The Stone Raft (Harvest Book)

by José Saramago

  And now this woman called Maria Guavaira, such a strange name, who climbed up into the attic of the house and found an old sock, of the real old-fashioned kind that were used to keep money as safely as in any bank vault, symbolic hoardings, gratuitous savings, and upon finding the sock empty she set about unraveling the stitches to amuse herself, having nothing else with which to occupy her hands. An hour passed and another and yet another, and the long strand of blue wool is still unwinding, yet the sock does not appear to get any smaller, the four enigmas already mentioned were not enough, which shows us that at least on this occasion the contents can be greater than the container. The sound of the waves does not reach this silent house, the shadow of passing birds does not darken the window, there must be dogs but they do not bark, the earth, if it trembled, trembles no more. At the feet of the woman unraveling the thread is the mountain that goes on growing. Maria Guavaira is not called Ariadne, with this thread we shall not emerge from the labyrinth, perhaps it will help us to succeed at last in losing ourselves. Where is the end of this thread.

  The first crack appeared in a large slab of natural stone, as smooth as the table of the winds, somewhere in these mountains of Alberes, which, at the eastern end of the Pyrenees, slope gently down to the sea and where the ill-starred dogs of Cerbère now rove, an allusion that is not inappropriate in time or place, for all these things, despite their appearances, are interconnected. Excluded, as has been stated, from any domestic sustenance, and consequently forced by necessity to recall in his unconscious memory the skills of his predatory ancestors in order to catch some stray rabbit, one of those dogs, Ardent by name and endowed with the acute hearing characteristic of the species, must have heard the stone cracking, for, although incapable of sniffing, the dog approached the stone, dilating his nostrils, his hairs bristling as much from curiosity as from fear. The crack, ever so fine, would remind any human observer of a line drawn with the sharpened point of a pencil, altogether different from that other line made with a branch on hard soil or in the loose, soft dust, or in the mud, should we choose to waste our time on such daydreams. But as the dog was approaching, the crack grew bigger, grew deeper and began to spread, splitting the stone up to the edges of the slab, and then all the way across, there was room to put a hand inside, a whole arm in width and length, had there been any man around with enough courage to cope with this phenomenon. The dog Ardent prowled around, agitated, yet unable to escape, attracted by the snake of which neither the head nor the tail could be seen, and suddenly he was lost, not knowing on which side to stay, whether in France, where he now found himself, or in Spain, no more than three spans away. But this dog, thanks be to God, was not one of those creatures who adapt to situations, the proof being that, with a single jump, he leapt over the abyss, if you'll pardon the obvious exaggeration in this expression, and ended up on this side, he preferred the infernal regions, and we shall never know what longings influence a dog's soul, what dreams, what temptations.

  The second crack, but for the world the first, appeared a considerable distance away, toward the Bay of Biscay, not far from a place called Roncevalles, alas all too famous in the history of Charlemagne and his twelve Paladins, where Roland died when he blew on Oli-phant, without Angelica or Durandal to come to his assistance. There, descending along the northeastern strip of the Sierra Abodi, runs the River Irati, which, originating in France, flows into the Spanish Erro, in its turn an affluent of the Aragón, which is a tributary of the Ebro, which, bearing all their waters, will finally deposit them in the Mediterranean. At the bottom of the valley, on the edge of the Irati, there is a town, Orbaiceta by name, and upstream exists a dam, or weir, as it is called in those parts.

  It is time to explain that what is reported here, or may come to be reported, is the truth and nothing but the truth, as you may verify on any map, provided it is sufficiently comprehensive to include certain details that might seem insignificant, for that is the virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein. And it does. We've already mentioned the rod of destiny, we've already shown that a stone, even if it be removed from the highest tidemark, can end up falling into the sea or make its way back to the shore, now it is the turn of Orbaiceta, where, after the salutary upheaval caused by the construction of the dam many years ago, calm had been restored, a city in the Province of Navarre and dormant amid mountains, now thrown into turmoil once more. For some days Orbaiceta became the nerve center of Europe, if not of the world, invaded by government ministers, politicians, civil and military authorities, geologists and geographers, journalists and mineralogists, photographers, film and television crews, engineers of every kind, inspectors and sightseers. But Orbaiceta's fame will not last for long, a few fleeting days, not much longer than the roses of Malherbe, and how long could the latter, grown on poor soil, have lasted, but we are talking about Orbaiceta, nothing else, until some more notable event is reported elsewhere, which is what happens with notable events.

