Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

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SANCHO PONDERS THIS REVELATION.

I knew it, I guess. I knew he had secrets in the part of his head I can’t get into. But a whole sister! That’s a lot. That’s a lot he just said right there. God from the machine, this is kinda like an ancient Roman theater trick, I’m finding the Latin in his storehouse now. Dea ex machina. Poof! Here’s a sister I’ve got you didn’t know about, he tells me, and she has been here all the time.

It’s a half sister. The father remarried, there was a child, the father died, the mother, who knows what became of her. I don’t know and either he doesn’t either or he isn’t saying or it’s still locked away somewhere deep inside him, still hidden inside that cloud I can’t blow away. How well do they know each other? Not very well, not anymore anyway, they haven’t met in many years, they don’t call, they don’t text, they don’t write. Or do they? What do I know, but I’m guessing hardly at all. But once they must have known each other, otherwise why this nickname, which I’m surmising is discourteous. A trampoline, it’s a thing people bounce up and down on, no? So he’s basically calling her a whore.

Not very nice.

But no, no, he’s telling me, it’s the song, it means she’s bouncing into Graceland. It’s a way of saying she’s a person of grace. Well, excuse me for misunderstanding. I’d excuse her for misunderstanding too. But he’s telling me about her now and she sounds like a goddamn saint. Made a stack of money on Wall Street when she was still in her twenties, a high stack, higher than the jumbo stack of pancakes in the diner down the street, if you take my meaning: I mean high…and then one day she said, this is not the life I need, and walked out past the charging bull and never worked for the finance bros again. Now she’s running her own organization, facing toward India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, creating a second micro-banking operation alongside Grameen Bank, generating global funding to offer small loans to women in South Asia trying to start up their own enterprises, beauty parlors, food catering, child daycare centers; also fighting sex trafficking, campaigning against sexual violence toward women in India, you get the idea. A noble, selfless individual, giving her life to the betterment of others. A good woman of this type is a kind of trampoline. People bounce on her and fly. And if they fall they bounce on her again and rise again. She doesn’t seek flight for herself but she spreads herself wide and people use her to climb as high as they can go.

All this, he’s telling me, and I go, okay, great, but (a) what happened between you and (b) what’s she really like? I mean, without the halo? He answers the second question first, to keep me hanging on, drawing it out, so annoying. Well,

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