‘Sartaj Singh, do you believe in God?’ (Ib.)

 

 In tales, in fiction, as in the stories that we prefer to narrate about ourselves, the evil one, has more or less a shape which is completely distinct from the good one.  In this way,  we can continue to believe in a superior principle which accompanies us, perhaps to punish us , with a gaze that keeps following us.

Sigmund Freud, Wir und der Tod; presentation to the Israeli Humanity Society "Wien" of the B'nai B'rith order, 1915. Noi e la morte, Palomar, Bari 1993; p. 39) I say that life looses thickness and interest, when the main ante [/gambling], the same life, is excluded from its fights. It becomes empty and silly like an american flirt, in which since the beginnig it’s clear that nothing has to happen, differently from a continental love story, in which both the partners must always be mindful of the hanging threat. (My translation)

This remark, which links the Sartaj’s tears in Amristar with his ability to realize "the love of Mary and for Mary", intertwines the idea of forgiveness with the idea of tolerance towards someone else’s imperfection and the own, as the warp and weft of the same canvas,

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Addio Padre Edipo

Libertà e incertezza nei Giochi Sacri di Vikram Chandra

1. SARTAJ, TU CREDI IN DIO?

La vita è come una storia, in cui Eros non ha significato se Thanatos non lo segue abbastanza da vicino da poterlo raggiungere. D’altra parte la natura di Eros, originato dal desiderio di Penia, Povertà, di concepire un figlio con Poros, Ricchezza, è anarchica, sempre oscillante fra stati opposti. 

Eros è il desiderio che la vita ha di se stessa e ci attraversa come un fiume percorre una valle. Rispetto alla natura del grande demone che con movimento incessante connette cielo e terra, la nostra è rigida e inerte quando è lontano, se non fosse per il canto che possiamo levare per invocarne la presenza e piangerne la distanza, quando non siamo troppo occupati a dimenticare che senza di lui la vita non ha senso.

Eros si è eclissato quando cominciano i Sacred Games, per entrambi i suoi protagonisti, l’ispettore di polizia Sartaj Singh, che ha una fantasia suicida, e il  grande gangster Ganesh Gaitonde chiuso in un bunker atomico. La sua assenza è come la mancanza del sole e della luna, e il lavoro dell’immaginazione a servizio del desiderio onnipotente ha solo rimandato l’incontro con la semplice verità, come ce la risparmiavano i nostri genitori quando eravamo troppo piccoli: indipendentemente da noi la luce si accende e si spegne, nel nostro umore come in cielo. Indipendentemente da noi veniamo al mondo e lo lasciamo.
Se l’identità nasce nella fiducia di poter un giorno appagare il desiderio, il soggetto cresce tollerando la caduta delle illusioni dorate dell’infanzia. Ci sostiene da svegli un po’ di illusione, mentre se vogliamo rendere stabile come una roccia l’orgoglio per la potenza del nostro pensiero e l’incisività della nostra azione spezziamo l’equilibrio nel quale viviamo, oscillante fra immaginazione e realtà quotidiana, fra la percezione dell’unicità del nostro essere che vuole affermarsi e il bisogno di sentire il sostegno degli altri. Nel quotidiano alternarsi del soggetto capace di controllo su sé e sul mondo nella veglia, e del suo eclisse nel sonno, l’equilibrio è un lavoro costante, rischioso, appassionante.
A chi si illude di eliminare i rischi, se non basta considerare i sogni notturni, così nostri e così non nostri, dovrebbe bastare la ricorrente percezione unhemlich, straniante, spaesante. Essa rivela in un batter d’occhio la fragilità della casa del proprio essere, mostra la città caotica, il paesaggio, di collina o di mare, spogliato di ogni bellezza, e nessuna lingua particolare viene in nostro soccorso, come se il fraintendimento fosse il suo esito beffardo.
Un’etica nuova è necessaria per raccontare come questo straniamento ricorrente sia la sola risorsa che abbiamo per dubitare delle certezze che da sempre hanno fondato le culture diverse, con le quali oggi ci troviamo confrontati. Abbiamo bisogno di tollerare lo scarto unhemlich della differenza da noi stessi, che è la sola condizione per riconoscere di cosa viviamo, abbandonando l’edificio della nostra origine, che amiamo, andando verso altre culture, che ci affascinano, che ci atterriscono. Abbiamo bisogno di immaginare una storia che non ci porti alla nera melanconia che fa scivolare ogni senso nell’insignificanza, di ogni bellezza nella dissoluzione, né a regredire aderendo a movimenti religiosi o ideologici, la cui corsa, come sempre, è tanto più cieca e distruttiva quanto più alza la bandiera di un superiore diritto a esercitare il dominio sugli altri, con le armi o col pensiero.

Nella riflessione sapienziale di ogni tempo e spazio possiamo trovare l’allusione a un mistero che sfugge alle parole, qualcosa che, essendo alla portata di tutti, ogni giorno della nostra vita, non riusciamo a vedere. Il sentimento di essere vivi, la presenza di Eros in noi, è sia una tensione verso l’infinito che il desiderio vuole sapere e avere tutto intero, sia il lutto costante per la sua impossedibilità.

L’io narrante di quasi metà dei Sacred Games, il grande gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, si chiede alla fine se si possa vivere senza il sostegno di una fede, di un Dio che che legittima l’esistenza e veste di dignità l’essere umano che crede in lui, onnipotente e onnisciente come il padre appare al bambino, indicando il confine fra il lecito dall’illecito, condannando e assolvendo, e mantenendo un ordine ci rassicura del fatto che il caos terrificante non prevarrà sull’ordine del  cosmo. Ci sono storie, racconti che servono a una ideologia che può definirsi religiosa, che funzionano come stampelle per chi teme di cadere:

Possibile che fossi un essere sballottato casualmente qua e là in balia degli eventi? Che un giorno seguisse l'altro solo perché così era, senza alcun motivo? Non potevo accettarlo. Questo ammasso ronzante di caos mi faceva soffrire, voglio dire che avevo mal di stomaco e mal di testa, poi mi tornarono le emorroidi che mi lasciarono stordito e tremante in bagno. Il mio corpo protestava contro l'asserzione che la mia vita fosse priva di significato. No, la mia vita aveva una forma.
E ancora adesso stavo imparando, stavo progredendo, avevo una missione per il mio paese, avevo un maestro, ero diretto da qualche parte. Avevo una storia. (Vikram Chandra, Giochi sacri, Mondadori, Milano 2006; pp. 721-722)

Ganesh Gaitonde ha una storia se affida la sua libertà a Guru-ji, che lo chiama il mio Arjun e lo assolve da tutti i suoi crimini, ponendolo con sé al di sopra del bene e del male, svelandogli il senso della vita che da solo non riesce più a vedere. Ma Ganesh Gaitonde scopre, al termine della sua corsa, nelle prime pagine di Sacred Games, che la morte è il solo senso della sua esperienza, e ora sa che per avere una storia occorre solo raccontarla, e che nessuna storia è insignificante se ne restiamo testimoni. Sceglie come ascoltatore il suo antagonista naturale, un poliziotto, che lo ascolta pochi minuti, mentre cerca il modo di aprire il suo bunker:

Una ruspa si muove sferragliando per ordine di Sartaj, al quale sembra di sentire le ultime parole del gangster:

 
Hai un padre che ti guida, Sartaj, al quale affidarti? Hai un padre, lettore, che ti rassicuri quando le tue risorse non bastano a vivere?

Il gangster si era affidato a un grande guru internazionale, scoprendo alla fine che stava preparando un attentato atomico a Bombay. Il tutore dell’ordine non si affida a nessuno, sente, pensa, agisce, si interroga. La sera prima della ruspa e del rifugio atomico, Sartaj Singh, il solo ispettore sikh di Mumbay, mentre sorseggiava il suo secondo whisky, solo in casa, aveva ricordato la città della sua infanzia:

Dall’incontro fra Ganesh Gaitonde e Sartaj Singh germoglia la possibilità di salvare dall’esplosione atomica Bombay, la città minacciata di annientamento come il reame di tante fiabe, e come nelle fiabe è necessario un eroe che la salvi adempiendo il suo compito impossibile.
Morfologicamente Ganesh Gaitonde e Sartaj Singh sono due forme dell’attante protagonista, legati in una fratellanza fragile e vera per lo sguardo e le parole in cui il primo si è sentito riconosciuto dal secondo, e ha creduto che lo sguardo di lui fosse capace di andare oltre le apparenze.
L’eroe negativo delle fiabe, che formano la struttura di tante storie contemporanee, è sgradevole dall’inizio, o ha qualcosa che ricordiamo, una volta che scopriamo la sua malvagità, come indizi che avrebbero potuto metterci in guardia. Allo stesso modo nella vita quotidiana il fallimento di un rapporto è meno doloroso quando possiamo rinarrarci la storia dicendo che c’erano tanti elementi che abbiamo trascurato, per un eccesso di fiducia. Così torniamo fra i buoni e collochiamo fra i cattivi la persona dalla quale ci siamo sentiti traditi, illudendoci di aver imparato come difenderci dal male.
Nei romanzi di Chandra, come nella realtà, è difficile distinguere i buoni dai cattivi, nessuno è stabilmente collocato da una parte, come se tutti i suoi personaggi avessero bisogno di capire chi sono, e insieme temessero di farlo. Se per la sua appartenenza al mondo del crimine Ganesh Gaitonde è un eroe negativo, ma nell’ascesa spregiudicata verso il potere il fremito costante della sua debolezza, disperata e furiosa, ce lo rende fin troppo vicino, e gli siamo accanto nel momento in cui riconosce che non ha cambiato il proprio destino, quando chiama Sartaj perché a nessun altro può consegnare se stesso e la sua storia.
Per Sartaj Singh, ispettore di polizia dotato dello spirito del detective che un tempo poteva operare solo fuori dall’istituzione, né la divisa né alcuna ideologia sono una protezione rassicurante sul senso della sua esistenza. Ha una sensibilità così fine che per restare aperto alla bellezza dei tramonti di Bombay e alla nostalgia per l’infanzia deve lasciar affiorare una fantasia suicida di cui non conosce l’autore, come non conosciamo l’origine dei nostri sogni notturni. Ama la sua città ma non la riconosce, e non è affatto sicuro che valga la pena darsi tanto da fare per salvare la città. Bombay, o Mumbai, è la città che contiene, al massimo grado, le contraddizioni che riguardano le città europee. È la civiltà che non riconosciamo perché non ci aiuta più a mantenere l’illusione di un’identità compatta, fondata: su una lingua particolare, su tradizioni un tempo considerate frutto di una mente superiore, come quella del padre per il bambino, del dio per il credente.

Nella fiaba, nella fiction, come nella storia che preferiamo raccontarci di noi stessi, il cattivo ha, prima o poi, una forma ben distinta da quella del buono, i persecutori sono anche somaticamente diversi dai soccorritori, in modo che possiamo continuare a credere in un principio superiore che ci accompagna, magari punendoci, purché uno sguardo ci segua, onnisciente e onnipresente. I fondamentalisti per il democratico sono folli, i politici sono corrotti, mentre lui è tollerante, aperto. Neri, gialli, fedeli di Allah, Cristo o Jahveh, sono per da rispettare, accogliere, comprendere, mentre chi non riuscendo più a trovare senso si chiude in una credenza è da disprezzare. È lo stesso movimento apparente risultato dall’anti-psichiatria negli anni Settanta: il fardello della colpa è stato tolto dalle spalle dello schizofrenico per essere appeso sulle spalle della madre schizofrenogenica.
La rivoluzione è un movimento apparente, un giro narcisistico che risponde a una situazione di incertezza rimescolando le carte e ridistribuendole, in modo che il giocatore possa riprendere un posto conveniente, e il gioco continuacome prima. Rispetto alla malattia mentale, la camicia di forza e l’elettroshock sono state squalificate come pratiche violente e reazionarie, e i muri dei manicomi sono stati abbattuti, per essere sostituiti dai muri virtuali degli psicofarmaci. Quel che conta è credere che questo sia il progresso, e continuare a proteggere la nostra normalità. La psicoanalisi stessa sembra aver perso il vigore vitale del doppio movimento operato da Freud, che ha riconosciuto nella nevrosi e nella psicosi gli stessi elementi che compongono il normale equilibrio, che compongono, con forme e risultati tanto diversi, le formazioni culturali più preziose, come la religione, le ideologie, la filosofia, l’arte.

