Shalimar the Clown (3 page)

They finished lunch and walked for a spell in the mountains, hiking like gods across the sky. It was not necessary to say anything. The world was speaking. She was the child of his old age. He was almost eighty years old, ten years younger than the wicked century. She admired him for the way he walked, without a hint of frailty in his gait. He could be a bastard, had in fact been a bastard more often than not, but he possessed, was possessed by, the will to transcendence, the interior power that enabled mountaineers to climb eight-thousand-meter peaks without oxygen, or monks to enter suspended animation for implausible numbers of months. He walked like a man in his prime; in, for example, his fifties. If the hornet of death were buzzing nearby right now, this demonstration of clock-stopping physical prowess would surely draw its sting. He had been fifty-seven when she was born. He walked as if he were younger than that now. She loved him for that will, felt it like a sword within herself, sheathed in her body, waiting. He had been a bastard as long as she could remember. He was not built to be a father. He was the high priest of the golden bough. He inhabited his enchanted grove and was adored, until he was assassinated by his successor. To become the priest, however, he also had had to murder his predecessor. Maybe she was a bastard too. Maybe she, too, could kill.

His bedtime stories, told on those unpredictable occasions when he had been at her childhood bedside, were not stories exactly. They were homilies such as Sun Tzu the philosopher of war might have delivered to his offspring. “The palace of power is a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms,” Max once said to his sleepy child. She imagined it into being, walked toward it, half-dreaming, half-awake. “It’s windowless,” Max said, “and there is no visible door. Your first task is to find out how to get in. When you’ve solved that riddle, when you come as a supplicant into the first anteroom of power, you will find in it a man with the head of a jackal, who will try to chase you out again. If you stay, he will try to gobble you up. If you can trick your way past him, you will enter a second room, guarded this time by a man with the head of a rabid dog, and in the room after that you’ll face a man with the head of a hungry bear, and so on. In the last room but one there’s a man with the head of a fox. This man will not try to keep you away from the last room, in which the man of true power sits. Rather, he will try to convince you that you are already in that room and that he himself is that man.

“If you succeed in seeing through the fox-man’s tricks, and if you get past him, you will find yourself in the room of power. The room of power is unimpressive and in it the man of power faces you across an empty desk. He looks small, insignificant, fearful; for now that you have penetrated his defenses he must give you your heart’s desire. That’s the rule. But on the way out the fox-man, the bear-man, the dog-man and the jackal-man are no longer there. Instead, the rooms are full of half-human flying monsters, winged men with the heads of birds, eagle-men and vulture-men, man-gannets and hawk-men. They swoop down and rip at your treasure. Each of them claws back a little piece of it. How much of it will you manage to bring out of the house of power? You beat at them, you shield the treasure with your body. They rake at your back with gleaming blue-white claws. And when you’ve made it and are outside again, squinting painfully in the bright light and clutching your poor, torn remnant, you must persuade the skeptical crowd—the envious, impotent crowd!—that you have returned with everything you wanted. If you don’t, you’ll be marked as a failure forever.

“Such is the nature of power,” he told her as she slipped toward sleep, “and these are the questions it asks. The man who chooses to enter its halls does well to escape with his life. The answer to the question of power, by the way,” he added as an afterthought, “is this: Do not enter that labyrinth as a supplicant. Come with meat and a sword. Give the first guardian the meat he craves, for he is always hungry, and cut off his head while he eats: pof! Then offer the severed head to the guardian in the next room, and when he begins to devour it, behead him too. Baf!
Et ainsi de suite.
When the man of power agrees to grant your demands, however, you must not cut off his head. Be sure you don’t! The decapitation of rulers is an extreme measure, hardly ever required, never recommended. It sets a bad precedent. Make sure, instead, that you ask not only for what you want but for a sack of meat as well. With the fresh meat supply you will lure the bird-men to their doom. Off with their heads! Snick-snack! Chop, chop, until you’re free. Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.”

