The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  A few more days passed, the school term ended with the last exam and the pinning up of the list of marks, his colleague the mathematics teacher said good-bye to him, I'm off on holiday now, but afterward, if you need anything, phone me, and be careful, be very careful, Don't forget what we agreed, the headmaster told him, and I'll phone you when I get back from holiday to find out how the work's going, but if you do decide to go away, because you do, after all, have a right to some rest, leave me a contact number on your answering machine. Some days later, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso invited Maria da Paz out to supper, his appalling treatment of her had finally begun to weigh on his conscience, not even so much as a formal thank-you for her help, not even some explanation of what the letter had said, even if he had to invent one. They met in the restaurant, she arrived a little late, sat down immediately, and blamed her lateness on her mother, to look at them no one would think they were lovers, or you might perhaps think that they had been lovers until recently and were still not yet used to their new state of mutual indifference, or having to pretend to be indifferent. They exchanged a few polite words, How are you, How have you been, Are you very busy, Me too, and while Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was once again hesitating as to which way the conversation should go, she anticipated him and jumped in with both feet, Did the letter tell you what you wanted to know, she asked, did it give you all the information you needed, Yes, he said, all too aware that his response was at once true and false, That wasn't my impression, Why's that, Well, I was expecting a bulkier envelope, Sorry, I don't understand, If I remember rightly, the facts you needed were so many and so detailed that they couldn't possibly have fit on one sheet of paper, and that was all the envelope contained, How do you know, did you open it, asked Tertuliano Máximo Afonso sharply and knowing, even as he said it, what response this gratuitous provocation would receive. Maria da Paz looked him straight in the eye and said serenely, No, I didn't, as you well know, Forgive me, I spoke without thinking, he said, Oh, I'll forgive you if you insist, but I can go no further than that, Further than what, For example, I can't forget that you considered me capable of opening a letter intended for you, Deep down, you know that isn't what I really think, Deep down, I know that you don't know me at all, If I didn't trust you, I would never have asked you if it was all right for the letter to be sent to you, My name was just a mask, a mask for your name, a mask for you, But I explained at the time why I thought that was the best way to proceed, Yes, you explained, And you agreed, Yes, I agreed, So, So, from now on I will be expecting you to show me this information you say you received, not because I'm interested, but simply because I think it's your duty to do so, Now you're the one who distrusts me, Yes, but I'll stop distrusting you if you can tell me how all the facts you asked for could possibly have fit on one sheet of paper, They didn't give me all the facts, Ah, they didn't give you all the facts, That's what I said, Then you'll have to show me what you've got. The food was growing cold on their plates, the sauce on the meat was congealing, the wine was sleeping forgotten in their glasses, and there were tears in Maria da Paz's eyes. For a moment, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso thought what an infinite relief it would be to tell her the whole story from the beginning, about this extraordinary, singular, astonishing, and never-before-seen case of the duplicate man, the unimaginable become reality, the absurd reconciled with reason, the final proof that for God nothing is impossible, and that the science of this century is, as someone said, a fool. If he did so, if he was open with her, then all his previous troubling actions would be explained, including those that had been, as far as Maria da Paz was concerned, aggressive, rude, or disloyal, or that had, in short, offended against the most elementary common sense, that is to say almost all his actions. Then harmony would be restored, all errors and mistakes would be unconditionally and unreservedly forgiven, Maria da Paz would beg him, Don't go on with this madness, it might turn out badly, and he would reply, You sound like my mother, and she would ask, Have you told her, and he would say, No, I just said that I had a few problems at the moment, and she would conclude, Now that you've talked to me about it, let's sort it out together. Not many tables are occupied, they have been given a corner table, and no one is paying them any particular attention, situations like this, couples who come to air their sentimental or domestic grievances between the fish and the meat courses or, worse, because the conflicts have taken longer to resolve, between the aperitif and paying the bill, form an integral part of the catering trade, whether in restaurants or in cafeterias. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's well-intentioned thought vanished as quickly as it came, the waiter asked if they had finished and took away the plates, Maria da Paz's eyes are almost dry, it's been said thousands of times before that there's no point crying over spilled milk, the problem in this case is what has happened to the jug, which lay shattered on the floor. The waiter brought the coffee and the bill that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso had asked for, and a few minutes later, they were in his car. I'll take you home, he had said, Yes, if you wouldn't mind, she had said. They did not speak until they reached the street where Maria da Paz lived. Before they reached the place where he normally dropped her, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso parked the car by the sidewalk and turned off the engine. Surprised by this unusual gesture, she shot him a glance, but still said nothing. Without turning his head, without looking at her, in a tense, determined voice, he said, Every word that has come out of my mouth during these last few weeks, including the conversation we've just had in the restaurant, has been a lie, but don't ask me what the truth is because I can't tell you, So it wasn't statistical data you wanted from the production company, Exactly, And I suppose there's no point expecting you to tell me what the real reason for your interest was, No, Presumably it's something to do with the videos you've got in your apartment, Just be satisfied with what I've told you and stop asking questions and making suppositions, Oh, I can promise you I won't ask you any questions, but I'm free to make all the suppositions I want, however absurd you may think them, You seem oddly unsurprised, Why should I be surprised, You know what I mean, don't make me repeat it, Sooner or later you would have had to tell me, I just didn't expect it to be today, And why would I have had to tell you, Because you're more honest than you think, Although not honest enough to tell you the truth, The reason for that isn't a lack of honesty, something else is keeping your lips sealed, What, A doubt, an anxiety, a fear, What makes you think that, Because I've read it in your face and heard it in your words, But the words were lying, They were, yes, but not the way they sounded, The moment has come to use the phrase politicians always use, I can neither confirm nor deny it, That's just one of those low rhetorical tricks that deceive no one, Why, Because anyone can see that the phrase inclines more toward confirmation than toward denial, Well, I've never noticed that, Neither have I, it only occurred to me now, thanks to you, But I didn't confirm the fear, the anxiety, or the doubt, You didn't deny them either, Now is not the time for word games, Well, it's better than sitting at a restaurant table with tears in your eyes, Forgive me, This time there's nothing to forgive, now I know half of what there is to know, so I can't complain, But all I said was that everything I told you was a lie, That's the half I know, from now on I hope to be able to sleep better, You might not be able to sleep at all if you knew the other half, Don't frighten me, please, There's no reason to be frightened, don't worry, there are no corpses involved, Don't frighten me, It's all right, as my mother usually says, in the end everything finds a solution, Promise me you'll take care, Yes, I promise, Great care, Yes, And if, among all the secrets I'm incapable of imagining, you find one you can tell me about, you will tell me, won't you, however insignificant it may seem to you, It's a promise, but, in this case, it's either all or nothing, Even so, I'll wait. Maria da Paz bent toward him, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and made to get out of the car. He placed one hand on her arm and stopped her, Stay, come back home with me. She gently pulled away, No, not tonight, you couldn't give me more than you already have, Unless I tol
d you everything, No, not even then. She opened the door, turned once more to say goodbye with a smile, and got out. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso started the engine, waited until she had gone into the building, and then, with a weary gesture, set the car in motion and drove home, where, patient and confident of its power, loneliness was waiting for him.

