. Only one can survive and so on. In the end this world will crumble and fall et cetera and we will be together at home for ever and I will make you mad with joy et cetera et cetera et cetera as you must already know
.

When she is not with him, she says, she visits past and present earthquake zones, in China, northern California, Japan, Tajikistan and elsewhere; all those places where the fabric of the earth has put itself in question. To Ormus, there is something ghoulish about this hobby, and about the lyricism with which she describes these high tragedies. She speaks of the earth beginning to sing, and rocking people’s houses as if they were swinging cradles. The earth’s pounding lullaby, not soothing but turbulent, coaxing human beings and their creations towards not sleep but death. She has spent a lot of time in Turkey, travelling to remote regions—Tochangri, Van—and India, too, gives her plenty to talk about: the devastation of Dharmsala and Palampur in the century’s early years, and the narrow escape in Simla of Lady Curzon, the Viceroy’s wife, who was just missed by a chimney that fell into her bedroom; also the Monghyr earthquake of 1934, when sulfurous mud and water bubbled up from great apertures in the earth like proofs of the existence of Hell, and Captain Barnard’s Flying Circus was hired by the local authorities to overfly the area and assess the damage
.

The great cracks in the streets of Orléansville, Algeria, the tidal wave that engulfed Agadir, the tidal wave that drowned Messina, the collapse of Managua and the escape of Howard Hughes, the Tokyo-Yokohama catastrophe of 1933, the endemic instability of Iran, and the strange behaviour of Sir J.A. Sweetenham, British governor of Jamaica, who refused the aid of the American navy after much of Kingston was flattened in the year 1907: about all these she painstakingly informs her bewildered beloved, in rather too much grue-somely relished detail
.

Underlying all earthquakes is the idea of Fault, she says. The earth has many faults, of course. Literally millions have been mapped et cetera. But human Faults cause earthquakes too. What is coming is a judgement
.

Now I know she’s mad, Ormus thinks, but holds his tongue
.

Earthquakes, Maria eagerly explains, are the means by which the earth punishes itself and its population for its wrongnesses. In spite of her disavowals of universal morality, she becomes, when she gets carried away, quite a tub-thumping fire-and-brimstone damnation preacher, bringing Ormus her hot gospel. She looks back to a Utopian golden age in which there were no quakes, for the world was at peace, there were no conflicting versions, the earth lacked its present tragic quality of irreconcilability. The lithosphere itself, she argues, was originally intact but has been gradually deformed by movements in the planet’s slowly convecting interior and so on. This hot, cauldron-like interior may be called the earth’s original sin, its First Fault, and earthquakes are its consequences. Too late now to contemplate any return to that original state of balance, of grace. Too late to reconcile the earth with itself. We must brace ourselves for the tectonic movements, the slippages, the tsunamis, the landslides, the rocking, rolling cities et cetera et cetera, the smashing of the real. We must prepare for shocks, for the fragmentation of the planet as it goes to war with itself, for the endgames of the self-contradictory earth
.

Human Faults cause earthquakes too. Maria on subsequent visits returns to her wildest notion. It is her view that there are certain individuals in whom the irreconcilability of being is made apparent, in whom the contradictoriness of the real rages like thermonuclear war; and such is the gravitational force of these individuals that space and time are dragged towards them and deformed. There are rifts, tears, slippages, incompatibilities. It is not that they are responsible for deforming the universe, but that they are the instruments through whose agency that growing deformity is clearly and terrifyingly unveiled
.

It is her view that Ormus Cama is such an individual
.

She says nothing about Vina in this regard
.

She has talked enough. Now she has other plans, and advances upon him. He is in bed, too weak to resist her, and she knows she has aroused his interest. This time he will not refuse
.

Ormus closes his eye
.

It’s almost fourteen years since our first night of love back in old Bombay and still Vina lies unclothed on our hot bed without so much as a
sheet to cover her. Another sleeping beauty waiting for her prince (not me, not me) to come.

In the middle 1970s I photographed a great Russian ballet dancer who had defected from the Kirov in France, running towards a group of soldiers and shouting,
Help to me, help for me
, in broken English, pursued by KGB goons.
Help by me, help with me
. Soon after his escape he ended up, as we all end up, in Manhattan, and found his way to my studio wrapped in furs, like a high-stepping big-mouthed bear. I stood him on a white sheet in front of an old eight-by-ten plate camera. He was certainly the loveliest creature he had ever seen, the most gorgeous by a long long way, and so with the help of (not very much) white wine I persuaded him to remove first his furs and then more and more of his clothes, until at length he was triumphantly nude, and delighted to be so. I told him to let his head hang down and allow his arms to hang loosely. Then he should slowly raise his head, and as he did so he should also bring his arms up and out from his body, and that was the shape I wanted, he should hold that, the exposure was a full second long and the plate camera’s depth of field was also a problem. He did as I asked and as his strong animal’s head rose I saw that the eyes were closed, he was lost in a rhapsody of self-love, which was so profound that synchronously with the rising of his arms he also raised, for my camera’s unhoped-for benefit, a long and glisteningly happy erection.

Love by me. Love with me, to me, for me. Love of me
.

Vina’s self-love is not less than this.

Here are some things she actually sings to me, in vengeful retribution for my humming that teasing Bernstein tune and raising the forbidden subject of Maria, her alternative-reality rival. Rai—this part’s the spoken intro—you think you’re such a fuckin’ star. Let me tell you who you really are. (Now comes the song.) You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are glass. You brown mouse, I like black rats. You boy pussy but I like tom cats. Just because you got this dance, don’t think you stand a fuckin’ chance.

(End of song.)

Rai, you are burger and I have steak at home. You are not what I want, never were, never will be. But I’m a hungry woman. I
want more than what I want
.

Do you know what you want, they asked Ormus, twice: once when
he awoke from the big sleep, once later. They never asked me but if they had I’d have had the answer down pat. I learned it from a good teacher, the toughest in the world.

There is a wind in the willows, and perhaps that is a water rat scurrying to his hole. It is a balmy day, soft-breezed, and oarsmen are on the water in lazy sculls and heaving eights. Flags flutter from passing pleasure craft. Beneath taut sails young men
en matelot
lean and strain. Aboard the motor launches all is relaxation. Brass-buttoned blazers, white duck trousers, the long bare legs of pretty girls. An ack-ack popping of corks. Quails’ eggs, and smoked salmon on brown bread. The river people wave to one another as they go, and if that is really Jesus Christ wearing a straw boater in that punt, then he too is welcome, he too deserves this moment of blessed beauty, this storybook English peace.

The war seems very far away.

Spenta walks down a path to the river, past a slope of bluebells and Waldo Crossley picking up leaves and an oak where once that old bastard Castlereagh liked to take his ease. He killed himself while staying here, slit his throat from ear to ear, they say, and emerged from his toilette bleeding to death from this second, lethal smile. In spite of the dead man’s ghost, this walk is Spenta’s favourite journey, along her mile and a half of shore, and it has become her custom to talk to her first husband while she takes the air.

How you would’ve loved it, Darius, to have guardianship of these historic moments, this riverbank, and oh, Darius, to feel this bliss. Life has vanquished death and even the furniture celebrates. The gloomy old leather chesterfields are shining and the whiskered ancestors posing in their frock coats and whatnot have stopped looking grim and have cracked out in smiles.