At the hotel there was a message for Joaquim Sassa from Pedro Orce, his companion in torment, Don't disturb me, and another from Joana Carda, this time by telephone, for José Anaiço, So it's all true, he hadn't dreamed it. Over José Anaiço's shoulder, the voice of Joaquim Sassa seemed to be mocking him, Lady Strange Eyes assures you she's real, therefore don't waste your time dreaming about her tonight. They went upstairs to their rooms, José Anaiço said, Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, I'll call her to say we'll go with her, if that's all right, Fine, and don't pay too much attention to what I said, as you've probably guessed, I'm jealous. To be jealous of what only appears to exist is a waste of effort, My wisdom secretly tells me that everything only appears to exist, nothing actually exists, we must be satisfied with that, Good night, prophet, Pleasant dreams, comrade.
People neither knew nor suspected what was going on, such was the secrecy with which governments and scientific institutions set about investigating the subtle movement that was carrying the peninsula out to sea with enigmatic persistence and constancy. To discover how and why the Pyrenees had cracked was no longer a matter for discussion, any hope of redressing the situation was abandoned within days. Despite the vast amount of accumulated information, the computers coldly demanded fresh data or gave preposterous results, as in the case of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose programmers blushed with embarrassment upon receiving on their terminals the peremptory diagnosis, Overexposure to the sun, would you believe. In Portugal, perhaps because of the difficulty, even today, of ridding everyday speech of certain archaisms, the nearest conclusion we could reach was, The pitcher goes so often to the well that the handle finally stays there, a metaphor that only served to confuse people, since it wasn't a question of handles or wells or pitchers, but it is not difficult to perceive in it a reference to the effects of repetition, whose very nature, making allowances for frequency, is such that one never knows where it might end. Everything depends on the duration of the phenomenon, on the accumulated effect of these actions, something along the lines of A steady fall of water wears away the hardest stone, a formula that curiously has never been output by a computer, although it might well be, for between the one and the other there are similarities of all kinds, in the first instance there is the heavy weight of the water in the pitcher, in the second instance there is water once more but this time drop by drop, dripping freely, and there is time, that other common ingredient.
These are popular philosophies that we could go on discussing forever, but they are of no great interest to men of science, to geologists or oceanologists. For the sake of simple souls, the matter could even be put in the form of an elementary question, one that in its ingenuousness brings to mind that of the Galician confronted by the River Irati, sinking into the earth, Where does this water go, he wanted to know, as you may recall, now we shall phrase it differently, What is happening beneath this water. Out here, where we stand with our feet firmly on the ground, looking at the horizon, or from the air where observation continues indefatigably, the peninsula is a mass of earth that seems, note the verb, seems to float on the waters. But obviously it cannot float. In order to do so it would need to have detached itself from the bottom, which means it would inevitably end up at that same bottom, this time reduced to rubble, for even supposing that under the circumstances a sufficient force could be applied without producing any greater deviation or damage, the disintegrating effect of the water and the maritime currents would progressively reduce the thickness of the navigating platform until the entire layer was dissolved. Therefore, by a process of elimination, we must conclude that the peninsula is sliding over itself at an unknown depth, divided now along a horizontal fault into two slabs, the lower one still part of the earth's crust, the upper one, as already explained, gliding slowly through the darkness of the waters, amid clouds of mud and startled fish, this is how the Flying Dutchman, of unhappy memory, must be navigating through the depths, somewhere in the ocean. The notion is intriguing and mysterious, with a little more imagination it could provide the most fascinating chapter of all for Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. We live in another age, however, science is much more exacting, and since it has not proved possible to discover what is causing the peninsula to displace itself above the seabed, someone should go down there to witness the phenomenon with his own eyes, to film the dragging of this great mass of stone, to record, perhaps, the whale's cry, that squeaking, that interminable laceration. For this is the moment for the deep-sea divers.
