Roberto Calasso: Ka

Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony , which was the winner of France’s Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger.

Suddenly an eagle darkened the sky. Its bright black, almost violet feathers made a moving curtain between clouds and earth. Hanging from its claws, likewise immense and stiff with terror, an elephant and a turtle skimmed the mountaintops. It seemed the bird meant to use the peaks as pointed knives to gut its prey. Only occasionally did the eagle’s staring eye flash out from behind the thick fronds of something held tight in its beak: a huge branch. A hundred strips of cowhide would not have sufficed to cover it.

Garuḍa flew and remembered. It was only a few days since he had hatched from his egg and already so much had happened. Flying was the best way of thinking, of thinking things over. Who was the first person he’d seen? His mother, Vinatā. Beautiful in her tininess, she sat on a stone, watching his egg hatch, determinedly passive. Hers was the first eye Garuḍa held in his own. And at once he knew that that eye was his own. Deep inside was an ember that glowed in the breeze. The same he could feel burning beneath his own feathers.

Then Garuḍa looked around. Opposite Vinatā, likewise sitting on a stone, he saw another woman, exactly like his mother. But a black bandage covered one eye. And she too seemed absorbed in contemplation. On the ground before her, Garuḍa saw, lay a great tangle, slowly heaving and squirming. His perfect eye focused, to understand. They were snakes. Black snakes, knotted, separate, coiled, uncoiled. A moment later Garuḍa could make out a thousand snakes eyes, coldly watching him. From behind came a voice: “They are your cousins. And that woman is my sister, Kadrū. We are their slaves.” These were the first words his mother spoke to him.

Vinatā looked up at the huge expanse that was Garuḍa and said: “My child, it’s time for you to know who you are. You have been born to a mother in slavery. But I was not born into slavery. I and my sister Kadrū were brides of Kaśyapa, the great ṛṣi , the seer. Slow, strong, and taciturn, Kaśyapa understood everything. He loved us, but apart from the absolute essentials took no care of us. He would sit motionless for hours, for days — and we had no idea what he was doing. He held up the world on the shell of his head. My sister and I longed to be doing something with ourselves. An angry energy drove us from within. At first we vied for Kaśyapa’s attention. But then we realized that he looked on us as clouds do: equally benevolent and indifferent to both. One day he called us together: it was time for him to withdraw into the forest, he said. But he didn’t want to leave without granting us a favor. Immediately we thought of ourselves all alone, amid these marshes, these woods, these brambles, these dunes. Kadrū needed no prompting: she asked for a thousand children, of equal splendor. Kaśyapa agreed. I too was quick to decide: I asked for just two children, but more beautiful and powerful than Kadrū’s. Kaśyapa raised his heavy eyelids: ‘You will have one and a half,’ he said. Then he set off with his stick. We never saw him again.”

Vinatā went on: “My child, I have kept watch over your egg for five hundred years. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to you as happened to your brother Aruṇa. Impatience got the better of me, and I opened his egg too soon. Only then did I understand what a ṛṣi from a distant land, a pale and angular seer, will say one day: that impatience is the only sin. Thus was the lower half of Aruṇa’s body left unformed. No sooner had he seen me than my first child cursed me. I would be my sister’s slave for five hundred years. And at the end of that time I would be saved by my other child, by you. This said, Aruṇa ascended toward the sun. Now you can see him cross the sky every day. He is Sūrya’s charioteer. He will never speak to me again.”

Vinatā went on: “We were the only human beings, myself and Kadrū, with a thousand black snakes about us, all of them the same, and your egg maturing imperceptibly in a pot of steaming clay. Already we loathed each other, we two sisters. But we couldn’t do without each other. One evening we were squatting down on the shore of the ocean. You know that I am also called Suparṇī, Aquilina, and perhaps that’s why I’m your mother. There’s nothing my eye doesn’t see. Kadrū has only one eye, she lost the other at Dakṣa’s sacrifice — oh, but that’s a story you could hardly know… Yet she too has very keen sight. One evening we were heading in the same direction, bickering and bored as ever, our eyes scanning the waters of the ocean, seeking out the creatures of the deep, the pearls. A diffuse glow in the depths led us on. We didn’t know where it came from. Then we turned to gaze at the ocean’s end, where sea joins sky. Two different lights. A sharp line separated them, the only sharp line in a world that was all vain profusion. Suddenly we saw something take shape against the light: a white horse. It raised its hooves over waters and sky, suspended there. Thus we discovered amazement. Beside the bright horse we glimpsed something dark: a log? its tail? Everything else was so distinct. That was what the world was made of, as we saw it: the expanse of the waters, the expanse of the sky, that white horse.”

Garuḍa stopped her: “Who was the horse?” “I knew nothing at the time,” Vinatā said. “Now I know only that this question will haunt us forever, until time itself dissolves. And that final moment will be announced by a white horse. All I can tell you now, of the horse, is what it is called and how it was born. The horse is called Uccaịśravas. It was born when the ocean was churned.” Listening to his mother, Garu̩a was like a schoolboy who for the first time hears something mentioned that will loom over his whole life. He said: “Mother, I shall not ask you any more about the horse, but how did it happen, what was the churning of the ocean?” Vinatā said: “That’s something you’ll have to know about, and you’ll soon understand why. You are my son — and you were born to ransom me. Children are born to ransom their parents. And there is only one way I can be ransomed by giving the soma to the Snakes. The soma is a plant and a milky liquid. You will find it in the sky; Indra watches over it, all the gods watch over it, and other powerful beings too. It’s the soma you must win. The soma is my ransom.”

Vinatā had withdrawn deep within herself. She spoke with her eyes on the ground, almost unaware of the majestic presence of her son, his feathers quivering. But she roused herself and began talking again, as though to a child, struggling both to be clear and to say only the little that could be said at this point: “In the beginning, not even the gods had the soma . Being gods wasn’t enough. Life was dull, there was no enchantment. The Devas, the gods, looked with hatred on the other gods, the Asuras, the antigods, the first-born, who likewise felt keenly the absence of the soma . Why fight at all, if the desirable substance wasn’t there to fight for? The gods meditated and sharpened their senses, but there would come the day when they wanted just to live. Gloomily, they met together on Mount Meru, where the peak passes through the vault of the heavens to become the only part of this world that belongs to the other. The gods were waiting for something new, anything. Viṣṇu whispered to Brahmā, then Brahmā explained to the others. They had to stir the churn of the ocean, until the soma floated up, as butter floats up from milk. And this task could not be undertaken in opposition to the Asuras, but only with their help. The pronouncement ran contrary to everything the Devas had previously thought. But in the end, what did they have to lose, given that their lives were so futile? Now they thought: Anything, so long as there be a trial, a risk, a task.”