The Collected Novels of José Saramago (335 page)

Given that preference is likely to be given to a device blessed with the seal of academic approval, the easiest thing for the relater or narrator, having reached this point, would be to say that nothing happened during the history teacher’s homeward journey across the city. Like a time machine, especially when
professional scruples will not permit the invention of a public fracas or a traffic accident just to fill in any gaps in the plot, those words, Nothing Happened, are used when there is an urgent need to move on to the next incident or when, for example, one does not know quite what to do with the character’s own thoughts, especially if these bear no relation to the existential milieu in which the character is supposed to live and work. The teacher and fledgling lover of videos, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, is in precisely this situation as he is driving his car. He was in fact thinking, a lot and very intensely, but his thoughts bore so little relevance to the last twenty-four hours he had just lived through that if we were to take them into account and include them in this novel, the story we had decided to tell would inevitably have to be replaced by another. True, it might be worthwhile, or rather, since we know everything about Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s thoughts, we know that it would be worthwhile, but this would mean declaring all our hard work, these forty or so dense, difficult pages, null and void, and going back to the beginning, to the ironic, insolent first page, throwing away all that honest toil to take a chance on an adventure, not just new and different, but also highly dangerous, for, of this we are sure, that is precisely where Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s thoughts would lead us. Let us remain therefore with this bird in the hand, rather than suffer the disappointment of seeing two fly away. Besides, we haven’t got time for anything else. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has just parked his car and is walking the short distance to his apartment, in one hand he has his teacher’s briefcase, in the other the plastic bag, what will he be thinking about now apart from calculating how many videos he will manage to view, to use the more formal term, before going to bed, that’s what comes of taking an interest in bit-part players, if he were a star, he’d be there in the very first scenes. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has already opened the front door, gone in, and closed the door behind him, he puts the briefcase down on the desk and, beside it, the bag containing the videos. The air is free of any presences, or perhaps they are simply not apparent, as if what came into the apartment last night had meanwhile become an inseparable part of it. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso went to his room to change his clothes, opened the fridge in the kitchen to see if there was anything in it he fancied eating, closed it again, and went back into the living room with a can of beer and a glass. He took the videos out of the bag and arranged them in order of date of production, from the oldest,
The Accursed Code,
made two years before
The Race Is to the Swift,
which he has already seen, to the most recent,
The Goddess of the Stage,
from last year. The other four, in the same order, are
Passenger without a Ticket, Death Strikes at Dawn, The Alarm Rang Twice,
and
Phone Me Another Day.
An involuntary reflex movement, doubtless provoked by the last of these titles, made him turn and look at his own phone. The light on the machine was blinking, informing him that there were messages for him. He hesitated for a few seconds but ended up pressing the button to hear them. The first was a female voice that did not announce its identity, knowing presumably that it would be instantly recognized, it said only, It’s me, then went on, I don’t know what’s wrong, but you haven’t phoned me for a week now, if you want to end the relationship, then it would be better to tell me so to my face, surely this silence isn’t to do with the fact that we quarreled the other day, well, only you know that, anyway, just to say that I still care about you, lots of love, bye. The second message was the same voice, Please phone me. There was a third message, but this was from the mathematics teacher, Listen, my friend, I got the impression that I did something today to annoy you, but, to be perfectly honest, I can’t imagine what it was I did or said, I think we should talk and clear up any possible misunderstanding between us, if I owe you an apology, then please take this call as at least the beginning of one, all the best, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that you have a friend in me. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso frowned, he vaguely remembered that something irritating or unpleasant had happened at school involving the mathematics teacher, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He rewound the tape and listened again to the first two messages, this time with a half smile and a look on his face that is usually described as dreamy. He got up to remove the tape of
The Race Is to the Swift
from the VCR and to replace it with
The Accursed Code,
