This episode in the street, only possible in a small place where everyone knows everyone else, speaks volumes about the inconvenience of the communication system instituted by death for the termination of the temporary contract which we call life or existence. It could be seen as a display of sadistic cruelty, like so many others we see every day, but death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough. She simply hadn't thought it through. And now, absorbed as she must be in reorganizing her support services after a long hiatus of more than seven months, she has neither eyes nor ears for the cries of despair and anguish uttered by the men and women who, one by one, are being warned of their imminent death, feelings of despair and anguish which, in some cases, are having precisely the opposite effect to the one she had foreseen, because the people condemned to disappear are not sorting out their affairs, they are not writing wills, they are not paying back taxes, and as for saying their farewells to family and close friends, they are leaving that to the last minute, which, of course, is not enough even for the most melancholy of farewells. Ill-informed about the true nature of death, whose other name is fate, the newspapers have outdone themselves in furious attacks on her, calling her pitiless, cruel, tyrannical, wicked, bloodthirsty, disloyal and treacherous, a vampire, the empress of evil, a dracula in skirts, the enemy of humankind, a murderess and, again, a serial killer, and there was even one weekly magazine, of the humorous kind, which, squeezing every ounce of sarcasm out of its copywriters, managed to come up with the term daughter-of-a-bitch. Fortunately, in some newspapers, good sense continued to reign. One of the most respected papers in the kingdom, the doyen of the national press, published a wise editorial in which it called for a frank and open dialogue with death, holding nothing back, with hand on heart and in a spirit of fraternity, always assuming, of course, that they could find out where she lived, her cave, her lair, her headquarters. Another paper suggested that the police authorities should investigate stationer's shops and paper manufacturers, because human users of violet-colored envelopes, if ever there were any, and they would always have been very few, would be sure to have changed their epistolary tastes in view of recent events, and it would thus be as easy as pie to catch the macabre customer when she turned up to refresh her supplies. Another newspaper, a bitter rival of the latter, was quick to describe this idea as both crass and stupid, because only an arrant fool could think that death, who, as everyone knew, was a skeleton draped in a sheet, would set out, bony heels clattering along the pavement, to mail her letters. Not wishing to lag behind the press, the television advised the interior minister to have policemen guard mailboxes and pillar boxes, apparently forgetting that the first letter addressed to the director-general of television had appeared in his office when the door was double-locked and no window panes broken. Floor, walls and ceilings revealed not a crack, not even one tiny enough to slip a razor blade through. Perhaps it really was possible to persuade death to show more compassion toward the poor unfortunates condemned to die, but to do that, they would have to find her and no one knew how or where.
It was then that a forensic scientist, well informed about everything that related, directly or indirectly, to his profession, had the idea of inviting over a celebrated foreign expert in the reconstruction of faces from skulls, this expert, basing himself on representations of death in old paintings and engravings, especially those showing her bare cranium, would try to replace any missing flesh, restore the eyes to their sockets, add, in just proportions, hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, as well as appropriate touches of color to the cheeks, until before him appeared a perfect, finished head of which a thousand photographic copies would then be made so that the same number of investigators could carry it in their wallets to compare with the many women they would see. The trouble was that, when the foreign expert had concluded his work, only someone with a very untrained eye would have said that the three chosen skulls were identical, and this obliged the investigators to work with not just one photograph, but three, which would obviously hinder the death-hunt, as the operation had, rather ambitiously, been called. Only one thing had been proved beyond doubt, and about which even the most rudimentary iconography, the most complicated nomenclature, and the most abstruse symbolism had all been correct. Death, in her features, attributes and characteristics, was unmistakably a woman. As you will doubtless remember, the eminent graphologist who studied death's first letter had clearly reached the same conclusion when he referred to the writer of the letter as its authoress, but that might have been pure habit, given that, with the exception of a very few languages, which, for some unknown reason, opt for the masculine or the neuter, death has always been a person of the female gender. Now we have given this information before, but, lest you forget, it would be as well to insist on the fact that the three faces, all of them female and all of them young, did differ from each other in certain ways, despite the clear similarities that everyone saw in them. The existence of three different deaths, for example, working in shifts, was simply not credible, so two of them would have to be excluded, although, just to complicate matters still further, it might well be that the skeletal model of the real and true death did not correspond to any of the three who had been selected. It was, as the saying goes, a question of firing a shot in the dark and hoping that benevolent chance had time to place the target in the bullet's path.