  In the history of rivers there had never been anything like it, water flowing eternally and suddenly it flows no more, like a tap abruptly turned off, as when someone is washing his hands in a basin after shutting off the tap, he pulls the plug, the water drains away, goes down the pipe, disappears, what has remained in the enameled basin will soon evaporate. To put it more aptly, the waters of the Irati retreated like waves that ebb from the shore and vanish, leaving the riverbed exposed, nothing but pebbles, mud, slime, fishes that gasp as they leap and die, then sudden silence.

  The engineers were not on the spot when this incredible event took place, but they noticed that something abnormal had occurred, the dials on the observation panels indicated that the river had stopped feeding the great aquatic basin. Three technicians set off in a jeep to investigate the intriguing development, they made their way along the edge of the weir, considered the different possible hypotheses, they had plenty of time to do so for they traveled almost five kilometers, and one of those hypotheses was that a subsidence or landslide on the mountain might have diverted the river's course, another was that it might be the work of the French, typical Gallic perfidy, notwithstanding the bilateral agreement about fluvial waters and their hydroelectric uses, yet another hypothesis, and the most radical of all, was that the source, the fountainhead, the spring, had dried up, the eternity that appeared to exist but did not exist after all. On this point, opinions were divided. One of the engineers, a quiet man, the thoughtful type, and someone who enjoyed life in Orbaiceta, feared that they might send him to some remote place, the others rubbed their hands with glee, perhaps they might be transferred to one of the dams on the Tagus, or closer to Madrid and the Gran Via. Debating these personal worries they reached the far end of the reservoir, where they found a drainage ditch but no river, nothing but a thin trickle of water still seeping from the soft earth, a muddy swirl that would not have enough power to turn a toy waterwheel. Where the devil can the river have got to, exclaimed the driver of the jeep, and he couldn't have been more forthright and explicit. Puzzled, amazed, uneasy and concerned, the engineers once more began discussing among themselves the various hypotheses mentioned earlier, and when they saw that there was nothing to be gained from this discussion, they returned to the offices attached to the dam, then went on to Orbaiceta where the administrators awaited them, having already been informed of the river's mysterious disappearance. There were recriminations, exclamations of disbelief, telephone calls to Pamplona and Madrid, and the final outcome of these exhausting discussions was expressed in an order of the utmost simplicity, broken down into three successive and complementary stages, follow the course of the river upstream, find out what happened, and say nothing to the French.

  Next morning before sunrise, the expedition set out for the frontier, keeping alongside or in sight of the parched river, and when the inspectors arrived, weary, they realized that there would be no more Irati. Through a crack that could not have been more than three meters
wide, the waters rushed into the earth, roaring like a tiny Niagara. On the other side, the French had already started to gather, it would have been sublimely naive to think that their neighbors, astute and Cartesian, would have failed to notice the phenomenon, but at least they showed themselves to be as amazed and dumbfounded as the Spaniards on this side, and all brothers in ignorance. The two sides got around to speaking, but the conversation was neither wide-ranging nor profitable, little more than exclamations of justified alarm, a tentative airing of new hypotheses on the part of the Spaniards, in short, a general atmosphere of irritation that could find no obvious target, the French were soon smiling, after all they continued to be masters of the river down to the frontier, they would not need to modify their maps.

  That afternoon, helicopters from both countries flew over the area, took photographs, observers were lowered with windlasses and suspended over the cataract, they looked and saw nothing, only the black gaping hole and the curving line and the shining surface of the water. In order to make some useful progress, the municipal authorities of Orbaiceta on the Spanish side, and of Larrau on the French side, met near the river under a tent set up for the occasion and dominated by the three flags, the Spanish bicolor and the French tricolor alongside the flag of Navarre, with the intention of examining the tourist potential of a natural phenomenon that must certainly be unique in the world, and how it might be exploited to their mutual advantage. Having considered the inadequacy and undoubtedly makeshift nature of the methods of analysis at their disposal, the gathering failed to draw up any document defining the obligations and rights of each party, so a joint commission was nominated and entrusted with preparing an agenda for another formal meeting, with all possible haste. At the last minute, however, a complication arose that upset the relative consensus they had reached, this being the almost simultaneous interventions, in Madrid and Paris, of the two States' delegates to the permanent commission charged with settling boundary disputes. These gentlemen expressed grave misgivings. The first thing to do was to see where the hole was opening up, whether toward the Spanish side or toward the French side. It seemed a trivial detail, but once the essentials had been explained, the delicacy of the matter became clear. It was clearly beyond question that from now on the Irati belonged entirely to France, under the jurisdiction of the district authorities in the Lower Pyrenees, but if the crack was entirely on the Spanish side, in the province of Navarre, further negotiations would be needed, since both countries, in a sense, would bear an equal share. If, on the other hand, the crack extended to the French side as well, then the problem was entirely French, just as the respective primary resources, the river and the gaping hole, belonged to them. Faced with this new situation, the two authorities, concealing any mental reservations, agreed to keep in touch until some solution could be found to this crucial problem. In their turn, with a joint declaration that had been laboriously drafted, the two nations' Ministries for Foreign Affairs announced their intention of pursuing urgent talks within the scope of the aforesaid permanent commission for boundary matters, to be advised, as one would expect, by their respective teams of geodetic experts.

