The Collected Novels of José Saramago (411 page)

WE’VE ALL HAD OUR MOMENTS OF WEAKNESS, AND IF WE
manage to get through today without any, we’ll be sure to have some tomorrow. Just as beneath the bronze cuirass of achilles there once beat a sentimental heart, think only of the hero’s ten years of jealousy after agamemnon stole away his beloved, the slave-girl briseis, and then the terrible rage that made him return to war, howling out his wrath at the trojans when his friend patroclus was killed by hector, so, beneath the most impenetrable of armors ever forged and guaranteed to remain impenetrable until the end of time, we are referring here, of course, to death’s skeleton, there is always a chance that one day something will casually insinuate itself into the dread carcass, a soft chord from a cello, an ingenuous trill on a piano, or the mere sight of some sheet music open on a chair, which will make you remember the thing you refuse to think about, that you have never lived and that, do what you may, you never will live, unless ... You had sat coolly observing the sleeping cellist, that man whom you could not kill because you got to him when it was too late, you saw the dog curled up on the carpet, and you were unable to touch that creature either, because you are not his death, and in the warm darkness of the room, those two living beings who, having surrendered to sleep, didn’t even know you were there, only served to fill your consciousness with an awareness of the depth of your failure. In that apartment, you, who had grown used to being able to do what no one else can, saw how impotent you were, tied hand and foot, with your double-o-seven license to kill rendered null and void, never, admit it, not in all your days as death, had you felt so humiliated. It was then that you left the bedroom for the music room, where you knelt down before suite number six for the cello by johann sebastian bach and made those rapid movements with your shoulders which, in human beings, usually accompany convulsive sobbing, it was then, with your hard knees digging into the hard floor, that your exasperation suddenly vanished like the imponderable mist into which you sometimes transform yourself when you don’t wish to be entirely invisible. You returned to the bedroom, you followed the cellist when he went into the kitchen to get a drink of water and open the back door for the dog, first, you’d seen him lying down asleep, now you saw him awake and standing up, and perhaps due to the optical illusion caused by the vertical stripes on his pajamas he seemed much taller than you, but that was impossible, it was just a trick of the eyes, a distortion due to perspective, the pure logic of facts tells us that you, death, are the biggest, bigger than everything else, bigger than all of us. Or perhaps you’re not always the biggest, perhaps the things that happen in the world can be explained by chance, for example, the dazzling moonlight that the musician remembers from his childhood would have shone in vain if he had been asleep, yes, chance, because you were once again a very small death when you returned to the bedroom and went and sat down on the sofa, and smaller still when the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto your girlish lap, and then you had such a lovely thought, you thought how unfair it was that death, not you, the other death, would one day come and douse the mild embers of that soft animal warmth, that is what you thought, imagine that, you who are so accustomed to the arctic and antarctic cold of the room to which you have returned and to which the voice of your ominous duty summoned you, the duty to kill the man who, as he slept, seemed to bear on his face the bitter rictus of one who has never shared his bed with a truly human companion, who had an agreement with this dog that they would each dream about the other, the dog about the man, the man about the dog, this man who gets up in the night in his striped pajamas to go to the kitchen for a drink of water, obviously it would be easier to take a glass of water to his room when he goes to bed, but he doesn’t do that, he prefers his little night-t time saunter down the corridor to the kitchen, in the midst of the peace and silence of the night, with the dog who always follows him and sometimes asks to be let out in the garden, but not always, This man must die, you say.

