The Ground Beneath Her Feet

  It’s time to leave. I shrug and shake my head.

  No.

  He calls after me as I’m leaving. The earthquake site, he wants to know. Was it flimsy? That makes me stop and turn. It was a wreck, if that’s what you mean, I tell him. As if you took a picture of beauty and then systematically broke everything in the picture. It was like that.

  He’s shaking his head. It’s thinning out all over, he says. I don’t think it can survive, it’s not strong enough. So these places where it just gives out, where it rips, they must be almost translucent. You saw it, didn’t you see it? The flimsiness. The weakness of it all.

  I saw a catastrophe, I say. I saw the place she died.

  Ormus will use all his considerable resources to pursue Vina’s phantom lover. He will employ detective agencies, and rewards will be offered. When this becomes known in New York, that is to say, everywhere, people begin to laugh behind their hands. He is making himself ridiculous, and doesn’t care.

  On more than one occasion (as I afterwards learn from Clea Singh) the detectives he hires point their fingers in my direction. When this happens, Ormus just laughs, fires them and hires new investigators.

  He believes he can see through the surface of things to another truth below, but remains incapable of seeing what’s right under his nose.

  Ormus and I have one thing in common. We’re both trying to cling to the reality of the woman we loved, to preserve and deepen her memory. And yes, we both yearn for resurrection, for her impossible return from the dead: our Vina, just as she was. Our wishes, however, are ceasing to signify. Vina in death is assailed by a second seismic force, which swallows her up all over again. Which swallows her up and regurgitates her in a thousand thousand hideous pieces.

  This force also goes by the name of love.

  16

  VINA DIVINA

  That she was loved, of course I always knew. The facts about her public persona were not in doubt: that people in countries she had never visited cherished her for the beauty of her voice; that millions of males desired her body and dreamed of it at night; that women of all ages admired and were grateful for her outspokenness, her fearlessness, her musicianship; that when she campaigned against famine, or for the alleviation of the third world’s burden of debt, or on behalf of various environmental and vegetarian agencies, the world’s leaders, expecting to patronize her, to pat her on the backside and ignore her demands, were first impressed, then seduced and finally coerced into significant concessions by her quickness of intellect, her determination, her grasp; that she was intensely famous, fabulously photogenic, overwhelmingly sexy and great good fun; and that she was the first superstar of the age of confession, who, by her willingness to bare her scars, to live her private life in public, to talk about her wounds, her mistakes, her faults, found a direct line to the world’s ashamed unconfident heart, so that, extraordinary and powerful and successful as she was, she came to be seen as an ordinary woman writ large, flawed yet worthy, strong and weak, self-reliant and needy. She was a rock goddess of the golden age, but she was, improbably, also one of us.

  To know all this was nevertheless to be entirely unprepared for the scale of the worldwide response to her death. She was, after all, “only a singer,” and not even a Callas or a Sutherland but merely a “low-culture” popular entertainer whose rock group, VTO, had been disbanded for almost two years. Her attempted comeback had hardly been a triumph, her solo record had sold acceptably but not well. These were the signs of a falling star. Given her fame, it was predictable that press, radio and television coverage of her demise would be heavy; that there would be small gatherings of grieving fans; that tears, many of them crocodile, would be freely or opportunistically shed; that there would be a number of determinedly jaundiced, professionally against-the-flow voices seeking to tarnish and diminish her memory; even that scandals hitherto concealed might come to light. But any more extreme reaction would be entirely without precedent. Retrospectives, tribute albums, charitable donations, a surge in back-catalog record sales, a memorial concert or two, and then on to the next business: these were the characteristic stages, the ordained rites of such a passage.

  Dead Vina, however, had a surprise up her sleeve for us all.

  This posthumous goddess, this underground post-Vina, queen of the Underworld, supplanting dread Persephone on her throne, grew into something simply overwhelming. Alive, and at her peak, she had been a beloved figure, even an icon, an electrifying performer and a charismatic loudmouth, but that was about the size of it, let’s not get carried away. Dying when the world shook, by her death she shook the world, and was quickly raised, like a fallen Caesar, to the ranks of the divine.

