The Stone Raft (Harvest Book) (7 page)

He put his Deux Chevaux into gear, into step, if such a thing might be said of a car, he wanted time to think, he needed to give the matter some serious thought. He had been an ordinary traveler heading for the border, a simple man with no particular qualities or importance, that was no longer so, at this very moment they were probably printing posters with his photograph and vital statistics,
Wanted
in big red letters, a manhunt. He looked into his rearview mirror and saw a police car, it was coming so quickly that it looked as if the car were about to come through the back window, They've caught up with me, he accelerated, then quickly slowed down without braking, all quite unnecessary, the police car overtook him in a flash, it must be rushing to some emergency, they did not so much as look at him, if only those speeding policemen knew who was driving along there, but of course there are lots of Deux Chevaux on the road, the expression is awkward but there is no mathematical contradiction. Joaquim Sassa took another look in the mirror, this time to have a good look at himself, to acknowledge the relief in his eyes, the mirror reflected little else, a tiny bit of his face, which makes it difficult to know to whom the face belongs, to Joaquim Sassa, as we already know, but who is Joaquim
Sassa, a man who is still young, in his thirties, closer to forty than to thirty, the day inevitably comes, his eyebrows are black, his eyes brown like those of most Portuguese, his nose sharply outlined, his features really quite unexceptional, we shall learn more about him when he turns toward us. For the moment, he thought to himself, It's only an appeal over the radio, the worst is still ahead of me, at the frontier, and as if that weren't enough, there's this name of mine, Sassa, which unfortunately means stone, when what I need right now is to be any old Sousa, like that other one from Coll de Pertus, one day he consulted the dictionary to see if the word existed, Sassa, not Sousa, and what did he find, he discovered that it was a massive tree from Nubia, that's a pretty name, Nubia, a name for a woman, near the Sudan, in West Africa, page 93 in the atlas, And tonight, where am I going to sleep, certainly not in a hotel, where people are always turning the radio on, by this time every hotel in Portugal must be looking out for hotel guests who request a room for one night, the refuge of the persecuted, you can imagine the scene, Let's see now, yes sir, we have an excellent room available, on the second floor, Room 201, Pimenta, please show Senhor Sassa to his room, and no sooner is he resting on the bed, still fully clothed, than the manager, nervous and flustered, is on the telephone, He's here, come quickly.

He parked Deux Chevaux at the side of the road, got out to stretch his legs and clear his mind, which, instead of giving him good advice, came up with a dubious proposition, Stay in a bigger city, somewhere where there's plenty of nightlife, look for a brothel, spend the night with one of the prostitutes, you can bet they won't ask to see any identification as long as you pay, and if under the circumstances you don't feel like gratifying your flesh, at least you'll be able to get some sleep, and you'll pay less than you would in a hotel, How ridiculous, said Joaquim Sassa in reply to this suggestion, the solution is to sleep in the car, by the side of some quiet road off the beaten track. But suppose some tramps or gypsies came along, they might attack you, rob you, maybe even kill you, It's peaceful around here, But suppose some arsonist or madman were to set the pine forests on fire, there's a lot of those around these days, you would wake up to find yourself
surrounded by flames, end up being burned to death, that must be the worst way to die, from what I've heard, just think of the martyrs of the Inquisition. How ridiculous, Joaquim Sassa repeated, I've made up my mind, I'm going to sleep in the car, and he made the image disappear, easy enough if one is strong-willed. It was still early, he could cover some forty or fifty kilometers along these winding roads, he would camp near Tomar, or Santarem, in one of those dirt roads that open onto cultivated fields, with those deep furrows once made by ox-drawn carts and nowadays made by tractors, no one passes at night, Deux Chevaux can be hidden anywhere around here, I might even sleep out in the open, the night is so warm, his mind did not react to this idea and clearly disapproved.

