The Collected Novels of José Saramago (370 page)

Thus ended this illuminating and prickly conversation between the interior minister and the council leader, with each having bandied about points of view, arguments and opinions which will, in all probability, have disoriented the reader, who must now doubt that the two interlocutors do in fact belong, as he or she thought, to the party on the right, the very party which, as the administrative power, is carrying out a vile policy of repression, both on a collective level, with the capital city submitted to the humiliation of a state of siege ordered by the country’s own government, and on an individual level, with harsh interrogations, lie detectors, threats
and, who knows, the very worst kinds of torture, although the truth impels us to say that if any such tortures were carried out, we could not bear witness to them, we were not there, not, however, that this means very much, for we were not present either at the parting of the red sea, and yet everyone swears that it happened. As for the interior minister, you must already have noticed that in the armor of the indomitable fighter, which he tries so hard to appear to be when locked in combat with the defense minister, there is a subtle fault, or to put it more colloquially, a crack big enough to poke your finger through. Were that not so, we would not have been witness to the successive failures of his plans, and the speed and facility with which the blade of his sword grows blunt, as this dialogue has just confirmed, for while he came in like lion, he went out like a lamb, if not something worse, one has only to look, for example, at the lack of respect evident in his categorical statement that god was born stone-deaf. As regards the council leader, we are, to use the words of the interior minister, pleased to note that he has seen the light, not the one the minister would like the capital’s voters to see, but the light that those casters of blank votes hope that someone will begin to see. The most common occurrence in this world of ours, in these days of stumbling blindly forward, is to come across men and women mature in years and ripe in prosperity, who, at eighteen, were not just beaming beacons of style, but also, and perhaps above all, bold revolutionaries determined to bring down the system supported by their parents and to replace it, at last, with a fraternal paradise, but who are now equally firmly attached to convictions and practices which, having warmed up and flexed their muscles on any of the many available versions of moderate conservatism, become, in time, pure egotism of the most obscene and reactionary kind. Put less respectfully, these men and these women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are. The fact that a politician belonging to the party on the right, a man in his forties, who has spent his whole life under the parasol of a tradition cooled by the air-conditioning of the stock exchange and lulled by the steamy zephyr of the markets, should have been open to the revelation, or, indeed, manifest certainty, that there was some deeper meaning behind the gentle rebellion in the city he had been appointed to administer, is something that is both worthy of record and deserving of our gratitude, so unaccustomed have we become to such singular phenomena.

It will not have gone unnoticed, by particularly exacting readers and listeners, that the narrator of this fable has paid scant, not to say non-existent, attention to the place in which the action described, albeit in rather leisurely fashion, is taking place. Apart from the first chapter, in which there were a few careful brushstrokes applied to the area of the polling station, although, even then, these were applied only to doors, windows and tables, and with the exception of the polygraph, that machine for catching liars, everything else, which is quite a lot, has passed as if the characters in the story inhabited an entirely insubstantial world, were indifferent to the comfort or discomfort of the places in which they found themselves, and did nothing but talk. In the room in which the government of the country has, more than once, and occasionally with the presence and participation of the president, gathered to debate the situation and take the necessary measures to pacify minds and restore peace to the streets, there would doubtless be a large table around which the ministers would sit on comfortable, upholstered chairs, and on which there were bound to be bottles of mineral water and glasses to match, pencils and pens in different colors, markers, reports, books on legislation, notebooks, microphones, telephones, and all the usual paraphernalia one finds in places of this calibre. There would be ceiling lights and wall lights, there would be padded doors and curtained windows,
there would be rugs on the floor, there would be paintings on the walls and perhaps an antique or modern tapestry, there would, inevitably, be a portrait of the president, a bust representing the republic and the national flag. None of this has been mentioned, nor will it be mentioned in future. Even here, in the more modest, but nonetheless spacious office of the leader of the city council, with a balcony overlooking the square and a large aerial photograph of the city hanging on the main wall, there would be ample opportunity to fill a page or two with detailed descriptions, and to make the most of that generous pause in order to take a deep breath before confronting the disasters to come. It seems to us far more important to observe the anxious lines furrowing the brow of the council leader, perhaps he is thinking that he said too much, that he gave the interior minister the