The Collected Novels of José Saramago (386 page)

The streetlights come on, the evening is creeping up the ramp of the sky, soon night will begin. The superintendent rang the bell, no reason for surprise, policemen mostly do ring the bell, they don’t always kick the door down. The doctor’s wife appeared, I was expecting you tomorrow, superintendent, I’m afraid I can’t talk to you right now, she said, we have visitors, Yes, I know them, that is, I don’t know them personally, but I know who they are, That doesn’t seem reason enough for me to let you in, Please, My friends have nothing to do with what brought you here, Not even you know what brought me here, and it’s high time you did, Come in.

THERE IS AN IDEA ABROAD THAT, GENERALLY SPEAKING, THE CONSCIENCE
of a police superintendent tends, on professional grounds and on principle, to be fairly accommodating, not to say resigned to the incontrovertible fact, theoretically and practically proven, that what must be must be and that there’s nothing to be done about it. The truth is, however, that, although it may not be the most common of spectacles, it has been known for one of these valuable public servants, by chance and when least expected, to find himself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, that is, between what he should be and what he would prefer not to be. For the superintendent of providential ltd, insurance and reinsurance, that day has come. He had spent at most half an hour at the home of the doctor’s wife, but that short time was enough to reveal to the astonished group gathered there the murky depths of his mission. He said he would do everything possible to divert from that place and those people the more than disquieting attentions of his superiors, but that he could not guarantee success, he told them he had been given the extremely tight deadline of five days to conclude the investigation and knew that the only acceptable verdict would be one of guilty, and, addressing the doctor’s wife, he said The person they want to make the scapegoat, if you’ll forgive the obvious impropriety of the expression, is you, madam, and, possibly indirectly, your husband, as for the others, I don’t think you’re in any real danger, your crime, madam, wasn’t murdering that man, your great crime was not going blind when the rest of us did, the incomprehensible can
be merely an object of scorn, but not if there is always a way of using it as a pretext. It is three o’clock in the morning, and the superintendent is tossing and turning in bed, unable to get to sleep. He is mentally making plans for the next day, he repeats them obsessively and then starts all over again, telling the inspector and the sergeant that, as arranged, he will go to the doctor’s house to continue the interrogation of the wife, reminding them of the task he had charged them with, following the other members of the group, but, given the present situation, none of this makes sense any more, now what he needs to do is to impede, to hinder events, to invent for the investigation advances and delays that will, without making it too obvious, simultaneously feed and hamper the minister’s plans, in short, he needs to wait and see what the minister’s promised help involves. It was nearly half past three when the red telephone rang. The superintendent leapt out of bed, put on the slippers bearing the police insignia and, half-ran, half-stumbled over to the desk on which the phone stood. Even before he had sat down, he was putting the receiver to his ear and saying, Hello, It’s albatross here, said the voice at the other end, Hello, albatross, puffin here, Now pay attention, puffin, I have some instructions for you, Yes, albatross, Today, at nine o’clock, this morning, not tonight, a person will be waiting for you at post six-north on the frontier, the army has been warned, so there’ll be no problem, Am I to understand that this person is coming to replace me, albatross, There’s no reason for you to think that, puffin, you have done well so far and will, I hope, continue to do so until this affair is closed, Thank you, albatross, and what are your orders, As I said, a person will be waiting for you at nine o’clock this morning at post six-north on the frontier, Yes, albatross, I’ve already made a note of that, You will give this person the photograph you mentioned, the one of the group in which the main suspect appears, you will also give him the list of names and addresses you obtained and which you have in your possession. The superintendent
felt a shiver run down his spine, But that photograph is necessary for my on-going investigations, he said, Well, I don’t think it’s as necessary as you say it is, puffin, indeed, I would go so far as to say that you don’t need it at all, given that, either personally or through your subordinates, you have already made contact with all the members of the gang, You mean group, don’t you, albatross, A gang is a group, Yes, albatross, but not all groups are gangs, Why, puffin, I had no idea you were so concerned about correct definitions, you obviously make good use of dictionaries, Forgive me for correcting you, albatross, my mind’s still a bit fuzzy, Were you asleep, No, albatross, I was thinking about what I have to do tomorrow, Well, now you know, the person who will be waiting for you at post six-north is a man about your age and he will be wearing a blue tie with white spots, I shouldn’t think there will be many other ties like that at military posts on the frontier, Do I know him, albatross, No, you