The dreams came to her still as they had come to her child-self: visions of battle and victory. In sleep she tossed and turned and fought the war he had lodged within her. This was the inheritance she was sure of, her warrior future, her body like his body, her mind like his mind, her Excalibur spirit, like his, a sword pulled from a stone. He was quite capable of leaving her nothing in the way of cash or goods, quite capable of arguing that disinheritance was the last thing of value he had to give her, the last thing he needed to teach and she to learn. She turned away from thoughts of death and looked out across the blue hills to the orange late-afternoon sky melting idly into the warm, sluggish sea. A cool breeze caught at her hair. In 1769, somewhere down there, the Franciscan Fray Juan Crespi found a freshwater spring and named it Santa Monica because it reminded him of the tears shed by the mother of Saint Augustine when her son renounced the Christian church. Augustine returned to the church, of course, but in California the tears of Saint Monica still flowed. India was contemptuous of religion, her contempt being one of the many proofs that she was not an India. Religion was folly and yet its stories moved her and this was confusing. Would her dead mother, hearing of her godlessness, have wept for her, like a saint?

In Madagascar they periodically hauled the dead out of their graves and danced with them all night. There were people in Australia and Japan for whom the dead were worthy of worship, for whom ancestors were sacred beings. Everywhere you went a few of the dead were studied and remembered and these were the best of the dead, the least dead, living in the world’s memory. The less celebrated, less advantaged dead were content to be kept alive within a few loving (or even hating) breasts, even in a single human heart, within the frontiers of which they could laugh and chatter and make love and behave well and badly and go to Hitchcock movies and vacation in Spain and wear embarrassing dresses and enjoy gardening and hold controversial opinions and commit unforgivable crimes and tell their children they loved them more than life. The deadness of India’s mother, however, was of the worst and deadest kind. The ambassador had entombed her memory under a pyramid of silence. India wanted to ask him about her, desperately wanted it every time they met and through all the moments they spent together. The wanting was like a spear in her belly. But she never managed it. The deadly dead woman her mother had become was lost in the ambassador’s silence, had been erased by it. This was stone death, death walled up in the Egyptian burial chamber of his silence along with her artifacts and foibles and everything that might have allowed her some small measure of immortality. India could have hated her father for this refusal. But then she would have had nobody to love.

They were watching the sun set into the Pacific through the beautifully dirty air and the ambassador was mumbling verses under his breath. He had been an American for most of his life but French poetry was still where he went for sustenance.

“Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir. . . .”
After he saved her life, he had guided her reading; by now she knew what he had wanted her to know. She knew this. O free man, you will always love the sea. The sea’s your mirror; you contemplate your soul in its surges as it endlessly unrolls. So he was thinking about death, too. She returned him Baudelaire for Baudelaire.
“Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir; Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.”
And again: “
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige . . . Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!”
The sky is sad and beautiful like a great, a great what, some sort of altar. The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood. The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood. Your memory shines in me like, damn it,
ostensoir.
Oh, right: a monstrance. Again with the religious imagery. New images urgently needed to be made. Images for a godless world. Until the language of irreligion caught up with the holy stuff, until there was a sufficient poetry and iconography of godlessness, these sainted echoes would never fade, would retain their problematic power, even over her.

She said it again, in English: “Your memory shines in me.”

“Let’s go home,” he murmured, kissing her on the cheek. “It’s getting chilly. Let’s not overdo it. I’m an old guy now.”

It was the first time she had heard him acknowledge his infirmity, the first time in her experience that he had conceded the power of time. And why had he kissed her then, spontaneously, when there was no need to do so. That, too, was an indication of weakness, a misjudgment, like the gift of the vulgar car. A sign of slipping control. They were no longer in the habit of demonstrating their affections to each other, except perfunctorily. By such samurai abstinence did they give each other proofs of their love.