The investigation began, as it had to, in the archives of the official identification service in which were gathered photographs of all the country's inhabitants, both indigenous and foreign, classified and ordered according to certain basic characteristics, the dolichocephalic to one side, the brachycephalic to the other. The results were disappointing. At first, of course, since, as we said before, the models chosen for the facial reconstruction had been taken from old engravings and paintings, no one really hoped to find the humanized image of death in these modern identification systems, instituted just over a century ago, but, on the other hand, bearing in mind that death has always existed and since there seems no reason to suppose that she would have needed to change her face over the ages, and not forgetting that it must be difficult for her to carry out her work properly and safe from suspicion while living in clandestinity, it is therefore perfectly logical to accept the hypothesis that she might have put herself down in the civil registry under a false name, for as we know all too well, nothing is impossible for death. Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact is that, despite asking for help from those gifted in information technology and data exchange, the investigators found not a single photograph of any identifiable woman who looked anything like the three virtual images of death. As had already been foreseen, there was, then, no alternative but to return to the classic investigatory methods, to the policemanly craft of piecing together snippets of information and sending forth those one thousand agents so that, by going from house to house, from shop to shop, from office to office, from factory to factory, from restaurant to restaurant, from bar to bar, and even visiting those places reserved for the onerous exercise of sex, they could inspect all the women in the land, excluding adolescents and those of mature or advanced years, because the three photographs they had in their pocket made it quite clear that death, if ever she were found, would be a woman of about thirty-six and very beautiful indeed. According to the model they had been given, any of them could have been death, although none of them was. After enormous effort, after trudging miles and miles along streets, roads and paths, after going up flights of stairs which, placed end to end, would have carried them up to the skies, the agents managed to identify two of these women, who differed from the existing photographs in the archives only because they had benefited from cosmetic surgery, which, by an astonishing coincidence, by a strange happenstance, had emphasized the similarities of their faces to the reconstructed faces of the models. However, a meticulous examination of their respective biographies ruled out, with no margin for error, any possibility that they had once dedicated themselves, even in their s
pare time, to the deadly activities of death, either professionally or as mere amateurs. As for the third woman, identified only from family albums, she had died the previous year. By a simple process of elimination, someone who had been the victim of death could not also be death. And needless to say, while the investigations were going on, and they lasted some weeks, the violet-colored envelopes continued to arrive at the homes of their addressees. It was clear that death would not budge from her agreement with humanity.
Naturally, one must ask if the government was merely standing by and impassively watching the daily drama being lived out by the country's ten million inhabitants. The answer is twofold, affirmative on the one hand and negative on the other. Affirmative, although only in rather relative terms, because dying is, after all, the most normal and ordinary thing in life, a purely routine fact, an episode in the endless legacy passed from parents to children, at least since adam and eve, and world governments would do enormous harm to the public's precarious peace of mind if they declared three days of national mourning every time some poor old man died in a home for the destitute. And negative because it would be impossible, even if you had a heart of stone, to remain indifferent to the palpable fact that the week's notice given by death had taken on the pro portions of a real collective calamity, not just for the average of three hundred people at whose door ill luck came knocking each day, but also for the people who remained, neither more nor less than nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and seven hundred people of all ages, fortunes and conditions, who, each morning when they woke from a night tormented by the most terrible nightmares, saw the sword of damocles hanging by a thread over their head. As for the three hundred inhabitants who had received the fateful violet-colored letter, responses to the implacable sentence varied, as is only natural, depending on the character of each individual. As well as those people mentioned above who, driven by a twisted idea of revenge to which one could quite rightly apply the neologism prepost-humous, decided to abandon their civic and familial duties by not writing a will or paying their back taxes, there were many who, acting on a highly corrupt interpretation of the horatian carpe diem, squandered what little life was left to them by giving themselves over to reprehensible orgies of sex, drugs and alcohol, thinking perhaps that by falling into such wild excesses, they might bring down upon their own heads some fatal stroke or, if not, a divine thunderbolt which, by killing them there and then, would snatch them from the grasp of death proper, thus playing a trick on death that might well make her change her ways. Others, stoical, dignified and courageous, went for the radical option of suicide, believing that they, too, would be teaching a lesson in manners to the power of thanatos, delivering what we used to call a verbal slap in the face, of the sort that, in accordance with the honest convictions of the time, would be all the more painful if it had its origin in the ethical and moral arena and not in some primitive desire for physical revenge. All these attempts failed, of course, apart, that is, from those stubborn people who reserved their suicide for the last day of the deadline. A masterly move, to which death could find no answer.
