Seeing

by José Saramago

  THE SUPERINTENDENT DID NOT WISH TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE interior minister's prodigal munificence. He did not seek distraction in theaters and cinemas, he did not visit the museums, he only left providential ltd, insurance and reinsurance, to have lunch and supper, and when he paid the bill at the restaurant, instead of taking the bill with him, he left it on the table along with the tip. He did not go back to the doctor's house and had no reason to return to the garden where he had made his peace with the dog of tears or, as he was officially known, Constant, and where, eye to eye, spirit with spirit, he had spoken with the dog's mistress about guilt and innocence. Nor did he go and spy on what the girl with dark glasses and the old man with the black eye-patch might be doing, or the divorced wife of the man who had been the first to go blind. As for the latter, the author of the vile letter of denunciation and author, too, of many misfortunes, the superintendent had no doubt that, if he saw him, he would cross over to the other side of the road. The rest of the time, for hours on end, morning and evening, he spent sitting by the phone, waiting, and even when he was sleeping, his ears were listening. He was sure that the interior minister would phone in the end, he could not otherwise understand why the minister had wanted to drain to the very last minute, or more accurately, to the final dregs, the five days he had allocated for the investigation. The most natural thing would be for the minister to order him back to headquarters to settle all outstanding accounts, whether by enforced retirement or by resignation, but experience had shown him that anything natural was far too simple for the interior minister's tortuous mind. He remembered the inspector's words, banal but expressive, It smells very fishy to me, he had said when the superintendent had told him about handing over the photograph to the man wearing the blue tie with white spots at military post six-north, and it seemed to him that the heart of the matter must lie there, in the photograph, although he could not imagine how or why. It was in this slow waiting, which had an end in sight and which would not, as people say when they want to embellish a story, be interminable, and in thoughts such as these, which were often nothing but a continuous, irrepressible somnolence from which his half-watchful consciousness occasionally startled him awake, that he would spend the three remaining days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, three leaves from the calendar which resisted being torn from midnight's stitching and which then remained stuck to his fingers, transformed into a shapeless, glutinous mass of time, into a soft wall that both resisted and sucked him in. Finally, on Wednesday, at half past eleven at night, the minister phoned. He did not say hello or good evening, he did not ask the superintendent if he was well or how he was coping with being alone, he did not mention whether he had questioned the inspector and the sergeant, together or separately, in friendly conversation or by issuing harsh threats, he merely said in passing, as if apropos of nothing, I think you'll find something in tomorrow's newspapers to interest you, I read the papers every day, minister, Congratulations, you're obviously very well-informed, nevertheless I urge you most strongly not to miss tomorrow's editions, you'll find them most interesting, I'll be sure to read them, minister, And watch the television news too, don't miss it whatever you do, We have no television set at providential ltd, minister, What a shame, although, on second thoughts, I rather approve, it's better like that, it might distract you from the arduous investigatory problems we set you, besides, you could always go and visit one of your new friends and suggest you all get together and enjoy the show. The superintendent did not respond. He could have asked what his disciplinary situation would be after Thursday, but he preferred to say nothing, it was clear that his fate lay in the minister's hands, and so it was up to him to pronounce sentence, if he did ask, he was sure to receive some sharp riposte, along the lines of, Don't be in such a hurry, you'll find out tomorrow. Suddenly, the superintendent became aware that the silence had lasted longer than is considered normal in a telephone conversation, a mode of communication in which the pauses or rests between phrases are, generally speaking, either brief or even briefer. He had not reacted to the interior minister's spiteful suggestion and this had not appeared to trouble him, he had remained silent as if he were leaving time for his interlocutor to think of a response. The superintendent said cautiously, Minister. The electrical impulses carried the word down the line, but there was no sign of life at the other end. The albatross had hung up. The superintendent put the phone back on its rest and left the room. He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water, it was not the