Skylight

by José Saramago

  Abel’s sparse and ill-assimilated readings in philosophy, gleaned at random from schoolbooks or pamphlets unearthed from amid the dust in the secondhand bookshops on the Calçada do Combro, allowed him to think and to say that he was searching for the hidden meaning of life. But when he was in one of his disenchanted moods, he had to admit that this was a purely utopian desire and that however much experience he accumulated, the veil he was trying to draw aside would only grow thicker. The lack of any real meaning to his life, however, forced him to stand by that desire—which had long since ceased to be one—and to make of it as good or as bad a reason to live as any other. On those grim days when he felt surrounded by the vacuum of absurdity, he always felt particularly weary. He tried to blame his weariness on the daily struggle to earn a living, on the depression brought on by those difficult times when he could barely get by. These were doubtless contributing factors, because hunger and cold do make one weary, but they weren’t enough. He had grown inured to everything, and things that had once frightened him he now viewed with indifference. He had hardened body and mind against difficulties and privations. He knew that he could, with relative ease, step free of them. He had learned to do so many jobs in his time that it would have been fairly easy for him to find a permanent position that would give him enough to live on. He had never taken that step, though. He didn’t want to be caught, he said, and it was true, but the reason why he didn’t want to be caught was that he would then have to admit the pointlessness of his existence so far. What had he gained in taking that long, circuitous route only to end up on the same road being followed by all the people he had tried so resolutely to leave behind? “Do they want me married, futile and taxable?” Fernando Pessoa had asked. “Is that what life wants of everyone?” asked Abel.

  The hidden meaning of life . . . “But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning.” Abel knew Pessoa’s poetry well. He had made of his poems another Bible. He may not have understood them completely and perhaps saw in them things that weren’t there, but while he suspected that Pessoa was often mocking his readers and that, while appearing to be sincere, he was, in fact, making fun of them, Abel had grown used to respecting him despite all his contradictions. And while he had no doubts about Pessoa’s greatness as a poet, it sometimes seemed to him, especially when he was in his absurd, disenchanted mood, that there was much that was gratuitous in his poetry. “So what?” thought Abel. “Why shouldn’t poetry be gratuitous? It can be, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But what is the point of gratuitous poetry? Perhaps poetry is like a spring or a mountain stream, which has no point, no reason to exist. Men get thirsty, and that’s what gives meaning to the water. Is it the same with poetry? No poet, and no man, whoever he may be, is simple and natural. Pessoa certainly wasn’t. No one feeling a thirst for humanity would try to slake that thirst on Fernando Pessoa’s verses: it would be like drinking salt water. And yet what wonderful, fascinating poetry! Gratuitous, yes, but what does that matter if, when I plumb my own depths, I find that I, too, am gratuitous and futile? And that’s what Silvestre can’t stand: the useless life. We should be fully engaged with life, each individual should reach out beyond himself. Being merely present isn’t enough. Being a mere witness is tantamount to being dead. That’s what he meant to say. It doesn’t matter if you stay in one spot, but your life should reach out if it is not to be a mere animal existence, as unconscious as the water flowing from a spring. But how to reach out? And where to? How and where: there’s a problem that throws up a thousand other problems. It’s not enough to say that one’s life should reach out, because there are a thousand answers as to the ‘how’ and the ‘where.’ Silvestre’s is one answer, someone who has a religious belief is another. How many more are there? And, of course, the same answer may be right for various people, just as another may be right for only one person and no one else. Anyway, I got lost along the way. Everything would be all right if I didn’t sense that there were many other roads to follow, and if I wasn’t so busy removing obstacles from my chosen path. The life I’ve chosen is a hard and difficult one. I’ve learned a lot from it. It’s in my power to abandon it and start another. So why don’t I? Because I like this life? Partly. I find it interesting to choose to lead a life that others would accept only if it was forced on them. But it’s not enough, this life isn’t enough. What to choose, then? Being ‘married, futile and taxable’? Is it possible to be one of those things and not the others? And then what?”

  Abel felt confused. Silvestre had accused him of being useless, and that had bothered him. No one likes his weaknesses to be exposed, and his awareness of his own uselessness was Abel’s Achilles’ heel. His mind was always asking him that awkward question: “Why?” He would avoid it, and then pretend he wasn’t by thinking about something else or engaging in vain speculations, but the question wouldn’t go away: it stood there stiff, ironic, implacable, waiting for him to return from his meanderings. What he found particularly distressing was that he never saw the same perplexity in other people, some indication that they felt as troubled as he did. Other people’s troubles (or so Abel thought) arose from personal misfortune, a lack of money, a case of unrequited love, but not from life itself. Once, this certainty had given him a consoling sense of superiority. Now he found it merely irritating. Such confidence, such sangfroid in the face of those secondary problems, prompted in him a mixture of scorn and envy.

