The Collected Novels of José Saramago (119 page)

Jesus rose to his feet and left. Heading for the gate through which he had entered, he paused and looked back. The column of smoke coming from the sacrificial fires climbed into the heavens, where it dispersed and vanished, as if sucked in by God’s mighty lungs. It was mid-morning, more and more people were arriving, while inside the Temple sat a man broken by a sense of emptiness, waiting to regain his composure so that he could reply calmly to one who came wanting to know if the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife turned into was rock salt or sea salt, or if Noah got drunk on white wine or red wine. Outside the Temple, Jesus asked the way to Bethlehem, his second destination. He lost his way twice amid the confusion of streets and people before he found the gate through which he had passed while inside his mother’s womb thirteen years earlier, almost ready to enter the world. But this was not in Jesus’ mind, because the obvious, as we all know, clips the wings of the restless bird of imagination, if any reader of this gospel were to look at a photograph of his pregnant mother when she was carrying him, for example, could he possibly imagine himself inside that womb. Jesus descends in the direction of Bethlehem, now he can reflect on the scribe’s answers not just to his own question but also to the questions raised by others. What worries him is the feeling that all those questions were really one question, and that the reply given to each answered all, especially the last reply, which summed up the rest, the insatiable hunger of the wolf of guilt that is forever gnawing, devouring, and spewing up. Thanks to the fickleness of memory we often do not know, or know but try to forget, what caused our guilt, or, speaking metaphorically like the scribe, the lair of the wolf that pursues us. But Jesus knows, and that is where he is going. He has no idea what he’ll do when he gets there, but this is better than announcing, I am here, and waiting for someone to ask, What do you want, punishment, pardon, or oblivion.

Like his father and mother before him, he stopped at Rachel’s tomb to pray. Then, feeling his heart beat faster and faster, he resumed his journey. The first houses of Bethlehem were within sight, this is the main road into the village, taken by his homicidal father and the soldiers in his dream night after night. In daylight it doesn’t seem a place of horror, even the tranquil white clouds drifting across the sky are benevolent gestures from God, and the very earth slumbers beneath the sun, as if bidding us, Let’s leave things as they are, there’s nothing to be gained by digging up the past, and before a woman with a child in her arms appears at a window asking, Who are you looking for, turn back, erase your footprints, and pray that the endless motion of the hourglass of time will quickly obliterate with its dust all memory of those events. Too late. There is a moment when a fly about to brush past the web still has time to escape, but once it touches the web and finds its wing caught, then the slightest movement suffices to trap and paralyze it completely, forever, however indifferent the spider to its new victim. For Jesus, that moment has passed. In the middle of a square with a spreading fig tree stands a tiny square building, and one does not have to look twice to see it is a tomb. Jesus approached, walked around it slowly, paused to read the faded inscription on one side, and this was enough, he had found what he was looking for. A woman crossed the square, leading a five-year-old child by the hand. She stopped, looked inquisitively at the stranger, and asked him, Where do you come from, and to justify her question added, You’re not from these parts. No, I’m from Nazareth in Galilee. Have you relatives here. No, I was visiting Jerusalem, and it seemed a good opportunity to take a look at Bethlehem. Are you passing through. Yes, I’ll return to Jerusalem later this afternoon, when it gets cooler. Lifting the child onto her left arm, the woman told him, May the Lord go with you, then turned to leave, but Jesus detained her, asking, Whose tomb is this. The woman pressed the child to her bosom, as if to protect it from some threat, and replied, Twenty-five little boys, who died years ago, are buried here. How many. Twenty-five. I mean how many years ago. Oh, about fourteen. So many. I think that’s right, they would be your age if they were alive today. Yes, but what about the little boys. One of them was my brother. You have a brother buried here. Yes. And this child in your arms, is he your son. He’s my firstborn. Why did they kill only the little boys. No one knows, I was only seven at the time. But you must have heard your parents and the other grown-ups talking about it. There was no need, I myself saw some of the children being killed. Your brother as well. Yes, my brother. And who killed them. The king’s soldiers came searching for little boys up to the age of three, and they killed all of them. Yet you don’t know why. No one knows to this day. And after Herod died, did anyone go to the Temple to ask the priests to investigate. I really don’t know. If the soldiers had been Romans, one might understand it, but to have our own king ordering his people slaughtered, mere babes, seems very strange, unless there was some reason. The will of kings is beyond our understanding, may the Lord go with you and protect you. It’s a long time since I was three. At the hour of death men go back to being children, replied the woman before departing.

