The Collected Novels of José Saramago (377 page)

The interior minister raised his hand, I notice that you are confident of the persuasive influence our voters may have on the minds of those to whom I must confess I was somewhat astonished to hear you refer merely as rebels, but you did not, I believe, speak of the contrary possibility, that the subversives might use their harmful theories to confuse those citizens who are still respecters of the law, You’re quite right, I don’t think I did mention that possibility, said the prime minister in response, because I imagined that were that to happen, it would not bring about any fundamental change, the worst possible consequence would be that the current eighty percent of people who cast blank votes would become one hundred percent, and the quantitative change introduced into the problem would have no qualitative impact, apart, obviously, from creating unanimity. What shall we do then, asked the minister of defense, That is precisely why we are here, to analyze, consider and decide, Including, I assume, the proposal made by the president of the republic, which, of course, has my wholehearted support, The president’s proposal, given the scale of the work involved and its many implications,
requires an in-depth study to be undertaken by an ad hoc commission that will have to be set up for that purpose, on the other hand, it is, I think, fairly obvious that the building of a wall of partition would not immediately resolve any of our difficulties and would inevitably create others, the president knows my views on the subject, and the personal and institutional loyalty I owe him would not allow me to remain silent about it here at this cabinet meeting, but this does not, I repeat, mean that the commission’s work should not begin as early as possible, as soon as it has been appointed, within the next few days. The president of the republic was visibly put out, I am the president, of course, and not the pope, and I do not, therefore, presume to any kind of infallibility, but I would like my proposal to be discussed with some urgency, As I said before, sir, came the prime minister’s prompt reply, I give you my word that you will receive news of the commission’s findings sooner than you might imagine, Meanwhile, I suppose we’ll just have to continue groping our way blindly forward, said the president. The silence that fell was thick enough to blunt the blade of even the sharpest of knives. Yes, blindly, he repeated, unaware of the general embarrassment. From the back of the room came the minister of culture’s calm voice, Just as we did four years ago. The minister of defense rose, red-faced, to his feet, as if he had been the object of a brutal, unforgivable obscenity, and, pointing an accusing finger, he said, You have just shamefully broken a national pact of silence to which we all agreed, As far as I know, there was no pact, far less a national one, I was a grown man four years ago, and I have no recollection of the population being summoned to sign a piece of parchment promising never to utter one word about the fact that for several weeks we were all of us blind, You’re right, there was no formal pact, said the prime minister, intervening, but we all thought, without any need for any agreement on paper, that the dreadful test we had been through would, for
the sake of our mental health, be best thought of as a terrible nightmare, something that existed as a dream rather than as a reality, In public maybe, but you are surely not telling me that you have never spoken about what happened in the privacy of your own home, Whether we have or not is of no importance, a lot of things happen in the privacy of one’s home that never go beyond its four walls, and, if I may say so, your allusion to the as yet unexplained tragedy that occurred amongst us four years ago shows a degree of bad taste that I would not have expected in a minister of culture, The study of bad taste, prime minister, must be one of the longest and juiciest chapters in the history of culture, Oh, I didn’t mean that kind of bad taste, but the other sort, otherwise known as a lack of tact, It would seem, prime minister, that you share the belief that death exists only because it has a name, that things have no real existence if we have no name to give them, There are endless things for which I don’t know the name, animals, vegetables, tools and machines of every shape and size and for all conceivable purposes, But you know that they have names, and that puts your mind at rest, We’re getting off the subject, Yes, prime minister, we are getting off the subject, all I said was that four years ago we were blind and what I’m saying now is that we probably still are. The indignation was general, or almost so, cries of protest leapt up and jostled for position, everyone wanted to speak, even the transport minister, who, being possessed of a strident voice, usually spoke very little, but was now setting his vocal cords to work, May I speak, may I speak. The prime minister looked at the president of the republic as if asking his advice, but this was pure theater, the president’s diffident attempt at a gesture, whatever it was intended to mean, was quashed by the raised hand of his prime minister, Bearing in mind the emotive and passionate tone of the interpolations, it is clear that a debate would get us nowhere, which is why I will let none of you speak, especially since, possibly without realizing it, the
