The Collected Novels of José Saramago (26 page)

Music is something else. Domenico Scarlatti brought a harpsichord to the coach-house, he did not carry it himself, but hired two porters who, with poles, ropes, and a pad filled with horsehair, and much perspiration on their brows, brought it all the way from the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, where it was purchased, to São Sebastião da Pedreira, where it would be played, Baltasar accompanied them to show the way, but they required no other assistance from him, for this method of transportation depends on skill and experience, on knowing how to distribute the weight and combine forces like the pyramid in the traditional dance known as the Bica, knowing how to use the ropes and poles in order to set up a steady pace, these, after all, are the secrets of the porter’s trade and are as valid as any other, for a tradesman worthy of the name tries to acquire as many secret skills as he can. The Galician porters put the harpsichord down outside the gate, for no one wanted them to discover the existence of the flying machine, so Baltasar and Blimunda had to carry it into the coach-house themselves, a hazardous job, not so much because of its weight as because they did not know how to go about it, not to mention that the vibration of the chords were like anguished cries tugging at their heart-strings, which were also seized by alarm and dismay in the face of such extreme fragility. That same afternoon Domenico Scarlatti arrived, sat himself down and began to tune the harpsichord, while Baltasar wove willow canes and Blimunda sewed the sails, jobs they could carry out in silence without disturbing the music. Once he had finished tuning the instrument, adjusting the jacks, which had been disturbed in transit, and checking the duck quills one by one, Scarlatti began to play, starting off by letting his fingers glide over the keys, as if he were releasing notes that had been imprisoned, then organising the sounds in tiny sections, as if choosing between the right and the wrong notes, between harmony and discord, between phrasing and pauses, in short, as if giving new expression to what had previously seemed fragmentary and dissonant. Baltasar and Blimunda knew very little about music apart from the plain-chant sung by the friars, on rare occasions the operatic swell of the Te Deum, popular airs from the city and countryside, some familiar to Blimunda, others to Baltasar, but nothing that could even remotely be compared to the sounds the Italian drew from the harpsichord, which seemed as much a childish game as some fulminating oath, as much a divertissement for angels as the wrath of God.

After an hour, Scarlatti got up from the harpsichord, covered it with a canvas cloth, and then said to Baltasar and Blimunda, who had interrupted their work, If Padre Bartolomeu’s Passarola were ever to fly, I should dearly love to travel in it and play my harpsichord up in the sky, and Blimunda rejoined, Once the machine starts to fly, the heavens will be filled with music, and Baltasar, remembering the war, interjected, Unless the heavens turn out to be hell. This couple can neither write nor read, yet they can say things that seem most unlikely at such a time and in such a place, but since everything has an explanation, we must look for one, and if nothing comes to mind just at present, we shall find it one day. Scarlatti returned many times to the estate of the Duke of Aveiro, he did not always play the harpsichord, but when he did, he sometimes urged them not to interrupt their labours, the forge roaring in the background, the hammer clanging on the anvil, the water boiling in the vat, so that the harpsichord could scarcely be heard above the terrible din in the coach-house, and meanwhile, the musician tranquilly composed his music as if he were surrounded by the vast silence of the space where he hoped to play one day.

