MAY I SPEAK TO SENHOR DANIEL SANTA-CLARA, ASKED Tertuliano Máximo Afonso when the man's wife answered, You're the same person, I presume, who phoned the other day, I recognize your voice, she said, Yes, I am, May I ask who's calling, That hardly seems necessary, your husband doesn't know me, You don't know him either, but you know his name, That's only natural, he's an actor, and therefore a public figure, So are we all, we are all more or less public figures, it's only the number of spectators that varies, My name is Máximo Afonso, Just a moment. The receiver was placed on the table, then picked up again, the voices of both men will repeat themselves as a mirror repeats itself when placed in front of another mirror, António Claro speaking, how may I help you, My name's Tertuliano Máximo Afonso and I'm a history teacher in a secondary school, My wife said your name was Máximo Afonso, That was just for brevity's sake, my full name is Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, Fine, how may I help you, You have doubtless already noticed that our voices are identical, Yes, Totally identical, So it seems, You see I have already had several occasions now to confirm this, How, By watching some of the films you've appeared in in recent years, the first was a fairly old comedy entitled The Race Is to the Swift, and the last was The Goddess of the Stage, I've probably seen eight or maybe ten in all, Really, I must say I feel rather flattered, I had no idea that the kind of film that I was, for some years, obliged to appear in could be of such interest to a history teacher, although, needless to say, the roles I'm playing now are quite different, Well, I have a good reason for watching them, which is why I would like to talk to you in person, Why in person, It isn't only our voices that are identical, What do you mean, Anyone seeing us together would swear on their own life that we were twins, Twins, More than twins, identical, In what way identical, Identical, quite simply identical, My dear sir, I don't know you and I can't even be sure that your name is what you say it is or that you really are a historian, I'm not a historian, I'm just a history teacher, as for my name I've never had any other, we don't use pseudonyms in teaching, for better or worse, we teach with our faces uncovered, That hardly seems relevant, look, let's just stop the conversation right here, I have things to do, So you don't believe me, No, I don't believe in impossibilities, Do you have two moles on your right forearm, one above the other in a line, Yes, I do, So do I, That doesn't prove anything, Do you have a scar under your left kneecap, Yes, So do I, And how do you know all this if we have never met, For me it was easy, I saw you in a beach scene, I can't remember which film it was now, but there was a close-up, And how am I to know that you have the same moles as I do, the same scar, That depends on you, The impossibilities of a coincidence are infinite, The possibilities are too, it's true that our moles could have been there at birth or developed later, over time, but a scar is always the consequence of an accident that affected a particular part of the body, we both had that accident and, in all probability, on the same occasion, Even admitting that such an absolute likeness could exist, and notice I'm only admitting it as a hypothesis, I can see no reason for us to meet and I don't understand why you've phoned, Out of curiosity, nothing but curiosity, it isn't every day that you find two identical people, Look, I've lived my whole life without knowing it, and I haven't missed knowing it at all, But now you do know, Then I'll pretend I don't, The same thing will happen to you as to me, every time you look at yourself in the mirror you will never be sure whether you are seeing your own virtual image or my real image, Frankly, I'm starting to think I've been talking to a madman, Remember that scar, if I'm mad, then we probably both are, I'll call the police, Oh, I doubt very much if the police would be interested, all I've done is make two phone calls asking to speak to the actor Daniel Santa-Clara, whom I did not threaten or insult or harm in any way, what crime have I committed exactly, You've upset my wife and myself, anyway, that's enough, I'm going to hang up now, You're quite sure you don't want to meet me, you don't feel the slightest twinge of curiosity, No, I don't feel any curiosity and I don't want to meet you, That's your last word, The first and the last, In that case, I must apologize, I had no evil intentions, Promise me you won't phone again, I promise, We have a right to our peace of mind, to our privacy, Of course, Good, I'm glad you agree, There's just one thing I'm not quite clear about, if you'll allow me, What's that, If we're identical, then will we also die at the same moment, People who are not identical and don't live in the same city die at the same moment every day, That's just coincidence, simple, banal coincidence, This conversation has come to an end, we have nothing more to say, I just hope now you have the decency to keep your word, Look, I promised I wouldn't phone you again at home and I won't, Excellent, Once more, please accept my apology, Apology accepted, Good-bye, Good-bye. There is something strange about Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's calm demeanor, when the natural, logical, human reaction would be, in this order, to slam down the phone, thump the desk in justifiable irritation, and exclaim bitterly, All that work for nothing. Week after week spent drawing up strategies, developing tactics, weighing every new step, pondering the effects of the previous step, maneuvering the sails to take