The Collected Novels of José Saramago (12 page)

Sete-Sóis raised himself on the pallet, feeling suspicious and uneasy, You’re making fun of me, no one can look inside people, I can, I don’t believe you, First you insisted on knowing and said you would not rest until you knew, now you know, and you say you don’t believe me, perhaps it’s just as well, but in future don’t take away my bread, I will only believe you if you can tell me what I am feeling this very minute, I can’t see anything unless I’m fasting, besides, I promised that I would never look inside you, I’m sure you’re trying to make fun of me, And I’m telling you it’s the truth, How can I trust you, Tomorrow I shan’t eat anything when I awake, we’ll go out together and then I will tell you what I can see, but I won’t look at you, and you will avoid my eyes, Is that agreed, Agreed, Baltasar replied, but explain this mystery, how did you come by these powers, if you’re not deceiving me, Tomorrow you will see that I am telling the truth, But aren’t you afraid of the Inquisition, others have paid dearly for much less, My powers have nothing to do with heresy or witchcraft, my eyes are quite normal, Yet your mother was flogged and sentenced to exile for having spoken of visions and revelations, did you learn these things from her, It’s not the same thing, I only see what is in the world, I cannot see what lies beyond it, whether it be heaven or hell, I practise neither enchantments nor hypnosis, I simply see things, Yet you signed yourself with your own blood, then made the sign of the cross on my chest with the same blood, surely that is witchcraft, The blood of virginity is the water of baptism, that much I discovered when you possessed me and as I felt you ejaculate inside me, I divined your gestures, What powers are these you possess, I see what exists inside bodies, and sometimes what lurks beneath the earth, I can see what lies below the skin, and sometimes even what is underneath people’s clothing, but I only see these things when I am fasting, I lose my gift when the quarter of the moon changes, but it is soon restored, and I only wish that I did not possess it, Why, Because what the skin conceals ought never to be seen, The soul as well, have you seen into someone’s soul, No, never, Perhaps the soul does not reside in the body after all, I cannot tell you, for I have never seen a soul, Perhaps because the soul cannot be seen, Perhaps, but now let me go, take your leg away, I want to get up.

For the rest of that day, Baltasar wondered if he had really held such a conversation or if he had dreamed it or if he had simply been in Blimunda’s dream. He looked at the enormous carcasses suspended from the iron hooks waiting to be quartered, he strained his eyes, yet all he could see was animal flesh, opaque, flayed, and livid, and as he looked at the lumps and slices of raw meat scattered over the wooden benches and being thrown on to the scales, he realised that Blimunda’s powers were more of a curse than a benefit, the entrails of these animals were not exactly a pleasant sight, which was no doubt equally true of the entrails of people, who are also made of flesh and blood. Besides, he had learned on the battlefield what he was now confirming, namely, that to discover what is inside human beings, you always have to use a cleaver, a cannon ball, a hatchet, the blade of a sword, a knife, or a bullet, only in this way can you pierce the virginity of fragile skin, then the bones and entrails are exposed, and it is not worth blessing yourself with this blood because it is no longer the blood of life, but of death. Although Baltasar’s mind is confused, these are the things he would say if he could order his thoughts and rid them of everything superfluous, it is not even worth asking him, What are you thinking about, Sete-Sóis, for he would only reply, believing himself to be telling the truth, I’m not thinking about anything, and yet he had thought of all these things and much more upon recalling the sight of his own bones, a deathly white in that torn flesh, when they carried him behind the lines, and that severed hand, which he saw being kicked aside by the surgeon’s foot, Bring in the next casualty, and the next to be carried in, wretched fellow, were he to have escaped with his life, would have been left without both legs. One would like to probe these mysteries, but to what purpose, when it ought to be enough for any man to wake up in the morning and feel lying beside him, asleep or awake, the woman who has appeared with time, the same time that will take her tomorrow, perhaps to some other bed, some humble pallet like the one here on the ground, or some luxurious four-poster with marquetry and gilded festoons, because fortunes change and it is madness or a temptation sent by Satan to ask her, Why are you eating your bread with your eyes closed, if you’re blind when you don’t eat, then don’t eat it, Blimunda, and you won’t see so much, for to see as much as you do is the greatest of sorrows, some sixth sense we humans cannot yet withstand, And you, Baltasar, what do you think about, Nothing, I think about nothing, nor can I say if I have ever thought about anything, Hey, Sete-Sóis, fetch that lump of salt pork over there.

