Skylight

by José Saramago

  “Are there no other letters for me?”

  The postman looked through the bundle of letters he was holding and said:

  “No, only that one.”

  Only that one! Carmen felt like crying. She realized then that what she had been hoping for was a letter from Manolo. And that letter had not come. With a slowness that intrigued the postman, she closed the door. How foolish she had been! What had she been thinking! Had she been completely out of her mind when she wrote to her cousin? So deeply immersed was she in these thoughts that she quite forgot about her mother’s letter, until suddenly she became aware of the touch of paper on fingertips. She murmured in Galician:

  “Miña nai . . . Mother . . .”

  She tore open the envelope. Two large sheets of paper, filled from top to bottom in the small, dense handwriting she knew so well. It was too dark in the corridor for her to read. She ran to the bedroom, turned on the light and sat down on the edge of the bed, and she did all this as urgently as if she were afraid the letter might dissolve in her hands. Her eyes were too filled with tears for her to be able to make out the words. She nervously wiped them away, blew her nose, and only then could she read what her mother had written.

  She said exactly what Carmen had expected her to say. How much she regretted her situation, but that it was no fault of hers, because right from the start she had warned her against marrying that man. Carmen knew all this perfectly well, and had read the same words in other letters, but was that all her mother had to say? Nothing more? What else could she say? But wait, what was this?

  There it was. Her mother was inviting her to leave Lisbon and spend some time with them. Two months, possibly three. She could bring Henrique with her. They would pay both their fares. It would be . . . well, Carmen didn’t know what it would be like. Her eyes again filled with tears and she could read no more. It would, of course, be a great source of happiness. Two months, perhaps three, far from this apartment, with her family, and with her son beside her.

  She dried her eyes and read on: news about the house, the family, the birth of a nephew and, at the end, love and best wishes. In the margin, in smaller writing, was a postscript. The doorbell rang. Carmen didn’t hear it. It rang again. Carmen had now read those lines, but still heard nothing. The postscript explained everything: Manolo had asked her mother to say that he wouldn’t write now because he was looking forward to seeing her in Vigo. Once more the doorbell rang out: strident, impatient, urgent. As if she were returning from the end of time itself, Carmen finally heard the bell. She went to open the door. It was her son. Henrique was bewildered to find his mother crying and laughing at the same time. He found himself clasped in her arms, felt her kisses and heard her say:

  “We’re going to see Grandpa Filipe and Grandma Mercedes, sweetheart, we’re going to spend some time with Grandpa and Grandma!”

  When Emílio arrived that night, Carmen showed him the letter. He had never taken any interest in his wife’s correspondence and had the good taste not to go reading it when she wasn’t looking. Suspecting that the letters would be full of complaints and that he doubtless appeared in them in the role of tyrant, he had no desire to read them. And though Carmen wouldn’t have minded her husband knowing what her family said about him, she showed him only the part of the letter in which her mother mentioned the possibility of a visit: she needed his permission, and if he read the rest of the letter he might, out of pure spite, refuse. Emílio noticed that one margin had been cut off with scissors. He did not ask why. He handed back the letter and said nothing.

  “So?” asked Carmen.

  He did not reply at once. He saw stretching ahead of him two, possibly three months of solitude. He saw himself free and alone in the empty apartment. He could go out when he wanted, come back when he wanted, could choose to sleep where he wanted, on the floor or in the bed. He could see himself doing all the things he longed to do, so many that he could not, just then, think of a single one. His lips opened in a smile. From that moment, he began to feel free, felt the chains that bound him fall away. A large, full life awaited him, a life in which there would be room for all his dreams and all his hopes. It might only be three months, but what did that matter? Perhaps by then he would have screwed up enough courage to—

  “So?” his wife asked again, sensing a refusal in his silence.

  “Fine. Why not.”

  Just three words. For the first time in many years, there were three contented people in that apartment. Henrique was excited at the prospect of a holiday, at riding on the clickety-clack train, excited, as any child would be, by the whole marvelous idea of a journey. For Emílio and for Carmen, it meant being liberated from the nightmare that bound them to each other.

