The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  TWENTY-THREE DEATHS SO FAR, AND WE'VE NO IDEA HOW MANY MORE they'll find under the rubble, that's at least twenty-three deaths, interior minister, said the prime minister, bringing the flat of his hand down on the newspapers that lay open on his desk, The media are almost unanimous in attributing the attack to some terrorist group with links to the insurrection by the blankers, sir, Firstly, purely as a matter of good taste, please do me the great favor of not using the word blanker in my presence, secondly, please explain what you mean by the expression almost unanimous, It means that there are only two exceptions, two newspapers who do not accept the version that is doing the rounds and who are demanding a proper investigation, Interesting, Read what this one says, sir. The prime minister read out loud, We Demand To Know Who Gave The Order, And this one, sir, less direct, but along the same lines, We Want The Truth Whoever It May Hurt. The interior minister went on, It's nothing to get alarmed about, I don't think we need worry, in fact, it's rather a good thing that there should be a few doubts, that way people can't say they're all speaking with their master's voice, Do you mean that twenty-three or more deaths don't worry you, It was a calculated risk, sir, In the light of what happened, a very badly calculated one, Yes, I suppose you could see it like that, We assumed it would be a less powerful bomb, just something to give people a bit of a fright, There was clearly an unfortunate failure in the chain of command, If only I could be sure that was the only reason, The order was, I can assure you, correctly given, you have my word, sir, Your word, interior minister, For what it's worth, sir, Yes, for what it's worth, In either case, we knew there would be deaths, But not twenty-three, Even if there had been only three, they would have been no less dead than these twenty-three, it isn't a question of numbers, No, but it is also a question of numbers, May I remind you that he who wills the ends, wills the means, Oh, I've heard that refrain many times before, And this won't be the last time, even if, next time, you hear it from someone else's lips, Appoint a commission of inquiry at once, minister, To reach what conclusions, prime minister, Just set it to work, we'll sort that out later, Very good, sir, Give all necessary help to the families of the victims, both those who died and those who are currently in hospital, tell the council to take charge of the funerals, In the midst of all this confusion, I forgot to inform you that the council leader has resigned, Resigned, why, Well, to be more precise, he walked out, At this precise moment, I don't really care whether he resigned or walked out, my question is why, He arrived at the station immediately after the explosion took place and his nerve went, he couldn't cope with what he saw, No one could, I know I couldn't, indeed, I imagine even you couldn't, minister, so there must be some other reason for his abrupt departure, He thinks the government is responsible, and he didn't just hint at his suspicions either, he was quite explicit about it, Do you think he was the one who passed the idea on to those two newspapers, Frankly, prime minister, I don't, and, believe you me, I would love to be able to lay the blame at his door, What will the man do now, His wife is a doctor, Yes, I know her, They'll have to get by until he finds a new job, And meanwhile, Meanwhile, prime minister, I will keep him under the strictest possible surveillance, if that's what you mean, Whatever was the man thinking of, he seemed so trustworthy, a loyal party member, with an excellent political career, a future, The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skilfully, to justify their cowardice, You're obviously something of an expert on the subject, did you glean all this from your own experiences, If I had, would I be in the post of interior minister, No, I suppose not, but everything is possible in this world, no doubt our finest torture specialists kiss their children when they get home, and some may even cry at the cinema, And I sir, am no exception, in fact, I'm just an old sentimentalist really, Glad to hear it. The prime minister leafed slowly through the newspapers, he looked at the photographs one by one with a mixture of repugnance and apprehension, and said, You probably want to know why I don't sack you, Yes, sir, I'm curious to know your reasons, Because if I did, people would think one of two things, either that, independent of the nature and degree of guilt, I considered you directly responsible for what had happened, or that I was quite simply punishing you for your supposed incompetence for not having foreseen the possibility of such an act of violence in abandoning the capital to its fate, Yes, knowing as I do the rules of the game, I thought those would be your reasons, Obviously, there's a third reason, possible, as all things are, but improbable, and therefore out of the question, What's that, That you might make public the truth behind the attack, You know better than anyone that no interior minister, in any age or in any country in the world, has ever opened his mouth to speak of the mean, dishonorable, treacherous, criminal