The Collected Novels of José Saramago (357 page)

As Tertuliano Máximo Afonso climbed into the car, his first thought was to get away from there, to go and park in some quiet spot where he could reflect seriously on the situation, impose order on the confusion that has been jostling about in his mind for the last twenty-four hours, and decide what to do. He started the engine and only had to turn the corner
to understand that he did not need to reflect at all, all he had to do was phone Maria da Paz, why on earth didn’t I think of it before, presumably because I was shut up in that apartment and therefore unable to make a phone call. A couple hundred meters farther on he found a telephone booth. He stopped the car, hurriedly entered the booth, and dialed the number. It was suffocatingly hot inside. The female voice at the other end asking, Who is it, was not her familiar voice, I wanted to speak to Maria da Paz, he said, Yes, but who is it, I’m a colleague of hers, from the bank where she works, Maria da Paz is dead, she died this morning in a car accident, she was with her fiancé and they both died, it’s a tragedy, a real tragedy. In an instant, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s whole body, from head to toe, was bathed in sweat. He babbled some words the woman could not understand, What did you say, yes, what had he said, a few words that he no longer remembers or ever will remember, that he has forgotten forever, and, without realizing what he was doing, like an automaton whose power supply has suddenly been turned off, he dropped the receiver. Standing utterly still inside the furnace of the telephone booth, he could hear one word, just one, echoing in his ears, Dead, but other words soon came to take its place, and these screamed, You killed her. António Claro didn’t kill her with his reckless driving, always supposing that was the cause of the accident, he, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, killed her, his moral weakness killed her, the will that made him blind to everything but revenge killed her, it was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren’t, you weren’t superluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother’s side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique. They say you can
hate someone only if you hate yourself, but the worst of all hatreds must be the hatred that cannot bear another person to be the same, worse still if that sameness should ever become total. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso staggered like a drunkard out of the booth, got into the car as if he were hurling himself inside, and sat there, staring blankly ahead, until he could stand it no longer and tears and sobs shook his chest. At this moment, he loves Maria da Paz as he had never loved her nor ever would love her in the future. The grief he feels is for her newborn absence, but an awareness of his guilt is creating a suppurating wound that will secrete pus and filth forever after. Some people looked at him with the gratuitous, impotent curiosity that does neither good nor ill in the world, but one person did come over and ask if he could help in any way, but he said no, thank you, and, having thanked him, wept still more bitterly, it was as if someone had come and placed a hand on his shoulder and said, Be patient, in time your sorrow will pass, it’s true, in time everything does pass, but there are cases when time takes time to let the grief abate, and there have been and will be cases, fortunately few, in which the grief never abated and time did not pass. He sat on like this until he had no more tears to shed, until time decided to start moving again and to ask, And now what, where will you go, and it was then that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, in all probability transformed into António Claro for the rest of his life, realized that he had nowhere to go. In the first place, the apartment he used to call his own belonged to Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, and Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is dead, in the second place, he can’t drive from here to the apartment that was António Claro’s and tell Helena that her husband is dead because, as far as she is concerned, he is Antonio Claro, and finally, there is Maria da Paz’s apartment, to which he had never even been invited, he could go there only to offer his useless sympathies to a poor mother bereft of her daughter. The natural thing at this point would be for Tertuliano Máximo Afonso to think of another mother, who, already informed of the sad news, will likewise be weeping the inconsolable tears of maternal orphanhood, but the unshakable consciousness that, as far as he is concerned, he is and always will be Tertuliano Máximo Afonso and that he is, therefore, alive, must have temporarily blocked out what, in other circumstances, would certainly have been his first impulse. Meanwhile, he will still have to find an answer to the question that has been left hanging, And now what, where will you go, one of the easier difficulties to resolve in any city, whether a vast metropolis like this or not, with hotels and boardinghouses to suit all tastes and purses. That is where he will have to go, and not just for a few hours to find shelter from the heat and to be free to weep. It was one thing to have spent the previous night with Helena, when doing so was just a move in the game, if you’re going to sleep with my wife, then I’ll sleep with yours, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, as demanded by the law of talion, never applied more appropriately than in this case, for our present-day word “identical” means the same as the Latin etymon
