The Collected Novels of José Saramago Read Free Page A

century, and the soldiers, archdukes, and others who accompanied him, may be Saramago’s most perfect work of art, as pure and true and indestructible as a Mozart aria or a folk song. I wrote of it in a review for the Guardian: “In his Nobel talk, Saramago said, ‘As I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world’s, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition.’ That hard, patient digging is what gives so light and delightful a book as this its depth and weight. It is no mere fable, as the story of an elephant’s journey through the follies and superstitions of sixteenth-century Europe might well be. It has no moral. There is no happy ending. The elephant Solomon will get to Vienna, yes; and then two years later he will die. But his footprints may remain across the reader’s mind, deep, round impressions in the dirt, not leading to the Austrian Imperial Court or anywhere else yet known, but indicating, perhaps, a more permanently rewarding direction to be followed.”
    Those tracks are now imprinted on electrons as well as in the dirt, on the page, in the mind; they are now in the vibrations in our computers, the symbols on our screens, as real and intangible as light itself, for all who will to see and read and follow.
    U RSULA K. L E G UIN
October 2010

Baltasar and Blimunda
A man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: Where are you going, my friend? And the condemned man replied: I’m not going anywhere. They’re taking me by force.
Padre Manuel Velho
     
João
Je sais que je tombe dans l’inexplicable, quand j’affirme que la réalité—cette notion si flottante—la connaissance la plus exacte possible des êtres est notre point de contact, et notre voie d’accès aux choses qui dépassent la réalité.
Marguerite Yourcenar

 
     
     
     
     
    D OM JOÃO, THE FIFTH monarch so named on the royal list, will pay a visit this night to the bedchamber of the Queen, Dona Maria Ana Josefa, who arrived more than two years ago from Austria to provide heirs for the Portuguese crown, and so far has shown no signs of becoming pregnant. Already there are rumours at court, both within and without the royal palace, that the Queen is barren, an insinuation that is carefully guarded from hostile ears and tongues and confided only to intimates. That anyone should blame the King is unthinkable, first because infertility is an evil that befalls not men but women, who for that very reason are often disowned and second, because there is material evidence, should such a thing be necessary, in the horde of bastards produced by the royal semen, who populate the kingdom and even at this moment are forming a procession in the square. Moreover, it is not the King but the Queen who spends all her time in prayer, beseeching a child from heaven, for two good reasons. The first reason is that a king, especially a king of Portugal, does not ask for something that he alone can provide, and the second reason is that a woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled, a natural supplicant, whether she pleads in novenas or in occasional prayers. But neither the perseverance of the King who, unless there is some canonical or physiological impediment, vigorously performs his royal duty twice weekly, nor the patience and humility of the Queen, who, besides praying, subjects herself to total immobility after her husband’s withdrawal, so that their generative secretions may fertilise undisturbed, hers scant from a lack of incentive and time, and because of her deep moral scruples, the King’s prodigious, as one might expect from a man who is not yet twenty-two years of age, neither the one factor nor the other has succeeded so far in causing Dona Maria Ana’s womb to become swollen. Yet God is almighty.
    Almost as mighty as God is the replica of the Basilica of St Peter