The Collected Novels of José Saramago (347 page)

then she moved noiselessly about the room while she took clothes off hangers and got dressed, before going out into the corridor. This is where the night visitor had walked, she heard his breathing next to this gap in the door before he came in and hid behind the curtain, no, don’t worry, this is not another evil assault made by Helena’s imagination, she herself is making fun of her own temptations, so trivial, now that she can compare them with the rosy glow coming in through that window, the one in the living room where, last night, she had felt as frightened as a little girl left alone in a wood in a fairy tale. There is the sofa on which the visitor sat, and it was not by chance that he did so, of all the places where he could have rested, if that was what he wanted, he chose that one, Helena’s sofa, as if to share it with her or to appropriate it for himself. There are plenty of reasons to think that the more we try to drive our imaginations away, the more they will amuse themselves by seeking out and attacking those points in our armor that, consciously or unconsciously, we left unprotected. One day, this woman Helena, who is in a hurry and has a professional timetable to keep to, will tell us why she too went and sat down on the sofa, why, during one long minute, she cozily lingered there, and why, having been so resolute when she woke up, she is behaving now as if the dream had taken her in its arms again and was gently rocking her. And why too, dressed and ready to leave, she opened the telephone directory and copied Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s address onto a piece of paper. She pushed open the bedroom door, her husband is still apparently asleep, but his sleep is nothing more than the final, diffuse threshold of wakefulness, she can therefore approach the bed, kiss him on the forehead, and say, I’m off now, and then receive on her mouth his kiss and the other man’s lips, good heavens, this woman must be mad,
the things she does, the things she thinks of. Are you late, asked António Claro, rubbing his eyes, No, I’ve still got a couple of minutes, she replied and sat down on the edge of the bed, What shall we do about this man, What do you want to do, Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep, I thought I should go and talk to him, but now I’m not so sure that would be a good idea, We either open the door to him, or we close it, to be honest, I don’t see any other solution, one way or another our life has changed and will never be the same again, The decision is in our hands, But it’s not in our hands, or anyone else’s, to make what happened unhappen, the arrival of this man is a fact that we can neither erase nor remove, even if we don’t let him in, even if we close the door on him, he’ll be there waiting on the other side until we can’t stand it anymore, You’re taking a very grim view of things, perhaps, after all, we can resolve matters with a simple meeting, he proves that he’s identical to me, I tell him, yes, sir, you’re quite right, and once that’s done, it’s good-bye and good riddance, please don’t bother us again, He’ll still be waiting on the other side of the door, Well, we won’t open it, He’s already come in, he’s inside your head and inside mine, We’ll forget him eventually, Possibly, but we can’t be sure. Helena got up, looked at her watch, and said, I’ve got to go, I’m going to be late, she took two steps toward the door but still had time to ask, Are you going to phone him, are you going to arrange to meet, Not today, replied her husband, raising himself up on one elbow, or tomorrow, I’ll wait a few days, it might not be a bad idea to let indifference and silence do their work, to allow time for the matter to die a natural death, Oh, well, it’s up to you, see you later. The apartment door opened and closed, and we will never know if Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was sitting on the stairs outside waiting. António
Claro stretched out in bed again, if life really hadn’t changed, as his wife claimed it had, he would turn over and sleep for another hour, it seems to be true what the envious say, that actors need a lot of sleep, it must be a consequence of the irregular life they lead, even when they go out at night as rarely as Daniel Santa-Clara. However, five minutes later, António Claro was up, unaccustomed to the early hour, although, to be fair, when his professional duties demand it, this actor, who gives every appearance of being somewhat lazy, is as capable of getting up as the most early-rising of larks. He peered at the sky out of the bedroom window, it was not hard to predict that it was going to be another hot day, then he went into the kitchen to make some breakfast. He thought about what his wife had said, He’s inside our heads, but she was like that, peremptory, no, not peremptory exactly, what she has is the gift of concision, of coming out with short, condensed, pithy phrases, using four words to say what others wouldn’t be able to say in forty. He wasn’t sure if his was the best solution, waiting a while before going on the offensive, either in the form of a secret meeting, face-to-face, without any witnesses who might blab afterward, or in the form of a terse telephone conversation, of the kind that leaves the other party dumbstruck, breathless, nonplussed. However, he doubted the efficacy of his dialectical skills to put a stop, once and for all, to any plans, present or future, that this wretch, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, might have to introduce into their lives the kind of pernicious psychological and conjugal disquiet of which he had implicitly boasted and to which he had explicitly given rise, for example, Helena, last night, having the boldness to declare, Every time I look at you, it will be as if I were seeing him. Only a woman whose moral foundations had been severely shaken would have thrown
