The Satanic Verses

stories, for example about the atheist gaucho who disproved Paradise, when his mother died, by calling upon her spirit to return, every night for seven nights. On the eighth night he announced that she had obviously not heard him, or she would certainly have come to console her beloved son; therefore, death must be the end. She snared him in descriptions of the days when the Perón people came in their white suits and slicked down hair and the peons chased them off, she told him how the railroads were built by the Anglos to service their estancias, and the dams, too, the story, for example, of her friend Claudette, ‘a real heartbreaker, my dear, married an engineer chap name of Granger, disappointed half the Hurlingham. Off they went to some dam he was building, and next thing they heard, the rebels were coming to blow it up. Granger went with the men to guard the dam, leaving Claudette alone with the maid, and wouldn’t you know, a few hours later, the maid came running, señora, ees one hombre at the door, ees as beeg as a house. What else? A rebel captain. – ‘And your spouse, madame?’ – ‘Waiting for you at the dam, as he should be.’ – ‘Then since he has not seen fit to protect you, the revolution will.’ And he left guards outside the house, my dear, quite a thing. But in the fighting both men were killed, husband and captain and Claudette insisted on a joint funeral, watched the two coffins going side by side into the ground, mourned for them both. After that we knew she was a dangerous lot,
trop fatale
, eh? What?
Trop
jolly
fatale
.’ In the tall story of the beautiful Claudette, Gibreel heard the music of Rosa’s own longings. At such moments he would catch sight of her looking at him from the corners of her eyes, and he would feel a tugging in the region of his navel, as if something were trying to come out. Then she looked away, and the sensation faded. Perhaps it was only a side-effect of stress.
    He asked her one night if she had seen the horns growing on Chamcha’s head, but she went deaf and, instead of answering, told him how she would sit on a camp stool by the galpón or bull-pen at Los Alamos and the prize bulls would come up and lay their horned heads in her lap. One afternoon a girl named Aurora del Sol, who was the fiancée of Martín de la Cruz, let fall a saucy remark: I thought they only did that in the laps of virgins, she stage-whispered to her giggling friends, and Rosa turned to her sweetly and replied, Then perhaps, my dear, you would like to try? From that time Aurora del Sol, the best dancer at the estancia and the most desirable of all the peon women, became the deadly enemy of the too-tall, too-bony woman from over the sea.
    ‘You look just like him,’ Rosa Diamond said as they stood at her night-time window, side by side, looking out to sea. ‘His double. Martín de la Cruz.’ At the mention of the cowboy’s name Gibreel felt so violent a pain in his navel, a pulling pain, as if somebody had stuck a hook in his stomach, that a cry escaped his lips. Rosa Diamond appeared not to hear. ‘Look,’ she cried happily, ‘over there.’
    Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower and the holiday camp, – running along the water’s edge so that the incoming tide washed away its footprints, – swerving and feinting, running for its life, there came a full-grown, large-as-life ostrich. Down the beach it fled, and Gibreel’s eyes followed it in wonder, until he could no longer make it out in the dark.

    The next thing that happened took place in the village. They had gone into town to collect a cake and a bottle of champagne, because Rosa had remembered that it was her eighty-ninth birthday. Her family had been expelled from her life, so there had been no cards or telephone calls. Gibreel insisted that they should hold some sort of celebration, and showed her the secret inside his shirt, a fat money-belt full of pounds sterling acquired on the black market before leaving Bombay. ‘Also credit cardsgalore,’ he said. ‘I am no indigent fellow. Come, let us go. My treat.’ He was now so deeply in thrall to Rosa’s narrative sorcery that he hardly remembered from day to day that he had a life to go to, a woman to surprise by the simple fact of his being alive, or any such thing. Trailing behind her meekly, he carried Mrs Diamond’s shopping-bags.
    He was loafing around on a street corner while Rosa chatted to the baker when he