  After the great earthquake of ’89, the footballer Achilles Hector is immediately released unharmed by his captors, thus becoming possibly the only person to benefit from the appalling tragedy. He tells a press conference that he feels as though he is beginning a new life, that having come so close to death it is as if this regained freedom were his afterlife, and our mortal earth Paradise itself. For these incautious words he is predictably condemned by Church leaders and ignominiously obliged to withdraw his happy, hyperbolic remarks.

  Meanwhile, the astonishing afterlife of Vina Apsara is rapidly spiraling beyond the power of any authority, spiritual or temporal, to censure or control.

  • • •

  All over the world, when the news of her death breaks, people pour into the streets, whatever their local hour, pushed out of their homes by a force they can’t yet name. It’s not the news of the earthquake that galvanizes them, not the myriad Mexican dead they’re mourning, it’s just her. It’s hard to mourn for strangers except conventionally, routinely; the true mourners of the hundred thousand casualties are themselves among the dead. But Vina is not a stranger. The crowds know her, and over and over again, in the streets of Yokohama, Darwin, Montevideo, Calcutta, Stockholm, Newcastle, Los Angeles, people are heard describing her death as a personal bereavement, a death in the family. By her dying she has momentarily re-invented their sense of a larger kinship, of their membership in the family of mankind.

  On the front lines of the world’s armed conflicts, amid the noxious fumes of ancient hatreds, men and women gather in cratered roads and sniper alleys, and embrace. It was always Ormus Cama’s hope that it might be possible for human beings—for himself—to transcend the frontier of the skin, not to cross the color line but to rub it out; Vina had been skeptical, questioning his universalist premises, but in death she has indeed transcended all frontiers: of race, skin, religion, language, history, nation, class. In some countries there are generals and clerics who, alarmed by the Vina phenomenon, by its otherness and globality, seek to shut it down, issuing commands and threats. These prove useless. Inspissated women in sexually segregated societies cast off their veils, the soldiers of oppression lay down their guns, the members of racially disadvantaged peoples burst out from their ghettos, their townships, their slums, the rusty iron curtain is torn. Vina has blown down the walls, and this has made her dangerous. The love of her muddied radiance has spread deep into the territories of the repressed. Defying the authorities, dancing in front of their tanks, linking arms before the faltering rifles, the mourners move to her phantom beat, looking increasingly like celebrants, and even seem prepared to embrace martyrdom in her name. Dead Vina is changing the world. The crowds of love are on the move.

  The standard model of the universe tells us that after the big bang, matter was not evenly distributed through the new cosmos. There was clumping, and from these aggregates of matter were born the galaxies and stars. Likewise, as the human race explodes out of doors, it clumps. The favored centers of congregation are not the high places of the world; not the palaces, parliaments, houses of worship or great squares. At first people seek out the low milieux of music, the dance halls, the record stores, the clubs. But these addresses prove unsuitable: not enough room. The crowds begin, instead, to gravitate to stadiums, arenas, parks, maid
ans—the major venues. Shea Stadium, Candlestick Park, Soldier’s Field, San Siro, Bernabeu, Wembley, Munich’s Olympic Stadium, Rio’s fabulous Maracaná. Even the old Altamont speedway is thronged. In Bombay where she never performed professionally—there was just that one moment on stage with the Five Pennies more than a quarter of a century ago—the Wankhede is full. In Tokyo, Sydney, Johannesburg, Beijing, Teheran, they gather in great numbers and simply wait.

  After a slow, even hostile start, the world’s authorities are forced into grudging compliance. Days of public mourning are announced, services of remembrance are proposed. The gathered crowds have no interest in this belated reaction of the high and mighty. From their governments they demand only food, water and toilet facilities, and these begin to be provided.

  In the packed stadiums, the sound systems offer her music to the crowds. This gift is accepted. Where possible, videotapes of her performances are played on stadium screens. In many countries, national sporting programs are suspended, cinemas and theaters are closed, restaurants stand empty. In all the world, or so it seems, there is only this single, uniting event: the miracle of the stadiums, the people gathered to share their loss. If her death was the death of all the world’s joy, this life after death is like that joy reborn and multiplied.

  In many stadiums the crowds call for stages to be constructed, and they duly are. Individual men and women walk up on to these stages and begin to declaim. They talk simply, personally but selflessly, about where they were when they first heard her music, and what it has meant in their lives, at their weddings, their children’s births, the deaths of their lovers; in solitude and fellowship, on special days and every-days, in their dotage and their youth.

