The Collected Novels of José Saramago (326 page)

Meanwhile, Cipriano Algor had reached the end of the street, turned off into the road that divided the village in two and, neither walking nor dawdling, neither running nor flying, as if he were dreaming that he was trying to break free from himself, but kept stumbling over his own body, he reached the top of the slope where the van was waiting with his son-in-law and his daughter. Before, the sky had seemed set fair, but now a hesitant, indolent rain had begun to fall, it might not perhaps last very long, but it greatly exacerbated the melancholy of these people who were only the turn of a wheel away from leaving much-loved places, even Marçal felt his stomach tighten uneasily. Cipriano Algor got into the van, sat down next to the driver, in the place that had been left for him, and said, Let’s go. He would not say another word until they reached the Center, until they got into the service elevator that carried them and their suitcases and packages up to the thirty-fourth floor, until they opened the door of the apartment, until Marçal exclaimed, Here we are, only then did he open his mouth to utter a few organized sounds, albeit nothing very original, he merely repeated his son-in-law’s words, with a small rhetorical addition, Yes, here we are. Marta and Marçal had also said very little during the journey. The only words worthy of recording in this story, and only superficially, purely incidentally, because they have to do with people about whom we have only heard, were those they exchanged when the van was going past the house of Marçal’s parents, Did you tell them we were leaving, asked Marta, Yes, the day before yesterday, when I came back from the Center, I just popped in, the taxi was waiting, Don’t you want to stop, she asked again, No, I’m tired of arguments, fed up to the back teeth, Even so, Remember the way they behaved when we both went to see them, you surely don’t want a repeat performance, said Marçal, It’s a shame, though, they are your parents after all, It’s a funny expression that, What, After all, That’s what people say, Yes, I know, but words which, at first sight, seem to be mere adornment and could, in every sense of the word, easily be discarded, become frightening once you start to think about them and realize what they imply, After all, Marta had said, which is another disguised way of saying what else can we do, what do you expect, that’s the way things are, or, put more bluntly, resign yourself, We have to live with the parents we’ve got, said Marçal, Not forgetting that someone will have to live with the parents we will become, concluded Marta. It was then that Marçal glanced to his right and said, smiling, Needless to say, this conversation about warring parents and children does not apply to you, but Cipriano Algor did not respond, he merely nodded vaguely. Sitting behind her husband, Marta could just see her father’s profile. I wonder what happened with Isaura, she thought, he obviously didn’t just go there, leave Found and come back, judging by the delay, they must have said something to each other, what I wouldn’t give to know what he’s thinking, his face looks quite serene, but at the same time it’s the face of someone who isn’t quite in control, someone who has escaped a great danger and is surprised to find himself still alive. She would know much more if she could see her father from the front, then she might perhaps say, I recognize those tears that never fall but are absorbed back into the eyes, I recognize that joyful pain, that painful happiness, that being and not being, that having and not having, that wanting and not being able to act. But it was early days yet for Cipriano Algor to answer her. They had left the village, left behind them the three ruined houses, now they were crossing the bridge over the stream with its dark, evil-smelling waters. Over there, in the middle of the countryside, in the clump of trees hidden by brambles, is where the archaeological treasure from Cipriano Algor’s pottery is hidden. Anyone would think that ten thousand years had passed since the last remains of an ancient civilization were dumped there.

