The Collected Novels of José Saramago (378 page)

Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime, have the grave disadvantage of being very short-lived, which fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over. This awkward pause, however, reduces down to almost nothing when there is an interior minister present. As soon as the cabinet had resumed their usual places, with the minister of public works and culture still wiping away a furtive tear, the interior minister raised his hand to ask permission to speak, Carry
on, said the prime minister, As the president of the republic so touchingly pointed out, there are perfect, truly sublime moments in life, and we have had the great privilege of experiencing two such moments here, with the president’s speech of thanks and the prime minister’s new strategy, which has, of course, received our unanimous approval and to which I will refer in this intervention, not in order to withdraw my applause, nothing could be further from my mind, but, if I may be so immodest, to amplify and facilitate the effects of that strategy, I am referring to what the prime minister said about not being able to guarantee results in twenty-four hours, but being sure of getting them before twenty-four days were up, now, with respect, I do not believe that we can afford to wait twenty-four days, or twenty or fifteen or even ten, cracks are beginning to appear in the social edifice, the walls are shaking, the foundations are trembling, it could all come crashing down at any moment, Do you have you any real proposal to make, asked the prime minister, apart from describing the imminent collapse of a building, Oh, yes, replied the interior minister, unperturbed, as if he had not noticed the prime minister’s sarcastic tone, Be so kind as to enlighten us, then, First of all, prime minister, I must make it clear that my proposal is merely intended to complement the proposal you presented to us and which we approved, it does not seek to amend, correct or perfect, it is simply another suggestion which is, I hope, deserving of everyone’s attention, Oh, get on with it and stop beating about the bush, get to the point, What I propose, prime minister, is a rapid action, a shock offensive, with helicopters, You’re surely not thinking of bombarding the city, Yes, sir, I am, but with paper, With paper, Exactly, prime minister, with paper, first, in order of importance, we would have a proclamation signed by the president of the republic and addressed to the population of the capital, second, a series of brief, punchy messages intended to pave the way and prepare people’s minds for the doubtless slower actions advocated by the prime minister, that is, newspaper articles, television programmes, memories of the time when we were blind, stories by writers, etc., by the way, I would just mention that my ministry has its own team of writers, people highly trained in the art of persuasion, which, as I understand it, writers normally achieve only briefly and after much effort, It seems an excellent idea to me, said the president of the republic, but obviously the text would have to be submitted to me for my approval so that I could make any changes I deem appropriate, but, on the whole, I like it, it’s a splendid idea, which, above all, has the enormous political advantage of placing the figure of the president of the republic in the front line of battle, oh, yes, a fine idea. The murmur of approval in the room indicated to the prime minister that this last move had been won by the interior minister, So be it, then, take all the necessary steps, he said, and on the appropriate page in the government’s school progress report he mentally added another black mark against the minister’s name.

THE REASSURING IDEA THAT, LATER OR SOONER, AND, MORE LIKELY
, sooner than later, fate will always strike down pride, was roundly confirmed by the humiliating opprobrium suffered by the interior minister, who, believing that he had, in extremis, won the latest round in the pugilistic battle in which he and the prime minister had been engaged, saw his plans fizzle out after an unexpected intervention from the skies, which, at the last moment, decided to change sides and join the enemy. However, in the final analysis and, indeed, in the first, the blame for this, in the view of the most attentive and competent of observers, lay entirely with the president of the republic for having delayed his approval of the manifesto which, bearing his signature and intended for the moral edification of the city’s inhabitants, should have been distributed by the helicopters. During the three days that followed the cabinet meeting the celestial vault revealed itself to the world in its magnificent suit of seamless blue, perfect weather, smooth and faultless, and above all with no wind, ideal for hurling papers out into the air and watching them float down, dancing the dance of the elves, to be picked up by anyone who happened to be passing or who had come out into the street curious to learn what news or orders were drifting down from above. During those three days, the much-thumbed text traipsed back and forth between the presidential palace and the ministry of the interior, sometimes more profuse in arguments, sometimes more concise in ideas, with words crossed out and replaced by others that would immediately suffer the same fate, with
