The story of the last battles beneath the walls of Troy was told by Homer, a blind poet; the battle of Kurukṣetra was handed down to us as told to a blind king by someone to whom Vyāsa, the author of the narrative and likewise a participant in it, had granted the gift of total vision: the omniscience of the narrator. At some point of the act of narration, a point that may be moved but not eliminated, we find blindness. Is this simply because he who sees too much, as Tiresias did, is punished with loss of sight? Or is it a hint at something beyond that, something that has to do with storytelling itself? Narration presupposes the loss of the reality narrated. It makes no sense to tell a story to someone who witnessed it. But when the real has sunk away in space and time — and such is its most usual state — all that is left is a dark room where words ring in the ear. Whether that dark room be that of the author, as with the Iliad, or the first listener, as with the Mahābhārata, is hardly important: in the beginning, author and listener merge. All that is really required is a scene of blood confined in a perpetual light, and a gaze that follows fleeting signs forming against a shadowy backdrop.
Satyavatī was dark, beautiful, dressed in rags. She gave off a subtle odor of fish and musk. She didn’t know it, but she was a princess. Every day she ferried pilgrims across the Yamunā. It seemed to her her life had always been made up of these monotonous gestures. She could recall nothing different in her infancy. The only thing the fisherman who had brought her up had told her was that she came from the river. Satyavatī felt this herself. But the fisherman hadn’t explained exactly how he found her: on opening up the belly of a big fish that had swallowed the seed of King Uparicara. Satyavatī rarely spoke. She held out her hand to take the pilgrims’ coins. She knew every inch of the Yamunā’s banks: the canes, the mud, the stones. She had no desires and never thought of herself as any different from her boat or the water beneath it. One evening, toward sundown, she brought her boat to the bank to pick up her last cargo of pilgrims. But this time there was no one there. Then she saw a brahman detach himself from the shadows. His eyes were bright, and he carried a stick. Without a word he climbed into her boat. Satyavatī didn’t wait and pushed off into the open water. As on hundreds of other occasions, she was gazing at the other bank, sensing the boat slide lightly along beneath her bare feet, when she felt two hands on the nape of her neck. A thread of fire darted up her back: or that was how she described this shiver she had never felt before. She didn’t even turn her head as the brahman ran his hands slowly over her. Thin, strong fingers slipped inside her rags. They lay down on the bottom of the boat, which, without veering off course, was drifting toward the further bank. The two bodies mingled with the puddles and scraps of food on the bottom of the boat. They said nothing. Suddenly they found themselves looking up toward the overarching sky suffused by the last light of the sun, already set. Backs on the damp wood, like leaves on a stream, they thought, without telling each other, that they had never known such happiness — that every further happiness must be measured against this. The prow touched the shore. Satyavatī got to her feet to tie up. She held out her hand to the brahman as he left the boat. Her fingers closed on a coin. The brahman looked at her, without saying good-bye. Soon the forest’s thick curtain had swallowed up his vigorous back. Thus was Vyāsa conceived, author of the Mahābhārata and grandfather of its protagonists.
If we go back to the origin of that imbalance that led to the war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas — and this is problematic, since anything any of the characters does reminds us of something their ancestors in various branches of the family did before them; and if then we restrict ourselves to following the line of Pāṇḍu, putative father of the Pāṇḍavas, each of whom bore the traits of one of five gods, we appreciate that that long convulsion of the lunar dynasty that lasted three generations and ended in massacre was triggered by the strange, unreasonable insistence of the king of the fishermen that the offspring of his adoptive daughter, Satyavatī, an abandoned orphan found in the belly of a fish and hence unable to claim any recognizable lineage, should prevail over all others. And, since Vyāsa later took Vicitravīrya’s place when it came to generating children, it was he who championed the privilege of the unknown line. For if Satyavatī presented herself as an abandoned orphan. Vyāsa was the fruit of an illicit love between Satyavatī and an unknown brahman. As the decisive crisis approaches, two orphans, offspring of unknown fathers, assert themselves within the lineage that must save the dharma. The irony receives further and glorious confirmation when five gods take the place of Pāṇḍu, Vyāsa’s son, as procreator, to generate the five princes who will fight in Kurukṣetra. Remote and legitimate, the lunar dynasty lurches toward the spasm of fratricidal war in a multiplication and exaltation of clandestine fathers, who endow it with impenetrable, shadowy powers, as though a slowly and laboriously achieved order needed to nullify itself in a welcoming darkness, the better to regenerate itself in the unknown.