deeds committed in the course of his work, so you can rest easy on that score because I will prove no exception, If it becomes known that we ordered the bomb to be planted, we will give the people who cast the blank votes the final reason they needed, If you'll forgive me, prime minister, that way of thinking offends against logic, Why, And, if you'll allow me to say so, it does an injustice to the usual rigor of your thinking, Get to the point, Whether they find out or not, if they are then shown to be right, it's because they were right already. The prime minister pushed the newspapers away and said, This whole business reminds me of the story of the sorcerer's apprentice, the one who couldn't control the magical forces he had unleashed, Who, in your view, prime minister, is the sorcerer's apprentice in this case, them or us, Well, I very much fear that both of us are, they set off down a dead-end road with no thought for the consequences, And we followed them, Exactly, and now it's just a matter of waiting to see what the next step will be, As far as the government is concerned, we simply have to keep up the pressure, although after what has just happened, we obviously don't want to take any further action right now, And what about them, If the information I received before coming here is true, then they are preparing to hold a demonstration, What on earth do they hope to achieve by that, demonstrations never achieve anything, if they did, we wouldn't allow them, Presumably they want to protest against the attack, and as for getting authorization from the ministry of the interior, on this occasion, they won't even have to waste their time asking for it, Will we ever get out of this mess, That is not a matter for sorcerers, prime minister, the fully qualified or the apprentices, but, in the end, as always, the strongest side will win, The one who is strongest at the last moment will win, and we haven't yet reached that moment, the strength we have now may not be sufficient by then, Oh, I have every confidence, prime minister, an organized state cannot possibly lose a battle like this, it would be the end of the world, Or the beginning of another, Now I'm not quite sure what I should make of those words, prime minister, Well, don't go spreading it around that the prime minister is entertaining defeatist ideas, Such a thought would never even enter my head, Just as well, You were clearly speaking hypothetically, Of course, If you don't need me for anything else, I'll get back to work, The president tells me he's had a brilliant idea, What's that, He didn't want to go into detail, he is awaiting events, To some purpose one hopes, He is the president, That's what I meant, Keep me informed, Yes, prime minister, Goodbye, Goodbye, prime minister.

  The information received by the ministry of the interior was correct, the city was preparing for a demonstration. The final death toll had risen to thirty-four. No one knows where or how the idea came about, but it was immediately taken up by everyone, the bodies were not to be buried in cemeteries like the ordinary dead, their graves were to remain per omnia sæ sæculorum in the landscaped area opposite the station. However, a few families known for their right-wing allegiances and who were utterly convinced that the attack had been the work of a terrorist group with, as all the media affirmed, direct links to the conspiracy against the present government, refused to hand over their innocent dead to the community. Ye
s, they clamored, they truly were innocent of all guilt, because they had all their lives respected their own rights and those of others, because they had voted as their parents and their grandparents had, because they were orderly people and had now become the victims and martyrs of this murderous act of violence. They also alleged, in another tone entirely, perhaps so as not to scandalize anyone with such a lack of civic solidarity, that they had their own historical family vaults and it was a deep-rooted family tradition that those who had always been united in life should remain so after death, again per omnia sæcula sæculorum. The collective burial would not, therefore, be of thirty-four bodies, but twenty-seven. This was still a large number of people. Sent by who knows who, but certainly not by the council, which, as we know, will be without a leader until the interior minister approves the necessary appointment of a replacement, anyway, as we were saying, sent by who knows who, there appeared in the garden a vast machine with many arms, one of those so-called multipurpose machines, like a gigantic quick-change artist, which can uproot a tree in the time it takes to utter a sigh and which would have been capable of digging twenty-seven graves in less time that it takes to say amen, if the gravediggers from the cemeteries, who were equally attached to tradition, had not turned up to carry out the work by hand, that is, using spade and shovel. What the machine had, in fact, come to do was to uproot half a dozen trees that were in the way, so that the area, once trodden down and leveled, looked as if it had been born to be a cemetery and a place of eternal rest, and then it, the machine that is, went off and planted the trees and the shade that they cast elsewhere.