phrases which, shorn of what went before, no longer fitted what came after, so much wasted ink, so much torn-up paper, this, we will have you know, is what is meant by the torment of writing, the torture of creation. On the fourth day, the sky, grown tired of waiting, and seeing that things down below still kept chopping and changing, decided to start off the morning covered by a layer of low, dark clouds, of the sort that usually bring the rain they promise. By late morning, a few sparse droplets had begun to fall, stopping now and then and starting up again, an irritating drizzle which, despite threatening more, seemed unlikely to get much worse. This on-off state of affairs continued until mid-afternoon, and then, suddenly, without warning, like someone who has grown weary of hiding his true feelings, the heavens opened to give way to a continuous, steady, monotonous rain, intense but not violent, the kind of rain that can continue falling for a whole week and for which farmers are generally grateful. Not so the ministry of the interior. Even assuming that the air force’s supreme command would authorize the helicopters to take off, which, would, in itself, be highly problematic, hurling papers down from above in weather like this would be utterly ridiculous, and not just because there would be hardly any people in the streets, and the main concern of the few who were would be to remain as dry as possible, even worse was the thought that the presidential manifesto might land in the mud, be swallowed up by the devouring drains, might crumble and dissolve in the puddles that the wheels of cars splash rudely through, throwing up fountains of grubby water as they go, in truth, in truth I say to you, only a fanatical believer in legality and the respect one owes to one’s superiors would bother to stoop down and rescue from the ignominious slime an explanation about the relationship between the general blindness of four years ago and this majority blindness now. To the interior minister’s vexation, he had to stand by and watch, powerless, as, on the pretext of the on-going and unpostponable
national emergency, the prime minister, with, moreover, the reluctant agreement of the president of the republic, set in motion the media machinery, encompassing press, radio, television and all the other written, aural and visual submedia available, both current and concurrent, whose task it would be to persuade the capital’s population that it was, alas, once more blind. When, days later, the rain stopped and the upper air had once more clothed itself in azure, only the stubborn and ultimately angry insistence of the president of the republic managed to get the postponed first part of the plan put into action, My dear prime minister, said the president, do not think for a moment that I have reneged on or am even considering reneging on the decision taken by the cabinet, I continue to believe that it is my duty to address the nation personally, But, sir, it really isn’t worth it, the clarification process is already underway and I’m sure we’ll soon be getting results, Those results could be about to appear around the corner the day after tomorrow, but I want my manifesto to be launched first, The day after tomorrow is, of course, just a manner of speaking, All the better, get that manifesto distributed now, Believe me, sir, A word of warning, if you don’t do it, I’ll blame you for the inevitable loss of personal and political trust between us, Allow me to remind you, sir, that I still have an absolute majority in parliament, any threatened loss of trust would be merely personal in nature and would have no political repercussions, It would if I made a statement to parliament declaring that the word of the president of the republic had been hijacked by the prime minister, Please, sir, that isn’t true, It’s true enough for me to say so, in parliament or out of it, Distributing the manifesto now, The manifesto and the other papers, Distributing the manifesto now would be pointless, That’s your opinion, not mine, But president, The fact that you call me president means that you recognize me as such, so do as I say, Well, if you put it like that, Oh, I do, and another thing, I’m tired of watching your battles with the interior minister, if you think he’s no good, then sack him, but if you don’t want to sack him or can’t, then put up with it, if you yourself had come up with the idea of a manifesto signed by the president, you would probably have issued orders for it to be delivered door to door, Now that’s unfair, sir, Maybe it is, I don’t deny it, but people get upset and lose their temper and end up saying things they didn’t intend to or hadn’t even thought, Let’s consider the matter closed, All right, the matter is closed, but tomorrow morning I want those helicopters in the air, Yes, president.

