The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  The following day, after Helena had gone out, António Claro phoned Maria da Paz's house. He did not feel particularly nervous or excited, silence would be his protective shield. The voice that answered was flat, with the hesitant fragility of someone recovering from some physical ailment, and yet although everything indicated that the voice belonged to a woman of a certain age, it did not sound as frail as that of an old woman, or, if you prefer euphemisms, an elderly lady. She did not say much, Hello, hello, who is it, say something, will you, hello, hello, honestly, how rude, a person can't even get any peace in her own home, and she hung up, but Daniel Santa-Clara, although he does not orbit the solar system of the really famous actors, has an excellent ear, for relationships in this case, and so it was easy for him to work out that the elderly woman, if she isn't the mother, is the grandmother, and if she isn't the grandmother, she's the aunt, excluding out of hand, because it bears no relation to actuality, that tired old literary cliché of the old-servant-who-never-got-married-out-of-love-for-her-master-and-mistress. Obviously, given his method of approach, he still doesn't know if there are any men at home, a father, a grandfather, an uncle, or a brother, but António Claro need not worry overmuch about such a possibility, since, in every respect, in sickness and in health, in life and in death, he will appear before Maria da Paz not as Daniel Santa-Clara, but as Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, who, while they may not fling wide the doors for him, either as friend or lover, must at least enjoy the advantages of a tacitly acknowledged relationship. Were we to ask António Claro what his preference would be, in accordance with the objectives he has in mind, as to the nature of the relationship between Tertuliano Máximo Afonso and Maria da Paz, whether they are lovers or friends, we have no doubt whatsoever as to his reply, that if the relationship were merely one of friendship, it would not hold half the attraction for him as it would if they were lovers. As we can see, the plan of action that Antonio Claro has been working on has not only advanced greatly as regards the setting of objectives, it is also beginning to grow in strength as regards the motivation it previously lacked, although that strength, unless we have made a grave error of interpretation, seems to be based entirely on malevolent ideas of personal revenge that the situation, as we see it, neither promised nor in any way justified. True, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso did challenge Daniel Santa-Clara directly when, without a word, and that, perhaps, was the worst thing, he sent him the false beard, but with a little common sense, the matter could have ended there, António Claro could have shrugged and said to his wife, The man's a fool, if he thinks he can provoke me that easily, he's very much mistaken, throw it in the bin, will you, and if he's stupid enough to repeat this nonsense, then we'll call the police and put a stop to this whole story once and for all, whatever the consequences. Unfortunately, common sense does not always appear when it is needed, and its brief absences have often resulted in some major dramas and in some of the most terrifying of catastrophes. The proof that the universe was not as well-thought-out as it should have been lies in the fact that the Creator ordered the star that illumines us to be called the sun. Had the king of the stars borne the name Common Sense, imagine how enlightened the human spirit would be now, both by day and by night, because, as everyone knows, the light we call moonlight comes not from the moon but always and solely from the sun. It's worth considering that the reason so many theories about the origin of the universe have been created since the birth of speech and the word is that all of them, one by one, have failed miserably, with a regularity that augurs rather ill for the one that, with a few variations, is currently in vogue. Let us return, however, to António Claro. It is clear that he wishes, as soon as possible, to meet Maria da Paz, and that, for entirely wrongheaded reasons, he has become obsessed with revenge, and, as you will no doubt already have noticed, there is no power in heaven or on earth that will dissuade him from this. Obviously, he cannot go and stand outside the building where she lives and ask every woman who goes in or out, Are you Maria da Paz, nor could he entrust himself to the hands of chance and fortune and, for example, walk up and down her street once, twice, three times and, on the third occasion, address the first woman he saw, You look like Maria da Paz, you can't imagine what a pleasure it is finally to meet you, I'm a movie actor and my name's Daniel Santa-Clara, allow me to invite you to a coffee, it's just across the road, I'm sure we're going to have lots to talk about, ah, the beard, yes, I congratulate you on your perspicacity, on not being deceived, but I ask you, please, don't be alarmed, keep calm, when we can meet in some more private place, a place where I can remove the beard without danger, you will see before you a person you know well, intimately I believe, and whom I, without a flicker of envy, would congratulate were he here, our very own Tertuliano Máximo Afonso. The poor woman would be utterly overwhelmed by the prodigious transformation, which would, however, be quite inexplicable at this point in the narrative, for it is vital to keep in mind the fundamental, guiding idea that things should patiently await their moment and not push or reach over the shoulders of those who arrived first, shouting, I'm here, although we would not entirely reject the hypothesis that if, occasionally, we did let them through, certain potential evils might lose some of their virulence or vanish like smoke in the air, for the banal reason that they had missed their turn. This outpouring of thoughts and analyses, this benevolent scattering of reflections and their offshoots over which we have been lingering, should not make us lose sight of the prosaic reality that, deep down, what António Claro wants to know is if Maria da Paz is worth it, if she is really worth all the trouble he is going to. If she was unattractive, as thin as a rail, or, on the contrary, suffering from an excess of fat, neither of which, we hasten to add, would constitute any great obstacle if love were playing a part, then, we would see Daniel Santa-Clara taking a rapid step backward, as must have happened so often in the past, during encounters based on friendships formed through correspondence, the ridiculous stratagems, the ingenuous means of identification, I'll be carrying a blue parasol in my right hand, I'll be wearing a white flower in my buttonhole, and, in the end, no parasol and no flower, perhaps one person waiting in vain at the arranged spot, perhaps neither, the flower thrown hastily into the gutter, the parasol hiding a face that preferred not to be seen. Daniel Santa-Clara, however, need not worry, Maria da Paz is