  Three days after the attack, in the early morning, people started to flood out into the streets. They were silent and grave-faced, many carried white flags, and all wore a white armband on their left arm, and don't let any experts in the etiquette of funeral rites go telling you that white cannot be a sign of mourning, when we are reliably informed that it used to be so in this very country, and we know that it has always been so for the Chinese, not to mention the Japanese, who, if it was left up to them, would all be wearing blue. By eleven o'clock, the square was already full, but all that could be heard was the great breathing of the crowd, the dull whisper of air entering and leaving lungs, in and out, feeding with oxygen the blood of these living beings, in, out, in, out, until suddenly, we will not finish the phrase, that moment, for those who have come here, the survivors, has not yet come. There were innumerable white flowers, quantities of chrysanthemums, roses, lilies, especially arum lilies, the occasional translucent white cactus flower, and thousands of marguerites which were forgiven their black hearts. Lined up twenty paces apart, the coffins were lifted onto the shoulders of the relatives and friends of the deceased, those who had them, and carried in procession to the graves, where, under the skilled guidance of the professional gravediggers, they were slowly lowered down on ropes until, with a hollow thud, they touched bottom. The ruins of the station still seemed to give off a smell of burned flesh. It will seem incomprehensible to some that such a moving ceremony, such a poignant display of collective grief, was not graced by the consolatory influence that would doubtless have come from the ritual practices of the country's sundry religious institutions, thus depriving the souls of the dead of their most certain viaticum and depriving the community of the living of a practical demonstration of ecumenicalism that might have contributed to leading the straying population back to the fold. The reason for this deplorable absence can only be explained by the various churches' fear that they might become the focus of suspicions, possibly tactical, or at worst strategic, of conniving with the blank-voting insurgency. This absence might also have to do with a number of phone calls, with minimal variations on the same theme, made by the prime minister himself, The nation's government would find it deeply regrettable if the chance presence of your church at the funeral service, while, of course, spiritually justified, should come to be considered, and subsequently exploited, as evidence of your political, and even ideological, support for the stubborn and systematic disrespect with which a large part of the capital's population continues to treat the legitimate and constitutional democratic authority. The burials were, therefore, purely secular, which is not to say that, here and there, a few private, silent prayers did not rise up to the various heavens to be welcomed there with benevolent sympathy. The graves were still open, when someone, doubtless with the best of intentions, stepped forward to give a speech, but this was immediately repudiated by the other people present, No speeches, we each have our own grief and we all feel the same sorrow. And the person who came up with this clear formulation of feelings was quite right. Besides, if that were the intention of the frustrated orator, it would be impossible to make a funeral oration for twenty-seven people, both male and female, not to mention some small child with no history at all. Unknown soldiers do not need the names that they used in life in order to be showered with the right and proper honors, and that's fine, if that's what we agree to do, but if these dead, most of them unrecognizable, and two or three of them still unidentified, want anything, it is to be left in peace. To those punctilious readers, showing a praiseworthy concern for the good ordering of the story, who want to know why the usual, indispensable DNA tests were not carried out, the only honest answer we can give is our own total ignorance, allow us, however, to imagine that the famous and much-abused expression, Our dead, so commonplace, so