The Collected Novels of José Saramago (408 page)

Naturally, one must ask if the government was merely standing by and impassively watching the daily drama being lived out by the country’s ten million inhabitants. The answer is twofold, affirmative on the one hand and negative on the other. Affirmative, although only in rather relative terms, because dying is, after all, the most normal and ordinary thing in life, a purely routine fact, an episode in the endless legacy passed from parents to children, at least since adam and eve, and world governments would do enormous harm to the public’s precarious peace of mind if they declared three days of national mourning every time some poor old man died in a home for the destitute. And negative because it would be impossible, even if you had a heart of stone, to remain indifferent to the palpable fact that the week’s notice given by death had taken on the proportions of a real collective calamity, not just for the average of three hundred people at whose door ill luck came knocking each day, but also for the people who remained, neither more nor less than nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and seven hundred people of all ages, fortunes and conditions, who, each morning when they woke from a night tormented by the most terrible nightmares, saw the sword of damocles hanging by a thread over their head. As for the three hundred inhabitants who had received the fateful violet-colored letter, responses to the implacable sentence varied, as is only natural, depending on the character of each individual. As well as those people mentioned above who, driven by a twisted idea of revenge to which one could quite rightly apply the neologism prepost-humous, decided to abandon their civic and familial duties by not writing a will or paying their back taxes, there were many who, acting on a highly corrupt interpretation of the horatian carpe diem, squandered what little life was left to them by giving themselves over to reprehensible orgies of sex, drugs and alcohol, thinking perhaps that by falling into such wild excesses, they might bring down upon their own heads some fatal stroke or, if not, a divine thunderbolt which, by killing them there and then, would snatch them from the grasp of death proper, thus playing a trick on death that might well make her change her ways. Others, stoical, dignified and courageous, went for the radical option of suicide, believing that they, too, would be teaching a lesson in manners to the power of thanatos, delivering what we used to call a verbal slap in the face, of the sort that, in accordance with the honest convictions of the time, would be all the more painful if it had its origin in the ethical and moral arena and not in some primitive desire for physical revenge. All these attempts failed, of course, apart, that is, from those stubborn people who reserved their suicide for the last day of the deadline. A masterly move, to which death could find no answer.

To its credit, the first institution to get a real sense of the mood of the people in general was the catholic apostolic church of rome, to which, since we live in an age dominated by the boom in the use of acronyms in day-to-day communications, both private and public, it might be a good idea to give the easier abbreviation of c.a.c.o.r. It is also true that you would have had to be stone-blind not to notice how, almost from one moment to the next, the churches filled up with distraught people in search of some word of hope, some consolation, a balm, an analgesic, a spiritual tranquilizer. People who, until then, had lived in the consciousness that death was inevitable and that there was no possible escape, but thinking at the same time, since there were so many other people doomed to die, that only by some real stroke of bad luck would their turn ever come around, those same people now spent their time peering from behind the curtains, waiting for the postman or trembling when they returned home, where the dreaded violet-colored letter, worse than a bloody monster with jaws gaping, might be lurking behind the door, ready to leap out at them. The churches did not stop work for a moment, the long queues of contrite sinners, constantly refreshed like factory assembly lines, wound twice round the central nave. The confessors on duty never stopped, sometimes they were distracted by fatigue, at others their attention was suddenly caught by some scandalous detail, but in the end they simply handed out a pro forma penance, so many our fathers, so many ave marias, and then muttered a hasty absolution. In the brief interval between one confessee leaving and the next confessant kneeling down, the confessors would grab a bite of the chicken sandwich that would be their lunch, meanwhile vaguely imagining some compensatory delight for supper. Sermons were invariably on the subject of death as the only way into the heavenly paradise, where, it was said, no one ever entered alive, and the preachers, in their eagerness to console, did not hesitate to resort to the highest forms of rhetoric and to the lowest tricks in the catechism to convince their terrified parishioners that they could, after all, consider themselves more fortunate than their ancestors, because death had given them enough time to prepare their souls with a view to ascending into eden. There were some priests, however, who, trapped in the malodorous gloom of the confessional, had to screw up their courage, god knows at what cost, because they, too, that very morning, had received the violet-colored envelope, and so had more than enough reason to doubt the emollient virtues of what they were saying.