As everybody knows, divers holding their breath cannot go down very deep or for very long. Fishers of pearls, sponges, or coral can dive to fifty feet, the best of them perhaps even to seventy, and they can stay under for three or four minutes, it's all a question of training and motivation. Here the depths are greater and the waters much colder, even when the body is protected by one of those rubber wet suits that transform anyone, man or woman, into a black Triton, with yellow stripes and dots. So one must have recourse to diving gear, to cylinders of compressed air, and with these more recent techniques and apparatus, taking a thousand and one precautions, one can reach depths on the order of two or three hundred meters. Better not tempt Providence by attempting to go any farther down, but send down unmanned machines instead, equipped with film and television cameras, sensors, tactile and ultrasonic probes, all the appropriate instruments for the job at hand.
At a given hour, to enable subsequent comparison of results, simultaneous operations began on the coasts to the north, south, and west, discreetly passed off as naval maneuvers within the scope of North Atlantic Treaty Organization training programes, lest the announcement of these investigations provoke fresh outbursts of panic, for, inexplicably, it had not occurred to anyone so far that the peninsula might be sliding over what for millions of years had been its plinth. The moment has come to reveal that the experts intend to keep quiet about another nagging anxiety stemming, almost inevitably, from this same hypothesis of a deep horizontal cut, it can be summed up in this other question of terrifying simplicity, What will happen if an abyss lies in the path of the peninsula, an end to that continuous surface over which it is sliding. Judging from experience, which is always desirable for a better understanding of the facts, in this case our experience as swimmers, we will understand perfectly what this must mean if we recall the novice swimmer's panic and distress when he unexpectedly loses his footing. Should the peninsula lose its footing or its balance, it will inevitably sink, go to the bottom, suffocate, drown, who would have thought that after so many centuries of miserable existence we would be doomed to the fate of Atlantis.
Let us spare ourselves the details, these will one day be divulged for the enlightenment of all those interested in submarine life, for the time being shrouded in the utmost secrecy they are to be found in ships' logs, confidential reports, and various records, some in code. All we shall say is that detailed examination of the continental platform yielded no results, no new crack was found, no abnormal friction was picked up by the microphones. This initial hypothesis having failed, examination of the depths was the next step, and the cranes lowered instruments built to withstand high pressures, to scan and search the depths of the silent waters, but these found nothing. The research submarine Archimedes, a jewel of technology French-manned and French-owned, descended to the maximum peripheral depths, from the euphatic to the pelagic zone, and from there to the bathypelagic zone, deployed lamps, pincers, bathometers, sounding lines of various kinds, scanned the subaquatic horizon with its panoramic sonar, to no avail. The vast versants, the steep escarpments, the vertical precipices were exposed in their somber majesty, in their unspoilt beauty, the instruments registered continuously, with much clicking and switching on and off of lights, the ascending and descending currents, they photographed the fish, the shoals of sardines, the colonies of hake, the brigades of tuna and bonito, the flotillas of mackerel, the armadas of swordfish, and if the Archimedes had been carrying in its belly a labo
ratory equipped with the necessary reagents, solvents, and other chemical paraphernalia, it would have been able to identify the elements dissolved in the waters of the ocean, namely, in diminishing order in terms of quantity, and for the cultural benefit of the masses who have not the faintest idea how much exists in the sea where they swim, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium, bromine, carbon, strontium, boron, silicon, fluorine, argon, nitrogen, phosphorus, iodine, barium, iron, zinc, aluminum, lead, tin, arsenic, copper, uranium, nickel, manganese, titanium, silver, tungsten, gold, such riches, dear God, and with all the things we lack on terra firma, the only thing we cannot trace is the crack that would explain the phenomenon, which does exist, after all, and is plain for all to see. In desperation, a North American expert, and one of the most distinguished, went so far as to proclaim before the winds and the horizon, standing on the deck of the hydrographic ship, I hereby declare that the peninsula cannot possibly be moving, whereupon an Italian expert, much less knowledgeable but armed with a historic and scientific precedent, muttered, but not so quietly that he could not be heard by that providential Being who hears all things, Eppur si muove. Their researchers empty-handed and chapped by all that salt, humiliated and frustrated, the governments simply announced that under the auspices of the United Nations they had carried out an investigation of possible changes in the habitat of the ichthyic species brought about by the peninsula's dislocation. It was not the mountain that had conceived a mouse, but rather the ocean that had given birth to a tiny sardine.
