The Collected Novels of José Saramago (412 page)

Nevertheless, the death who now rises from her chair is an empress. She shouldn’t be living in this freezing subterranean room, as if she had been buried alive, but on top of the highest mountain presiding over the fates of the world, gazing benevolently down on the human herd, watching them as they rush hither and thither, unaware that they’re heading in the same direction, that one step forward will take them just as close to death as one step back, that it makes no difference because everything will have but one ending, the ending that a part of yourself will always have to think about and which is the black stain on your hopeless humanity. Death is holding the index card in her hand. She is conscious that she must do something with it, but she doesn’t know quite what. First, she must calm down and remember that she is the same death she was before, nothing more, nothing less, that the only difference between today and yesterday is that she is more certain of who she is. Second, the fact that she can finally have it out with the cellist is no reason to forget to send today’s letters. She had only to think this and instantly two hundred and eighty-four index cards appeared on the desk, half were of men and half of women, and with them two hundred and eighty-four sheets of paper and two hundred and eighty-four envelopes. Death sat down again, put the index card to one side and began to write. The very last grain of sand in a four-hour hourglass would have just slipped through as she finished signing the two hundred and eightieth letter. An hour later, the envelopes were sealed and ready to be dispatched. Death went to fetch the letter that had been sent three times and returned three times and placed it on the pile of violet-colored envelopes, I’m going to give you one last chance, she said. She made the customary gesture with her left hand and the letters disappeared. Not even ten seconds had passed before the letter to the musician silently reappeared on the desk. Then death said, If that’s how you want it, fine. She crossed out the date of birth on the index card and changed it to the following year, then she amended his age, and where fifty was written, she changed it to forty-nine. You can’t do that, said the scythe, It’s done, There’ll be consequences, Only one, What’s that, The death, at last, of that wretched cellist who’s been having a laugh at my expense, But the poor man doesn’t know he should be dead, As far as I’m concerned, he might as well know it, Even so, you don’t have the power or the authority to change an index card, That’s where you’re wrong, I have all the power and authority I need, I’m death, and never more so than from this day forward, You don’t know what you’re getting into, warned the scythe, There’s only one place in the world that death can’t get into, Where’s that, What they call a coffin, casket, tomb, funeral urn, vault, sepulcher, I can’t enter there, only the living can, once I’ve killed them, of course, All those words to say the same sad thing, That’s what these people are like, they’re never quite sure what they mean.

DEATH HAS A PLAN. CHANGING THE MUSICIAN’S YEAR OF
birth was only the opening move in an operation which, we can tell you now, will deploy some quite exceptional methods never before used in the history of the relationship between the human race and its oldest, most mortal enemy. As in a game of chess, death advanced her queen. A few more moves should open the way to a checkmate, and the game will end. One might now ask why death doesn’t simply revert to the status quo ante, when people died simply because they had to, with no waiting around for the postman to bring them a violet-colored letter. The question has its logic, but the reply is no less logical. It is, firstly, a matter of honor, determination and professional pride, for if death were to return to the innocence of former times, it would, in the eyes of everyone, be tantamount to admitting defeat. Since the current process involves the use of violet-colored letters, then these must be the means by which the cellist will die. We need only put ourselves in death’s place to understand the rationale behind this. As we have seen on four previous occasions, there remains the principal problem of delivering that now weary letter to its addressee, and if the longed-for goal is to be achieved, that is where the exceptional methods we referred to above come in. But let us not anticipate events, let us see what death is doing now. At this precise moment, death is not actually doing anything more than she usually does, she is, to use a current expression, hanging loose, although, to tell the truth, it would be more exact to say that death never hangs loose, death simply is. At the same time and everywhere. She doesn’t need to run after people to catch them, she will always be where they are. Now, thanks to this new method of warning people by letter, she could, if she chose to, just sit quietly in her subterranean room and wait for the mail to do the work, but she is, by nature, strong, energetic and active. As the old saying goes, You can’t cage a barnyard chicken. In the figurative sense, death is a barnyard chicken. She won’t be so stupid, or so unforgivably weak, as to repress what is best in her, her limitlessly expansive nature, therefore she will not repeat the painful process of concentrating all her energies on remaining at the very edge of visibility without actually going over to the other side, as she did the previous night, and at what a cost, during the hours she spent in the musician’s apartment. Since, as