The same was happening with the therapists that the health minister, hastening to imitate the therapeutic aid given by the church, had dispatched to bring succor to the most desperate. It was not infrequent for a psychiatrist, when counseling a patient that crying would be the best way to relieve the pain tormenting him, to burst into convulsive sobs himself when he remembered that he, too, might be the recipient of an identical envelope in the next day’s post. Both psychiatrist and patient would end the session bawling their eyes out, embraced by the same misfortune, but with the therapist thinking that if a misfortune did befall him, he would still have seven days to live, one hundred and ninety-two hours. A few little orgies of sex, drugs and alcohol, which he had heard were being organized, would ease his passage into the next world, although, of course, you then ran the risk that such excesses might only make you miss this world all the more intensely when you were up there on your ethereal throne.

ACCORDING TO THE WISDOM OF THE NATIONS, THERE IS AN
exception to every rule, even rules that would normally be considered utterly inviolable, as for example, those regarding the sovereignty of death, to which, by definition, there never could be an exception, however absurd, and yet it really must be true because, as it happened, one violet-colored letter was returned to sender. Some will object that such a thing is impossible, that death, being ubiquitous, cannot therefore be in any one particular place, from which one can deduce the impossibility, both material and metaphysical, of locating and defining what we normally understand by the word sender, or, in the meaning intended here, the place from which the letter came. Others will also object, albeit less speculatively, that, since a thousand policemen have been looking for death for weeks on end, scouring the entire country, house by house, with a fine-tooth comb, as if in search of an elusive louse highly skilled in evasive tactics, and have still found neither hide nor hair of her, it is as clear as day that if no explanation has yet been given as to how death’s letters reach the mail, we are certainly not going to be told by what mysterious channels the returned letter has managed to reach her hands. We humbly recognize that our explanations about this and much more have been sadly lacking, we confess that we are unable to provide explanations that will satisfy those demanding them, unless, taking advantage of the reader’s credulity and leaping over the respect owed to the logic of events, we were to add further unrealities to the congenital unreality of this fable, now we realize that such faults seriously undermine our story’s credibility, however, none of this, we repeat, none of this means that the violet-colored letter to which we referred was not returned to its sender. Facts are facts, and this fact, whether you like it or not, is of the irrefutable kind. There can be no better proof of this than the image of death before us now, sitting on a chair while wrapped in her sheet, and with a look of blank amazement on the orography of her bony face. She eyes the violet envelope suspiciously, studies it to see if it bears any of the comments postmen usually write on envelopes in such cases, for example, returned, not known at this address, addressee gone away leaving no forwarding address or date of return, or simply, dead, How stupid of me, she muttered, how could he have died if the letter that should have killed him came back unopened. She had thought these last words without giving them much importance, but she immediately summoned them up again and repeated them out loud, in a dreamy tone of voice, Came back unopened. You don’t need to be a postman to know that coming back is not the same thing as being sent back, that coming back could merely mean that the violet-colored letter failed to reach its destination, that at some point along the way something happened to make it retrace its steps and return whence it had come. Letters can only go where they’re taken, they don’t have legs or wings, and, as far as we know, they’re not endowed with their own initiative, if they were, we’re sure that they would refuse to carry the terrible news of which they’re so often the bearers. Like this news of mine, thought death impartially, telling someone that they’re going to die on a particular date is the worst possible news, it’s like spending long years on death row and then having the jailer come up to you and say, Here’s the letter, prepare yourself. The odd thing is that all the other letters from the last batch were safely delivered to their addressees, and if this one wasn’t, it can only have been because of some chance event, for just as there have been cases of a love letter, god alone knows with what consequences, taking five years to reach an addressee who lived only two blocks and less than a quarter of an hour’s walk away, it could be that this letter passed from one conveyor belt to another without anyone noticing and then returned to its point of departure like someone who, lost in the desert, has nothing more to go on than the trail he left behind him. The solution would be to send it again, said death to the scythe that was next to her, leaning against the white wall. One wouldn’t expect a scythe to respond, and this one proved no exception. Death went on, If I’d sent you, with your taste for expeditious methods, the matter would have been resolved, but times have changed a lot lately, and one has to update the means and the systems one uses, to keep up with the new technologies, by using e-mail, for example, I’ve heard tell that it’s the most hygienic way, one that does away with inkblots and fingerprints, besides which it’s fast, you just open up outlook express on microsoft and it’s gone, the difficulty would be having to work with two separate archives, one for those who use computers and another for those who don’t, anyway, we’ve got plenty of time to think about it, they’re always coming out with new models and new designs, with new improved technologies, perhaps I’ll try it some day, but until then, I’ll continue to write with pen, paper and ink, it has the charm of tradition, and tradition counts for a lot when it comes to dying. Death stared hard at the violet-colored envelope, made a gesture with her right hand, and the letter vanished. So now we know that, contrary to what so many thought, death does not take her letters to the post office.