don’t, he’s not from our department, Ah, He will respond to your password with the phrase No, there’s never enough, And what’s mine, There’s always plenty of time, Very good, albatross, your orders will be carried out, I’ll be there on the frontier at nine o’clock to meet him, Now go back to bed and sleep well for the rest of the night, puffin, I myself have been working up until now, so I’m going to do the same, May I ask you a question, albatross, Of course, but keep it short, Does the photograph have anything to do with the help you promised me, Very sharp of you, puffin, nothing gets past you, does it, So it does have something to do with it, Yes, it has everything to do with it, but don’t expect me to tell you how, if I told you that, it would ruin the element of surprise, Even though I’m the person directly responsible for the investigations, Exactly, Does that mean you don’t trust me, albatross, Draw a square on the ground, puffin, and put yourself inside it, within the space delineated by the lines of that square I trust you, but outside of it, I trust only myself, your investigation is
that square, be content with the square and with your investigation, Yes, albatross, Sleep well, puffin, you’ll hear from me before the week is out, I’ll be here waiting, albatross, Good night, puffin, Good night, albatross. Despite the minister’s conventional wishes for a good night’s sleep, what little remained of the night did not prove of much use to the superintendent. Sleep refused to come, the doors and passageways of the brain were all closed, and inside ruled insomnia, queen and absolute mistress. Why does he want the photo, he asked himself over and over again, what did he mean by that threat that I would hear from him before the week was out, there was no threat contained in the individual words, but the tone, yes, the tone was threatening, if the superintendent, after a lifetime of interrogating all kinds of people, has learned to distinguish in amongst the tangled labyrinth of syllables the path he must follow to get out, he is also perfectly capable of noticing the shadowy zones that each word produces and trails behind it whenever it is pronounced. Say out loud the words You’ll hear from me before the week is out, and you will see how easy it is to introduce into them a drop of insidious dread, the putrid stench of fear, the authoritarian timbre of a paternal ghost. The superintendent would prefer to think such soothing thoughts as these, But I have no reason to feel afraid, I do my work, I carry out the orders I’m given, and yet, in the depths of his conscience, he knew this was not true, he wasn’t carrying out those orders for the simple reason that he did not believe that because the doctor’s wife had not gone blind four years she was therefore to blame for eighty-three percent of the capital’s voting population having cast blank votes, as if the first odd fact were automatically responsible for the second. Even he doesn’t believe it, he thought, he just wants a target to aim at, if this one fails, he’ll find another, and another, and another, as many as it takes until he finally gets it right, or until, by dint of sheer repetition, the people he is trying to persuade of his merits grow indifferent to the methods and
processes he adopts. In either case, the party will have won. Thanks to the skeleton key of digression, sleep had managed to open a door, escape down one of the corridors and immediately set the superintendent dreaming that the interior minister had asked him for the photograph so that he could stick a pin through the eyes of the doctor’s wife, all the while singing a wizard’s spell, Blind you were not, blind you will be, white you wore, black you will see, with this pin I prick you, from behind and before. Terrified, drenched in sweat, his heart pounding, the superintendent woke to the screams of the doctor’s wife and the loud laughter of the minister, What an awful dream, he muttered as he turned on the light, what monstrous things the brain can generate. According to the clock, it was half past seven. He calculated how much time he would need to reach post six-north and was almost tempted to thank the nightmare for having been so kind as to wake him. He dragged himself out of bed, his head weighed heavy as lead, his legs weighed even more than his head, and he staggered uncertainly to the bathroom. He emerged twenty minutes later, slightly reinvigorated by the shower, newly shaved and ready for work. He put on a clean shirt and finished dressing, He’ll be wearing a blue tie with white spots, he thought, and went into the kitchen to heat up a cup of coffee left over from the previous evening. The inspector and the sergeant must still have been sleeping, at least, they gave no sign of life. He munched his way unenthusiastically through a biscuit, and even bit into another one, then returned to the bathroom to clean his teeth. He went into the bedroom, placed in a medium-sized envelope the photograph and the list of names and addresses, having first copied the latter onto another piece of paper, and when he went back into the sitting-room, he heard noises coming from the room in the apartment where his subordinates were sleeping. He didn’t wait for them, nor did he knock on their door. He scribbled a note, I had to go out early, I’m taking the car, do as I told you