  In telling him about his past, Silvestre had only added to his feeling of unease. And yet, for all that, Abel had to say that Silvestre’s life had been just as useless as his, since none of the things he had strived for had been achieved. Silvestre was old, doing today what he had always done—mending shoes—but Silvestre himself had said that at least his life had taught him to see beyond the soles of the shoes he was mending, while all life had given Abel was the ability to sense the existence of something hidden, of something capable of giving real meaning to his life. It would be better not to have that ability. He would be able to live peacefully, the peace that comes from dulling one’s mind, which was what most people did. “‘Most people,’” he thought, “what a stupid expression! What do I know about ‘most people’? I might come across thousands of people in the course of a day, but I only truly see a few dozen. I see them looking serious, happy, slow, harassed, ugly or beautiful, plain or attractive, and I call them ‘most people.’ I wonder what they think of me. I, too, walk slowly or quickly, am serious or happy. Some will think me ugly, others handsome or plain or attractive. After all, I am ‘most people’ too. Some would also consider my mind dull. We all receive the daily dose of morphine that dulls our thoughts. Habits, vices, repeated words and hackneyed gestures, boring friends and enemies we don’t even really hate, these are all things that dull our minds. A full life! Who can genuinely claim to live a full life? We all wear around our neck the yoke of monotony, we all have hopes, though heaven knows what for! Yes, we all have hopes! Some more obscure than others, but we all have expectations. ‘Most people’! Said in that disdainful, superior tone, it’s simply idiotic. The morphine of habit, the morphine of monotony. Ah, Silvestre, my good, pure Silvestre, you have no idea what massive doses of morphine you have swallowed! You and your plump wife Mariana, so kind she makes you want to weep!” (As he was thinking these thoughts, Abel was almost weeping himself.) “These thoughts don’t even have the merit of being very original. They’re like a secondhand suit in a shop full of new clothes, a piece of merchandise left behind after the market, the nausea brought on by indigestion.”

  Whenever he reached this point, Abel would leave the house. If he was in time and if he had enough money, he would go to the cinema. He found the plots of the films absurd. Men pursuing women, women pursuing men, mental aberrations, cruelties, and stupidity from first frame to last. Stories repeated a thousand times over: a man, a woman and her lover; a woman, a man and his lover; and even worse was the simplistic way they dealt with the battle between good and evil, be
tween purity and depravity, between the mud and the stars. Morphine. A legal drug advertised in all the papers. A way of passing the time, as if we were all going to live forever.

  The lights went up, the audience got to their feet with a clatter as the chair seats flipped back into position. Abel sat on for a while. The two-dimensional ghosts occupying the seats had fallen silent. “I am a four-dimensional ghost,” he murmured to himself.

  Thinking he was asleep, the ushers came to shoo him away. Outside, the last filmgoers were rushing to catch the tram. Newly married couples, arms about each other. Petit-bourgeois couples who had spent years locked in holy matrimony, she walking behind, he in front. Less than half a step separated them, but that half step expressed the insuperable distance that lay between them. The mature, bourgeois couples were the future portrait of the newlyweds whose wedding rings were still shiny and new.

  Abel continued along the quiet, almost empty streets where the parallel tram lines gleamed, the proverbial parallel lines that never meet. “They meet in infinity, at least that’s what scholars say. We all meet in infinity, in the infinity of stupidity, apathy, stag­nation.”

  “Fancy a good time, dearie?” said a woman’s voice in the darkness. Abel smiled sadly.

  “What an admirable society this is, providing, as it does, for everything and everyone, even the poor unhappy bachelors who need an outlet for their sexual urges! Even happily married husbands who like a bit of variety for not much outlay! Ah, Society, you loving mother!”

  In the streets of the city’s outlying areas, rubbish bins stood outside every door. The dogs look for bones there, the rag-and-bone men for rags and paper. “Nothing is wasted,” murmured Abel. “In Nature nothing is created and nothing is lost. Poor dear Lavoisier, I bet you never thought that the proof of your words would be found in a rubbish bin!”

  He went into a café: tables, some occupied, others not, yawning waiters, clouds of cigarette smoke, the hum of conversations, the clink of cups—stagnation. And there he was alone. He left, filled with anguish. The warm April night greeted him. The tall buildings were showing him the way. Straight on, always straight on. He turned to left or right only when the street decided for him. The street and the need, sooner or later, to go home. And sooner or later, Abel did go home.

  He had taken to speaking very little. And Silvestre and Mariana found this odd. They had grown used to considering him a member of the household, almost one of the family, and they felt hurt, their confidence betrayed. One night Silvestre went into Abel’s room on the pretext of showing him some article in the newspaper. Abel was lying on the bed, reading a book and smoking a cigarette. He read the article, which did not interest him in the least, then handed the newspaper back to Silvestre, muttering a few distracted words of thanks. Silvestre stayed where he was, leaning on the foot of the bedstead, looking at Abel. Seen from that angle, Abel looked smaller and, despite the cigarette and his five o’clock shadow, rather childlike.

  “Are you feeling trapped?” asked Silvestre.

  “Trapped?”

  “Yes, you know, the tentacle . . .”

  “Ah.”

  This exclamation was spoken in an indefinable, almost absent tone. Abel sat up, looked hard at Silvestre and added slowly:

  “No, perhaps I’m feeling the lack of a tentacle. The conversations we’ve had have made me think about things I thought had long since been safely filed away.”