On the table is a list of two hundred and ninety-eight names, rather fewer than usual, one hundred and fifty-two men and one hundred and forty-six women, and the same number of violet-colored envelopes and sheets of paper are ready for the next mailing, or death-by-post. Death added to the list the name on the letter that had been returned to sender, underlined it and replaced her pen in the pen holder. If she had any nerves at all, we could say that she felt slightly excited, and with good reason. She had lived for far too long to consider the return of the letter unimportant. It’s easy enough to understand, it takes very little imagination to see why death’s workplace is probably the dullest of all those created since cain killed abel, an incident for which god bears all the blame. Since that first deplorable incident, which, from the moment the world began, demonstrated the difficulties of family life, and right up until the present day, the process has remained unchanged for centuries and centuries and more centuries, repetitive, unceasing, uninterrupted, unbroken, varying only in the many ways of passing from life to non-life, but basically always the same because the result was always the same. The fact is that whoever was meant to die died. And now, remarkably, a letter signed by death, written in her own hand, a letter warning of someone’s irrevocable and un-postponable end, had been returned to sender, to this cold room where the author and signatory of the letter sits, wrapped in the melancholy shroud that is her historic uniform, the hood over her head, as she ponders what has happened, meanwhile drumming on the desk with the bones of her fingers, or the fingers of her bones. She’s slightly surprised to find herself hoping that the letter will be returned again, that the envelope will carry, for example, a message denying all knowledge of the addressee’s whereabouts, because that really would be a new experience for someone who has always managed to find us wherever we were hidden, if, in that childish way, we thought we might escape her. However, she doesn’t really believe that the supposed absence will be marked on the back of the envelope, here the archives are updated automatically with every gesture or movement we make, with every step we take, every change of house, status, profession, habit or custom, if we smoke or don’t smoke, if we eat a lot or a little or nothing, if we’re active or indolent, if we have a headache or indigestion, if we suffer from constipation or diarrhea, if our hair falls out or we get cancer, if it’s a yes, a no or a maybe, all she will have to do is open the drawer of the alphabetical file, look for the corresponding folder, and there it will all be. And it shouldn’t astonish us in the least if, at the very moment we were reading our own personal file, we saw instantaneously recorded there the sudden pang of anxiety that froze us. Death knows everything about us, and that perhaps is why she’s sad. If it’s true that she doesn’t smile, this is only because she has no lips, and this anatomical lesson tells us that, contrary to what the living may believe, a smile is not a matter of teeth. There are those who say, with a sense of humor that owes more to a lack of taste than it does to the macabre, that she wears a kind of permanent, fixed grin, but that isn’t true, what she wears is a grimace of pain, because she’s constantly pursued by the memory of the time when she had a mouth, and her mouth a tongue, and her tongue saliva. With a brief sigh, she took up a sheet of paper and began writing the first letter of the day, Dear madam, I regret to inform you that in a week your life will end, irrevocably and irremissibly. Please make the best use you can of the time remaining to you, yours faithfully, death. Two hundred and ninety-eight sheets of paper, two hundred and ninety-eight envelopes, two hundred and ninety-eight names removed from the list, this is not exactly a killingly hard job, but the fact is that when she reaches the end, death is exhausted. Making that gesture with her right hand with which we’re already familiar, she dispatched the two hundred and ninety-eight letters, then, folding her bony arms on the desk, she rested her head on them, not in order to sleep, because death doesn’t sleep, but in order to rest. When, half an hour later, once recovered from her tiredness, she raised her head, the letter that had been returned to sender and sent again was back, right there before her empty, astonished eye sockets.