Nei romanzi di Chandra si intrecciano la cattiveria, la viltà, il tradimento, dei buoni e dei cattivi, il loro slancio compassionevole, la capacità di sacrificarsi per un ideale, in una scrittura che comincia dopo la consapevolezza della mescolanza spesso indistinguibile di bene e male, premio e punizione, bellezza e bruttezza. Vivono, lottano, si confondono e si distinguono in ogni pagina, come se il senso del libro fosse contemplarli, non imporre loro un ordine rassicurante.
In Vikram Chandra, come in pochissimi scrittori del Novecento, riconosco la capacità di sospendere qualsiasi giudizio, di non cedere alla tentazione di chiudere gli occhi di fronte alla realtà contemporanea, alla sua tragica incertezza. Questo significa smantellare dentro di sé il carcere, il manicomio, lasciare che i pensieri peggiori affiorino, rischiando di sentirsi privi di riferimenti etici, di affetti, di parentele, di casa, di patria. Solo attraversando questa dissoluzione delle certezze, che Freud chiamava illusioni, si può scoprire come la passione che la vita ha per se stessa affiori dentro di noi, chissà da quale sorgente segreta, e ci faccia ritrovare quello che credevamo di aver perduto, i nostri legami, l’utopia, la tragedia, l’amore.
Prima del Novecento l’immaginario collettivo era come una civiltà circondata da terre che attendevano di essere scoperte, di popoli ignoranti che andavano illuminati. La cultura del passato consentiva di dedicare i propri sforzi a un perfezionamento crescente della maîtrise della propria, perché divenendo sempre migliore potesse attrarre chi, volente o nolente, si trovava all’oscuro. Lo splendore della riflessione di Socrate nell’opera di Platone non è concepibile senza i popoli barbari, balbuzienti, che restavano fuori dalle mura dell’utopica Atene, inaccessibili alla pratica dialogica della verità.

L’identità umana si sostiene in un gioco di opposizioni, che permette di dislocare fuori da sé, proiettandolo sui nemici, diversi e inferiori, tutto lo sporco che ci appartiene ma di cui non vogliamo sapere nulla. Gli scrittori che resistono alla tentazione di soffocare la voce della verità, di per sé già fioca, sono pochissimi, e Chandra è l’ultimo, e quello che amo di più, per qualcosa che mette in movimento la mia sensibilità, e mi aiuta a riflettere sulle contraddizioni della cultura classica nella quale sono cresciuta. Ciò che scrittori tanto lontanti fra loro, come Marcel Proust, Fernand Celine, Alice Munro, è che alla fine dei loro libri sappiamo di noi stessi e del mondo meno di quando abbiamo cominciato a leggere, ma non ci sentiamo più poveri. Non abbiamo accumulato nozioni né acquisito certezze, ma abbiamo alleggerito il nostro bagaglio di pesi inutili. Non sappiamo quale direzione prendere per trovare il nemico da combattere o l‘amico al quale associarci, né ci sentiamo purificati da una qualche fustigazione autoriale, ma ci sentiamo più creature che artefici. Siamo meno illusi, ma più disposti a vivere. 
Nessuna sapienza, nessuna soluzione, nessun dio, nessun ateismo.

Dopo queste parole, che Sartaj non è certo di aver sentito, Gaitonde si spara, e il sardar sikh comincia a cercare il senso della sua morte, per trovare la salvezza per la città e per sé un nuovo amore.
Metà del libro è il racconto in prima persona di Ganesh Gaitonde, ma da dove parla? e a chi parla?
In Red Earth and Pouring Rain c’era una vecchia scimmia morente, nella quale si svegliava la memoria dell’essere umano che era stato. Questo uomo del passato, Sanjay, aveva bisogno di raccontare prima di morire, perché solo così poteva liberarsi dalle reincarnazioni animali, facendo rivivere la parola umana che era scomparsa nel silenzio del suo suicidio.
Sanjay era morto suicida, e muore quando non ha più voglia di raccontare. Ganesh Gaitonde si spara alla testa e continua a raccontare dopo essere morto. Il potere della scrittura è svincolato dal dispositivo narrativo che chiamava come testimoni diretti Hanuman e Yama, che ora sono nella forza del racconto e nella morte che lo delimita a ogni pagina.
Due protagonisti in Sacred Games, due in Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Uno dei due causa la morte dell’altro, e insieme gli permette di raccontare.
‘Do you want Ganesh Gaitonde?’ dice il gangster in punto di morte a Sartaj prima di raccontare.
Sacred Games è il grande romanzo che Abhai promette di raccontare alla fine di Red Earth, per richiamare alla vita una bambina in coma a causa di un attentato terroristico, perché non bastano i medici e i genitori che pure la curano amorevolmente: Raccontale una storia, ha detto la scimmia Sanjay ad Abhai, prima di morire:

Fra le pagine bianche che delimitano il racconto scritto, fra il silenzio o il rumore che precedono e seguono la voce del narratore, cresce un loto rampicante, sorvegliato dal lavoro di un giardiniere che non segue regole del passato, non perché non ne conosca l’arte, ma proprio conoscendola, né si identifica in una tradizione orientale per trovare un nuovo confine che la separi dall’occidente, o viceversa, che lavora perché possa entrarvi chiunque si trovi a passarvi accanto. Per coltivare la città del nostro tempo dobbiamo riconoscere la nostra appartenenza a lei, dobbiamo e possiamo riconoscere il dissolvimento dei confini che fino all’Ottocento erano i segni visibili dell’ordine cosmico, come le righe sulle carte geografiche, che corrono lungo i fiumi o le catene montuose, che corrono diritte come le hanno volute i colonizzatori, o serpeggiano seguendo secoli di guerre e trattati. L’identità fondata sulla maîtrise di una cultura sull’altra si sta dissolvendo, come la padronanza sulla realtà psichica dell’Io, armato della razionalità e della logica tradizionale. L’articolazione più universale del patriarcato, quella fra maschio e femmina, con la disposizione gerarchica che ha sempre diviso e unito i due sessi, è logora, e nei tentativi di restaurare l’ordine con l’astuzia della ragione o con proclami sanguinari scorgiamo l’inevitabile fallimento. È  lecito distogliere lo sguardo cercando nel passato una casa che oggi non si trova? Nessuno guarda ciò che non può sostenere, Freud ce lo ha insegnato e la pratica psicoanalitica ci mostra quotidianamente come scegliamo di camuffare la realtà o di delirare quando temiamo che la nostra visione di noi stessi e delle cose possa dissolversi. Solo una parte di noi può tollerare il bagno di incertezza nel quale siamo di fatto immersi, e se è vero che non trova una soluzione, la strada per un lieto fine, è vero che scopre come questa condizione non impedisca di vivere, agire, ascoltare e raccontare. Scopre che quel che sembrava il caos può essere una nuova forma del cosmo, fra le mille e una che il passato ci ha consegnato, e gli accade come a chi non sa nuotare e per paura annaspa e va sotto, quando finalmente scopre che se smette di agitarsi l’acqua lo sostiene e lo culla.
Per farlo occorre conoscere il richiamo fascinante e assillante che spinge a selezionare i propri pensieri e delimitare la sensibilità in una prospettiva che pone al suo orizzonte una forma di purezza. In Red Earth and Pouring Rain Chandra mi ha insegnato a snodarmi da questo richiamo, che risuona con le parole della Poetica  di Aristotele:

La vita si offre a chi è immerso nell’incertezza non meno che a chi difende i confini del passato, ma l’esultanza per le forme che genera la sua danza, vorticosa eppure quieta come un minuetto, è massima per chi ha temuto che nulla potesse può dar senso alla sua vita. Accade alla scimmia Sanjay la notte prima di cominciare a raccontare:

Ma tutto questo, molte volte, non basta, e il cosmo che ci invitava a cantare la sua melodia diventa un’illusione che si dissolve e cade come un velo, e tutto il meglio che abbiamo creduto di ricevere e donare appare un cumulo di detriti che ha preso temporaneamente una forma per illuderci.
La rivelazione della vanitas vanitatum è l’incipit del romanzo, nella fantasia suicida di Sartaj Singh e nelle parole che Ganesh Gaitonde gli dice prima di spararsi alla testa: Build it big or small, there is no house that is safe. To win is to lose everything, and the game always wins.
La vanitas vanitatum, che in passato era l’amaro grido del saggio, la sua sapienza inaccessibile e non desiderata, è in Sacred Games il punto di partenza dei due protagonisti, come se dicessero: omnia vanitates, il grido dell’antico Ecclesiaste si leva quotidianamente dentro e fuori di noi. Il grido, più dell’invito aristotelico alla purezza, sgombra il tavolo da tutte le cianfrusaglie, i souvenir, i trucchi di prestigio. Il racconto allora ricomincia, antico e nuovo, per sorprenderci mentre ci svela qualcosa che non sapevamo di sapere.

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2. ‘TU NON SEI UN PAZZO,’ DISSE LEI.

Sherlock Holmes non avrebbe mai descritto in questo modo il suo procedimento, e soprattutto non lo avrebbe detto a una donna, perché, come sa bene Ganesh Gaitonde:

Nel conflitto che oppone due forme dell’essere, maschile e femminile, e nella disposizione gerarchica che ne ricava, il soggetto trova una via per definire se stesso e il senso della propria vita. Il soggetto maschile è attivo, ha sempre una direzione, che mantiene se riesce a proiettare nella donna, diversa e minus habens per eccellenza, ogni dubbio sulla stabilità di questa prerogativa, che tutela come il proprio axis mundi.

Ganesh Gaitonde paga le donne che usa per confermare il senso della propria virilità, del proprio axis mundi, fino a quando ascolta la preghiera di Dipika. La giovane, figlia di un gangster amico suo, ama un giovane dalit, e sa che il padre non le permetterà mai di sposarlo. Ganesh le parla del dovere verso la famiglia e la esorta a dimenticare, ma senza alcun risultato:

Prima di dar ascolto a Dipika, Ganesh Gaitonde diceva:

Non è la morte a costituire un limite per il soggetto, che anzi abita trionfalmente l’orlo che lo separa da lei, deciso a batterla con la sua stessa mancanza di pietà. Gainesh Gaitonde vede nella fragile Dipika un coraggio pari al suo, e nello sguardo quello splendid pride che nessuna delle donne che ha posseduto e pagato ha mai mostrato per lui.
Ganesh promette a Dipika di aiutarla, ma si rende conto che la forza di Eros sfugge completamente al suo controllo, e la tradisce svelando il suo segreto al padre di lei e lasciando che sia costretta a un matrimonio combinato, dopo il quale Dipika muore in un incidente stradale.
Pagare le donne e cercare di fottere la morte, camminando per le strade che controlla fra le benedizioni e l’ammirazione di tanta gente non gli basta più.
Paga la donna più di quanto avesse mai fatto, cerca di comprare il suo amore, estende le dimensioni del suo pene con esercizi di ginnastica e si sottopone a interventi chirurgici perché il suo volto privo dei segni del tempo, ma si chiede se l’amore che la donna gli mostra sia sincero.
La domanda di Ganesh Gaitonde non è sulla donna, ma sulla propria anima: basta la potenza a controllare il mondo? La donna sostiene l’identità, non la crea, l’axis mundi che ci sostiene si forma perché nasciamo dal padre non meno che dalla madre, e dai suoi genitori Ganesh Gaitonde è fuggito, per lasciarsi alle spalle il destino di debolezza che lo legava a loro.
Quando vede in Guru-ji il padre buono, forte e sapiente che gli è mancato, si affida a lui credendo di ottenere una legittimazione che lo liberi dai dubbi che minano la sua sicurezza, e mette nelle sue mani la domanda sull’amore della donna, che lo rode da dentro come un tarlo.
Il grande guru, che affascina occidentali e orientali, muovendo aerei e capitali immensi, dispensando un’antica saggezza di cui si considera depositario, lo rassicura:

 
Anche Guru-ji, che vuole distruggere la città con una piccola bomba atomica, ha una saggezza, e nella sua risposta c’è una verità che va estratta: non si può amare il tempo (weather) per la sua stabilità, né l’acqua corrente è il riferimento per rafforzare il proprio axis mundi. Se lo scopo della vita è ergersi contro la vita stessa che si manifesta nella fioritura della pianta come nel fiore che cade e marcisce nella terra, occorre considerare la mutevolezza del tempo e del fiume, e l’incertezza della passione o dell’amore, meno importanti del proprio axis mundi, che sia personale o elevato a feticcio da una religione o da un’ideologia. Il piacere e la gratitudine per una giornata di sole o per l’aria liberata da un temporale, il nostro umore che torna sereno dopo giorni cupi, senza che sappiamo da dove vengano l’uno e l’altro, non impediscono di agire e pensare, ma tolgono la delirante pretesa che il nostro axis mundi domini il flusso della vita.
Solo considerando la donna inferiore - weak, lier, evasive, actress, whore - è possibile per il soggetto maschile non perdere la propria sicurezza centrata sul dominio fallico, lasciando che lei resti ai margini del suo sacred game, che ha solo altri maschi come referenti. Guru-ji ha ragione quando invita Ganesh a considerare il dolore della passione come una porta verso la saggezza, ma questa ragione provoca una ribellione nel corpo:

A Guru-ji non resta altro che il richiamo alla fede, come sollecitazione a non ascoltare la propria sensibilità, fatta di carne non meno che di pensieri, mettendo nelle sue mani paterne la ricerca del proprio senso della vita:

Nulla eguaglia il conforto di un padre che ci sostiene, nulla consola quanto sapere che qualcuno ci conosce e ci guida, e Vikram Chandra dipinge la nostalgia di questo padre in tutti i Sacred Games, ma il desiderio vive della rinuncia all’illusione di appagarlo, senza dimenticare la sua impareggiabile dolcezza:

Il padre come solo conforto che tratta l’incertezza come un male dal quale si può guarire, aiuta a tenersi lontani dalla rivelazione che è il titolo del primo romanzo di Chandra:

La vita, dice la canzone, cade in noi come la pioggia, dopo la quale non si può più distinguere cosa è nostro e cosa è dell’altro, cosa abbiamo donato e ricevuto, cosa abbiamo cercato e cosa abbiamo scoperto per caso. Cosa è nel figlio più del padre che della madre, o viceversa?
Chi ha scelto il giorno della nostra nascita, chi ha scelto di essere? I genitori sono il nostro ponte per entrare nella vita, non i nostri autori, e finché non rinunciamo a un Genitore Autore l’esistenza si consuma fra fughe e regressioni alla loro immaginaria onnipotenza.