we have said a thousand and one times, she is present everywhere, she is there too. The dog is sleeping in the garden, in the sun, waiting for his master to come home. He doesn’t know where his master has gone or what he has gone to do, and the idea of following his trail, were he ever to try, is something he has ceased to think about, for the good and bad smells in a capital city are so many and so disorienting. We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion. Death, however, knows that the cellist is sitting on the stage of a theater, to the right of the conductor, in the place that corresponds to the instrument he plays, she sees him moving the bow with his skillful right hand, she sees his no less skillful left hand moving up and down the strings, just as she herself had done in the half-dark, even though she has never learned music, not even the basics of music theory, so-called three-four time. The conductor stopped the rehearsal, tapping his baton on the edge of the music stand to make some comment and to issue an order, in this passage, he wants the cellists, and only the cellists, to make themselves heard, while, at the same time, appearing not to be making a sound, a kind of musical charade which the musicians appear to have mastered without difficulty, that is what art is like, things that seem impossible to the layperson turn out not to be. Death, needless to say, fills the whole theater, right to the very top, as far as the allegorical paintings on the ceiling and the vast unlit chandelier, but the view she prefers at the moment is the view from a box just above the stage, very close, and slightly at an angle to the section of strings that play the lower notes, the violas, the contraltos of the violin family, the cellos, which are the equivalent of the bass, and the doublebasses, which have the deepest voice of all. Death is sitting there, on a narrow crimson-upholstered chair, and staring fixedly at the first cellist, the one she watched while he was asleep and who wears striped pajamas, the one who owns a dog that is, at this moment, sleeping in the sun in the garden, waiting for his master to return. That is her man, a musician, nothing more, like the almost one hundred other men and women seated in a semicircle around their personal shaman, the conductor, and all of whom will, one day, in some future week or month or year, receive a violet-colored letter and leave their place empty, until some other violinist, flautist or trumpeter comes to sit in the same chair, perhaps with another shaman waving a baton to conjure forth sounds, life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again, singing the evocative song sung by the waters as they cascade from her decks, like the watery song, dripping like a murmuring sigh over her undulating body, sung by the goddess amphitrite at her birth, when she became she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given. Death wonders where amphitrite is now, the daughter of nereus and doris, where is she now, she who may never have existed in reality, but who nevertheless briefly inhabited the human mind in order to create in it, again only briefly, a certain way of giving meaning to the world, of finding ways of understanding reality. But they didn’t understand it, thought death, nor will they, however hard they try, because everything in their lives is provisional, precarious, transitory, gods, men, the past, all gone, what is will not always be, and even I, death, will come to an end when there’s no one left to kill, either in the traditional manner, or by correspondence. We know that this is not the first time such a thought has passed through whatever part of her it is that thinks, but it was the first time that thinking it had brought her such a feeling of profound relief, like that of someone who, having completed a task, slowly leans back to take a rest. Suddenly the orchestra fell silent, all that can be heard is the sound of a cello, it’s what they call a solo, a modest solo that will last, at most, two minutes, it’s as if from the forces invoked by the shaman a voice had arisen, speaking perhaps in the name of all those who are now silent, even the conductor doesn’t move, he’s looking at the same musician who left open on a chair the sheet music of suite number six opus one thousand and twelve in d major by johann sebastian bach, a suite he will never play in this theater, because he is merely a cellist in the orchestra, albeit the leader of his section, not one of those famous concert artistes who travel the world playing and giving interviews, receiving flowers, applause, plaudits and medals, he’s lucky that he occasionally gets a few bars to play solo, thanks to some generous composer who happened to remember the side of the orchestra where little of anything out of the ordinary tends to happen. When the rehearsal ends, he’ll put his cello in its case and take a taxi home, a taxi with a large trunk, and maybe tonight, after supper, he’ll put the sheet music for the bach suite on the stand, take a deep breath and draw the bow across the strings so that the first note thus born can console him for the irredeemable banalities of the world and so that the second, if possible, will make him forget them, the solo ends, the rest of the orchestra covers the last echo of the cello, and the shaman, with an imperious wave of his baton, has returned to his role as invoker and guide of the spirits of sound. Death is proud of how well her cellist played. As if she were a family member, his mother, his sister, his fiancée, not his wife, though, because this man has never married.

