The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

  At the same time, the undertakers' representatives, burials, cremations, funerals, round-the-clock service, are going to meet at the corporation headquarters. Faced by the overwhelming and never before experienced professional challenge that the simultaneous death and subsequent funerary dispatch of thousands of people throughout the country will bring with it, the only real solution they can come up with, which also promises to be highly profitable thanks to a rationalized reduction in costs, will be to pool, in a coordinated and orderly fashion, all the personnel and the technological means, in other words, the logistics, at their disposal, establishing along the way proportional quotas for shares in the cake, as the president of the corporation so drolly put it, provoking discreet but amused applause from the other members. They will have to bear in mind, for example, that the production of coffins, tombs, caskets, biers and catafalques for human use had ground to a halt the day people stopped dying and that, in the unlikely event of there being any stock left in some conservatively minded carpenter's shop, it will be like malherbe's little rosebud, which, once transformed into a rose, can last no longer than a morning. This literary reference came from the president who went on to say, rather spoiling the mood, but nevertheless provoking applause from the audience, At least we'll no longer have to suf fer the humiliation of having to bury dogs, cats and pet canaries, And parrots, said a voice from the back, Indeed, and parrots, agreed the president, And tropical fish, added another voice, That was only after the controversy caused by the spirit hovering over the water in the aquarium, said the minutes secretary, from now on they'll be thrown to the cats, for as lavoisier said, in nature, nothing is created and nothing is lost, everything is transformed. We never found out quite to what extremes the undertakers' show of almanac wisdom would go because one of their representatives, concerned about the time, a quarter to midnight by his watch, put up his hand to propose telephoning the association of carpenters to ask how many coffins they had, We need to know what supplies we can rely on from tomorrow onward, he concluded. As one might expect, this proposal was warmly applauded, but the president, barely disguising his pique because he himself had not come up with the idea, remarked, There probably won't be anyone there at this hour, Allow me to disagree, president, the same reasons that brought us together must have prompted them to the same thing. The proposer was absolutely right. The corporation of carpenters replied that they had informed their respective members as soon as they'd heard the letter from death read out, alerting them to the need to start manufacturing coffins again as soon as possible, and, according to the information coming in all the time, not only had many businesses immediately called in their workers, most were already hard at work. That does, of course, contravene legislation regarding working hours, said the corporation's spokesperson, but, given that we're in a state of national emergency, our lawyers are sure that the government will have no option but to close their eyes to this and will, moreover, be grateful to us, what we cannot guarantee, in this first phase, is that the coffins being supplied will be of the same high quality and finish to which our clients have become accustomed, the polish, the varnishes and the crucifixes on the lid will have to be left for the second phase, when the pressure of funerals starts to diminish, but we are, nevertheless, conscious of the responsibility of being a fundamental part of this process. There was more and still warmer applause among that gathering of undertakers' representatives, for now there really were reasons for mutual congratulation, no corpse would be left unburied, no invoice would be left unpaid. And what about the gravediggers, asked the man who had made the proposal, The gravediggers will do as they're told, replied the president irritably. This wasn't quite true. Another phone call revealed that the gravediggers were demanding a substantial salary increase and triple the going rate for any overtime. That's a problem for the local councils, said the president, let them sort it out. And what if we arrive at the cemetery and there's no one to dig the graves, asked the secretary. The debate raged on. At twenty-three hours and fifty minutes, the president had a heart attack. He died on the last stroke of midnight.