Death is once again a skeleton swathed in a shroud, with the hood low over her forehead, so that the worst of her skull remains covered, although it was hardly worth going to the trouble of covering up, if this really did concern her, because there’s no one here to be frightened by the macabre spectacle, and especially since all that can be seen are the tips of the bones of fingers and toes, the latter resting on the flagstones, whose icy chill they do not feel, the former leafing, like a rasp, through the pages of the complete volume of death’s historic ordinances, from the first of all rules, which was set down in three simple words, thou shalt kill, to the more recent addenda and appendices, in which all the manners and variants of dying so far known are listed, and you could say of that list that it was inexhaustible. Death was not surprised by the negative results of her researches, it would, in fact, be incongruous, more than that, superfluous, to find in a book that determines for each and every representative of the human race a full stop, a conclusion, an end, a death, such words as life and live, such words as I’m alive and I will live. There is only room in that book for death, not for absurd hypotheses about what to do if someone escapes death. That has never been known. Perhaps, if you looked hard, you might find once, and only once, in some unnecessary footnote, the words I lived, but that search was never seriously attempted, which leads one to conclude that there is a very good reason why not even the fact of having lived deserves a mention in the book of death. And the reason is that the other name for the book of death, as it behooves us to know, is the book of nothingness. The skeleton pushed the regulations to one side and stood up. As was her custom when she needed to get to the nub of a problem, she walked twice round the room, then she opened the drawer in the filing cabinet that contained the cellist’s card and took it out. Her gesture has just reminded us that now is the moment, now or never, yet another instance of chance, to clarify an important aspect relating to the functioning of these archives and about which, due to reprehensible neglect on the part of the narrator, we have not yet spoken. Firstly, and contrary to what you may have imagined, the ten million index cards filed away in these drawers were not filled out by death, they were not written by her. Certainly not, death is death, not a common clerk. The cards appear in their places, arranged alphabetically, at the exact moment when someone is born, only to disappear at the exact moment when that person dies. Before the invention of the violet-colored letters, death didn’t even go to the trouble of opening the drawers, the comings and goings of the cards took place without any fuss or confusion, there is no memory of there ever having been any embarrassing scenes with some people saying they didn’t want to be born and others protesting that they didn’t want to die. The cards of the people who die go, without anyone having to take them, to a room below this one, or, rather, they take their place in one of the rooms that lie in layer upon subterranean layer, going ever deeper, and which are already well on the way to the fiery center of the earth, where all this paperwork will one day burn. Here, in the room occupied by death and the scythe, it would be impossible to establish a similar criterion to the one adopted by a certain registrar who decided to bring together in one archive the names and documents belonging to the living and the dead under his protection, yes, every single one, alleging that only when they were brought together could they represent humanity as it should be understood, an absolute whole, independent of time and place, and that keeping them separate until then had been an attack upon the spirit. That is the enormous difference between the death we see before us now and the sensible registrar with his papers of life and death, while she prides herself on her olympian disdain for those who have died, we should remember the cruel phrase, so often repeated, which says that what’s past is past, he, on the other hand, thanks to what we, in current phraseology, call historical awareness, believes that the living should never be separated from the dead and that, if they are, not only will the dead remain forever dead, the living will only half-live their lives, even if they turn out to live as long as methuselah, about whom, by the way, there is some dispute as to whether he died at nine hundred and sixty-nine as stated in the ancient masoretic text or at seven hundred and twenty as stated in the samaritan pentateuch. Clearly not everyone will be in agreement with the daring archival plan put forward by that registrar of all the names given and yet to be given, but we will leave it here, in case it should prove useful in the future.

Death examines the card and finds nothing on it that she has not seen before, that is, the biography of a musician who should have died a week ago and who, nevertheless, continues to live quietly in his modest artist’s home, with his black dog who climbs onto ladies’ laps, with his piano and his cello, his nocturnal bouts of thirst and his striped pajamas. There must be a way of resolving this dilemma, thought death, it would be preferable, of course, if the matter could be sorted out without drawing too much attention to it, but if the highest authorities serve any purpose, if they are not there merely to have honors and praise heaped upon them, then they now have an excellent opportunity to show that they are not indifferent to those down here laboring away on the plains, let them change the regulations, let them impose some special measures, let them authorize, if it comes to that, some act of dubious legality, anything but allow such a scandal to continue. The curious thing about this case is that death has no idea who they actually are, these high authorities who should, in theory, resolve this dilemma. It’s true that in one of the letters she had written and which was published in the press, the second one if we’re not mistaken, she had referred to a universal death who would, although no one knew when, do away with all manifestations of life in the universe down to the last microbe, but this, as well as being a philosophical commonplace, since nothing, not even death, can last forever, originated, in practical terms, from a common-sense deduction that had long been doing the rounds of the various deaths in their different sectors, although it remained to be confirmed by a knowledge backed up by study and experience. It’s us sectorial deaths, thought death, who do the real work of removing any excrescences, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, should the cosmos ever disappear, it won’t be as a consequence of some solemn proclamation by that universal death, echoing around the galaxies and the black holes, but merely the accumulation of all those little private and personal deaths that are our responsibility, one by one, as if the proverbial chicken, instead of filling its crop grain by grain, grain by grain, began foolishly to empty it out, because that, I reckon, is what is most likely to happen with life, which is busily preparing its own end, with no need of any help from us, not even waiting for us to give it a helping hand. Death’s perplexity is perfectly understandable. She was placed in this world so long ago that she can no longer remember from whom she received the necessary instructions to carry out the job she was charged with. They placed the regulations in her hands, pointed out the words thou shalt kill as the one guiding light of her future activities and told her, doubtless not noticing the macabre irony, to get on with her life. And she did, thinking that, in case of doubt or some unlikely mistake, she would always have her back covered, there would always be someone, a boss, a superior, a spiritual guru, of whom she could ask advice and guidance.

