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 Martín 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 pâtés 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 foodstains 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 Doña 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.
He felt something grab him from behind, spin him around and fling him flat on his back. There was nobody to be seen, but Rosa Diamond was sitting bolt upright in bed, staring at him wide-eyed, making him understand that she had given up hope of clinging on to life, and needed him to help her complete the last revelation. As with the businessman of his dreams, he felt helpless, ignorant … she seemed to know, however, how to draw the images from him. Linking the two of them, navel to navel, he saw a shining cord.
Now he was by a pond in the infinity of the thistles, allowing his horse to drink, and she came riding up on her mare. Now he was embracing her, loosening her garments and her hair, and now they were making love. Now she was whispering, how can you like me, I am so much older than you, and he spoke comforting words.
Now she rose, dressed, rode away, while he remained there, his body languid and warm, failing to notice the moment when a woman’s hand stole out of the thistles and took hold of his silver-hafted knife …
No! No! No, this way!
Now she rode up to him by the pond, and the moment she dismounted, looking nervously at him, he fell upon her, he told her he couldn’t bear her rejections any longer, they fell to the ground together, she screamed, he tore at her clothes, and her hands, clawing at his body, came upon the handle of a knife …
No! No, never, no! This way: here!
Now the two of them were making love, tenderly, with many slow caresses; and now a third rider entered the clearing by the pool, and the lovers rushed apart; now Don Enrique drew his small pistol and aimed at his rival’s heart, –
– and he felt Aurora stabbing him in the heart, over and over, this is for Juan, and this is for abandoning me, and this is for your grand English whore, –
– and he felt his victim’s knife entering his heart, as Rosa stabbed him, once, twice, and again, –
– and after Henry’s bullet had killed him the Englishman took the dead man’s knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound.
Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point.
When he regained his senses the old woman in the bed was speaking to herself, so softly that he could barely make out the words. ‘The pampero came, the south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That’s when they found him, or was it before.’ The last of the story. How Aurora del Sol spat in Rosa Diamond’s face at the funeral of Martín de la Cruz. How it was arranged that nobody was to be charged for the murder, on condition that Don Enrique took Doña Rosa and returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the train at the Los Alamos station and the men in white suits stood on the platform, wearing borsalino hats, making sure they really left. How, once the train had started moving, Rosa Diamond opened the holdall on the seat beside her, and said defiantly, I brought something. A little souvenir. And unwrapped a cloth bundle to reveal a gaucho’s silver-hafted knife.
‘Henry died the first winter home
. Then nothing happened. The war. The end.’ She paused. ‘To diminish into this, after being in that vastness. It isn’t to be borne.’ And, after a further silence: ‘Everything shrinks.’
There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt a weight lifting from him, so rapidly that he thought he might float up towards the ceiling. Rosa Diamond lay still, eyes closed, her arms resting on the patchwork counterpane. She looked: normal. Gibreel realized that there was nothing to prevent him from walking out of the door.
He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady; found the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to Henry Diamond, and the grey felt trilby inside which Don Enrique’s name had been sewn by his wife’s own hand; and left, without looking back. The moment he got outside a wind snatched his hat and sent it skipping down the beach. He chased it, caught it, jammed it back on. London shareef, here I come. He had the city in his pocket: Geographers’ London, the whole dog-eared metropolis, A to Z.
‘What to do?’ he was thinking. ‘Phone or not phone? No, just turn up, ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea bed to your bed, takes more than a plane crash to keep me away from you. – Okay, maybe not quite, but words to that effect. – Yes. Surprise is the best policy. Allie Bibi, boo to you.’
Then he heard the singing. It was coming from the old boathouse with the one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and the song was foreign, but familiar: a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was familiar, although a little different, less quavery; younger. The boathouse door was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in the wind. He went towards the song.
‘Take your coat off,’ she said. She was dressed as she had been on the day of the white island: black skirt and boots, white silk blouse, hatless. He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing in the confined, moonlit space. She lay down amid the random clutter of an English life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding table, trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side.
‘How can you like me?’ she murmured. ‘I am so much older than you.’
3
When they pulled his pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha broke down for the second time that night; this time, however, he began to giggle hysterically, infected, perhaps, by the continuing hilarity of his captors. The three immigration officers were in particularly high spirits, and it was one of these – the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was Stein – who had ‘debagged’ Saladin with a merry cry of, ‘Opening time, Packy; let’s see what you’re made of!’ Red-and-white stripes were dragged off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the van with two stout policemen holding each arm and a fifth constable’s boot placed firmly upon his chest, and whose protests went unheard in the general mirthful din. His horns kept banging against things, the wheel-arch, the uncarpeted floor or a policeman’s shin – on these last occasions he was soundly buffeted about the face by the understandably irate law-enforcement officer – and he was, in sum, in as miserably low spirits as he could recall. Nevertheless, when he saw what lay beneath his borrowed pyjamas, he could not prevent that disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth.
