The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  Out in the street, Senhor José hailed a taxi, Take me to the Central Registry, he said distractedly to the driver. He would have preferred to walk, in order to save what little money he had and to end the day as he had begun it, but weariness would not allow him to take another step. Or so he thought. When the driver announced, Here we are, Senhor José discovered that he wasn't outside his house, but at the door of the Central Registry. It wasn't worth explaining to the man that he should go around the square and up the side street, he'd only have to walk about fifty yards, not even that. He paid with his last few coins, got out and when he put his feet on the pavement and looked up, he saw that the lights in the Central Registry were on, Not again, he thought, and he immediately forgot his concern for the fate of the lady in the ground-floor apartment and the fact that the mother with the child had remembered him, the problem now is finding an excuse for the following day. He went around the corner, there was his house, squat, almost a ruin really, clinging to the high wall of the building that seemed about to crush it. It was then that brutal fingers clutched at Senhor José's heart. The light was on in his house. He was sure he'd turned it off when he went out, but, bearing in mind the confusion that has reigned for days now inside his head, he admits that he might have forgotten, if it weren't for that other light, the one in the Central Registry, the five windows brilliantly lit. He put his key in the door, he knew what he was going to see, but he paused on the threshold as if social convention required him to be surprised. His boss was sitting at the table, before him were a few papers carefully lined up. Senhor José did not need to approach in order to find out what they were, the two forged letters of authority, the unknown woman's report cards, his notebook, the cover from the Central Registry file containing official documents. Come in, said his boss, it's your house. The clerk closed the door, went over to the table and stopped. He didn't speak, he felt his head become a whirlpool in which all his thoughts were dissolving. Sit down, as I said, it's your house. Senhor José noticed that on top of the report cards there was a key the same as his. Are you looking at the key, asked the Registrar, and continued calmly, don't imagine it's some fraudulent copy, the houses of staff members, when there were houses, always had two keys to the communicating door, one, of course, for the use of the owner, and another which remained in the possession of the Central Registry, everything's fine, as you see, Apart from your having come in here without my permission, Senhor José managed to say, I didn't need your permission, the master of the key is the master of the house, let's say we're both the masters of this house, just as you seem to have considered yourself master enough of the Central Registry to remove official documents from the archive, I can explain, There's no need, I've been keeping regular track of your activities, and, besides, your notebook has been a great help to me, may I take the opportunity to congratulate you on the excellent style and the appropriateness of the language, I'll hand in my resignation tomorrow, I won't accept it. Senhor José looked surprised, You won't accept it, No, I won't, Why, if you don't mind my asking, Feel free, since I am an accomplice to your irregular activities, I don't understand. The Registrar picked up the file of the unknown woman, then said, You will understand, first, though, tell me what happened in the cemetery, your narrative ends with the conversation you had with the clerk over there, It'll take a long time, Just tell me in a few words, so that I get the complete picture, I walked through the General Cemetery to the section for suicides, I went to sleep under an olive tree, and the following morning, when I woke up, I was in the middle of a flock of sheep, and then I found out that the shepherd amuses himself by swapping around the numbers on the graves before the tombstones are put in place, Why, It's hard to explain, it's all to do with knowing where the people we're looking for really are, he thinks we'll never know, Like the woman you call the unknown woman, Yes, sir, What did you do today, I went to the school where she was a teacher and I went to her apartment, Did you find anything out, No, sir, and I don't think I wanted to. The Registrar opened the file, took out the record card that had got stuck to the cards of the last five famous people in whom Senhor José had taken an interest, Do you know what I would do in your position, he asked, No, sir, Do you know what is the only logical conclusion to everything that has happened up until now, No, sir, Make up a new card for this woman, the same as the old one, with all the correct information, but without a date for her death, And then, Then go and put it in the archive of the living, as if she hadn't died, That would be a fraud, Yes, it would, but nothing that we have done or said, you and I, would make any sense if we don't, I still don't understand. The Registrar leaned back in the chair, drew his hands slowly over his face, then asked, Do you remember what I said inside there on Friday, when you turned up for work without having shaved, Yes, sir, Everything, Everything, Then you'll remember that I referred to certain facts without which I would never have realised the absurdity of separating the dead from the living, Yes sir, Do I need to tell you which facts I was referring to, No, sir.

