Grimus - By Salman Rushdie Page 0,1

for they were extremely ugly. It was undeclared, because each had been so badly damaged by experience that they preferred to nurture their feelings in the privacy of their own bosoms, rather than expose them to possible ridicule and rejection. So they would sit close, but separated by this privacy, and Dolores would sing cracked songs, toothless rimes of mourning and requition; while Virgil would talk his lilting elliptical talk, exercising the thoughts and the tongue which were both too large for his head to hold, and there on the deserted beach was as close as they came to joy.

Whitebeard is all my love and white beard is my desire, sang Dolores dolefully, to the rhythm of the swaying rocking-chair. Virgil, lost in thought, stroked his white-grizzled chin and did not hear.

—Language, he mused, language makes concepts. Concepts make chains. I am bound, Dotty, bound and I don’t know where. Not enough of the ether for the way of Grimus, not enough of the earth for the way of K, moving pingpongways in thought between them and you. Dolores O’Thule. Sorrow of the gods. My dear, I was not always as you see me now. The terror of the titties, I. Once. Then. Before.

—Early one morning, just as the Son was horning, I a maiden crying in the valley below, wailed Dolores.

The insensate Eagle was within a foot of the rockers.

—This island, muttered Virgil Jones firmly, but under his breath, is the most terrible place in all creation. Since we seem to survive and are not sucked into its ways, we seem to love.

He would have reflected further, on ritual, on obsession, on the neuroses and displacement activities that exile creates, on age, on entrapment, on friendship and love, on the state of his corns, on the ornithology of myth, and refined and invented thoughts in the peace of Dolores’ presence; and she would have sung further, until her songs dropped a tear from her eyes; and then they would have gone home.

But at that moment the body of Flapping Eagle came to rest against the perfectly-carved rockers of the perfectly-carved rocking-chair with the perfectly-carved dancers spiralling along them. The chair, thus affronted, stopped rocking.

—Death, exclaimed Dolores in terror. Death, from the sea….

Virgil Jones didn’t reply, having a mouth full of the sea which had lodged in Flapping Eagle’s lungs. But he, too, as he breathed life back into the stranger, was alarmed.

—No, he said eventually, willing himself and Dolores to believe it. The face is too pale.

A remarkable fact about Flapping Eagle’s arrival at Calf Island: the island-dwellers, who shouldn’t have been too surprised at his arrival, found it highly disturbing, even unnerving. Whereas Flapping Eagle himself, once he acquired a certain piece of knowledge, rapidly came to accept his arrival as entirely unremarkable.

The piece of knowledge was this:

No-one ever came to Calf Island by accident.

The mountain drew its own kind to itself.

Or perhaps it was Grimus who did that.

II

THE DAY HAD begun well enough. That is to say, it resembled the previous day sufficiently (in terms of weather, temperature and mood) to give the half-sleeping young man the illusion of continuity. Yet it also differed sufficiently from the recently-passed (in terms of subtle things like the direction of the wind, the cries of the swooping birds above and the squawks of the womenfolk below) to produce an equal and opposite illusion of temporal movement. The young man was basking pleasurably in these conflicting and harmonious mirages, drifting slowly up towards consciousness, which would banish both and substitute a third illusion: the present.

I was the boy. I was Joe-Sue, Axona Indian, orphan, named ambiguously at birth because my sex was uncertain until some time later, virgin, younger brother of a wild female animal called Bird-Dog, who was scared of losing her beauty, which was ironic, for she was not beautiful. It was my (his) twenty-first birthday, too, and I was about to become Flapping Eagle. And cease to be a few other people.

(I was Flapping Eagle.)

The Axona aren’t interested in twenty-first birthdays. They celebrate only puberty, loss of virginity, proof of bravery, marriage and death. At puberty the Old took goats’ hairs and tied them like a beard round my face, while the Sham-Man anointed my newly-potent organs with the entrails of a hare, for fertility, chanting to the god Axona as he did so.

The god Axona had only two laws: he liked the Axona to chant to him as often as possible, in the field, on the toilet,