minister of culture was spot on when he compared the plague currently afflicting us to a new form of blindness, That is not a comparison of my making, prime minister, I merely remarked that we were blind and that we very probably continue to be blind, any extrapolation not logically contained in my initial proposition is not allowable, Changing the position of words often changes their meaning, but they, the words, when weighed one by one, continue physically, if I may put it like that, to be exactly what they were and, therefore, In that case, allow me to interrupt you, prime minister, I want to make it quite clear that responsibility for any changes in the position or meaning of my words lies entirely with you and that I had nothing whatsoever to do with it, Let’s say that you provided the nothing and I contributed the whatsoever and that the nothing and the whatsoever together authorize me to state that the blank vote is as destructive a form of blindness as the first one, Either that or a form of clear-sightedness, said the minister of justice, What, asked the interior minister, who thought he must have misheard, I said that the blank vote could be seen as a sign of clear-sightedness on the part of those who used it, How dare you, in the middle of a cabinet meeting, utter such antidemocratic garbage, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, no one would think you were the minister of justice, cried the minister of defense, Actually, I wonder if I’ve ever been more of a minister of justice or for justice than I am at this moment, Soon you’ll have me believing that you, too, cast a blank vote, said the interior minister drily, No, I didn’t cast a blank vote, but I’ll certainly consider doing so next time. When the scandalized clamor of voices resulting from this last statement had begun to die away, a question from the prime minister brought it to a complete halt, Do you realize what you have just said, Yes, so much so that I place in your hands the post with which you entrusted me, I am tendering my resignation, replied the man who was now no longer either minister for or minister of justice. The president of the republic turned pale, he looked like an old rag that someone had distractedly left behind on the back of the chair, I never thought I would live to see the face of treachery, he said, and felt that history was sure to record the phrase, and should there be any risk of history forgetting, he would make a point of reminding it. The man who had up until now been the minister of justice got to his feet, bowed in the direction of the president and the prime minister and left the room. The silence was interrupted by the sudden scraping of a chair, the minister of culture had got up and, from the bottom of the table, in a strong, clear voice, was announcing, I wish to resign too, Oh, come on, don’t tell me that, as your friend promised us just now in a moment of commendable frankness, you’re considering casting a blank vote next time as well, the prime minister said, trying to be ironic, I doubt that will be necessary, I did so last time, Meaning, Exactly what you heard, nothing more, Kindly leave the room, Yes, prime minister, I was about to, the only reason I turned back was to say goodbye. The door opened, then closed, leaving two empty chairs at the table. Well, exclaimed the president of the republic, we hardly had time to get over the first shock when we got another slap in the face, That was no slap in the face, president, ministers come and ministers go, it’s the most common thing in the world, said the prime minister, anyway, the government entered this room with a full complement of ministers and will leave with a full complement, I’ll take over the post of justice minister and the minister for public works will take care of cultural affairs, But I don’t have the necessary qualifications, remarked the latter, Yes, you do, culture, as certain people in the know are always telling me, is also a public work, it will, therefore, be perfectly safe in your hands. He rang the bell and ordered the clerk who appeared at the door, Take those chairs away, then, addressing the meeting, Let’s have a short break of fifteen or twenty minutes, the president and I will be in the next room.

Half an hour later, the ministers resumed their places round the table. The absences went unnoticed. The president of the republic came in looking utterly perplexed, as if he had just been given a piece of news whose meaning was completely beyond his comprehension. The prime minister, on the other hand, seemed very pleased with himself. The reason would soon become clear. When, earlier on, I brought to your attention the urgent need for a change of strategy, given the failure of all the actions drawn up and executed since the beginning of this crisis, he began, I never for one moment expected that an idea capable of carrying us forward to victory would come precisely from a minister who is no longer with us, I refer, as you will doubtless have surmised, to the ex-minister of culture, who has shown once again how important it is to examine the ideas of your adversary in order to discover which aspects of those ideas can be used to your advantage. The ministers of defense and of the interior exchanged indignant glances, that was all they needed, to hear the intelligence of a despised traitor being praised to the skies. The interior minister scribbled a few rapid words on a piece of paper and passed it to his colleague, My instinct was right, I distrusted those guys right from the start, to which the minister of defense replied by the same means and with the same emotion, There we were trying to infiltrate them, and it turns out they had infiltrated us. The prime minister was continuing to discuss the conclusions he had reached based on the ex-minister of culture’s sibylline statement about how we had all been blind yesterday and continued to be blind today, Our mistake, our great mistake, for which we are paying right now, lay in that attempt at obliteration, not of our memories, since we would all of us be capable of recalling what happened four years ago, but of the word, the name, as if, as our ex-colleague remarked, in order for death to cease to exist, we would simply have to stop saying the word we use to describe it, Aren’t we getting away from the main problem, asked