advantage of favorable winds, wherever they came from, and all this to arrive at the end and humbly beg forgiveness, promising, like a child caught red-handed in the pantry, that he will never do it again. Contrary to all reasonable expectations, however, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is pleased. Firstly, because he feels that during the conversation he coped with the situation well, he was never intimidated, he argued, and here the expression is appropriate, as equal to equal, and even, occasionally, leaped nimbly onto the offensive. Secondly, because he considers it simply unthinkable that things will stop here, doubtless a highly subjective view, but one backed up by countless actions which, despite the force of curiosity that should set them immediately in motion, are often delayed, to the point, in some cases, where they appear to have been forgotten for good. Even if the immediate effect of the revelation is not as momentous as it was for Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, it is impossible that António Claro will not, one of these days, take steps, either openly or covertly, to compare one face with the other and one scar with the other. I don't know what to do, Antórnio Claro said to his wife after adding to his part of the conversation that of the other man, which she had not been able to hear, he speaks with such confidence it makes me feel like finding out if his story is actually true, If I were you, I would just wipe the matter from my mind, I would repeat to myself a hundred times a day that there cannot possibly be two identical people in the world, until I had convinced myself and could forget all about it, And you wouldn't make any attempt to get in touch with him, No, I don't think so, Why not, I'm not sure really, out of fear I suppose, It's obviously not a very common situation, but I don't see why you should be afraid, The other day, I felt almost dizzy when I realized it wasn't you on the phone, Well, I can understand that, because listening to him is just like listening to me, What I thought, no, it wasn't a thought, it was more of a feeling, like a wave of panic closing over me, making my skin creep, and I felt that if the voice was the same, then everything else would be too, Not necessarily, we might not be completely identical, He says you are, We would have to prove it, And how would we do that, invite him over here so that you could undress and he could undress, and I, nominated judge by you both, could pronounce sentence, or not pronounce sentence at all, because it turned out that you actually were identical, and if I was to leave the room and come back in afterward, I wouldn't know who was one and who was the other, and if either of you was to go out, to leave this apartment, which one of you would I be left with afterward, tell me that, with you or with him, You'd be able to tell us apart by our clothes, Unless you had swapped, Look, don't worry, we're only talking, nothing like that will happen, Imagine it, though, having to make a decision based on what's outside rather than what's inside, Calm down, And I wonder now what he meant when he talked about how if you were identical, then you would both have to die at the same moment, He didn't state it as a fact, he was merely expressing a thought, a suppo
sition, as if he were asking himself the question, Yes, but why mention it then, out of the blue, He probably did it to shock me, Who is this man, what does he want with us, You know as much as I do about who he is and what he wants, which is nothing, He said he was a history teacher, That must be true, he wouldn't invent that, and he did strike me as an educated man, as for him telephoning us, I would probably have done the same if, instead of him, I had been the one to discover the resemblance, And how are we going to feel now, with that ghostlike presence in the house, every time I look at you, it will be as if I were seeing him, We're still suffering the effects of the shock, the surprise, tomorrow it will all seem much simpler, one more oddity among many, after all, it's not like a cat with two heads or a calf with five legs, we're just a couple of Siamese twins who happen to have been born apart, A little while ago, I spoke of fear, panic, but I realize now that it's something else I'm feeling, What, Well, I'm not sure, a presentiment perhaps, Good or bad, It's just a presentiment, like a closed door behind another closed door, You're trembling, Yes, I am. Helena, for that is her name, although we did not know it until now, responded abstractedly to her husband's embrace, then sat huddled in one corner of the sofa and closed her eyes. António Claro tried to distract her, to cheer her up with a joke, If I ever get top billing, this Tertuliano fellow can be my double, I'll have him do all the dangerous scenes or the boring bits, and I can stay at home, and no one will notice the difference. She opened her eyes, smiled wanly, and said, A history teacher playing someone's double would certainly be a sight to see, the only thing is that cinema doubles come when they're called, and this one has invaded our house, Look, try not to think about it, read a book, watch television, do something, No, I don't feel like reading, still less like watching TV, I'm going to lie down. When Antonio Claro went to bed an hour later, Helena appeared to be sleeping. He pretended to believe her and turned out the light, knowing beforehand that it would take him a while to get to sleep too. He remembered the disquieting dialogue he had had with the intruder, sifting his phrases and even his words for hidden meanings, until the words, which were as tired as he was, began to grow neutral, to