Dove Eros è presente, l’illusione che un axis mundi basti a sostenerci nella vita si dissolve, mostrando la sua anarchia, e come le tradizioni si costituiscano per non esserne sovvertite.  
Sartaj si snoda dalla tradizione quando confida a Mary di sentirsi fool, e riconosce il balsamo della sua risposta, mentre Ganesh si scontra con la tradizione quando, nonostante la sua potenza di gangster non vede un modo di aiutare Dipika:

Seduto accanto a Paritoh Shah, mortificato dalle sue lacrime e incapace di guardarlo negli occhi, percepii tutta la mia impotenza. Avrei picchiato tutti i suoi parenti, li avrei calpestati con le mie stesse scarpe, avrei spaccato quei musi compiaciuti per far assaggiare loro un po' di aria moderna, se sol oquesto avesse cambiato qualcosa. Ma la tradizione aleggia tra gli uomini e le donne, si nasconde nella pancia dei bambini e sfugge e si espande e svanisce a ogni respiro, è impossibile farla fuori, o anche solo afferrarla, si può solo sopportarla. (Ib., p. 326)

Gaitonde non può cominciare a sciogliersi dall’axis mundi della cultura patriarcale, fallocentrica, non vede nessun appiglio per evitare i bagni di sangue che ogni Guru-ji pretende per realizzare il suo ordine, sangue umano che va versato per fondare ogni città e per salvarla nel tempo, come il sangue di Dipika.

L’incertezza che sperimenta Sartaj Singh parlando con Mary, che non lo tradirà, non prima della pagina bianca che conclude i Sacred Games, somiglia a quella di Ulisse nel suo ultimo naufragio, o al suo smarrimento quando si sveglia a Itaca avvolto dalla nebbia.  La sperimenta Sherlock Holmes prima di affrontare un caso che Scotland Yard considera insolubile. Ma Ulisse né Sherlock Holmes sono insieme alla donna, senza alcuna gerarchia, mentre vivono l’incertezza, che fa sperimentare la vaghezza errante del senso della vita, e la loro storia in qualche forma continua ad alimentare l’illusione that they knew what they were doing all along.

La compulsione al senso è il rovescio della ricerca del senso, che culmina nel falso proprio quando crede di catturare la verità. Per questo la violenza è strutturalmente connaturata al gesto con cui mettiamo la nostra libertà nelle mani di chi si presenta come detentore di soluzioni definitive, promettendo che userà la nostra delega per realizzare l’utopia di una società giusta, e illudendo i propri seguaci che con lui saranno al sicuro dal rischio di smarrire il senso della propria vita.

‘You are not a fool,’ dice Mary a Sartaj, e gli ricorda come abbia usato tutto ciò che sa di sapere per trovarsi dove qualcosa poteva cadergli in grembo (drop in his lap). Gli dice, come donna, che questa posizione di attesa ricettiva non è né passiva né folle.
Né Sartaj né Ganesh Gaitonde sono garantiti da un padre, anche se fino alla fine della vita o del libro non rinunciano all’illusione di averlo. Il distacco da un’autorità paterna che può legittimare il proprio essere non è una scelta, perché nessuno sceglie di rinunciare alla culla nella quale si sente sicuro, ma la conseguenza dello sguardo lucido sugli axis mundi di cui i nostri mezzi di comunicazione ci mostrano molti, troppi esemplari. L’axis fallico deve essere unico, non può includere quelli degli altri se non disponendoli gerarchicamente sotto al proprio.
Rinunciare a seguire l’insegnamento di Guru-ji riguardo al femminile, da usare subordinandolo al maschile, implica una nostalgia infinita di padre, di patria, di stabilità dell’essere, e la scoperta  che la nostalgia vive senza contare di raggiungere la meta.
Dopo può accadere un incontro imprevisto, e la parola di qualcuno i cui parenti non erano nulla per i nostri parenti basta a rassicurarci, come Mary che dice a Sartaj che non è a fool:

Mi piace pensare che questo è un amore in un una forma nuova, non la ribellione mortale degli amanti, come Dipika e il dalit povero, simili a Giulietta e Romeo o Laylah e Majnun, né il matrimonio che inserendosi armonicamente nella storia delle famiglie d’origine ne preserva la tradizione, con le sue parole in sordina che scendono come un balsamo, come la maschera di bellezza che Sartaj e Mary si faranno a vicenda, alla fine del romanzo. Forse oggi i veri amanti non si sostengono a vicenda, né uno dirige l’altro, non si inseriscono nella tradizione né la combattono morendo, ma si perdonano per il loro smarrimento. Non trovano per questo né una ragione per vivere, né per morire, ma solo una compagnia che scalda l’anima, fino alla pagina bianca che mette fine alla loro storia.

---

3. IL  MIRACOLO PIÙ GRANDE

Dhàrma: - E qual è il miracolo più grande?
Yudhìshtira: - Ogni giorno la morte compisce e noi viviamo coem se fossimo immortali. Questo è il miracolo più grande. (Peter Brook, The Mahabharata, GB 1989; trad. nostra)

Per un soffio la città non scompare in un fungo atomico, come sono cadute le Twin Towers, come esplodono ogni giorno persone e case e villaggi. Un soffio permette di evitare un olocausto, di tornare a sentire la vita nel miracolo più grande, e nel romanzo di Chandra il soffio si libra dall’incontro gratuito fra i due protagonisti. Allo stesso modo in Red Earth il flusso dei racconti scaturiva dall’incontro mortale fra il giovane Abhai e Sanjai nel corpo di scimmia.

Gaitonde non ha mai avuto una donna, se non per il tempo che le comprava, e la moglie che non amava è morta col figlioletto in una delle battaglie che regolano i conti delle bande criminali. La sola donna che non ha sacrificato alla sua potenza di bhai di Bombay è Jojo, la sola che lo comprenda, la sola di cui riconosce, da un semplice sospiro, se è di malumore o distratta. Entrambi sanno che il loro rapporto esiste a patto che non si incontrino, grazie al limite del telefono, il mezzo che hanno scelto per viverlo e delimitarlo.
Quando Ganesh Gaitonde si rende conto che non potrà impedire l’attentato atomico, vuole salvare Jojo, contro la sua volontà. Il suo potere gli consente di farla portare con la forza nel bunker, dove dovrà restare con a lui. Sono due esseri umani che non hanno mai rinunciato alla loro onnipotenza, ciascuno dei quali riesce a vivere ergendo dentro di sé un axis mundi che non può spostare, indebolire, inclinare. Né Ganesh Gaitonde nè Jojo possono inchinarsi al destino o a un altro essere umano, e quando la donna non trova un mezzo per sottrarsi alla presa del suo amico, lo colpisce con il disprezzo per la sua virilità. La prevedibile collera di Ganesh è l’opposto complementare della violenza di Jojo, e l’arma impugnata, lo sparo con cui la riduce al silenzio è il solo modo che ha per rapportarsi a lei.
Morta Jojo, Ganesh Gaitonde è costretto a incontrarsi con se stesso, perché nulla e nessuno ormai lo separa dalla scoperta che la debolezza che ha fuggito è cresciuta dentro di lui e ora lo sommerge.

In un’antica storia sufi un giovane di Baghdad vede la Morte che lo fissa e temendo che voglia prenderlo monta a cavallo e galoppa fino a Samarcanda, dove la trova ad aspettarlo. La Morte lo aveva fissato a lungo perché le era sembrato troppo lontano da Samarcanda, dove sapeva di doverlo prendere con sé. Nella tragedia di Edipo, eroe tragico per eccellenza nell’antica Grecia e chiave di volta mitica nella psicoanalisi, il protagonista fugge il destino di parricida incestuoso che gli ha rivelato l’oracolo di Delfi abbandonando la reggia dei sovrani che crede i suoi genitori. Sulla via di Tebe uccide il padre sconosciuto e divenendo re della città sposa la madre e genera figli con lei. Quando scopre che la sua fuga dal destino è stata una corsa verso il destino, Edipo si acceca. 
Lo ritroviamo quando giunge vicino ad Atene, vecchio, stanco, mendico, con la sola luce della figlia sorella Antigone, e gli abitanti del demo di Colono inorridiscono di fronte alla sua miseria gravata dal carico di disgrazie che porta:

Non esser nati è condizione
che tutte supera; ma poi, una volta apparsi,
tornare al più presto colà donde si venne,
è certo il secondo bene. 
(trad. di Umberto Albini e Vico Faggi; Sofocle, Le tragedie; Mondadori, Milano 1983; vv. 1224-1227)

La vittoria sul destino di Edipo che ascende al trono di Tebe si è rivelata la sconfitta definitiva. Eppure Edipo dice che non sarà ricordato come empio, perché non è stata sua la scelta di uccidere il padre e generare figli con la madre. La catena delle generazioni che lo hanno preceduto, e il destino che ha raggiunto fuggendone l’orrore, ne ha fatto il vecchio misero e cieco che è ora.
In questa condizione di sconfitta giunge un nuovo messaggio dell’oracolo, dal quale si apprende  che la città che darà a Edipo un luogo per morire sarà vittoriosa, e all‘eroe tragico spetta la scelta.
Edipo respinge Creonte, re di Tebe, che vuole portarlo via con la forza, e maledice il figlio che giunge a supplicarlo di unirsi a lui, perché lo aiuti a realizzare il suo diritto al trono di Tebe Edipo a Colono rigetta ogni legame trad patriarcale di sangue, ricordando che il solo conforto che ha avuto nella disgrazia è l’amore delle figlie.
Non alla sua patria, Tebe, assegna la vittoria, ma ad Atene, la città governata da Teseo, di cui conosciamo la giustizia per come parla a Edipo, l’uomo di dolore:

Sono uno di fronte all’altro vivi per un tempo di cui non scelgono l’inizio né la fine, e la loro comprensione del miracolo più grande rende possibile un riconoscimento che ha un valore più grande dei legami di sangue e della posizione gerarchica in cui si trovano. Il re giusto non è superiore all‘uomo di dolore.
Comprendendo il valore dell’uomo che ha combattuto il destino e ne è stato sconfitto, che è stato re e ora è un lacero mendicante, che ha trovato la soluzione dell’enigma della Sfinge ed è cieco per sempre, l’accoglie perché muoia in pace: questa è la ricchezza che rende invincibile la città.
L’utopia di Sofocle, che scrisse Edipo a Colono un anno prima di morire, vola nella memoria come un’eredità che possiamo accogliere all’inizio del terzo millennio  
Dalla morte dell’eroe che si riconosce sconfitto, e si scioglie da ogni legame di sangue e di stirpe, sboccia l’utopia di una città che non si fondi sul sangue, sul rigetto dell’altro.
Atene non otterrebbe la salvezza se Teseo, riconoscendo la propria umanità, non accogliesse Edipo vicino alla morte, e Mumbai non si salverebbe dall’esplosione atomica se Ganesh Gaitonde e Sartaj Singh non si riconoscessero. Quando il grande gangster in incognita cercava di incontrare Guruji, e Sartaj gli aveva detto che gli sembrava di conoscerlo, Gaitonde aveva replicato:

Nella sconfitta, solo nel bunker, dopo l’estrema vana difesa della sua identità, del suo axis mundi, uccidendo Jojo che vi si contrapponeva col proprio, Gaitonde ha bisogno della sola cosa alla quale non possiamo rinunciare. Non è la profusa bellezza della la terra con i suoi mari, del cielo con i suoi soli, che sente Sanjay prima di cominciare i racconti, che deve bastare e spesso non basta, né la posizione assegnata o conquistata nell’ordine gerarchico fra esseri umani, ma il desiderio di raccontare la propria storia, di lasciarla volare chissà dove, chissà per quanto tempo.

