The Satanic Verses (54 page)

           
The official version of what followed, and the one accepted by all the news
media, was that Gibreel Farishta had been lifted out of the danger area in the
same winch-operated chariot in which he'd descended, and from which he hadn't
had time to emerge;―and that it would therefore have been easy for him to
make his escape, from his isolated and unwatched place high above the melee.
This version proved resilient enough to survive the "revelation" in
the Voice that the assistant stage manager in charge of the winch had not,
repeat not, set it in motion after it landed;―that, in fact, the chariot
remained grounded throughout the riot of the ecstatic film fans;―and that
substantial sums of money had been paid to the backstage staff to persuade them
to collude in the fabrication of a story which, because totally fictional, was
realistic enough for the newspaper-buying public to believe. However, the
rumour that Gibreel Farishta had actually levitated away from the Earls Court
stage and vanished into the blue under his own steam spread rapidly through the
city's Asian population, and was fed by many accounts of the halo that had been
seen streaming out from a point just behind his head. Within days of the second
disappearance of Gibreel Farishta, vendors of novelties in Brickhall, Wembley
and Brixton were selling as many toy haloes (green fluorescent hoops were the
most popular) as headbands to which had been affixed a pair of rubber horns.

           
* * * * *

           
He was hovering high over London!―Haha, they couldn't touch him now, the
devils rushing upon him in that Pandemonium!―He looked down upon the city
and saw the English. The trouble with the English was that they were English:
damn cold fish!―Living underwater most of the year, in days the colour of
night!―Well: he was here now, the great Transformer, and this time
there'd be some changes made―the laws of nature are the laws of its transformation,
and he was the very person to utilize the same!―Yes, indeed: this time,
clarity.

           
He would show them―yes!―his
power
.―These powerless
English!―Did they not think their history would return to haunt
them?―"The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to
become the persecutor" (Fanon). English women no longer bound him; the
conspiracy stood exposed!―Then away with all fogs. He would make this
land anew. He was the Archangel, Gibreel.―
And I'm back!

           
The face of the adversary hung before him once again, sharpening, clarifying.
Moony with a sardonic curl to the lips: but the name still eluded . . .
tcha
,
like tea?
Shah
, a king? Or like a (royal? tea?) dance:
Shatchacha
.―Nearly
there.―And the nature of the adversary: self-hating, constructing a false
ego, auto-destructive. Fanon again: "In this way the
individual"―the Fanonian
native
―"accepts the
disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and
by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm."―
I'll
give him stony calm!―
Native and settler, that old dispute, continuing
now upon these soggy streets, with reversed categories.―It occurred to
him now that he was forever joined to the adversary, their arms locked around
one another's bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail, as when they fell to earth:
when they settled.―As things begin so they continue.―Yes, he was
coming closer.―Chichi? Sasa?―
My other, my love
. . .

           
. . . No!―He floated over parkland and cried out, frightening the
birds.―No more of these England-induced ambiguities, these
Biblical-Satanic confusions!―Clarity, clarity, at all costs
clarity!―This Shaitan was no fallen angel.―Forget those
son-of-the-morning fictions; this was no good boy gone bad, but pure evil.
Truth was, he wasn't an angel at all!―"He was of the djinn, so he
transgressed."―Quran 18:50, there it was as plain as the
day.―How much more straightforward this version was! How much more
practical, down-to-earth, comprehensible!―Iblis/ Shaitan standing for the
darkness, Gibreel for the light.―Out, out with these sentimentalities:
joining,
locking together, love
. Seek and destroy: that was all.

           
. . . O most slippery, most devilish of cities!―In which such stark,
imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of
greys.―How right he'd been, for instance, to banish those
Satanico-Biblical doubts of his,―those concerning God's unwillingness to
permit dissent among his lieutenants,―for as Iblis/Shaitan was no angel,
so there had been no angelic dissidents for the Divinity to repress;―and
those concerning forbidden fruit, and God's supposed denial of moral choice to
his creations;―for nowhere in the entire Recitation was that Tree called
(as the Bible had it) the root of the knowledge of good and evil.
It was
simply a different Tree!
 Shaitan, tempting the Edenic couple, called
it only "the Tree of Immortality"―and as he was a liar, so the
truth (discovered by inversion) was that the banned fruit (apples were not
specified) hung upon the Death-Tree, no less, the slayer of men's
souls.―What remained now of that morality-fearing God? Where was He to be
found?―Only down below, in English hearts.―Which he, Gibreel, had
come to transform.