  IT WAS MUCH MORE THAN A HECATOMB. THE SEVEN MONTHS that death's unilateral truce had lasted produced a waiting list of more than sixty thousand people on the point of death, or sixty-two thousand five hundred and eighty to be exact, all laid to rest in a moment, in an instant of time packed with a deadly power that would find comparison only in certain reprehensible human actions. By the way, we feel we must mention that death, by herself and alone, with no external help, has always killed far less than mankind has. Some curious-minded soul might be wondering how we came up with that precise figure of sixty-two thousand five hundred and eighty people who all closed their eyes at the same time and forever. It was very easy. Knowing that the country in which this is happening has more or less ten million inhabitants and that the death rate is more or less ten per thousand, two simple, not to say elementary arithmetical operations, multiplication and division, and factoring in, of course, the intermediate monthly and annual rates, allowed us to arrive at a narrow numerical band in which the quantity seemed like a reasonable average, and we use the word reasonable because we could have opted for the numbers on either side, sixty-two thousand five hundred and seventy-nine or sixty-two thousand five hundred and eighty-one if the death of the president of the undertakers' corporation, so sudden and unexpected, had not introduced into our calculations an element of doubt. Nevertheless, we are confident that the count made of the number of deaths, begun first thing the next morning, will confirm the accuracy of our calculations. Another curious-minded soul, of the kind who is always interrupting the narrator, will be wondering how the doctors knew which houses to go to in order to carry out a duty without which no dead person can be deemed legally dead, however indisputably dead they may be. Needless to say, in certain cases, the deceased's own family called out a locum or their g.p. but that would clearly not have been enough, since the aim was to try, in record time, to make official an entirely anomalous situation, and thus avoid confirming yet again the saying that misfortunes never come singly, which, when applied to this situation, would mean that any sudden death at home would be swiftly followed by putrefaction. Events went on to show that it is not by chance that a prime minister reaches such lofty heights and that, as the infallible wisdom of nations has demonstrated time and again, each country gets the government it deserves, although it must be said that while it is true to say that prime ministers, for good or ill, are not all the same, neither, it is no less true to say, are all countries. In short, in either case, it depends. Or if you prefer a slightly longer version of the same phrase, you never can tell. As you will see, any observer, even one not prone to making impartial judgments, will not hesitate to acknowledge that the government proved itself able to cope with the gravity of the situation. We will all remember that in the joy to which these people innocently surrendered themselves during those first, delicious and all-too-brief days of immortality, one lady, a recent widow, celebrated this new-found happiness by hanging the national flag from the flower-bedecked balcony of her dining room. We will also recall that, in less than forty-eight hours, this custom spread through the country like wildfire, like an epidemic. After seven months of continual and hard-to-bear disappointments, very few of those flags had survived, and even those that had were reduced to melancholy rags, their colors faded by the sun and washed away by the rains, the central emblem now nothing but a sad blur. Showing admirable foresight, the government, as well as taking other emergency measures intended to mitigate any collateral damage caused by death's unexpected return, had reclaimed for themselves the national flag as a sign that there, in that third-floor apartment on the left, a dead person lay waiting. With these instructions, those families wounded by the odious parcae sent one of their members to the shop to buy a new flag, hung it at the window, and, as they brushed the flies from the face of the deceased, waited for the doctor to come and certify the death. It must be acknowledged that the idea wa
s not just effective, but also extremely elegant. The doctors in each city, town, village or hamlet, in a car, on a bicycle or on foot, had only to wander the streets looking for a flag, go into the house thus marked and, having confirmed the death after a purely visual examination, without the help of instruments, since the scale of the emergency had made any closer scrutiny unfeasible, leave a signed piece of paper that would reassure the undertakers as to the specific nature of the raw material, which is to say, that, as the proverb goes, if they came to this house of the dead looking for wool, they would not go home shorn. As you will have realized, this clever use of the national flag would have a double aim and a double advantage. Having started out as a guide for doctors, it would then be a beacon for those who came to prepare the body. In the case of larger cities, and especially in the capital, which was a vast metropolis given the relatively small size of the country, the division of urban areas into sections, with a view to establishing proportional quotas for shares in the cake, as the unfortunate president of the association of funeral directors had so pithily put it, would prove an enormous help to the transporters of human freight in their race against time. The flag had another unforeseen and unexpected effect, one that shows how wrong we can be when we systematically devote ourselves to the cultivation of skepticism, and this was the virtuous gesture performed by certain citizens who were both respecters of the most deeply rooted traditions of polite social conduct as well as wearers of hats, for they would doff said hats whenever they passed a window adorned with a flag, thus leaving floating in the air a delightful doubt as to whether they were doing so because some one had died or because the flag was the living, sacred symbol of the nation.