talis,
from which the term “talion” comes, for not only were the crimes committed identical, those who committed them were identical too. It was one thing, then, if you will allow us to return to the beginning of the sentence, to have spent the night with Helena when no one could possibly have guessed that death was about to enter the game and declare checkmate, it would be quite another thing, knowing as he does that António Claro is dead, even if tomorrow’s newspapers say that the dead man’s name was Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, to spend a second night with
her, thus compounding one deceit with a still-worse deceit. We human beings, although we are still animals, some of us more than others, do have a few decent feelings, sometimes even a remnant or a beginning of self-respect, and this Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, who, on so many occasions, has behaved in ways that justified our severest criticism, will not dare to take the step that, in our eyes, would condemn him forever. He will, therefore, go in search of a hotel and see what tomorrow brings. He started the car and drove toward the center, where he will have more choices, all he needs is a modest, two-star hotel, it’s only for one night, And who can say that it will only be for one night, he thought, where will I sleep tomorrow, and after that, and after that, and after that, for the first time, the future seemed to him a place in which there will definitely still be a need for history teachers, but not this one, in which the actor Daniel Santa-Clara will have no option but to give up his promising career, and in which it will be necessary to find some point of equilibrium between having been and continuing to be, it is doubtless comforting to have our consciousness tell us, I know who you are, but our own consciousness might start to doubt both us and its own words if it were to notice, all around, people asking each other the awkward question, Who’s he. The first person to have the opportunity to display this public curiosity was the clerk at the hotel reception when he asked Tertuliano Máximo Afonso for some proof of identity, thank heavens he didn’t ask him his name first, because Tertuliano Máximo Afonso could easily have said, out of sheer force of habit, the name that has been his for the last thirty-eight years and which now belongs to a mangled corpse waiting in a cold morgue somewhere for the autopsy that no accident victim can escape. The identity card he handed to the clerk bears the name of António
Claro, the face in the photograph is the same as the face the receptionist has before him and which he would scrupulously examine were there any reason to go to such lengths. There isn’t, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has signed the guest book, in these cases all that’s required is a scrawl that bears some resemblance to the proper signature, he has the key to the room in his hand, he has already said that he has no luggage with him, and to support a truth that no one has asked him to justify, he explained how he had missed his plane and left his suitcases at the airport, which is why he is staying only one night. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso may have changed his name, but he continues to be the same person whom we accompanied to the video shop, who always talks more than is necessary, who does not know how to be natural, fortunately, the receptionist has other things to think about, the telephone ringing, a few foreigners who have just arrived weighed down with suitcases and travel bags. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso went up to his room, made himself comfortable, and went to the bathroom to relieve his bladder, apart from having missed his plane, as he had told the receptionist, he appeared to have no other worries, but that was before he lay down on the bed, intending to rest a little, for his imagination immediately placed before him a car reduced to a pile of scrap metal and, inside it, wretchedly bleeding, two mangled bodies. The tears returned, the sobs returned, and who knows how long he would have gone on like this if, suddenly, the shocking thought of his mother had not irrupted into his disoriented brain. He sat bolt upright, placed his hand on the phone, at the same time heaping insults on himself, I’m a fool, a half-wit, an idiot, an imbecile, an utter cretin, how could it not have occurred to me that the police were bound to go to my apartment, that they would ask the neighbors if I had any relatives, that my upstairs