Perché si possa raccontare una storia occorrono un narratore e un ascoltatore, fra i quali possa scendere la grazia di una verità all’unisono, siano un re giusto e un mendicante carico di tutte le disgrazie,  siano un grande gangster e un ispettore di polizia.
Ganesh Gaitonde potrebbe chiamare un giornalista del Mumbai Mirror che starebbe avido ad ascoltarlo:

Se a questo punto volessimo trarre una morale dalla storia, potremmo celebrare l’unisono fra un criminale e un poliziotto, la verità che scende come una grazia per vie diverse da quelle ordinate dai ruoli e dalle posizioni gerarchiche, e ricordare il riconoscimento evangelico del proprio prossimo come specchio di sé. Dovrebbe bastare, ma non basta.
Lo psicoanalista Franco Fornari poneva come compito dell’analisi il ribaltamento della massima latina mors tua vita mea / vita tua mors mea. Osservando come al tempo dei grandi arsenali atomici, nella guerra fredda fra USA e URSS, gli uomini si trovassero per la prima volta di fronte a uno scenario in cui la distruzione del nemico e dell’amico coincidevano, lo psicoanalista italiano si chiedeva se non fosse l’occasione per imparare a rinunciare alla violenza che esplode e si placa nella distruzione del nemico.
Lo scenario che si apre a distanza di pochi decenni sembra piuttosto risultare dalla riduzione dell’esito estremo della contrapposizione, frammentando il conflitto in molteplici scenari, così che si possa continuare a eliminare e convertire i nemici senza per questo scomparire insieme a loro. Né la minaccia della fine della vita sul pianeta, causata dall’inquinamento dei popoli dominanti, ma ugualmente mortale per tutti, può alimentare il pio desiderio di un nostro rinsavimento salutare.
Sentendoci tutti piuttosto ingiusti, perché solo la condizione di vittima sembra custodire una coscienza pura, continuiamo la nostra vita come gli abitanti di Sodoma e Gomorra, nelle città inquinate e ingiuste che non per questo smettono di commuoverci con la loro bellezza.
La contemplazione della bellezza della città è in Sacred Games accompagnata dalla consapevolezza che vederla è una scelta che rispetta la propria sensibilità, non un valore assoluto, da imporre agli altri. Accade a Ganesh Gaitonde quando torna a Bombay:

Accade a Sartaj Singh, dopo aver finalmente sventato l’attentato atomico:

Il miracolo più grande è per il soggetto la realtà più immediatamente percepibile, e allo stesso tempo più difficile da accettare. La bellezza esiste solo se il nostro sguardo la coglie, ma il nostro sguardo non la crea. Abbiamo solo la nostra vita, ma non abbiamo scelto di averla.
Fra l’onnipotenza che spinge il soggetto verso il dominio paranoide, verso l’isolamento del protagonista assoluto della storia, e l’impotenza che ci fa percepire la nostra fragilità come insignificanza, e la nostra sparizione come unico senso, il soggetto tenta, nella mitica normalità, di garantirsi un equilibrio stabile, come se non fosse il frutto di tensioni opposte, incrociate, che si congiungono e si disgiungono guidate da una forza vitale, che può ugualmente sembrarci l’espressione di una luce superiore o di un buio cieco.
 
Resta il sentimento di verità del riconoscimento reciproco, dove Eros come forza di vita si manifesta con una semplicità che sovverte qualsiasi sistema di pensiero. Piccoli gesti, parole che non colonizzano il silenzio, ma lo abitano, e restano accanto, alla fine del libro, come invito a interrogarci su quante volte ciascuno di noi le ha sentite senza ascoltarle, e quante volte le ha dette vanamente.
Le domande di Sartaj e di Gaitonde restano alla fine dei Sacred Games, quel che un poco è cambiato forse è la tensione eroica a trovare risposte, avendo compreso che la soluzione definitiva rivelerà prima o poi il suo asse di sopraffazione, come la volontà di Guru-ji di formare un India perfetta, che procede fra massacri giustificati dalla perfezione stessa a cui aspira.
Sartaj alla fine è una persona normale, come Ulisse quando riprese la sua vita a Itaca, quella di cui nessun Omero può raccontare, è il libro dopo la sua fine libro, è l’invito a raccontare la propria storia, come a vivere la propria vita, lasciando che la mente metabolizzi il gioco sacro del romanzo, che i colori delle nostre emozioni, dei nostri risvegli e dei nostri giorni cupi abbiano sfumature che non esisterebbero se non avessimo letto questo libro.

Dalla sconfitta tragica nella corsa contro il destino viene il principio della salvezza della città, se Gaitonde, come Edipo, non vuole la distruzione di tanti esseri umani affollati in un piccolo spazio, a Bombay come ad Atene. Ogni città rivela la sua bellezza se lo sguardo coglie cosa la rende commovente: le costruzioni di esseri umani separati gli uni dagli altri da secoli e da desideri diversi compone un piano che neppure l’architetto più geniale, l’artista più grande e il dittatore più potente potrebbero eguagliare. Ciò che ci fa amare una città, o la città, è il senso del conflitto e dell’incontro fra generazioni e gerarchie, che la forma e la trasforma, invitandoci ad abitarla e a costruire a nostra volta.

Dopo Ganesh Gaitonde, pari a lui per simpatia e umanità, Sartaj Singh si libera dall’ansia di legittimazione che lo tiene legato alla figura paterna, quando per trovare la bomba deve detronizzare il suo capo Parulkar, dal quale ha imparato tanto. E poi ritrova piangendo la radice, l’acqua sorgiva della sua nostalgia del padre, nel penultimo capitolo, ad Amritsar, e la lascia all’infanzia, al sogno in bianco e nero che ci consola, alla memoria che costruisce l’essere.
L’incubo atomico è finito, e Sartaj mantiene la promessa di accompagnare la madre ad Amritsar, e camminando ricorda quando faceva lo stesso percorso da bambino, per mano al padre e alla madre. Allora non sapeva leggere i nomi dei martiri sikh, ora non può farne a meno:

 
Non si può fare nessun bilancio che faccia tornare i conti delle perdite e dei guadagni in un massacro, in una guerra, in un omicidio. Sartaj piange per i martiri della sua religione e per i loro nemici, e incontra se stesso come in un racconto di Borges-bhai, come Chandra chiama in un saggio lo scrittore argentino, si incontrano i primi fratelli:

1. ‘Don’t you understand?’

 

Ganesh Gaitonde, the wealthy head of one of Mumbai’s most powerful criminal gangs, has secretly collaborated with the Indian secret services, and has had as his spiritual guide an internationally famous guru.  He has discovered that his Guru-ji has organized, with his help, an atomic attack that will destroy the city, in order to attribute responsibility to an Islamic terrorist organization that has been created for this purpose.  The aim of his spiritual guide, whom he had considered as the caring father that he had never known, is to bring about a pure India, cleaner and more orderly even than Singapore.

Ganesh Gaitonde has unsuccessfully tried to stop the attack, and is now waiting in the atomic bunker at Kailashpada, where he will survive the city’s destruction.

 

He is very lonely, however, and his identity has nothing left to support it: only Jojo Mascarenas, to whom he is linked by the understanding experienced in so many telephone conversations over the years, is able to stop his being slipping endlessly away:

 

We were so small, and this world was so vast. Without her voice in my hear, I was smaller still.

I had to bring her in. (Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, 2006; p. 805)

 

Jojo Mascarenas had once tried to become an actress, and then became a success procuring models and aspiring actresses for rich and powerful men.  The most important of these is a former Miss India who has become a famous actress, Zoya Mirza.  Jojo has proposed that she becomes Ganesh Gaitonde’s lover, and has thus found her the financier for her cinema career and for the plastic surgery that has made her perfect.  The gangster first tries to convince his friend, whom he has never met in person, to join him in the bunker.  Meeting with no success, he brings her there by force.

 

She tries to convince him to let her go, but Gaitonde is unbending:

 

 

‘Don’t you understand? I can’t stay like this. I can’t. I have to go out. You can’t keep me in this jail.’

‘Don’t you understand? Up there you’ll die.’

‘So what? I would rather die than stay in this hole.’ (Ib., p. 813)

 

Gaitonde forces her to stay in the modern bunker, which is supplied with every luxury, as an expression of the force that allows her to save herself.  For Jojo it is an unbearable prison.

In this confrontation, their understanding, thanks to which each had been able to understand the other’s mood just from hearing their voice on the telephone, vanishes.

Gaitonde is unable to take Jojo’s words seriously, and tries to impose himself, maintaining that what she is saying is nonsense: he, unlike her, knows what she needs:

 

‘That is complete nonsense. You’re crazy right now. You know that’s not the truth. You don’t want do die.’ (Ibidem)

 

Why does Gaitonde not try to understand her, why does Jojo not take into account the fact that Gaitonde cannot remain in a situation that puts his back to the wall?

‘Don’t you understand?’ they ask each other as if in mutual incomprehension.  Jojo Mascarenas should put her pride to one side to allow him to show his virility and should bear witness to the only truth that he can manifest: only I can save you, and if I hurt you it’s for your own good.  She could manage to understand that his unstoppable blind determination is the only form of love that he can give her.  She could at least pretend to listen to him to save herself.

But Jojo is unwilling or unable to play the game between men and women that accepts ancient limits, which seems ridiculous to her.  Her aim is not to be subjected, to challenge him:

 

Shall I tell you the truth, Gaitonde? You are a coward. You used to be something, you used to be a man, but now you are a trembling little madman hiding in a pit.’ (Ibidem)

 

Jojo knows that his reaction will be violent, and is not surprised when he responds with a violent backhander and follows her shouting words that are the same as those of a sexual violence:

 

 

‘Randi.’ I followed her around the room as she staggered back. ‘You want to see what kind of man I am? Let me show you. No, come, come. Here, you want some more? Who’s trembling, han? Who’s shaking?” (Ibidem)

 

Her mouth bleeding, Jojo laughs: he has not shown her anything, he cannot shock her, stop her, master her, silence her.  The mirror that Perseus used to defeat the petrifying Medusa can also be wielded by a woman:

 

‘You, you’re not a man,” she said. She spat laughter at me, and stood her ground. “You bought women so you think you’re a great hero. None of them never liked you, you bastard. Without your cash, you wouldn’t even have been able to come near them.’ (Ibidem)

 

Gaitonde does not want to believe and cannot believe that she is telling the truth, and tries to hit her again, telling her that he wants to save her.  Jojo agilely dodges the blow and counterattacks:

 

‘Bas,’ I warned her. ‘Enough. Be quiet. Understand - I am trying to help you. I am trying to save your life.’

‘They laughed at you, gaandu. They made jokes together, about what a pathetic, weak little rat you are. You think you are anything in front of a woman like Zoya? She told us that she never got one good night in bed out of you.’(Ibidem)

 

 

His masculine pride cut to the quick, Ganesh Gaitonde forgets that Jojo is as fragile as he is, and that like him she is afraid.  Jojo becomes immense, supported by the mocking choir of all the women that she has procured for him.  If he is unable to subject her, if his pride is humiliated, then it is the woman who has taken away his phallic power.

Gaitonde has always been afraid that Zoya Mirza did not love him, that she faked her pleasure with him.  Watching her filming with Arnold Schwarzenegger, he imagined that he gave her the pleasure that she was looking for and that she faked with him.

When Jojo tells him what he has always suspected, she breaks the veil of doubt that protected him from this humiliating truth.  Gaitonde is now helpless, like a child caught by his mother whilst doing something wrong.

 

In order to understand the fascinating and tragic sacred game of Ganesh Gaitonde and Jojo Mascarenas, we need to open a psychoanalytic map.

The mother has the power to deceive her son into believing that he is her favourite, her only love, and to disillusion him harshly when ever she prefers another, older and more powerful: the father.  An equilibrium is needed between illusion and disillusion, without which the debt that the child will incur to preserve his ability to grow up will be so great that his whole life will not be enough to pay it, to free himself from it.  We may think of our growing up as a possibility that we obtain on the condition that we accept a debt: we have to believe what our parents say of us, whatever story they tell us.  If we are unable to become part of the story that they have prepared for us, we can only close ourselves in a form of autism.  It is better to take on the debt with the hope of paying it off with time, once we are grown-ups.       .

The male character here has a personal history that represents a debt that it is almost impossible to pay.  Gaitonde despised his father’s weakness, and his mother was unfaithful to his father.  One day, his father killed his mother and fled, abandoning him, and his mother supported herself and her child with the help of her lovers.  Her son ran away as soon as he was an adolescent, changed his name (as if he were a child of no-one), and went to live in Mumbai, where he became a major gangster.  In the chapter that we are reading, Ganesh Gaitonde Goes Home, all the power that he has acquired funnels him towards the bunker, where he will meet his destined fate, that very fate that he had been trying to flee.  