Once alone, Jesus knelt beside the boulder covering the entrance to the tomb, took the last piece of stale bread from his pack, rubbed it into crumbs between his palms, and sprinkled the crumbs all along the entrance, as if making an offering to the invisible mouths of the innocents buried
there. As he finished, another woman appeared from around the corner, but this woman was very old and bent and walked with the aid of a stick. No longer able to see clearly, she had caught only a fuzzy glimpse of what the boy did. She stopped, watched him carefully, saw him get to his feet and bow his head as if praying for the repose of the souls of those unfortunate infants, and although it is customary, we will refrain from adding the word eternal to souls, for our imagination failed us on the one and only occasion we tried to picture eternal rest. Jesus ended his prayer and looked around him, blank walls, closed doors, nothing except the old woman standing there, dressed in a slave’s tunic and leaning on her stick, the living image of that third part of the sphinx’s famous enigma about the animal that walks on four feet in the morning, two at midday, and three in the evening, It is man, replied astute Oedipus, who forgot that some do not even get as far as midday, and that in Bethlehem alone twenty-five infants were cut down. The old woman drew closer, hobbling at a snail’s pace, and now she stands before Jesus, twists her neck to get a better view of him, and asks, Are you looking for someone. The boy did not answer immediately, in fact he was not looking for anyone, those he sought are all dead, buried here, and are not even what you could call someone, mere infants still in diapers and with pacifiers in their mouths, whimpering, their noses running, yet death struck and turned them into an enormous presence that cannot be contained in any ossuary or reliquary, these are bodies that come out of their graves each night, if there is any justice, to show their wounds, the holes that, opened at sword point, allowed life to escape, No, replied Jesus, I am not. The old woman did not go, she seemed to be waiting for him to continue, so Jesus confided, I was born in this village, in a cave, and was curious to see the place. She stepped back unsteadily and strained her eyes to get a better look, her voice trembling as she asked him, What is your
name, where do you come from, who are your parents. No one needs to answer a slave, but the elderly, however low their station, deserve our respect, we must never forget that they have little time left for asking questions, it would be cruel in the extreme to ignore them, after all we might possess the very answer they have been waiting for. My name is Jesus and I come from Nazareth of Galilee, the boy told her, and he seems to have been saying nothing else since he left home. The old woman stepped forward again, And your parents, what are their names. My father’s name was Joseph, my mother is Mary. How old are you. I’m almost fourteen. The woman looked around her, as if seeking a place to sit, but a square in Bethlehem of Judaea is not the same as a garden in Sao Paulo de Alcântara, with its park benches and pleasant view of the castle, here we have to sit on the dusty ground, at best on a doorstep or, if there’s a tomb, on the stone by the entrance put there for the respite of the living who come to mourn their loved ones, and perhaps also for those ghosts who leave their rest to shed any remaining tears, as does Rachel, in the tomb nearby, where it is written, Here lies Rachel who weeps for her children and seeks no consolation, for one does not need to be as shrewd as Oedipus to see that this place befits the circumstances, and Rachel’s weeping the cause of her grief. The old woman lowered herself onto the stone with effort, and the boy went to help her, but too late, for halfhearted gestures are never made in time. I know you, the old woman told him. You must be mistaken, said Jesus, I’ve never been here before and I never saw you in Nazareth. The first hands to touch you were not your mother’s but mine. How is that, old woman. My name is Salome, and I was the midwife who delivered you. Acting on impulse, which only goes to prove the sincerity of gestures made spontaneously, Jesus fell to his knees at the old woman’s feet, wanting both to know everything and to show his gratitude for bringing him out of
a limbo without memory into a world that would mean nothing without memory. My mother never mentioned you, said Jesus. There was no need, your parents appeared on my master’s doorstep, and I was asked to help, since I had some experience as a midwife. Was that when the innocents were massacred. That’s right, you were fortunate they didn’t find you. Because we lived in a cave. It was either that or because you’d already left, I never found out, for when I went to see what had happened to you, the cave was empty. Do you remember my father. Yes, I remember him well, at that time he was in his prime, a fine figure of a man, and honest. He’s dead. Poor man, he didn’t live long, but if you’re his heir, what are you doing here, for I assume your mother is still alive. I came to see the place where I was born, also to learn more about the children who were slaughtered here. God alone knows why they had to die, the angel of death, disguised as Herod’s soldiers, descended into Bethlehem and slew them. So you believe it was God’s will. I’m only an old slave, but all my life I’ve heard people say that everything that happens in this world can happen only by the will of God. So it is written. God may decide to take me any day now, that I can understand, but these were innocent little children. Your death will be decided by God in His own good time, but it was a man who ordered that the children be killed. The hand of God, then, can do precious little if it cannot come between the sword and little children. You mustn’t offend the Lord, good woman. An ignorant old woman like me isn’t likely to cause any offense. Today in the Temple I heard it said that every human action, however insignificant, interferes with the will of God, and that man is free only in order to be punished. My punishment doesn’t come from being free, it comes from being a slave, the old woman told him. Jesus fell silent. He hardly heard Salome’s words, because it suddenly dawned on him that man is a mere toy in the hands of God and forever subject to His will, whether he imagines himself to be obeying or disobeying Him.