such words in the face of her own husband unaware of the adulterous element they contained, diaphanous, it is true, but highly revealing. Meanwhile, going around and around in António Claro’s head, although he would doubtless angrily deny this if we so much as mentioned it, is the outline of an idea that, out of pure caution, we will not go so far as to classify as being on a par with a Machiavelli, at least not until its eventual effects, doubtless negative, have been revealed. This idea, which, at the moment, is nothing but a mental sketch, consists, neither more nor less, and however shocking it may seem to us, in working out whether, with skill and cunning, it would be possible to obtain from the resemblance, similarity, or absolute identity, should this be confirmed, some advantage of a personal nature, that is, whether António Claro or Daniel Santa-Clara could find a way of profiting from a business that, at the moment, appears not at all favorable to their interests. Since we cannot, at the moment, expect the person responsible for the idea to illumine the doubtless tortuous routes via which he vaguely imagines that he will reach his objectives, do not count on us, mere transcribers of other people’s thoughts and faithful copyists of their actions, to anticipate the next steps of a procession that has still got no farther than the vestibule. What can, however, be excluded from this embryonic plan is the suggestion that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso might serve as the actor Daniel Santa-Clara’s double, we must all concur that it would show a grave lack of intellectual respect to ask a history teacher to take part in the hirsute frivolities of the seventh art. António Claro was just taking his last sip of coffee when another idea crossed his synapses, and this was to get in his car and go and have a look at the street and the building where Tertuliano Máximo Afonso lives. Despite no longer being driven by irresistible hereditary instincts, the actions of human beings are repeated with such startling regularity that we believe it would be permissible, without stretching a point, to hypothesize the slow but steady formation of a new kind of instinct, perhaps “sociocultural” would be the right word, which, based on variants of repeated tropisms and in response, of course, to identical stimuli, would mean that any idea that had occurred to one person would, necessarily, occur to someone else. First it was Tertuliano Máximo Afonso coming to this street dramatically disguised, all in black on a brilliant summer’s morning, now it is António Claro who is preparing to go to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s street without even considering the complications that might ensue if he appears there barefaced, then, while he is shaving, showering, and getting dressed, the finger of inspiration touches his forehead, reminding him that in a drawer somewhere, stored away in an empty cigar box, as a touching professional souvenir, is the mustache Daniel Santa-Clara wore five years ago when playing the role of receptionist in the comedy
The Race Is to the Swift.
As the wise old proverb almost says, Keep a thing five years and you’ll always find a use for it. It will not take long for António Claro to discover where the history teacher lives thanks to the estimable telephone directory, now sitting slightly askew on the bookshelf where they usually keep it, as if it had been replaced by a nervous hand after having been nervously consulted. He has noted down the address in his pocket diary, as well as the telephone number, for, although making use of the latter is not in his plans for the day, if he ever does phone Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s apartment, he wants to be able to do so from wherever he happens to be, without having to depend on a telephone directory that he may have neglected to put back in its place and which he might
then be unable to find when he most needs it. He is ready to leave now, his mustache in position, although not particularly securely since it has lost some of its adhesive qualities over the years, but it is unlikely to fall off at the critical moment, since walking by the teacher’s building and having a quick look at it will take him only a matter of seconds. When he was putting the mustache on, using his reflection in the mirror to guide him, he remembered that, five years before, he had had to shave off the natural mustache that at the time adorned the space between his nose and upper lip, merely because the director had thought both its shape and design to be inappropriate for what he had in mind. At this point, let us prepare ourselves for the attentive reader, a direct descendant of those ingenuous but extremely bright young lads who, in the early days of cinema, used to call out to the boy on the screen that the map of the mine was hidden in the hatband of the evil, cynical enemy fallen at his feet, let us prepare ourselves for them to call us to order and denounce as an unforgivable lapse the difference in behavior between the character Tertuliano Máximo Afonso and the character António Claro, since, in identical situations, the former had to go into a shopping center in order to put on and take off his false beard and mustache, while the latter is blithely preparing to leave the house in the equally blithe light of day wearing on his face a mustache that, while it may belong to him, is not in fact his. That attentive reader is forgetting what has already been pointed out during this narrative, that just as Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is, in every respect, the double of the actor Daniel Santa-Clara, so the actor Daniel Santa-Clara, although for different reasons, is the double of Antonio Claro. No one living in the building or in the street will find it strange that the man who entered the building yesterday without a mustache should be leaving it today with one, at most, if they notice at all, they would say, He’s obviously already made up for filming. Sitting in his car, with the window open, Antonio Claro consults the route map and the