He did not stop in Tomar, nor reach Santarem, he dined incognito in a town on the banks of the Tagus, the local inhabitants are inquisitive by nature, but not to the extent of saying, point-blank, to the first traveler who arrived, Tell me, what's your name, but if he were to linger here, then certainly they would very soon start asking questions about his past life and his plans for the future. The television was on, as he ate his dinner Joaquim Sassa watched the last part of a documentary about underwater life, with numerous shoals of tiny fishes, undulating rays and sinuous moray eels, and an ancient anchor, then came the commercials, some fast-moving, built of images in dazzling montage, others deliberately, voluptuously, slow, like some achingly familiar gesture, there were children's voices shouting loudly, the insecure voices of adolescents, or of women who were somewhat hoarse, the men were all virile-sounding baritones, at the back of the house the pig grunted, fattened on slops and leftovers. At last the news came on, and Joaquim Sassa shuddered, he wouldn't stand a chance if they showed his photograph. The appeal was read, but no photograph appeared, they were not pursuing a criminal, after all, they were simply requesting, with polite insistence, that he make his whereabouts known, thus serving the highest national interest, no citizen worthy of the name would shrink from fulfilling such a duty, would fail to appear before the authorities, who simply wished him to make a statement. Three other guests were eating dinner, an elderly
couple, and at another table the usual man, sitting by himself, of whom one always says, He must be a commercial traveler.

The conversation ceased when they heard the first news from the Pyrenees, the pig went on grunting but no one paid any attention, and, all this in an instant, the landlord got up on a chair to turn up the volume, the girl who waited on the tables stood wide-eyed, the guests carefully rested their silverware on the edge of their plates, and little wonder, on the screen they were showing a helicopter that was being filmed from another helicopter, both were entering the fearsome channel, and then they showed the towering walls, so tall that the sky was scarcely visible overhead, the merest thread of blue, Good heavens, it's enough to make you dizzy, the girl said, and the landlord snapped, Be quiet, now extremely powerful floodlights were showing the gaping hole, this is what the Greeks' notion of the entrance to hell must have looked like, but where Cerberus would have barked, a pig is grunting, mythologies aren't what they used to be. These dramatic pictures, the announcer reeled off, were taken under hazardous conditions, human lives were at risk, the voice became husky, muffled, the two helicopters transformed themselves into four, the phantoms of phantoms, Damned aerial, the landlord muttered.

By the time sound and picture were once more stable and intelligible, the helicopters had disappeared and the announcer was reading the same old appeal, now addressed to the public at large, Anyone who may know of any strange events or inexplicable phenomena, of anything that seems suspicious, is requested to inform the nearest authorities at once. Prompted by these words addressed directly to her, the girl remembered how people had gossiped locally when a kid had been born with five legs, four black and one white, but the landlord shot back, That was months ago, you fool, kids with five legs and chicks with two heads are nothing out of the ordinary, now what's really odd is this business of the teacher's starlings, What starlings, what teacher, Joaquim Sassa asked, The local teacher, his name is José Anaiço, for some days now, wherever he goes, he is followed by a flock of starlings, as many as two hundred of them, Or more, the commercial traveler corrected him, only this morning I saw them as
I was arriving, they were circling above the school, and the racket they were making, flapping their wings and screeching, was unbelievable. At this point the elderly man interrupted, Unless I'm mistaken, we should inform the mayor about the starlings, He already knows, the landlord observed, He knows all right, but he doesn't connect the one thing with the other, he can't tell his ass from his elbow, if you'll forgive the expression, Then what should we do, Let's go and talk to him tomorrow morning, besides it would be good publicity for the region if the story were on television, it would be good for our economy, But let's keep it a secret among ourselves, not tell anyone, And that teacher, where does he live, Joaquim Sassa asked as if he were not really very interested in the answer, so the distracted landlord was not in time to prevent the girl from blurting out, He lives in the teacher's house right next to the school, there's always a lighted window even late at night, there seemed to be a note of sadness in her voice. Furious, the landlord scolded the poor girl, Shut your mouth, imbecile, you'd better go and see if the pig needs feeding, hard to imagine a more foolish command, for pigs do not eat at this hour, they are usually asleep, perhaps the landlord's angry outburst was caused by worry, for here, too, in the stables and paddocks around the countryside, the mares neigh and shake their heads, nervous, restless, and in their impatience they paw the loose gravel on the ground, tear at the straw. It must be the moon, in the opinion of the foreman.