The sun was going down, and the fig tree’s evil shadow lengthened and came closer. Jesus spoke to the old woman. Salome raised her head with effort, What do you want, she asked. Take me to the cave where I was born, or at least tell me how to get there, if it’s too far for you to walk. I’m not very steady on my feet, but you won’t find it unless I show you. Is it far from here. No, but there are many caves and they all look alike. Let’s go, then. As you wish, she said. Anyone who happened to be watching that day, when Salome and the unknown boy passed by, must have asked himself where those two could have met. But no one ever knew, because the old slave revealed nothing to the day she died, and Jesus never again returned to the land of his birth. Next morning Salome went to the cave where she had left the boy. No sign of him. She was relieved, because even if he had still been there, they would have had nothing more to say to each other.

M
UCH HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT LIFE’S COINCIDENCES BUT
little or nothing about the everyday encounters that guide the course of life, although one could argue that an encounter, strictly speaking, is a coincidence, which obviously does not mean that all coincidences have to be encounters. Throughout this gospel there have been many coincidences, and if we look carefully at the life of Jesus, especially after he left home, we can see that there has been no lack of encounters either. Leaving aside his unfortunate adventure with the thieves, since it is too early to tell what the consequence of that might be in the future, Jesus’ first journey on his own has resulted in many meetings, such as the providential appearance of the Pharisee, thanks to whom the boy not only satisfied his hunger but, by eating in haste, reached the Temple in time to listen to the questions and answers that prepared the ground, as it were, for his question about guilt, the question that brought him all the way from Nazareth. When critics discuss the rules of effective narration, they insist that important encounters, in fiction as in life, be interspersed with others of no importance, so that the hero of the story does not find himself transformed into an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens. They argue that this narrative approach best serves the ever desirable effect of verisimilitude, for if the episode imagined and described is not, and is not likely to become or supplant, factual reality, there must at least be some similitude, not as in the present narrative, where the reader’s credence has clearly been put to the test, Jesus having taken himself to Bethlehem only to come face-to-face as soon as he arrives, with Salome, who assisted at his birth, as if that other encounter, with the woman carrying a child in her arms, whom we deliberately planted there to fill in the story, had not been license enough. The most incredible part of our story, however, is yet to come, after the slave Salome accompanies Jesus to the cave and leaves him there at his request, Leave me alone between these dark walls, that I may hear my first cry in the deep silence, if echoes can last that long. These were the words the woman thought she heard, and so they are recorded here, at the risk of once more offending verisimilitude, but, then, we can always blame the unreliable testimony of a senile old woman. Unsteady on her feet, Salome hobbled off, moving cautiously, one step at a time and leaning heavily on her staff, which she gripped with both hands. It would have been a nice gesture on the boy’s part to help this poor, suffering creature return home, but such is youth, selfish and thoughtless, and there is nothing to suggest that Jesus was different from other boys his age.