The Double

by José Saramago

  Having replaced the receiver on the rest, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had got what he wanted and had more than enough reason to be pleased with himself, but the fact was that their long, difficult conversation had always been dictated by her even when it appeared not to be, subjecting him to a kind of continual humiliation that never found explicit expression in the words spoken by either of them, and yet those words, one by one, left an increasingly bitter taste in his mouth, which is precisely how people often describe the taste of defeat. He knew he had won, but he was aware too that his victory was in part illusory, as if each advance he had made had been only the mechanical consequence of a tactical withdrawal by the enemy, golden bridges skilfully placed to draw him on, with flags flying and drums and bugles sounding, until there came a point perhaps when he would find himself hopelessly encircled. In order to gain his objectives, he had thrown around Maria da Paz a net of sly, calculating speeches, but the knots with which he thought he was binding her had merely ended up limiting his own freedom of movement. During the six months they had known each other, he had deliberately kept Maria da Paz on the margins of his private life, so as not to let himself become too involved, and now that he had decided to end the relationship, and was only waiting for the right moment to do so, he found himself obliged not only to ask for her help, but to make her an accomplice in actions of whose origins and causes, as well as whose final end, she knew nothing. Common sense would call him an unscrupulous exploiter, but he would reply that the situation he was living through was unique in the world, that there were no antecedents by which to establish the guidelines for socially acceptable behavior, that no law had foreseen the extraordinary circumstance of a person being duplicated, and so, he, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, had to invent, at every turn, the procedures, correct or incorrect, that would lead him to his objective. The letter was just one of those procedures, and if, to write it, he had been obliged to abuse the trust of a woman who said she loved him, it wasn't such a very grave crime, other people had done far worse things and no one was marking them out for public condemnation.

  Tertuliano Máximo Afonso put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and paused to think. The letter would have to look as if it came from an admirer, it would have to be enthusiastic, but not too enthusiastic, after all, the actor Daniel Santa-Clara was not exactly a star capable of provoking hysterical outbursts of feeling, the letter should go through the ritual of asking for a signed photograph, even though what Tertuliano Máximo Afonso really wants to know is where the actor lives, as well as his real name, if, as everything seems to indicate, Daniel Santa-Clara is the pseudonym of a man who may, who knows, also be called Tertuliano. Once the letter has been sent, there are two possible hypotheses as to what will happen next, the production company will either respond directly, giving the information requested, or say that it is not authorized to do so, in which case they will probably send the letter on to the person to whom it is really addressed. Is that what will happen, wondered Tertuliano Máximo Afonso. A moment's brief reflection made him see that the last hypothesis was the least likely because it would show a complete lack of professionalism and even less consideration on the part of the company in burdening its actors with the task and with the expense of replying to letters and sending out photographs. Let's hope so, he muttered, the whole thing will fall apart if he sends Maria da Paz a personal reply. For a moment, he seemed to see before him the thunderous collapse of the house of cards that, for a week now, he has been so painstakingly building, but administrative logic and an awareness that there was no other possible route helped him, gradually, to restore his shaken spirits. Writing the letter did not prove easy, which explains why his upstairs neighbor heard the hammering of the typewriter for over an hour. At one point, the phone rang, rang insistently, but Tertuliano Máximo Afonso did not pick it up. It was probably Maria da Paz.