the president of the republic, we need concrete proposals, objectives, the cabinet is going to have to take some important decisions, On the contrary, president, this is the main problem, and if I’m right, this is the idea that will give us, on a plate, the possibility of resolving once and for all a problem which we have, at most, managed only to patch up here and there, but those patches quickly come unstitched and leave everything exactly as it was, What are you getting at, explain yourself, please, President, gentlemen, let us dare to take a step forward, let us replace silence with words, let us put an end to this stupid, pointless pretence that nothing happened four years ago, let us talk openly about what life, if it can be called a life, was like during the time that we were blind, let the newspapers report it, let writers write about it, let the television show us images of the city taken immediately after we recovered our sight, let’s encourage people to talk about the many and various evils we had to endure, let them talk about the dead, the disappeared, the ruins, the fires, the rubbish, the putrefaction, and then, when we have torn off the rags of false normality with which we have tried to bind up the wound, we will say that the blindness of those days has returned in a new guise, we will draw people’s attention to the parallel between the blankness of that blindness of four years ago and the blind casting of blank ballot papers now, the comparison is crude and fallacious, as I would be the first to recognize, and there will be those who will reject it at once as an offence to intelligence, to logic and to common sense, but it is just possible that many people, and I hope they will soon become the overwhelming majority, will be convinced, will stand before the mirror and ask themselves if they are, again, blind, if this blindness, more shameful than the other blindness, is not leading them from the straight and narrow, propelling them toward the ultimate disaster which would be the possibly definitive collapse of a political system which, without our even noticing the threat, carried within it,
right from the start, in its vital nucleus, in the voting process itself, the seeds of its own destruction or, a no less disquieting hypothesis, of a transition to something entirely new and unknown, so different that we would probably have no place in it, raised as we were in the shelter of an electoral routine which, for generations and generations, managed to conceal what we now realize was one of its great trump cards. I firmly believe, the prime minister continued, that the strategic change we needed is in sight, yes, the restoration of the system to the status quo ante is within our grasp, however, I am the prime minister of this country and not some vulgar snake-oil salesman promising miracles, but I will say that, while we may not get results in twenty-four hours, I am sure we will begin to see them within twenty-four days, the struggle, though, will be long and hard, because sapping the energy of this new blank plague will take time and much effort, not forgetting, ah, not forgetting the dreaded head of the tapeworm, which can hide itself away anywhere, for until we can locate it in the foul innards of the conspiracy, until we can drag it out into the light of day to be given the punishment it deserves, that fatal parasite will continue to produce its rings and to undermine the strength of the nation, but we will win the final battle, my word and your word, now and until the final victory, will be the guarantee of that promise. Pushing back their chairs, the ministers rose as one man and stood applauding enthusiastically. Purged of its troublesome members, the cabinet was, at last, a cohesive whole, one leader, one will, one plan, one path. Seated in his armchair, as befitted the dignity of his office, the president of the republic was clapping too, but only with the tips of his fingers, thus letting it be known, as well as by the stern look on his face, how piqued he was not to have been the object of some reference, however minimal, in the prime minister’s speech. He should have known better who he was dealing with. When the clamorous crackle of applause was beginning to subside, the prime minister raised his right hand to call for silence and said, Every voyage needs a captain, and during the dangerous voyage on which the country is now embarked, that captain is and must be your prime minister, but woe betide the ship that does not carry a compass to guide it over the vast ocean and through the storms, well, gentlemen, the compass that guides me and the ship, the compass, in short, that guides us all, is here, by our side, always keeping us on course with his vast experience, always encouraging us with his wise advice, always instructing us with his peerless example, a thousand rounds of applause, then, and a thousand thanks to his excellency the president of the republic. The ovation was even warmer than the first and seemed as if it would never end, nor would it end as long as the prime minister continued to clap his hands or until the clock in his head said, Enough, stop there, he’s won. Just two minutes more to confirm that victory and, at the end of those two minutes, the president of the republic, with tears in his eyes, was embracing the prime minister. Perfect, nay, even sublime moments can occur in the life of a politician, he said afterward, his voice choked with emotion, but whatever tomorrow may hold for me, I assure you that this moment will never be erased from my memory, it will be my crowning glory in happy times, my consolation in sad ones, I thank you with all my heart, with all my heart, I embrace you. More applause.