  The following day, about midmorning, he set off for his first reconnoitering of the unknown territory where Daniel Santa-Clara lived with his wife. He was wearing the false beard meticulously fixed to his face and a peaked cap to throw a protective shadow over his eyes, which he decided at the last moment not to conceal behind a pair of dark glasses because, in conjunction with the rest of the disguise, they gave him an outlaw air likely to awaken the suspicions of the whole neighborhood and to be the cause of a full-scale police hunt, with the all-too-foreseeable consequences of capture, identification, and public opprobrium. He was not making this expedition in the expectation of collecting any particularly significant facts, at most he would learn something of the exterior of things, gain a topographical knowledge of places, the street, the building, but little more. It would be the most extraordinary fluke to see Daniel Santa-Clara going into the building, with remnants of makeup still on his face, and wearing the irresolute, perplexed expression of someone who is taking rather too long to emerge from the skin of the character he had been playing an hour before. Real life has always seemed to us more frugal in coincidences than the novel or other forms of fiction, unless we were to allow that the principle of coincidence is the one true ruler of the world, in which case, we should give as much value to the coincidence one actually experiences as to that which is written about, and vice versa. During the half hour that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso spent there, stopping to look in shopwindows and to buy a newspaper, then sitting reading the paper outside a café right next to the building, Daniel Santa-Clara was seen neither entering nor leaving. Perhaps he's resting in the peace of his home with his wife and his children, if he has any, perhaps, as he was the other day, he is busy at a film shoot, perhaps there is no one in the apartment, the children because they have gone to spend the holidays with their grandparents, the mother because, like so many others, she has a job to go to, either to safeguard a position of real or imagined personal independence or because the household finances cannot survive without her material contribution, for the fact is that, however quickly a supporting actor scurries from small role to small role, however often he is selected by the production company that uses him now on a more or less tacitly exclusive basis, the money he can earn will always be subordinated to the rigors of the law of supply and demand, which is never based on the objective needs of the subject but purely on the latter's real or imagined talents and abilities, those that it favors him with recognizing or those that, with unknown and usually negative intent, are attributed to him, forgetting that he might have other, less visible talents and abilities that might be worth putting to the test. This means that Daniel Santa-Clara could become a big star if fortune were to decide to have him noticed by a clever producer who didn't mind taking a risk, the sort who, while he might occasionally take it into his head to destroy a really first-rate star, has also been known, with great generosity, to polish up the shine on second-rate or even third-rate stars. Letting time do its work has always been the best option ever since the world began, Daniel Santa-Clara is still young, he has a pleasant face, a good physique, and undeniable gifts as an actor, it wouldn't be right for him to have to spend the rest of his life playing hotel receptionists or other such occupations. It is not long since we saw him playing a theater impresario in The Goddess of the Stage, at last duly acknowledged in the opening credits, and this could be a sign that he has begun to be noticed. The future, wherever it is, and although it is hardly a novelty to say so, awaits. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, on the other hand, had better not wait around very much longer, for fear that the troubling blackness of his general appearance should become etched on the photographic memory of the waiters in the café, we neglected, by the way, to mention that he is wearing a dark suit and that, as protection against the glare of the sun, he has now had to resort to dark glasses. He left the money on the table, so as not to have to summon the waiter, and walked quickly over to the telephone booth on the other side of the road. From his top jacket pocket he removed a piece of paper bearing Daniel Santa-Clara's telephone number, which he dialed. He didn't want to speak to anyone, just to know if anyone would answer, and who. This time no woman came running from the other end of the apartment, nor did a child tell him Mummy's not home, nor did he hear a voice identical to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's say, Hello. She must be at work, he thought, and he's probably filming, playing a traffic cop or a public-works contractor. He emerged from the telephone booth and looked at his watch. It was nearly lunchtime, neither of them will be coming home, he said, but at that moment, a woman passed, he didn't manage to see her face, she was crossing the street in the direction of the café, she looked as if she was going to sit down at a table outside, but she didn't, she went on, took a few more steps, and entered the building where Daniel Santa-Clara lives. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso made a gesture of barely contained frustration, It must have been her, he muttered, for this man's worst defect, at least since we have known him, has been an excess of imagination, no one would think he was a history teacher, someone who should be interested only in facts, here we have him inventing identities after catching only a brief rear view of the woman who passed him, someone he does not know and has never seen before, either from behind or from in front. To be fair to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso though, despite this tendency to imaginative flights of fancy, he can still manage, at decisive moments, to impose upon himself a calculating coolness that would make the most hardened of stock-exchange speculators turn pale with professional envy. There is, in fact, a simple, not to say elementary, way, although, as with all things, it is necessary first to have had the idea, of finding out if the woman who went into the building was going up to Daniel Santa-Clara's apartment, he would just have to wait a few minutes, to allow time for the lift to reach the fifth floor where Antonio Claro lives, to wait for her to open the front door and go in, two more minutes for her to put her bag down on the sofa and make herself comfortable, it wouldn't be right to make her run as he had the other day, as you could tell from her breathing. The phone rang and rang, rang and rang again, but no one answered. So it wasn't her, said Tertuliano Máximo Afonso as he hung up. He has nothing more to do here, this latest preliminary act of investigation is over, many of the previous ones had been absolutely vital to the success of the operation, others had not really been worth wasting time on, but they had, at least, served to deceive his doubts, anxieties, and fears, to allow him to pretend that marking time was the same as going forward and that retreat was merely an opportunity to think things through. He had left his car on a nearby street and was setting off to find it, his work as a spy had ended, or so we thought, but Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, and heaven knows what they'll think, cannot help shooting glances of burning intensity at every woman he passes, well, not every woman, some are excluded as being too old or too young to be married to a thirty-eight-year-old man, Which is my age and, therefore, presumably his age, now it should be said at this point that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's thoughts set off along two different paths, some to question the discriminatory idea underlying his allusion to age differences in marriage and other similar unions, thus upholding the prejudices of social consensus where the fluctuating but deep-rooted concepts of what is proper and improper are generated, and others, the thoughts we mentioned, to dispute the possibility subsequently aired, which is that the history teacher and the actor, based on the fact that each is the spitting image of the other, as established earlier by videographic evidence, are exactly the same age. As regards the first branch of reflections, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso had no option but to recognize that every human being, insuperable and private moral impediments apart, has the right to be bound to whome
ver they like, where and how they like, as long as the other interested party wants this too. As for the second line of thought, this suddenly revived in Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's mind, and for more pressing reasons now, the troubling question of who is the duplicate of whom, rejecting as improbable the hypothesis that both were born, not only on the same day, but also at the same hour, at the same minute, and same fraction of a second, for this would imply that, as well as seeing the light at the very same moment, they would, at that very same moment, both have experienced crying for the first time too. Coincidences are fine as long as they respect the minimum degree of probability demanded by common sense. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is troubled now by the possibility that he might be the younger of the two, that the other man might be the original and he nothing but a mere and, of course, devalued repetition. Obviously, his nonexistent powers of divination do not allow him to peer into the fog of the yet-to-be and see if this will have any influence on a future that we have every reason to describe as impenetrable, but the fact that he was the discoverer of the supernatural miracle we know so well had given rise in his mind, without him noticing, to a kind of sense of primogeniture that, at this moment, is rebelling against the threat, as if an ambitious bastard brother had come to turn him off his throne. Absorbed in these ponderous thoughts, harried by these insidious anxieties, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, still wearing his beard, turned into the street where he lives and where everyone knows him, running the risk that someone might suddenly start shouting that the teacher's car is being stolen and for a determined neighbor to block the way with his own car. Solidarity, however, has lost many of its former virtues, in this case it would be quite appropriate to say fortunately so, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso proceeded on his way without impediment, and, without anyone giving any sign that they had recognized him or the car he was driving, he left the area and its environs and, now that necessity has made of him a frequent visitor to shopping centers, went into the first one he found. Ten minutes later, he emerged, cleanshaven, apart from the tiny amount of his own beard that had grown since the morning. When he got home there was a message from Maria da Paz on the answering machine, nothing important, just to ask how he was. I'm fine, he murmured, absolutely fine. He promised himself that he would phone her that night, but he probably won't if he decides to take the next step, which cannot be delayed for even a page longer, that of phoning Daniel Santa-Clara.