impression, if not the stark certainty, that he had joined the ranks of the enemy, and that, by his imprudence, he would, perhaps irremediably, have compromised his political career inside and outside the party. The other possibility, as remote as it is unimaginable, would be that his reasoning might have given the interior minister a push in the right direction and caused him to rethink entirely the strategies and tactics with which the government hopes to put an end to the sedition. We see him shake his head, a sure sign that, having swiftly examined the possibility, he has discarded it as being foolishly ingenuous and dangerously unrealistic. He got up from the chair where he had remained seated throughout his conversation with the minister and went over to the window. He did not open it, he merely drew back the curtain a little and gazed out. The square looked as it always did, various passers-by, three people sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree, the café terraces and their customers, the flower-sellers, a woman and a dog, the newspaper kiosks, buses, cars, the usual scene. I need to go out, he thought. He went back to his desk and phoned his chief administrative officer, I’m going out for a while, he said, tell
any councillors who are in the building, but only if they ask for me, as for the rest, I leave you in charge, Certainly, sir, I’ll tell your driver to bring the car round to the front door, Yes, if you would, but tell him that I won’t be needing him, I’ll drive myself, Will you be coming back to the town hall today, Yes, I hope so, but I’ll let you know if I decide otherwise, Very well, How are things in the city, Oh, nothing very grave to report, the news we’ve received has been no more serious than usual, a few traffic accidents, the occasional bottleneck, a minor fire in which no one was hurt, a failed bank robbery, How did they manage, now that there are no police, The robber was an amateur, and the gun, although it was a real one, wasn’t loaded, Where have they taken him, The people who disarmed him took him to a fire station, Whatever for, they haven’t any facilities for detaining prisoners, Well, they had to put him somewhere, So what happened next, Apparently, the firemen spent an hour giving him a good talking-to and then let him go, There wasn’t much else they could do, I suppose, No, sir, there wasn’t, Tell my secretary to let me know when the car arrives, Yes, sir. The council leader leaned back in his chair, waiting, and his brow was again deeply furrowed. Contrary to the predictions of the gloom-mongers, there had been no more robberies, rapes or murders than before. It seemed that the police were, after all, not essential for the city’s security, that the population itself, spontaneously and in a more or less organized manner, had taken over their work as vigilantes. The robbery at the bank was a case in point. No, the robbery at the bank, he thought, was irrelevant, the man had obviously been very nervous and unsure of himself, a mere novice, and the bank employees had seen that they were in no danger, but tomorrow it might be different, what am I saying, tomorrow, today, right now, over the last few days crimes will have been committed in the city that will obviously go unpunished, if we have no police, if the criminals aren’t arrested, if there’s no investigation and no trial, if the
judges go home and the courts don’t work, criminality will inevitably increase, it’s as if everyone were expecting the council to take over the policing of the city, they’re asking for it, demanding it, protesting that without some form of security, there can be no peace of mind, and I keep wondering how, by issuing a call for volunteers, for example, by creating urban militias, surely we’re not going to go out into the street dressed like gendarmes straight out of a comic opera, with uniforms rented from the theater’s costume department, and what about guns, where are we going to get those, and what about using them, not just knowing how to use them, but being capable of using them, taking out a gun and firing it, can anyone imagine me, the councillors, the town hall civil servants, engaged in a rooftop pursuit of the midnight murderer, the Tuesday rapist or the white-gloved cat burglar of high-society salons. The phone rang, it was his secretary, Sir, your car is here, Thank you, he said, I’m going out now and I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be back today or not, but if there are any problems, just call me on my mobile, Take care, sir, Why do you say that, Given the way things are, sir, that’s the least we can wish each other, May I ask you a question, Of course, as long as I have an answer for it, If you don’t want to, don’t answer, What’s the question, Who did you vote for, No one, sir, Do you mean you abstained, No, I mean that I cast a blank vote, Blank, Yes, sir, blank, And you’re telling me just like that, You asked me the question just like that, And that gave you the confidence to reply, Just about, sir, but only just, If I understand you rightly, you also thought it could be a risk, Well, I hoped that it wouldn’t be, As you see, your confidence was rewarded, Does that mean that I won’t be asked to hand in my notice, No, you can sleep easy on that score, It would be far better if we didn’t need to sleep in order to feel at ease, sir, Well put, Anyone could have said the same, sir, it certainly wouldn’t win any literary prizes, You will have to be satisfied with my applause, then, That’s reward enough, sir, So let’s leave it that if you need me, you can call me on my mobile, Yes, sir, Right, then, I’ll see you tomorrow, if not later on today, Yes, see you later, or tomorrow, replied the secretary.