lose their significance, as if they no longer had anything to do with the mental world of the man who was silently, desperately continuing to pronounce them, The infinite possibilities of a coincidence, Those who are identical die together, he had said, and, The virtual image of the person looking at himself in the mirror, The real image of the person looking out at him from the mirror, then the conversation with his wife, her presentiment, her fear, he made a purely private decision, for it was getting late, that the matter would have to be resolved for good or ill, whatever happened, and quickly too, I'll go and talk to him. The decision deceived his mind, tricked the tensions in his body, and sleep, finding the way clear, crept in and lay down. Worn out by an immobility against which every nerve in her body protested, Helena had also finally fallen asleep, and for two hours she managed to rest beside her husband, António Claro, as if no other man had come between them, and she would probably have remained so until dawn if her dream had not startled her awake. She opened her eyes to find the room immersed in a gloom that was almost darkness, she heard her husband's slow, regular breathing, and was suddenly aware that there was another breathing in the house, someone had come in, someone was moving around, perhaps in the living room, perhaps in the kitchen, behind the door that leads into the corridor, anyway, right here. Shaking with fear, Helena reached out her arm to wake her husband, but, at the last moment, reason stopped her. There's no one here, she thought, there can't possibly be anyone out there, it's just my imagination, sometimes dreams do step out of the brain that dreamed them, then we call them visions, phantasmagoria, premonitions, omens, warnings from beyond, the person who was breathing and walking about the house, the person who just sat down on my sofa, the person hidden behind the curtains, isn't that man, but a fantasy I have inside my head, this figure heading straight toward me, touching me with hands identical to those of this other man asleep by my side, looking at me with the same eyes, who would kiss me with the same lips, who in the same voice would say the everyday words and the other, tender, intimate words, those of the spirit and those of the flesh, is a fantasy, nothing but a mad fantasy, a nightmare borne out of fear and anxiety, tomorrow everything will return to its place, I won't need the cockerel to crow to drive away bad dreams, the alarm clock will be enough, everyone knows that no man can be exactly the same as another man in a world in which they make machines to wake us up. A ridiculous conclusion that offended both good sense and a simple respect for logic, but to this woman, who had spent all night wandering among the vaguenesses of obscure thoughts composed of shifting scraps of fog constantly changing form and direction, the conclusion seemed unanswerable and irrefutable. We must even be grateful to absurd reasoning if, in the midst of the bitter night, it restores to us a little serenity, however illusory, and gives us the key with which we can finally, hesitantly, open the door to sleep. Helena opened her eyes before the alarm was due to go off, she silenced it so that her husband would not wake up, and, lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, she allowed her confused ideas to gradually come to order and to follow the route that would at last draw them all together into rational, coherent thought, free of inexplicable phantasms and all-too-easily explained fantasies. She could hardly believe that given all the real and mythological chimera, the sort that spit fire and have the head of a lion, the tail of a dragon, and the body of a goat, for the flaccid monsters of her insomnia could have appeared to her in this form too, she could hardly believe that she could have been tormented, like some lewd, not to say indecent, temptation, by the image of another man whom she would not even need to undress in order to know what he was like physically, from head to toe, every inch of him, because an identical man lies beside her now. She was not ashamed of herself because these ideas did not really belong to her, they were the ambiguous fruit of an imagination that, shaken by unusual, violent emotions, had jumped the rails, what matters is that she is lucid and alert now, the mistress of her thoughts and her desires, the hallucinations of the night, be they of the flesh or of the spirit, always dissolve into air with the first light of morning, the light that reorders the world and restores it to its usual orbit, once more rewriting the books of the law. It is time to get up, the travel agency she works for is on the other side of the city, every morning on her way there she thinks how wonderful it would be if she could get them to transfer her to one of the offices in the center, the wretched traffic, at this time of day, more than deserves the term "infernal" coined by someone in some happy moment of inspiration, who knows when, who knows where. Her husband will remain in bed for another hour or two, he has no filming to do today, and the current project, it seems, is coming to an end. Helena slipped out of bed with a lightness that, though natural to her, has been perfected during her ten years as attentive, devoted spouse, then she moved noiselessly about the room while she took clothes off hangers and got dressed, before going out into the corridor. This is where the night visitor had walked, she heard his breathing next to this gap in the door before he came in and hid behind the curtain, no, don't worry, this is not another evil assault made by Helena's imagination, she herself is making fun of her own temptations, so trivial, now that she can compare them with the rosy glow coming in through that window, the one in the living room where, last night, she had felt as frightened as a little girl left alone in a wood in a fairy tale. There is the sofa on which the visitor sat, and it was not by chance that he did so, of all the places where he could have rested, if that was what he wanted, he chose that one, Helena's sofa, as if to share it with her or to appropriate it for himself. There are plenty of reasons to think that the more we try to drive our imaginations away, the more they will amuse themselves by seeking out and attacking those points in our armor that, consciously or unconsciously, we left unprotected. One day, this woman Helena, who is in a hurry and has a professional timetable to keep to, will te