Joaquim Sassa paid for his dinner, said goodnight, left a generous tip in recompense for the information the girl had given him, the landlord might pocket it, out of pique rather than greed, people's generosity is no better than their deepest selves, no less subject to eclipses and contradictions, rarely constant, as in the case of this girl, scolded and abruptly dismissed, now trying unsuccessfully to feed a pig that is not hungry, scratching its forehead between the eyes. The evening is pleasant, Deux Chevaux is resting beneath the plane trees, refreshing its wheels in the water that runs idly from the spring, and Joaquim Sassa lets it stay there, goes on foot to look for the school and the illuminated window, people cannot hide their secrets even though they may say they wish to keep them, a sudden shriek betrays them,
the sudden softening of a vowel exposes them, any observer with experience of the human voice and human nature would have perceived at once that the girl at the inn is in love. The town is nothing but one large village, in less than half an hour you can walk past all the houses from one end to the other, but Joaquim Sassa will not have to walk quite so far, he asked a little boy he met where the school was and could not have found a better-informed guide, You take that street there, you come to a square, you see a church, you turn left, then you keep to the right, you can't go wrong, you'll see the school right away, And does the teacher live there, Yes sir, he does, there's a light in the window, but there was no hint of love in any of these words, the boy is probably a bad pupil and school is his first experience of purgatory, but his voice suddenly became cheerful, children are never resentful, that is their saving grace, And the starlings are always flying overhead, and they're always screeching, if he does not abandon his studies too soon, the boy will learn to shape his sentences without repeating the same constructions so insistently.

There is still a clear patch in one half of the sky, the other half has not completely darkened, the sky is blue as if dawn were about to break. But inside the houses the lights are already on, the tranquil voices of weary people can be heard, quiet sobbing from a cradle, people are really so lacking in awareness, you put them out to sea on a raft and they go on living their lives as if they were still on terra firma, babbling like Moses when he floated down the Nile in a little basket made of rushes, playing with the butterflies, so blessed that even the crocodiles could not harm him. At the end of the narrow street is the school, surrounded by its walls, had Joaquim Sassa not been warned he would have thought the house was just a house like any other, at night they all look drab, by day some are still drab, meanwhile darkness has started falling, but some time remains before the street lamps will light up.

In order not to contradict the girl at the inn and the little boy who kept his feelings to himself, there is a light in the window, and Joaquim Sassa goes and knocks on the pane, the starlings are not so noisy after all, they are settling down for the night, with their habitual
squabbling and neighborly disputes, but it will not be long before they calm down beneath the enormous leaves of the fig tree where they are roosting, invisible, black amid the inky darkness, only later will the moon rise, some will stir at the touch of its white fingers before going back to sleep, they do not know how far they will have to travel. From inside the house came a man's voice, Who is it, and Joaquim Sassa replied, If you don't mind, magic words that substitute for any formal identification, language is full of these and other more perplexing enigmas. The window has opened, against the light it is not easy to see who lives in this house, but as if in compensation Joaquim Sassa's face is perfectly clear, some of his features we described earlier, the rest conform, dark brown hair, smooth, sunken cheeks, the nose quite commonplace, the lips full only in speech, Forgive me for disturbing you at this hour, It isn't late, said the teacher, but he had to raise his voice because the starlings, now disturbed, sent up a chorus of protest and alarm, It's really because of them that I'd like to talk to you, Them, who, The starlings, Ah, And about a stone I threw into the sea, much heavier than I can manage, What is your name, Joaquim Sassa, Are you the person they keep mentioning on the radio and on television, That's me, Please come in.