  HE WOKE LATE. HE HAD SPENT A TROUBLED NIGHT, SHOT through with fleeting, disquieting dreams, a staff meeting at which none of the teachers were present, an endless corridor, a videocassette that refused to fit into the VCR, a cinema with a black screen on which a black film was being shown, a telephone directory with the same name repeated on every line and which he could not read, a parcel with a fish inside, a man carrying a stone on his back and saying, I'm an Amorite, an algebraic equation with people's faces where there should have been letters. The only dream he could remember with any clarity was the one about the parcel, although he had been unable to identify the fish, and now, still barely awake, he consoled himself with the thought that at least it couldn't have been a monkfish, because a monkfish wouldn't have fit inside the box. He got up with some difficulty, as if his joints had stiffened after some excessive and unaccustomed physical effort, and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, a full glass gulped down with all the urgency of someone who had eaten something salty for supper. He was hungry but didn't feel like preparing breakfast. He went back into the bedroom to fetch his dressing gown, then returned to the living room. The letter to the production company was there on the desk, the final and definitive version of the many versions with which the wastepaper basket was filled almost to overflowing. He reread it and it seemed to him to serve his present purposes, he had not only requested a signed photograph of the actor, he had also, as if in passing, asked for his address. A final comment, which Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was immodest enough to consider an imaginative and strategic masterstroke, suggested that there was an urgent need for a study of the importance of supporting actors, who were, according to the writer of the letter, as essential to the development of filmic action as small tributaries are to the formation of great rivers. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was convinced that such a metaphorical, sibylline conclusion would remove any possibility of the company forwarding the letter to an actor, who, even though his name had appeared in the opening credits of the most recent films he had acted in, was, nevertheless, one of the legion of actors considered to be inferior, subaltern, and incidental, a kind of necessary evil, an indispensable nuisance, who, in the opinion of the producer, always takes up too much space in the budget. If Daniel Santa-Clara were to receive a letter written in these terms, his thoughts would naturally turn to financial and social rewards in keeping with his role as a tributary of the Nile and the Amazon of the major stars. And if that first individual action, begun in order to defend the simple, selfish well-being of one claimant, were to multiply, to spread, to expand into a vast collective action of solidarity, then the pyramid structure of the film industry would collapse like another house of cards, and we would be granted the extraordinary fate or, better still, the historic privilege of witnessing the birth of a new and revolutionary concept of the cinema and of life. There is no danger, however, that such a cataclysm will occur. The letter, signed with the name of a woman called Maria da Paz, will be sent to the appropriate department, where a clerk will call the boss's attention to the ominous suggestion contained in the final paragraph, the boss will at once pass on the dangerous item for consideration by his immediate superior, and, that same day, before the virus slips, by mistake, out into the streets, the few people who know about the letter will be instantly sworn to absolute secrecy, rewarded in advance with appropriate promotions and substantial increases in salary. A decision will then have to be taken as to what to do with the letter, whether to grant the requests for a signed photograph and for information about where the actor lives, the first purely routine, the second rather unusual, or to behave simply as if it had never been written or had got lost in the confusion of the postal service. The discussion held by the board of directors will take up the whole of the following day, not because it proved difficult to reach initial unanimity, but because every foreseeable consequence became the object of prolonged consideration, and not only those consequences, but others that seemed to be the products of sick imaginations. The final decision will be both radical and clever. Radical because the letter wil
l be burned at the end of the meeting, with the whole board of directors present to witness it and breathe a sigh of relief, clever because it will satisfy the two requests in a way that will guarantee the double gratitude of the writer, the first, purely routine as we said, no problem at all, the second, With reference to your letter, which we read with great interest, those were the terms in which it was put, underlining the exceptional nature of the information being given. This did not exclude the possibility that the writer of the letter, Maria da Paz, would one day meet Daniel Santa-Clara, now that she has his address, and would mention to him her theory about tributaries as applied to the distribution of roles in the dramatic arts, but, as experience in communications has abundantly shown, the mobilizing power of the spoken word, which is in no way inferior to that of the written word and may even, in the short term, prove more effective in marshaling minds and multitudes, has a more limited historical range, given that, when a speech is repeated, it soon runs out of breath and strays from its original aims and intentions. Why else are the laws that rule us written down. It is more likely, though, that, if such a meeting were to take place and if such a matter were to be brought up, Daniel Santa-Clara would pay only scant attention to Maria da Paz's tributarial theories and suggest diverting the conversation to less arid subjects, if we can be forgiven such a flagrant contradiction, given that it was of water that we were speaking and the rivers that carry it away.