Shalimar the Clown Read Free

Sea. Then in her telling of it came the history of the twentieth century, shaped by potato magic. “Of course hard times,” she said, to the old ladies on their balconies, to the old gentlemen by the pool, to India wherever and whenever she could corner her, right now to Ambassador Max Ophuls on his daughter’s twenty-fourth birthday. “Of course poverty; also oppression, dislocation, armies, servitude, today’s kids they got it easy, they know nothing, I can see you are a man of sophistication who has gotten around some. Of course dislocation, survival, the necessity to be cunning like a rat. Am I right? Of course somewhere a man, a dream of elsewhere, a marriage, children, they don’t stay, their lives are their own, they take them from you and go. Of course war, a husband lost, don’t ask me about grief. Of course dislocation, hunger, deception, luck, another man, a good man, a man of the sea. Then a journey across water, the lure of the West, a journey across land, a second widowhood, a man will not last, present company not included, a man is not built to endure. In my life men were like shoes. I had two of them and they both wore out. After that I learned you could say to go barefoot. But I did not ask men to make things possible. Never I have asked this. Always it was what I knew that brought me what I wanted. My potato art, yes. Whether food, whether children, whether travel papers or work. Always my enemies failed and I in glory triumphed. The potato is powerful and all things may by it be accomplish. Only now comes the creeping of the years and even the potato it cannot turn back time. We know the world, am I right? We know how it ends.”
    He sent the driver up with the flowers and waited for India below. The new driver. India noted in her careful dispassionate way that this was a handsome man, even a beautiful one, fortysomething, tall, as graceful in his movement as the incomparable Max. He walked as if across a tightrope. There was pain in his face and he did not smile although the corners of his eyes were creased with laugh lines and he was staring at her with an unlooked-for intensity that felt like an electric shock. The ambassador did not insist on uniforms. The driver wore an open white shirt and chinos, the anti-uniform of the sun-blessed in America. The beautiful came to this city in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian ruble or Argentine peso; to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls.
    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