ll us why she too went and sat down on the sofa, why, during one long minute, she cozily lingered there, and why, having been so resolute when she woke up, she is behaving now as if the dream had taken her in its arms again and was gently rocking her. And why too, dressed and ready to leave, she opened the telephone directory and copied Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's address onto a piece of paper. She pushed open the bedroom door, her husband is still apparently asleep, but his sleep is nothing more than the final, diffuse threshold of wakefulness, she can therefore approach the bed, kiss him on the forehead, and say, I'm off now, and then receive on her mouth his kiss and the other man's lips, good heavens, this woman must be mad, the things she does, the things she thinks of. Are you late, asked António Claro, rubbing his eyes, No, I've still got a couple of minutes, she replied and sat down on the edge of the bed, What shall we do about this man, What do you want to do, Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep, I thought I should go and talk to him, but now I'm not so sure that would be a good idea, We either open the door to him, or we close it, to be honest, I don't see any other solution, one way or another our life has changed and will never be the same again, The decision is in our hands, But it's not in our hands, or anyone else's, to make what happened unhappen, the arrival of this man is a fact that we can neither erase nor remove, even if we don't let him in, even if we close the door on him, he'll be there waiting on the other side until we can't stand it anymore, You're taking a very grim view of things, perhaps, after all, we can resolve matters with a simple meeting, he proves that he's identical to me, I tell him, yes, sir, you're quite right, and once that's done, it's good-bye and good riddance, please don't bother us again, He'll still be waiting on the other side of the door, Well, we won't open it, He's already come in, he's inside your head and inside mine, We'll forget him eventually, Possibly, but we can't be sure. Helena got up, looked at her watch, and said, I've got to go, I'm going to be late, she took two steps toward the door but still had time to ask, Are you going to phone him, are you going to arrange to meet, Not today, replied her husband, raising himself up on one elbow, or tomorrow, I'll wait a few days, it might not be a bad idea to let indifference and silence do their work, to allow time for the matter to die a natural death, Oh, well, it's up to you, see you later. The apartment door opened and closed, and we will never know if Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was sitting on the stairs outside waiting. António Claro stretched out in bed again, if life really hadn't changed, as his wife claimed it had, he would turn over and sleep for another hour, it seems to be true what the envious say, that actors need a lot of sleep, it must be a consequence of the irregular life they lead, even when they go out at night as rarely as Daniel Santa-Clara. However, five minutes later, António Claro was up, unaccustomed to the early hour, although, to be fair, when his professional duties demand it, this actor, who gives every appearance of being somewhat lazy, is as capable of getting up as the most early-rising of larks. He peered at the sky out of the bedroom window, it was not hard to predict that it was going to be another hot day, then he went into the kitchen to make some breakfast. He thought about what his wife had said, He's inside our heads, but she was like that, peremptory, no, not peremptory exactly, what she has is the gift of concision, of coming out with short, condensed, pithy phrases, using four words to say what others wouldn't be able to say in forty. He wasn't sure if his was the best solution, waiting a while before going on the offensive, either in the form of a secret meeting, face-to-face, without any witnesses who might blab afterward, or in the form of a terse telephone conversation, of the kind that leaves the other party dumbstruck, breathless, nonplussed. However, he doubted the efficacy of his dialectical skills to put a stop, once and for all, to any plans, present or future, that this wretch, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, might have to introduce into their lives the kind of pernicious psychological and conjugal disquiet of which he had implicitly boasted and to which he had explicitly given rise, for example, Helena, last night, having the boldness to declare, Every time I look at you, it will be as if I were seeing him. Only a woman whose moral foundations had been severely shaken would have thrown such words in the face of her own husband unaware of the adulterous element they contained, diaphanous, it is true, but highly revealing. Meanwhile, going around and around in