In the safe silence of the bedroom, between sheets rumpled by the recent amorous agitations, the man heard his wife tell him that her period was two days late, and the news seemed to him extraordinary and utterly amazing, a kind of second fiat lux in an age in which Latin has ceased to be used and practiced, a vernacular surgeet ambula which has no idea where it is going and which is frightening for that very reason. Only an hour before, at most, in a moment of touching openness rare in the masculine sex, marçal Gacho had admitted to being a child, when, quite unbeknownst to him, he had been a father in embryo for some weeks, which just goes to show that we should never be too sure about what we think we are because it could easily happen that, at that precise moment, we are, in fact, something completely different. Almost everything that Marta and marçal said to each other that night, before falling asleep out of sheer exhaustion, is described in a thousand and one stories of couples with children, but the concrete analysis of the concrete situation in which this married couple find themselves did not leave un-examined certain questions peculiar to them, for example, Marta's diminished ability to cope with the hard physical work of the pottery, but it failed to resolve, because this was dependent on the expected promotion, whether the baby would be born before or after their move to the Center. On the first point, Marta said she was sure that her mother, the late Justa Isasca, who had worked tirelessly up until the last day of her life, would never have succumbed to the pleasures of complete idleness just because she was pregnant, I myself would be a witness to that if only I could dredge up my memories of the nine months I lived inside her, A child in the womb can't possibly know what's going on outside, replied marçal, yawning, I suppose so, but you must at least admit that a baby would have an intimate knowledge of what's going on inside its mother's womb, it's all just a question of remembering, We don't even remember the trauma of birth, Well, that's probably when we lose the first of all our memories, Now you're just inventing things, give me a kiss. Before this delicate conversation and that kiss, marçal had expressed a vehement wish that the move to the Center should take place before the birth, You'll have the best medical treatment and the best nursing you could possibly imagine, there's nothing like it anywhere, either near or far, as regards both medicine and surgery, How do you know if you've never been to the hospital at the Center, you've probably never even been inside it, No, but I know someone who was admitted as a patient, a superior of mine who was at death's door when he went in and came out a new man, there are people outside who try to use their influence to get admitted as patients, but the rules are very strict, To hear you talk anyone would think that no one at the Center ever dies, Of course they do, but death is less obvious somehow, That's certainly an advantage, You'll see when we go there, See what, that death is less obvious, is that what you mean, No, I wasn't talking about death, Yes, you were, Look, I'm not interested in death, I was talking about you and our child, about the hospital you'll go to, Always assuming your promotion isn't too long in coming, If they don't promote me within nine months, they never will, Give me a kiss, Mr. Security Guard, and let's go to sleep, All right, here's your kiss, but there's still one other thing we need to talk about, What's that, From now on you'll do less work in the pottery and in two or three months' time you'll stop working altogether, Do you expect my father to do everything, especially if the Center puts in an order for the dolls, Get someone in to help, You know there's no point, no one wants to work in a pottery, In your condition, What about my condition, my mother carried on working when she was pregnant with me, How do you know, Because I can remember. They both laughed, then Marta said, Let's not tell my father about this just yet, he'll be thrilled, but it's best we don't say anything to him, Why, Oh, I don't know, he's got too much on his mind as it is, The pottery, The pottery's just one thing, The Center, The Center's another thing, whether or not we'll get the order, the stock he's got to remove from the warehouse, but there are other things too, a certain water jug with a loose handle, for example, but I'll tell you about that later. Marta was the first to go to sleep. marçal was feeling less shaken by then, he knew more or less which road he would have to take after the birth, and when, nearly half an hour later, sleep touched him with its smoky fingers, he let himself drift unresistingly off, his spirit at peace. His last conscious thought was to ask himself if Marta really had said something about the handle on a water jug, Ridiculous, I must have dreamed it, he thought. He was the one who slept the least, and he was the one to wake up first. The dawn light was sifting in through the gaps in the shutters. You're going to have a child, he said to himself, and he repeated, a child, a child, a child. Then, moved by a curiosity quite without desire, almost innocent, if innocence still exists in that place in the world we call bed, he lifted the covers and looked at Marta's body. She was turned toward him, with her knees slightly bent. The lower half of her nightshirt was caught up around her waist, her white belly was only just visible in the half-darkness and disappeared completely into the dark area of the pubis. marçal lowered the covers and realized that the moment for caresses had not gone away, it had remained in the room all night, and there it was, waiting. Doubtless touched by the draft of cold air caused by the movement of the bedcovers, Marta sighed and changed position. Like a bird gently testing out the site for its first nest, Manual's left hand lightly brushed her belly Marta opened her eyes and smiled, then said jokingly, Good morning, Father-to-be, but her expression changed abruptly, she had just realized that they were not alone in the room. The moment for caresses had slipped in between them, had got in between the sheets, it could not have said precisely what it wanted, but they did exactly as it wished.
