The Notebook. José Saramago
of their government, have been perpetrating in cold blood against millions of people all over the world, who are threatened with losing whatever money they have left, after many of them—I don’t doubt that there are millions—have already lost their only, often inadequate, source of income: work.
The criminals are known, they have names and surnames, yet they take limousines to the golf course, so sure of themselves that they do not even think of hiding. They would be easy to catch. Who dares bring these gangsters to court? Even if an action against them didn’t succeed, we would all be so grateful. It would be a sign that for honest people all is not yet lost.
October 21: Constitutions and Realities
The Portuguese Constitution came into effect on April 25, 1976, two years after the revolution and the end of a troubled period of partisan struggles and social unrest. Since then it has been through seven revisions, the most recent in 2005. In many of its constituent articles, a political constitution is a declaration of intent. Constitutionalists should not rend their garments when I say this: I am not trying to minimize the importance of these documents, which I am considering here along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has been in force (or rather, we should say, in latency) since 1948. As we all know, changes to a constitution are a form of operational correction, adjustments to social reality, when they are not simply the result of the political will of a parliamentary majority that is able to promote or impose its own preferences. On the other hand, maybe through superstition or inertia, it is not unusual for constitutions, or at least some of them, to retain fossilized remains of articles that have entirely or partly lost their original meaning. There is no other way to explain how the preamble to the Portuguese Constitution has retained, as if untouchable, even if as a purely rhetorical concession, the phrase “to open a path to socialism.” In a world dominated by the cruelest economic and financial liberalism ever imagined, this reference, the last echo of a thousand popular aspirations, risks raising a smile. A tearful smile, that is. Constitutions exist, and it is by their light that I believe we should judge the administration of our governments. The law of the jungle that has ruled these past thirty years would not have produced the consequences we see today if governments, all of them, had each made the constitution of its country into a vade mecum to be used day and night, the primer for all good citizens. It may be that the terrible shock the world is experiencing will lead us to treat our constitutions as something more than the simple declarations of intent they remain in so many respects. Let us hope so.
October 22: Chico Buarque de Holanda
Do parallel universes exist? Faced with the various “proofs” presented to the court of public opinion by those writers who dedicate themselves to science fiction, it is not hard to believe that they do, or at least to concede to this audacious hypothesis that which we would deny no one—that is, the benefit of the doubt. Now, supposing such parallel universes do exist, it would be logical and I think inevitable that we should acknowledge the existence of parallel literatures, parallel writers, parallel books. A sarcastic soul would not fail to remind us that you needn’t go that far to find parallel writers, better known as plagiarists, who nonetheless never actually become real plagiarists at all because they feel obliged to put something of their own labor into the work they sign in their own name. Absolute plagiarism was what Pierre Menard did, who according to Borges copied Quixote word for word, and even in this case Borges himself warned us that the word justice in the twentieth century does not mean the same thing (or the same justice) as when it was written at the beginning of the seventeenth. . . Another kind of parallel writer (nowadays called a “ghost”) is the writer who writes for others, so that they can enjoy the supposed or actual glory of seeing their names on a book jacket. It is this type of author that Chico Buarque de Holanda’s novel Budapest is apparently about, and if I say apparently it is only because the ghost whose grotesque adventures we follow (entertained, and at the same time filled with pity) is merely the unconscious cause of a series of repetitions, which, if not actually repeated universes or literatures, are certainly, disconcertingly, repetitions of authors and books. What is most unsettling, however, is the feeling of vertigo that continually overtakes the reader, who from moment to moment knew where he was but from moment to moment does not know where he is. Without seeming to be trying to do so, each page of the novel expresses a “philosophical” question and an “ontological” provocation: What is reality, after all? What and who am I, after all, in this scheme they have taught me to call reality? A book exists, stops existing, will exist again. One person wrote it, another person signed it; if the book disappears, will they both disappear, too? And if they disappear, will they disappear altogether or only in part? If one survives, will he survive in this universe or another? Who would I be, if by surviving I were no longer who I was? Chico Buarque shows great audacity in this book; he writes crossing a chasm on a high wire and makes it to the other side. To the side where we find his work masterfully accomplished, demonstrating a mastery of language, of narrative construction, of just doing. I don’t think I am wrong when I say that something new happened in Brazil with the appearance of this book.
October 23: Do Torturers Have Souls?
Over the past few days Judge Garzón has been made the object of target practice. Even those who defend him would argue that his personality is controversial, as if we were each obliged to be identical to our next-door neighbor. . . The thing is that Garzón, with his highly individual edicts, is the judge who has given the most joy to those who—in spite of everything—expect a lot from justice, or, to be more accurate, from those tasked with administering it. Following some complaints that were brought to his attention, Garzón waded into an issue that is bigger than he and all judicial institutions are put together: the Spanish Civil War, the illegality of Francoism, the dignity of those who defended the Republic and an entire way of life. He knows that he might have to abandon the battlefield, but he will have left the doors open for certain truths to be recognized, and for the dead to be identified and, ultimately, decently buried. The Spanish transition, a period that was lived through in the hope of what might be possible, is not a safe conduct: the left yielded because military and civilian Francoism were beginning to appear. But they did not give up, they didn’t say, “This is the last word,” they simply waited for the day to come when they could count their dead and call things by their proper names. Garzón has used his position of authority to help, and no one felt greater joy at this than the war victims who have managed to survive to this day.
Judge Garzón is no partisan. He understands that nothing human can be alien to him, and he delves into matters he considers to be criminal because he has the authority to do so. He also wonders whether torturers have souls, which is more than enough of an indication that he approaches an analysis from both sides. A few months ago he asked me to write a prologue for a piece of work he had carried out with the journalist Vicente Romero. This, I repeat, was an investigation into the behavior of torturers. I enthusiastically recommend reading this book— El Alma de los Verdugos [The Torturers’ Soul], published by RBA—and until you have a copy in your hands I shall leave you with these lines that I wrote in the manner of a prologue for Baltasar Garzón and Vicente Romero.
DO TORTURERS HAVE SOULS?
The idea of a soul that can be considered responsible for any and every act we commit must necessarily lead us to recognize the complete innocence of the body, reduced to being the passive instrument of a will, of a yearning, of a desire impossible to locate in any specific part of itself. A hand in repose, with its bones, nerves, and tendons, is ready to fulfill an order within the instant it is given, an order for which the hand is not responsible, whether it is to offer someone a flower or to stub out a cigarette on someone’s skin. On the other hand, attributing a priori the responsibility for all our actions to an immaterial entity, the soul, that, mediated by our conscience, is also the judge of those actions, leads us into a vicious circle, in which in the end no culprit is answerable for his deed.