neighbor would give them my mother’s address and telephone number, how could something so very obvious not have crossed my mind, how was it possible. No one answered. The telephone rang and rang, but no one came to ask, Who is it, so that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso could at last say, It’s me, I’m alive, the police made a mistake, I’ll explain later. His mother wasn’t at home, and this fact, unusual in any other circumstances, could mean only one thing, that she was on her way to the city, that she had hired a taxi and was on her way, she might even have arrived, in which case, she would have gone to ask the upstairs neighbor for the key and will now be weeping out her grief, my poor mother, how right you were to warn me. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso dialed his own phone number, and again no one answered. He tried to think calmly, to clarify his muddled mind, even if the police had been exceptionally diligent, they would need time to carry out and conclude their investigations, one must remember that this city is a seething mass of five million restless inhabitants, that there are many accidents and even more victims of accidents, that it is necessary to identify them, to go in search of their families, no easy task when there are negligent people who go about the streets without so much as a piece of paper on them warning, In case of accident, call so-and-so. Fortunately, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is not such a person, nor, it would seem, was Maria da Paz, in their respective address books, on the page reserved for personal information, was everything necessary for a perfect identification, at least as regards any initial requirements, which almost always end up being the last requirements too. No one, apart from a criminal, would be wandering around with false documents or documents stolen from another person, and so it is legitimate to conclude, with respect to the present case, that what the police
took to be the truth was the truth, and since there was no reason to doubt the identity of one of the victims, why on earth should there be any doubts about the other one. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso rang again, and again there was no reply. He is no longer thinking about Maria da Paz, now he just wants to know where Carolina Máximo is, taxis these days are powerful machines, not like the old clunkers of yesteryear, and, in a dramatic situation like this, there would be no need to bribe the driver with the promise of a tip if he put his foot down, in four hours she should be here, and given that it’s a Saturday and everyone’s away on holiday, with the traffic on the roads reduced to a minimum, she should have arrived at his apartment already, so that she could ease her son’s disquiet. He rang again, and this time, unexpectedly, the answering machine came on, This is Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, please leave a message, it was a terrible shock, he had been in such a state of nerves before that he hadn’t noticed the machine had not come on, and now it was as if he had suddenly heard a voice not his own, the voice of a dead stranger that, tomorrow, so as not to upset the sensitive, will have to be replaced by the voice of someone living, an operation of removal and replacement that happens every day in thousands and thousands of places all over the world, although we may prefer not to think about it. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso needed a few seconds to calm himself and recover his own voice, then, tremulously, he said, Mama, it’s not true what they’ve told you, I’m alive and well, I’ll tell you later what happened, but I repeat, I’m alive and well, I’m going to give you the name of the hotel I’m staying at, the room number, and the telephone number, call me as soon as you get there and don’t cry anymore, don’t cry, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso might have said these last words a third time, if he himself had not burst into tears, tears for his mother, for Maria da Paz, whose memory was back with him again, and tears of pity for himself too. Exhausted, he fell back on the bed, he felt weak, as helpless as a sick child, he remembered that he had not had any lunch, and the idea, instead of arousing his appetite, made him feel so violently sick that he had to get up and run to the bathroom, where his retchings summoned up from his stomach nothing but a little bitter foam. He went back into the room, sat down on the bed with his head in his hands, allowing his thoughts to drift like a small cork boat heading downstream and which, now and again, when it bumps against a rock, changes direction for a moment. It was thanks to this half-conscious daydreaming that he remembered something important he should have told his mother. He rang his own number, fearing that the machine would again play tricks on him and refuse to work, and he gave a great sigh of relief when the answering machine, after a few seconds’ hesitation, whirred into life. He left only a short message, he said, Don’t forget, the name is António Claro, and then, as if he had just discovered a weighty bit of evidence that would contribute to a definitive elucidation of the shifting, unstable identities under discussion, he added the following information, The dog’s name is Tomarctus. When his mother arrives, he won’t need to recite to her the names of his father and of his grandparents, of his aunts and uncles on both sides, he won’t have to mention the arm he broke when he fell out of the fig tree, or his first girlfriend, or the bolt of lightning that demolished the chimney when he was ten years old. In order for Carolina Máximo Afonso to be absolutely sure that the child of her heart is there before her, there will be no need for that marvelous maternal instinct of hers or for any scientific, confirmatory DNA tests, the name of the dog will be enough.