Cipriano Algor was already up and about. He had slept badly, worried about whether he would get a reply from the head of the buying department that day and what the reply would be, whether positive or negative, whether reticent or dilatory, but what prevented him from sleeping at all for some hours was an idea that sprang into his head halfway through the night and which, as is so often the case with ideas that assail us at dead of sleepless night, he found extraordinary, magnificent, and even, in the case in question, the masterstroke of a negotiating talent worthy of applause. When he woke up from the barely two hours of restless sleep that his desperate body had managed to filch from its own exhaustion, he realized that the idea was, after all, worthless, that the sensible thing would be not to feed any illusions he might have about the nature and character of the person wielding the big stick, and that any order issued by someone invested with more than the usual degree of authority should be treated as if it were an irrefutable diktat from destiny. If simplicity really is a virtue, no idea could be more virtuous than this, as you will soon see, Sir, Cipriano Algor would say to the head of the buying department, I've been pondering what you said about having two weeks to remove the stock taking up space in the warehouse, it didn't occur to me at the time, probably because of my excitement when I saw that there was a slight hope that I might be allowed to continue as a supplier to the Center, but then I started thinking about it and thinking about it, and I realized that it's difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill two obligations at once, that is, to remove the crockery and make the dolls, yes, I know you haven't yet put in a firm order for them, but just supposing that you did, it occurred to me, purely as a precaution, to suggest an alternative that would leave me free during the first week to get on with making the dolls, I would then remove half of the crockery in the second week, go back to the dolls during the third week, and remove the remaining crockery during the fourth week, I know, I know, you don't have to tell me, I'm not pretending that there isn't another option which would be to start with the crockery the first week and then alternately, in sequence, dolls, crockery, dolls, but I think, in this particular case, one should take into account the psychological factor, everyone knows how different the state of mind of the creator is from that of the destroyer, of someone who destroys, and if I could start making the dolls, that is start with creation, es
pecially in the excellent frame of mind in which I find myself now, I would face with renewed courage the hard task of having to destroy the fruits of my own labor, because having no one to sell them to or, worse still, not even being able to give them away, is tantamount to destroying them. This speech, which, at three in the morning, appeared to its author to be possessed of an irresistible logic, seemed absurd to him in the early dawn and positively ridiculous in the revealing light of the sun. Oh, well, what will be will be, said the potter to the dog Found, the devil isn't necessarily lurking behind every door. Given the manifest difference in concepts and the different nature of their respective vocabularies, Found could not even begin to understand what his master was trying to tell him, and in a way it was just as well because an indispensable condition for passing on to the next level of understanding would be to ask him who this devil was, a figure, entity, or character who, one supposes, has been absent from the spiritual world of dogs since the beginning of time, and, as you can imagine, if he were to ask a question like that right at the beginning, the discussion would be never-ending. With the arrival of Marta and marçal, both unusually cheerful, as if the night had rewarded them with something more than the usual alleviation of ten days' worth of accumulated desire, Cipriano Algor dismissed the last remnants of his ill humor and immediately, via mental processes, which, for those aware of the premise and the conclusion, would be easy enough to delineate, he found himself thinking about Isaura Estudiosa, about her personally, but also about her name, unable to understand why we still call her Estudiosa, if the name comes from her husband, who is dead, The first chance I get, thought the potter, I must remember to