Over the next three days, apart from the time it took her to run to the subterranean room, hurriedly write the letters and send them off, death was more than his shadow, she was the very air he breathed. Shadows have a grave defect, they lose their place, they vanish the moment there’s no source of light. Death traveled next to him in the taxi that took him home, she went into his apartment when he did, she observed benevolently the dog’s wild effusions at the arrival of his master, and then, like someone invited to spend a little time there, she made herself comfortable. It’s easy enough for someone who doesn’t need to move, she doesn’t mind whether she’s sitting on the floor or perched on top of a wardrobe. The orchestra rehearsal had finished late, it will soon be dark. The cellist gave the dog some food, then prepared his own supper from the contents of two cans, heated up whatever needed heating up, put a cloth on the kitchen table, along with knife, fork and napkin, poured some wine into a glass and, unhurriedly, as if he were thinking about something else, put the first forkful of food in his mouth. The dog sat down beside him, any leftovers that his master might leave on his plate and proffer to him on his hand will serve as his dessert. Death looks at the cellist. She can’t really tell the difference between ugly people and pretty people, because, since she is familiar only with her own skull, she has an irresistible tendency to imagine the outline of the skull beneath the face that serves as our shop window. Basically, if truth be told, in death’s eyes we are all equally ugly, even in the days when we might have been beauty queens or their male equivalent. She admires the cellist’s strong fingers, she guesses that the tips of the fingers on his left hand must have gradually grown harder, perhaps even slightly calloused, life can be unfair in this and other ways, the left hand is a case in point, for even though it does all the hard work on the cello, it receives far less applause from the audience than the right hand. Once supper was over, the cellist washed the dishes, carefully folded the tablecloth and the napkin, put them in a drawer in the cupboard and, before leaving the kitchen, looked around to see if anything was out of place. The dog followed him into the music room, where death was waiting for them. Contrary to the supposition we made while in the theater, the cellist did not play the bach suite. One day, in conversation with some colleagues in the orchestra who were talking jokingly about the possibility of composing musical portraits, genuine ones, not just pictures of types, like mussorgsky’s portraits of samuel goldenberg and schmuyle, he said that, assuming such a thing really were possible in music, they would find his portrait not in any cello composition, but in the briefest of chopin études, opus twenty-five, number nine, in g flat major. When asked why, he replied that he simply couldn’t see himself in any other piece of music and that this seemed to him the best of reasons. And that in the space of fifty-eight seconds chopin had said all there was to say about someone he could never possibly have met. For a few days, by way of an amiable joke, the wittier orchestra members called him fifty-eight seconds, but the nickname was far too long to stick, and, besides, it’s impossible to keep up a dialogue with someone who has decided to take fifty-eight seconds to reply to any question put to him. In the end, the cellist won this friendly contest. As if he had sensed the presence in his house of a third person, to whom, for unexplained reasons, he felt he should talk about himself, and wishing to avoid having to make the long speech which even the simplest of lives requires in order to say anything of substance, the cellist sat down at the piano, and after a brief pause for the audience to settle, he launched into the piece. Lying half asleep next to the music stand, the dog didn’t appear to give much importance to the storm of sound unleashed above his head, perhaps because he had heard it before, perhaps because it added nothing to what he already knew about his master. Death, however, who, in the line of duty, had listened to a great deal of music, notably that same composer chopin’s funeral march and the adagio assai from beethoven’s third symphony, she, for the first time in her very long life, had a sense of what might well be the perfect blend of what is said and the way in which it is said. She didn’t much care if it was or wasn’t the musical portrait of the cellist, it’s likely that he’d fabricated in his mind any alleged similarities, real or imagined, but what impressed death was that she seemed to hear in those fifty-eight seconds of music a rhythmical and melodic transposition of every and any human life, be it run-of-the-mill or extraordinary, because of its tragic brevity, its desperate intensity, and also because of that final chord, like an ellipsis left hanging in the air, something yet to be said. The cellist had fallen into one of the least forgivable of human sins, that of presumption, when he thought he could see his face, and his alone, in a portrait in which everyone could be found, a presumption which, however, if we think about it, if we choose not to remain on the surface of things, could equally be interpreted as a manifestation of its polar opposite, that is, of humility, since if it is a portrait of everyone, then I must be included in it too. Death hesitates, she can’t quite decide between presumption and humility, and to break the deadlock, to decide once and for all, she amuses herself now by observing the cellist, waiting for the expression on his face to reveal to her what she needs to know, or perhaps his hands, for the hands are like two open books, not for the real or supposed reasons put forward by chiromancy, with its heart lines and its life lines, yes, life, ladies and gentlemen, you heard correctly, life, but because they speak when they open and close, when they caress or strike, when they wipe away a tear or disguise a smile, when they rest on a shoulder or wave goodbye, when they work, when they are still, when they sleep, when they wake, and then death, having finished her observations, concluded that it isn’t true that the antonym of presumption is humility, even if all the dictionaries in the world swear blind that it is, poor dictionaries, who have to rule themselves and us only with the words that exist, when there are so many words still missing, for example, this word that should be the polar opposite of presumption, but never the bowed head of humility, the word that we see clearly written on the face and hands of the cellist, but which cannot tell us what it is called.