  Supper passed peacefully. There were smiles and friendly words. Henrique was happy. Even his parents seemed happy. The light in the kitchen seemed somehow brighter. Everything was brighter and purer.

  29

  Nothing was said about the night when Justina had revealed herself naked to her husband for the first time. Caetano kept quiet out of cowardice, and Justina out of pride. All that remained was a still-greater coldness between them. After leaving work, Caetano spent the rest of the night and the following morning in someone else’s bed. He returned home only at lunchtime, after which he slept all afternoon. They kept the bare essentials of communication as brief and monosyllabic as possible. Their mutual dislike of each other had never been so complete. Caetano avoided all contact with his wife, as if he feared she might suddenly appear before him again stark naked. Justina, on the other hand, eyed him with scorn, almost insolence. He felt the weight of that look and seethed with impotent rage. He knew that many men beat their wives, and that some husbands and wives found this natural. He knew that, for many men, this was considered a proof of their virility, just as some believed that catching a venereal disease was a sign of manliness. However, although he could boast of having been afflicted by various forms of the French disease, he could not pride himself on ever having beaten his wife, not as a matter of principle, as he would like to have claimed, but, again, out of cowardice. He was intimidated by Justina’s serenity, whose calm surface he had seen crack only on that one occasion and in a way that filled him with shame. The vision returned to him over and over of that scrawny, naked figure and that strange sobbing laughter. The sheer unexpectedness of his wife’s reaction had only increased his feeling of inferiority in relation to her, which is why he avoided her, spent as little time as possible at home and shrank from lying beside her in bed. There was another reason too. He knew that if he lay down with her in the same bed, he would feel impelled to have sex with her. When he first became aware of this impulse, he felt frightened. He tried to suppress it, called himself an idiot, listed all the reasons that should make such a feeling impossible: her graceless body, the many times she had rejected him, her scorn. But however many reasons he added to the list, his desire only grew in intensity. He tried to quench that desire elsewhere, but never succeeded. He would arrive home drained, unsteady and hollow-eyed, but he just had to smell the peculiar smell of Justina’s body for a wave of desire to wash over his innermost being. It was as if he had emerged from a long period of sexual abstinence only to find a woman lying within arm’s reach. When he went to bed after lunch, even the warmth of the sheets was a torment to him. His eyes would be drawn to some item of clothing his wife had left draped over a chair. In his mind’s eye, he endowed that empty dress, that folded stocking, with the shape and motion of a living body, of a tense, vibrant leg. His imagination constructed perfect forms that bore no relation to reality. And if, at that moment, Justina came into the room, he had to draw on every ounce of willpower not to leap out of bed and drag her onto it. He was filled with a base sensuality. He had the kind of erotic dreams that had besieged him as an adolescent. He exhausted his various temporary lovers and heaped insults on them because they could not assuage his longings. Desire, like a bothersome fly, constantly buzzed about him. Just as a
moth, with one side of its body paralyzed by the light, flies in ever-diminishing circles until it’s burned by the flame, so he circled about his wife, attracted by her smell, by her gaunt, unlovely shape.

  Justina had no clue as to the effect her presence had on her husband. She noticed that he was unusually nervous and excitable, but attributed this to her redoubled scorn. Like someone toying with a dangerous animal and perfectly aware of the risks she is running, but too consumed with curiosity to flee, Justina wanted to see just how much her husband could take. She wanted to gauge the depth and breadth of his cowardice. She shifted from silent disdain to becoming almost talkative, so that she might have more opportunities to reveal her disdain. In every word, in every inflection of her voice, she was showing her husband how unworthy she considered him. Caetano reacted in a way she could not have foreseen. He had become a masochist. All her insults, all her blows to his pride as a man and a husband, provoked in him new paroxysms of desire. Justina, all unwitting, was playing with fire.