“My time is being swept away,” the ambassador said. “Nothing will remain.” He foretold the Cold War’s accelerated ending, the Soviet Union’s house-of-cards collapse. He knew that the Wall would fall and that the reunification of Germany could not be held back and would happen more or less overnight. He foresaw the invasion of Western Europe by the elated job-hungry Ossis in their Trabants. Ceaus¸escu’s Mussoliniesque ending, and the elegiac presidencies of the writers, of Václav Havel and Arpad Goncz, these too he foresaw. He closed his mind to other, less palatable possibilities, however. He tried to believe that the global structures he had helped to build, the pathways of influence, money and power, the multinational associations, the treaty organizations, the frameworks of cooperation and law whose purpose had been to deal with a hot war turned cold, would still function in the future that lay beyond what he could foresee. She saw in him a desperate need to believe that the ending of his age would be happy, and that the new world which would come after would be better than the one that would die with him. Europe, free of the Soviet threat, and America, free of the need to remain permanently at battle stations, would build that new world in friendship, a world without walls, a frontierless newfound land of infinite possibility. The doomsday clock would no longer be set at seven seconds to midnight. The emerging economies of India, Brazil and a newly opened-up China would be the world’s new powerhouses, the counterweights to the American hegemony of which he had always, as an internationalist, disapproved. When she saw him surrender to the utopian fallacy, to the myth of the perfectibility of man, India knew he could not have long to live. He looked like a tightrope walker trying to keep his balance even though there was no longer a rope beneath his feet.

The weight of the inexorable bore down on her, as if the gravitational force of the earth had suddenly increased. When she was younger they had often touched. He could place his lips against any part of her body, her hand, her cheek, her back, and find a bird in there and make it speak. Birdsong burst from her skin under the magic pressure of his mouth, soaring, celebratory. Until the age of eight she would climb him like an Everest. She had learned the story of the Himalayas on his knee, the story of the giant proto-continents, of the moment when India broke off from Gondwanaland and moved across the proto-oceans toward Laurasia. She closed her eyes and saw the huge collision, the mighty mountains crumpling up into the sky. He taught her a lesson about time, about the slowness of the earth:
the collision is still happening.
So if he was a Himalaya, if he too had been caused by the smashing together of great forces, by a clash of worlds, then he, too, was growing still. The collision in him was also still taking place. He was her mountain-father and she his mountaineer. He held her hands in his and up she came until she was straddling his shoulders, her groin against his neck. He kissed her stomach and she somersaulted backward off his shoulders to the floor. One day he said, No more of that. She wanted to cry but controlled herself. Childhood was over? Very well, then, it was over. She would put aside childish things.

The freeway home was empty, shockingly empty, as if the world were ending, and while they were floating along in that asphalt void the ambassador again began to speak volubly, the words crowding out of him like traffic, trying to make up for the absence of the cars. Volubility came easily to Max Ophuls, but it was just one of his many techniques of concealment, and he was never more hidden than when he seemed most open. For the greater part of his life he had been a burrower, a man of secrets, whose job it was to uncover the mysteries of others while protecting his own, and when by choice or necessity he spoke the use of paradox had long been his preferred disguise. They moved down the empty freeway so swiftly that it seemed they were standing still, with the ocean to their right and the city beginning to twinkle to their left, and it was of the city that Max decided to speak because he knew he had already said too much about himself, shown too much, like an amateur. So now he praised the city, commended it precisely for the qualities that were commonly held to be its greatest faults. That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view outdated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe in such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing so to devalue. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future. As India navigated the hollow freeways her father lauded the city’s bizarre anatomy, which was fed and nourished by many such congealed and flowing arteries but needed no heart to drive its mighty flux. That it was a desert in disguise caused him to celebrate the genius of human beings, their ability to populate the earth with their imaginings, to bring water to the wilderness and bustle to the void; that the desert had its revenge on the complexions of its conquerors, drying them, ingraining lines and furrows, provided those triumphant mortals with the salutary lesson that no victory was absolute, that the struggle between earthlings and the earth could never be decided in favor of either combatant, but swung back and forth through all eternity. That it was a hidden city, a city of strangers, appealed to him most of all. In the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors, only royalty had the privilege of remaining occult. In this brilliant burg, however, secrecy was freely available to all comers. The modern obsession with intimacy, with the revelation of the self to the other, was not to Max’s taste. An open city was a naked whore, lying invitingly back and turning every trick; whereas this veiled and difficult place, this erotic capital of the obscure stratagem, knew precisely how to arouse and heighten our metropolitan desires.