  The Registrar got up, I'll leave the key here, I have no intention of using it again, and he added, before Senhor José could say anything, There is still one last thing to resolve, What's that, sir, There's no death certificate in the unknown woman's file, I didn't manage to find it, it must be somewhere back there in the archive, or perhaps I dropped it on the way, As long as it remains lost, that woman will be dead, She'll be dead whether I find it or not, Unless you destroy it, said the Registrar. Having said that, he turned his back, and shortly afterwards came the sound of the door to the Central Registry closing. Senhor José stood in the middle of the room. There was no need to fill in a new card because he already had a copy in the file. He would, however, have to tear up or burn the original, where the date of death was registered. And there was still the death certificate. Senhor José went into the Central Registry, walked over to the Registrar's desk, opened the drawer where the flashlight and Ariadne's thread were waiting for him. He tied the end of the thread around his ankle and set off into the darkness.

  The translator would like to thank Maria Manuela Lisboa, Maria Eugénia Penteado and Benm Sherriff for all their help and advice.

  Reading Group Guide

  1. How do the Central Registry's hierarchy of authority and the operating procedures reflect those of institutions, groups, and other bureaucracies with which you are familiar? In what ways might they be said to represent the structure and workings of society itself?

  2. Including "the labyrinthine catacombs of the archive of the dead," (5) what labyrinths and mazes—external and internal—appear in the novel? What purpose do they serve? How do Senhor José and others navigate them? What perils and rewards are associated with them?

  3. In what way does Senhor José's accidental possession and examination of the card belonging to a woman of thirty-six bring him "face-to-face with destiny"? (25) What attracts him to this specific card and its person? How does that "destiny" subsequently unfold? How might he have changed his destiny in this regard?

  4. Senior José's ceiling—"the multiple eye of God"—doesn't believe his claim that he paid a nighttime visit to the street where the unknown woman was born, "Because what you say you did doesn't fit with my reality and what doesn't fit with my reality doesn't exist." (31) How does this notion that objective reality depends on conformity to an individual's perceived reality recur through All the Names?

  5. How do fear, timidity, and anxiety affect Senhor José's thinking and behavior? What enables him to overcome his mild manners, timidity, and anxieties and act deceptively and—in some instances—with despotic authority, much like the Registrar?

  6. What roles do chance and coincidence play in Senhor José's endeavors? To what degree is he aware of the importance of chance and coincidence? What does the narrator have to say about the part they play in all our lives?

  7. In what ways, and why, do Senhor José's endeavors soil and bruise both his body and his spirit? Why might the sullying and bruising be necessar
y stages in his progress? When he looks at himself in the school bathroom mirror, Senhor José is surprised at his filthy state. "It doesn't even look like me, he thought, and yet he had probably never looked more like himself." (91–92) In what ways might this be so?

  8. The narrator refers to Senhor José's "highly efficient deductive mechanism." (84) What instances are there of that mechanism at work? How do Senhor José's powers of deduction serve him well, especially in light of his physical and emotional frailties? In what instances do those powers fail him, and why?

  9. What comprises the "knowledge of the night, of shadows, obscurity and darkness" that Senhor José has acquired over the years and "that makes up for his natural timidity"? (87) What kinds of obscurity and darkness occur in All the Names, and how does Senhor José deal with them? What internal and external darknesses must he cope with? What sources of light can he draw on to illuminate the internal darkness, on the one hand, and the external darkness, on the other?

  10. Why does the Registrar suddenly begin to show concern for, and act on behalf of, Senhor José's well-being, and subsequently take unprecedented actions to transform the hidebound structure and operations of the Central Registry? To what extent is Senhor José responsible for this shocking transformation in the Registrar himself?

  11. "Meaning and sense were never the same thing," writes Saramago; "meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, ... while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide...." (112) How might this digression on meaning and sense characterize both Senhor José's experience and Saramago's technique as a novelist? What shifting patterns of meaning and sense occur throughout All the Names?

