Shalimar the Clown Read online

  The driver dragged his gaze away from her, looking down toward the floor. He came, he said in halting reply to her inquiry, from Kashmir. Her heart leapt. A driver from paradise. His hair was a mountain stream. There were narcissi from the banks of rushing rivers and peonies from the high meadows growing on his chest, poking out through his open collar. Around him there raucously echoed the sound of the swarnai. No, that was ridiculous. She was not ridiculous, would never permit herself to sink into fantasy. The world was real. The world was as it was. She closed her eyes and opened them again and there was the proof of it. Normalcy was victorious. The deflowered driver waited patiently by the elevator, holding the door. She inclined her head to thank him. She noticed that his hands were bunched into fists and trembling. The doors closed and they began to descend.

  The name he went by, the name he gave her when she asked, was Shalimar. His English was not good, barely functional. He would probably not have understood that phrase, barely functional. His eyes were blue, his skin color lighter than hers, his hair grey with a memory of fair. She didn’t need to know his story. Not today. Another time she might ask him if those were blue contacts, if that was his natural hair color, if he was making a statement of personal style, or if this was a style imposed on him by her father who had known all his life how to impose, with such charm that you accepted the imposition as your own idea, as authentic. Her dead mother came from Kashmir also. She knew this about the woman about whom she knew little else (but surmised much). Her American father had never passed a driving test but loved buying cars. Therefore, drivers. They came and went. They wanted to be famous of course. Once, for a week or two, the ambassador had been driven by a gorgeous young woman who left to work in the daytime soaps. Other drivers had flickered briefly to life as dancers in music videos. At least two, one female, one male, had been successful in the field of pornographic cinema and she had run into their naked images late at night in hotel rooms here and there. She watched pornography in hotel rooms. It helped her sleep when she was away from home. She also watched pornography at home.

  Shalimar from Kashmir escorted her downstairs. Was he legal? Did he have his papers? Did he even have a driver’s license? Why had he been employed? Did he have a major penis, a penis worthy of late-night hotel viewing? Her father asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She looked at the driver and briefly wanted to be the kind of woman who could have asked him pornographic questions, right there in the elevator, within seconds of their first meeting; who could have talked dirty to this beautiful man, knowing that he would not have understood a word, that he would have smiled an employee’s assenting smile without knowing what he was agreeing to. Did he take it in the ass? She wanted to see his smile. She didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to make documentary films. The ambassador should have known, should not have needed to ask. He should have brought her an elephant to ride down Wilshire Boulevard, or taken her skydiving, or to Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu or Kashmir.

  She was twenty-four years old. She wanted to inhabit facts, not dreams. True believers, those nightmarish dreamers, grabbed at the corpse of the Ayatollah Khomeini, as once other true believers in another place, in India whose name she bore, had bitten off chunks of the cadaver of St. Francis Xavier. One piece ended up in Macao, another in Rome. She wanted shadows, chiaroscuro, nuance. She wanted to see below the surface, the meniscus of the blinding brightness, to push through the hymen of the brightness, into the bloody hidden truth. What was not hidden, what was overt, was not true. She wanted her mother. She wanted her father to tell her about her mother, to show her letters, photographs, to bring messages from the dead. She wanted her lost story to be found. She didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted lunch.

  The car was a surprise. Max customarily went in for big classic English vehicles but this was something else entirely, a silver luxury speedmobile with batwing doors, the same futuristic machine in which people were time-traveling in the movies that year. To be chauffeur-driven in a sports car was an affectation unworthy of a great man, she thought, disappointed.

  “There’s no room for three people in this rocket ship,” she said aloud. The ambassador dropped the keys into her hand. The car closed round the two of them, ostentatious, potent, wrong. The handsome driver, Shalimar from Kashmir, remained on the sidewalk, diminished into an insect in her wing mirror, his eyes like shining swords. He was a silverfish, a locust. Olga Volga the potato witch stood beside him and their dwindling bodies looked like numerals. Together they made the number 10.

  She had felt the driver wanting to touch her in the elevator, felt his tearful yearning. That was puzzling. No, it was not puzzling. What was puzzling was that the need did not feel sexually charged. She felt herself transformed into an abstraction. As if by wanting to put his hand on her he hoped to reach out to someone else, across unknown dimensions of sad memory and lost event. As if she were just a representative, a sign. She wanted to be the kind of woman who could ask a driver, who do you want to touch when you want to touch me. Who, when you abstain from touching me, is not being touched by you? Touch me, she wanted to say to his uncomprehending smile, I’ll be your conduit, your crystal ball. We can have sex in elevators and never mention it. Sex in transit zones, in places like elevators that are between one place and the next. Sex in cars. The transit zones traditionally associated with sex. When you fuck me you’ll be fucking her, whoever she is or was, I don’t want to know. I won’t even be here I’ll be the channel, the medium. And the rest of the time, forget it, you’re my father’s employee. It’ll be a Last Tango kind of thing without obviously butter. She said nothing to the aching man, who would not have understood anyway unless of course he would, she really had no knowledge of the level of his language skills, why was she making assumptions, why was she making this stuff up, she sounded ridiculous. She exited the elevator and let her hair down and went outside.