  One night, unable to resist any longer, Caetano raced home after leaving work. He completely forgot that he had arranged to meet someone else, not that the woman expecting him could possibly have satisfied him. Like a madman who could still remember the place where reason would be restored to him, he hurried home. He hailed a passing taxi and promised the driver a fat tip if he got him to his destination quickly. The taxi bounded along the deserted streets and covered the short distance in no time at all. The tip was generous, even extravagant. As he entered the apartment, Caetano suddenly remembered the humiliation he had suffered the last time he had come home at that hour. In a brief moment of lucidity, he understood what he was going to do and feared the consequences. Then he heard Justina’s regular breathing, felt the warmth of the room, touched the body lying stretched out on the bed, and a sexual frenzy rose in him like a wave out of the depths of the sea.

  The room lay in darkness. Justina recognized her husband instantly. Still half immersed in sleep, she tried frantically to defend herself, but he was stronger than she and held her pinned to the mattress. She lay there motionless, detached, unable to react, as if caught up in one of those nightmares in which some monstrous Thing, strange and horrible, falls upon us. She finally managed to free one arm and groped in the darkness for the bedside lamp. When she turned it on, she saw her husband. His face terrified her: the bulging eyes, the more than usually pendulous lower lip, the red, perspiring face, the animal grimace. The only reason Justina did not cry out was that her throat was so tight with terror she could not utter a single sound. Suddenly Caetano’s mask-like visage contracted in such a way as to become unrecognizable. It was the face of an utterly alien creature, that of a man plucked from a prehistoric animality, a wild beast in human form.

  Then, eyes glinting coldly, Justina spat in his face. Stunned and still trembling, Caetano looked at her. He could not quite understand what had happened. He ran his hand over his face and looked at the still-warm saliva stuck to his fingers. He spread his fingers wide and saw how the saliva formed shining threads between them, threads that grew thinner and thinner until they broke. Then Caetano understood, finally understood. It was like the whiplash too far that causes the tame tiger to rise up on its back legs, claws extended, teeth bared. Justina closed her eyes and waited. Her husband still did not move. Fearfully, she half opened her eyes and immediately felt him begin thrusting away at her again. She tried to slide out from under him, but his body had hers in its grip. She tried to remain cold, as she had the first time, but that coldness had been quite natural, not an act of will. Now willpower alone could maintain that coldness, but her will had begun to weaken. Powerful forces that had lain dormant until then were stirring inside her, breaking over her like fast-running waves. A kind of bright light flickered on and off inside her head. She gave an inarticulate groan. Her will was drowning in the deep well of instinct. For a moment it managed to keep its head above water, before flailing helplessly about and vanishing. Like a thing possessed, Justina responded to her husband’s embrace. Her thin body was barely visible beneath his. She trembled and writhed, as mad with desire as he, subject to the same blind instinct. A simultaneous loud moan emerged from both and their bodies rolled about on the bed, entwined, pulsating.

  Then, propelled apart by a mutual feeling of repugnance, they separated and lay in silence on their respective sides of the bed. Caetano’s heavy breathing drowned out Justina’s, whose breathing now came in the form of a few final shudders.

  A void opened up in Justina’s mind. Her limbs felt limp and painful. The stink of her husband’s body had impregnated her skin. Sweat dripped from her armpits, and a profound lassitude prevented her from moving. She seemed still to feel the weight of her husband on top of her. She tentatively reached out an arm and switched off the bedside lamp. Caetano’s breathing gradually grew more regular. Sated, he slipped into sleep. Justina was left alone. The shuddering stopped, her tiredness diminished. Only her mind remained empty of thoughts. Very slowly, small scraps of ideas began to appear. They followed one on the other, fragmentary, inconclusive, with no connecting thread. Justina tried to think about what had happened, tried to grab hold of one of those fleeting ideas, which appeared and disappeared like beans in a boiling pot of water that rise to the surface only to vanish at once. It was still too soon for coherent thought; instead, she was suddenly gripped by horror. What had happened only minutes before seemed to her so absurd she thought she must have dreamed it. However, her bruised body and a strange sense of indefinable plenitude in certain parts of her anatomy gave the lie to that. It was then, and only then, that she was struck, or allowed herself to be struck, by the full horror of it all.

