Erri De Luca is an extraordinary and prolific novelist, more than one new book per year, all short like philosophical tales. Having become one of the great figures of the Italian novel, he stood resolutely apart from the intelligentsia. This Neapolitan, living in Rome, born in 1950, has long displayed extreme left ideas with Lotta Continues. Rather than frequenting the Roman salons, he was a mason for twenty years. He has helped the besieged Bosnians and now the Ukrainians. He has warned endlessly about the tragedy of migrants drowned at sea. Today, he can make a living from his pen, a rebellious pen, a sober, essential, poetic language.
His new novel The Rules of Mikado, begins in the mountains near the border between Italy and Slovenia where an old watchmaker spends long periods of time, even in winter. She is a young gypsy who fled her family and her camp to escape an arranged marriage and the anger of her father. The former watchmaker opens his tent to protect her. Then begins a series of dialogues about men and life, an exchange of knowledge and visions – she who reads hand signs, who trains a bear; he who feels like a cog in the machine of the world and who interprets this world according to the rules of the Mikado. He will guide her towards the sea, opening up the spaces of a new world.
But in its second part, the book tells what happened later to the two characters and reveals surprises that shake up our ideas, secrets that we leave to the reader the pleasure of discovering.
Why did you take Mikado’s game as the central theme of your novel?
It’s a game from my childhood that I played — badly — when I was on vacation. It came to mind and I added it to my watchmaker character. There is no other reason. I leave all interpretations free to my readers. In another novel, I talked about The Game of the Goose. This just means that at my age, play becomes more important to maintain the proper functioning of the mechanisms of the head.
Are we parts of a general Mikado?
We are like billions of Mikado sticks thrown on the surface of the Earth and the destiny of each one is to resist the solution of the enigma as much as possible because to remove our stick would be to be removed from the whole, to disappear.
Should we accept chaos?
Everyone tries to give their interpretation to the chaos: some go back to a divinity, others to an absence of justification. I am a child of coincidences. I guess everything comes by coincidence. We could talk about miracles, but I limit myself to marveling at these magnificent coincidences that surround us and make us walk. As a reader I always prefer to stay on the surface of the text I am reading.
Your two characters reveal a double bottom line.
Each of us has a double bottom, made up of secrets that allow us to stand tall, ready for the days ahead. The unspoken is the strongest thing in the human constitution. We cannot know everything about the Other. The charm is in the misunderstanding, not in the understanding. Wanting to understand everything about the other is not only impossible and presumptuous but it is also an exercise of impossible power over the very consistency of the other. In this novel, the characters have double bottoms which belong to the history of the 20th century. What brought me to this story format is the mystery within each person that makes them interesting. Only fools are without a false bottom. We all have this false bottom that protects us. I understand my double bottom very well, which is not Freud’s unconscious. I am well aware of my double bottom and that it must stay there.
Meeting with the great writer Erri De Luca: “My life was a game of goose without freedom”
The character of the watchmaker welcomes the Other in his difference. It’s hospitality.
Opening your tent to others is the ground floor of civilization, welcoming someone who needs shelter, a piece of bread, a glass of water. . The minimum level of our civilization. The civilizations of the Mediterranean were founded on the movement of communities from one place to another under the force of necessity and welcome. A fraternal welcome, but also interested. When Abraham begins to make his endless pilgrimage, he arrives in places where he is welcomed because he is able to dig wells, to find hidden water. His technique enriches the place. Welcoming first enriches the one who welcomes. Today, we make it difficult for others to pass through, except for example for their food and we open restaurants to discover the food of those we refuse to welcome. It’s a way of gently introducing the presence of others. The entire civilization of the Mediterranean is a civilization of passage.
In your novel, the rationalist watchmaker exchanges with the gypsy woman.
She teaches him very practical things and he teaches her to read. I had a friend who spent a lot of time in prison for political reasons. She told me that the luck when you are isolated in a cell is to share it with a gypsy because she is capable of inventing everything and creating a house in a cell. True encounter does not happen through similar people but through different people. The fertility of the human species came through the mixture of aliens. Our blood shows that we are inhabited by peoples who have mixed, we are magnificent bastards of the Mediterranean. Pure blood is the dead end of genetics.
You know you have become old when people use the word “again” for you.
But the borders are closing and the sea has become a cemetery.
Migration flows cannot be strangled. It is obvious. We call a migration emergency phenomena that have been occurring regularly for decades. The Mediterranean is my sea, the one in which I grew up. It has become worse than a cemetery, a mass grave. Because in a cemetery there is at least an identification of the dead. However, here, there is a mass grave for thousands of anonymous bodies, drowned by a deliberate lack of help, a deliberate omission organized by the Italian and other governments. But despite this, the migratory flow is unstoppable.
Where do your political and humanitarian commitments come from?
There are agendas that force me to invent a personal or collective response. My responsibility is to respond to it as I did by going on the Doctors Without Borders rescue boat to respond to the irresponsibility of the emergency services. These are the events that stare at me and prevent me from looking away. I make commitments out of biological necessity, that’s all. There is a Yiddish proverb that says “if we have to do it, we can do it”. I reverse the proverb and say “if I can do it, I must do it”. With Lotta continued, I was lucky to be able to respond in a collective with great militant strength at the time. I shared the agenda of a generation. Now I’m alone and I do what I can. I can take my time going to Ukraine by buying a truck and loading it with essential things.
Are books the answer?
No, books are a wonderful way to accompany my life, to keep myself company by writing and even more by reading. Because the definition I give to myself is to be first a reader before calling myself a writer. I read a lot more than I write. I can read in other languages while I can only write in Italian. Books gave me a happiness adapted to my character, to my way of isolating myself even in the chaos of life around me. When I was a worker, I deepened this capacity for isolation through books and writing. As a reader, I take pages that give me happiness, that make me completely forget the station where I have to get off. If the book carries me, I am happy, if I have to carry the book, then it falls from my hands.
The world is getting worse and worse, crises and wars are piling up. How do you see our future?
The history of human societies has this pendulum which swings between the end of destruction and the end of peace and construction. Wars all end one day, that’s for sure, and at the end of each war, we wonder why they took place and what always remains unanswered, because faced with the systematic destruction of works and human lives, the reason for which these justifications for the war were put in place no longer hold, it has become a pretext. The news will be when the war ends, that moment of wonder of relief, of desire to right the wrongs.
Guilt and sensuality of Erri De Luca
Your watchmaker talks a lot about old age
He said to the gypsy: It’s when someone speaks to you and they slip in the word “encore”. Are you still working? Are you still camping, doing this and that? If anyone asks me how I’m doing, I say, “Still, I’m still here.”
You know you’ve become old when people use the word “still” for you. But for me, old age is an experimental age, because we no longer have any reference points. The old age of others teaches me nothing. Whereas when I was young, other young people could be role models. So I invent my old age which I see as the rise of a hill, when we gradually leave the dense trees and see more light. Goethe’s last words on his deathbed were “Mehr Licht” (” More light”). At that moment Goethe saw more light than before. Old age is an exciting age to the point of seeing all previous ages as first fruits. We see the future of others, the future of the world as it will be without me. And it pleases me to imagine a future that doesn’t concern me but that I can look at right now. As soon as we imagine life without us as thinkable, then we see this future.
**** The rules of Mikado, Erri De Luca, translated from Italian by Danièle Valin, Gallimard, 154 pp., €18, digital version: €13
