Read The Ground Beneath Her Feet Online
Authors: Salman Rushdie
There’s also my past. In Mira’s opinion I haven’t completely got Vina out of my system. She thinks I’m still silently making comparisons, physical, psychological, vocal. I tell her that if I am, I don’t mean to, and I’m doing my damnedest to stop. She’s a patient woman, and she’s waiting for the day.
And Tara: Tara, I love. How it is that she’s growing up with Vina’s wiry, springy hair, with a complexion many shades darker than her mother’s, I have no idea. Perhaps Luis Heinrich had a grandmother we don’t know about. Anyway, Tara and I have one important trait in common: surrounded as we have been and will always be by singers, we can’t hit a note. This makes us allies, musketeers to the death in a world of non-stop mockery by the self-satisfied croony-moony élite.
“After,” the title song of the album, is Mira’s elegy for Ormus. You were the stranger that I needed, she sings, the wanderer who came to call. You were the changer that I heeded. Now you’re just a picture on my wall. And everything is stranger after you.
In all the old stories, in different ways, the point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire. They vacate the stage and leave us alone upon it, stumbling over our lines. This, the myths hint, is what a mature civilization is: a place where the gods stop jostling and shoving us and seducing our womenfolk and using our armies to lave their poxy quarrels in our children’s blood; a time when they move back, still leering, still priapic, still whimsical, from the realm of the
actual to the land of so to speak—Olympus, Valhalla—leaving us free to do our best or worst without their autocratic meddling.
In my life time, the love of Ormus and Vina is as close as I’ve come to a knowledge of the mythic, the overweening, the divine. Now that they’ve gone, the high drama’s over. What remains is ordinary human life.
I’m looking at Mira and Tara, my islands in the storm, and I feel like arguing with the angry earth’s decision to wipe us out, if indeed such a decision has been made. Here’s goodness, right? The mayhem continues, I don’t deny it, but we’re capable also of this. Goodness drinking o.j. and munching muffins. Here’s ordinary human love beneath my feet. Fall away, if you must, contemptuous earth; melt, rocks, and shiver, stones. I’ll stand my ground, right here. This I’ve discovered and worked for and earned. This is mine.
Tara’s got hold of the zapper. I’ve never got used to having the tv on at breakfast, but this is an American kid, she’s unstoppable. And today, by some fluke, wherever she travels in the cable multiverse she comes up with Ormus and Vina. Maybe it’s some sort of VTO weekend and we didn’t even know. I don’t believe it, Tara says, zapping again and again. I don’t
buh-leeve
it. Oh,
puh-leeze
. Is this what’s going to happen now, for ever and
ever
? I thought they were supposed to be
dead
, but in real life they’re just going to go on singing.
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