  She did not sleep for what remained of the night. She stared into the darkness, disoriented, unable to think. She had a vague sense that her relationship with her husband had undergone a change. It was as if she had passed from the shadows into the blinding glare of day, preventing her from seeing the surrounding objects except as blurred, indeterminate shapes. She heard the clock strike each and every hour. She observed the withdrawal of night and the approach of morning. Bluish reflections began to seep into the room. The door that opened onto the corridor glowed opalescent in the dim light. With the coming of morning the building filled with vague sounds. Caetano was sleeping, lying on his back, one leg uncovered as far as the groin, a soft, white leg, like the belly of a fish.

  Rebelling against the torpor in her limbs, Justina sat up and remained sitting, back bent, head hanging. Her whole body hurt. She slid out of bed very cautiously so as not to wake her husband, put on her dressing gown and left the room. She still could not string two ideas together, but her involuntary thought processes, the ones that evolve and develop independent of the will, were nevertheless beginning to work.

  It took only a matter of seconds for Justina to reach the bathroom and another moment for her to look at herself in the mirror. She looked and did not recognize her own image. The face before her either did not belong to her or had remained hidden until then. The dark shadows encircling her eyes made them seem still duller. Her cheeks were hollow. Her unruly hair was a reminder of the night’s agitation. None of this, however, was new to her: whenever her diabetes worsened, the mirror showed her just that face. What was different was the expression. She should be indignant and yet she was calm, she should feel offended and yet she felt as if she had pardoned an insult.

  She sat down on a bench in the enclosed balcony. The sun was already slanting in through the topmost panes, striping the wall with a sliver of pink light that gradually grew longer and brighter. In the fresh morning air she could hear the twitter of passing swallows. On an impulse she went back into the bedroom. Her husband had not moved. He was sleeping, his mouth open, his teeth very white in his beard-blackened face. She crept slowly toward the bed and bent over him. Those inert features bore only a remote resemblance to the contorted face she had seen earlier. She remembered that she had spat in that face, and she felt a
fraid, a fear that made her draw back. Caetano stirred slightly. The sheet covering him slipped from his bent leg and left his penis exposed to view. A wave of nausea rose from Justina’s stomach. She fled the room. Only then did the last knot binding up her thoughts come undone. As if trying to make up for lost time, her brain whirred furiously into action until it fixed on one obsessive thought: “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

  She felt neither scorn nor indifference now, only hatred. She hated her husband and she hated herself. She knew that she had given herself to him with the same uninhibited frenzy with which he had possessed her. She took a few indecisive steps about the kitchen, as if lost in a labyrinth. Wherever she turned she met with closed doors and dead ends. Had she been able to remain indifferent, she could have seen herself as the victim of brute force. She knew that, as a married woman, she had no right to refuse, but pure passivity would have been a way of refusing. She could have allowed herself to be possessed without surrendering herself, but she had surrendered herself, and her husband had seen that she had; he would consider this a victory and would behave like a victor. He would impose what laws he liked and laugh in her face when she tried to rebel. A moment’s madness, and the work of years had been destroyed. A moment’s blindness, and strength had become weakness.

  She must think about what she should do, and think quickly before he woke up. Think before it was too late. Think while her hatred was still raw and bleeding. She had given in once and did not want to give in again. However, the memory of what she had felt that night began to trouble her. Until then, she had never scaled the highest peak of pleasure. Even when she used to have normal sexual relations with her husband, she had never experienced the kind of intensity of sensation that makes one both fear and desire madness. She had never been thrown, as then, into the maelstrom of pleasure, with all ties broken, all frontiers crossed. What for other women was an ascent into the heavens was, for her, a fall.