The travelers heard this news as they were leaving Lisbon but did not consider it important, just one more report among others pertaining to the separation of the peninsula, which itself seemed to be of no great importance. A person can get used to anything, as can nations with even greater ease and speed, when all is said and done it is as if we were now traveling in an immense ship, so big that it would even be possible to live aboard for the rest of one's life without ever seeing the prow or the stern, the peninsula was not a ship when it was still attached to Europe and there were still plenty of people who knew no country other than that of their birth, so tell me, if you please, what's the difference. Now that Joaquim Sassa and Pedro Orce appear to have escaped at last from the obsessive prying of the scientists and there is nothing more to fear from the authorities, they can return to their respective homes, and José Anaiço too, for the starlings have unexpectedly lost interest in him, but the apparition, so to speak, of this woman has sent everything back to square one, this being fairly characteristic of women, although not always in so radical a manner. It was after a meeting in that same park where Joana Carda and José Anaiço had been the day before that the four of them decided, after reexamining the facts, to make the journey together that will take them to the spot marked with a line on the ground, one of those lines we have all had to make in life, but one with singular features, to judge from the agent and witness, coincidently one and the same person. Joana Carda had still not revealed the name of the place or even that of the nearest city, but merely indicated the general direction, We'll take the highway north, then I'll show you how to get there. Pedro Orce had taken José Anaiço discreetly aside to ask him if he thought it was a good idea to set out like this, blindly falling in with the whims of an eccentric woman with a stick in her hand, suppose this were a snare, a plot to kidnap them, a cunning ruse, On whose part, José Anaiço wanted to know, That 1 can't tell you, perhaps they want to take us to the laboratory of some mad scientist, as you see in films, some Frankenstein or other, Pedro Orce replied smiling, No wonder people are always talking about the Andalusian imagination, it doesn't take much water to start boiling, José Anaiço commented, It's not because there isn't much water, it's because there's so much fire, Pedro Orce replied, Forget it, José Anaiço concluded, what must be, will be, and they rejoined the others, who had started a discussion more or less in this vein, I don't know how it happened, the stick was lying on the ground, 1 picked it up and drew a line, Did it ever occur to you that it might be a magic wand, It seemed rather big for a magic wand, and I've always heard it said that they are made of shimmering gold and crystal, with a star on top, Did you know it was an elm branch, I know very little about trees but in this case I'm sure a matchstick would have produced the same effect, Why do you say that, What has to be, has to be, and that's something you can't fight, Do you believe in fate, I believe in what must be, Then you're just like José Anaiço, said Pedro Orce, he also believes in fate. The morning, with a light wind that blew like a playful mouthful of air, gave little promise of a warm day, Shall we go, José Anaiço asked, Let's go, they all replied, including Joana Carda who had come to look for them.
Life is full of little episodes that seem unimportant, while others at a certain moment absorb all our attention, when we reappraise them later, in the light of their consequences, we find that our memory of the latter has faded while the former have come to seem decisive or, at least, a link in a chain of successive and meaningful events, to give the example one expects, there will not be any frenetic loading and unloading, apparently so much to be expected when the luggage of four passengers is packed into a car as small as Deux Chevaux. This tricky operation engages everyone's attention, each of them makes some suggestion or proposal, tries to lend a hand, but the main question latent in all this, which may well determine the final constellation of the four people in the car, is at whose side Joana Carda will travel. That Joaquim Sassa should drive Deux Chevaux seems right, on the first leg of a journey a car should always be driven by its owner, this is an undisputed fact that bespeaks prestige, prerogative, a sense of possession. The alternative driver, when the right moment comes, will be José Anaiço, since Pedro Orce, not so much because of his age but because he lives in a terrain disturbed by excavations and his job keeps him behind a counter, has never ventured into the complex mechanics of a steering wheel or gearshift, and it is rather soon to be asking Joana Carda if she knows how to drive. In the light of these details, it seems inevitable that these two should travel in the back seat, with the pilot and copilot logically seated in front. But Pedro Orce is Spanish, Joana Carda is Portuguese, neither of them speaks the other's language, and besides they've only just met, later on, when they've had time to become acquainted, things will be different. The seat beside the driver, although considered by the superstitious and proved by the statistics to be the dead man's seat, is generally regarded as a place of honor and should therefore be offered to Joana Carda, putting her on Joaquim Sassa's right, with the other two men behind, and they should not have much difficulty understanding each other after sharing so many experiences. But the elm branch is much too big to go in front, and Joana Carda has made it clear that nothing will induce her to part with it. So, there being no alternative, Pedro Orce will sit in front for two explicable reasons, each more excellent than the other, first, as we have already said, because it is a place of honor, second, because Pedro Orce is the oldest person here, the one closest to death, on account of what we term, with black humor, the nature of life. But what really counts, more than this twofold reasoning, is that Joana Carda and José Anaiço want to ride together in the back seat, and by means of gestures, pauses, and feigned distractions they've managed it. Let us be seated, then, and get on our way.