If this acerbic exchange had not taken place, if the presidential manifesto and the other leaflets had, because unnecessary, ended their brief life in the rubbish, the story we are telling would have developed quite differently from this point on. We can’t imagine exactly how or in what way, we just know it would have been different. Obviously, any reader who has been paying close attention to the meanderings of the plot, one of those analytical readers who expects a proper explanation for everything, would be sure to ask whether the conversation between the prime minister and the president of the republic was simply added at the last moment to justify such a change of direction, or if it simply had to happen because that was its destiny, from which would spring soon-to-be-revealed consequences, forcing the narrator to set aside the story he was intending to write and to follow the new course that had suddenly appeared on his navigation chart. It is difficult to give such an either-or question an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally. Unless, of course, the narrator were to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale of a city which, en masse, decided to return blank ballot papers, in which case this violent exchange of words between the prime minister and the president of the republic, which ended so happily, would have been as welcome
to him as flowers in May. What other explanation is there for his abrupt abandonment of the complex narrative thread he had been developing merely in order to set off on gratuitous digressions not about what-did-not-happen-but-might-have, but about what-did-happen-but-might-not-have. We are referring, to put it plainly, to the letter which the president of the republic received three days after the helicopters had showered the capital’s streets, squares, parks and avenues with the colored leaflets in which the ministry of the interior’s writers set out their conclusions about the likely connection between the tragic collective blindness of four years ago and the present-day electoral madness. The signatory was fortunate in that his letter fell into the hands of a particularly scrupulous clerk, the sort who looks at the small print before he starts reading the large, the sort who is capable of discerning amongst the untidy scrawl of words the tiny seed that requires immediate watering, if only to find out what it might grow into. This is what the letter said, Your excellency, Having read, with due and deserved attention, the manifesto addressed by you to the people and, in particular, to the inhabitants of the capital, and being keenly aware both of my duty as a citizen of this country and of the need, during the crisis into which the nation is currently plunged, for every one of us to maintain a close, constant, zealous watch for anything strange that we might see now or might have seen in the past, I wish to bring to the attention of your excellency’s renowned powers of judgement a few unknown facts which may help toward a better understanding of the nature of the plague that befell us. I say this because, although I am just an ordinary man, I believe, as you do, that there must be some link between the recent blindness of casting blank ballot papers and that other blindness which, for weeks that none of us will ever forget, made us all outcasts from the world. What I am suggesting, your excellency, is that the first blindness might perhaps help to explain this blindness
now, and that both might be explained by the existence, and possibly by the actions, of one person. Before going on, however, impelled as I am by a sense of civic duty upon which I would challenge anyone to cast doubt, I wish to make it clear that I am not an informer or a sneak or a grass, I am simply trying to be of service to my country in the distressing situation in which it currently finds itself, without so much as a lantern with which to illumine the path to salvation. I do not know, how could I, if the letter I am writing will be enough to light that lantern, but I repeat, duty is duty, and at this moment, I see myself as a soldier taking a step forward and presenting myself as a volunteer for a mission, and this mission, your excellency, consists in revealing, and I use the word reveal because this is the first time I have spoken of this matter to anyone, that four years ago, together with my wife, I fell in with a group of people who, like so many others, were struggling desperately to survive. It will seem that I am not telling you anything that you, through your own experiences, do not know already, but what no one knows is that one of the people in our group, the wife of an ophthalmologist, did not go blind, her husband went blind like the rest of us, but she did not. At the time, we made a solemn vow never to speak about the matter, she said that she did not want to be seen afterward as a rare phenomenon, to be subjected to questions and submitted to examinations once we had all recovered our sight, that it would be best just to forget and pretend it had never happened. I have respected that vow until today, but can no longer remain silent. Your excellency, allow me to say that I would feel deeply offended if this letter were seen as a denunciation, although, on the other hand, perhaps it should be seen as such, because, and this is something else you do not know, during that time, a murder was committed by the person I am telling you about, but that is a matter for the courts, I content myself with the thought that I have done my duty as a patriot by drawing your lofty attention to a fact which has, until now, remained a secret and which, once examined, might perhaps produce an explanation for the merciless attack of which the present political system has been the target, this new blindness which, if I may humbly reproduce your excellency’s own words, strikes at the very foundations of democracy in a way in which no totalitarian system ever succeeded in doing. Needless to say, sir, I am at your disposal, or at the disposal of whichever institution is charged with carrying out what is clearly a necessary investigation, to amplify, develop and elaborate on the information contained in this letter. I assure you that I feel no animosity toward the person in question, however, what counts above all else is this our nation, which has found in you the most worthy of representatives, that is my one law, the only one I hold to with the serenity of a man who has done his duty. Yours faithfully. There followed the signature and below that, on the left, the signatory’s full name, address and telephone number, as well as his identity card number and e-mail address.