first time he had noticed that talking to the interior minister created in him an almost desperate thirst, as if throughout the conversation he had been burning up inside and now had to hurry to put out his own fire. He went and sat down on the sofa in the sitting-room, but did not stay there long, the state of semi-lethargy in which he had lived for the past two days had disappeared, as if it had vanished at the minister's first word, for things, that vague agglomeration to which we usually give the generic and lazy label of things when it would take too much time and too much space to explain or merely define it, had begun to move very fast and they would not stop now until the end, but what end, and when, and how, and where. Of one thing he was sure, he did not need to be a maigret, a poirot or a sherlock holmes to know what the newspapers would publish the following day. The waiting was over, the interior minister would not phone him again, any order still to be issued would arrive through the intermediary of a secretary or directly from the police commissioner, a mere five days and five nights had been enough for him to go from being a superintendent in charge of a difficult investigation to a wind-up toy whose spring had gone and which was to be thrown out with the rubbish. It was then that it occurred to him that he still had one duty to perform. He looked up a name in the telephone book, mentally confirmed the address and dialed the number. The doctor's wife answered, Hello, Oh, good evening, it's me, the superintendent, forgive me for phoning you at this hour of the night, That's all right, we never go to bed early, Do you remember me telling you, when we were talking in the park, that the interior minister had ordered me to hand over that group photograph, Yes, I remember, Well, I have every reason to believe that the photograph will be published in tomorrow's newspapers and broadcast on television, Well, I won't ask you why, but I do remember you telling me that the minister wouldn't have wanted it for any good purpose, Exactly, but I never expected him to use it like this, What's he up to, We'll see tomorrow what the newspapers do apart from printing the photograph, but I imagine that they'll try to stigmatize you in the mind of the public, Because I didn't go blind four years ago, You know very well that the minister finds it highly suspicious that you didn't go blind when everyone else was losing their sight, and now that fact has become more than sufficient, from his point of view, for him to find you responsible, either wholly or in part, for what is happening now, Do you mean the blank votes, Yes, the blank votes, But that's absurd, utterly absurd, As I've learned in this job, not only are the people in government never put off by what we judge to be absurd, they make use of absurdities to dull consciences and to destroy reason, What do you think we should do, Hide, disappear, but don't go to your friends' apartments, you wouldn't be safe there, they'll be putting them under surveillance soon as well, if they haven't already, You're right, but, in any case, we would never put at risk the safety of someone who had chosen to protect us, right now, for example, I'm wondering if you haven't been foolish in phoning us, Don't worry, the line is secure, in fact, there aren't many lines much securer than this, Superintendent, Yes, There's a question I'd like to ask, but I'm not sure I dare, Ask it, please, Why are you doing this for us, why are you helping us, Because of something I read in a book, years ago now, and which I had forgotten, but which has come back to me in the last few days, What was that, We are born, and at that moment, it is as if we had signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf, Fine, thought-provoking words, what's the book called, You know I'm ashamed to say it, but I can't re
member, Never mind, even if you can't remember anything else, not even the title, Not even the name of the author, Those words, which probably no one else, at least not in that precise form, would ever have said before, had the good fortune not to have lost each other, they had someone to bring them together, and who knows, perhaps the world would be a slightly better place if we were able to gather up a few of the words that are out there wandering around alone, Oh, I doubt the poor despised creatures would ever find each other, No, probably not, but dreaming is cheap, it doesn't cost any money, Let's see what the papers say tomorrow, Yes, let's see, I'm prepared for the worst, Whatever the immediate results, think about what I said, hide, disappear, All right, I'll talk to my husband, Let's hope he manages to persuade you, Good night, and thank you for everything, There's nothing to thank me for, Take care. After he had hung up, the superintendent wondered if he hadn't been rather stupid to declare, as if it were his property, that the line was secure, that there wouldn't be many lines in the country much more secure. He shrugged and murmured, What does it matter, nothing is secure, no one is secure.