António Claro's head, although he would doubtless angrily deny this if we so much as mentioned it, is the outline of an idea that, out of pure caution, we will not go so far as to classify as being on a par with a Machiavelli, at least not until its eventual effects, doubtless negative, have been revealed. This idea, which, at the moment, is nothing but a mental sketch, consists, neither more nor less, and however shocking it may seem to us, in working out whether, with skill and cunning, it would be possible to obtain from the resemblance, similarity, or absolute identity, should this be confirmed, some advantage of a personal nature, that is, whether António Claro or Daniel Santa-Clara could find a way of profiting from a business that, at the moment, appears not at all favorable to their interests. Since we cannot, at the moment, expect the person responsible for the idea to illumine the doubtless tortuous routes via which he vaguely imagines that he will reach his objectives, do not count on us, mere transcribers of other people's thoughts and faithful copyists of their actions, to anticipate the next steps of a procession that has still got no farther than the vestibule. What can, however, be excluded from this embryonic plan is the suggestion that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso might serve as the actor Daniel Santa-Clara's double, we must all concur that it would show a grave lack of intellectual respect to ask a history teacher to take part in the hirsute frivolities of the seventh art. António Claro was just taking his last sip of coffee when another idea crossed his synapses, and this was to get in his car and go and have a look at the street and the building where Tertuliano Máximo Afonso lives. Despite no longer being driven by irresistible hereditary instincts, the actions of human beings are repeated with such startling regularity that we believe it would be permissible, without stretching a point, to hypothesize the slow but steady formation of a new kind of instinct, perhaps "sociocultural" would be the right word, which, based on variants of repeated tropisms and in response, of course, to identical stimuli, would mean that any idea that had occurred to one person would, necessarily, occur to someone else. First it was Tertuliano Máximo Afonso coming to this street dramatically disguised, all in black on a brilliant summer's morning, now it is António Claro who is preparing to go to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's street without even considering the complications that might ensue if he appears there barefaced, then, while he is shaving, showering, and getting dressed, the finger of inspiration touches his forehead, reminding him that in a drawer somewhere, stored away in an empty cigar box, as a touching professional souvenir, is the mustache Daniel Santa-Clara wore five years ago when playing the role of receptionist in the comedy The Race Is to the Swift. As the wise old proverb almost says, Keep a thing five years and you'll always find a use for it. It will not take long for António Claro to discover where the history teacher lives thanks to the estimable telephone directory, now sitting slightly askew on the bookshelf where they usually keep it, as if it had been replaced by a nervous hand after having been nervously consulted. He has noted down the address in his pocket diary, as well as the telephone number, for, although making use of the latter is not in his plans for the day, if he ever does phone Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's apartment, he wants to be able to do so from wherever he happens to be, without having to depend on a telephone directory that he may have neglected to put back in its place and which he might then be unable to find when he most needs it. He is ready to leave now, his mustache in position, although not particularly securely since it has lost some of its adhesive qualities over the years, but it is unlikely to fall off at the critical moment, since walking by the teacher's building and having a quick look at it will take him only a matter of seconds. When he was putting the mustache on, using his reflection in the mirror to guide him, he remembered that, five year
s before, he had had to shave off the natural mustache that at the time adorned the space between his nose and upper lip, merely because the director had thought both its shape and design to be inappropriate for what he had in mind. At this point, let us prepare ourselves for the attentive reader, a direct descendant of those ingenuous but extremely bright young lads who, in the early days of cinema, used to call out to the boy on the screen that the map of the mine was hidden in the hatband of the evil, cynical enemy fallen at his feet, let us prepare ourselves for them to call us to order and denounce as an unforgivable lapse the difference in behavior between the character Tertuliano Máximo Afonso and the character António Claro, since, in identical situations, the former had to go into a shopping center in order to put on and take off his false beard and mustache, while the latter is blithely preparing to leave the house in the equally blithe light of day wearing on his face a mustache that, while it may belong to him, is not in fact his. That attentive reader is forgetting what has already been pointed out during this narrative, that just as Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is, in every respect, the double of the actor Daniel Santa-Clara, so the actor Daniel Santa-Clara, although for different reasons, is the double of Antonio Claro. No one living in the building or in the street will find it strange that the man who entered the building