His thighs had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as well as hairy. Below the knee the hairiness came to a halt, and his legs narrowed into tough, bony, almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven hoofs, such as one might find on any billy-goat. Saladin was also taken aback by the sight of his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect, an organ that he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his own. ‘What’s this, then?’ joked Novak – the former ‘Hisser’ – giving it a playful tweak. ‘Fancy one of us, maybe?’ Whereupon the ‘moaning’ immigration officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and shouted, ‘Nah, that ain’t it. Seems like we really got his goat.’ ‘I get it,’ Novak shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged testicles. ‘Hey! Hey!’ howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. ‘Listen, here’s an even better … no wonder he’s so fucking horny.’
At which the three of them, repeating many times ‘Got his goat … horny …’ fell into one another’s arms and howled with delight. Chamcha wanted to speak, but was afraid that he would find his voice mutated into goat-bleats, and, besides, the policeman’s boot had begun to press harder than ever on his chest, and it was hard to form any words. What puzzled Chamcha was that a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and unprecedented – that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp – was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine. ‘This isn’t England,’ he thought, not for the first or last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced towards the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding aeroplane and that everything that followed had been some sort of after-life. If that were the case, his long-standing rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look pretty foolish. – But where, in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being, whether benevolent or malign? Why did Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this place might be, look so much like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which every schoolboy knew? – Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had not actually perished in the Bostan disaster, but was lying gravely ill in some hospital ward, plagued by delirious dreams? This explanation appealed to him, not least because it unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call, and a man’s voice that he was trying, unsuccessfully, to forget … He felt a sharp kick land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him doubt the truth of all such hallucination-theories. He returned his attention to the actual, to this present comprising a sealed police van containing three immigration officers and five policemen that was, for the moment at any rate, all the universe he possessed. It was a universe of fear.
Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. ‘Animal,’ Stein cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in: ‘You’re all the same. Can’t expect animals to observe civilized standards. Eh?’ And Novak took up the thread: ‘We’re talking about fucking personal hygiene here, you little fuck.’
Chamcha was mystified. Then he noticed that a large number of soft, pellety objects had appeared on the floor of the Black Maria. He felt consumed by bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his natural processes were goatish now. The humiliation of it! He was – had gone to some lengths to become – a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of Gujranwala, but he was cut from different cloth! ‘My good fellows,’ he began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, ‘my good fellows, you had best understand your mistake before it’s too late.’
Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. ‘What’s that? What was that noise?’ he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, ‘Search me.’ ‘Tell you what it sounded like,’ Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth he bellowed: ‘Maa-aa-aa!’ Then the three of them all laughed once more, so that Saladin had no way of telling if they were simply insulting him or if his vocal cords had truly been infected, as he feared, by this macabre demoniasis that had overcome him without the slightest warning. He had begun to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.
The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at least the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the pellety refuse rolling around the floor of the moving van. ‘In this country,’ he informed Saladin, ‘we clean up our messes.’
The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled h
im into a kneeling position. ‘That’s right,’ said Novak, ‘clean it up.’ Joe Bruno placed a large hand behind Chamcha’s neck and pushed his head down towards the pellet-littered floor. ‘Off you go,’ he said, in a conversational voice. ‘Sooner you start, sooner you’ll polish it off.’
Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of his unwarranted humiliation, – or, to put it another way, as the circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and outré – Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing, they no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom his colleagues called ‘Mack’ or ‘Jockey’, turned out to be a large, burly man with a thick roller-coaster of a nose; his accent, it now transpired, was exaggeratedly Scottish. ‘Tha’s the ticket,’ he remarked approvingly as Chamcha munched miserably on. ‘An actor, was it? I’m partial to watchin’ a guid man perform.’
This observation prompted Officer Novak – that is, ‘Kim’ – who had acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an ascetically bony face that reminded one of medieval icons, and a frown suggesting some deep inner torment, to burst into a short peroration about his favourite television soap-opera stars and game-show hosts, while Officer Bruno, who struck Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting dramatically with the darker hair on his head, – Bruno, the youngest of the three, asked lasciviously, what about watchin’ girls, then, that’s my game. This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the constables in their places. ‘Little children,’ Mr Stein admonished them, ‘should be seen an’ no hearrud.’