To its credit, the first institution to get a real sense of the mood of the people in general was the catholic apostolic church of rome, to which, since we live in an age dominated by the boom in the use of acronyms in day-to-day communications, both private and public, it might be a good idea to give the easier abbreviation of c.a.c.o.r. It is also true that you would have had to be stone-blind not to notice how, almost from one moment to the next, the churches filled up with distraught people in search of some word of hope, some consolation, a balm, an analgesic, a spiritual tranquilizer. People who, until then, had lived in the consciousness that death was inevitable and that there was no possible escape, but thinking at the same time, since there were so many other people doomed to die, that only by some real stroke of bad luck would their turn ever come around, those same people now spent their time peering from behind the curtains, waiting for the postman or trembling when they returned home, where the dreaded violet-colored letter, worse than a bloody monster with jaws gaping, might be lurking behind the door, ready to leap out at them. The churches did not stop work for a moment, the long queues of contrite sinners, constantly refreshed like factory assembly lines, wound twice round the central nave. The confessors on duty never stopped, sometimes they were distracted by fatigue, at others their attention was suddenly caught by some scandalous detail, but in the end they simply handed out a pro forma penance, so many our fathers, so many ave marias, and then muttered a hasty absolution. In the brief interval between one confessee leaving and the next confessant kneeling down, the confessors would grab a bite of the chicken sandwich that would be their lunch, meanwhile vaguely imagining some compensatory delight for supper. Sermons were invariably on the subject of death as the only way into the heavenly paradise, where, it was said, no one ever entered alive, and the preachers, in their eagerness to console, did not hesitate to resort to the highest forms of rhetoric and to the lowest tricks in the catechism to convince their terrified parishioners that they could, after all, consider themselves more fortunate than their ancestors, because death had given them enough time to prepare their souls with a view to ascending into eden. There were some priests, however, who, trapped in the malodorous gloom of the confessional, had to screw up their courage, god knows at what cost, because they, too, that very morning, had received the violet-colored envelope, and so had more than enough reason to doubt the emollient virtues of what they were saying.
The same was happening with the therapists that the health minister, hastening to imitate the therapeutic aid given by the church, had dispatched to bring succor to the most desperate. It was not infrequent for a psychiatrist, when counseling a patient that crying would be the best way to relieve the pain tormenting him, to burst into convulsive sobs himself when he remembered that he, too, might be the recipient of an identical envelope in the next day's post. Both psychiatrist and patient would end the session bawling their eyes out, embraced by the same misfortune, but with the therapist thinking that if a misfortune did befall him, he would still have seven days to live, one hundred and ninety-two hours. A few little orgies of sex, drugs and alcohol, which he had heard were being organized, would ease his passage into the next world, although, of course, you then ran the risk that such excesses might only make you miss this world all the more intensely when you were up there on your ethereal throne.