  12. When Senhor José returns to work after recovering from the flu, the Registrar solemnly declares, "Loneliness, Senhor José, ...never made for good company, all the great sadnesses, great temptations and great mistakes are almost always the result of being alone in life..." (117) What sadnesses, temptations, and mistakes has Senhor José's loneliness occasioned? In what way are they transformed or reinforced by his quest? How does Saramago present the conflict between withdrawal, isolation, and loneliness, on the one hand, and connection and relationship, on the other?

  13. How does the Registrar interpret what he calls "the double absurdity of separating the dead from the living," (176) and what are the implications of his explanation of the two absurdities? What other interpretations of that double absurdity are possible?

  14. What is the significance that the General Cemetery is entered "via an old building with a facade which is the twin sister of the Central Registry facade"? (180) In what way do other historical, organizational, and administrative details establish a correspondence between the General Cemetery and the Central Registry? In what ways do the two institutions differ?

  15. What would you say is, finally, "the essence of the strange adventure into which chance" has plunged Senhor José? (200)

  16. In what instances and in what ways do truths become lies and lies become truths, in All the Names'? Why does the distinction between truth and He seem at times so insubstantial? How might the transformations between truth and lie be related to the transformations between life and death?

  17. What is the significance of Senhor José's dream in which he finds himself in the cemetery, where sheep continually change numbers, a voice repeatedly calls, "I'm here," and the sheep disappear leaving the ground strewn with numbers "all attached end to end in an uninterrupted spiral of which he himself was the centre"? (208–209) In what ways is Senhor José himself the center and the objective of his search? In his search for the unknown woman, how does Senhor José come closer and closer to finding his own true self?

  18. We are told that Senhor José, as he postpones entering the unknown woman's apartment building, "both wants and doesn't want, he both desires and fears what he desires, that is what his whole life has been like." (228–229) What patterns of wanting and not wanting, of desiring and fearing have emerged during the several days through which we have followed Senhor José in his quest? What other personal contradictions has he exhibited?

  19. What does the unknown woman ultimately represent for Senhor José, for Saramago, and for us? Why, even when Senhor José has her faculty card before him, have we not learned her name?

  20. What interpretations might be given of our final view of Senhor José, tying the end of Ariadne's thread around his ankle and setting off into the darkness?

  The discussion questions were prepared by

  Hal Eager & Associates, Somerville, New Jersey.

  THE CAVE

  Translated from the Portuguese

  by Margaret Jull Costa

  A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  © José Saramago e Editorial Caminho, SA, Lisboa—2000

  English translation copyright © 2002 by Margaret Jull Costa

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,

  Harcourt Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  This is a translation of A Caverna

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Saramago, José.

  [Caverna. English]

  The cave/José Saramago; translated from the Portuguese

  by Margaret Jull Costa.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-15-100414-5

  ISBN 0-15-602879-4 (pbk.)

  I. Costa, Margaret Jull. II. Title.

  PQ9281.A66 C3813 2002

  869.3'42—dc21 2002002355

  Text set in Dante MT

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2003

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  For Pilar

  What a strange scene you describe

  and what strange prisoners,

  They are just like us.

  —Plato, The Republic, Book VII

  The man driving the truck is called Cipriano Algor, he is a potter by profession and is sixty-four years old, although he certainly does not look his age. The man sitting beside him is his son-in-law, Marçal Gacho, and he is not yet thirty. Nevertheless, from his face too, you would think him much younger. As you will have noticed, attached to their first names both these men have unusual family names, whose origin, meaning, and reason they do not know. They would probably be most put out to learn that "algor" means the intense cold one feels in one's body before a fever sets in, and that "gacho" is neither more nor less than the part of an ox's neck on which the yoke rests. The younger man is wearing a uniform, but is unarmed. The older man has on an ordinary jacket and a pair of more or less matching trousers, and his shirt is soberly buttoned up to the neck, with no tie. The hands grasping the wheel are large and strong, peasant's hands, and yet, perhaps because of the daily contact with soft clay inevitable in his profession, they also suggest sensitivity. There is nothing unusual about Marçal Gacho's right hand, but there is a scar on the back of his left hand that looks like the mark left by a burn, a diagonal line that goes from the base of his thumb to the base of his little finger. The truck does not really deserve the name of truck, since it is really only a medium-sized van, of a kind now out of date, and it is laden with crockery. When the two men left home, twenty kilometers back, the day had barely begun to dawn, but now the morning has filled the world with sufficient light for one to notice Marçal Gacho's scar and to speculate about the sensitivity of Ciprian
o Algor's hands. The two men are traveling slowly because of the fragile nature of the load and also because of the uneven road surface. The delivery of merchandise not considered to be of primary or even secondary importance, as is the case with plain ordinary crockery, is carried out, in accordance with the official timetables, at mid-morning, and the only reason these two men got up so early is that Marçal Gacho has to clock in at least half an hour before the doors of the Center open to the public. On the days when he does not have to give his son-in-law a lift but still has crockery to deliver, Cipriano Algor does not have to get up quite so early However, every ten days, he is the one who goes to fetch Marçal Gacho from work so that the latter can spend the forty hours with his family to which he is entitled, and, afterward, Cipriano Algor is also the one who, with or without crockery in the back of the van, punctually returns him to his responsibilities and duties as a security guard. Cipriano Algor's daughter, who is called Marta and bears the family names of Isasca, from her late mother, and Algor, from her father, only enjoys the presence of her husband at home and in bed for six nights and three days every month. On the previous night, she became pregnant, although she does not know this yet.