yesterday and concentrate on following the women, the wife of the man with the black eye-patch and the ex-wife of the man who wrote the letter, have lunch out if you can manage it, I’ll be back here later this afternoon, I expect results. Clear orders, precise instructions, if only everything could be like that in this superintendent’s difficult life. He left providential ltd and took the lift down to the garage. The attendant was already there, the superintendent said good morning, received a greeting in return, and wondered, in passing, if the man actually slept in the garage too, There don’t seem to be any specific hours of work in this place. It was nearly half past eight, I’ve got time, he thought, I’ll be there in less than half an hour, besides, I shouldn’t be the first to arrive, albatross was quite explicit, quite clear about that, the man will be waiting for me at nine o’clock, so I can arrive a minute later, or two or three, at midday if I want. He knew this wasn’t true, that he must simply not arrive before the man he was going to meet, Perhaps it’s because the soldiers on guard at post six-north would get nervous seeing someone parked on this side of the dividing line, he thought, as he put his foot down on the accelerator to go up the ramp. Monday morning, but there wasn’t much traffic, the superintendent would take twenty minutes at most to reach post six-north. But where the devil is post six-north, he suddenly asked out loud. In the north, of course, but six, where the hell was that. The minister had said six-north as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if it were one of the capital’s most famous monuments or else the metro station that had been destroyed by a bomb, the kind of place that everyone was sure to know, and, foolishly, it had not occurred to him to ask, Just where exactly is that, albatross. In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave than the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along,
but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated. The superintendent, having managed to park the car somewhere, had unfolded the map of the city and was now resting it on the steering-wheel, anxiously searching for post six-north on the northern periphery of the capital. It would be relatively easy to locate if the city were shaped like a rhombus or a lozenge or formed a parallelogram, a space whose four lines circumscribed, as albatross had so coolly put it, the amount of trust he deserved, but the city’s outline is irregular and, on the fringes, on either side, it is impossible to tell where the north ends and where the east or the west begins. The superintendent looks at his watch and feels as afraid as a sergeant expecting a reprimand from his superior. He won’t arrive on time, it’s simply impossible. He tries to reason calmly, Logic would say, but since when has logic ruled human decisions, that the various military posts would have been numbered in a clockwise direction from the westernmost point of the northern sector, hour-glasses are clearly of no use in this instance. Perhaps this reasoning is wrong, but then since when has reason ruled human decisions, not an easy question to answer, but it’s always better to have one oar than none, and, besides, it is written that a moored boat goes nowhere, and so the superintendent put a cross where it seemed to him post number six should be and set off. Since the traffic was light and there wasn’t so much as the shadow of a policeman on the streets, he was sorely tempted to jump every red light he came to, a temptation he did not resist. He was
not speeding, he was flying, he barely took his foot off the accelerator, and when he had to brake, he performed a controlled skid, as those acrobats of the steering-wheel do in car chases in the movies, making the more nervous spectators jump in their seats. The superintendent had never driven like this in his life and he never would again. It was already gone nine o’clock when he finally reached post six-north, and the soldier who came to find out what this agitated driver wanted told him that this was, in fact, five-north. The superintendent swore out loud and was about to turn round, but stopped this precipitate gesture just in time and asked in which direction he would find six-north. The soldier pointed east and, just in case there was any doubt, uttered two brief words, That way. Fortunately, there was a road running more or less parallel to the frontier, it was only a matter of three kilometers, the way is clear, there aren’t even any traffic lights, the car started, accelerated, braked, took a bend at breathtaking speed and screeched to a halt, almost touching the yellow line painted across the street, there it is, post six-north. Next to the barrier, about thirty meters away, a middle-aged man was waiting, So he’s quite a bit younger than me, thought the superintendent. He picked up the envelope and got out of the car. He couldn’t see a single soldier, they must have had orders to keep out of sight or to look the other way while this ceremony of meeting and handing-over took place. The superintendent walked toward the man. He was holding the envelope in his hand and thinking, I mustn’t make any excuses about being late, if I were to say Hello, good morning, sorry about the delay, I had a bit of trouble finding the place, and, do you know what, albatross forgot to tell me where post six-north was, you didn’t have to be a genius to realize that this long, rambling sentence could be understood by the other man as a false password, and then one of two things would happen, the man would either summon the soldiers to arrest this liar and provocateur, or he would take out his gun and with a cry of