The Collected Novels of José Saramago (313 page)

The first act of the play is over, the scenery has been removed, the actors are resting from their exertions in the final climactic scene. Not a single piece of pottery made by the Algor family remains in the Center’s warehouses, apart from a scattering of red dust on the shelves, it is always as well to recall that the cohesive nature of matter is not eternal, if the continual rubbing of time’s invisible fingers can so easily destroy marble and granite, what will it not do to mere clay of precarious composition and doubtless the product of somewhat hit-and-miss firing. marçal Gacho went unrecognized in the buying department thanks to the beret and dark glasses he was wearing, not to mention his unshaven face, which he had deliberately left unshaven in order to make his protective disguise still more effective, since among the various distinguishing characteristics of a Center security guard is a perfect, closely shaven chin. The assistant head of department was, however, puzzled by the suddenly improved mode of transport, a logical feeling for a person who had more than once allowed himself an ironic smile at the sight of Cipriano Algor’s ancient van, but what was surprising, to say the least, was the barely contained irritation evident in his eyes and in his face when Cipriano Algor informed him that he had come to take away the rest of the crockery, All of it, the man asked, All of it, replied the potter, I’ve brought a truck and someone to help me. If this demonstrably ill-natured assistant head of department were to have any kind of future in the story we have been following, we would probably eventually get around to asking him to explain what lay behind his feelings on that occasion, that is, to explain the underlying reason for his clearly illogical annoyance, which he either made no attempt to hide or else was simply incapable of doing so. He would doubtless try to fob us off by saying, for example, that he had grown used to Cipriano Algor’s daily visits and, although he could not in all honesty say that they were friends, he had grown rather fond of him, especially given the poor man’s distinctly inauspicious professional situation. A barefaced lie, of course, since if we go beyond merely uncovering the depths and excavate the even lower depths, we will see that his sense of exasperation betrayed his frustration at losing that most perverse of pleasures, that of gloating over other people’s misfortunes even when one stands to gain nothing from them oneself. On the pretext that the work would take too long and that they would get in the way of other suppliers unloading their goods, the ghastly man even tried to stop them loading the truck, but Cipriano Algor, as the eloquent phrase has it, dug his heels in, and asked who then would pay for the hire of the truck if they had to turn back, he demanded to be given the complaints book, and his final, desperate gambit was to say that he would not leave until he had spoken to the head of the buying department. Any book on elementary applied psychology, in the chapter on behavior, will tell you that nasty people are often cowards, and so we should not be too surprised that the assistant head of department’s fear of being overruled in public by his hierarchical superior produced an instantaneous change of attitude. He made some rude comment to cover up his feelings of humiliation, then disappeared into the back of the warehouse and remained there until the truck, fully loaded up, had left the basement. Neither Cipriano Algor nor marçal Gacho sang a victory song, either literally or figuratively, they were too tired to waste what was left of their breath on trills and congratulations, the older man merely said, He’ll make our lives a misery when we deliver the other merchandise, he’ll examine the dolls with a magnifying glass and reject them by the dozen, and the younger man said that, yes, he might, but it was by no means certain, and, besides, it was the head of the buying department who was in charge, at least we’ve solved one problem, Pa, and we’ll deal with the next one when it arises, that’s how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both. They had parked the van on a nearby street corner, and it would stay there until they returned from unloading the last bits of crockery in the hollow near the river, then they would return the truck to the garage and, finally, as dusk was falling, they would arrive home, exhausted, more dead than alive, one because he had grown too used to walking the smooth corridors of the Center and had thus lost the healthy habit of physical effort, the other because of the all too familiar disadvantages of age. The dog Found will come down the road to meet them, leaping and barking the way dogs do, and Marta will be waiting at the door. She will ask, So, is it all taken care of then, and they will say, yes, it’s all taken care of, and then all three of them are bound to think or feel, always assuming that there is some imbalance or contradiction between feeling and thinking, that the part that has just finished is the same part that is now impatient to begin, that the first, second, and third acts, whether in the theater or in life, are always part of one play. It is true that some of the props have been removed from the stage, but the clay from which the new props will be made is the same as yesterday’s clay, and the actors, when they wake tomorrow from their sleep in the wings, will place their right foot in front of the mark made by their left foot, then place the left foot in front of the right, and, do what they will, they will not depart from that path. Despite marçal’s exhaustion, he and Marta will repeat, as if it were the first time, the gestures, movements, groans, and sighs of love. And the words too. Cipriano Algor will sleep dreamlessly in his bed. Tomorrow morning, as usual, he will take his son-in-law to work. Perhaps, on the way back, he will have a look at the hollow by the river, for no particular reason, not even out of curiosity, he knows exactly what is there, but despite that, he might nevertheless walk to the edge of the hollow and, if he does, he will look down and wonder if he should cut a few more branches in order to camouflage the pots and plates more effectively, it is as if he did not want anyone to know about them, as if he wanted the pots to stay there, hidden, stored away, until the day when they are needed again, ah, how difficult it is to separate ourselves from what we have made, be it reality or a dream, even if we have actually destroyed it with our own hands.