but at the last moment, his finger already on the play button, he realized that, if he went on, he would be committing a grave infraction, omitting one of the sequential points in the plan of action he had drawn up, that is, copying down from the end of
The Race Is to the Swift
the names of the lowest-ranking bit-part actors, the ones who, even though they occupy time and space in the story, even though they say a few words and serve as satellites, tiny ones, of course, at the service of the interconnections and crossed orbits of the stars, do not even have the right to one of those temporary names, as necessary in life as in fiction, although we should not perhaps say so. He could, of course, do it afterward, at another time, but order, as people also say of the dog, is man’s best friend, although, like the dog, it does occasionally bite. Everything in its place and a place for everything has always been the golden rule in prosperous families, just as, time and again, do what you have to do in good order has been shown to be the most solid insurance policy against the phantoms of chaos. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso quickly wound on the now familiar tape of
The Race Is to the Swift,
paused it at the relevant place, copied onto a sheet of paper the names of the men, only the men, because this time, most unusually, the object of the search is not a woman. We assume this provides an adequate explanation of the plan Tertuliano Máximo Afonso drew up during his long deliberations, that is, to try and identify the hotel receptionist, the one who was the spitting image of himself in the days when he had a mustache, and who doubtless continues to be so today without the mustache, and, who knows, tomorrow too, when the receding hairline of one begins to move in the direction of the baldness of the other. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s plan was, like Columbus’s discovery of the Indies, obvious once one had thought of it, to note down all the names of the supporting actors, both in the films in which the receptionist appeared and those in which he did not. For example, if his human copy does not appear in the film,
The Accursed Code,
that he has just slotted in the VCR, he can strike from the first list all those actors who also appeared in
The Race Is to the Swift.
As we know, a Neanderthal’s brain would be no use at all in a situation like this, but for a history teacher accustomed to grappling with people from the most various places and times, why, only yesterday he was reading a chapter on the Amorites in that erudite tome about ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, this poor man’s version of a treasure hunt is pure child’s play and probably did not merit, on our part, such a detailed and comprehensive explanation. In the end, contrary to all our expectations, the hotel receptionist did appear in
The Accursed Code,
this time in the guise of a bank clerk being threatened by a gunman and, doubtless to appear more convincing in the dissatisfied eyes of the director, exaggerating his fearful tremblings as he was forced to transfer the contents of the safe into a bag that the attacker hurled across the counter at him, at the same time snarling out of the corner of his mouth, a gesture so characteristic of the gangster genre, Either fill this up or I’ll fill you full of lead. He had a certain taste for alliteration, this bandit. The bank clerk reappeared on two other occasions, the first time to answer police questions, the second when the bank manager decided to take him off counter duty because, traumatized by the incident, he had started to view all customers as potential thieves. Needless to say, the bank clerk sported the same fine, lustrous mustache as the hotel receptionist. This time, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso did not feel cold rivulets of sweat running down his back, this time his hands did not shake, he paused the image for a few seconds, studied it with cold curiosity, then moved on. Since this was a film in which the identical man, the look-alike, the unattached Siamese twin, the prisoner of Zenda, or some other thing still awaiting classification, had taken part, the method to be followed in the search for his real identity would clearly have to be different, marking any names that had appeared on the first list and were repeated on the second. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso marked two, only two, with a cross. It was still some time until supper, his appetite showed no signs of impatience, he could therefore see the film that was next in chronological order,
Passenger without a Ticket
was the title, but it might just as well have been called A Complete Waste of Time, for the man in the iron mask had not been hired to appear in it. A Complete Waste of Time, we say, but not so complete, because thanks to