  The area they are driving through is dull and dirty, not worth a second glance. Someone gave these vast and decidedly unrural expanses the technical name of the Agricultural Belt and also, by poetic analogy, the Green Belt, but the only landscape the eyes can see on either side of the road, covering many thousands of apparently uninterrupted hectares, are vast, rectangular, flat-roofed structures, made of neutral-colored plastic which time and dust have gradually turned gray or brown. Beneath them, where the eyes of passersby cannot reach, plants are growing. Now and then, trucks and tractors with trailers laden with vegetables emerge from side roads onto the main road, but most of these deliveries are done at night, and those appearing now either have express and exceptional permission to de liver late or else they must have overslept. Marçal Gacho discreetly pushed back the left sleeve of his jacket to look at his watch, he is worried because the traffic is gradually becoming denser and because he knows that, from now on, once they enter the Industrial Belt, things will only get worse. His father-in-law saw the gesture, but said nothing, this son-in-law of his is a nice fellow, but very nervous, one of those people who was born anxious, always fretting about the passage of time, even if he has more than enough, in which case he never seems to know quite how to fill it, time, that is. What will he be like when he's my age, he thought. They left the Agricultural Belt behind them, and the road, which grows dirtier now, crosses the Industrial Belt, cutting a swath through not only factory buildings of every size, shape, and type, but also fuel tanks, both spherical and cylindrical, electricity substations, networks of pipes, air ducts, suspension bridges, tubes of every thickness, some red, some black, chimneys belching out pillars of toxic fumes into the atmosphere, long-armed cranes, chemical laboratories, oil refineries, fetid, bitter, sickly odors, the strident noise of drilling, the buzz of mechanical saws, the brutal thud of steam hammers and, very occasionally, a zone of silence, where no one knows exactly what is being produced. That was when Cipriano Algor said, Don't worry, we'll get there on time, I'm not worried, replied his son-in-law, only just managing to conceal his anxiety, Of course you're not, but you know what I mean, said Cipriano Algor. He turned the van into a side road reserved for local traffic, Let's take a shortcut down here, he said, if the police ask us why we're here, just remember what we agreed, we had some business to deal with at one of these factories before we went into town. Marçal Gacho took a deep breath, whenever the traffic on the main road got bad, his father-in-law would always, sooner or later, take a detour. What worried him was that he might get distracted and decide to make the turn too late. Fortunately, despite all his fears and his father-in-law's warnings, they had never yet been stopped by the police, One day, he'll realize that I'm not a little boy any more, thought Marçal, and that he doesn't have to remind me every time about how we have business to deal with at one of the factories. It did not occur to either of them that the real reason behind the continued tolerance or benevolent indifference of the traffic police was Marçal Gacho's uniform, that of a security guard working at the Center, rather than the result of multiple random lucky breaks or of stubborn fate, as they would doubtless have said if asked why they thought they had so far escaped being fined. Had Marçal Gacho known this, he might have made more of the weight of authority conferred on him by his uniform, and had Cipriano Algor known this, he might have spoken to his son-in-law with less ironic condescension. It is true what people say, the young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability.