The Satanic Verses (23 page)

           
He asked her one night if she had seen the horns growing on Chamcha's head, but
she went deaf and, instead of answering, told him how she would sit on a camp
stool by the galpon or bull-pen at Los Alamos and the prize bulls would come up
and lay their horned heads in her lap. One afternoon a girl named Aurora del
Sol, who was the fiancee of Martin de la Cruz, let fall a saucy remark: I
thought they only did that in the laps of virgins, she stage-whispered to her
giggling friends, and Rosa turned to her sweetly and replied, Then perhaps, my
dear, you would like to try? From that time Aurora del Sol, the best dancer at
the estancia and the most desirable of all the peon women, became the deadly
enemy of the too-tall, too-bony woman from over the sea.

           
"You look just like him," Rosa Diamond said as they stood at her
night-time window, side by side, looking out to sea. "His double. Martin
de la Cruz." At the mention of the cowboy's name Gibreel felt so violent a
pain in his navel, a pulling pain, as if somebody had stuck a hook in his
stomach, that a cry escaped his lips. Rosa Diamond appeared not to hear.
"Look," she cried happily, "over there."

           
Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower and the
holiday camp,―running along the water's edge so that the incoming tide
washed away its footprints,―swerving and feinting, running for its life,
there came a full-grown, large-as-life ostrich. Down the beach it fled, and
Gibreel's eyes followed it in wonder, until he could no longer make it out in
the dark.

           
* * * * *

           
The next thing that happened took place in the village. They had gone into town
to collect a cake and a bottle of champagne, because Rosa had remembered that
it was her eighty-ninth birthday. Her family had been expelled from her life,
so there had been no cards or telephone calls. Gibreel insisted that they
should hold some sort of celebration, and showed her the secret inside his
shirt, a fat money-belt full of pounds sterling acquired on the black market
before leaving Bombay. "Also credit cards galore," he said. "I
am no indigent fellow. Come, let us go. My treat." He was now so deeply in
thrall to Rosa's narrative sorcery that he hardly remembered from day to day
that he had a life to go to, a woman to surprise by the simple fact of his
being alive, or any such thing. Trailing behind her meekly, he carried Mrs.
Diamond's shopping-bags.

           
He was loafing around on a Street corner while Rosa chatted to the baker when
he felt, once again, that dragging hook in his stomach, and he fell against a
lamp-post and gasped for air. He heard a clip-clopping noise, and then around
the corner came an archaic pony-trap, full of young people in what seemed at
first sight to be fancy dress: the men in tight black trousers studded at the
calf with silver buttons, their white shirts open almost to the waist; the
women in wide skirts of frills and layers and bright colours, scarlet, emerald,
gold. They were Singing in a foreign language and their gaiety made the street
look dim and tawdry, but Gibreel realized that something weird was afoot, because
nobody else in the street took the slightest notice of the ponytrap. Then Rosa
emerged from the baker's with the cake-box dangling by its ribbon from the
index finger of her left hand, and exclaimed: "Oh, there they are,
arriving for the dance. We always had dances, you know, they like it, it's in
their blood." And, after a pause: "That was the dance at which he
killed the vulture."

           
That was the dance at which a certain Juan Julia, nicknamed The Vulture on
account of his cadaverous appearance, drank too much and insulted the honour of
Aurora del Sol, and didn't stop until Martin had no option but to fight,
hey
Martin, why you enjoy fucking with this one, I thought she was pretty dull
.
"Let us go away from the dancing," Martin said, and in the darkness,
silhouetted against the fairy-lights hung from the trees around the
dance-floor, the two men wrapped ponchas around their forearms, drew their
knives, circled, fought. Juan died. Martin de la Cruz picked up the dead man's hat
and threw it at the feet of Aurora del Sol. She picked up the hat and watched
him walk away.

           
Rosa Diamond at eighty-nine in a long silver sheath dress with a cigarette
holder in one gloved hand and a silver turban on her head drank gin-and-sin
from a green glass triangle and told stories of the good old days. "I want
to dance," she announced suddenly. "It's my birthday and I haven't
danced once."