He has not slept and she has not slept. Dawn has broken and they have stayed in bed, Baltasar got up only to eat some cold crackling and to drink a mug of wine, then went back, Blimunda remained still, her eyes firmly closed, prolonging her fast so that her powers of vision might be intensified, her eyes sharp and penetrating when they should finally confront the light of day because this is a day for seeing, not just for looking, which may be all right for all those who possess eyes yet suffer from another form of blindness. The morning passed and it was time for dinner, the name given to the midday meal, let us not forget. Blimunda finally gets up, her eyelids barely open, and Baltasar has his second meal, Blimunda, in order to see, eats nothing, Baltasar, even fasting would still see nothing, and then they leave the house together. The day is so tranquil that it seems at variance with these events, Blimunda walks ahead, Baltasar close behind, so that though she does not see him, he will be able to listen when she tells him what she is seeing.

And she tells him, That woman who is seated on the doorstep is carrying a male infant in her womb, but the child has two strands of cord around its neck, so it could either live or die, I cannot be sure what
will happen and this ground we are treading has a top surface of red clay and a layer of white sand underneath, below the sand is gravel, and farther down is granite, right at the bottom is a huge cavity full of water, with the skeleton of a fish bigger than me, that old man who is passing also has an empty stomach, and he’s losing his sight, and the young man staring at me has his penis wasted away by venereal disease and it oozes pus like a tap dripping water, yet despite his infirmity he’s always smiling, his male vanity makes him go on staring and smiling at women in the street, I hope that you suffer from no such vanity, Baltasar, and that you will avoid catching any disease, and there goes a friar who has a solitary worm in his bowels, which he has to nourish by eating enough for two, but he would gorge himself even if he had no such worm, and now observe those men and women kneeling before the Shrine of St Crispin, you see them make the sign of the cross, and strike their breasts and one another as an act of penance, but what I see there are sackfuls of excrement and worms and a tumour that will end up strangling the man, he doesn’t know yet, but tomorrow he will know, and then, as now, it will be much too late, for the tumour is incurable, But how can I believe these things to be true, when I cannot see them with my own eyes, Baltasar asked her, whereupon Blimunda told him, Make a hole over there in the ground with your spike and you will unearth a silver coin, Baltasar obeyed, he made a hole in the ground and extracted a coin, You were wrong, Blimunda, the coin is made of gold, All the better for you, I should not have ventured to make any guesses, because I always confuse silver with gold, nevertheless, I did foretell that you would find a coin and that it would be precious, what more can you ask, when you have been told the truth and found something of value, and if the Queen passed by this very minute, I could tell you that she is pregnant again, but it is still too early to verify whether it will be a boy or a girl, my mother always used to say that the worst thing about the female womb is that, when it has swollen once, it has a tendency to go on swelling over and over again, I can also tell you that the quarter of the moon has started to change, because I can feel my eyes burning and there are yellow shadows passing before them like vermin crawling and extending their claws, gnawing at my eyes, for the love of God, Baltasar, I beg of you to take me home and give me something to eat, and then lie down beside me, walking ahead of you, I cannot see you, and I have no wish to see inside you, I only want to look at you, at that swarthy, bearded face, those tired eyes, and that sad expression even when you lie at my side and make love to me, take me home, I shall walk behind you with my eyes lowered, for I have sworn never to look inside you, I shall keep that oath and deserve to be punished if I ever break my promise.

