Seeing - Saramago Jose - Страница 3

It had stopped raining, but nothing seemed to indicate that th civic hopes of the presiding officer would be satisfactorily fulfille by a ballot box in which, so far, the votes barely covered the bottom All those present were thinking the same thing, the election so far had been a terrible political failure. Time was passing. The clock on the tower had struck half past three when the secretary's wife came in to vote. Husband and wife exchanged discreet smiles, but there was also just a hint of an indefinable complicity, which provoked in the presiding officer an uncomfortable inner spasm, perhaps the pain of envy, knowing that he would never exchange such a smile with anyone. It was still hurting him in some fold of his flesh when, thirty minutes later, he glanced at the clock and wondered to himself if his wife had, in the end, gone to the cinema. She'll turn up, if she ever does, at the last possible moment, he thought. The ways of warding off fate are many and almost all are useless, and this one, forcing oneself to think the worst in the hope that the best will happen, is one of the most commonplace, and might even be worthy of further consideration, although not in this case, because we have it from an unimpeachable source that the presiding officer's wife really has gone to the cinema and, at least up until now, is still undecided as to whether to cast her vote or not. Fortunately, the oft-invoked need for balance which has kept the universe on track and the planets on course means that whenever something is taken from one side, it is replaced by something else on the other, something that more or less corresponds, something of the same quality and, if possible, the same proportions, so that there are not too many complaints about unfair treatment. How else can one explain why it was that, at four o'clock in the afternoon, an hour which is neither late nor early, neither fish nor fowl, those voters who had, until then, remained in the quiet of their homes, apparently blithely ignoring the election altogether, started to come out onto the streets, most of them under their own steam, but others thanks only to the worthy assistance of firemen and volunteers because the places where they lived were still flooded and impassable, and all of them, absolutely all of them, the healthy and the infirm, the former on foot, the latter in wheelchairs, on stretchers, in ambulances, headed straight for their respective polling stations like rivers which know no other course than that which flows to the sea. It will probably seem to the sceptical or the merely suspicious, the kind who are only prepared to believe in miracles from which they hope to gain some advantage, that the present circumstance has shown the above-mentioned need for balance to be utterly wrong, that the trumped-up question about whether the presiding officer's wife will or will not vote is, anyway, far too insignificant from the cosmic point of view to require compensation in one of Earth's many cities in the form of the unexpected mobilization of thousands and thousands of people of all ages and social conditions who, without having come to any prior agreement as to their political and ideological differences, have decided, at last, to leave their homes in order to go and vote. Those who argue thus are forgetting that not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding, and if, at this particular point, the scandalous disproportion between something which might, but for now only might, have seen the ballot box deprived of, in this case, the vote cast by the presiding officer's supposedly unpleasant wife and the tide of men and women now on the move, if we find this difficult to accept in the light of the most elementary distributive justice, prudence warns us to suspend for the moment any definitive judgement and to watch with unquestioning attention how events, which have only just begun to unfold, develop. Which is precisely what the newspaper, radio and television journalists, carried away by professional enthusiasm and by an unquenchable thirst for news, are doing now, racing up and down, thrusting tape-recorders and microphones into people's faces, asking What was it made you leave your house at four o'clock to go and vote, doesn't it seem extraordinary to you that everyone should have come out onto the street at the same time, and receiving in return such abrupt or aggressive replies as, It just happened to be the time I'd decided to go and vote, As free citizens, we can come and go as we please, we don't owe anyone an explanation, How much do they pay you to ask these stupid questions, Who cares what time I leave or don't leave my house, Is there some law that obliges me to answer that question, Sorry, I'm only prepared to speak with my lawyer present. There were polite people too, who replied without the reproachful acrimony of the examples given above, but they were equally unable to satisfy the journalists' devouring curiosity, merely shrugging and saying, Look, I have the greatest respect for the work you do and I'd love to help you publish a bit of good news, but, alas, all I can tell you is that I looked at my watch, saw it was four o'clock and said to the family Right, let's go, it's now or never, Why now or never, That's the funny thing, you see, that's just how it came out, Try to think, rack your brains, No, it's not worth it, ask someone else, perhaps they'll know, But I've asked fifty people already, And, No one could give me an answer, Exactly, But doesn't it strike you as a strange coincidence that thousands of people should all have left their houses at the same time to go and vote, It's certainly a coincidence, but perhaps not that strange, Why not, Ah, that I don't know. The commentators, who were following the electoral process on the various television programmes and, for lack of any firm facts on which to base their analyses, were busily making educated guesses, inferring the will of the gods from the flight and the song of birds, regretting that animal sacrifice was no longer legal and that they were thus prevented from poring over some creature's still twitching viscera to decipher the secrets of chronos and of fate, these commentators woke suddenly from the torpor into which they had been plunged by the gloomy prospects of the count and, doubtless because it seemed unworthy of their educational mission to waste time discussing coincidences, hurled themselves like wolves upon the fine example of good citizenship that the population of the capital were, at that moment, setting the rest of the country by turning up en masse at polling stations just when the specter of an abstention on a scale unparalleled in the history of our democracy had seemed to be posing a grave threat to the stability not just of the regime but, even more seriously, of the system itself. The statement emanating from the ministry of the interior did not go quite that far, but the government's relief was evident in every line. As for the three parties involved in the election, the parties on the right, in the middle and on the left, they, having first made rapid calculations as to the losses and gains that would result from this unexpected influx of voters, issued congratulatory statements in which, along with other stylistic niceties, they affirmed that democracy had every reason to celebrate. With the national flag draped on the wall behind them, the president in his palace and the prime minister in his mansion both expressed themselves in similar terms, give or take a comma. At the polling stations, the lines of voters, standing three deep, went right round the block and as far as the eye could see.