  It was about this time that vast numbers of geologists from all over the world began to appear on the scene. Between Orbaiceta and Larrau there were already a considerable number of foreign geologists, if not quite as many as suggested earlier. But now all the wise men of this and other lands began to arrive in force, the inspectors of landslides and natural disasters, erratic strata and blocks, each carrying a tiny hammer in one hand, tapping on everything that so much as looked like stone. A French journalist called Michel, something of a wit, quipped to a Spanish colleague, a serious fellow named Miguel, who had already reported to Madrid that the crack was de-fi-nite-ly Spanish, or, to speak in geographical and nationalist terms, Navarrese, Why don't you people just keep it, was what the insolent Frenchman said, if the crack gives you so much pleasure and you need it so badly, after all, in the Cirque de Gavarnie alone we have a waterfall four hundred and twenty meters high, we don't need any inverted artesian wells. Miguel could have replied that on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees there are also plenty of waterfalls, and some of them very fine and high, but the problem was different here, a waterfall open to the sky presents no mystery, always looks the same, in full view of everyone, while in the case of the Irati, you can see where the crack originates, but no one knows where it ends, just like life itself. But it was another journalist, a Galician, moreover, who was passing through, as often happens with Galicians, who came up with the question that had yet to be asked, Where does this water go. This was at a time when geologists in both camps were engaged in scientific discussions, and the question, like that of a timid child, was barely heard by the person who is now putting it on record. Since the accent was Galician, therefore discreet and cautious, it was drowned out by Gallic rapture and Castilian bluster, but then others arrived to repeat the question, proudly claiming to have thought of it first, but then no one pays any heed to tiny nations, this is not a persecution mania, but a historical fact. The debate among the wise men had become almost incomprehensible for the layman, yet two basic theories emerged nonetheless from their discussions, that of the monoglaciologists and that of the polyglaciologists, both inflexible, and soon in opposition, like two conflicting religions, the one monotheist, the other polytheist. Certain statements even sounded interesting, such as the one about deformations, certain deformations that might be due either to a tectonic elevation or to an isotonic compensation for erosion. All the more so, they added, since our examination of the actual forms of the cordillera allows us to conclude that it is not old, that is to say, not old in geological terms. All this, probably, had something to do with the crack. After all, when a mountain is subjected to such play of traction, it is not surprising that there comes a day when it finds itself obliged to give way, to splinter, to collapse, or, as in this instance, to crack open. This was not the case with the great slab lying inert on the mountains of Alberes, but the geologists had not seen it, the slab was far away, in a remote spot, no one came near it, the dog Ardent chased after the rabbit and did not return.

  After two days, the members of the commission for boundaries were engaged in field work, taking measurements with their theodolites, checking against their tables, calculating with their instruments, and comparing all these data against the aerial photographs, the French somewhat disgruntled because there was no longer any doubt that the crack was Spanish, as the journalist Miguel had been the first to argue, when suddenly there was news of another fracture. No more was said about tranquil Orbaiceta nor about the River Irati, now cut off, sic transit gloria mundi and of Navarre. The journalists, some of whom were women, swarmed on to the crucial site in the Eastern Pyrenees, fortunately endowed with excellent means of access, so many and so excellent that within a few hours everyone who mattered was assembled there, people had even come from as far away as Toulouse and Barcelona. The highways were congested, and by the time the police on both sides of the border intervened to divert the flow of traffic it was much too late, the cars stretched for kilometer after kilometer, mechanical chaos, it soon became necessary to take drastic measures, to make everyone turn back in the other lane, which meant pulling down barriers, jamming the sides of the road with cars, an inferno, the Greeks had good reason to locate hell in this region. Particularly useful in dealing with the crisis were the helicopters, those flying constructions or airships capable of landing almost anywhere, and, whenever it proves impossible to land, they imitate the hummingbird, drawing close until they almost touch the flower, the passengers do not need a ladder, a little jump and that is all, they enter the corolla at once, amid the stamens and pistils, breathing in the aroma, frequently that of naphtha and charred flesh. Heads lowered, they set off running, anxious to find out what has happened, some of them have come straight from the Irati, already experienced in structural geology, but not equipped to cope with anything quite like this.