yesterday without a mustache should be leaving it today with one, at most, if they notice at all, they would say, He's obviously already made up for filming. Sitting in his car, with the window open, Antonio Claro consults the route map and the A—Z and learns from them what we know already, that the street where Tertuliano Máximo Afonso lives is on the other side of the city, and, having bade a friendly good morning to a neighbor, he sets off. It will take nearly an hour to reach his destination, he will try tempting fate by driving past the building three times at ten-minute intervals, as if he were looking for a place to park, who knows, some happy coincidence might draw Tertuliano Máximo Afonso down into the street, although, those of us who are fully informed of the duties the history teacher has to fulfill know that, at this precise moment, he is sitting quietly at his desk, working hard on the proposal the headmaster commissioned him to write, as if his future depended on the result of this effort, when the truth is, and this we can tell you now, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso will never again enter a classroom, either in the school to which we have occasionally accompanied him or in any other. The reason will be revealed later. António Claro saw what there was to see, a nondescript street, a building like many others, no one would imagine that in that second-floor apartment, behind those innocent curtains, lives a phenomenon of nature no less extraordinary than the seven heads of the Lernaean Hydra and other such marvels. Whether Tertuliano Máximo Afonso truly merits a description that would exclude him from human normality is something that remains to be seen, for we still do not know which of these two men was the first to be born. If the first-born was Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, then it is Antonio Claro who deserves the designation phenomenon of nature, since, having come into being second, he appeared in this world on false pretenses to occupy a place not his own, just like the Lernaean Hydra, which is why Hercules killed it. The sovereign equilibrium of the universe would not have been disturbed one iota if António Claro had been born and become an actor in some other solar system, but here, in the same city, and, therefore, as far as an observer watching us from the moon is concerned, right next door, all kinds of disorders and confusions are possible, especially the worst, especially the most terrible. And just in case you think that, because we have known him longer, we harbor some special preference for Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, we would point out that, mathematically speaking, as many inexorable probabilities of his having been the second-born hang over his head as over António Claro's. Nevertheless, however strange to sensitive eyes and ears the following syntactical construction might appear, it is legitimate to say that what will be has been, and all that's lacking now is for it to be written down. António Claro did not drive along the street again, four blocks farther on, he removed Daniel Santa-Clara's mustache, furtively, in case some good citizen should catch him in the act and call the police, then, having nothing else to do, he set off for home, where the script for his next film awaited him for study and annotation. He left the house again only to go for lunch in a nearby restaurant, then took a short nap and resumed work until his wife came home. He was not yet one of the main characters in the film, but his name would appear on the posters that would be placed strategically about the city when the time came, and he was pretty sure that he would garner some critical praise, however brief, for his performance as a lawyer, which is the role he had been given this time. His only difficulty was the enormous number of lawyers in all shapes and sizes who had appeared in films and on television, public and private prosecutors with various styles of legal patter, from the caressing to the aggressive, defense lawyers blessed with varying degrees of eloquence and for whom being convinced of the innocence of their client did not always appear to be of great importance. He would like to create a new kind of lawyer, a person who would be capable of astonishing the judge with his every word and every gesture and of dazzling the public with the sharpness of his ripostes, with his implacable powers of reasoning, with his superhuman intelligence. It was true that none of this was in the script, but the director might allow himself to be persuaded to steer the screenwriter in that direction if the producer put in a good word for him. He would have to think about it. Having muttered to himself that he would have to think about it immediately transported his thoughts to other parts, to the history teacher, to his street, to the building, to the curtained windows, and from there, in retrospect, to last night's phone call, to his conversations with Helena, to the decisions that he would sooner or later have to take, he wasn't so sure now that he could profit from the situation, but, as he has just said, he would have to think about it. His wife arrived slightly later than usual, no, she hadn't been shopping, it was the usual problem, the traffic, you could never predict what might happen, as António Claro knew, for it had taken him an hour to reach Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's street, but I'd better not mention that today, I'm sure she wouldn't understand why I did it. Helena will likewise say nothing either, she is equally sure that her husband would not understand what she had done.
The Collected Novels of José Saramago Page 293