The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  What a face, murmured Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, when he looked at himself in the mirror, and he was quite right. He had slept for only an hour, having spent the rest of the night struggling with the shock and horror described above, possibly in excessive detail, an excess entirely forgivable perhaps, given that never before in the history of humanity, the same history that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso tries so hard to teach his students, have two identical people existed in the same place and at the same time. There have been instances in far-distant times of a perfect physical resemblance between two people, sometimes men, sometimes women, but they were always separated by tens and hundreds and thousands of years and by tens and hundreds and thousands of kilometers. The most remarkable case we know was that of a particular town, long since disappeared, in which in the same street and in the same house, but not in the same family, and separated by an interval of two hundred and fifty years, two identical women were born. This marvelous event was not recorded in any chronicle, nor was it preserved in the oral tradition, which is perfectly understandable, really, given that when the first was born, no one knew there would be a second, and when the second came into the world, all memory had been lost of the first. Naturally. Notwithstanding the complete absence of any documentary proof or of eyewitness accounts, we are able to confirm, and even swear on our word of honor if necessary, that everything we have described or will describe or might describe as having happened in that now disappeared town did actually happen. The fact that history does not record a fact doesn't mean the fact did not exist. When he had reached the end of his morning shaving ritual, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso dispassionately examined the face before him and thought that, all in all, he looked better. Indeed, any impartial observer, whether male or female, would not shrink from describing his features, taken as a whole, as harmonious, and would definitely not neglect to give due importance to certain slight asymmetries and certain subtle volumetric variations that, if we may put it like this, constituted the salt that enlivened what would otherwise be an entirely savorless delicacy, so often the curse of faces endowed with an overly regular physiognomy. Not that we're saying Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is the perfect figure of a man, he would never be so immodest and we would never be so subjective, but, with just a pinch of talent he could doubtless have had a successful career as a leading man in the theater. And, of course, if he could act in a theater, he could act in movies too. An unavoidable parenthesis. There are moments in a narrative, and this, as you will see, has been one of them, when any parallel manifestation of ideas and feelings on the part of the narrator with respect to what the characters themselves might be feeling or thinking at that point should be expressly forbidden by the laws of good writing. The violation, either out of imprudence or a lack of respect, of such restrictive clauses, which, if they existed, would probably be of a nonobligatory nature, can mean that a character, instead of following, as is his inalienable right, an autonomous line of thought and feeling in keeping with the status conferred upon him, finds himself assailed quite arbitrarily by thoughts or feelings that, given their provenance, cannot be entirely alien to him, but which can, nonetheless, prove, at the very least, inopportune and, in some cases, disastrous. This was precisely what happened to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso. He was looking at himself in the mirror the way someone looks at himself simply in order to gauge the damage done by a bad night's sleep, he was thinking about this and nothing else, when, suddenly, the narrator's unfortunate thoughts about his physical features and the problematic possibility that, should he reveal the necessary talent, they might, at some future date, be placed at the service of the dramatic or cinematic arts, unleashed in him a reaction that it would be no exaggeration to describe as one of horror. If the man who played the part of the clerk at the reception desk were here, he thought melodramatically, if he were standing here in front of this mirror, the face he would see would be this face. We cannot blame Tertuliano Máximo Afonso for forgetting that the other man was wearing a mustache in the film, he did forget, it's true, but perhaps only because he was absolutely certain that the other man wouldn't have a mustache now, which is why he has no need to resort to that mysterious source of knowledge, the presentiment, because he finds the best of all reasons in his own clean-shaven, utterly hairless face. Any feeling person will happily agree that the word horror, apparently ill suited to the domestic world of a person living alone, would describe with some accuracy what went through the mind of the man who has just come running back from his desk where he went to fetch a black felt-tipped pen and who now, standing once more before the mirror, traces on his own image, just above his own upper lip, a mustache identical to that worn by the clerk at the reception desk, the fine, pencil mustache of a leading man. At that moment, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso became the actor about whose name and life we know nothing, the teacher of history in a secondary school is no longer here, this apartment is not his, the face in the mirror has another owner. Had the situation lasted a minute longer, or not even that, anything could have happened in this bathroom, a nervous breakdown, a sudden fit of madness, a destructive rage. Fortunately, despite certain behavior which may have led one to believe the contrary, and which has doubtless not made its last appearance, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is made of sterner stuff, and having, for a few moments, lost control of the situation, he has now regained it. However great an effort it may take, we know that all it requires to escape from a nightmare is to open our eyes, but the cure in this case was to close the eyes, not his own, but those reflected in the mirror. As effectively as any wall, a squirt of shaving foam separated these Siamese twins who have not yet met, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's right hand, splayed over the mirror, undid the faces of both men, so much so that neither would now be able to find or recognize himself in the surface smeared with white foam and with gradually thinning trickles of black. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso could no longer see the face in the mirror, now he was alone in the apartment. He got into the shower, and although he has always, since birth, been deeply skeptical about the Spartan virtues of cold water, his father used to say that there is no better way to prime the body or sharpen the brain, and so it occurred to him this morning that a good blast of cold water, without the addition of any decadent but delicious warmer water, might prove beneficial to his feeble head and might rouse once and for all the part inside him that is trying, all the time, surreptitiously, to slide into sleep. Washed and dried, hair combed without the aid of the mirror, he went into his bedroom, made the bed, got dressed, and then went straight to the kitchen to prepare a breakfast composed, as usual, of orange juice, toast, coffee, and yogurt, for teachers need to be well fed before they set off to school to face that most difficult of tasks, planting trees or even bushes of wisdom in ground that, in most cases, tends to be barren rather than fertile. It is still very early, his class will not start until eleven o'clock, but, in the circumstances, it is understandable that he would rather not be at home today. He returned to the bathroom to clean his teeth, and, while he was doing so, it occurred to him that today was the day his upstairs neighbor usually came to clean the apartment, she was an elderly woman, a widow with no children, who, as soon as she realized that her new neighbor also lived alone, had appeared at his door six years ago to offer her services as a cleaner. No, it's not her day today, he will leave the mirror as it is, the foam is already starting to dry, it comes off with the slightest touch of the fingers, but, for the moment, it's still sticking to the surface and he can see no one peeping out from underneath. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is ready to leave, he has already decided that he will go in the car in order to reflect calmly on the recent troubling events, without having to put up with the push and shove of public transport, which, for obvious economic reasons, it has been his habit to use. He put the homework books into his briefcase, paused for a few seconds to look at the empty video box, it would be a good time to follow the advice given by his common sense and take the video out of the VCR, put it back in its box, and go strai
ght to the shop, Here you are, he would say to the assistant, I thought it would be interesting, but it wasn't, it was a waste of time, Do you want another one, the assistant would ask, struggling to recall the name of this customer who had only been in the day before, we've got a very wide selection, good films of every kind, old and new, ah, yes, Tertuliano, the last three words would only be thought, of course, and the accompanying ironic smile only imagined. Too late, the history teacher Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is already on his way down the stairs, this is not the first battle that common sense will have to resign itself to losing.

  He drove slowly through the city, like someone who has decided to make the most of being out and about early, and while he did so, despite the help of a few red and amber lights slow to change, he vainly racked his brains to find some way out of a situation that, as would be clear to any reasonably informed person, was entirely in his hands. He knew where the difficulty lay and admitted it to himself out loud as he reached the street where the school stands, If only I could put all this nonsense behind me, forget about this insane business, just dismiss the whole absurd situation, here he paused to consider that the first part of this sentence would have been quite sufficient on its own, and then concluded, But I can't, which shows all too clearly how obsessed this disoriented man has become. As mentioned before, the history class doesn't start until eleven, which is two hours away. Sooner or later, his colleague the mathematics teacher will appear in the staff room where Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, who is waiting for him, is pretending, with apparent naturalness, to check through the homework in his briefcase. An attentive observer would not perhaps take long to notice this pretense, but for that he would have to be aware that no run-of-the-mill teacher would start reading for a second time what he had corrected a first time, not so much because there was a chance he would find new mistakes and therefore have to make new emendations, but as a matter of prestige, authority, and experience, or merely because what has been corrected stays corrected, and it is neither necessary nor possible to go back. That was all Tertuliano Máximo Afonso needed, to be correcting his own mistakes, always assuming that on one of the sheets of paper, which he is now reading without seeing, he had corrected what was right and put a lie in the place of an unexpected truth. As can never be stated too often, the best inventions are made by those who did not know what they were doing. At this point, the mathematics teacher entered the room. He saw his colleague the history teacher and went straight over to him. Good morning, he said, Good morning, Sorry, he said, I'm interrupting you, No, no, not at all, I was just having another quick glance through these, but I've corrected most of them already, How are they, Who, Your students, Oh, the usual, so-so, not too bad, Exactly like us when we were their age, said the mathematics teacher, smiling. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was waiting for his colleague to ask him if he had, in the end, got around to renting the video, if he had seen it and liked it, but the mathematics teacher seemed to have forgotten entirely, his mind far from their interesting conversation of the previous day. He went and poured himself a coffee, came back, sat down, and calmly spread the newspaper out on the table, ready to learn about the general state of the world and the country. Having perused the headlines on the front page and wrinkled his nose at each of them, he said, Sometimes I wonder if the disastrous state the planet's in isn't all our own fault, Ours, whose, mine, yours, asked Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, pretending to be interested but hoping that this conversation, even though it was starting off with a subject so very far from his own concerns, would, eventually, lead them to the nub of the matter, Imagine a basket of oranges, said his colleague, imagine that one of them, at the bottom, starts to rot, and then imagine how each orange, one after the other, starts to rot too, who would then be able to say where the rot began, The oranges you're referring to, are they countries or people, asked Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, Within a country, they're the people, within the world, they're countries, and since there are no countries without people, it's obvious that the rot begins with the people, And why should it be us, you, me, who are the guilty parties, It must have been someone, Ah, but you're not taking society into account, Society, my dear friend, like humanity, is an abstraction, Like mathematics, Far more than mathematics, mathematics, in comparison, is as real as the wood this table's made of, What about social studies then, So-called social studies are often not studies about people at all, Let's just hope no sociologists are listening, they would condemn you to a civic death, at the very least, Contenting yourself with the music of the orchestra you play in and with the part you play in it is a common mistake, especially among nonmusicians, Some people are more responsible than others, you and I, for example, are relatively innocent, of the worst evils that is, Ah, the usual argument of the easy conscience, Just because it comes from an easy conscience doesn't mean it isn't true, The best way to achieve a universal exoneration is to conclude that since everyone is to blame, no one is guilty, Perhaps there's nothing we can do about it, perhaps they're just the world's problems, said Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, as if bringing the conversation to a close, but the mathematics teacher retorted, The only problems the world has are problems caused by people, and with that he stuck his nose in his paper. The minutes passed, it was nearly time for the history class, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso could see no way of bringing up the subject that interested him. He could, of course, simply ask his colleague directly, put the question to him point-blank, By the way, except that he hadn't been coming that way at all, but these language fillers exist precisely for such situations, an urgent need to change the subject without appearing to insist, a kind of socially acceptable pretend-that-I-just-remembered-something, By the way, he would say, did you notice that the clerk in the film, the one at the reception desk, is the spitting image of me, but this would be tantamount to showing your strongest card in a game, making a third person party to a secret that wasn't even known as yet to two parties, with all the subsequent, future awkwardness of avoiding inquisitive questions, for example, So, have you met your double yet. Just then the mathematics teacher glanced up from the newspaper, So, he said, did you rent that video, Yes, I did, replied Tertuliano Máximo Afonso excitedly, almost happy, And what did you think of it, Quite amusing really, It helped with your depression, your apathy, I mean, Apathy or depression, it makes no odds, the name isn't the problem, It helped you though, Possibly, it made me laugh a couple of times. The mathematics teacher got up, he too had students waiting for him, what better opportunity for Tertuliano Máximo Afonso to say, By the way, when was the last time you saw The Race Is to the Swift, not that it really matters, of course, I was just curious, The last time was the first and the first time the last, When did you see it though, About a month ago, a friend lent it to me, Oh, I thought it was yours, part of your collection, No, if it had been, I would have lent it to you, not made you go spending good money on renting it. They were in the corridor now, on their way to the classrooms, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso felt easy and relaxed in his mind, as if his depression had suddenly evaporated, disappeared into infinite space, perhaps never to return. At the next corner, they would part and go their separate ways, and it was only when they had reached the corner and had both said, See you later, then, that the mathematics teacher, when he was about four paces away, turned and said, By the way, did you notice that one of the bit-part actors in the film looked incredibly like you, all you need is a mustache, and you'd be as alike as two peas in a pod. Like a devastating bolt of lightning, his depression fell from on high and reduced Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's buoyant mood to ashes. Despite this, he put on a brave face and managed to reply in a voice that seemed to break with every syllable, Yes, I did, it's an amazing coincidence, absolutely extraordinary, then added with a colorless smile, The only difference is that I haven't got a mustache and he's not a history teacher, otherwise we're identical. His colleague looked at him oddly, as if he had just met him again after a long absence, Now that I think of it, you had a mustache a few years ago too, he s
aid, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, throwing caution to the wind, just like the lost man who will listen to no advice, replied, Perhaps, at the time, he was the teacher. The mathematics teacher came over to him, placed a paternal hand on his shoulder, You really are seriously depressed, I mean, something like that, a silly, unimportant coincidence, shouldn't upset you in this way, It didn't upset me, I just didn't sleep very much, I had a bad night, You probably had a bad night because you were upset. The mathematics teacher felt Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's shoulder tense beneath his hand, as if his whole body, from head to toe, had suddenly grown hard, and the shock was so great, the impression so strong, that it forced him to withdraw his hand. He did so as slowly as he could, trying not to show that he knew he had been rejected, but the unusual hardness in Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's eyes left no room for doubt, the pacific, docile, submissive history teacher whom he usually treated with friendly but superior benevolence is a different person right now. Perplexed, as if he had been set down in front of a game whose rules he did not know, he said, Right, I'll see you later, then, I won't be having lunch at school today. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's only reply was to bow his head and go off to his class.