young, pretty, elegant, with a nice figure and a good character, that last attribute, though, is irrelevant to the matter at hand, for, nowadays, the scales on which the fate of the parasol or the destiny of the flower were once decided are not particularly sensitive to considerations of this nature. Meanwhile, António Claro has an important problem to resolve if he does not want to spend hours and hours hanging about on the pavement outside Maria da Paz's building, waiting for her to appear, with fatal and dangerous consequences arising from the natural apprehensions of the neighbors, who would, in no time, be phoning the police to alert them to the suspicious presence of a bearded man who certainly wasn't there just to keep the building propped up. He must have recourse, therefore, to reason and to logic. It is likely that Maria da Paz works, that she has a regular job and leaves and returns at regular hours. Like Helena. But António Claro does not want to think about Helena, he tells himself that the two things have nothing to do with each other, that whatever happens with Maria da Paz will not put his marriage at risk, you could almost call it a whim, of the kind to which men are said to be so easily prone, if, in the present case, the right words were not vengeance, revenge, retaliation, retribution, redress, reprisal, rancor, vindictiveness, if not the very worst of them all, hatred. Good heavens, how ridiculous, where will it all end, cry those happy people who have never come face-to-face with a copy of themselves, who have never suffered the terrible affront of receiving in the post a false beard in a box without even a pleasant, good-humored note to soften the blow. What is, at this moment, going through António Claro's head will show to what extent, and contrary to the most elementary good sense, a mind dominated by base feelings can make i
ts own conscience fall in with them, slyly forcing it to reconcile the worst actions with the best reasons and to use both to justify each other, in a kind of double game in which the same player will always win or lose. What António Claro has just thought, incredible though it may seem, is that taking Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's lover to bed under false pretenses would, as well as being a way of returning the slap in the face with a still more resounding one, be the most extreme way, now can you imagine anything more absurd, of avenging his wife Helena's wounded dignity. However hard we pleaded, Antonio Claro would be unable to explain what extraordinary offenses these were that could, theoretically, be avenged only by a new and no less shocking offense. This has now become in him an idée fixe, and there is nothing to be done. It is something of an achievement that he is still capable of returning to his interrupted reasoning, when he recalled that Helena was similar to Maria da Paz in having work obligations, a regular job, and particular hours for leaving and returning. Instead of walking up and down the street in the hope of some highly unlikely chance encounter, what he should do is get there really early, stand somewhere inconspicuous, wait for Maria da Paz to come out, and then follow her to work. What could be easier, one might think, and yet how wrong one would be. The first problem is that he does not know if Maria da Paz, on leaving her building, will turn left or right, and therefore to what extent the position he chooses to keep watch from, as regards both the direction she chooses to take and the place where he will leave his car, will complicate or facilitate the task of following her, not forgetting, and here is the second and no less serious problem, the possibility that she may have her own car parked outside the door, which would not give him enough time to run back to his car and join the traffic without losing sight of her. What will probably happen is that he will fail completely on the first day, return on the second to fail in one respect but succeed in another, and then trust that the patron saint of detectives, impressed by his pertinacity, will take it upon himself to make the third day a perfect and definitive triumph in the art of following a trail. António Claro will still have one other problem to resolve, relatively insignificant, it is true, compared with the enormous difficulties already overcome, but which will have to be dealt with using a remarkable degree of tact and spontaneity. Apart from when he has to drag himself from between the sheets when obliged to do so by work, an early-morning shoot or one taking place outside the city, Daniel Santa-Clara, as you will have noticed, prefers to remain snug in his bed for one or two hours after Helena has left for the day. He will, therefore, have to come up with a good explanation for the unusual fact that he intends to get up at the crack of dawn, not on one day, but on two, possibly even three, when, as we know, he is currently resting professionally, waiting for the call for action on The Trial of the Charming Thief, in which he will play the part of a lawyer's assistant. Telling Helena that he has a meeting with the producers wouldn't be a bad idea if his investigations into Maria da Paz were concluded in one day, but, given the circumstances, the likelihood of this happening is remote to say the least. On the other hand, he does not necessarily need to carry out his inquiries on consecutive days, in fact, when he thinks about it, this could even prove inappropriate for the purpose he has in mind, since the appearance of a bearded man three days in a row on the street where Maria da Paz lives, quite apart from arousing the suspicion and alarm of the neighbors, as we said earlier, could provoke the anachronistic, and thus doubly traumatic, rebirth of childish nightmares just when we were convinced that the advent of television had once and for all erased from the imaginations of modern children the terrible threat that the bearded bogeyman represented to generation upon generation of innocent infants. Thinking along these lines, António Claro rapidly reached the conclusion that there was no sense in worrying about hypothetical second and third days before he even knew what the first might have to offer. He will therefore tell Helena that he has a meeting tomorrow with the producers, I have to be there by eight at the latest, That's awfully early, she will say, although without a great deal of interest, Yes, I know, but it has to be at eight because the director's leaving for the airport at noon, Fine, she said and went into the kitchen, closing the door behind her, to decide what to make for supper. She had more than enough time, but she wanted to be alone. She had said the other day that her bed was her castle, she could equally well have said that the kitchen was her fortress. Meanwhile, deft and silent as the charming thief, António Claro went and opened the drawer where he kept the box containing the false beard and mustache, removed the beard, and, silent and deft, hid it under one of the cushions on the big sofa in the living room, on the side where they hardly ever sit. So that it doesn't get too squashed, he thought.

