Security level 1. Like that of a president. A police officer sitting 24 hours a day outside his hotel room. And on the street and in the Ateneo de Madrid, where he speaks with the writer Javier Cercas, a police army. Sitting in the chair in the Ateneo auditorium, the wounds on his face from the attack that almost ended his life two years ago are still noticeable. He himself shows the mark of the dagger in his hand to the press. And he talks about the miracle of him having regained mobility, strength, in her. And the greatest miracle is that, although he has lost vision in one eye because the young attacker severed his optic nerve, it did not affect his brain by a millimeter. A millimeter, he remarks. And yet… Yet Salman Rushdie is… happy. With enormous humor.
He even jokes about the “army” that protects him, and believes that it is just a matter of being cautious: with one or two people who would have stopped his attacker from running before climbing the four steps to the stand in New York… but no. there were. Bad luck, he says. “You as an audience don’t seem dangerous, I think we’re doing well today,” jokes the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, for which Ayatollah Khomeini launched a deadly fatwa against him in 1989. In his new book, Cuchillo ( Random House), Rushdie (Bombay, 1947) talks about the 15 stab wounds that almost killed him decades later. But he also talks about love, humor, the limited power of literature. And even, and it is the only moment where his face turns sad, that of Paul Auster, his great friend, who accompanied him after the attack.
“Paul read Knife. It had just been printed and I sent him one of the first copies. And I told him, you don’t need to read it. He was already in the terminal phase of cancer. He died on Tuesday, I saw him on Sunday. And the first thing he told me was: I have read your book. It’s the kind of closeness we had. Together with Don DeLillo we were like a little band. Don went to see him on Monday. I had the feeling that Paul was waiting to see us to die. “He wanted to see me, he wanted to see Don and then he died peacefully,” he says in a slightly lower voice.
And he talks about the attack without fear. And with humor. “I am not religious, I have never thought that this life is an anteroom and true life is beyond. This is all there is and that’s why I value it a lot. And what happened in a way proves that I am right. At the time I was on the ground I didn’t see any light. There were no angels. There were no devils. There were no gates to heaven or hell. I did not see anything. There was nothing supernatural. It was incredibly physical,” he smiles. Although, he admits, “the trauma was intense.”
“I was awake until I got to the hospital, where they put me to sleep. But I don’t have the typical effects of post-traumatic stress, such as replaying what happened over and over again in my mind. It seems that I have recovered. There was the possibility that in acts like this I would return to experience what happened, but it has not happened and I think it is because I have written the book: now I am not talking about the fact, but about the book. Instead of talking about someone who is on the ground bleeding, I am talking about someone who has written a. book about someone lying on the ground bleeding. That helps me,” he admits.
And in that sense he says that “the book is a way of facing it and going further. I’m basically a novelist. When I started being a writer, it never occurred to me that I would write about myself. It didn’t seem interesting to me. Then, unfortunately, I acquired an interesting life. And I thought, well, since I’m a writer, I want to be the person who tells this story.”
A person who, he admits, finds it difficult to understand the rise of fanaticism, populism, nationalism: “Of course it surprises me because I am a creature of the sixties. He was 21 years old in 1968, the year of the revolutions. And we believed then that the world was better. All kinds of things pointed to the world going in the right direction. The first feminist generation, America’s civil rights revolution. Well, we were wrong, it seems. It’s amazing to see what’s happening now. Back then religion was not an issue. Nobody talked about her. The idea that it was going to become part of people’s fundamental thinking seemed impossible. “Again, we were wrong.”
And today is a time, he warns, “very dangerous for artists,” be it China, Russia, some countries in Africa and in certain places in the Islamic world. “Ironically, on the day of the attack I was at that event to talk about the network of refuge cities for persecuted writers, to talk to the man who heads the project in one of those cities, Pittsburgh. “It was very ironic that we were going to talk about protecting some people and that I was the one who actually needed protection.”
Of course, it was difficult to imagine, he admits, that after dismantling six attempts at serious attacks against him in the first years, the attack was going to come a long time after a 24-year-old boy “with no criminal record, a boy who had gone to visit his father to Lebanon, to a town dominated by Hezbollah four years before the attack, and returned to New Jersey changed and lived a very isolated life in the basement of his mother’s house, playing video games like Call of Duty, in which you kill to a hundred people a minute, and I know this because my son plays, and listening to some radical clergy on the internet.”
And, he asks himself, “how to explain that a 24-year-old boy who has not bothered to know anything about me decides to take the leap to murder?” He himself has given an answer in the book by inventing a dialogue with him. “I have turned him into a fictional character, now he belongs to me. That’s my revenge,” he smiles.
Javier Cercas agrees with him on this idea. In her talk with him, presented by Montserrat Domínguez, she emphasizes that Cuchillo “is not a minor book, it is extraordinary, it tells the story of a transformation, a metamorphosis. It is a defense of intelligence, of the words of a great writer against the barbarity of fanaticism. And if I had to hurry, I would say that this book is an act of revenge because with literature we often take revenge on reality. It is an act of defense and revenge. And alchemy: because it transforms horror and violence into beauty and meaning.”
A book that, he concludes, surprises, because the people who read it… laugh: “Rushdie, like the great novelists, from Cervantes to Kafka or García Márquez, is a humorist, and his books are extremely funny. And that’s what fans hate. “To protect Rushdie is to protect joy, laughter, the will to live.”