The Notebook. José Saramago
over whom to assert one’s assumed power, resorts to the facile stimuli of rhetorical evocation. Exalted rhetoric, which is not necessarily a bad thing, does however bring with it a sense of self-satisfaction that leads to confusing words with deeds.
On that October day, Portugal—still barely begun—took a great step forward, a step so decisive that Lisbon was not lost again. But we will not allow ourselves the Napoleonic vanity of exclaiming: “Eight hundred years look down on us from the height of that castle,” and pat ourselves on the back for having survived so long. . . Rather we recall that blood was shed, first on one side and then the other, and that all sides make up the blood that flows in our own veins. We, the inheritors of this city, are the descendents of Christians and Moors, of blacks and Jews, of Indians and Orientals, in short, of all races and creeds considered good, along with those that have been called bad. We shall leave to the ironic peace of their tombs those disturbed minds that not so long ago invented a Day of the Race for the Portuguese, and instead reclaim the magnificent mixing, not only of bloods but above all of cultures, that gave Portugal its foundation and has made it last to this day.
In recent years Lisbon has been transformed, has managed to reawaken in the conscience of its citizens that strength that hauled it out of the mire into which it had fallen. In the name of modernization, concrete walls have been erected over ancient stones, the outlines of hills disrupted, panoramas altered, sightlines modified. But the spirit of Lisbon survives, and it is the spirit that makes a city eternal. Entranced by that crazy love and divine enthusiasm that inhabit poets, Camões once wrote that Lisbon was “. . . a princess among other cities.” We will forgive his exaggeration. It is enough that Lisbon is simply what it should be—cultured, modern, clean, organized—without losing any of its soul. And if all these virtues end up making her a queen, well, so be it. In our republic, queens like this will always be welcome.
September 17: An Apology to Charles Darwin?
A piece of good news, naïve readers would say, assuming that after so many disappointments there could still be any good news out there. The Anglican Church, the British version of Catholicism established in the time of Henry VIII and the official religion of the kingdom, has announced an important decision: they are apologizing to Charles Darwin, on the bicentenary of his birth, for how badly they treated him following the publication of The Origin of Species, and how much worse after The Descent of Man. I have nothing against all these apologies that seem to be cropping up almost every day for one reason or other, other than to question how useful they are. Even if Darwin were still alive and inclined to be magnanimous, saying, “Yes, I forgive you,” those generous words could not erase a single insult, a single calumny, a single one of the many contemptuous remarks that were thrown at him. The only institution to benefit from this apology will be the Anglican Church, which will see its store of goodwill increased at no expense. Nonetheless, I’m grateful for a repentance, however belated, that might perhaps prompt Benedict XVI—currently engaged in a diplomatic maneuver in relation to secularism—to ask forgiveness of Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno, especially the latter, who was tortured in the Christian manner, most charitably, right up until the moment when he was burned on the bonfire.
This apology by the Anglicans won’t please North American creationists one bit. They will feign indifference, but quite clearly this goes against their plans. And against those of the Republicans, who, like their vice-presidential candidate, have raised the flag of that pseudoscientific aberration that goes by the name of creationism.
September 18: George W. Bush, or the Age of Lies
I wonder why it is that the United States, a country so great in all things, has so often had such small presidents. George W. Bush is perhaps the smallest of them all. This man, with his mediocre intelligence, abysmal ignorance, confused communication skills, and constant succumbing to the irresistible temptation of pure nonsense, has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a herd of cattle. We don’t know what he really thinks, we don’t even know if he does think (in the noble sense of the word), we don’t know whether he might not be just a badly programmed robot that constantly confuses and switches around the messages it carries around inside it. But to give the man some credit for once in his life, there is one program in the robot George Bush, president of the United States, that works to perfection: lying. He knows he’s lying, he knows we know he’s lying, but being a compulsive liar, he will keep on lying even when he has the most naked truth right there before his eyes—he will keep on lying even after the truth has exploded in his face. He lied to justify waging war in Iraq just as he lied about his stormy and questionable past, and with just the same shamelessness. With Bush, the lies come from very deep down; they are in his blood. A liar emeritus, he is the high priest of all the other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past few years.
George Bush expelled truth from the world, establishing the age of lies that now flourishes in its place. Human society today is contaminated by lies, the worst sort of moral contamination, and he is among those chiefly responsible. The lie circulates everywhere with impunity, and has already turned into a kind of other truth. When a few years ago a Portuguese prime minister—whose name for charity’s sake I will not mention here—stated that “politics is the art of not telling the truth,” he could never have imagined that some time later George W. Bush would transform this shocking statement into a naïve trick of fringe politics, with no real awareness of the value or the significance of words. For Bush, politics is simply one of the levers of business, and perhaps the best one of all—the lie as a weapon, the lie as the advance guard of tanks and cannons, the lie told over the ruins, over the corpses, over humanity’s wretched and perpetually frustrated hopes. We cannot be sure that today’s world is more secure, but we can have no doubt that it would be much cleaner without the imperial and colonial politics of the president of the United States, George Walker Bush, and of the many—quite aware of the fraud they were perpetrating—who allowed him into the White House. History will hold them to account.
September 19: Berlusconi and Co.
According to the North American magazine Forbes, the Gotha of global wealth, Berlusconi’s fortune comes to nearly ten thousand million dollars. Earned honorably, of course, albeit not without the assistance of many other people, including, for instance, my own. Being published in Italy by the Einaudi publishing house, owned by the aforementioned Berlusconi, I must have earned him some money. An infinite drop of water in the ocean, to be sure, but at least enough to be keeping him in cigars, assuming that corruption is not his only vice. Apart from what is public knowledge, I don’t know very much myself about the life and miracles of Silvio Berlusconi, il Cavaliere. The Italian people, who have sat him once, twice, three times in the prime minister’s chair, must know far more than I do. Well, as we often hear it said, the people are sovereign, and they are not only sovereign, they are also wise and prudent, especially since the continual exercise of their democratic rights allows citizens to learn certain useful things about how politics works and about the different means of attaining power. This means that the people are very well aware of what it is they want when they are called to vote. In the particular case of the Italian people, since that is who we’re talking about and no one else (the time for others will come), it is obvious that the sentimental feelings they have for Berlusconi, which they have demonstrated three times, are quite impervious to any consideration of moral order. Really, in the land of the Mafia and the Camorra, what importance could the proven fact that the prime minister is a criminal possibly have? In a land where justice has never had much of a reputation, who cares if the prime minister gets approval for laws aimed at defending his own interests and protecting himself against any attempt to punish his excesses and abuses of authority?
Eça de Queiroz used to say that if we were to send a laugh around an institution, that institution would fall to pieces. That was then. What can be said about the recent prohibition—ordered