The Collected Novels of José Saramago (189 page)

When it is time for lunch, Raimundo Silva will make an omelette with three eggs and chorizo, an indulgence his liver can still tolerate. With a plate of soup, an orange, a glass of wine, and a coffee to finish off, no one with his sedentary lifestyle could wish for more. He carefully washed up, using more water and detergent than necessary, he dried the dishes and put them back in the kitchen cupboard, he is a methodical man, a proof-reader in the absolute sense of the word, if any word can be said to exist and go on existing for ever with the same absolute meaning, since the absolute demands nothing less. Before getting back to his work, he went to look at the weather, the sky had cleared a little, the other side of the river is becoming visible, nothing but a dark line, an elongated blur, but it is still cold. On his desk there are four hundred and thirty-seven pages of proofs, two hundred and ninety-three of them have already been corrected and checked, the rest should not take too long, the proof-reader has the entire afternoon, and the evening, yes, the evening as well, because this meticulous professional always gives the proofs one last reading from start to finish as if he were an ordinary reader, finally there is the pleasure and satisfaction of understanding in a relaxed manner without looking out for mistakes, how right that author was who asked one day, What would Juliet’s complexion have looked like if examined with the eyes of a hawk, now then, the proof-reader in his vigilant task, is just like the hawk, even when his eyes have started to tire, but when he comes to the final reading, he is that self-same Romeo gazing upon Juliet for the first time, innocent, and transfixed by love.

In the case of
The History of the Siege of Lisbon,
Romeo is fully aware that he will not find much cause for rapture, although Raimundo Silva, in the preliminary and somewhat labyrinthine conversation about the correction of errors and errors of correction, had told the author that he liked the book, and, in fact, he was not lying. But what does liking mean, we ask ourselves, between liking something a lot and not liking it at all, there is less and little, and it is not enough to write it in order to know how much yes, or no, or maybe, means in all of this, you would have to utter it aloud, hearing invariably captures the ultimate vibration, and when we are deceived or allow ourselves to be deceived it is only because we did not listen sufficiently to our hearing. It must be recognised, however, that there was no such deception in that dialogue, and it soon became clear that this was a vague or distracted kind of liking, as lukewarmly expressed by Raimundo Silva, I like it, and no, sooner had he uttered these words than they turned cold. In those four hundred and thirty-seven pages he did not find a single new fact, controversial interpretation, unpublished document, even as much as a fresh reading. Nothing more than yet another regurgitation of those interminable, played-out accounts of the siege, the description of places, the speeches and deeds of the royal personage, the arrival of the crusaders at Oporto and their navigation until they entered the Tagus, the events that occurred on the feast of St Peter, the ultimatum given to the city, the efforts that went into the siege, the battles and assaults, the surrender, and finally the sacking of the city,
die vero quo omnium sanctorum celebratur ad laudem et honorem nominis Christi et sanctissimae ejus genitricis purificatum est templum,
words attributed to Osbern, who entered the pantheon of literature thanks to the siege and capture of Lisbon and what has been written about them, these Latin words, translated roughly by someone who knows the language, mean that on All Saints Day the corrupt mosque became the most holy Catholic church, and now the muezzin will definitely no longer be able to summon the faithful for prayers to Allah, he will be replaced by a bell or carillon after one god has been substituted for another, and what a pity they did not let him go. He is blind, poor man, but then just as blind with sanguinary wrath was the crusader Osbern, the same only in name, when, with sword in hand, he saw an elderly Moor who did not even have the strength to escape, floundering there on the ground, waving his arms and legs as if trying to bury himself under the earth, this fear being real while that other was imaginary, and he will have his wish, as sure as he is still alive, but not for much longer, say we, nor will he be able to bury himself because by then he will be dead, the proof-reader thought to himself, meanwhile the common graves are being dug. From time to time, the low bleating of a foghorn can be heard coming from the river, it has been doing this since morning, to warn ships, but only now has Raimundo Silva noticed, perhaps because of the great silence that has suddenly descended upon him.