           
* * * * *

           
The exertions of that night on which Rosa and Gibreel danced until dawn proved
too much for the old lady, who collapsed into bed the next day with a low fever
that induced ever more delirious apparitions: Gibreel saw Martin de la Cruz and
Aurora del Sol dancing flamenco on the tiled and gabled roof of the Diamond
house, and Peronistas in white suits stood on the boathouse to address a
gathering of peons about the future: "Under Per—n these lands will be
expropriated and distributed among the people. The British railroads also will
become the property of the state. Let's chuck them out, these brigands, these
privateers ..." The plaster bust of Henry Diamond hung in mid-air,
observing the scene, and a white-suited agitator pointed a finger at him and
cried, That's him, your oppressor; there is the enemy. Gibreel's stomach ached
so badly that he feared for his life, but at the very moment that his rational
mind was considering the possibility of an ulcer or appendicitis, the rest of
his brain whispered the truth, which was that he was being held prisoner and
manipulated by the force of Rosa's will, just as the Angel Gibreel had been
obliged to speak by the overwhelming need of the Prophet, Mahound.

           
"She's dying," he realized. "Not long to go, either."
Tossing in her bed in the fever's grip Rosa Diamond muttered about ombŸ poison
and the enmity of her neighbour Doctor Babington, who asked Henry, is your wife
perhaps quiet enough for the pastoral life, and who gave her (as a present for
recovering from typhus) a copy of Amerigo Vespucci's account of his voyages.
"The man was a notorious fantasist, of course," Babington smiled,
"but fantasy can be stronger than fact; after all, he had continents named
after him." As she grew weaker she poured more and more of her remaining
strength into her own dream of Argentina, and Gibreel's navel felt as if it had
been set on fire. He lay slumped in an armchair at her bedside and the
apparitions multiplied by the hour. Woodwind music filled the air, and, most
wonderful of all, a small white island appeared just off the shore, bobbing on
the waves like a raft; it was white as snow, with white sand sloping up to a
clump of albino trees, which were white, chalk-white, paper-white, to the very
tips of their leaves.

           
After the arrival of the white island Gibreel was overcome by a deep lethargy.
Slumped in an armchair in the bedroom of the dying woman, his eyelids drooping,
he felt the weight of his body increase until all movement became impossible.
Then he was in another bedroom, in tight black trousers, with silver buttons
along the calves and a heavy silver buckle at the waist.
You sent for me,
Don Enrique
, he was saying to the soft, heavy man with a face like a white
plaster bust, but he knew who had asked for him, and he never took his eyes
from her face, even when he saw the colour rising from the white frill around
her neck.

           
Henry Diamond had refused to permit the authorities to become involved in the
matter of Martin de la Cruz,
these people are my responsibility
, he told
Rosa,
it is a question of honour
. Instead he had gone to some lengths to
demonstrate his continuing trust in the killer, de la Cruz, for example by
making him the captain of the estancia polo team. But Don Enrique was never
really the same once Martin had killed the Vulture. He was more and more easily
exhausted, and became listless, uninterested even in birds. Things began to
come apart at Los Alamos, imperceptibly at first, then more obviously. The men
in the white suits returned and were not chased away. When Rosa Diamond
contracted typhus, there were many at the estancia who took it for an allegory
of the old estate's decline.

           
What am I doing here
, Gibreel thought in great alarm, as he stood before
Don Enrique in the rancher's study, while Do–a Rosa blushed in the background,
this
is someone else's place
.―Great confidence in you, Henry was saying,
not in English but Gibreel could still understand.―My wife is to
undertake a motor tour, for her convalescence, and you will accompany . . .
Responsibilities at Los Alamos prevent me from going along.
Now I must
speak, what to say
, but when his mouth opened the alien words emerged, it
will be my honour, Don Enrique, click of heels, swivel, exit.

           
Rosa Diamond in her eighty-nine-year-old weakness had begun to dream her story
of stories, which she had guarded for more than half a century, and Gibreel was
on a horse behind her Hispano-Suiza, driving from estancia to estancia, through
a wood of arayana trees, beneath the high cordillera, arriving at grotesque
homesteads built in the style of Scottish castles or Indian palaces, visiting
the land of Mr. Cadwallader Evans, he of the seven wives who were happy enough
to have only one night of duty each per week, and the territory of the
notorious MacSween who had become enamoured of the ideas arriving in Argentina
from Germany, and had started flying, from his estancia's flagpole, a red flag
at whose heart a crooked black cross danced in a white circle. It was on the
MacSween estancia that they came across the lagoon, and Rosa saw for the first
time the white island of her fate, and insisted on rowing out for a picnic
luncheon, accompanied neither by maid nor by chauffeur, taking only Martin de
la Cruz to row the boat and to spread a scarlet cloth upon the white sand and
to serve her with meat and wine.

