Joseph Anton: A Memoir (63 page)

Carmen Balcells, the legendary all-powerful Spanish literary agent, called Andrew Wylie from Barcelona to say that the great Gabriel García Márquez was writing a “novelization based on Mr. Rushdie’s life.” It would, she added, be “completely written by the writer, who is a well-known author.” He didn’t know how to respond. Should he be flattered? Because he was not flattered. He was to be someone else’s “novelization” now? If the roles were reversed he would not have felt he had the right to come between another writer and his own life story. But his life had perhaps become everyone’s property, and if he tried to stop the book he could just imagine the headlines.
RUSHDIE CENSORS MÁRQUEZ
. And what was meant by a “novelization”? If García Márquez was writing about a Latin American writer who had fallen foul of Christian religious fanatics then good luck to him. But if Márquez proposed to climb inside his head then that would feel like an invasion. He asked Andrew to express his concerns and a long silence from Balcells ensued, followed by a message saying that the Márquez book was not about Mr. Rushdie. Then what, he wondered, had this whole strange episode been about?

Gabriel García Márquez never published a “novelization” or anything bearing any resemblance to what Carmen Balcells had proposed. But the Balcells approach had rubbed salt in his self-inflicted wound. García Márquez had wanted, or didn’t want, to write either a work of fiction or nonfiction about him, but he himself hadn’t written a word of fiction all year—no, for much more than a year. Writing had always been at the center of his life but now things from the margins had flooded in to fill up the space he had always kept free for his work. He recorded a TV introduction to a film about Tahar Djaout. He was offered
a monthly column to be distributed worldwide by the
New York Times
syndicate and asked Andrew to accept.

Christmas was coming. He was exhausted and, in spite of all the year’s political successes, at a low ebb. He talked to Elizabeth about the future, about having a child, about how they might live, and realized that she could not imagine feeling safe without police protection. He had met her in the middle of the spider’s web and the web was the only reality she trusted. If one day he reached a point at which the “prot” could end, would she feel too frightened to stay with him? It was a small cloud on the horizon. Would it grow to fill the sky?

Thomasina Lawson died aged just thirty-two. Clarissa was having chemotherapy. And Frank Zappa died too. The past leaped out at him when he read that, ambushing him with powerful, unexpected emotions. On one of their first dates Clarissa and he had gone to hear the Mothers of Invention at the Royal Albert Hall and in the middle of the show a stoned black guy in a shiny purple shirt climbed up onto the stage and demanded to play with the band. Zappa was unfazed. “Uh-huh, sir,” he said, “and what is your instrument of choice?” Purple Shirt mumbled something about a horn and Zappa cried, “Give this man a horn!” Purple Shirt began to tootle tunelessly. Zappa listened for a few bars and then, in a stage aside, said, “Hmm. I wonder what we can think of to accompany this man on his horn. I know! The mighty, majestic Albert Hall pipe organ!” Whereupon one of the Mothers climbed up to the organ bench, pulled out all the stops, and played “Louie Louie,” while Purple Shirt tootled on tunelessly and inaudibly below. It was one of their early happy memories, and now Zappa was gone, and Clarissa was fighting for her life. (At least her job had been saved. He had called her bosses at A. P. Watt, and pointed out how bad it would look to lay off a woman who was fighting cancer and was the mother of Salman Rushdie’s son. Gillon Aitken and Liz Calder called too, at his request, and the agency relented. Clarissa didn’t know he had had anything to do with it.) He invited her to spend Christmas Day with them. She came with Zafar, smiling weakly, looking hunted, and seemed to enjoy the day.

People were writing him letters too, like the imaginary letters in his head. One hundred Arab and Muslim writers jointly published a book of essays written in many languages and published in French,
Pour Rushdie
, to defend freedom of speech. One hundred writers who mostly understood what he had been talking about, who came from the world out of which his book had been born, and who, even when they didn’t like what he said, were willing to defend, as Voltaire would have defended, his right to say it.
With him the prophetic gesture has been opened up to the four winds of the imaginary
, wrote the book’s editors, and then came the cavalcade of the great and small voices of the Arab world. From the Syrian poet Adonis:
Truth is not the sword / Nor the hand that holds it
. And Mohammad Arkoun of Algeria:
I would like to see
The Satanic Verses
made available to all Muslims in order that they might be able to reflect in a more modern fashion on the cognitive status of revelation
. And Rabah Belamri of Algeria:
The Rushdie Affair has very clearly revealed to the entire world that Islam … has now demonstrated its incapacity to undergo with impunity any serious kind of examination
. And from Turkey, Fethi Benslama:
In his book Salman Rushdie went the whole way, once and for all, as if he really wanted to be, all by himself, all the different authors who had never been able to exist in the history of his tradition
. And Zhor Ben Chamsi of Morocco:
We should really be grateful to Rushdie for having opened up the imaginary for Muslims once again
. And Assia Djebar, the Algerian:
This prince of a writer … is nothing else but perpetually naked and alone. He is the first
man
to have lived in the condition of a Muslim
woman
(and … he is also the first man to be able to write from the standpoint of a Muslim woman)
. And Karim Ghassim of Iran:
He is our neighbor
. And Émile Habibi, Palestinian:
If we fail to save Salman Rushdie—God forbid!—the shame will haunt global civilization as a whole
. And the Algerian Mohammed Harbi:
With Rushdie, we recognize the disrespect, the principle of pleasure that is freedom in culture and the arts, as a source of fruitful examination of our past and present
. And the Syrian Jamil Hatmal:
I choose Salman Rushdie over the murderous turbans
. And Sonallah Ibrahim of Egypt:
Every person of conscience must go to the aid of this great writer in hardship
. And the Moroccan-French writer Salim Jay:
The only truly free man today is Salman Rushdie.… He is the Adam of a library to come: one of freedom
. And Elias Khoury of Lebanon:
We have the obligation to tell
him that he personifies our solitude and that his story is our own
. And the Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb:
Rushdie, you have written what no man has written.… Instead of condemning you, in the name of Islam, I congratulate you
. And Sami Naïr, French-Algerian:
Salman Rushdie must be read
.