The council leader quickly tidied up the papers scattered about his desk, most of them might have been written about another country and another century, not about this capital now, under a state of siege, abandoned by its own government, surrounded by its own army. If he tore them up, if he burned them, if he threw them in the wastepaper basket, no one would come to him demanding an explanation for what he had done, people had far more important things to think about now, the city, after all, is no longer part of the known world, it’s a pot full of putrefying food and maggots, an island set adrift in a sea not its own, a dangerous source of infection, a place which, as a precautionary measure, has been quarantined until the plague becomes less virulent or until it runs out of people to kill and ends up devouring itself. He asked his secretary to bring him his raincoat, picked up his briefcase containing papers to be studied at home and went downstairs. The driver, who was waiting for him, opened the car door, They said you won’t be needing me, sir, No, I won’t, you can go home, See you tomorrow, then, sir, See you tomorrow. It’s odd how we spend every day of our life saying goodbye, saying and hearing others say see you tomorrow when, inevitably, on one of those days, which will be someone’s last, either the person we said it to will no longer be here, or we who said it will not. We will see if on today’s tomorrow, what we normally refer to as the following day, when the council leader and his chauffeur meet again, they will be capable of grasping what an extraordinary, near-miraculous thing it is to have said see you tomorrow and to find that what had been no more than a problematic possibility has come to pass as if it had been a certainty. The council leader got into his car. He was going for a drive around the city, to have a
look at the people on the way, not in any hurry, but stopping now and then to get out and walk for a while, listening to what was being said, in short, taking the pulse of the city, assessing the strength of the incubating fever. From his childhood reading he remembered a king in some far eastern country, he wasn’t sure now whether he had been a king or an emperor, he was, more than likely, the caliph of the time, who was in the habit of disguising himself and leaving his palace to go and mingle with the ordinary people, the lower orders, and to eavesdrop on what was said about him during frank exchanges in the squares and streets. The truth is that such exchanges would not have been as frank as all that, because in those days, as ever, there would have been no shortage of spies to take note of opinions, complaints and criticisms and of any embryonic conspiracies. It is an unvarying rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start to think, afterward, it might be too late. The council leader is not the king of this besieged city, and as for the vizier of the interior, he has exiled himself to the other side of the frontier and he will, at this moment, doubtless be in some meeting with his collaborators, we will find out who and why in a while. For this reason the council leader does not need to disguise himself with a false beard and moustache, the face he is wearing is the one he usually wears, except that it looks a little more preoccupied than normal, as we have noticed before from the lines on his forehead. A few people recognize him, but few say hello. Do not assume, however, that the indifferent or the hostile are to be found only amongst those who originally cast blank votes, and who would, therefore, see him as an adversary, quite a few voters from his own party and from the party in the middle also look at him with ill-disguised suspicion, not to say with clear antipathy, What’s he doing around here, they will think, what’s he doing mixing with this rabble of blankers, he should be at work earning his salary, perhaps now that the majority has
changed hands, he’s come looking for votes, well, if he has, he hasn’t got a hope in hell, there won’t be any elections round here for a while, if I was the government, I know what I would do, I’d get rid of this whole council and instead appoint a decent administrative committee, who could be trusted politically. Before continuing this story, it would be as well to explain that the use of the word blanker a few lines earlier was neither accidental nor fortuitous, nor was it a slip of the fingers on the computer keyboard, and it certainly isn’t a neologism that the narrator has hastily invented in order to fill a gap. The term exists, it really does, you can find it in any up-to-date dictionary, the problem, if it is a problem, lies in the fact that people are convinced that they know the meaning of the word blank and of all its derivatives, and therefore won’t waste their time going back to the source to check, or else they suffer from chronic intellectual lazyitis and stay right where they are, refusing to take even one step toward making a possibly beautiful discovery. No one knows who in the city first came up with it, which inquisitive researcher or chance discoverer, but one thing is certain, the word spread rapidly and immediately took on the pejorative meaning that its very appearance seems to provoke. Although we may not previously have mentioned the fact, which is in every way deplorable, even the media, especially the state television channels, are already using the word as if it were one of the very worst of obscenities. When you see it written down, you don’t notice it so much, but as soon as you hear it spoken with that angry curl of the lips and in that snide tone of voice, you would have to have the moral armor of a knight of the round table not to put a noose around your neck, don a penitent’s tunic and walk along beating your chest and renouncing all your old principles and precepts, A blanker I was, a blanker no more, forgive me, my country, forgive me, my lord. The council leader, who will have nothing to forgive, since he is no one’s lord and never will be, who will