much part of the routine patter of patriotic harangues, were to be taken literally in these circumstances, that is, if these dead, all of them, belong to us, we should not consider any of them exclusively ours, which would mean that any DNA analysis which took into account all the factors, including, in particular, the non-biological ones, and however hard it rummaged around inside the double helix, would only succeed in confirming a collective ownership which required no proof anyway. That man, or perhaps woman, had more than enough reason to say, as we noted above, Here, we each have our own grief and we all feel the same sorrow. Meanwhile, the earth was shoveled back into the graves, the flowers were shared out equally, those who had reasons to weep were embraced and consoled by the others, if such a thing is possible with such a recent grief. The loved one of each person, of each family, is here, although one does not know quite where, perhaps in this grave, perhaps in that, it would be best if we wept over all of them, as a shepherd once so rightly said, although heaven knows where he learned it, One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

  The trouble with these narrative digressions, taken up as we have been with bothersome detours, is that one can find, too late, of course, almost without noticing, that events have moved on, have gone on ahead, and instead of us announcing what is about to happen, which is, after all, the elementary duty of any teller of tales worth his salt, all we can do is to confess contritely that it already has. Contrary to what we had supposed, the crowd has not dispersed, the demonstration continues and is now advancing en masse, filling the streets, in the direction, as the shouts are telling us, of the presidential palace. And on the way lies neither more nor less than the prime minister's official residence. The journalists from press, radio and television, who are at the head of the demonstration, take nervous notes, describe the events over the phone to the offices where they work, and excitedly unburden themselves of their professional and citizenly disquiets, No one seems to know quite what is going to happen, but we have reason to fear that the crowd is preparing to storm the presidential palace, which does not exclude, indeed we would say it remains highly likely, the possibility that they will also sack the prime minister's official residence and any ministerial buildings they pass on the way, this is not some apocalyptic vision, the mere fruit of our own fears, you have only to see the people's distraught faces, it would be no exaggeration to say that each of those faces is calling for blood and destruction, and thus, although it pains us to have to say this out loud and to the whole country, we reach the dreadful conclusion that the government, which has shown itself to be so efficient
in other ways and was, for that very reason, applauded by all honest citizens, acted with a reprehensible lack of caution when it decided to abandon the city to the instincts of the angry mob, without the fatherly, dissuasive presence of the police on the streets, with no riot squads, with no tear-gas, no water-cannon, no dogs, in a word, unchecked. This speech warning of certain disaster reached a peak of media hysteria when they came in sight of the prime minister's residence, a bourgeois mansion, late-eighteenth-century in style, where the journalists' shouts became screams, Now, now, anything could happen, may the holy virgin protect us all, may the glorious and revered spirits of our nation, up there in the empyrean into which they ascended, quell the wrathful hearts of these people. Anything could have happened, it's true, but, in the end, nothing did, apart from the demonstration, the small section of it that we can see, coming to a halt at the crossroads where the mansion, with its small surrounding park, occupies one corner, the rest of the crowd spilled over onto the pavements, into the adjoining squares and streets, if the police arithmeticians were here, they would say that, all in all, there were only about fifty thousand people, when the exact number, the real number, because we counted them all, one by one, was ten times higher.