  As if for the first time, the importance of this music—her music, and the music of which she has been part—is made manifest as people, motivated by her living-dead memory, find their voices and speak awkward or eloquent words of love. Music—Vina’s voice, singing Ormus’s melodies—surges round the world, crossing all frontiers, belonging everywhere and nowhere, and its rhythm is the rhythm of life. And Ormus singing his “Song for Vina” answers her. Disembodied, or rather embodied in song, their love hangs in the air, its story no longer limited by corporeal or temporal constraints. This love is music now.

  Immortal, I think. Their immortal story, in which my own love’s mortal tale is nowhere to be heard.

  Here is a Gary Larson cartoon of Vina and Jesse Garon Parker, the grotesquely Vegas-rhinestoned Fat Jesse of his latter, pill-popping, burgerizing days. They’re alone in a motel room, looking out at the world through the slats of a Venetian blind. What’s this supposed to be, the dressing room of the undead? A zombie transit zone on the Far Side? Ha ha ha.

  The lords of information have been caught napping by the unexpected gigantism of the death and after-death of Vina Apsara, but within hours the greatest media operation of the century is well under way, dwarfing the Olympic games, the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Awards, the Royal Wedding, the World Cup. Video packages are wrapped, sound is bitten. A global struggle begins, whose prize is something beyond even audience share or advertising revenue. Meaning itself is the prize. Overnight, the meaning of Vina’s death has become the most important subject on earth.

  Vina significat humanitatem.

  Here is Madonna Sangria, speaking of women’s pain as men’s only access to an understanding of the transcendent—she died that men might learn how to feel—and expatiating, also, upon sublimation. Now that she is safely dead they can say how much they lusted after her, without upsetting their wives. (Madonna Sangria, who latterly reviled Vina and her music, is now, guiltily, reconstituting herself as the keeper of the flame.)

  Here is a female music fan from Japan, a futuristically fashionable young beauty in a Planet of the Apes designer outfit, calling Vina Apsara the great love of her life; no man or ape could ever come as close as this woman she never met.

  Here is a fast-mouthed Italian woman admitting Vina to the pantheon of the century’s female heroes, and as the true genius of VTO, whose voice could bring about miracles. Ormus Cama? Pah! A parasite. A leech.

  Here is a fat Englishwoman, last of the Runts, stuck in her tonguestud-and-leather time warp, boasting mendaciously of the time she told Vina she was too old to rock. Move over, grandma, and tell grandpa Cama the news.

  Here is a great American intellectual’s essay, “Death as Metaphor,” in which she argues that Vina’s life, not her death, was the liberating force; that death is merely death and should be seen as such: as the revenge of the inevitable upon the new.

  Here is a recently ordained woman priest, deducing that the Vina phenomenon reveals the world’s spiritual hunger, its need for soul food. She invites the stadium crowds to congregate each Sunday in their neighborhood church, as Vina would very likely have wished.

  Here are Islamist women wearing birdcage shrouds. In their emphatic opinion this madness about a single immoral female reveals the moral bankruptcy and coming annihilation of the decadent and godless Western world.

  Vina, who was driven from home to home, is claimed by the places that drove her out: rural Virginia, upstate New York. India claims her, because of her paternal bloodline; England, because it’s where her singing career began; Manhattan, because all that is mythic on today’s earth is a citizen of New York.

  Here is a cultural-studies guru, Primo Uomo, repeating for the one millionth time the oft-iterated idea that Vina has become the patron divinity of the age of uncertainty, the goddess with the feet of clay.

  Here are two British psychoanalysts. This one, the young lazy-eyed hunky one, author of Winking, Nibbling and Licking and Sex: The Morning After, speaks in awed tones of a mammoth spontaneous act of group therapy. That one, a grumpy codger of the old school, is haughtily contemptuous, criticizing the way in which the Vina event privileges raw sentimentality over reason, so that now we can no longer think, only feel. This one calls the phenomenon populist-democratic. That one fears it may be crypto-fascist, the origin of a new kind of intolerant mob.