Every man follows his own path in search of grace, whatever that grace may be, a simple landscape with the sky overhead, a certain hour of the day or night, two trees, three if they are painted by Rembrandt, a sigh, without our knowing whether this closes or finally opens the path or where the path may lead us, whether to some other landscape, hour, tree, or sigh, behold this priest who is about to cast out one God and replace him with another, without knowing whether this new allegiance will do him any good in the end, behold this musician who would find it impossible to compose any other kind of music and who will no longer be alive a hundred years from now to hear that first symphony, which is mistakenly referred to as the Ninth, behold this one-handed soldier who has ironically become a manufacturer of wings, although he has never risen to being more than a common foot soldier, man rarely knows what to expect from life, and this man least of all, behold this woman with those extraordinary eyes, who was born to perceive wills, her revelations about a tumour, a strangled foetus, and a silver coin were mere child’s play when compared with the wonders she is destined to achieve when Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço returns to the estate of São Sebastião da Pedreira and tells her, Blimunda, Lisbon is stricken by a horrendous plague, people are dying everywhere, and it has just occurred to me that this is an excellent opportunity to collect wills from the dying, if they still have any, but I must warn you that you will be taking a great risk, don’t go unless you really want to, for I shall not put you under any obligation, even if it were within my power to do so, What is this plague, It is rumoured that the plague was carried here by passengers aboard a ship from Brazil and that it first broke out in Ericeira. That’s close to my home, said Baltasar, whereupon the priest reassured him, No deaths have been reported in Mafra, judging from the symptoms, the disease is believed to be the black plague or yellow fever, the name scarcely matters, the fact is that people are dying like flies, you must decide, Blimunda. She got up from her stool, raised the lid of the chest, and brought out a glass phial, How many wills were in there, she wondered, about a hundred, perhaps, but certainly nothing like the number they needed, and even this amount had required a lengthy and arduous search and a great deal of fasting, often to find oneself lost as in a labyrinth, Where is that will, for all I can see are entrails and bones, an agonising maze of nerves, a sea of blood, viscous food lodged in the stomach before finally turning to excrement, Will you go, the priest asked her, I’ll go, she replied, But not on your own, Baltasar added.

Early the next day there were signs of rain when Blimunda and Baltasar left the estate, she still fasting, he carrying their provisions in his knapsack until such time as sheer physical exhaustion or the desire to linger a while would permit or force Blimunda to eat some food. For many hours that day Baltasar was not to see Blimunda’s face, because she always walked in front, warning him to look away whenever she turned her head, this game of theirs is a strange business, the one has no wish to see, the other has no wish to be seen, it looks easy to play, but only they know how difficult it is to avoid looking at each other. As the day draws to a close, Blimunda, who has eaten, finds that her eyes have been restored to normal, and Baltasar begins to emerge from his state of torpor, exhausted not so much by the journey as by not being looked at.

Blimunda has lost no time in visiting the dying. Wherever she goes she is greeted with acclaim and gratitude, no one inquires whether she is a relative or a friend, whether she lives on that very street or in some other district, and because this country is so accustomed to works of mercy, sometimes her presence goes unnoticed, the patient’s bedroom is crammed with visitors, the corridor is blocked, the staircase swarms with people coming up and going down, the traffic is endless, the priest who has administered or is about to administer the last rites, the doctor if they thought it was worth summoning him and had the money to pay him, and the blood-letter who travels from house to house sharpening his knives, no one pays any attention when a woman intent upon theft enters and leaves concealing a glass phial with yellow amber inside, to which the stolen wills stick like birds to lime. Between São Sebastião da Pedreira and Ribeira, Blimunda entered some thirty-two houses and collected twenty-four dark clouds, six of the patients no longer had a will, which might well have been lost many years previously, and in the remaining two patients they were so firmly stuck to their bodies that only death was likely to remove them. In five other houses she visited, she found neither wills nor souls, only corpses, a few tears, and much lamentation.

Everywhere rosemary was being burned to ward off the epidemic, in the streets, in the doorways of houses, and above all in the bedrooms of the sick, there were traces of a bluish haze giving off an unmistakable fragrance, and the city bore no resemblance to that fetid pigsty of healthier times. There was much searching for tongues from St Paul, pebbles in the shape of a bird’s tongue, which are to be found on the beaches that stretch all the way from São Paulo to Santos, whether because of the sanctity of these places or because of the sanctification bestowed by the names, it is well known that such pebbles, and several others that are round in shape and the size of chick-peas, are extremely effective in curing malignant fevers, made of the finest dust, these pebbles can mitigate excessive heat, alleviate gallstones, and sometimes cause perspiration. When ground to a powder, the pebbles are a decisive antidote to poison, whatever it may be and however it may have been administered, especially in the case of a poisonous bite inflicted by some animal or insect, you need only place the tongue from St Paul or the chick-pea over the wound and the poison is sucked out immediately. That explains why these pebbles are also known as snake eyes.