When, on the morning after his day off, Marçal left the thirty-fourth floor in order to go to work as a fully fledged resident guard, the apartment was clean, tidy, and orderly, with the things brought from the other house in their proper places, and all that was necessary now was for the inhabitants willingly to take up their rightful places among them. It won’t be easy, a person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of the long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don’t go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent. The first problem to be resolved by the new inhabitants, with the exception of Marçal Gacho, who will continue with his familiar, routine work of watching over the security of the people and property institutionally or incidentally associated with the Center, the first problem, we were saying, will be to find a satisfactory answer to the question, And now what am I going to do. Marta is in charge of running the household, when her time comes, she will have a child to bring up, and that will be more than enough to keep her occupied for many hours of the day and for some hours of the night. However, because people are, as pointed out above, subject to both action and thought, we should not be surprised if she should ask herself, in the middle of a task that has already taken up an hour and could well take up another two, And now what am I going to do. In any case, it is Cipriano Algor who is confronted by the worst possible situation, that of looking at his hands and knowing that they are useless, of looking at the clock and knowing that the next hour will be the same as this, of thinking about tomorrow and knowing that it will be as empty as today. Cipriano Algor is no adolescent, he cannot spend the whole day lying on the bed that barely fits into his tiny bedroom, thinking about Isaura Madruga, repeating the words that they said to each other, reliving, if one can give such an ambitious name to the memory’s insubstantial operations, their shared kisses and embraces. Some will think that the best medicine for Cipriano Algor’s ills would be for him to go down to the garage right now, get into the van and drive off to see Isaura Madruga, who, back in the village, will more than likely be going through the same anxieties of body and soul, and for a man in his position, for whom life holds no more industrial and artistic triumphs of primary or secondary importance, having a woman whom he loves and who has already told him that she reciprocates his love, is the most sublime of blessings and the greatest good fortune. They obviously don’t know Cipriano Algor. He has already told us that a man should not ask a woman to marry him if he lacks the means to guarantee his own living, and he would say to us now that he is not someone to take advantage of favorable circumstances and to behave as if he had a right to the resulting satisfactions, however justified by the qualities and virtues that adorn him, by the mere fact of being a man and of having made a particular woman the focus of his male attentions and desires. In other words, put more frankly and directly, what Cipriano Algor is not prepared to do, even though he will pay for it with the bitter pain of solitude, is to see himself playing the part of the fellow who periodically visits his mistress and returns from there with, as his only sentimental souvenirs, an evening or night spent agitating his body and shaking up his senses, then planting an absentminded kiss on a face now bereft of makeup, and in the case in point, patting the head of a canine, See you again soon, Found. Cipriano Algor, therefore, has two ways of escaping the prison which the apartment has, in his eyes, suddenly become, apart from the short-lived and merely palliative act of going over to the window now and then and looking out at the sky through the glass. His first recourse is the city, that is, Cipriano Algor, who has always lived in the insignificant village which we know only slightly and who knows only that part of the city he used to see en route to the Center, will now be able to spend his time strolling, ambling, and airing his feathers, a figurative caricature of an expression that must date from the days in which noblemen and gentlemen of the court wore feathers in their hats and would sally forth to air both hats and feathers. He also has at his disposal the city’s public parks and gardens where elderly men tend to gather in the afternoons, men who have the face and typical gestures of the retired and the unemployed, which are two ways of saying the same thing. He could join them and become friends with them, and enthusiastically play cards until dusk, until it is no longer possible for their myopic eyes to tell whether the spots on the cards are red or black. He will demand vengeance if he loses and encourage it in others if he wins, the rules of the park are simple and easy to learn. The second recourse, needless to say, is the Center in which he lives. Naturally, he knows it already from before, but not as well as he knows the city, because, on his few visits to the Center, always with his daughter, just to do a bit of shopping, he could never quite remember how he got where. Now, in a way, the Center is all his, it has been handed to him on a plate of sound and light, he can wander about in it as much as he likes, enjoy the easy-listening music and the inviting voices. If, when they came to visit the apartment for the first time, they had used the elevator on the other side, they would have been able to see, during the slow ride upward, as well as the new arcades, shops, escalators, meeting points, cafés, and restaurants, many other equally interesting and varied installations, for example, a carousel of horses, a carousel of space rockets, a center for toddlers, a center for the Third Age, a tunnel of love, a suspension bridge, a ghost train, an astrologer’s tent, a betting shop, a rifle range, a golf course, a luxury hospital, another slightly less luxurious hospital, a bowling alley, a billiard hall, a battery of table football games, a giant map, a secret door, another door with a notice on it saying experience natural sensations, rain, wind, and snow on demand, a wall of china, a taj mahal, an egyptian pyramid, a temple of karnak, a real aqueduct, a mafra monastery, a clerics’ tower, a fjord, a summer sky with fluffy white clouds, a lake, a real palm tree, the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus, another one apparently alive, himalayas complete with everest, an amazon river complete with indians, a stone raft, a corcovado christ, a trojan horse, an electric chair, a firing squad, an angel playing a trumpet, a communications satellite, a comet, a galaxy, a large dwarf, a small giant, a list of prodigies so long that not even eighty years of leisure time would be enough to take them all in, even if you had been born in the Center and had never left it for the outside world.

