Fury by Salman Rushdie Read Free Book Online Page B

SAVE US. The cult, born of Miami’s necessary demonology-according to which Castro the devil, Hannibal-the-Cannibal Castro, would eat the boy alive, would tear out his immortal soul and munch it down with a few fava beans and a glass of red wine-instantly developed a priesthood as well. The dreadful media-fixated uncle was anointed pope of Elianismo, and his daughter, poor Marisleysis, with her “nervous exhaustion,” was exactly the type who would, any day now, start witnessing the seven-year-old’s first miracles. There was even a fisherman involved. And of course apostles, spreading the word: the photographer living in Elian’s bedroom, the TV-movie people waving contracts, publishing houses doing likewise, CNN itself and all the other news crews with their uplink dishes and fuzzy mikes. Meanwhile in Cuba, the little boy was being transformed into quite another totem. A dying revolution, a revolution of the old and straggle-bearded, held the child up as proof of its renewed youth. In this version, Elian rising from the waters became an image of the revolution’s immortality: a lie. Fidel, that ancient infidel, made interminable speeches wearing an Elian mask.
    And for a long time the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, stayed in his hometown of Cardenas and said little. He said he wanted his son back, which was perhaps dignified, and perhaps enough. Pondering what he himself might do if his uncles and cousins were to come between him and Asmaan, Professor Solanka snapped a pencil in half. Then he switched channels back to the ball game, but it was too late. El Duque, himself a Cuban refugee, would not be of Solanka’s mind in this. That mind, in which Asmaan Solanka and Elian Gonzalez blurred and joined, was overheating again, pointing out that in his own case no relatives had needed to get between Solanka and his child. He had achieved the rupture without outside assistance. As the helpless rage mounted in him he used, again, his well-practiced techniques of sublimation, and directed the anger outward, at the ideologically deranged Miami mob, transformed by experience into what they hated most. Their flight from bigotry had turned them into bigots. They screamed at journalists, abused politicians who disagreed with them, shook their fists at passing cars. They spoke of the evils of brainwashing, but their own brains were self-evidently unclean. “Not washing but staining,” Solanka found himself actually yelling aloud at the Cuban pitcher on TV. “You people have been brainstained by your lives. And that little boy on a swing with a hundred camera snouts nosing at his confusion: what are you telling him about his dad?”
    He had to go through it all over again: the shaking, the pounding, the gasping for air, the shower, the darkness, the breathing, the visualization. No drugs; he had put them off-limits, and he was also avoiding head doctors. The gangster Tony Soprano might be going to a shrink, but fuck him, he was fictional. Professor Solanka had resolved to face his demon by himself. Psychoanalysis and chemistry felt like cheating. If the duel were to be truly won, if the demon that possessed him was to be wrestled to the mat and consigned to hell, it had to be just the two of them going at it, ass naked, without restraint, in a bare-knuckle fight to the death.
    It was dark when Malik Solanka deemed himself fit to leave the apartment. Shaken, but putting on a show of jauntiness, he set out for the Kieslowski double bill. If he had been a Vietnam vet or even a re porter who’d seen too much, his behavior would have been more readily comprehensible. Jack Rhinehart, an American poet and war correspondent he had known for twenty years, if woken by a ringing telephone would, to this day, usually smash the instrument to bits. He couldn’t stop himself doing it, and was only half awake when it happened. Jack got through a lot of phones, but he accepted his fate. He was damaged, and thought himself lucky it wasn’t