It is January and darkness falls early. The atmosphere in the study is heavy and airless. The doors are closed. To protect himself from the cold, the proof-reader has a shawl over his knees, the heater right up against the desk almost scalding his ankles. Easy to see that the house is old and lacking in comfort, dating from more spartan and primitive times, when to go outdoors with the weather at its coldest was still the best solution for anyone who had nothing better than a freezing corridor where he could march up and down in an effort to keep warm. But on the very last page of
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Raimundo Silva will discover the impassioned expression of a fervent patriotism, which he will have no difficulty in recognising unless a monotonous and humdrum existence has dampened his own patriotism, now he will shiver, that is true, but from that unmistakable breath that comes from the souls of heroes, note what the historian wrote, On the summit of the fortification, the Moslem moon made its final descent, and definitively and for evermore, alongside the cross which announced to the world the holy baptism of a new Christian city, slowly rising into the blue sky above, kissed by light, tossed by the breeze, the standard of Dom Afonso Henriques which bears the five shields of the Portuguese coat of arms is proudly unfurled in jubilant triumph, shit, and do not imagine that the proof-reader is insulting the national emblem, on the contrary this is the legitimate outburst of someone who, having been ironically reprimanded for inventing ingenuous errors, will have to allow the errors of others to pass, when what he is tempted to do, and rightly so, is to fill the margins of the page with a flurry of indignant
deleaturs,
however, we know he will do no such thing, because any such corrections would offend the author, Let the cobbler stick to his last, for that is all he is paid to do, said the impatient Apelles categorically. Now these errors are not as serious as those we found regarding the word sling or catapult, these are mere trifles hovering uncertainly between a possible yes or no, for in all truth, we do not give a damn nowadays whether these weapons are described as balearicas or as something else, but what’ is wholly unacceptable is this nonsense of referring to coats of arms in the time of Dom Afonso, the First, when it was only during the reign of his son Sancho that they appeared on the Portuguese flag, nor do we know how they were depicted, whether forming a cross in the centre, or each emblem in a separate corner, or filling up the entire space, this final hypothesis being the most likely according to the most reliable sources. A serious blot, but not the only one, which will forever stain the closing page of
The History of the Siege of Lisbon,
otherwise so richly orchestrated with resounding trumpets, with drums and rapturous outbursts, with the troops lined up on parade, and let us try to picture the scene, foot-soldiers and cavalrymen watching that abominable standard being lowered and the insignia of Christian Portugal being raised in its place, and calling out in one voice, Long live Portugal, and striking their shields vigorously with their swords in an outburst of military zeal, followed by a march past in the presence of the king, who is vindictively trampling underfoot, not only Moorish blood, but that Moslem crescent of the moon, a second error and totally absurd, for no such flag was ever raised above the walls of Lisbon and, as the historian ought to know, the crescent of the moon on a flag was an invention of the Ottoman empire, two or three centuries later. The tip of Raimundo Silva’s biro was still poised over the shields in the coat of arms, but then he thought that if he were to remove them and the crescent, it would provoke an earthquake on the page, everything would come crashing down, an inconclusive history in keeping with the greatness of the moment, and this is an excellent way of teaching people the importance of something which, at first sight, appears to be nothing other than a piece of cloth in one or more colours, with designs also in different colours, such as castles or stars, lions, unicorns, eagles, suns, scythes or hammers, wounds, roses, sabres or machetes, compasses, wheels, cedars, elephants or oxen, birettas, hands, palm-trees, hones or candelabra, as I know all too well and, without a guide or catalogue, you could get lost in this museum, even more so if someone has remembered to embellish the flags with coats of arms, all belonging to the same family, for then it becomes an endless list of fleurs-de-lis, shells, buckles, leopards, bees, bells, trees, croziers, mitres, spikes, bears, salamanders, herons, rings, drakes, doves, wild boars, virgins, bridges, ravens, caravels, lances, books, yes, even books, the Bible, the Koran,
Das Kapital,
written by whom do you think, and so forth and so on, from which we may conclude that men are incapable of saying who they are unless they can claim to be something else, and this would be reason enough for leaving aside the episode of the flags, the one reviled, the other exalted, but bearing in mind that the whole thing is a lie, useful to some extent, the ultimate disgrace, simply because we did not have the courage to correct it or know how to replace it with the honest truth, the most ambitious but constant aspiration of all, and may Allah have mercy, on us.

