“I must admit that, on the occasion of our first meeting after the atrocity, I expected to find you changed, in some ways reduced to size. Not by chance: you were and are intact, still completely intact. And I thought, amazed: he is up to the task of the situation”.
Martin Amis, letter to Salman Rushdie, 2023
We were all getting older, he said Salman Rushdie. “And the situation certainly won’t improve.” An entire generation is close to leaving the scene, he added. But up to the occasion, as Martin Amis wrote in that long email to Rushdie shortly before the end and shortly after the stabbings. Being up to the situation: it seems to me that everything revolves around this phrase, it seems to me to be the most important thing of all and also the heart of this book. The atrocious attack against Salman Rushdie on 12 August 2022, his miraculous survival and recovery, the desire to write about it but certainly not as therapy: as a story. The novel of a man, or rather of a writer, who has never resigned himself to coincide with his fatwa. That he had his eyelid sewn and then unstitched, and that he has only one thought: to continue writing and loving.
Knife. Meditations after an attempted assassination came out a week ago all over the world, in Italy by Mondadori with the translation by Gianni Pannofino, and there was no way to get a copy before. Not that I wanted to violate any embargo, I just had the urge to read, but I waited patiently, at a certain point I just threatened to set myself on fire, and then here is Knife, which carries in its exergue a phrase by Samuel Beckett: “We are something else, no longer what we were before yesterday’s calamity”. We are different, we have lost our innocence. Salman Rushdie writes that he is very nostalgic for that August 11th, a Thursday night, the evening before the attack, like in that Doonesbury comic strip, in which one character says to another: “You know what? I really miss September 10th.” Because September 11th changed everything and because only on the 10th we were carefree people watching the full moon reflect on the lake, or who were about to publish a new novel, or who knows what else. We all know the calamity that befell Salman Rushdie, including his new black-lens eyeglasses, but his words in describing it are precise, devoid of any heroic flavour, and full of serious amazement: “There is a man who goes to bed. The following morning his life will change. He knows nothing about it, the poor naive one. He sleeps “.
Just before going on stage that morning, he was handed the envelope with the check, the compensation for his speech. Rushdie put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, a Ralph Lauren suit that was later cut up and for which he later felt sincere regret, but now that same man weighs twenty-five kilos less and the bright side is that he has stopped snoring ( he wouldn’t recommend his diet to anyone, since you always have to put captions). The blood-stained envelope is among the circumstantial exhibits. When he was on the ground, Rushdie saw all that blood and thought: “I’m dying.” One guy, a retired firefighter, had his thumb pressed against his neck to keep the blood from gushing out. He was embarrassed to answer the question: how much does he weigh? but he answered anyway, and it was the last thing he said before flying in a helicopter to the hospital and being put to sleep by an anesthetic mask. Buy the book if you want to know the weight in kilograms.
Salman Rushdie survived, “as attentive readers will have guessed”. But before this miraculous survival, and then recovery, what happened? What were those minutes? “Out of the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would see – I saw the black man running towards me down the corridor to the right of the stalls. Dressed in black, with a black mask. He advanced quickly with his head down: a low missile. I stood up and watched his progression. I didn’t try to escape. I was petrified.”
Thirty-three years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence for blasphemy against him and anyone connected with his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, a young man dressed in black who knew nothing about him but had decided to kill him, ran towards him with a knife, and had been sleeping nearby for two days. Rushdie did not see the knife. He felt a big blow to his right jaw and thought: “All my teeth are going to fall out.” Then she saw the blood.
“At that point several things happened in rapid succession, which is why I’m not quite sure of their chronological order. There was a deep wound on my left hand, which severed all the tendons and almost all the nerves.” (and many months later Fran Lebowitz asked him, seriously: “You are right-handed, am I right? Why, then, did you raise your left hand to defend yourself?”). “I received at least two other deep stab wounds in the neck and one in the face, also on the right side. If I look at my chest now, I see a series of wounds in the center, and two other cuts on the lower right; further down, in the upper part of the thigh, another lesion. And I also suffered damage to the left side of my mouth and my hairline. And then there was the stab wound to the right eye, the cruelest thrust: the blade penetrated all the way to the optic nerve, and there was no chance of saving my sight. I lost it”.
The loss of sight in the right eye is not just the loss of sight in the right eye, it is not just the pain, the pain, the (rejected) proposal of a ceramic eye, but it has to do with the nightmare of Salman Rushdie of all his life: blindness. Everyone has their own nightmare: mice, impotence, memory loss. In her penultimate novel, The City of Victory, the protagonist is blinded. That scene was written before August 12th, and before August 12th Rushdie had several nightmares about being stabbed, he even fell out of bed. The worst thing in the world for Rushdie is losing his sight. “And now I found myself without my right eye, while my left, the only one I have left, is affected by macular degeneration, a retinal disease that can lead to an almost complete loss of vision”. Injections into the eyeball once a month and the hope that the situation remains stable, there is not much else that can be done.
Readers in need of splatter details will be satisfied, but so will everyone else, because Salman Rushdie, with irony and with a great and irresistible love for life, reflects on violence but also on what happened to him as a free man and as writer, and reflects on the change that never really happens, because the comforting thing is that you will remain who you are. Rushdie did not become a believer, he did not change his idea of the world, he did not change, as far as possible, his way of life, but now he expresses with great enthusiasm and without detachment his love for his family, for his friends, and for his romantic and all-encompassing love for his wife Eliza, to whom he had been married for a year when he was stabbed and almost killed. But here’s the point: “The most unpleasant aspect of the attack is that it transformed me back into the person I had tried so hard not to be. For more than thirty years I refused to be defined by the fatwa and insisted on being regarded as the author of all my books: five before the fatwa, and then sixteen more. I was finally succeeding. By the time my last books came out, people had stopped asking me about the attacks on The Satanic Verses and on me. And now here I am again, dragged into this discussion again, despite myself. Now I fear I will never be able to evade it again. Whatever I have written or may write from here on out, I will always be the one who was stabbed. The knife defines me.”
This is a writer’s thought. The horror of definitions. He is a man who considers the life of his books at least as important as his own. And if he has to resign himself, then that knife becomes the title of his book. He didn’t just suffer it. In fact, at the same time, Rushdie considers that his books, together with the people who helped him and together with his love, saved his life. In short, books are his only act of faith.
“No, I don’t believe in miracles, but yes, my books believe in them. To quote Walt Whitman’s famous formula: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I don’t believe in miracles, yet my survival is miraculous. Okay, then. And so be it. The reality of my books – my ‘magical realism’, if you will – is now the reality I find myself living in. Perhaps my books, for decades, had built that bridge, and now the miraculous was able to cross it. The magical had become real. Maybe it was my books that saved my life.”.
According to Milan Kundera, who died while Rushdie was writing this book, life is an irreversible experience. There are no second drafts. No corrections are made. Yet, Rushdie writes, he was actually given a second draft. A second try. The question then becomes much more urgent than the knife, hatred, even the truth: how to employ this new round of drafts? Rushdie’s magnificent answer, it seems to me, is: as always. Working and loving. This is what it means: to live up to it. Of death and life.
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