Let us now raise our eyes, for it is time to watch the Infante Dom Francisco firing shots from the window of his palace on the banks of the Tagus at the sailors perched on the yards of their ships to prove what a good shot he is, and when he hits, they fall on to the deck, all of them bleeding profusely, several of them dead and when he misses, they are left with broken limbs, the Infante claps his hands with irrepressible glee, while his footmen reload his gun, one of the footmen might even be the brother of that wounded sailor, but from this distance not even the voice of blood and kinship can be heard, there goes another blast, another shout, and another casualty, and the quartermaster does not dare to order the sailors to get down, for fear that he should annoy His Royal Highness, besides, no matter how many casualties, the manoeuvres have to be carried out, and the interpretation that the quartermaster does not dare annoy His Royal Highness is the ingenuous opinion of someone viewing events from afar and it is much more likely that no such humane considerations even enter his head, There goes that son of a bitch taking potshots at my sailors who are preparing to sail across the ocean to make fresh discoveries in India or Brazil and all he can do is order them to scrub the decks instead, and there we shall leave the matter rather than bore the reader with tiresome repetition, after all, if the sailors are ultimately fated to die beyond the straits from bullets fired by some French pirate, it is preferable that they be shot here, for, dead or wounded, at least they are in their own country, and speaking of French pirates, our gaze travels as far as Rio de Janeiro, where a French armada has invaded without firing a single shot, for the Portuguese officials, whether responsible for governing on land or sea, were having their siesta, the French were free to anchor at their convenience and disembarked without being challenged, they behaved as if they were on their own territory, and the Governor acceded
to their demands by giving formal instructions that no one was to attempt to remove or conceal their possessions, he must have had his own good reasons, at least those induced by fear, and the French exploited the situation by looting and plundering everything they could find, anything they were unable to remove and transport back to their ships, they sold and auctioned in the public squares, and there was no lack of customers to purchase what the French had stolen from them within the last hour and they could scarcely have shown more contempt for the Portuguese authorities as they set fire to the Treasury Buildings, and some of the invaders marauded in the surrounding countryside, at the instigation of Jewish informers who put them on the trail of caches of gold and treasure belonging to certain high-ranking officials, outrages committed by some two or three thousand Frenchmen against our force often thousand, the Governor was clearly in collusion with the enemy, so no more need be said, there were also many traitors among the Portuguese forces, although appearances can be deceptive, for example, the soldiers from the regiments of Beira who, as we mentioned, went over to the enemy were not deserters, they simply went where they could be sure of finding something to eat and others returned to their homes, which is only to be expected and scarcely an act of disloyalty, any nation that wants soldiers so that it may lead them to their death should at least try to feed and clothe them while they are still alive, and not leave them to rove barefoot and in tatters without any discipline or military manoeuvres, for these same men would derive greater satisfaction from putting their own captain in the line of fire than from wounding a Spaniard on the opposing side, and what could be more amusing than the sight of those thirty ships from France we mentioned earlier. Some claimed to have seen them from Peniche, others in the nearby Algarve, and as a precaution the watch-towers on the Tagus were garrisoned and the entire marine force put on the alert as far as Santa Apolónia, it is unlikely that the ships could have made their way downriver from Santarem or Tancos, but the French are capable of anything, and because the Portuguese had few ships at their disposal, they sought the assistance of some English and Dutch convoys that were at hand, combined forces were then positioned to confront the enemy, which was believed to be approaching
in that imaginary zone and just as on the famous occasion when a fishing fleet landing cod was mistaken for an invading fleet, this time the supposed enemy turned out to be a consignment of wine from Porto, the ships assumed to be French men-of-war were in fact English trading vessels, and their crews had a jolly good laugh at our expense, foreigners find us an easy target for jokes, although it should be said that we are also quite good at making them about ourselves, We might as well be frank, our stupidity is clear for all to see, without recourse to Blimunda’s visionary powers, and then there was the episode of the clergyman, who frequented prostitutes who did everything to please their client, and, better still, allowed their client to do everything he pleased, thus satisfying the appetites of the stomach while indulging those of the flesh, and this clergyman dutifully said his Masses but whenever he saw his chance would make off with any valuables in sight, until one day he was denounced by a prostitute from whom he had taken a great deal more than he had given, the bailiffs arrived to arrest him by order of the district magistrate at a house where he had moved in with other innocent women, they forced an entry but were so haphazard in carrying out their search that they failed to find him, the clergyman was hiding in one bed while they searched another, thus allowing him enough time to make his escape, stark naked, he scampered down the stairs, clearing his way with kicks and punches, the bailiffs’ men took quite a beating and, muttering to themselves, chased after this lecherous clergyman, who knew how to use his fists, they pursued him down the Rua dos Espingardeiros at eight o’clock in the morning, just as people were getting out of bed, a fine start to the day, with howls of laughter coming from every door and window in the street as the naked clergyman ran like a hare, the bailiffs’ men in hot pursuit, his mighty penis erect, and may God bless him, for a man so well endowed should not be servicing altars but women in bed, the sight of his penis gave quite a shock to the female residents, poor souls, taken unawares, just as the innocent women who were praying in the Church of Conceição Velha were taken unawares when they saw the clergyman rush down the aisle panting for breath, as naked as Adam but covered with sins, sounding bell clappers and rattles, he appeared at the stroke of one, hid at the stroke of two, and had disappeared forever at the stroke of three and the providential intervention of the clergy played some part in this vanishing trick and after covering his nakedness, they helped him escape over the rooftops, an incident which need cause no great surprise for the Franciscan friars of Xabregas are notorious for hoisting women up into their cells and enjoying their favours, and at least this clergyman climbed on foot to the brothels, where the women longed to receive the sacrament, as usual, everything oscillates between sin and penance, for it is not only during the Holy Week processions that excited flagellants come out on the streets, how many wicked thoughts the women who live in the centre of Lisbon must have to confess, and those sanctimonious old maids of Conceição Velha, once they have feasted their eyes on that lustful clergyman with the bailiffs’ men after him, Catch him, catch him, and how they wished they could catch him for something else I could mention, ten paternosters, ten salve reginas, and an offering of ten réis to our patron, St Antony, and to lie down for a whole hour, with arms crossed, on one’s stomach, as prostration demands, or on one’s back, which is a position of the most heavenly pleasure, but always lifting up one’s thoughts and not one’s skirts, for that is being reserved for the next sin.