For the first time in all these years of painstaking labour, Raimundo Silva will not give the book one final reading from beginning to end. There are, as we explained, four hundred and thirty-seven heavily annotated pages, to read all of them would mean staying up all night or at least most of it, a torment he does not relish for he has positively come to dislike the book and its author, tomorrow the ingenuous readers will say and schoolchildren repeat that the fly has four legs, as affirmed by Aristotle, and on the next centenary of the conquest of Lisbon from the Moors, in the year two thousand and forty-seven, if Lisbon still exists and continues to be inhabited by the Portuguese, some president or other will evoke that sublime moment when the insignia of the proud victors triumphantly replaced the unholy crescent of the moon in the blue skies of our lovely city.

Nevertheless, his professional scruples demand that he should, at least, slowly go over the pages, his expert eyes scanning the words, in the hope that by thus varying the degree of concentration, he might discover some minor error of his own, like that shadow suddenly displaced by strong light, or that familiar sideways glance which at the last minute captures an image in flight. We do not need to know whether Raimundo Silva managed to tidy up those tiresome proofs, but what is interesting is to observe him as he re-reads the speech Dom Afonso Henriques made to the crusaders, according to the version attributed to Osbern, here translated from the Latin by the author of the
History
himself, who does not trust the lessons of others, especially when dealing with such an important subject, no less than the first speech of our founding king to be recorded, for there is no reliable evidence of any other. Raimundo Silva finds the entire speech absurd from start to finish, not because he is competent to question the accuracy of the translation, a command of Latin not being amongst the talents of this average proof-reader, but because no one in their right mind could possibly believe that this King Afonso, who had no gift for rhetoric, made such a convoluted speech, more like one of those pretentious sermons the friars would be giving six or seven centuries later than the limited phrases of a language which at that time was little more than childish prattle. There was the proof-reader smiling scornfully, when suddenly he felt his heart leap, if Egas Moniz really had been the excellent tutor described in the annals, if he was born not simply to accompany the little cripple to Carquere or subsequently to go to Toledo with a noose round his neck, then surely he would have instilled a fair number of Christian precepts and political maxims into his pupil, and Latin being the perfect language in which to impart this knowledge, one might assume that the royal prince, in addition to a natural command of Galician, would have known
quantum satis
Latin in order to be able to make the aforementioned harangue at the right moment, to all those foreign and highly civilised crusaders, since at that time the only language they understood was the one they had learned in the cradle and a few words of the foreign language with the help of the friars who acted as interpreters. Dom Afonso Henriques, therefore, would have known Latin and not needed to send an emissary in his place to that famous assembly, perhaps he himself might even have been the author of those celebrated words, a wholly plausible hypothesis in the case of someone who in his own hand, and in Latin no less, had written
The History of the Conquest of Santarém,
as we are solemnly informed by Barbosa Machado in his
Biblioteca Lusitana
and who also states that the manuscript was preserved at the time in the Royal Convent of Alcobaça at the end of a book of about St Fulgentius. It has to be said that the proof-reader does not believe a single word of what he is reading, he is more than sceptical, he himself has already said so, but in order to be fair-minded, as well as to break the monotony of this obligatory reading, he consulted the primary source on which the modern histories are based, he searched and found, just as I suspected, the credulous Machado copied, without checking, what Fray Bernardo de Brito and Fray Antonio Brandão had written, this is how historical misconceptions come about, So-and-So says that Beltrano said that Cicrano heard, and three such statements are enough to make a story, but what is beyond question is that
The Conquest of Santarém
was written by a member of the community of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, whose very name has not survived to take its rightful place in the library and remove that of the usurping king.