A—Z
and learns from them what we know already, that the street where Tertuliano Máximo Afonso lives is on the other side of the city, and, having bade a friendly good morning to a neighbor, he sets off. It will take nearly an hour to reach his destination, he will try tempting fate by driving past the building three times at ten-minute intervals, as if he were looking for a place to park, who knows, some happy coincidence might draw Tertuliano Máximo Afonso down into the street, although, those of us who are fully informed of the duties the history teacher has to fulfill know that, at this precise moment, he is sitting quietly at his desk, working hard on the proposal the headmaster commissioned him to write, as if his future depended on the result of this effort, when the truth is, and this we can tell you now, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso will never again enter a classroom, either in the school to which we have occasionally accompanied him or in any other. The reason will be revealed later. António Claro saw what there was to see, a nondescript street, a building like many others, no one would imagine that in that second-floor apartment, behind those innocent curtains, lives a phenomenon of nature no less extraordinary than the seven heads of the Lernaean Hydra and other such marvels. Whether Tertuliano Máximo Afonso truly merits a description that would exclude him from human normality is something that remains to be seen, for we still do not know which of these two men was the first to be born. If the first-born was Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, then it is Antonio Claro who deserves the designation phenomenon of nature, since, having come into being second,
he appeared in this world on false pretenses to occupy a place not his own, just like the Lernaean Hydra, which is why Hercules killed it. The sovereign equilibrium of the universe would not have been disturbed one iota if António Claro had been born and become an actor in some other solar system, but here, in the same city, and, therefore, as far as an observer watching us from the moon is concerned, right next door, all kinds of disorders and confusions are possible, especially the worst, especially the most terrible. And just in case you think that, because we have known him longer, we harbor some special preference for Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, we would point out that, mathematically speaking, as many inexorable probabilities of his having been the second-born hang over his head as over António Claro’s. Nevertheless, however strange to sensitive eyes and ears the following syntactical construction might appear, it is legitimate to say that what will be has been, and all that’s lacking now is for it to be written down. António Claro did not drive along the street again, four blocks farther on, he removed Daniel Santa-Clara’s mustache, furtively, in case some good citizen should catch him in the act and call the police, then, having nothing else to do, he set off for home, where the script for his next film awaited him for study and annotation. He left the house again only to go for lunch in a nearby restaurant, then took a short nap and resumed work until his wife came home. He was not yet one of the main characters in the film, but his name would appear on the posters that would be placed strategically about the city when the time came, and he was pretty sure that he would garner some critical praise, however brief, for his performance as a lawyer, which is the role he had been given this time. His only difficulty was the enormous number of lawyers in all shapes and sizes who had appeared in films and on television, public and private prosecutors with various styles of legal patter, from the caressing to the aggressive, defense lawyers blessed with varying degrees of eloquence and for whom being convinced of the innocence of their client did not always appear to be of great importance. He would like to create a new kind of lawyer, a person who would be capable of astonishing the judge with his every word and every gesture and of dazzling the public with the sharpness of his ripostes, with his implacable powers of reasoning, with his superhuman intelligence. It was true that none of this was in the script, but the director might allow himself to be persuaded to steer the screenwriter in that direction if the producer put in a good word for him. He would have to think about it. Having muttered to himself that he would have to think about it immediately transported his thoughts to other parts, to the history teacher, to his street, to the building, to the curtained windows, and from there, in retrospect, to last night’s phone call, to his conversations with Helena, to the decisions that he would sooner or later have to take, he wasn’t so sure now that he could profit from the situation, but, as he has just said, he would have to think about it. His wife arrived slightly later than usual, no, she hadn’t been shopping, it was the usual problem, the traffic, you could never predict what might happen, as António Claro knew, for it had taken him an hour to reach Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s street, but I’d better not mention that today, I’m sure she wouldn’t understand why I did it. Helena will likewise say nothing either, she is equally sure that her husband would not understand what she had done.