  “I don’t think they could have been filed away, or only very haphazardly. If you really were the kind of person you try so hard to appear to be, I would never have told you about my life.”

  “You should be pleased, then.”

  “Pleased? On the contrary. I think you’re in the grip of tedium. You’re tired of life, you think you’ve learned all there is to learn, and everything you see around you only increases your sense of tedium. Why, then, should I feel pleased? It isn’t always easy to cut off a tentacle. You can always leave a boring job and, even more easily, a boring woman, but tedium, how do you cut yourself off from that?”

  “You’ve said all this before, you’re surely not going to repeat—”

  “I’m obviously annoying you.”

  “No, not at all!”

  Abel leapt to his feet and reached out one arm to Silvestre, who, having made as if to leave the room, now remained where he was. Abel sat down on the edge of the bed, half turned toward Silvestre. They were looking at each other, unsmiling, as if waiting for something important to happen. Then Abel said:

  “You do know, don’t you, that I’m your friend?”

  “I do,” answered Silvestre. “And I’m your friend too, but we seem to have had a falling-out.”

  “That’s my fault.”

  “Perhaps it’s mine. You need someone who can help you, and I don’t seem to be that person.”

  Abel got up, put on his shoes and went over to a trunk in one corner of the room. He opened it and, pointing to the books almost filling it, said:

  “Even in my worst moments it never once occurred to me to sell them. These are all the books I brought from home, plus others I’ve bought over the past twelve years. I’ve read and reread them all. I’ve learned a lot from them. Half of what I learned I’ve forgotten, and the other half might be quite wrong, but right or wrong, the truth is that they have only contributed to making my own uselessness more obvious.”

  “But you were quite right to read them. Think of all the people who live their entire lives without ever realizing how useless they are. In order for someone to be truly useful, he must, at some point, feel his own uselessness. At least then he’s less likely to go back to being useless . . .”

  “Be useful, that’s all you ever say to me. But how can I be useful?”

  “That’s something you have to discover for yourself, like everything else in life. No one can give you advice about that. I’d really like to—if I thought it would do any good.”

  “And I’d like to know what you really mean.”

  Silvestre smiled:

  “Don’t worry. All I mean is that we won’t become what we are meant to be in life by listening to other people’s words or advice. We have to feel in our own flesh the wound that will make us into proper men. Then it’s up to us to act . . .”

  Abel closed the trunk. He turned to Silvestre and said in a dreamy tone:

  “To act . . . If everyone acted as we have done, there would be no proper men . . .”

  “My time is past,” said Silvestre.

  “That’s why it’s so easy for you to criticize me. Listen, how about a game of checkers?”

  27

  That night, Paulino had arrived late, at around eleven o’clock. He gave Lídia a peck on the cheek, then went over to his favorite sofa, where he sat smoking his usual cigarillo.

  As it happened, Lídia was not wearing the obligatory negligee, which may have contributed to Paulino’s unspoken irritation. Even the way he gripped his cigarillo between his teeth and drummed his fingers on the arm of the sofa were signs of his displeasure. Sitting at his feet on a low stool, Lídia was doing her best to amuse him by recounting the minutiae of her day. She had begun to notice a change in her lover some nights before. He no longer “devoured” her with his eyes, and while this could be attributed to long familiarity, it could also mean that he was losing interest in her for some other reason. Lídia’s permanent feeling of insecurity meant that she always feared the worst. Apparently insignificant details, a certain degree of inattentiveness and brusqueness on his part, a slightly abstracted air, only added to her anxiety.

  Paulino was doing nothing to keep the conversation going. There were long pauses during which neither of them knew what to say, or, rather, during which Lídia didn’t know what to say, for it seemed Paulino preferred to remain silent. She racked her brain for ways to keep the conversation alive, but he responded only distractedly. And the conversation, for lack of substance, was burning out like a lamp with no oil in it. That evening, Lídia’s clothes
seemed a further motive for his distant behavior. Paulino kept blowing out great clouds of smoke with a long, impatient sigh. Abandoning her attempt to find a subject that might interest him, Lídia said, almost casually:

  “You seem a bit preoccupied.”

  “Hm.”

  Such a vague response could mean anything. He appeared to be waiting for Lídia to decide what he meant. Gripped by the vague fear of the unknown that lurks both in dark houses and in imprudent words whose consequences one can never predict, Lídia added:

  “You’ve been behaving differently for a few days now. You always used to tell me your problems. I don’t wish to be indiscreet, of course, but it might help you to talk about them.”

  Paulino stared at her in amusement. He even smiled. Lídia found both look and smile terrifying. She regretted having spoken. Seeing her shrink back, and not wishing to miss the opportunity she was offering him, Paulino said only:

  “Problems at work . . .”

  “You always used to say that when you were with me, you forgot all about work.”

  “I know, but it’s different now.”

  His smile was full of malice. His eyes had the implacable concentration of someone carefully noting imperfections and blemishes. Lídia felt herself blush. She had a feeling something bad was about to happen. When she still said nothing, Paulino added:

  “No, now I can’t forget about work. Not that I no longer feel at ease with you, not at all, but some problems are so complicated we can’t help but think about them all the time regardless of the company we’re in.”