The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  Having replaced the receiver on the rest, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had got what he wanted and had more than enough reason to be pleased with himself, but the fact was that their long, difficult conversation had always been dictated by her even when it appeared not to be, subjecting him to a kind of continual humiliation that never found explicit expression in the words spoken by either of them, and yet those words, one by one, left an increasingly bitter taste in his mouth, which is precisely how people often describe the taste of defeat. He knew he had won, but he was aware too that his victory was in part illusory, as if each advance he had made had been only the mechanical consequence of a tactical withdrawal by the enemy, golden bridges skilfully placed to draw him on, with flags flying and drums and bugles sounding, until there came a point perhaps when he would find himself hopelessly encircled. In order to gain his objectives, he had thrown around Maria da Paz a net of sly, calculating speeches, but the knots with which he thought he was binding her had merely ended up limiting his own freedom of movement. During the six months they had known each other, he had deliberately kept Maria da Paz on the margins of his private life, so as not to let himself become too involved, and now that he had decided to end the relationship, and was only waiting for the right moment to do so, he found himself obliged not only to ask for her help, but to make her an accomplice in actions of whose origins and causes, as well as whose final end, she knew nothing. Common sense would call him an unscrupulous exploiter, but he would reply that the situation he was living through was unique in the world, that there were no antecedents by which to establish the guidelines for socially acceptable behavior, that no law had foreseen the extraordinary circumstance of a person being duplicated, and so, he, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, had to invent, at every turn, the procedures, correct or incorrect, that would lead him to his objective. The letter was just one of those procedures, and if, to write it, he had been obliged to abuse the trust of a woman who said she loved him, it wasn't such a very grave crime, other people had done far worse things and no one was marking them out for public condemnation.

  Tertuliano Máximo Afonso put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and paused to think. The letter would have to look as if it came from an admirer, it would have to be enthusiastic, but not too enthusiastic, after all, the actor Daniel Santa-Clara was not exactly a star capable of provoking hysterical outbursts of feeling, the letter should go through the ritual of asking for a signed photograph, even though what Tertuliano Máximo Afonso really wants to know is where the actor lives, as well as his real name, if, as everything seems to indicate, Daniel Santa-Clara is the pseudonym of a man who may, who knows, also be called Tertuliano. Once the letter has been sent, there are two possible hypotheses as to what will happen next, the production company will either respond directly, giving the information requested, or say that it is not authorized to do so, in which case they will probably send the letter on to the person to whom it is really addressed. Is that what will happen, wondered Tertuliano Máximo Afonso. A moment's brief reflection made him see that the last hypothesis was the least likely because it would show a complete lack of professionalism and even less consideration on the part of the company in burdening its actors with the task and with the expense of replying to letters and sending out photographs. Let's hope so, he muttered, the whole thing will fall apart if he sends Maria da Paz a personal reply. For a moment, he seemed to see before him the thunderous collapse of the house of cards that, for a week now, he has been so painstakingly building, but administrative logic and an awareness that there was no other possible route helped him, gradually, to restore his shaken spirits. Writing the letter did not prove easy, which explains why his upstairs neighbor heard the hammering of the typewriter for over an hour. At one point, the phone rang, rang insistently, but Tertuliano Máximo Afonso did not pick it up. It was probably Maria da Paz.