ACCORDING TO THE WISDOM OF THE NATIONS, THERE IS AN exception to every rule, even rules that would normally be considered utterly inviolable, as for example, those regarding the sovereignty of death, to which, by definition, there never could be an exception, however absurd, and yet it really must be true because, as it happened, one violet-colored letter was returned to sender. Some will object that such a thing is impossible, that death, being ubiquitous, cannot therefore be in any one particular place, from which one can deduce the impossibility, both material and metaphysical, of locating and defining what we normally understand by the word sender, or, in the meaning intended here, the place from which the letter came. Others will also object, albeit less speculatively, that, since a thousand policemen have been looking for death for weeks on end, scouring the entire country, house by house, with a fine-tooth comb, as if in search of an elusive louse highly skilled in evasive tactics, and have still found neither hide nor hair of her, it is as clear as day that if no explanation has yet been given as to how death's letters reach the mail, we are certainly not going to be told by what mysterious channels the returned letter has managed to reach her hands. We humbly recognize that our explanations about this and much more have been sadly lacking, we confess that we are unable to provide explanations that will satisfy those demanding them, unless, taking advantage of the reader's credulity and leaping over the respect owed to the logic of events, we were to add further unrealities to the congenital unreality of this fable, now we realize that such faults seriously undermine our story's credibility,
however, none of this, we repeat, none of this means that the violet-colored letter to which we referred was not returned to its sender. Facts are facts, and this fact, whether you like it or not, is of the irrefutable kind. There can be no better proof of this than the image of death before us now, sitting on a chair while wrapped in her sheet, and with a look of blank amazement on the orography of her bony face. She eyes the violet envelope suspiciously, studies it to see if it bears any of the comments postmen usually write on envelopes in such cases, for example, returned, not known at this address, addressee gone away leaving no forwarding address or date of return, or simply, dead, How stupid of me, she muttered, how could he have died if the letter that should have killed him came back unopened. She had thought these last words without giving them much importance, but she immediately summoned them up again and repeated them out loud, in a dreamy tone of voice, Came back unopened. You don't need to be a postman to know that coming back is not the same thing as being sent back, that coming back could merely mean that the violet-colored letter failed to reach its destination, that at some point along the way something happened to make it retrace its steps and return whence it had come. Letters can only go where they're taken, they don't have legs or wings, and, as far as we know, they're not endowed with their own initiative, if they were, we're sure that they would refuse to carry the terrible news of which they're so often the bearers. Like this news of mine, thought death impartially, telling someone that they're going to die on a particular date is the worst possible news, it's like spending long years on death row and then having the jailer come up to you and say, Here's the letter, prepare yourself. The odd thing is that all the other letters from the last batch were safely delivered to their addressees, and if this one wasn't, it can only have been because of some chance event, for just as there have been cases of a love letter, god alone knows with what consequences, taking five years to reach an addressee who lived only two blocks and less than a quarter of an hour's walk away, it could be that this letter passed from one conveyor belt to another without anyone noticing and then returned to its point of departure like someone who, lost in the desert, has nothing more to go on than the trail he left behind him. The solution would be to send it again, said death to the scythe that was next to her, leaning against the white wall. One wouldn't expect a scythe to respond, and this one proved no exception. Death went on, If I'd sent you, with your taste for expeditious methods, the matter would have been resolved, but times have changed a lot lately, and one has to update the means and the systems one uses, to keep up with the new technologies, by using e-mail, for example, I've heard tell that it's the most hygienic way, one that does away with inkblots and fingerprints, besides which it's fast, you just open up outlook express on microsoft and it's gone, the difficulty would be having to work with two separate archives, one for those who use computers and another for those who don't, anyway, we've got plenty of time to think about it, they're always coming out with new models and new designs, with new improved technologies, perhaps I'll try it some day, but until then, I'll continue to write with pen, paper and ink, it has the charm of tradition, and tradition counts for a lot when it comes to dying. Death stared hard at the violet-colored envelope, made a gesture with her right hand, and the letter vanished. So now we know that, contrary to what so many thought, death does not take her letters to the post office.
The Collected Novels of José Saramago Page 349