He wants to have with him the only woman who has ever understood him, a woman who refuses to yield and claims not to need anyone.  If now he could save her, make her yield, possess her, he would pay off his debt, feel himself a true man, mitigating thereby his lack of confidence in his identity, which he has managed to keep hidden from everyone else, but not from himself.  The maternal feminine power, against which no father has shown himself able to resist, is represented by Jojo and a chorus of high-class randis.  This is unfavourable ground for Gaitonde, but he cannot afford to lose this opportunity, and rebuts the claim

 

 

“That’s a lie. Zoya liked me.”

She threw her head back and howled. ‘Zoya liked me,’ she crowed. ‘Zoya liked me.’ She bent over and put her hands on her knees. ‘Zoya liked me.’ Blood slipped and tripped on to the ground, but she was only amused. ‘Zoya liked me.’ Blood slipped and dripped on to the ground, but she was only amused. ‘Zoya liked me’

‘She did.’ The voice coming out of my throat was strange to me, small and forlorn. (Ib., p. 813-814)

 

 

His voice now reveals that he is losing, but he can no longer stop himself.  It is as if his mother were speaking to him like a child: you’re imagining things, you silly fool... The child no longer has any excuse; he discovers that he has only imagined being his mother’s favourite, for she has instead always made fun of him.  Gaitonde debates this with himself and fools himself:

 

‘The first night we were together, she told me that. She said I was amazing. She did. We did it all night. That’s the truth.’

‘Gaitonde, you idiot.’ She was triumphant now. ‘You fool. She made a chutiya out of you. It wasn’t you, you simpleton. She gave you a glass of milk and badams. And in it she gave you a crushed-up Viagra, one full big tablet. She was going to give you two, but I was afraid we’d kill you. I told her, it’s okay to want to get ahead, you want to go to the moon, I understand, but don’t burst the rocket that’s going to get you there. And it worked. It wasn’t you, saala. It was the Viagra.’

A blue haze of rage came across my eyes. Through it I saw her, standing straight up, laughing. She was not afraid of me. (Ib., 814)

 

If Jojo is not afraid of him, Gaitonde is lost, because he has defended himself from his own fragility by frightening others, or dominating them with money and power.  He cannot buy her, because she is not for sale; he cannot forgive her, as she has no use for his forgiveness; he cannot save her as she prefers death to salvation by him.  Gaitonde is reduced to impotence, and his blue haze of rage is a sort of paranoid madness representing the last bastion of male pride and of the coherence of his identity.  Gaitonde must react, as like every human being he values his identity more than his concrete survival.  The perception of the integrity of his own being or the hope, however small, of obtaining that integrity allows existence as human subjects, even when burdened by heavy debts or when on the edge of madness or death.  If reality were only made up of biological needs and objects suitable or unsuitable for satisfying them, then our world would not be what we experience every day and we would not need to question the suffering and joy we feel, impossible to explain with common sense.

 

Yet not even Jojo, who appears to be so lucid and self-controlled, is following a sensible plan.  If her aim were to conquer him, then she would stop now that he is beaten; instead, she continues to challenge him, tauntingly echoing his words as if they were children making fun of each other.  Does she want to conquer or be conquered?

 

 

‘Zoya liked me,’ she said. ‘Gaitonde, you fool, you think she was some virgin you impressed with your huge manliness. You chutiya. She had had a dozen men before you, and many afterwards, and you were the most pathetic. You were, you were smallest.”

‘Liar. She was a virgin. You told me. She told me.’

‘A virgin?’

‘Yes.’

‘You idiot. How do you think she survived in this city before she came to you? You bhenchod men always pay more for virgins, so she became a virgin for you.’

‘No. I saw the blood.’

She laughed so hard she had to hold on to the side of a table. ‘Gaitonde, of all the pompous, gaandu men in the world, you are the blindest. Arre, inside ten miles of here there are twenty doctors who will make any woman a virgin again. The operation takes half an hour, it costs twenty-five, thirty thousand rupees. And in three weeks the renewed virgin can be ready to spread her legs on a white sheet, so some tiny little Gaitonde can see all the blood and think he’s big.’

I shot her. (Ibidem)

 

 

The shot closes the bodily struggle that destroys men and women when no-one is able to go beyond the mirror-like answerless question: “Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand me?”

Jojo’s blood gushes out from a hole at heart level, making the pain of the deceitful blood from the first night with Zoya Mirza disappear.

Gaitonde no longer has any doubt that he is a man; he can rest now, and lies down alongside her.  When he wakes up, he discovers that he has slept for more than one day and one night, and sees next to him Jojo’s foot as realization returns to him of the fact that he has killed her.

 

But what I noticed all new, all keen and fresh and as if for the first time, was how complicated a thing a woman foot is. It has little pads, and arches, and a convoluted network of muscles and nerves, it has bones, so many bones. It flexes and moves and walks and endures. Its skin takes on the colour of the year it passes through, until the cracks in it form a net as complicated as the life itself.

I held Jojo’s foot. I cupped its ankle and held its cold inertia. (Ib., p. 815)

 

For the first time, lying next to the body of the only woman by whom he has felt himself understood, whom he has stopped next to him with the gun, Gaitonde welcomes life, which manifests itself in all its complexity in a foot, just as it does in a glance or a lotus vine. Where does this salvation come from to reach Ganesh Gaitonde, and where does it take him?[i]

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. The Favourite Strife

 

Ganesh Gaitonde Goes Home; in the bunker at Kailashpada he goes to meet his destiny, taking Jojo Mascarenas with him.  Their fatal bodily struggle recalls Carmen, the story set to music by Georges Bizet (1875).  The plot, with some modifications, comes from the short story of the same name by Prosper Mérimée (1845), and it has been retold and restaged so many times that we may consider it one of the great collective dreams of Western culture.

The most important difference between the couple in Vikram Chandra’s novel and that in Mérimée’s story is that the former pair do not have a sexual relationship.  As Gaitonde and Jojo meet for the first time in the bunker at Kailashpada, their tragedy is not caused by the erotic attraction of a femme fatale.  Imputing the tragedy to the diabolic seductiveness of the gypsy Carmen allows an attenuation of the anxiety of the bodily struggle with a justification that appears biological, almost animal.

By not having Gaitonde and Jojo meet sexually, Chandra allows all the disturbing intensity of the extreme bodily struggle between man and woman to emerge for whoever is willing and able to understand. 

At the end of the opera, Carmen is about to enter with her friends into the bullring where the toreador Escamillo is to dedicate the corrida to her when Don José, who has deserted and become an outlaw for her sake, comes on stage.  Like Ganesh Gaitonde, he has found no space in a consensual male order and now needs a woman to notice his desperation.  This desperate and rejected lover is a terrible danger for Carmen, and her friends recommend her to avoid him:

 

            Frasquita: Prends garde!

            Carmen: Je ne suis pas femme à trembler devant lui...
                        Je l'attends et je vais lui parler.

            [...]

            Mercédès: Carmen, crois-moi, prends garde!

            Carmen: Je ne crains rien!

            Frasquita: Prends garde!

(Carmen, Acte Quatrieme, Scène I) [ii]

Carmen stops in front of Don José: she does not run away.  He implores her, saying that he is not there to threaten her but rather to forgive her and begin a new life together.

But Carmen does not want this:

 

            Carmen: Tu demandes l’impossible!

                        Carmen jamais n'ai menti!

                        Son âme reste inflexible;

                        entre elle et toi... c’est fini
                        Jamais je n'ai menti!  

                        Entre nous c'est fini!

            Don José: Carmen, il est temps encore,
                        oui, il est temps encore...
                        O ma Carmen, laisse-moi
                        te sauver, toi que j'adore,
                        ah! laisse-moi te sauver
                        et me sauver avec toi!

                        (Ib.)[iii]

Don José wants to save her notwithstanding the fact that she does not want to be saved:

 

            Carmen: En vain tu dis: je t'adore!
                        Tu n'obtiendras rien, non, rien de moi,
                        ah! c'est en vain...
                        Tu n'obtiendras rien, rien de moi!

                        (Ib., Scène II)[iv]

In order for blood not to flow, woman must here lapse into silence.  His word must prevail – is it not in a Man that the Word becomes flesh? Is it not he that was created in God’s own image and likeness, according to the Old Testament? This truth is affirmed in all possible registers.  An Italian proverb in the Venetan dialect that is still quoted today peremptorily summarizes how a woman should be, and I hypothesize that the same thing is said, with minimal variation, in all the world’s languages:

           

            Che la piasa

            che la tasa

            che la staga in casa.[v]

Nobody has ever pretended that women are never to speak.  It is enough to think of the great Scheherazade, whose words are enough to make up The Thousand and One Nights; the priestess Diotima, who reveals the nature of Eros in Plato’s Symposium; or the sibyls, who were consulted whenever knowledge other than that commonly accessible was needed.  But in the patriarchal order women must close their mouths so that the male word can prevail.  Female silence too, if it does not imply submission, is intolerable for men.  Scheherazade tells stories every night, but after having asked the sultan’s permission, and with dawn she lapses into silence: the sultan can thus go to exercise his power feeling himself fully able to encompass her. [vi]

Unlike Socrates’ interlocutors, Diotima knows the truth about the nature of Eros, but it is Socrates who reports her words, including her in his own discourse.  The sibyls’ words were precious, but through their mouths the god Apollo was speaking.  The female oracles of antiquity lived apart from the cities, in places that were carefully marked out or hard to reach.

If a woman spoke with her own voice, without accepting male domination, she could only be a character in a tragedy, even if what she spoke was the truth.  The soothsayer Cassandra, who had not respected the will of Apollo, lived in the city of Troy foretelling the future, but was condemned never to be believed.  Antigone, who had honoured her dead brother’s remains against the decree of the king of Thebes, was put to death even though her liberated words had defended one of humanity’s oldest and most universal forms.

The male subject in the patriarchal order only exists insofar as his word, his body and his law limit and encompass women, condemning them to death if they refuse to allow themselves to be limited. To defend this patriarchal axis, the Inquisition of Holy Mother Church has sent eight million women to be burnt at the stake as witches in the five centuries of its history.

 

What huge murderous power is attributed to a woman’s independent words and desires, if to manifest them corresponds to tragedy, if her autonomy brings about death for herself and others?

This myth of terrifying female power is nourished by other myths, and is fully present in the unconscious of both men and women, impermeable to modern scientific conventions, equal rights and clear critical thinking.  The myth of the wild woman, demonic and damned, wraps around the most external zone of male domination; it is the earth’s terrifying edge that forms the base of the axis mundi, the pivot of patriarchal culture.  Around this upwards-pointing phallic centre is the cultivated and generous earth, wanting only to support it and guarantee that it lasts.  It is made up of those women that are lovely and are silent when necessary, welcoming wives and mothers, celebrated by patriarchal culture as much as the heroic male, who liberates the earth from monsters with wars, scientific discoveries and the wielding of power.  

In this representation, reminiscent of the Ptolemaic cosmos, the male logos rises in the centre supported by the earth, and all of the demons and phantoms that refuse to be colonized or annihilated are pushed to the margins like the sea monsters on the edges of old sea charts.  The demonic female power is the representation of the remainder that culture neither knows how to or is able to dominate, a life force that is unseeing because it is unseen, removed or .  What is called demon is a power that does not co-operate with human order, and this naming has the function of pushing it into the most distant space possible. [vii]. Beyond the borders of the world, or in the heart of its origin, in the female womb: from the body and soul of the woman who does not submit to men lies a danger that overturns everything.  This representation is a terrific structure in male and female psychic realities and can be recognized in every human culture.

 

The hypothesis of a matriarchal society preceding patriarchal society may be considered a myth presenting phallocentric organization as more evolved.  In a patriarchy, women must be lovely, be silent and stay at home, so that her children and husband may leave her there and find her there as they please.  An order assigning to men the right/duty to dominance dates back, perhaps, to the first human records that we have.  In Palaeolithic art women are often represented plastically, with monstrously developed breasts, buttocks and vulva, far more than in today’s sex symbols.  Their extremities are missing and their limbs are only lightly sketched (Palaeolithic Venuses), so as to indicate that they have nothing to do with autonomous movement.  Male figures, however, are often drawn in movement on cave walls, with stick-figure bodies, well-developed limbs and weapons in their hands.  An erect penis often crowns this representation of the male.   

 

The persistence of the myth of masculine superiority, the conviction that the subject of culture is male – the words Man and mankind use the ‘man’ to include both men and women – is still expressed today even in the very moment in which we deceive ourselves that we are looking at it critically.  When we believe that the logocentric and phallocentric patriarchy is something desired by men against women, all we are doing, men and women both, is attributing to the male part of humanity the responsibility for how culture and the social order are: this is an only apparently different way of repeating the supremacy of the male.  To talk of a male tendency to prevarication, dominance, arrogance and war and a female tendency to conflict resolution, meekness and peace means changing the terms of the game whilst leaving it intact.  The myth is so powerful that we can turn it upside down, not distance ourselves from it, and thus it happens that in Europe we have passed in the space of a century from the certainty that women cannot vote to the affirmation that more women in parliament and government means a guarantee of peace.    