Lying on a bed of arrows that passed right through his body and stuck deep in the ground, his head resting on yet more arrows that Arjuna had shot out of a sense of pity; tortured by hundreds of mortal wounds, which would not kill him until he himself decided to die, until, that is, fifty-six days had passed and the sun began its journey northward, Bhīṣma talked. He talked for hours and days. Around him, in a circle, were his Pāṇḍava nephews, Kṛṣṇa, a few princes, a few brahmans. Worn out, they took turns listening. Bhīṣma talked and talked. Nothing was too big, nothing too small to be named. The encyclopedia of encyclopedias flowed calmly from the mouth of the venerable warrior.
Bhīṣma talked without looking at his listeners. He kept his eyes fixed on the sky, on its blessed neutrality, which mirrored his own. He let the rains wash his bloody scabs. He exposed his old and withered skin to constant sunshine. The doctrines he had to set forth before dying were many and complex. They would be of service to those who had beaten and shot him: the Pāṇḍavas. And above all the greatest of them, Yudhiṣṭhira, who was overcome by anguish and kept saying: “This victory feels like a defeat.” But the only essential thing was this: that the doctrines be set forth for a last time in every detail. Bhīṣma didn’t expect that they would be understood in every detail. He knew that his function was first and foremost that of recapitulating an interminable sequence of truths and precepts that was already melting away in much the same manner as his life, the last hours of which were now trickling from his body. He was perfectly aware of being at the origin of everything that had happened at Kurukṣetra. For if his nephews had fought each other to the death, luring whole tribes and peoples to their deaths with them, if from now on all claims to legitimacy would forever be accompanied by the mocking shadow of doubt, then this was simply because one day he, Bhīṣma, fruit of King Śāṃtanu’s love of a goddess, Gaṅgā, and hence legitimate and indisputable heir to the kingdom, had agreed to renounce not only his birthright but likewise the right to procreate, in order to allow his father to keep by his side that obscure ferry-girl Satyavatī, with her subtle odor of fish and musk, who had usurped the role of his mother and, obedient to the inflexible will of the king of the fishermen who had adopted her, was to become the mother of Śāṃtanu’s successor. At the time Bhīṣma was called Devavrata. But when he made a public declaration to the effect that he was simultaneously renouncing both sovereignty and offspring, after uttering this denial at once so unnatural and unreasonable, depriving him as it did of what almost everyone yearns for, power and women, while nevertheless leaving him in the midst of power and women insofar as he was to continue to carry out his work as chief counselor — after uttering this denial Bhīṣma heard a sigh and a word: “This man is terrible, bhīṣma ’yam!” And from then on, he was simply called Bhīṣma, the Terrible. Why did he do it? Was it just an excess of filial devotion? If so, why was he so determined later on to ensure that the heirs of Satyavatī should in their turn have descendants? Why did he go so far as to abduct the three princesses of Kāśī with their enchanting and childish names — Ambā, Ambikā, Ambālikā—to marry them to one of those heirs? And how was it that he attracted the savage hatred of one of those girls. Ambā, who thought him the most vile of rapists, when on the contrary he observed a strict vow of chastity? And why, finally, when Vicitravīrya, Satyavatī’s last son, died, worn out by his pleasures but childless all the same, did Bhīṣma, again obedient to his vow, refuse to take the place of his half brother, agreeing instead that the queens should accept the repellent embrace of Vyāsa, Satyavatī’s illegitimate and neglected son, to bring forth their offspring with his seed?