I’m going to clean out the kiln, said Cipriano Algor when he got home. The dog Found’s previous experiences made him think that his master was about to sit down again on the bench of meditations, the poor man’s mind must still be clouded with conflicts, his life turned upside down, and it is on just such occasions that dogs are most needed, when they sit before us with the infallible question in their eyes, Do you need help, and although, at first glance, it might seem beyond the ken of an animal like that to offer a remedy for pain, anxiety and other human afflictions, perhaps it is only because we are incapable of perceiving what lies beyond our humanity, as if other afflictions in the world only have a tangible reality if they can be measured by our standards or, put more simply, as if only what is human existed. Cipriano Algor did not sit down on the stone bench, he walked straight past it, then, having drawn back, one after the other, the three great bronze bolts installed at different heights, at the top, in the middle and at the bottom, he opened the kiln door, which creaked gravely on its hinges. After the first few days of sensorial investigations, which had satisfied his immediate curiosity as a newcomer, the dog Found had shown no further interest in the kiln. It was a brick structure, old and crudely built, with a high, narrow door, it was a building with no known use and where no one lived, with three things on the top like chimneys, but which were obviously not chimneys, since the provoking smell of food had never once issued forth from them. And now the door had unexpectedly opened and his master had gone inside as nonchalantly as if he were entering his house, just like the other house over there. On principle and as a precautionary measure, a dog should always bark at any surprises life throws at him, because he has no way of knowing beforehand if the good surprises could turn bad or the bad cease to be what they were, therefore Found barked and barked, first out of concern when his master appeared to vanish into the shadowy depths of the kiln, then out of joy to see him emerge whole and with a changed look on his face, these are the small miracles of love, for caring about what you do also deserves that name. When Cipriano Algor went back into the kiln, this time wielding a broom, Found was not in the least concerned, for, when you think about it, a master is in some ways like the sun and the moon, we must be patient when he disappears and wait for time to pass, a dog, of course, will be unable to say whether a long time or a short time has passed, for he cannot distinguish between such periods as an hour and a week, between a month and a year, for such an animal there is only absence and presence. During the cleaning of the kiln, Found made no attempt to go in, he moved to one side to avoid the shower of small fragments of fired clay and shards from broken pots expelled by the broom, and lay down, his head between his paws. He seemed absorbed, half-asleep, but even a person inexperienced in canine ways would know, if only from the furtive manner in which the dog occasionally opened and closed his eyes, that the dog Found was simply waiting. Once the task of cleaning was done, Cipriano Algor left the kiln and went over to the pottery. As long as he remained in view, the dog did not move, then he slowly got up, advanced with outstretched neck toward the kiln door and looked in. It was a strange, empty house with a vaulted ceiling, utterly devoid of furniture or decoration and lined with off-white slabs, but what most impressed Found’s nose was the extreme dryness of the air inside, as well as the pungency of the one perceptible smell, the final smell of an infinite process of calcination, and do not be surprised by that flagrant and conscious contradiction between final and infinite, for we are dealing here not with human sensations, but with what it was humanly practicable for us to imagine a dog might have felt on entering an empty kiln for the first time. Contrary to what one would naturally expect, Found did not mark the new place with urine. It is true that he began to do as instinct ordered him, it is true that he did threateningly raise one leg, but he controlled himself and stopped at the very last moment, perhaps terrified by the surrounding mineral silence, by the rough construction of the place, by the whitish, phantasmagorical color of walls and floor, perhaps, more simply, it was because he thought his master might react violently if the kingdom, throne and dossal of the fire, the crucible in which the ordinary clay dreams of being turned into a diamond, were found to be sullied by urine. With the hairs along his back bristling, with his tail between his legs, as if he had been spurned and driven far away, the dog Found left the kiln. He could not see either of his owners, the house and the countryside looked utterly empty, and the mulberry tree, though this was doubtless merely the effect of the sun’s angle of incidence, seemed to cast a strange shadow that lay on the ground as if it had been cast by an entirely different tree. Contrary to the general view, dogs, however well cared for and however kindly treated, do not have an easy life, first, because they have not as yet reached a satisfactory understanding of the world into which they were born, and, second, because that difficulty is continually exacerbated by the contradictory and unstable behavior of the human beings with whom they share, if we may put it like that, house, food, and occasionally bed. His master has disappeared, his mistress is nowhere to be seen, so the dog Found vents his melancholy and his full bladder on the stone bench whose only use is as a place of meditation. It was then that Cipriano Algor and Marta emerged from the pottery. Found ran to meet them, it is at moments like this that he has the feeling that he is finally going to understand everything, that feeling did not last, however, it never does, his master bawled at him, Get out of here, his mistress, alarmed, shouted, Down, boy, there really is no fathoming these people, only afterward will the dog Found notice that each of his owners is carrying some clay figures balanced on small planks, three apiece and three on each plank, you can imagine how disastrous it would have been if they hadn’t reined in his enthusiasm in time. The funambulists move toward the long drying shelves which, for weeks now, have been empty of plates, mugs, cups, saucers, bowls, jugs, jars, pitchers, pots, and other ornaments for house and garden. These six dolls, which are going to dry in the open air, protected by the shade of the mulberry tree, but touched occasionally by the sun that slips in and out between the leaves, are the advance guard of a new occupation, that of hundreds of identical figures whose serried ranks will fill the long shelves, one thousand two hundred figurines, six times two hundred according to their earlier calculations, but the calculations were wrong, the joy of victory is not always a good counselor, these potters, despite their three generations of experience, seem to have forgotten that, since even scissors can eat the cloth they cut, it is vital to allow some margin for losses, a piece can fall or break, can become distorted, can contract too much or too little, can crack under heat because it was poorly made, can emerge badly fired because of the faulty circulation of hot air, and to all of this, which is directly related to the physical contingencies of a craft that has much to do with alchemy, that, as we know, is not an exact science, to all of this, as we were saying, must be added the rigorous examination to which, as is only to be expected, the Center, not to mention that assistant head of department who seems to have it in for them, will subject each of the dolls. Cipriano Algor only thought of these two threats, one definite and one potential, when he was sweeping out the kiln, that’s the good thing about the association of ideas, they draw each other out, one after the other, the skill lies in not losing the thread, in understanding that a shard of pottery on the ground is not only what it is at present, it is also what it was in the past when it was something else, as well as what it might become in the future.