What guarantees the permanence of patriarchal culture, the only of which we have any historical record, is the existence of a phallic axis mundi; it would therefore be preferable to grant possession and care of it to women: it is not rare to hear it affirmed that women are considered inferior in order to limit their real superiority.   In order not to ask questions about the imaginary make-up of the phallic axis mundi, we think with laughable naïveté that patriarchal culture has been imposed by one sex on the other.

In my psychoanalytical experience, I have long observed how many women, of every age and socio-cultural condition, demonstrate an unconscious tendency to back up what men say, even when they are fighting him as much as possible on the conscious level.

 

The myth of a unique centre suggests a reading of the story of Carmen as the violent suppression of female liberty by the male.  From this point of view, Jojo Mascarenas is a free woman and Ganesh Gaitonde the representative of a purely male violence.

Can we forget that Jojo, who knows Gaitonde well, provokes him to the point of killing her?

Can we forget that Carmen could ignore Don José and go to see Escamillo kill the bull for her?

When the fanfare and the cries of the crowd go up for his victory over the bull, she is already dead, having preferred to fight Don José.

Carmen and Jojo do not want to be limited or stopped by men who want to save them, protect them, love them.  Or do they want to be stopped?

Don José and Ganesh Gaitonde know the indomitable natures of Carmen and Jojo: why is it them that they want?

 

Don José lives the same tragedy as Ganesh Gaitonde; like him he has lost every certain reference to a cultural system and has left his family and become an outlaw.  But why, like Gaitonde, does he think that only this woman can provide a base for his heart and that only a masterless woman who knows how to tell the truth is able to accept his uncertain soul like a hospitable house? This woman is not maternal, does not want to accept him or give him the time to regenerate himself in her womb.  Or does she desperately want to be a life-favouring womb to him but is unable to succeed?

 

Words reach their maximum violence, and then verbal language gives way and the body enters into action:

 

            Carmen (voulant passer): Laisse-moi... laisse-moi...

            José:    Sur mon âme,
                        Tu ne passeras pas,
                        Carmen, c'est moi que tu suivras!

            Carmen: Laisse-moi, Don José, je ne te suivrai pas.

            [...]

            José:    Non, par le sang, tu n'iras pas!
                        Carmen, c'est moi que tu suivras!

            Carmen: Non, non! jamais!

            José (avec violence): Je suis las de te menacer!

            Carmen (avec colère): Eh bien! frappe-moi donc, ou laisse-moi passer.

            (Carmen, cit., Ib.) [viii]

This male violence is at one and the same time an expression of impotence and a desperate barrier against that very impotence, felt as it is to be the annihilation of the male subject.  If Carmen and Jojo were to understand the weakness of the men confronting them, why should they fight them? Why do they continue to challenge them when they see that they are defeated? Do they want to destroy them or do they want their phallic maleness to demonstrate itself mythically capable and able to contain female destructiveness?

Carmen, like Jojo Mascarenas, does not seem able to bear Don José’s weakness, and cruelly lets him know this, challenging his maleness, no matter the cost:

 

            José (éperdu): Pour la dernière fois, démon,
                        veux-tu me suivre?

            Carmen: Non! non!
            (à demi voix, avec rage) Cette bague, autrefois, tu me l'avais donnée... Tiens!
            (elle la jette à la volée)

            José (le poignard à la main, s'avançant sur Carmen): Eh bien! damnée!
            Carmen recule... José la poursuit... Pendant ce temps fanfares et chœur dans le    cirque.

Chœur : Toréador, en garde!

Et songe bien, oui, songe en combattant
qu'un oeil noir te regarde
et que l'amour t'attend,

            José a frappé Carmen... Elle tombe morte... Le vélum s'ouvre. La foule sort du cirque.

            José (se levant): Vous pouvez m'arréter... c'est moi qui l'ai tuée!

                        Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée! (Ib.9 [ix]

The curtain falls; the fatal bodily struggle has once again been won? She is dead, and Don José gives himself up to the guardians of the law, ready to be executed.  He has nothing more to say; there is nothing more to hear.

But in Mérimée’s story, Don José has time left to him between Carmen’s death and his own, and it is the time in which the story may be told.  Just before being garroted, Don José says something to his listener about truth and falsehood that does not cease from making us ask ourselves questions, if we are able to control our fear:

 

Elle mentait, monsieur, elle a toujours menti. Je ne sais pas si dans sa vie cette fille-là à jamais dit un mot de vérité ; mais quand elle parlait, je la croyais : c’était plus fort que moi. (Prosper Mérimée, Carmen; p. 38) [x]

3. The Phallic Axis Grows Dim

 

There are blind antihistorical truths that justify violence.  In Sacred Games, the truth of fundamentalism is sustained by Guru-ji, who has a huge faithful following all over the world.  In order to bring about a pure and perfect India, he does not hesitate to destroy all of Mumbai with an atomic bomb.

The mingling of politicians, or guardians of order, with illegality is elevated to the level of a system.  In his latest novel, Chandra relates to us that though honesty is something that may exist, it has to be spoken of under one’s breath.  Before the nineteen-sixties, it was improper in Italy to discuss sex; people now hesitate before they speak about doing something because of their ideals.  Taking pleasure in doing something that brings with it neither money nor exposure is becoming an intimate act, as Katekar, the sardar who has worked with Sartaj Singh for seven years, knows well.  He is unable to find a response to a relative of his who asks him why he doesn’t leave his badly-paid job, and reflects to himself:

 

Yes, really, Sadrakshanaya Khalanighranaya. Katekar knew he could never confess this urge to anyone, much less Vishnu, becouse fancy talk of protecting the good and destroying evil and seva and service would elicit only laughter. Even among colleagues, this was never spoken about. But it was there, however buried it may be under grimy layers of cinycism. Katekar had seen it occasionally in Sartaj Singh, this senseless, embarassing idealism. Of course neither of them would ever so much as hint at the other’s romanticism, but perhaps this was why their partnership was so enduring. Only once, when they had rescued a trembling ten-year old girl from a shed in Vikhroli, from her kidnappers, Sartaj Singh had scratched at his beard and muttered, ‘Today we did good work.’ That had been enough. (Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, p. 220)

 

Words like those of the Sanskrit motto of the Mumbai police, Protect Truth, Destroy Evil, are part of the grand ideals that in the twentieth century have been used to cover the worst of crimes.  It is right to be distrustful of them, but it is impossible to orientate oneself in life’s labyrinth without giving life a meaning, which functions like Ariadne’s clew, and allows us, at least sometimes, to think that we have done good work.

 

Just as in all of our world, in Sacred Games there are rich people who think only of making themselves yet richer, to the point that it becomes difficult to distinguish the morals of the gangster from those of the guardians of order.  We hear of people of every faith who suffer persecutions and atrocious losses, but no-one thinks to look for justice for them.  There are young people who, in order to escape from poverty or simply from being invisible, are willing to sell themselves to pimps; there is, above all, the immense city, with its luxury areas and its slums, and its beautiful sunsets that are perhaps caused by air pollution.

There are many truths co-existing inside the characters and moving through the city streets like the tendrils of a vine that even winds around itself in the hope of finding something to support it so that it can climb and flower.

In Sacred Games the flower is the salvation of Mumbai from atomic destruction, a metaphor for the radical risk that we perceive is faced by this world of ours – so unfair, so full of contradictions, and so rich.

 

Ganesh Gaitonde, after having held Jojo’s motionless foot in his hand, reflects:

 

I had slept for more than twenty-four hours.

Get on with it. But get on with what? More money-making, more woman, more killing. I already lived that, I had no appetite for more. So, get on with what? Lying on the ground, next to Jojo, I asked myself that. I felt whole again, delivered from fuzziness and distraction and exhaustion by this long rest on this bloodstained ground. (Ib., p. 815)

 

What is this integrity that Gaitonde feels for the first time? How is it possible that a gangster is aware of it after he has killed the friend that he wanted to save alongside himself?

When a part of the meaning of life manifests itself, it has a subdued and invincible force.  No religious practice, no ideology, no scientific research, possesses it.  It has the indomitable force of a budding leaf, and its nature is the same as that of the voice of the intellect that Freud says is soft but that insists until it has gained a hearing.

 

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little. (The Future of an Illusion, p. 53)

 

Something pushes through and only emerges when we renounce to trying to dominate life and recognize that all of the knowledge of which we are rightly proud is impotent in the face of pain and love, of a sense of nothingness and of a communion with the whole world.  The voice of reason is the radical opening to reality, the discovery of the inevitable limits of our presence: our short time that may be enough. [xi] The paradox is that seeking to live ignoring our limits, we only find life by recognizing them.

 

Now that for the first time he is in possession of himself, Ganesh Gaitonde wants to give himself up, and chooses a guardian of the law, like Don José after killing Carmen in Bizet’s opera.  The only person who comes to mind is the Sikh inspector Sartaj Singh, who was on duty when, years before, he had gone to a secret meeting with Guru-ji.

Sartaj Singh doesn’t know why the gangster has chosen him.

The day before he had been called to a man barricaded in his bed room whose wife wanted to kill him and who kept stabbing a kitchen knife into the door panels.  During an argument the husband had thrown his wife’s white Pomeranian out of the window of their fifth-floor flat.

Thinking of the poor little body on the pavement, Sartaj Singh says:

 

Love is a murdering gaandu. Poor Fluffy. (Chandra, Sacred Games, p. 5)

 

When Gaitonde calls him the next day to the Kailashpada bunker, Sartaj Singh does not know why.  He does not know that he once looked at the terrible head of the Mumbai underworld with humanity; he does not even know that he has met him, as he was disguised.  Gaitonde chooses him because he is a guardian of order whose humanity is not cancelled out by his uniform: he is the only person to whom he can give up himself and his story.

 

Sartaj Singh arrives in the Kailashpada bunker and uselessly tries to convince the gangster to leave it.  He remains there, listening to Gaitonde as he tells the story of his first exploits in Mumbai, and at a certain point becomes interested in the story, but when the bulldozer that he has requested manages to break down a hole in the bunker’s walls he stops listening.

 

You’re coming in. I’m still talking, but you aren’t listening to me any more. Your eyes are afire. You want me, you and your riflemen. But listen to me. There is a whirlwind of memories in my head, a scatter of tattered faces and bodies. I know how they skirl through each other, their connections and their disjunctions, I can trace their velocities. Listen to me. If you want Ganesh Gaitonde, then you have to let me talk. Otherwise Ganesh Gaitonde will escape you, as he escaped every time, as he escaped every last assassin. Ganesh Gaitonde escaped even me, almost. Now, at this last hour, I have Ganesh Gaitonde, I know what he was, what he became. Listen to me, you must listen to me. But you are now in the bunker. (Ib., p. 817)

 

What is the purpose of telling the story of a life?

Even though Sartaj is no longer listening to him, as he has his work to do, the discovery of the bunker and the two people in it is the start of the foiling of Guru-ji’s atomic attack, involving policemen, gangsters and secret agents, people from every religion and faith, ne’er-do-wells and idealists, men and women...  Gaitonde gives himself up to Sartaj, who completes the task of stopping an attack that is so terrifying as to seem only possible in a film.  The head of the Mumbai underworld had tried to defeat the fundamentalist Guru-ji, and his defeat is the starting point for the Sikh sardar’s success.

Gaitonde’s bequest is an act of faith without any guarantee, just like any true gift from one person to another.  Sartaj’s impatience does not stop the gift reaching its destination:

 

Under each step of yours, I can see dozens of my years pass. I can see it all together now, from the very beginning to the first house I built for myself, my first home in Gopalmath. (Ibidem)

 

In the time that it takes to take a step, a dozen years pass for Gaitonde.  Within the pages of a book that only takes up a little less than ten cubic centimetres for all that, like of Chandra’s novels, it is big, a mass of interweaving stories are found, an intricate labyrinth of lives, pain, disappointed hopes, deaths and hopes, heavens, sewers, luxurious rooms...   Vikram Chandra’s ability to keep the thread of all these stories together is his extraordinary power as a narrator.  Rather than an omniscient narrator in the classic canonical tradition, Chandra seems to be a listener renarrating stories without taking possession of them, welcoming them instead, taking care of them like a gardener in order that they flower.

 

Each Inset is so rich as to make one think of a rough sketch for a new novel, but although the pages multiply space, Sartaj Singh’s investigation and the gangster’s story claim the majority of the narration.  No-one is listening to him, but Gaitonde goes on speaking:

 

Here is the pistol. The barrel fits snugly into my mouth. I think of what Jojo would say: Bastard, you’re scared or what? You want me to do it for you?

No, Jojo. I’m not afraid.

Sartaj, do you know why I do this? I do it for love. I do it becouse I know who I am.