the film a few more names could be crossed out on the first list and the second, By a process of elimination I’ll get there in the end, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso said out loud, as if he had suddenly felt a need for company. The telephone rang. The least probable of all the possibilities was that it was his colleague the mathematics teacher, the most possible of all the probabilities that it was the same woman who had phoned twice before. It could also be his mother calling from far away, inquiring after the health of her beloved son. After a few rings, the telephone fell silent, a sign that the recording mechanism was about to start, from then on the recorded words will have to wait for the time when someone wants to listen to them, the mother asking, How have you been, my dear, the friend insisting, I don’t think I said or did anything wrong, the lover despairing, I don’t deserve to be treated like this by you. Whatever is now inside the machine, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso does not feel like listening to it. To distract himself, rather than because his stomach was demanding food, he went into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich and open another can of beer. He sat down on a stool, munched without pleasure on this frugal meal while his thoughts, set free, abandoned themselves to daydreaming. Realizing that conscious vigilance had faded away into a kind of swoon, common sense, which, after its first energetic intervention, had simply wandered off somewhere, insinuated itself in between two inconclusive fragments of that vague meditation and asked Tertuliano Máximo Afonso if he was happy with the situation he had created. Brought abruptly back to the bitter taste of a beer that had soon lost its coldness and to the soft, clammy consistency of a piece of low-quality ham squeezed between two slices of phony bread, the history teacher
replied that happiness had nothing to do with what was going on here, and, as for the situation, he would just like to say that he had not created it. I agree you didn’t create it, replied common sense, but most situations in which we find ourselves would never have got where they are if we hadn’t helped them along, and you’re not going to deny that you helped this one along, It was just curiosity, that’s all, We’ve already discussed this, Have you got anything against curiosity, All I’m saying is that life hasn’t yet taught you to understand that our finest gift, and by ours I mean common sense’s, has always been curiosity, In my view, common sense and curiosity are incompatible, How wrong you are, sighed common sense, Prove it to me then, Who do you think invented the wheel, Nobody knows, Oh yes we do, the wheel was invented by common sense, only an enormous amount of common sense would have been capable of inventing it, And what about the atomic bomb, did common sense invent that too, asked Tertuliano Máximo Afonso in the triumphant tone of one who has just caught his opponent off guard, Oh, no, the atomic bomb was obviously invented by a sense, but there was nothing common about it, Forgive me saying so, but common sense is naturally conservative, I would go further and say reactionary, Ah, those accusing letters, sooner or later everyone writes them and everyone receives them, If all those people were sufficiently of one mind to write them, even those who had no alternative but to receive them, apart, that is, from writing them themselves, then it must be true, You know perfectly well that being of one mind doesn’t always mean being in the right, what tends to happen is that people gather together under an opinion as if it were an umbrella. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso opened his mouth to speak, if the expression “opened his mouth” is allowable in a description of an entirely silent dialogue, taking place entirely in the mind as this one was, but common sense was no longer there, it had noiselessly withdrawn, not defeated exactly, but annoyed with itself for having allowed the conversation to be diverted from the matter that had provoked its reappearance. Always assuming, of course, that it hadn’t been entirely common sense’s fault that this had happened. Indeed, common sense has often been mistaken about consequences, badly so when it invented the wheel, disastrously so when it invented the atomic bomb. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso looked at his watch, calculated how long it would take to watch another film, for he was starting to feel the effects of that sleepless night, his eyelids, with the help of the beer he had drunk, were heavy as lead, and this was probably what lay behind the abstracted state into which he had fallen earlier. If I go to bed now, he said, I’ll probably just wake up again in two or three hours’ time, and then I’ll feel even worse. He decided to see a bit of
Death Strikes at Dawn,
the guy might not even be in it, which would simplify everything, he could fast-forward to the end, make a note of the names, and then go to bed. He was quite wrong. There he was, playing the part of a hospital auxiliary, without a mustache this time. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s hair stood on end again, this time only on his arms, the sweat left his back alone, and a normal sweat, not a cold one, contented itself with slightly dampening his forehead. He watched the whole film, put a cross next to another name that had appeared on other lists, and went to bed. He even read a couple of pages from the chapter on the Amorites before turning out the light. His last conscious thought was about his colleague the mathematics teacher. He really didn’t know how to explain his sudden coldness toward him in the corridor at school. Was it because he put his hand on my shoulder, he asked, and immediately replied, I’ll look like a complete fool if I tell him that and he turns his back on me, which is what I would do in his place. He used the final second before sleep to murmur, perhaps addressing himself, perhaps his colleague, There are some things you just can’t explain in words.