Cipriano Algor, having excluded, as entirely inadequate, staring out at the city and its rooftops through the apartment windows, having eliminated the parks and gardens because he has not yet reached the state of mind that could be classified as mute despair or utter tedium, and having set aside, for the potent reasons explained above, the tempting but problematic visits to Isaura Madruga for sentimental and physical relief, found that all that was left to him, if he did not want to spend the rest of his life yawning and, figuratively speaking, banging his head against the walls of his inner prison, was to throw himself into the discovery and methodical investigation of the marvelous island on which he had been cast up after the shipwreck. Every morning, therefore, after breakfast, Cipriano Algor tosses his daughter a hurried See you later, and sets off, like someone on his way to work, sometimes going up to the top floor, at others going down to the ground floor, using the elevators, now at maximum speed, now at minimum speed, according to his observational needs, walking down corridors and passageways, crossing large halls, skirting vast, complex conglomerations of shop windows, displays, showrooms, and showcases containing everything that could possibly exist to be eaten and drunk or worn on the body or the feet, to pamper hair and skin, nails and body hair, both above and below, to hang around the neck, to dangle from ears, to slip onto fingers, to jingle on wrists, to do and to undo, to sew and to sow, to draw and to erase, to increase and to diminish, to gain weight with and to lose weight, to stretch and to shrink, to fill up and to empty, and to say all this is to say nothing, since for this, too, it would require more than eighty years of leisure time to read and analyze the fifty-five fifteen-hundred-page volumes that constitute the Center’s commercial catalogue. Obviously, Cipriano Algor is not much interested in the goods on display, after all, making purchases is neither his responsibility nor his concern, that is the business of the wage earner, i.e. his son-in-law, and of the person who then manages, administers and uses the money, i.e., his daughter. He is the one who walks around with his hands in his pockets, stopping here and there, occasionally asking a guard the way, although never Marçal, even if he happens to bump into him, so as not to reveal their family ties, and, above all, making the most of that most precious and enviable of the many advantages of living at the Center, that is, being able to enjoy for free or at much reduced prices the multiple attractions at the disposal of customers. We have already given two sober and condensed accounts of these, the first about what could be seen from the elevator on this side, the second about what could be seen from the elevator on the other side, however, out of a desire for objectivity and informational rigor, we should point out that, in both cases, we never went beyond the thirty-fourth floor. Above this, as you will recall, sits a universe of another fourteen floors. Dealing as we are here with a person of a reasonably inquisitive turn of mind, we hardly need say that Cipriano Algor’s first investigative steps led him to the mysterious secret door, which, however, had to remain mysterious because, despite insistent ringing at the doorbell and a few raps on the door, no one emerged from inside to ask him what he wanted. He did, however, have to give a full and prompt explanation to a guard who, attracted by the noise or, more likely, guided by the images on the closed circuit television, came over to ask who he was and what he was doing there. Cipriano Algor explained that he lived on the thirty-fourth floor and that he just happened to be passing and his interest had been aroused by the sign on the door, Simple curiosity, sir, the simple curiosity of someone who has nothing else to do. The guard asked him for his official identity card and the card that proved he was a resident, compared his face with the photos on both, examined the fingerprints on both documents through a magnifying glass, and, finally, took a print of that same finger, which Cipriano Algor, after due instruction, pressed against what was presumably the scanner of a portable computer that the guard removed from a bag he wore slung across his shoulder, at the same time saying, Don’t worry, it’s just a formality, but take my advice, don’t come here again, it could get you into trouble, being curious once is enough, besides, there’s nothing secret behind that door, there was once, but not now, In that case, why don’t they remove the sign, asked Cipriano Algor, It acts as a lure so that we can find out who are the inquisitive ones living in the Center. The guard waited until Cipriano Algor had moved a few meters off, then followed him until he met a colleague and, in order to avoid being recognized, he passed the duty of surveillance on to him, What did he do, asked Marçal Gacho, pretending unconcern, He was knocking at the secret door, That’s hardly a serious offense, it happens several times a day, said Marçal, relieved, Yes, but people have to learn not to be curious, to walk on by, not to stick their nose in where it isn’t wanted, it’s just a question of time and training, Or force, said Marçal, Apart from certain very extreme cases, force is no longer necessary, I could have taken him in for interrogation, but I just gave him some good advice, used a bit of psychology, Right, I’d better go after him, then, said Marçal, I wouldn’t want him to give me the slip, If you notice anything suspicious, tell me so that I can add it to the report and then we can both sign it. The other guard left, and Marçal continued to follow at a distance as his father-in-law explored two floors above, then he let him go. He wondered what would be the best thing to do, to talk to him and tell him to take care when wandering around the Center, or simply