  HE WOKE LATE. HE HAD SPENT A TROUBLED NIGHT, SHOT through with fleeting, disquieting dreams, a staff meeting at which none of the teachers were present, an endless corridor, a videocassette that refused to fit into the VCR, a cinema with a black screen on which a black film was being shown, a telephone directory with the same name repeated on every line and which he could not read, a parcel with a fish inside, a man carrying a stone on his back and saying, I'm an Amorite, an algebraic equation with people's faces where there should have been letters. The only dream he could remember with any clarity was the one about the parcel, although he had been unable to identify the fish, and now, still barely awake, he consoled himself with the thought that at least it couldn't have been a monkfish, because a monkfish wouldn't have fit inside the box. He got up with some difficulty, as if his joints had stiffened after some excessive and unaccustomed physical effort, and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, a full glass gulped down with all the urgency of someone who had eaten something salty for supper. He was hungry but didn't feel like preparing breakfast. He went back into the bedroom to fetch his dressing gown, then returned to the liv ing room. The letter to the production company was there on the desk, the final and definitive version of the many versions with which the wastepaper basket was filled almost to overflowing. He reread it and it seemed to him to serve his present purposes, he had not only requested a signed photograph of the actor, he had also, as if in passing, asked for his address. A final comment, which Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was immodest enough to consider an imaginative and strategic masterstroke, suggested that there was an urgent need for a study of the importance of supporting actors, who were, according to the writer of the letter, as essential to the development of filmic action as small tributaries are to the formation of great rivers. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was convinced that such a metaphorical, sibylline conclusion would remove any possibility of the company forwarding the letter to an actor, who, even though his name had appeared in the opening credits of the most recent films he had acted in, was, nevertheless, one of the legion of actors considered to be inferior, subaltern, and incidental, a kind of necessary evil, an indispensable nuisance, who, in the opinion of the producer, always takes up too much space in the budget. If Daniel Santa-Clara were to receive a letter written in these terms, his thoughts would naturally turn to financial and social rewards in keeping with his role as a tributary of the Nile and the Amazon of the major stars. And if that first individual action, begun in order to defend the simple, selfish well-being of one claimant, were to multiply, to spread, to expand into a vast collective action of solidarity, then the pyramid structure of the film industry would collapse like another house of cards, and we would be granted the extraordinary fate or, better still, the historic privilege of witnessing the birth of a new and revolutionary concept of the cinema and of life. There is no danger, however, that such a cataclysm will occur. The letter, signed with the name of a woman called Maria da Paz, will be sent to the appropriate department, where a clerk will call the boss's attention to the ominous suggestion contained in the final paragraph, the boss will at once pass on the dangerous item for consideration by his immediate superior, and, that same day, before the virus slips, by mistake, out into the streets, the few people who know about the letter will be instantly sworn to absolute secrecy, rewarded in advance with appropriate promotions and substantial increases in salary. A decision will then have to be taken as to what to do with the letter, whether to grant the requests for a signed photograph and for information about where the actor lives, the first purely routine, the second rather unusual, or to behave simply as if it had never been written or had got lost in the confusion of the postal service. The discussion held by the board of directors will take up the whole of the following day, not because it proved difficult to reach initial unanimity, but because every foreseeable consequence became the object of prolonged consideration, and not only those consequences, but others that seemed to be the products of sick imaginations. The final decision will be both radical and clever. Radical because the letter wi
ll be burned at the end of the meeting, with the whole board of directors present to witness it and breathe a sigh of relief, clever because it will satisfy the two requests in a way that will guarantee the double gratitude of the writer, the first, purely routine as we said, no problem at all, the second, With reference to your letter, which we read with great interest, those were the terms in which it was put, underlining the exceptional nature of the information being given. This did not exclude the possibility that the writer of the letter, Maria da Paz, would one day meet Daniel Santa-Clara, now that she has his address, and would mention to him her theory about tributaries as applied to the distribution of roles in the dramatic arts, but, as experience in communications has abundantly shown, the mobilizing power of the spoken word, which is in no way inferior to that of the written word and may even, in the short term, prove more effective in marshaling minds and multitudes, has a more limited historical range, given that, when a speech is repeated, it soon runs out of breath and strays from its original aims and intentions. Why else are the laws that rule us written down. It is more likely, though, that, if such a meeting were to take place and if such a matter were to be brought up, Daniel Santa-Clara would pay only scant attention to Maria da Paz's tributarial theories and suggest diverting the conversation to less arid subjects, if we can be forgiven such a flagrant contradiction, given that it was of water that we were speaking and the rivers that carry it away.