ask her what her own name is, her original family name. Absorbed in the grave decision he had just made, one of the most daring of enterprises in the very private territory of names, indeed it is not the first time that a love story, to take but one example, has begun with that fatally curious question, What's your name, Cipriano Algor did not at first notice that marçal and the dog were fraternizing and playing like old friends who have not seen each other in ages, It was the uniform, his son-in-law was saying, and Marta was repeating, It was the uniform. The potter looked at them oddly, as if everything in the world had suddenly changed its meaning, perhaps it was because he had been thinking about Isaura more in terms of her name than as the woman she was, it really isn't that common, even when distracted, to get the two things mixed up, maybe there are some things we only begin to understand when we reach that point, Reach what point, Old age. Cipriano Algor walked over to the kiln, muttering, as if it were a senseless litany, Marta, marçal, Isaura, Found, then in a different order, marçal, Isaura, Found, Marta, and yet another, Isaura, Marta, Found, marçal, and another, Found, marçal, Marta, Isaura, finally he added his own name, Cipriano, Cipriano, Cipriano, and he repeated it until he lost count of the number of times he had said it, until a kind of vertigo whirled him outside of himself, until what he was saying became meaningless, then he pronounced the word kiln, the word woodshed, the word mud, the word mulberry, the word floor, the word lantern, the word earth, the word wood, the word door, the word bed, the word cemetery, the word handle, the word jug, the word van, the word water, the word pottery, the word grass, the word house, the word fire, the word dog, the word woman, the word man, the word, the word, and all the things in this world, those with names and those without, the known and the secret, the visible and the invisible, like a flock of birds which, grown weary of flying, descends from the clouds, all gradually took up their places, filling the gaps and reordering the senses. Cipriano Algor sat down on the old stone bench that his grandfather had placed beside the kiln and he rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, he wasn't looking at the house or at the pottery, or at the fields that stretched out beyond the road, or at the rooftops of the village to his right, he was looking at the ground scattered with tiny fragments of baked clay, at the whitish, grainy earth beneath them, at a stray ant carrying in its powerful mandibles a strand of wheat beard twice its size, at the shape of a stone from behind which the slender head of a lizard was peeping out, only to disappear at once. He had no thoughts or feelings, he was merely the largest of the bits of clay, a small dry clod that would crumble with the slightest pressure of the fingers, a strand of beard from an ear of wheat that had happened to be carried off by an ant, a stone behind which a living creature would hide from time to time, a beetle or a lizard or an illusion. Found seemed to emerge from the void, he wasn't there and then suddenly he was, he abruptly placed his paws on his master's knees, thus ruining Cipriano Algor's pose as a contemplator of the vanities of this world who is wasting time, or, as he believes, gaining time, asking questions of ants and beetles and lizards. Cipriano Algor stroked the dog's head and asked another question, What do you want, but Found did not answer, he just panted and opened his mouth, as if smiling at the inanity of the question. Just then, he heard marçal's voice calling, Are you coming, Pa, breakfast's ready. It was the first time his son-in-law had done such a thing, something unusual must be happening in the house and in the lives of Marta and marçal, and he could not think what it was, he imagined his daughter saying, You call him, or else, even more extraordinarily, marçal anticipating her, I'll call him, there must be some explanation for all this. He got up from the bench, again stroked the dog's head, then off they went. Cipriano Algor did not notice that the ant would never again travel the road that would lead it back to the anthill, it still has the strand of wheat beard firmly clenched between its mandibles, but its journey ended there, the fault of that clumsy dog Found, who doesn't look to see where he's putting his feet.
The Collected Novels of José Saramago Page 256