The journey was uneventful, that's what novelists in a hurry always say when they think that, in the ten minutes or ten hours they are about to eliminate, nothing has taken place that would warrant any special mention. Strictly speaking, it would be much more correct and honest to put it like this, As in all journeys, whatever their duration and length, there have been a thousand incidents, words and thoughts, and for a thousand you could read ten thousand, but the narrative is dragging, so I'm allowing myself to abbreviate, using three lines to cover two hundred kilometers, bearing in mind that the four people inside the car have traveled in silence, with neither thought nor gesture, pretending that by the end of the journey they will have nothing to relate. In our case,
for example, it would be impossible not to derive some meaning from the fact that Joana Carda had quite naturally accompanied José Anaiço when he took over from Joaquim Sassa, who wanted a rest from driving, and that she had managed, God knows how, to squeeze the elm branch into the front, without hampering the driver or blocking his vision. And needless to say, when José Anaiço returned to the back seat, Joana Carda went with him, and so wherever José happened to be Joana was there too, although neither of them could yet say for what reason or purpose, or they knew but cannot bring themselves to say it, each moment has its own flavor and the flavor of this moment has not yet been lost.
There were few abandoned cars on the roads, and those they saw invariably had parts missing, having been stripped of their wheels, headlights, rearview mirrors, windshields, a door, sometimes all the doors, the seats, some cars were even reduced to a bare shell like crabshells with no meat left inside. But the gasoline shortage meant that traffic was thin and there were long intervals between one passing car and the next. Certain incongruities also hit one in the eye, like a cart being drawn by a donkey along the highway, or a squadron of cyclists who even at full speed were far below the minimum speed the signs foolishly continued to impose, indifferent to the force of reality. And there were also people traveling on foot, usually with a knapsack on their back, or, in rustic fashion, with two sacks loosely tied together at the top and strung over one shoulder like a saddlebag, the women with baskets on their heads. Many people were alone, but there were also families, to all appearances entire families with old and young and babes in arms. When Deux Chevaux had to leave the highway farther ahead, the number of pedestrians diminished only in proportion to the relative importance of the road. Three times Joaquim Sassa tried to ask people where they were going, and they all gave him the same answer, We're on our way to see the world. They must have known that the world, the immediate world, strictly speaking, was now much smaller than before, perhaps for this very reason their dream of knowing all of it had become much more feasible, and when José Anaiço asked, But what about your home and your job, they calmly replied, Our home will be waiting for us and work we can always find, those are the priorities of the past and they must not be allowed to hinder the future. And perhaps it was just as well that people did not ask him the same question, whether too discreet or simply too absorbed in their own affairs, otherwise he would have been forced to explain, We're accompanying this woman to examine the line she drew on the ground with this stick, and as far as their jobs were concerned they would have made a poor impression, perhaps Pedro Orce would have confessed, I've left my patients to look after themselves, and Joaquim Sassa argued, Let's face it, office clerks are a dime a dozen, I won't be missed, besides I'm enjoying a well-deserved vacation, and José Anaiço, I'm in the same situation, if I were to go back to school now I wouldn't find any pupils, until October my time is my own, and Joana Carda, I've nothing to tell you about myself, if I've revealed nothing so far to these men with whom I'm traveling, there's no reason why I should confide in strangers.
The Collected Novels of José Saramago Page 133