           
As white as snow and as red as blood and as black as ebony
. As she
reclined in black skirt and white blouse, lying upon scarlet which itself lay
over white, while he (also wearing black and white) poured red wine into the
glass in her white-gloved hand,―and then, to his own astonishment,
bloody
goddamn
, as he caught at her hand and began to kiss,―something
happened, the scene grew blurred, one minute they were lying on the scarlet
cloth, rolling all over it so that cheeses and cold cuts and salads and pates
were crushed beneath the weight of their desire, and when they returned to the
Hispano-Suiza it was impossible to conceal anything from chauffeur or maid on
account of the food stains all over their clothes,―while the next minute
she was recoiling from him, not cruelly but in sadness, drawing her hand away
and making a tiny gesture of the head, no, and he stood, bowed, retreated,
leaving her with virtue and lunch intact,―the two possibilities kept
alternating, while dying Rosa tossed on her bed, did-she-didn't-she, making the
last version of the story of her life, unable to decide what she wanted to be
true.

           
* * * * *

           
"I'm going crazy," Gibreel thought. "She's dying, but I'm losing
my mind." The moon was out, and Rosa's breathing was the only sound in the
room: snoring as she breathed in and exhaling heavily, with small grunting
noises. Gibreel tried to rise from his chair, and found he could not. Even in
these intervals between the visions his body remained impossibly heavy. As if a
boulder had been placed upon his chest. And the images, when they came,
continued to be confused, so that at one moment he was in a hayloft at Los
Alamos, making love to her while she murmured his name, over and over,
Martin
of the Cross
,―and the next moment she was ignoring him in broad
daylight beneath the watching eyes of a certain Aurora del Sol,―so that
it was not possible to distinguish memory from wishes, or guilty
reconstructions from confessional truths,―because even on her deathbed
Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye.

           
Moonlight streamed into the room. As it struck Rosa's face it appeared to pass
right through her, and indeed Gibreel was beginning to be able to make out the
pattern of the lace embroidery on her pillowcase. Then he saw Don Enrique and
his friend, the puritanical and disapproving Dr. Babington, standing on the
balcony, as solid as you could wish. It occurred to him that as the apparitions
increased in clarity Rosa grew fainter and fainter, fading away, exchanging
places, one might say, with the ghosts. And because he had also understood that
the manifestations depended on him, his stomach-ache, his stone-like
weightiness, he began to fear for his own life as well.

           
"You wanted me to falsify Juan Julia's death certificate," Dr.
Babington was saying. "I did so out of our old friendship. But it was
wrong to do so; and I see the result before me. You have sheltered a killer and
it is, perhaps, your conscience that is eating you away. Go home, Enrique. Go
home, and take that wife of yours, before something worse happens."

           
"I am home," Henry Diamond said. "And I take exception to your
mention of my wife."

           
"Wherever the English settle, they never leave England," Dr.
Babington said as he faded into the moonlight. "Unless, like Do–a Rosa,
they fall in love."

           
A cloud passed across the moonlight, and now that the balcony was empty Gibreel
Farishta finally managed to force himself out of the chair and on to his feet.
Walking was like dragging a ball and chain across the floor, but he reached the
window. In every direction, and as far as he could see, there were giant
thistles waving in the breeze. Where the sea had been there was now an ocean of
thistles, extending as far as the horizon, thistles as high as a full-grown
man. He heard the disembodied voice of Dr. Babington mutter in his ear:
"The first plague of thistles for fifty years. The past, it seems,
returns." He saw a woman running through the thick, rippling growth,
barefoot, with loose dark hair. "She did it," Rosa's voice said
clearly behind him. "After betraying him with the Vulture and making him
into a murderer. He wouldn't look at her after that. Oh, she did it all right.
Very dangerous one, that one. Very." Gibreel lost sight of Aurora del Sol
in the thistles; one mirage obscured another.