not even be a candidate at the next elections, has stopped watching the passers-by, he is looking now for signs of shabbiness, neglect, decline, and, at least at a first glance, he can find none. The shops and department stores are all open, although they don’t appear to be doing much business, the traffic is flowing, impeded only by the occasional minor jam, there are no queues of anxious customers at the doors of the banks, the kind of queue that always forms in time of crisis, everything seems to be normal, there are no violent muggings, no shoot-outs or knife-fights, there is nothing but this luminous afternoon, neither too cold nor too hot, an afternoon that seems to have come into the world to satisfy all desires and to calm all anxieties. But not the council leader’s unease or, to be more literary, his inner disquiet. What he feels, and he may be the only person amongst those passing by to feel this, is a kind of menace floating in the air, the kind that sensitive temperaments feel when the thick clouds covering the sky grow tense with waiting for the thunderbolt to fall, or as we might feel when a door creaked open in the darkness and a current of icy air brushed our cheek, when an awful feeling of foreboding opened the gates of despair to us, when a diabolical laugh sundered the delicate veil of the soul. Nothing concrete, nothing we could describe with any authority or objectivity, but the fact is that the council leader has to make a real effort not to stop the first person who passes and say to him, Be careful, don’t ask me why or about what, just be careful, I’ve got a feeling that something bad is going to happen, If you, the council leader, with all your responsibilities, don’t know, how do you expect me to, they would ask him, It doesn’t matter, what matters is that you should be very careful, Is it some epidemic, No, I don’t think so, An earthquake, This isn’t an area prone to earthquakes, there’s never been one here, A flood, then, a deluge, It’s been years since the river broke its banks, What then, Look, I don’t know, Forgive me for asking, You’re forgiven before you’ve even asked, No offence, sir,
but have you perhaps had one drink too many, you know what they say, the last one is always the worst, No, I only drink at mealtimes, and then only in moderation, I’m certainly not an alcoholic, Well, in that case, I don’t understand, When it’s happened, you will, When what has happened, The thing that is going to happen. Bewildered, his interlocutor glanced around him, If you’re looking for a policeman to arrest me, said the council leader, don’t bother, they’ve all gone, No, I wasn’t looking for a policeman, lied the other man, I’d arranged to meet a friend here, oh, there he is, see you again, then, sir, and take care, you know, to be perfectly frank, if I were you, I’d go straight home to bed, when you sleep you forget everything, But I never go to sleep at this hour, As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping, May I ask you a question too, Of course, sir, feel free, Did you cast a blank vote, Are you doing a survey, No, I’m just curious, but if you’d rather not answer, don’t. The man hesitated for a second, then, very gravely, he replied, Yes, I did, it’s not, as far as I know, forbidden to do so, No, it’s not forbidden, but look at the result. The man seemed to have forgotten about his imaginary friend, Look, sir, I have nothing against you personally, I’m even prepared to acknowledge that you’ve done a good job on the city council, but I’m not to blame for what you call the result, I voted as I wanted to vote, within the law, now it’s up to you, the council, to respond, if the potato’s too hot, blow on it, Don’t get upset, I just wanted to warn you, You still haven’t told me about what, Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t, Then I’ve been wasting my time here, Forgive me, your friend’s waiting for you, There isn’t any friend waiting, I was just using that as an excuse to get away, Then thank you for having stayed a little longer, Sir, Please don’t stand on ceremony, From what I know about what goes on in people’s minds, I would say that it’s your conscience that’s troubling you, For something I didn’t do, Some people say that’s the worst kind of remorse, for something you allowed to happen, Maybe you’re right, I’ll think about that, but, anyway, be careful, I will, sir, and thank you for the warning, Even though you still don’t know what I’m warning you against, Some people deserve our trust, You’re the second person who’s said that to me today, Then you can safely say that you’ve had a very good day indeed, Thank you, See you again, sir, Yes, see you again.