It seems inconceivable that so many people should still have been dying when there were so many remedies and precautions, Lisbon must have committed some irreparable crime in the eyes of God for four thousand people to die from the epidemic within three months, which means that more than forty corpses had to be buried daily. The beaches were stripped of pebbles and the tongues of the diseased were silenced, thus preventing them from complaining that such a cure had proved futile. To deny it would have betrayed their lack of repentance, for no one should be surprised that pebbles ground to a fine powder and dissolved in some beverage or broth can cure malignant fevers, when it is widely known what happened to Mother Teresa of the Annunciation when making sweetmeats and running out of sugar, she sent a messenger to borrow some from a nun in another convent who replied that she could not oblige because her own sugar was of an inferior quality, which greatly distressed Mother Teresa, who thought to herself, What am I going to do with my life, I know, I’ll make some toffee, although it’s a much less refined confection, let us be clear, she did not make toffee with her own life, but with the inferior sugar, but when it reached the setting point, it had become so greatly reduced and yellow that it looked more like resin than an appetising delicacy, ah, how upsetting and with no one else to turn to, Mother Teresa protested to the Lord, reminding Him of His responsibilities, an invariably effective strategy, as we saw in the case of St Antony and the silver lamps, You know perfectly well that I have no more sugar and have no means of finding any, these labours are Yours rather than mine, tell me how I am supposed to serve You, for it is You who provides the wherewithal, not I, and just in case this admonition might not be enough, she cut a tiny piece off the cord that the Lord wears around His waist and put it into the saucepan, and, lo and behold, the mixture began to gain volume and become much lighter in colour, and there was toffee the likes of which had never been tasted since monasteries and convents started producing such delicacies. If no such miracles are worked today in monastic kitchens, it is because the cord Our Lord once wore around His waist no longer exists, having been cut up in tiny pieces and distributed among all the congregations where nuns devoted themselves to making sweetmeats, such times are gone forever.

Exhausted after all that walking and going up and down stairs, Blimunda and Baltasar returned to the estate, seven pale suns and seven waning moons, Blimunda suffering from the most unbearable nausea, as if she were returning from a battlefield after witnessing a thousand bodies being blown to pieces by artillery, and if Baltasar wanted to divine what Blimunda was witnessing, all he had to do was merge into a single recollection his experiences of war and those in the slaughterhouse. They lay together without any desire to make love, not so much because of their fatigue, which, as we know, can often be a wise counsellor of the senses, but because of their acute awareness of their internal organs, as if these were protruding through their skin, perhaps a difficult thing to explain, but it is by means of the skin that bodies come to recognise, know, and accept one another, and if certain deep penetrations, certain intimate contacts occur between the mucus and the skin, the difference is barely perceptible, it is as if one had sought and found a more remote skin. They are both asleep covered by an old blanket and still wearing their clothes, and it is cause for wonder to see such a mighty enterprise entrusted to two vagabonds, who look worse now that the bloom of youth has vanished, like foundation stones soiled by the earth they reinforce and perhaps, like them, overwhelmed by the weight they will have to bear. The moon was slow in appearing that night, they slept and did not see it, but the moonlight filtered through the chinks and slowly pervaded the entire coach-house, the flying machine and, in passing, lit up the glass phial and clearly exposed the dark clouds inside, perhaps because no one was watching or because moonlight is capable of revealing the invisible.

Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço was satisfied with the day’s collection, it was only the first day, and they had been out at random into the heart of a city afflicted by disease and mourning, there were twenty-four wills to be added to the list. After a month, they calculated that they had stored a thousand wills in the phial, a force of elevation that the priest considered sufficient for one globe, so Blimunda was given a second phial. In Lisbon, rumours were rife about this strange couple who roved the city from one end to another, without fear of succumbing to the epidemic, he walking behind, she in front, never breaking their silence as they passed through the streets and entered houses, where they did not tarry, and she lowered her eyes when she had to pass him, and if this daily ritual did not provoke greater suspicion and wonder, it was because of the rumour that they were both doing penance, a ruse invented by Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço when people started to gossip. Had he been a little more imaginative, he would have passed off the mysterious couple as two envoys sent from heaven to assist the dying and to reinforce the effects of extreme unction, which might have weakened from overuse. It takes little or nothing to undo reputations, the merest trifle makes and remakes them, it is simply a question of finding the best means of engaging the confidence or interest of those who are to become one’s unsuspecting echoes or accomplices.