  This was the last day she and her father would ever spend together. The next time she saw him it would be different. This was the last time.

  “It’s for you,” he said, “the car, you can’t be such a puritan that you don’t want it.” Space-time was like butter, she thought, driving fast, and this car the warm knife slicing through it. She didn’t want it. She wanted to feel more than she felt. She wanted somebody to shake her, scream in her face, strike her. She was already numb, as if Troy had fallen. Yet things were good. She was twenty-four years old. There was a man who wanted to marry her and other men who did not, who wanted less. She had her first subject for a documentary film and there was money, enough to begin work. And her father was right beside her in the passenger seat as the DeLorean flew up the canyon. It was the first day of something. It was the last day of something else.

  They ate hungrily in a high canyon lodge watched over by rows of antlered heads. Father and daughter, alike in their appetites, their high metabolic rates, their love of meat, their slender high-toned bodies. She chose venison to defy the watching heads of dead stags.

  “O beast, I eat your ass.”

  This invocation she offered up aloud, to make him smile. He chose venison also but as an act of respect, he said, to give their absent bodies meaning. “This flesh whereof we eat is not their true flesh but the flesh of others like them, through whom their own lost forms may be conjured up and honored.” More proxies, she thought. My body in the elevator and now this meat on my plate.

  “I’m a little freaked out by your driver,” she said. “He looks at me as if I’m someone else. Are you sure about him? He checked out okay? What sort of name is that, Shalimar. Sounds like a club on La Brea with exotic dancers. Sounds like a cheap beach resort, or a trapeze artist in a circus. Oh, please,” she raised an impatient hand before he condescendingly attempted to tell her the obvious, “spare me the horticultural explanation.” She pictured the other Shalimar, the great Mughal garden of Kashmir, descending in verdant liquid terraces to a shining lake that she had never seen. The name meant “abode of joy.” She set her
jaw. “It still sounds like a candy bar to me. Also, by the way, speaking of names, I wanted to finally tell you, mine is pretty much a burden. This foreign country you made me carry around on my shoulders. I want to be some other name and smell as sweet. Maybe I’ll use yours,” she decided before he could reply. “Max, Maxine, Maxie. Perfect. Call me Maxie from now on.”

  He shook his head dismissively and ate his meat, not understanding that it was her way of begging him to stop mourning the male child he’d never had, to give up that old-fashioned sadness which he carried everywhere he went and which both wounded and offended her, because how could he allow his shoulders to sag beneath the weight of the unborn son sitting up there jeering at his failure, how could he permit himself to be tormented by that malicious incubus when she was standing right in front of him filled with love, and was she not his living image, was she not an altogether finer and worthier creature than any nonexistent boy? Her coloring and her green eyes might be her mother’s, and her breasts certainly were, but almost everything else, she told herself, was the ambassador’s legacy. When she spoke she failed to hear her other inheritance, the other, unknown cadences, and heard only her father’s voice, its rise and fall, its mannerisms and pitch. When she looked in the mirror she blinded herself to the shadow of the unknown and saw only Max’s face, his body type, his languid elegance of manner and form. All along one wall of her bedroom were mirrored, sliding closet doors and when she lay on her bed and admired her naked body, turning and turning it, striking attitudes for her own delight, she was frequently aroused, actually turned on, by the notion that this was the body her father would have had if he had been a woman. This firm jawline, this stalk of a neck. She was a tall young woman and her height was his gift, too, given in his own proportions; the relatively short upper body, the long legs. The spinal scoliosis, the slight curvature which hooked her head forward, giving her a hawklike, predatory air: that, too, came from him.

  After he died she went on seeing him in her mirror. She was her father’s ghost.

  She did not mention the matter of the name again. The ambassador by his demeanor gave her to understand that he was doing her a favor by forgetting a piece of embarrassing behavior, forgiving her by forgetting it, the way one forgives a urinating baby or a teenager who lurches home drunk and vomitous after passing an exam. Such forgiveness was irritating; but she in her turn let it go, making her behavior the mirror of his. She mentioned nothing that mattered or rankled, not the childhood years in England during which thanks to him she had not known her own story, nor the woman who had not been her mother, the buttoned woman who had raised her in the aftermath of scandal, nor the woman who had been her mother, and of whom it was forbidden to speak.

  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 August
ine 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.