  He did not sleep well, he dreamed of a cloud of words that fled and scattered as he chased after them with a butterfly net, pleading, Stop, please, don't move, wait for me. Then, suddenly, the words stopped and gathered together in a clump, one on top of the other, like a swarm of bees waiting for a hive they could swoop down on, and he, with a cry of joy, lunged forward with his net. What he had caught was a newspaper. It had been a bad dream, but it would have been worse if the albatross had returned to prick out the eyes of the doctor's wife. He woke early. He pulled on some clothes and went downstairs. He no longer went out via the garage, through the tradesmen's entrance, now he went out through the main door, what one might call the pedestrian entrance, he greeted the porter with a nod of his head if he happened to see him in his lodge or exchanged a word or two with him if he was outside, but it wasn't necessary, he - the superintendent, not the porter - was, in a way, merely there on loan. The streetlights were still on, the shops wouldn't open for another two hours. He looked for and found a newspaper kiosk, one of the larger ones that receives all the papers, and he stood there waiting. Fortunately, it wasn't raining. The street lights went out, leaving the city plunged for a few moments in a last, brief darkness, which vanished as soon as his eyes grew accustomed to the change, and the bluish light of early morning descended upon the streets. The delivery van arrived, unloaded the bundles of papers and continued on its way. The newsagent started opening the bundles and arranging the newspapers according to the number of copies received, from left to right, from large to small. The superintendent went over to him, Good morning, he said, I'll have a copy of all of them. While the man was putting his purchases into a plastic bag, the superintendent looked at the rows of newspapers and saw that, with the exception of the last two, they all carried the photograph on the front page under banner headlines. The arrival of this keen customer with sufficient means to pay has got the newspaper kiosk off to good start this morning, indeed, we can safely say that the rest of the day will be no different, for every one of the newspapers will be snapped up, apart from those two piles on the right, of which only the usual number of copies will be sold. The superintendent was no longer there, he had run to catch a taxi he had spotted on the nearby corner, and having given the driver the address of providential ltd, and apologized for the shortness of the journey, he was now nervously taking the papers out of the bag and opening them. Alongside the group photo, with an arrow indicating the doctor's wife, was an enlargement of her face in a circle. And the headlines were, in red and in black, Revealed At Last - The Face Behind The Conspiracy, Four Years Ago This Woman Escaped Blindness, Mystery Of The Blank Ballot Papers Solved, Police Investigation Yields First Results. The still faint morning light and the swaying of the car as it bumped over the cobbled surface prevented him from reading the smaller print of the articles beneath. In less than five minutes the taxi had deposited him outside the door of the building. The superintendent paid, left the change in the driver's hand and rushed in. He raced past the porter without bothering to greet him and got into the lift, his state of excitement almost making him tap his toes with impatience, come on, come on, but the machinery, which had spent its whole life carrying people up and down, listening to conversations, unfinished monologues, tuneless fragments of songs, the occasional irrepressible sigh, the occasional troubled murmur, pretended that this was none of its business, it took a certain amount of time to go up and a certain amount of time to come down, like fate, if you're in that much of a hurry, take the stairs. The superintendent finally put the key in the door of providential ltd, insurance and reinsurance, turned on the light and made straight for the table on which he had spread out the map of the city and where he had eaten a last breakfast with his now absent assistants. His hands were shaking. Forcing himself to slow down and not to skip any lines, he read, word by word, the articles in the four newspapers that had published the photograph. With a few small changes in style, with slight differences in vocabulary, the information was the same in all of them and one could sense a kind of arithmetic mean calculated by the editorial consultants at the ministry of the interior to fit the original font. The primitive prose read more or less like this, Just when we were thinking that the government had decided to leave it to time, to that same time by which everything is worn away and transformed, the job of isolating and shrinking the malignant tumor that so unexpectedly grew in this nation's capital, taking the abstruse and aberrant form of the mass casting of blank ballot papers, which, as our readers know, vastly exceeded the number of votes cast for all the democratic political parties put together, our editorial desk has just received the most surprising and gratifying news. The investigatory genius and persistence of the police, in the persons of a superintendent, an inspector and a sergeant, whose names, for security reasons, we are not authorized to reveal, have managed to uncover the individual who is, in all probability, the head of the tapeworm whose coils have kept the civic conscience of the majority of the city's inhabitants of voting age entirely paralyzed and in a state of dangerous atrophy. A certain woman, married to an ophthalmologist, and who, wonder of wonders, was, according to reliable witnesses, the only person to escape the terrible epidemic four years ago that made of our homeland a country of the blind, this woman is now considered by the police to be the person responsible for the current blindness, limited this time, fortunately, to what used to be the capital city, and which has introduced into political life and into our democratic system the dangerous germ of perversion and corruption. Only a diabolical mind, like those of the greatest criminals in the history of humankind, could have conceived what, according to reliable sources, his excellency the president of the republic has so eloquently described as a torpedo fired below the water line of the majestic ship of democracy. For that is what it is. If it is proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, as everything indicates it will be, that this doctor's wife is guilty, then all those citizens who still respect order and the law will demand that the full rigor of justice falls upon her head. How strange life is. Given the singularity of her case four years ago, this woman could have become an invaluable subject of study for our scientific community, and, as such, would have deserved a prominent place in the clinical history of ophthalmology, but she will now be singled out for public execration as an enemy of her country and of her people. One is tempted to say that it would have been better if she had gone blind.