to pretend that he knew nothing about this very minor incident and to pray that nothing more serious happened. He chose the latter option, but when Cipriano Algor laughingly told him about it over supper, he had no alternative but to assume the role of mentor and ask him to behave in a way that would not attract the attention of guards or non-guards, If you’re going to live here, that’s the only correct way to proceed. Then Cipriano Algor took a piece of paper out of his pocket, I copied down these phrases from some posters, he said, I hope I didn’t attract the attention of some spy or observer, So do I, said Marçal grumpily, Is it regarded as suspicious to copy down phrases that are on display for customers to read, asked Cipriano Algor, Reading them is normal, copying them down isn’t, and anything that isn’t normal is, at the very least, suspected of being abnormal. Marta, who, until then, had taken no part in the conversation, said to her father, Read them out to us. Cipriano Algor smoothed the paper out on the table and began to read, Be bold, dream. He looked at his daughter and at his son-in-law, and since they seemed disinclined to comment, he went on, Experience the thrill of dreaming, that’s just a variant on the first one, and here are the others, one, Get operational, two, the south seas within your grasp without even leaving home, three, this isn’t your last chance, but it’s the best you’ll get, four, we think about you all the time, now it’s time for you to think about us, five, bring your friends, as long as they buy something, six, with us, you will never want to be anything else, seven, you’re our best customer, only don’t tell your neighbor, That’s the one they had up on the façade outside, said Marçal, Well, now it’s inside, the customers must have liked it, replied his father-in-law. What else did you find on this dangerous exploratory expedition of yours, asked Marta, You’ll fall asleep if I tell you, All right, then, send me to sleep, The thing I liked best, began Cipriano Algor, were the natural sensations, What’s that, Just imagine this, All right, I’ll try You go into a reception area, you buy your ticket, I had to pay only ten percent of the normal price because they gave me a discount of forty-five percent for being a resident and the same discount for being over sixty, It looks like you get a pretty good deal if you’re over sixty, said Marta, Oh, yes, the older you are, the more you earn, and you die rich, And then what happened, asked Marçal impatiently, Have you never been in there, asked his father-in-law, somewhat surprised, No, I knew it existed, but I’ve never been inside, never had the time, Well, you’ve no idea what you’ve missed, If you don’t tell us, I’m off to bed, threatened Marta, All right, after you’ve paid and they’ve furnished you with a raincoat, a hat, Wellingtons, and an umbrella, all in bright colors, you can get them in black too, but it costs more, you’re ushered into a changing room where a voice from a loudspeaker tells you to put on the boots, the raincoat, and the hat, and then you go into a kind of corridor where they line you up in fours, but with enough space between you so that you can move freely, there were about thirty of us, for some, like me, it was the first time, others, it seemed to me, went there now and then, and at least five of them were old hands, I even heard one of them say This is like a drug, you try it once and you’re hooked. And then what happened, asked Marta, Then it began to rain, just a few drops at first, then a bit harder, we all opened our umbrellas, and the voice over the loudspeaker gave us the order to advance, and it was just indescribable, you would have to have been there, the rain started falling in torrents, then suddenly there’s a gale blowing, one gust, then another, umbrellas turn inside out, hats fly off heads, the women are screaming so as not to laugh, the men are laughing so as not to scream, and the wind gets stronger, it’s like a typhoon now, the people slither around, fall over, get up, fall over again, the rain has become a deluge, it takes us a good ten minutes to cover, oh, about twenty-five or thirty meters, And then what, asked Marta, yawning, Then we turned around, and immediately snow started falling, just a few scattered flakes at first like threads of cotton, then it got thicker and thicker, it was falling ahead of us like a curtain through which we could barely see our colleagues, some still had their umbrellas up, which only made matters worse, finally we got back to the changing room and there was the most splendid sun shining, A sun in the changing room, said Marçal doubtfully, Well, it wasn’t a changing room any more, by then, it was more like a meadow, And these were the natural sensations, asked Marta, Yes, But that’s nothing you can’t see every day outside, That was precisely what I said when we were giving back the equipment, but I should have kept my mouth shut, Why, One of the old hands looked at me scornfully and said I feel sorry for you, you just don’t understand, do you. Helped by her husband, Marta started clearing the table. Tomorrow or the day after, I’m going to the beach, announced Cipriano Algor, Now I have been there once, said Marçal, And what’s it like, Very hot and tropical, and the water is warm, And the sand, There is no sand, there’s a plastic floor which, from a distance, looks real, And presumably there aren’t any waves either, Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, there’s a machine inside that produces a wave motion just like the sea, No, It’s true, The things people think up, Yes, I know, said Marçal, it’s a bit sad really. Cipriano Algor got to his feet, wandered about, asked to borrow a book from his daughter and then, as he was going into his bedroom, he said, I went downstairs again, the floor doesn’t vibrate any more and you can’t hear the diggers now, and Marçal replied, They must have finished the work.