Bas, enough. (Ibidem)

 

The magical force of literature may still be experienced today: the expanses of time that comes pouring out in a river of words, one person alone narrating, aware of the fact the he or she is collecting the words of many people, of all people.  There is an interesting coincidence: Chandra’s two big novels fall either side of two centuries, two millennia.  As in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), in Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) the protagonist is dying and recounts a whole novel in the first person.

In Sacred Games a narrator dies at the end of the second chapter: what does this mean?

The chapters that Ganesh Gaitonde narrates in the first person alternate with the events involving the Sikh sardar, reaching thereby almost the end of the novel, and the topological equivalence between the Sikh’s sardar’s footsteps and the dozens of years of life, or chapters, is only announced before the salvation chapter.  The person to whom Ganesh Gaitonde’s story is addressed both is and is not inside the novel: it is us, the readers, as grasping this topological time Vikram Chandra has been able to listen to it and recount it to us.

In Sacred Games, there are large-scale representations of the dramas afflicting our global world, the contradictions of history, but the flower blossoms thanks to Chandra’s ability to go down into the tiny infinite drama of the subject: here the world dies, resprouts and is reborn.  

 

There exists a linear, irreversible time and a regular, measurable, space.  It is possible to build watches that are ever more precise and to measure things unthinkable a century ago.  Knowledge extending beyond the limits of our perception disturbs us, especially when applied to our minds.  This is the theme of the Inset The Great Game, in which K.D. Yadev, director of the Indian secret service, is dying from a disease that is destroying his mind.

We may consider K.D. a model of maleness due to his intelligence, ability to command, compassion and love for his nation.  His faith is fading, not because he is dying, but because he can no longer distinguish present reality from long-ago memories:

 

K.D. Yadav now has memory, but not sequence. He has elements, but not the distance between them. To him the past is no longer separated from the present by a distinct and comfortable boundary, everything is equally present, all things are connected and are here. Why? What’s happened to me?K.D. can’t remember. But he can remember. (Ib., p. 298)

 

How are two opposing affirmations possible? Can we say that one is true and one false?

 

...He is in a hospital bed in Delhi, losing his mind.

He considers the phrase: to lose your mind. What would be left, if you misplaced your mind? If there is no mind, is there still a self? He remembers the parable, that to know the I there must be another I, an eye that watches the birds of the self feasting on the nectar of the world. But will there still be a watcher if you take these mind-structures away, these façades of language, these foundations of logic, these narratives of cause and effect? What will be left when it all comes crashing down? Bliss, or numbness? A presence, or an absence? ‘The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.’ (Ib., pp. 305-306)

 

Control escapes K.D. Yadav, and what he understands finds an explanation in parable, whilst his memories crowd uncontrollably.

Where do stories dwell, if they continue when the mind has lost control over reality and self-expression?

Stories have one root in dreams, one in delirium; they have roots everywhere in daily reality, allowing our character to emerge with all its otherwise unnameable twists, and can at once hide and unmask our souls.

In what part of the mind do stories dwell?

 

With every one of Sartaj’s steps in the Kailashpada bunker, Ganesh Gaitonde remembers a dozen years.  Memory is like a book: it is enough to open it and leaf through in order to visit countries and cities, see once again those we love and have lost, feel once more pain and defeat.  Memory is immense; it expands and contracts infinitely, but if our brain is switched off then everything disappears. 

Writing increases the subject time; it carries its story across generations and allows it to cross borders undreamt of in life.  The communication made possible today by the web, the immense quantity of information that we can store in a small PC: these things are miraculous, but they are a realization of the same human desire that led to the invention of writing.  Our mind accepts and reproduces the immense game of life, and literature is the living mirror of its breath.

Even if Sartaj Singh does not have time to hear Gaitonde’s story, it is out of his determination to deliver his story and himself that the investigation is born  that will lead to the Sikh inspector’s saving Mumbai from the atomic explosion and finding love once again when he meets Mary Mascarenas, Jojo’s sister.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Another Day

 

With psychoanalysis, Freud started a radical revolution regarding the question of what the mind is, not only the subjects’ psychological life, but also their culture.  Contemporary neurology proposes models far more similar to those of psychoanalysis than to those proposed by medicine in Freud’s day. 

The borders between normality and madness show themselves to be similar to those separating nations or social classes.  They exist, but they change with time; no longer representing a certainty, they fade like the distinct and comfortable boundary between past and present in K.D. Yadav’s mind.

 

If borders fall, we can experience the joy of broadening our horizons, but we must also face the uncertainty of our identity, which loses its traditional waymarks.  In his novels Vikram Chandra seems to have contemplated every character, great and small, before telling their story and showing us their faith, simple or complex as it may be: no-one is condemned; no-one is saved.  There are characters that survive, like Sartaj Singh and Mary Mascarenas; there are others that die, like Ganesh Gaitonde and Jojo, to whom we have compared Don José and Carmen.

We have mentioned Prosper Mérimée’s story, in which Don José says that Carmen had always lied, yet he had always believed her:

 

I believed her:  it was stronger than me. (Cit.)

 

In a patriarchy, the domination of women is supported by the attribution to the male sex of a greater reasoning power.  Man is born first, as in the Old Testament, and woman is formed from a part of him.  It may be remembered that in pre-modern western medicine the sex of the child depended on the temperature of the mother’s womb at the moment of conception: if it was not hot enough, then the foetus was able to grow, but the genitalia were unable to emerge and remained inside the body.  The child born was thus female, minus habens with respect to the male.  It may also be remembered that ovulation was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century: before that, it was thought that sperm contained the homunculus and that the woman was to the child as earth is to the seed.  A couple’s infertility could thus always be attributed to the woman’s sterility.  

We have to understand how science is based upon cultural myths and how no human thought is possible except within a cultural myth.  The primacy of affect with respect to thought processes is ever more evident, even for those who are unaware that Freud provides its first and most decisive theorization.

 

This understanding implies a suspension of judgement about what is true and false and what is real and what imaginary.  But this does not mean being unaware of the difference between good and evil, because doubting which is the right direction to take in life’s labyrinth is not a form of ethical relativism, as if accepting the radical questioning of our epoch were less courageous than choosing sides under the flag. 

The phallic axis mundi, the pivot of patriarchal culture and support of the dominant male, has been examined over the last century just as much as subquantic physics, and its nature, perceived at first as solid, has been revealed as instead resembling a nebula.  No longer making use of the prospectives opened up in all the sciences implies regressing, as has happened, to forms of fundamentalism that terrify us with their irrational and antihistorical violence.

 

To speak of maleness today means taking into account the weakening of the male subject, who has the right and the duty to limit the female word.  It means understanding that the centrality of the single logos, of the phallic axis, is a cultural need that cannot be refused, and that keeping its absolute singularity means reaffirming the ancient maîtrise over what is different, considering it nonetheless minus habens.

For Guru-ji, all Muslims should wiped out from India; for Islamic fundamentalists, the influence of the West should be eliminated from the Arab world; America and Europe try to impose their democracy with force of arms.  Nihil novi sub sole, given that history tells us of alternating empires: even though they may last for a millennium and appear eternal, they die, just as languages do, just as every living organism does, allowing other languages and other forms of culture to develop. 

 

What is new, however, is the fact that an immense number of human beings are able to observe in real time the simultaneous actions of different peoples and cultures, all equally convinced of their right and duty to dominate.  Are we obliged to hope that one of them prevails, so that the logocentric and phallocentric axis mundi may be restored?

Or may we consider the possibility, once reserved to mystics and the wise, of contemplating the great game of life?

If our control turns out to be illusory, if we see in front of our eyes the ruin caused by affirming a unique superior principle, then why should we be obliged to choose sides and to affirm that our way out of life’s labyrinth is straighter and better than all the others? And how can we believe that this gives us the right and duty to impose it with force?

 

Contemplating the foot of the friend whom he has killed, Ganesh Gaitonde wakes up out his dream of power, which has become a nightmare.  The truth that he utters before he shoots himself is the same as that which we can find in the Mahabharata.  When Dharma asks his son for an example of victory, Yudhishtira replies to his divine father: defeat.

 

‘Sartaj, you called me yaar. So I’ll tell you something. Build it big or small, there is no house that is safe. To win is to lose everything, and the game always wins.’ (Ib., p. 42)

 

The sacred game of life wins out over every attempt to control it and to seize once and for all its meaning.

 

The fatal bodily struggle between Gaitonde and Jojo, like that between Don José and Carmen, is the sacred game through which, not stopping at the limits ascribed by a patriarchal culture to a man and woman in a patriarchal culture, they find their deaths.  In pathological terms, it is the fatal meaning between the hysteric and the obsessive.  But this diagnosis does not take into account the fascination exercised by the countless stories that show it in action, and the meeting is not necessarily tragic: we need only recall that it was hysterical patients who led Sigmund Freud, who was certainly obsessive, to discover psychoanalysis.

There is something so vital in these stories that death itself seems to stop and listen, fascinated by the rhythm of the story like the god Yama, who in Red Earth and Pouring Rain sits on his throne of darkness to listen to the stories told by the ape who had been a Brahmin.

What Gaitonde and Jojo find, in each other, for each other, against each other, is their story, which we love to listen to, because in the moment in which we identify ourselves with them and transcend the limits of our everyday experience we are returned to a time common with theirs that remembers them in one of the soul’s tiny yet immense spaces.

The patriarchy always expels what it cannot dominate or control, but the richness of chaos is no less important because of the life of its miraculously regular processes.

When a woman is not considered an emanation of man and reclaims a limitless freedom, she meets the man who cannot resist the desire to love her in order to become her civilizing hero; the vital and terrifying chaos expelled by patriarchal culture returns from unknown lands, from islands where the only people who put to shore are those who have lost their course.

 

Gaitonde has understood the meaning of being near to Jojo in the same moment in which he renounces trying to dominate reality: he has opened himself to the great game that makes all of us meet their own destiny, in an encounter that becomes more tragic the more one deceives oneself that one is able to flee it.  Anyway, even the attempt to flee one’s destiny is a destiny:

 

 Maybe Jojo was waiting for me on the other side. Maybe she would curse me and hit me, but finally she would understand. I would talk her and she would understand, as she always had. It was just a matter of talking, and time. And I would curse her for betraying me, for lying to me. But finally I would forgive her. We would forgive each other. (Ib. p. 816)

 

A force greater than him, Don José said, made him believe Carmen even though he knew that she was lying.  Perhaps the same force leads Gaitonde to understand what connected him to Jojo to the point of killing her only to die a little after her, as if their fatal bodily struggle were shown to be an encounter leading to a new understanding, the capacity to be together, forgiving each other.

 

Two sisters, Jojo and Mary Mascarenas, two protagonists who meet, the Sikh inspector and the famous gangster.  A city threatened with total destruction, a difficult path to salvation, only one couple that at the end is saved.  These are the ingredients of many stories, many fairy tales, but the protagonist does not resemble a hero, even though he has defeated the enemy Guru-ji, and fought against the old king, the powerful corrupt deputy commissioner of police, Parulkar.

At the end of the novel, before the blank page:

 

Sartaj got off the bike. He put up his shoes up on the pedal, one by one, and buffed them with spare handkerchieff untile they shone. Then he ran a finger around his waistline, along the belt. He patted his cheeks, and ran a forefinger and thumb his moustache. He was sure it was magnificent. He was ready. He went in and began another day. (Ib., p. 900)[xii]

No hero ends his story polishing his shoes and adjusting his moustache.

 

A few pages earlier we read of another act that is no way heroic, like that with which a mother or father cares for their child or a healthy person someone ill.

Mary and Sartaj have made love and are now in bed, and she takes out a relaxing facial mask:

 

Mary wanted to put mud on Sartaj’s face. ‘It’s not mud,’ she said indignantly, but that’s exactly what it looked like, mud in a small pink pot.

“Yes, it is,’ Sartaj said. ‘You went downstairs and got it from under one of the plants.’ (Ib., p. 897)

 

The narrative voice shares Sartaj’s viewpoint, who has had Mary at his house for the first time, and the saviour of Mumbai:

 

...had spent the afternoon tidying up and cleaning away the dust that had accumulated during his Amritsar trip. (Ibidem)

 

Having explained how expensive this treatment is in the beauty salon where she works, Mary Mascarenas sets to work:

 

‘Arre, don’t move, baba.’ She dipped two fingers in the pot, and painted the stuff over his forehead. It felt cool going on, cool and smooth. ‘Pull your hair back.’

She worked carefully and slowly, her tongue between her teeth.

[...]

When she had finished, and nodded with satisfaction, he took the pot from her and scooped up a dab and smoothed it along the line of her cheekbone. The stuff was red and softer than ordinary mud, very even and fine-grained, and it went on easily. (Ib., p. 898)

 

This is a reciprocal act of caring, neither humiliating his virility nor making her feel less ready to accept him.  Many pages earlier, the Sikh inspector had confessed to her his uncertainties about his job, telling her that much of it depended on luck:

 

 

‘You sit around, and something drops into your lap. Then you pretend that you knew what you were doing all along.’