  Here are literary critics and drama critics. The literary critics are divided; the lisping old warhorse Alfred Fiedler Malcolm quotes Marlowe’s Faustus—Then will I headlong run into the earth: Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbor me!—and tries to build a complex theory about great celebrity being a Promethean theft of divine fire, whose price is this posthumous hell-on-earth in which the dead woman is actually rendered incapable of dying, and is constantly renewed, like the liver of Prometheus, to be devoured by insatiable vultures calling themselves devotees. This is eternal torment masquerading as eternal love, he says. Let the lady rest in peace. He is rudely ridiculed by the two young turks on the panel, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, who mock his arrant élitism and offer a spirited defense of the place of rock music in society, though they are also fashionably scornful of the low quality of language used by the speakers in the stadiums, their repetitiveness, the use of doggerel rhyming and tabloid cliché, the worrying prevalence of received ideas about the afterlife (Vina living forever, in the stars, in our hearts, in every flower, in every new-born child). These ideas, Gatsby says sharply, are not very cutting-edge; not very rock ’n’ roll.

  The drama panel is divided too. There is praise for the spontaneous, improvisatory, street-theater rawness of the phenomenon, but the British participants bemoan the inordinate length of the global mourning, the French regret the absence of a firm directing hand, the Americans are concerned about its lack of leading players or a viable second act. All the theater people unite, however, to complain that their views are receiving insufficient attention, that they are as usual being treated as the poor relations, the beggars at the feast.

  Here are tv biopic-film producers, advertising for look-alikes. Here are the open casting calls. Here are the lines of hopefuls, stretching round various blocks.

  Here is Rémy Auxerre, calling the size of the phenomenon a product of the feedback loop. In the days before globalized mass comm
unication, he argues, an event could occur, pass its peak and fade away before most people on earth were even aware of it. Now, however, the initial purity of what happens is almost instantly replaced by its televisualization. Once it’s been on tv, people are no longer acting, but performing. Not simply grieving, but performing grief. Not creating a phenomenon out of their raw unmediated desires, but rushing to be part of a phenomenon they have seen on tv. This loop is now so tight that it’s almost impossible to separate the sound from the echo, the event from the media response to it. From what Rémy insists on calling the immediatization of history.

  Here are two wild-haired New Quakers, a paranoiac and a mystic, probably both Gary Larson fans, denying her death.… Where’s the body? Just show me the body, okay? She’s not dead, somebody wanted her out of the way is all, we should be storming the Pentagon, the United Nations, you know? … No, she’s free, man, only we are not worthy of her, we have to purify ourselves, and at the hour of our cleanness she will cometh again, dig, maybe from a spaceship?, maybe from a chariot of the gods?, to liberate us. Like Buddha Jesus, man, she liveth.

  Television.

  Back at the Orpheum in the winter cold, alone and bereft, I hug myself and shiver while my white breath hangs in the air. I’m sitting out on the roof in my hat and coat with my hands over my cold-stung ears, trying to conjure up Vina sunbathing naked in the height of summer, Vina stretching her body and turning to me with a lazy faithless smile. But it’s too cold, and anyway the racket is everywhere, there’s no escape from the war of meanings, the white air is full of words. Diachronically speaking, this is an event in history, to be understood within time, as a phenomenon with certain linear antecedents, social, cultural, political. Synchronically, however, all versions of it exist simultaneously, collectively forming a contemporary statement about art and life … its importance lies in the random meaninglessness of the death … her radical absence is a void or an abyss into which a tide of meanings can pour … she has become an empty receptacle, an arena of discourse, and we can invent her in our own image, as once we invented god … no possibility of the phenomenon fizzling any time soon because the phase of exploitation has now set in, the shirts bearing the last photograph, the commemorative coins, the mugs, the tackiness, her old schoolmates selling their stories, her army of casual lovers, her entourage, her friends … these are multiplier effects, she’s caught in an echo chamber and the noise bounces round and round, getting boomier, fuzzier, less distinct … it’s just noise now … and imagine, if she had lived, the dying of her flame, her slow descent towards non-fame, towards nothing … that really would have been an ending, a tumble into the Underworld, and the worst part is she would still have been alive. Maybe it’s better this way. For ever young, right? Well, young-looking, anyway. Pretty fucking fantastic for a woman of her years.