It’s hard to believe, therefore, and here we enter at last into the cold, objective analysis for which the situation of death and the cellist has long been crying out, that an information system as perfect as the one that has kept these archives updated over millennia, continually revising the data, making index cards appear and disappear as people were born or died, it’s hard to believe, we repeat, that such a system should be so primitive and so unidirectional that the information source, wherever it is, isn’t, in turn, constantly receiving all the data resulting from the daily activities of death on the ground, so to speak. And if it does receive that data and fails to react to the extraordinary news that someone didn’t die when they should have, then one of two things is happening, either, against all our logic and natural expectations, it finds the episode of no interest and therefore feels no obligation to intervene in order to neutralize any difficulties caused, or we must assume that death, contrary to what she herself believes, has carte blanche to resolve, as she sees fit, any problem that may arise during her day-to-day work. The word doubt had to be spoken once or twice here before it rang a bell in death’s memory, for there was a passage in the regulations which, because it was written in very small print and appeared only as a footnote, neither attracted nor fixed the attention of the studious. Putting down the cellist’s index card, death picked up the book. She knew that what she was looking for would be neither in the appendices nor in the addenda, that it must be in the early part of the regulations, the oldest and therefore the least often consulted part, as tends to be the case with basic historical texts, and there she found it. This is what it said, In case of doubt, death must, as quickly as possible, take whatever measures her experience tells her to take in order to fulfill the desideratum that should at all times guide her actions, that is, to put an end to human lives when the time prescribed for them at birth has expired, even if to achieve that effect she has to resort to less orthodox methods in situations where the person puts up an abnormal degree of resistance to the fatal judgment or where there are anomalous factors that could not have been foreseen at the time these regulations were drawn up. It couldn’t be clearer, death has a free hand to act as she thinks best. This, as our examination of the matter will show, was hardly a novelty. Just look at the facts. When death, on her own account and at her own risk, decided to suspend her activities from the first day of January this year, the idea didn’t even enter her empty head that some superior in the hierarchy might ask her to justify her bizarre behavior, just as she didn’t even consider the high probability that her picturesque invention of the violet-colored letters would be frowned on by that same superior or by another even higher up. These are the dangerous consequences of working on automatic pilot, of stultifying routine, of doing the same job for too long. A person, or death, it really doesn’t matter, scrupulously fulfills her duties, day after day, encountering no problems, no doubts, concentrating entirely on following the rules established by those above, and if, after a time, no one comes nosing around into how she carries out her work, then one thing is sure, that person, and this is what happened with death, will end up behaving, without her realizing it, as if she were queen and mistress of all that she does, and not only that, but of when and how she should do it too. That is the only reasonable explanation for why it never occurred to death to ask her superiors for authorization when she made and implemented the important decisions we have described and without which this story, for good or ill, could not exist. She didn’t even think to do so. And now, paradoxically, precisely at the moment when she cannot contain her joy at discovering that the power to dispose of human lives as she sees fit is, after all, hers alone and that she will not be called upon to explain herself to anyone, not today or ever, just when the scent of glory is threatening to befuddle her senses, she cannot suppress the kind of fearful thought that might assail someone who, just as they were about to be found out, miraculously, at the very last moment, escaped exposure, Phew, that was a close shave.