[...]

‘You have to be listening, but sometimes the trouble is that you don’t know what you’re listening for. Like there’s a song, but you don’t know what the tune is. So you just have to wander around, looking and listening. It can make you feel like a fool.’

She was very direct now, her eyes locked on to his. ’You are not a fool,’ she said.

It was a declaration, and Sartaj didn’t hesitate now. (Ib., pp. 592-593)

 

Although the hierarchy is dissolved along with the phallic axis, an exclusively male possession, this does not mean that men and women stop desiring one another.

A myth, even if, like an empire, it lasts for millennia, may be a season of human life, just one stage in the sacred game.

 

Salman Rushdie’s above-mentioned novels and, more innovatively and richly, those of Vikram Chandra, offer the possibility of sharing in a viewpoint that enriches our understanding of Western patriarchal culture, which seems to pervade all of the cultures of the planet in the very moment that it is showing signs of its decline.

 

A different perception of I and the self, both difficult and a daily event for those who, like the current author, practice psychoanalysis, finds a profound and luxuriant expression in Sacred Games.  An Indian author, with a culture of incomparable antiquity and richness behind him, after its long struggle with English culture, tells the story of our time and of the male subject in a new way.  The choice of the English language allows translation, in the sense of the Latin transducere, to traduce, an awareness of time and space that allows the subject to renarrate itself beyond the fall of the male phallic axis.

A different way of experiencing time, of including in one’s consciousness the perception of death rather than struggling against death: is this not the meaning that we may grasp in the sadhus who create vast mandalas of coloured sand only to destroy them? 

Sartaj sees them by chance during his investigation, whilst they are creating a peace mandala

 

 

It was restful to watch the fall of the sand from the sadhu’s hands, their sure and graceful movements. After a while, the general structure of the mandale emerged for Sartaj in dim white outline. Inside the final circle there were going to be several indipendents regions, ovals, each with its own scene or figures, human and animal and godly. Between these ovals, at the very centre of the entire wheel, there was a shape, Sartaj couldn’t make out what it was. Outside these ovals there was the inner wall of the square, and outside the square there was another wheel, and more figures, and then a rim with its own patterns, all of it hypnotically complex and somehow pleasing. Sartaj was content to be lost in it.

‘When they are finished, saab, they wipe it all up.’

‘After all this work?’ Sartaj said. ‘Why?’

Ganga shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s like our women’s rangoli. If it’s made of sand, it won’t last long anyway.’

Still, Sartaj thought, it was cruel to create this entire whirling world, and then destroy it abruptly. But the sadhu looked quite happy. One of them, an older man with greying hair, caught Sartaj’s eye and smiled. (Ib., pp. 221-222)

 

It is cruel to make a figure that will be destroyed, as long as one is trying to gain a mastery over life.  But we may begin asking ourselves whether the mandala of coloured sand is not in fact truly useful for peace.  Reading Sacred Games, we may think that it is worthwhile telling and retelling its meaning, like that of the rangoli and of the thousands of humble everyday tasks of men and women whose words do not reach us. [xiii]

Translated from the Italian by Luke Seaber)

 

Works Cited

 

Arabian Nights, The. Translated by Husain Haddawy. Based on the text of the Fourteenth-century Syrian Manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi. New York – London: ; W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.

 

Albertazzi, Silvia,  and Adalinda Gasparini, Il romanzo new-global. Storie di intolleranza, fiabe di comunità; Pisa: ETS, 2003.

 

Carmen (1875), par Henri Meilhac et Ludovic Halévy. Musique de Georges Bizet. Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, 2002; http://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/reserves/cd2283/text/act04.html

 

Chandra, Vikram, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. London: Faber and Faber, 1995

Chandra, Vikram, Sacred Games. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

The Future of an Illusion. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 21. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1968.

 

Gasparini, Adalinda Farewell, Father Œdipus. Freedom and Uncertainty in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games; to be published in the anthology Exploring Hidden Connections: Critical Insights into Vikram Chandra’s Fiction, edited by Sheobhushan Shukla,  Anu Shukla, Christopher Rollason; Delhi: Sarup & Sons.

 

Mérimée, Prosper (1875), Carmen. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1960.

 

Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1981

Rushdie, Salman The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Vintage, 1995

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TEXT AND TEXTURE
ALICE MUNRO, CHILD OF ATHENA

Female ancestry - More of a problem - A sack over her head - A dirty shadow - Noise of life - Save the baby - The joy to find herself forgiven - Female offspring

 

Female ancestry

 

According to the common version of the myth, Athena emerged from the head of Zeus. However this oversimplifies the older story, which was told by Hesiod. Zeus made love with Methis who became pregnant. Zeus learned that the goddess was destined to give birth to a child stronger than himself, so as the delivery grew near he swallowed her, having entangled her thoughts in illusions and enchanting words. This is how Athena arrived through the head of her father, who prevented the birth of a rival male child and held Methis in his own belly, that the goddess might devise for him both good and evil (Theogony, vv. 888-900).

 

One of the basic texts of patriarchal Greek culture tells the story of the female voice mèthis, which means cunning intelligence. This voice is embodied by the uppermost god. The most widespread version of the story denies Athena’s maternal origin. We usually think of Athena as the goddess of war and intelligence. Moreover, we remember that Ulixes was her favorite hero and that Athens, the polis, not only received its name from Athena, but was also protected by her.  However, very few people know that her dominion included broidery and texture.

What do knitted bonnets, sweaters and bootees and soakers, handmade tiny gowns ... with crocheted trimming and minute embroidered flowers and birds and lambs (Munro, 1998, 312) have to do with the Greek goddess of battles and intelligence?

 

Alice Munro, together with very few contemporary writers, does not respect the coordinates of the patriarchal map. She opens a new perspective while rejecting the sublimated icon of an endlessly bountiful mother. In mythical terms, Athena tells the tale of her maternal ancestry, and Metis might even be disgorged by Zeus, who had once forced his father Cronus to reject his own children.

 

 

More of a problem

 

In the book she wrote about her mother, Sheila Munro states:

She never had any intention of resisting marriage and motherhood. For her it was always a matter of both/and, rather than either/or [...] She wanted a conventional life that included a husband and children, and beyond that she needed some kind of protective camouflage to conceal her raw ambition from the rest of the world. [...] Going off to Paris and declaring herself a writer [...] would have been sheer folly, a dangerous exposure. I’ve heard writers and critics who marvel at my mother’s ability to be a writer and the mother of three daughters. I know myself that the domestic life can combine very well with the writing, if you get some time alone. (12-13)    

 

To find time and space to write is not a real problem: when a woman complains about her lack of time and space she is really hinting at a repressed conflict. To give up an already acknowledged talent is the kind of private sacrifice that is required of a woman if she wants to be blessed by a dim household goddess. To allow one’s talent to develop is an experience linked to the anarchic side of the psyche, which can only be steered by the blind god Eros. The golden god, “limb-loosing, tamer of mortals’ and immortals’ thoughts and wise aims” (Hesiod, cit., vv. 121-122), does not care about  household matters or institutions like marriage and family. A true talent, more of a problem than of a gift, affects and inspires Alice Munro, not her daughter Sheila.

 

A woman, says Alice Munro, is the house itself, she cannot do anything unless it pertains to the care of her husband and children. A true talent may look like a mortal enemy, as if this anarchic human side should rule out maternal instinct.

 

Munro’s short story “My Mother’s Dream”, found in her ninth collection entitled The Love of a Good Woman (1999), is about a young mother, Jill. Narrated by her twelve year daughter, the story tells of an event that took place in July 1945, when the narrator was just six weeks old. Jill, who had grown up in an orphanage, had just settled into the house of her husband, an air force pilot, who died before the end of the war. Jill is a violin player:

 

How can I describe what music is to Jill? Forget about landscapes and visions and dialogues. It is more of a problem, I would say, that she has to work out strictly and daringly, and that she has taken on as her responsibility in life.  (1998, 318-319)

 

The artist’s problem of realising his fateful connection with art, requires a woman to answer a major question: can she work both as an artist and as a mother? In this short story there is no man who represses Jill’s desire to play violin. Since her birth, the baby refuses her mother’s breast and the only person who takes care of her is Iona, one of her sisters-in-law: Jill has a lot of time for herself. When she, with her fingers still stiff, but no longer puffy as they were during her pregnancy, decides to play some scales, another soloist comes onto the stage: 

 

I woke without a whimper of discontent. No warning, no buildup. Just a shriek, a waterfall of shrieks descended on the house, a cry unlike any cry I’d managed before. (317)

 

The baby’s cry is a violin solo, so acute that it does not allow any space, any time.

 

The letting loose of a new flood of unsuspected anguish, a grief that punished the world with its waves full of stones, the volley of woe sent down from the windows of the torture chamber. 

Iona was up at once, alarmed for the first time at any noise made by me, crying, “What is it, what is it?”

And Aisla, rushing around to shut the windows, was calling out, “It’s the fiddle, it’s the fiddle.” She threw open the doors of the living room.

“Jill, Jill. This is awful. This is just awful. Don’t you hear your baby?” (317-318)

 

 

Jill is giving up her motherly duties and rights, but the baby still claims her.

This short story is not just a literal representation of a mother-baby relationship, or a paradigmatic one, but the tale of a woman facing a major problem. Its core is the black hole of patriarchal culture, an issue which is repressed because it is impossible to settle.  All that  our culture could not master has been repressed in the obscurity of the woman’s womb. This makes the woman both the origin of offspring, alma mater, and the dark cave that dissolves every living being. This private knowledge is unutterable in  clear speech and only rarely whispered among women, in the secret of their houses. Having grown up in an orphanage, convinced of the fateful connection between her and the violin, Jill was not aware of this problem.

 

The incident of the violin music ruined by the soloist baby is something to be hidden by Aisla, then it becomes a joke she tells her neighbours.

Jill, who had “taken her music on as her responsibility in life“, hears them laughing.

 

Suppose then that the tools that serve for her working on this problem are taken away. The problem is still there in its grandeur and other people sustain it, but it is removed from her. [...] My crying is a knife to cut out of her life all that isn’t unuseful. To me. (319)

 

 

Is Munro telling us something about maternity, about individual ambition, about both, or about something else? Munro’s stories do not present any sociological issue. No common sense, no cheap psychology may help to disentangle their closely knit structure. These are the same issues that concern psychoanalysts: issues that must be sought out with the eyes and ears, issues that must be taken on as one’s responsibility in life. dealing with these kinds of issues means giving up any beliefs as soon as they reveal their deceiving nature. It also means freeing oneself from any illusions. In a woman’s life, this new kind of odyssey is written in her flesh and on her page. Alice Munro is one of the rare story-tellers of this choral odyssey.

.

 

A sack over her head

 

Munro is aware of a commonly repressed truth: women constitute the patriarchal order just like men. Women who think of the disjunction between males and females as issued by men are perpetuating this ancient social order: one positively ascribes men their fabulous power in a new way, while seemingly contending it.

No sane man or woman has ever really thought that women are lesser than men. If we look at ancient literature, Greek literature for instance, we find many stories of powerful women in heroic enterprises: without Ariadne, Theseus might never have been able to  overcome the Minotaurus (Ovidi Metamorphoses, L. VIII vv. 152-176); without Medea, Jason could never have obtained the golden fleece (ibidem, L. VII vv. 1-158), and Socrates acquired knowledge about the demonic nature of Eros from a woman, Diotima (Plato, Symposium, 203A-204C). But Ariadne had to be abandoned before Theseus’ return, Jason had to disavow the mighty Medea, and Diotima’s far-reaching knowledge depends on Socrates to get its place in philosophy. Even when a woman does not use her power against a man, even if she devotes all her power to a man, as Medea to Jason, in the end she is unsuitable  as a wife and  a mother. Her father, her husband, her son, or even her lover, need to believe not only that she is devoted, but that she depends on them – the men must feel that they are able to dominate her.

 

 

While women are becoming independent regarding to their rights, profession, economic means, men try to defend their role, grounded on the ancient phallic supremacy. The breakup of a marriage comes from a root so difficult to see that divorce often looks like a tragedy of errors, lacking in sense that two opposite versions try to explain.

 

The title “The Children Stay” (1998) is taken from a line of the protagonist’s husband when she leaves him:

 

“The children,” he said, in this same shivering and vindictive voice. Changing the word “kids” to “children” was like slamming a board down on her - a heavy, formal righteous threat.

“The children stay,” Brian said. [...]

The weight of Mara on her hip, yesterday. The sight of Caitlin’s footprints on the floor.

Paw. Paw. [...]

Give in, give in, get back to them any way at all, how can she not do that?

A sack over her head.

A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.

 

This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. [...]

And still, what pain. To carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and not any possible present. (211-213)

 

Although Paw is not an actress, she will play the role of Eurydice in Anou