Thank you, my brothers and sisters, he silently replied to the hundred voices. Thank you for your courage and understanding. I wish you all a happy new year.

H
IS BIGGEST PROBLEM, HE THOUGHT IN HIS MOST BITTER MOMENTS, WAS
that he wasn’t dead. If he were dead nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of his security and whether or not he merited such special treatment for so long. He wouldn’t have to fight for the right to get on a plane, or to battle senior police officers for tiny increments of personal freedom. There would no longer be any need to worry about the safety of his mother, his sisters, his child. He wouldn’t have to talk to any more politicians (
big
advantage). His exile from India wouldn’t hurt. And the stress level would definitely be lower.

He was supposed to be dead, but he obviously hadn’t understood that. That was the headline everyone had set up, just waiting to run. The obituaries had been written. A character in a tragedy, or even a tragic farce, was not meant to rewrite the script. Yet he insisted on living, and, what was more, talking, arguing his case, believing himself not to be the wronger but the wronged, standing by his work, and also—if one could believe such temerity—insisting on getting his life back, inch by inch, step by painful step. “What’s blond, has big tits, and lives in Tasmania? Salman Rushdie!” was a popular joke, and if he had agreed to go into some sort of witness protection program and lived out his tedious days somewhere obscure under a false name then that, too, would have been acceptable. But Mr. Joseph Anton wanted to get back to being Salman Rushdie and that was, frankly, unmannerly of him. His was not to be a success story, and there was certainly no room in it for pleasure. Dead, he might even be given the respect due to a free-speech martyr. Alive, he was a dull and unpleasantly lingering pain in the neck.

When he was alone in his room, trying to convince himself that this was no more than the familiar solitude of the writer at work, trying to forget the armed men playing cards downstairs and his inability to walk out of his front door without permission, it was easy to slide
toward such bitterness. But fortunately there seemed to be a thing in him that woke up and refused that unattractive, self-pitying defeat. He instructed himself to remember the most important rules he had made for himself: Not to accept the descriptions of reality made by security people, politicians or priests. To insist, instead, on the validity of his own judgments and instincts. To move toward a rebirth, or at least a renewal. To be reborn
as himself
, into his own life: That was the goal. And if he was a “dead man on leave,” well, the dead went on quests, too. According to the ancient Egyptians death was a quest, a journey toward rebirth. He too would journey back from the Book of the Dead toward the “bright book of life.”

And what could be a finer affirmation of life, of the power of life over death, the power of his will to defeat the forces arrayed against him, than to bring a new life into the world? All of a sudden he was ready. He told Elizabeth that he agreed; they should try to have a child. All the problems remained, the security issues, the simple translocated chromosome, but he didn’t care. The newborn life would make its own rules, would insist on what she or he needed. Yes! He wanted to have a second child. In any case it would not have been right to prevent Elizabeth from becoming a mother. They had been together for three and a half years and she had loved and put up with him with all her heart. But now she was not the only one who wanted a baby. After he said
Yes, let’s do it
she could not stop beaming at him, hugging him, kissing him all evening. They had a bottle of Tignanello to celebrate at dinnertime, in memory of their first “date.” He had always teased her that on that evening at Liz Calder’s place she had “thrown herself at him” after dinner. “On the contrary,” was her view, “
you
threw yourself at me.” Now, three and a half strange years later, they were in their own home, at the end of a good meal and near the bottom of a bottle of fine Tuscan red wine. “I guess you can throw yourself at me again,” he said.

The year 1994 began with a rebuff.
The New York Times
withdrew its offer of a syndicated column. The French syndication bureau had complained that its staff and offices would be endangered. It was at first
unclear if the newspaper’s owners were aware of, or had approved, the decision. Within a couple of days it was plain that the Sulzbergers did know and that the offer was definitively withdrawn. Gloria B. Anderson, the New York syndication chief, was regretful but powerless. She told Andrew that she had initially made the offer purely for commercial reasons, but since then had started reading Rushdie and was now a fan. That was nice, but useless. More than four years would pass before Gloria called again.

Malachite was the coolest prot. The other members of “A” Squad called it a “glory job” and even though the Malachite veterans Bob Major and Stanley Doll modestly pooh-poohed the notion it was plainly true. The Malachite team was, in the opinion of its fellow officers, doing the most dangerous job and the most important one. The others were “just” protecting politicians. Malachite was defending a principle. The police officers understood this clearly. It was a shame the nation was more confused. In London there were two Tory MPs ready to ask questions in the House of Commons about the cost of the protection. It was plain most Conservative MPs believed the protection was a waste of money and wanted it ended. So did he, he wanted to tell them. Nobody was more eager to get back to ordinary life than he. But the new man in charge of Operation Malachite, Dick Wood, told him that Iranian intelligence was “still trying as hard as ever” to find their target. Rafsanjani had approved the hit long ago and the killers no longer needed to refer to him. It remained their number one concern. Soon afterward, Stella Rimington, head of MI5, said in the BBC’s annual Dimbleby lecture that “the determined efforts to locate and kill the author Salman Rushdie seem likely to go on.”