  It was here, where the demonstration had come to a halt and was standing in absolute silence, that a sharp-eyed television reporter discovered amidst that sea of heads a man whose face, despite half of it being covered by a dressing, he nonetheless recognized, especially since he had been lucky enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of his normal, healthy face, which, as is perfectly understandable, both confirms and is confirmed by the wounded half. Dragging his cameraman along behind him, the reporter began pushing his way through the crowd, saying to the people on either side of him, Excuse me, excuse me, may I come through, out of the way, please, this is very important, and then, when he was getting close, Sir, sir, excuse me, although what he was thinking was less polite, What the hell is this guy doing here. Reporters usually have good memories and this particular reporter had not forgotten the public attack delivered by the council leader on the night of the bomb blast and of which the news networks had been the entirely undeserving targets. Now the council leader would find out just how wounded they had been. The reporter stuck the microphone in his face and made a kind of secret sign to the cameraman which could as easily have meant Start recording as Beat him to a pulp, and which, in the present situation, probably meant both, Sir, may I say how astonished I am to see you here, Astonished, why, For the reason I've just given, to see you taking part in this demonstration, Well, I'm a citizen like any other, I can demonstrate when and how I want to, especially now that there's no need to ask for authorization, But you're not just any citizen, you're the council leader, No, I'm not, I stopped being council leader three days ago, I'd have thought that was common knowledge by now, It's the first I've heard of it, we haven't received any official statement about it as yet, from the council or from the government, You're surely not expecting me to call a press conference, You resigned, No, I walked out, Why, The only answer I have is a closed mouth, mine, The city's population will want to know why their council leader, As I said, I'm no longer council leader, Why their council leader has joined an anti-government demonstration, This is not an anti-government demonstration, it's a demonstration of grief, the people here came to bury their dead, The dead have been buried and yet the demonstration is continuing, how do you explain that, Ask these other people, At the moment, it's your opinion I'm interested in, Well, I'm just going where they're going, Do you sympathize with the electors who cast blank votes, with the blankers, They voted as they wanted to vote, and whether I sympathize or not is irrelevant, And what about your party, what will they say when they find out you joined the demonstration, Ask them, You're not afraid they'll impose sanctions on you, No, What makes you so sure, For the simple reason that I no longer belong to the party, Did they expel you, No, I left, just as I left the post of council leader, What was the interior minister's reaction, Ask him, Who has taken over from you or will take over, Find out for yourself, Will we see you on more demonstrations, Turn up and you'll find out, So you've left the party on the right, in which you've spent your entire political career, and have gone over to the left, One day, I hope to understand just where it is I have gone, Sir, Don't call me that, Sorry, force of habit, and I have to confess to feeling confused, Careful, now, moral confusion, because I'm assuming your confusion is moral, is the first step along the path to disquiet and after that, as you yourselves are so fond of saying, anything can happen, No, I really am baffled, sir, I don't know what to think, Turn off the recording equipment, your bosses might not like what you just said, and, please, don't call me sir, The camera is already off, Just as well, that way you won't get yourself into any trouble, They say that the demonstration is heading for the presidential palace, Ask the organizers, Where are they, who are they, Everyone and no one, I suppose, There must be a leader, movements like this don't organize themselves, spontaneous generation doesn't exist, still less in the case of mass actions on this scale, Not until now, no, Do you mean that you don't believe the blank vote movement was spontaneous, It's outrageous of you to make such an inference, My impression is that you know much more about this business than you're letting on, The time always comes when we discover that we knew much more than we thought we did, now, leave me alone and get on with your job, find someone else to question, look, the sea of heads has started to move, What amazes me is that there isn't a single shout, a single long live or down with, not a single slogan saying what it is the people want, just this threatening silence that sends shivers down your spine, Forget the horror movie language, perhaps people are just tired of words, If people get tired of words, then I'll be out of a job, You won't say a truer word all day, Goodbye, sir, Once and for all, I'm not sir any more. The leading front quarter of the demonstration had turned back on itself, now it was going up a steep slope toward a long, broad avenue at the end of which it would turn to the right and receive on its face the cool caress of the breeze from the river. The presidential palace was about two kilometers away, on the flat. The reporters had received orders to leave the demonstration and to run on to take up positions outside the palace, but the general idea, amongst both the professionals working on the ground and those back at the editorial desks, was that, from the point of view of news interest, the coverage had been a pure waste of time and money, or to put it more crudely, a real kick in the balls for the media, or, in more delicate and refined terms, an undeserved slight. These guys aren't even any good at demonstrations, they said, they might at least throw the odd stone, burn the president in effigy, break a few windows, sing one of the old revolutionary songs, anything to show the world that they're not as dead as the people they've just buried. The demonstration did not live up to their expectations. The people arrived and filled the square, they stood for half an hour staring in silence at the closed-up palace, then they dispersed, and, some walking, others in buses, still others cadging lifts from supportive strangers, they all went home.