  It was a few minutes after eight o'clock the following morning when he parked the car almost opposite the door out of which he expected Maria da Paz to emerge, on the other side of the street. It seemed that the patron saint of detectives had been there all night, saving the place for him. Most of the shops are still closed, some of them, according to the notices fixed on the doors, for the purpose of staff holidays, there are not many people about, a queue of them, shorter rather than long, is waiting for the bus. António Claro soon realized that his laborious musings on how and where he should place himself in order to spy on Maria da Paz had been not only a waste of time, but also a useless waste of mental energy. Inside the car, reading the newspaper, is where he is least at risk of attracting attention, he'll just look like he's waiting for someone, which is true but can't be spoken out loud. A few people, mainly men, occasionally emerge from the building under surveillance, but none of the women correspond to the image that António Claro, without realizing it, had been forming in his mind with the help of a few female characters from films in which he has taken part. It was half past eight on the dot when the building door opened and a pretty, young woman, pleasing to look at from head to toe, came out, accompanied by an elderly lady. That's them, he thought. He put down his newspaper, turned on the engine, and waited, as restless as a horse in the starting gate before the pistol sounds. The two women continued slowly along on the right-hand side of the pavement, the younger giving her arm to the older, there is no doubt about it, they are mother and daughter and probably live alone. The old lady is the one who answered the phone yesterday, and by the way she's walking, she must have been ill, but the other one, I would bet anything you like that the other one is the famous Maria da Paz, and she's got a pretty good body, yes, sir, the history teacher has excellent taste. The two of them were moving off, and António Claro didn't know what to do. He could follow them and come back when they got into the car, but then he would risk losing them. What shall I do, shall I stay or go, where's she taking the old biddy, his rather nervous state is to blame for this somewhat discourteous expression, António Claro does not normally talk like that, it just came out. Ready for anything, he leaped out of the car and strode after the two women. When they were about thirty meters away, he slowed his pace and tried to match his speed to theirs. To avoid getting too close, he had to stop now and then and pretend he was looking in the shop windows. He was surprised to find that the slowness was beginning to irritate him, as if he saw in it an obstacle to future actions that, although not yet fully defined in his head, would, in any case, brook no impediment. The false beard was making him itch, the walk seemed endless, and he hadn't even gone very far, about three hundred meters in all, the next corner brought the end of the journey, Maria da Paz helps her mother up the steps of the church, kisses her good-bye, and is now walking back the way she came, with the nimble step of certain women who walk as if they were dancing. António Claro crossed over to the other side of the street and paused farther on outside a shop in whose window, shortly afterward, the slender figure of Maria da Paz would pass. Alertness is all now, a moment of indeci sion could ruin everything, if she gets into one of these cars and he doesn't manage to reach his quickly enough, then he can kiss all his carefully laid plans good-bye unti
l the next time. What António Claro does not know is that Maria da Paz doesn't own a car, she is calmly going to wait for the bus that will drop her close to the bank where she works, so the detectives' handbook, completely up-to-date as regards the latest technology, had forgotten that, of the five million people in this city, some of them would have lagged behind in acquiring their own means of transport. The queue had not grown much, Maria da Paz joined it, and António Claro, so as not to stand too close, allowed three people to go ahead of him, the false beard covers his face but not his eyes, his nose, his eyebrows, head, hair, or ears. Someone educated in the esoteric doctrines would choose to add the soul to the list of things that a beard does not cover, but on this point we will remain silent, we would not want to add fuel to a debate that has been going on pretty much since time began and which will go on for a long time yet. The bus arrived, Maria da Paz managed to find a free seat, António Claro will stand in the aisle, at the back. It's worked out well, he thought, this way we can travel together.