  Having placed before him one of the letters that Maria da Paz had written to him some time before, and after a few trial runs to loosen up and prepare his hand, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso transcribed as best he could the sober but elegant signature that concluded the letter. He did this out of respect for the childish and somewhat melancholy desire she had expressed, and not because he thought that the more perfect the forgery the more credible the document would appear, a document that, as mentioned above, will, within a matter of a few days, have vanished from this earth, burned to ashes. It makes one feel like saying, All that work for nothing. The letter is already in the envelope, the stamp is in its place, all he needs to do now is to go down to the street and put it in the postbox on the corner. Since today is a Sunday, the postal van won't be picking up the correspondence, but Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is anxious to be free of the letter as soon as possible. As long as it is here, time will remain as still as a deserted stage, or this, at least, is his vivid impression. The row of videos on the floor provokes in him the same nervous impatience. He wants to clear the stage, to leave no traces, the first act is over, it is time to remove the props. No more of Daniel Santa-Clara's films and no more anxiety, Will he be in this one, Perhaps he won't appear, Will he have a mustache, Will he wear his hair parted in the middle, no more putting little crosses by names, the puzzle has been solved. It was at this moment that he remembered the call he had made to the first of the Santa-Claras in the phone book, that house where no one had responded. Shall I try again, he wondered. If he did, if someone answered, if they said, yes, Daniel Santa-Clara did live there, the letter that had cost him so much mental labor would become unnecessary, dispensable, he could tear it up and throw it in the wastepaper basket, as useless as the failed drafts that had prepared the way for the final version. He realized that he needed a pause, a respite, even just a week or two, the time it would take for the production company to reply, a period in which he could pretend that he had never seen The Race Is to the Swift or the hotel receptionist, knowing that this false calm, this appearance of tranquility, would have a limit, an imminent expiration date, and that when it was time, the curtain would rise inexorably on the second act. But he realized too that if he didn't try to phone again, he would remain tethered thereafter to the obsessive idea that he had behaved in a cowardly fashion in a fight to which no one had challenged him and into which he had entered of his own free will, having himself provoked it. Searching for a man called Daniel Santa-Clara who did not even know he was the object of a search, this was the absurd situation Tertuliano Máximo Afonso had created, more suited to the plot of a detective novel with no known criminal, and quite unjustifiable in the hitherto uneventful life of a history teacher. Caught thus with his back to the wall, he made an agreement with himself, I'll phone once more, if someone answers and says that Daniel Santa-Clara lives there, I'll throw the letter away and deal with whatever the consequences might be, I'll decide then whether to speak or not, but, if they don't answer, then the letter will be sent off and I'll never phone the number again, come what may. The feeling of hunger he had felt up until then had been replaced by a kind of nervous palpitation in the pit of his stomach, but the decision had been made, he would not go back on it. The number was dialed, the phone rang somewhere in the distance, the sweat started trickling slowly down his face, the phone rang and rang, it was clear there was no one at home, but Tertuliano Máximo Afonso defied fate, he gave his adversary one last chance to pick up the phone, until the ringing became a strident victory cry and the telephone fell silent of its own accord. Right, he said out loud, let no one say of me that I failed in my duty. He felt suddenly calmer than he had in a long time. His period of rest had begun, he could go into the bathroom with a clear head, shave, shower unhurriedly, and get dressed carefully, Sundays tend to be dull, gloomy days, but there are some when one feels glad to have been born. It was too late to have breakfast and too early for lunch, he would have to fill the time somehow, he could go out and buy a newspaper and come back, he could look over the lesson he has to teach tomorrow, he could sit down and read a few more pages of A History of Mesopotamian Civilizations, he could, he could, then a light came on in one small corner of his memory, the recollection of one of his dreams of the previous night, the one in which a man was carrying a stone on his back and saying, I'm an Amorite, it would be nice if that stone had been King Hammurabi's famous Code and not just any old stone picked up from the ground, it's only logical really that historians, having studied so hard, should dream historical dreams. It is hardly surprising that A History of Mesopotamian Civilizations should lead him to King Hammurabi's laws, it was a transition as natural as opening the door into the next room, but the fact that the boulder carried on the back of the Amorite should have reminded him that he hadn't phoned his mother for nearly a week, even the most skilled interpreter of dreams would have been incapable of explaining to us, having excluded outright as insulting and ill intentioned, the easy interpretation that, deep down, and never daring to confess as much to himself, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso thinks of his progenitor as a heavy burden. Poor woman, far away, bereft of news, so discreet and respectful of her son's life, I mean, he's a secondary school teacher, and only in an emergency would she dare to phone, for fear of interrupting a labor that, to some extent, she finds beyond her comprehension, not that she lacks education, not that she didn't study history herself as a child, but what she has always found bewildering is that history can be taught at all. When she used to sit on the benches at school and hear the teacher talking about the events of the past, it seemed to her that all these things were pure imaginings and that if the teacher had those imaginings, she could have them too, just as she occasionally found herself imagining her own life. Finding these events set down in the history book did not change her mind in the least, all the textbook did was collect together the free-flowing fantasies of the person who had written it, and there was clearly little difference between those fantasies and the ones you could find in a novel. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's mother, whose name, Carolina, surname Máximo, finally appears here, is a fervent and assiduous reader of novels. As such, she knows all about telephones that ring unexpectedly and of others that ring when you are desperately hoping they will. This was not the case now, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's mother has just been thinking, I wonder when my son will phone, and there, suddenly, is his voice in her ear, Hello, Mama, how have you been, Oh, fine, fine, pretty much as usual, what about you, Oh, I'm fine too, as always, Have you had a lot of work at school, No more than normal, homework, tes
ts, the occasional staff meeting, And when do your classes end this year, In about two weeks' time, then I'll have a week of exams, Does that mean that you'll be here with me within a month, Of course I'll come and see you, but I won't be able to stay for more than a few days, Why's that, Because I've got some things to sort out here, a few loose ends to tie up, What sort of things, what loose ends, the school closes for the holidays, and holidays, as I understand it, were made for people to rest, Don't worry, I'll rest, but there are some matters I need to sort out first, And are they serious matters, Yes, I believe so, What do you mean, if they're serious, they're serious, it's not a question of belief, It was just a manner of speaking, Has it anything to do with your girlfriend, with Maria da Paz, In a way, You're like a character in a book I've been reading, a woman who always answers questions with another question, You're the one who has been asking the questions, my only question was to ask how you've been, That's because you don't speak to me clearly and directly, I believe so, you say, in a way, you say, I'm not used to you being so mysterious with me, Don't get angry, I'm not getting angry, it's just that I find it odd that, once the holidays start, you won't be coming straight here, it's never happened before as I recall, Look, I'll tell you all about it later, Are you going on a trip somewhere, Another question, Are you or aren't you, If I was, I would tell you, What I don't understand is why you said that Maria da Paz had something to do with these things that oblige you to stay, It isn't quite like that, perhaps I was exaggerating, Are you thinking of getting married again, Oh, Mama, please, Well, perhaps you should, People don't tend to get married so much these days, you must have gleaned that from your novels, Now I'm not stupid and I know perfectly well the kind of world I'm living in, it's just that I don't think you should keep the girl dangling, But I've never promised her marriage or even suggested we live together, As far as she's concerned, a relationship that's lasted six months is like a promise, you don't know women, No, I don't know the women of your day, And you don't know much about the women of yours either, Possibly, I don't really have that much experience of women, I've been married once, divorced once, and the rest doesn't really count for much, There's Maria da Paz, She doesn't really count for much either, Don't you realize how cruel you're being, Cruel, that's a very solemn word, Yes, I know it sounds like something out of a cheap romance, but cruelty can take many forms, sometimes it even comes disguised as indifference or indolence, shall I give you an example, delaying a decision can become a conscious weapon of mental aggression against other people, Well, I knew you had a talent for psychology, but I had no idea you knew so much, Oh, I don't know a thing about psychology, I've never read a single word about it, but I know a thing or two about people, All right, I'll let you know when the time comes, Don't keep me waiting too long, from now on I won't have a moment's peace, Please don't worry, one way or another everything in this world finds a solution, Sometimes in the worst possible way, Not in this case, Well, I certainly hope not, Take care, Mama, You too, son, take care, Yes, I will. His mother's anxiety dissipated the sense of well-being that had lent a new vivacity to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's spirit after phoning the Santa-Clara who was not at home. Mentioning the serious matters he would have to deal with when school was over had been an unforgivable mistake. True, the conversation had got diverted afterward onto his relationship with Maria da Paz and, at a certain point, seemed set to stay there, but when, to soothe her, he had said that everything in this world finds a solution, his mother's words, Sometimes in the worst possible way, sounded to him now like an augury of disaster, a warning of future misfortunes, as if, in the place of the elderly lady called Carolina Máximo, who also happened to be his mother, a sibyl or a Cassandra had spoken to him from the other end of the line, telling him in so many words, There's still time to stop. For a moment, he considered jumping in his car and making the five-hour journey that would bring him to the small town where his mother lived, telling her everything, then, his soul washed clean of unhealthy miasmas, coming back to his job as a history teacher with no taste for cinema, determined to turn this confusing page of his life and even, who knows, prepared seriously to consider the possibility of marrying Maria da Paz. Les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus, said Tertuliano Máximo Afonso out loud, this man who had never been inside a casino in his life, but who has among his assets as a reader a few famous novels from the belle epoque. He put the letter addressed to the production company in one of his jacket pockets and went out. He will forget to post it, have lunch in a restaurant somewhere, and come back home to drain to the bitter dregs this Sunday afternoon and evening.