           
Abracadabra!

           
Hocus Pocus!

           
But where should he begin?―Well, then, the trouble with the English was
their:

           
Their:

           
In a word
, Gibreel solemnly pronounced,
their weather
.

           
Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral
fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. "When the day is
not warmer than the night," he reasoned, "when the light is not
brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a
people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see
everything―from political parties to sexual partners to religious
beliefs―as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly!
For truth is extreme, it is
so
and not
thus
, it is
him
and
not
her
; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief,
heated
city
," he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like
thunder, "I am going to tropicalize you."

           
Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a
tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta,
development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace,
higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks,
cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with
hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta,
vermilion, neon-green), spidermonkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for
domestic airconditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A
coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for
conferences, etc.; better cricketers; higher emphasis on ballcontrol among
professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to
"high workrate" having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious
fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia. No more
British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid
nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values:
friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments,
closure of old folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier food; the
use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully
dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.

           
Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust,
noise, a culture of excess.

           
Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried:
"Let it be."

           
Three things happened, fast.

           
The first was that, as the unimaginably colossal, elemental forces of the
transformational process rushed out of his body (for was he not their
embodiment?
),
he was temporarily overcome by a warm, spinning heaviness, a soporific churning
(not at all unpleasant) that made him close, just for an instant, his eyes.

           
The second was that the moment his eyes were shut the horned and goaty features
of Mr. Saladin Chamcha appeared, on the screen of his mind, as sharp and
well-defined as could be; accompanied, as if it were sub-titled there, by the
adversary's name.

           
And the third thing was that Gibreel Farishta opened his eyes to find himself
collapsed, once again, on Alleluia Cone's doorstep, begging her forgiveness,
weeping
O God, it happened, it really happened again
.

           
* * * * *

           
She put him to bed; he found himself escaping into sleep, diving headlong into
it, away from Proper London and towards Jahilia, because the real terror had
crossed the broken boundary wall, and stalked his waking hours.

           
"A homing instinct: one crazy heading for another," Alicja said when
her daughter phoned with the news. "You must be putting out a signal, some
sort of bleeping thing." As usual, she hid her concern beneath wisecracks.
Finally she came out with it: "This time be sensible, Alleluia, okay? This
time the asylum."

           
"We'll see, mother. He's asleep right now."

           
"So he isn't going to wake up?" Alicja expostulated, then controlled
herself. "All right, I know, it's your life. Listen, isn't this weather
something? They say it could last months: 'blocked pattern', I heard on
television, rain over Moscow, while here it's a tropical heatwaye. I called
Boniek at Stanford and told him: now we have weather in London, too."

           
When Baal the poet saw a single teardrop the colour of blood emerging from the
corner of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat in the House of the Black Stone,
he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on his way back to Jahilia after an
exile of a quarter-century. He belched violently―an affliction of age,
this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general thickening induced by
the years, a thickening of the tongue as well as the body, a slow congealment
of the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a figure quite unlike his
quick young self. Sometimes he felt that the air itself had thickened,
resisting him, so that even a shortish walk could leave him panting, with an
ache in his arm and an irregularity in his chest . . . and Mahound must have
changed, too, returning as he was in splendour and omnipotence to the place
whence he fled emptyhanded, without so much as a wife. Mahound at sixty-five.
Our names meet, separate, and meet again, Baal thought, but the people going by
the names do not remain the same. He left Al-Lat to emerge into bright
sunlight, and heard from behind his back a little snickering laugh. He turned,
weightily; nobody to be seen. The hem of a robe vanishing around a corner.
These days, down-at-heel Baal often made strangers giggle in the street.
"Bastard!" he shouted at the top of his voice, scandalizing the other
worshippers in the House. Baal, the decrepit poet, behaving badly again. He
shrugged and headed for home.

           
The city of Jahilia was no longer built of sand. That is to say, the passage of
the years, the sorcery of the desert winds, the petrifying moon, the
forgetfulness of the people and the inevitability of progress had hardened the
town, so that it had lost its old, shifting, provisional quality of a mirage in
which men could live, and become a prosaic place, quotidian and (like its
poets) poor. Mahound's arm had grown long; his power had encircled Jahilia,
cutting off its life-blood, its pilgrims and caravans. The fairs of Jahilia,
these days, were pitiful to behold.