  Sales of newspapers, we hardly need say, shot up, even more so than when it seemed that death was a thing of the past. Obviously a lot of people had already heard on television about the cataclysm that had befallen them, many even had dead relatives at home awaiting the doctor's arrival, along with a flag weeping on the balcony outside, but it's easy to understand that there is a difference between the nervous image of the director-general talking last night on the small screen and these convulsive, agitated pages, emblazoned with exclamatory, apocalyptic headlines that can be folded up and put in one's pocket and carried off to be re-read at leisure in one's home and of which we are pleased to present a few of the more striking examples here, After Paradise, Hell, Death Leads The Dance, Immortal But Not For Long, Once More Condemned To Die, Checkmate, Prior Warning From Now On, No Appeal And No Hope, A Letter On Violet Paper, Sixty-Two Thousand Deaths In Less Than A Second, Death Strikes At Midnight, No Escape From Destiny, Out Of the Dream And Into the Nightmare, Return To Normal, What Did We Do To Deserve This, etcetera, etcetera. All the newspapers, without exception, reprinted death's letter on the front page, but one of them, to make it easier to read, reproduced the text in a box and in a fourteen-point font, corrected the punctuation and syntax, adjusted the tenses of the verbs, added capitals where necessary, including on the final signature, which was changed from death to Death, an alteration unappreciable by the ear, but which, that same day, would provoke an indignant protest from the writer of the missive herself, again using the same violet-colored paper. According to the authorized opinion of a grammarian consulted by the newspaper, death had simply failed to master even the first rudiments of the art of writing. And then, he said, there's the calligraphy, which is strangely irregular, it's as if it combined all the known ways, both possible and aberrant, of forming the letters of the latin alphabet, as if each had been written by a different person, but that could be forgiven, one could even consider it a minor defect given the chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas and, most unforgivable sin of all, the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter, which, can you imagine, is even omitted from the actual signature of the letter and replaced by a lower-case d. It was a disgrace, an insult, the grammarian went on, asking, If death, who has had the priceless privilege of seeing the great literary geniuses of the past, writes like this, what of our children if they choose to imitate such a philological monstrosity, on the excuse that, considering how long death has been around, she should know everything there is to know about all branches of knowledge. And the grammarian concluded, The syntactical blunders that fill this appalling letter would lead me to think that this was some huge, clumsy confidence trick were it not for grim reality and the painful evidence that the terrible threat has come to pass. As we mentioned, on the afternoon of that same day, a letter from death reached the newspaper, demanding, in the most energetic terms, that the original spelling of her name be restored, Dear sir, she wrote, I am not Death, but death, Death is something of which you could never even conceive, and please note, mister grammarian, that I did not conclude that phrase with a preposition, you human beings only know the small everyday death that is me, the death which, even in the very worst disasters, is incapable of preventing life from continuing, one day you will find out about Death with a capital D, and at that moment, in the unlikely event that she gives you time to do so, you will understand the real difference between the relative and the absolute, between full and empty, between still alive and no longer alive, and when I say real difference, I am referring to something that mere words will never be able to express, relative, absolute, full, empty, still alive and no longer alive, because, sir, in case you don't know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps, I give you this information gratis and for free, meanwhile, concern yourself with explaining to your readers the whys and wherefores of life and death, and now, returning to the original purpose of this letter, written, as was the one read out on television, by my own hand, I ask you to fulfill the provisions contained in the press regulations which demand that any error, omission or mistake be rectified on the same page and in the same font size, and if this letter is not published in full, sir, you run the risk of receiving tomorrow morning, with immediate effect, the prior warning that I was reserving for you in a few years' time, although, so as not to ruin the rest of your life, I won't say exactly how many, yours faithfully, death. Accompanied by fulsome apologies from the editor, the letter appeared punctually the next day and in duplicate too, that is, reproduced in manuscript form as well as boxed and in the same fourteen-point font. Only when the newspaper was distributed did the editor dare to emerge from the bunker in which he had been hidden away from the moment he had read that threatening letter. And he was so frightened that he even refused to publish the graphological study delivered to him personally by an important expert. I got myself in quite enough of a mess just by printing death's signature with an upper case d, so take your analysis to some other newspaper, let's share out the misfortune and from now on leave things to god, anything to avoid getting another fright like that. The graphologist went to another newspaper, then another and another, and only at the fourth try, when he was already losing hope, did he find someone prepared to accept the fruits of the many hours of labyrinthine work he had put in, toiling day and night over his magnifying glass. The substantial and juicy report began by noting that the interpretation of writing had originally been one of the branches of physiognomy, the others being, for the information of those not au fait with this exact science, mime, gesture, pantomime and phonognomy, after which he brought in the major authorities on this complex subject, each in his or her own time and place, for example, camillo baldi, johann caspar lavater, édouard auguste patrice hocquart, adolf henze, jean-hippolyte michon, william thierry preyer, cesare lombroso, jules crépieux-jamin, rudolf pophal, ludwig klages, wilhelm helmuth müller, alice enskat, robert heiss, thanks to whom graphology had been restructured as a psychological tool, demonstrating the ambivalence of graphological details and the need to express the
se as a whole, and then, having set out the essential historical facts of the matter, our graphologist launched into an exhaustive definition of the principal characteristics being studied, namely, size, pressure, spacing, margins, angles, punctuation, the length of upward and downward strokes, or, in other words, the intensity, shape, slant, direction and fluidity of graphic signs, and finally, having made it clear that the aim of his study was not to make a clinical diagnosis, or a character analysis, or an examination of professional aptitude, the specialist focused his attention on the evident links with the criminological world which the writing revealed at every step, Nevertheless, he wrote in grim, frustrated tones, I find myself faced by a contradiction which I can see no way of resolving, and for which I very much doubt there is any possible resolution, and this is the fact that while it is true that all the vectors of this methodical and meticulous graphological analysis point to the authoress of the letter being what people call a serial killer, another equally irrefutable truth finally imposed itself upon me, one that to some extent demolishes that earlier thesis, which is this, that the person who wrote the letter is dead. And so it was, and death herself could not but confirm this, You're quite right, sir, she said when she read this display of erudition. What no one could understand was this, if she was dead and nothing but bones, how then could she kill? More to the point, how could she write letters? These are mysteries that will never be explained.

  Occupied as we were with explaining what happened after the fateful stroke of midnight to the sixty-two thousand five hundred and eighty people left in a state of suspended life, we put off for a more opportune moment, which happens to be this one, our indispensable reflections on the way in which the changed situation affected the eventide homes, the hospitals, the insurance companies, the maphia and the church, especially the catholic church, which was the country's majority religion, so much so that it was commonly believed that our lord jesus christ would not have wanted to be born anywhere else if he had had to repeat, from a to z, his first and, as far as we know, only earthly existence. To begin with the eventide homes, feelings were much as you would expect. If you bear in mind, as we explained at the very start of these surprising events, that the continuous rotation of inmates was a necessary condition for the economic prosperity of these enterprises, the return of death was bound to be, and indeed was, a reason for joy and renewed hope for the respective managements. After the initial shock provoked by the reading out on television of the famous letter from death, the managers immediately began to do their sums and they all came out right. Not a few bottles of champagne were drunk at midnight to celebrate this unexpected return to normality, and while such behavior may appear to show a gross indifference to and scorn for other people's lives, what it really showed was the perfectly natural sense of relief, the need to give vent to pent-up emotions, of someone who, standing outside a locked door to which he has lost the key, suddenly sees it swing open and the sun come pouring in. More scrupulous people will say that they should at least have avoided the noisy, frivolous ostentation of champagne, with corks popping and glasses overflowing, and that a discreet glass of port or madeira, a drop of cognac, a touch of brandy in one's coffee would have been celebration enough, but we know how easily the spirit lets slip the reins of the body when happiness takes over, and know, too, that even though one shouldn't condone it, one can always forgive. The following morning, the managers summoned the families to fetch their dead, then they had the rooms aired and the sheets changed, and, having gathered all the staff together to tell them that life goes on despite all, they sat down to examine the list of potential customers and to choose from among the applicants those who seemed most promising. For reasons not entirely identical in every aspect, but which, nevertheless, merit equal consideration, the mood among hospital administrators and the medical classes had also improved overnight. However, as we said before, although a large number of patients who were beyond cure or whose illness had reached its end or its final stage, if one can apply such terms to a nosological state deemed to be eternal, had been moved back to their homes and their families, What better hands could the poor wretches find themselves in, they asked hypocritically, the truth is that many of them, with no known relatives and no money to pay the rates demanded by the eventide homes, were crammed in wherever there was space, not in corridors, as has long been the custom in these worthy establishments yesterday, today and always, but in lumber rooms and attics, where they would often be left for days at a time, without anyone taking the slightest notice of them, for, as the doctors and nurses said, regardless of how ill they might be, they couldn't die. Now they were dead, and had been taken away and buried, and the air in the hospitals, with its unmistakable aroma of ether, iodine and disinfectant, had become as pure and crystalline as mountain air. They didn't crack open any bottles of champagne, but the happy smiles of administrators and clinical directors were a salve to the soul, and as for the male doctors, suffice it to say that they had recovered their traditionally predatory gaze when they gave the female nursing staff the eye. Normality, in every sense of the word, had been restored. As for the insurance companies, third on the list, there is not as yet much to say, because they haven't quite figured out whether the present situation, in the light of the changes introduced into life insurance policies and which we described in detail earlier, will be to their advantage or disadvantage. They will not take a step without being quite sure they are walking on firm ground, but when they finally do, they will put down new roots under whatever form of contract they draw up to suit their own best interests. Meanwhile, since the future belongs to god and because no one knows what tomorrow will bring, they will continue to con sider as dead any insured person who has reached the age of eighty, that bird at least they have firmly grasped in their hand, and it only remains to be seen if tomorrow they can get two more to fall into the net. Some, however, propose that they should make the most of the current confusion in society, which stands more than ever between the devil and the deep blue sea, between scylla and charybdis, between a rock and a hard place, and that it might not be a bad idea to increase the age of actuarial death to eighty-five or even ninety. The reasoning of those who defend this change is as clear as water, they say that, by the time people reach such an age, not only do they have no relatives to look after them in time of need, indeed, any such relatives might be so old that it makes no odds anyway, they also suffer a real reduction in the value of their retirement pensions because of inflation and the rising cost of living, which means that they are often forced to interrupt payment of their premiums, thus giving insurance companies the best of motives to consider the respective contract null and void. That's inhuman, object some. Business is business, say the others. We will see how it all ends.