The Notebook. José Saramago
Cavaliere’s powers already stretched so far? How has it been possible for such senseless acts to have been committed, especially since we know that however many times we might send a laugh around the Quirinale it will not fall? Our outrage may be just, but we should make an effort here to understand the complexity of the human heart. W. is a film that attacks Bush, and Berlusconi, a man of heart just as any Mafia boss might be, is a friend, colleague, buddy of the man who is still president of the United States. They are good for one another. What would be no good at all would be for the Italian people to place Berlusconi in the seat of power for a fourth time. No amount of laughter will be able to save us then.
September 20: The Pulianas Cemetery
Once, perhaps seven or eight years ago, we were sought out, Pilar and I, by a man from León by the name of Emilio Silva, who was asking for support for an undertaking he was planning to embark upon: to find the remains of his grandfather, assassinated by the Francoists at the start of the civil war. He asked us for moral support, no more than that. His grandmother had expressed a wish that his grandfather’s bones should be recovered and given a dignified burial. Rather than just taking these words as the will of a bitter old woman, Emilio Silva took them as an order that it was his duty to fulfill, whatever might happen. This was the first step in a mass movement that quickly spread across all Spain: retrieving from ditches and ravines the tens of thousands of victims of fascist hatred that had been buried there, identifying them, and handing them over to their families. It was a massive task that did not enjoy universal support—and mention should be made of the continuous efforts of the Spanish political and social right to block it when it was already a thrilling reality, when the relics of those who had paid with their lives for fidelity to their ideas and to the legitimacy of the Republic were being raised from the dug-up and turned-over earth. Let me introduce here—in a symbolic bow to so many who have dedicated themselves to this work—the name of Ángel del Río, a brother-in-law of mine, who has given the best part of his time to it, including writing two books of research on the disappeared and those killed in reprisal.
It was inevitable that the rescuing of the remains of Federico García Lorca, buried like thousands of others in the Viznar ravine in the province of Granada, would quickly become a genuine national imperative. One of Spain’s greatest poets, the most universally known, there he is in that desert, that place we know almost as a certain fact is the ditch where the author of Romancero Gitano lies, along with three other men who had been shot—a primary school teacher called Dióscoro Galindo and two anarchists who had worked in the bull ring as banderilleros, Joaquín Arcollas Cabezas and Francisco Galadí Melgar. Strangely, however, García Lorca’s family has always opposed his exhumation. To a greater or lesser extent their arguments concern what we might call questions of social decorum, such as the unhealthy prurience of the media and the spectacle that would be made of the excavation of the skeletons, and these are undoubtedly respectable reasons, but, if I might be allowed to say this, today they are outweighed by the simplicity with which Dióscoro Galindo’s granddaughter replied when asked in a radio interview where she would take her grandfather’s remains if they were to be found: “To the Pulianas cemetery.” I should clarify that Pulianas, in the province of Granada, is the village where Dióscoro Galinda worked and where his family still lives. Pages in books are for turning over, pages in life are not.
September 22: Aznar, the Oracle
We can sleep easy: global warming doesn’t exist. It is a malicious invention by ecologists, a strategic part of their “ideology of totalitarian inclinations,” as defined by that implacable observer of planetary politics and universal phenomena who is José María Aznar. There is no way we could live without this man. No matter that one day flowers will begin to grow in the Arctic, no matter that the Patagonian glaciers are diminishing each time someone sighs and makes the environmental temperature go up by a tiny fraction of a degree, no matter that Greenland has lost a significant part of its territory, no matter that droughts and devastating floods take so many lives, no matter that there is less and less difference between the seasons of the year—none of this matters if the distinguished sage José María denies the existence of global warming, based on the meandering pages of a book by Czech president Vaclav Klaus that Aznar himself, in a lovely piece of scientific and institutional solidarity, will soon be presenting. We’re already listening. And yet we are tortured by a very serious doubt, which it is now time to offer up for the reader’s consideration. What could be the origin, the spring, the source of this systematic attitude of denial? Might it have resulted from a dialectic egg deposited by Aznar in the uterus of the Partido Popular when he was its lord and master? When Rajoy, with his characteristically calm seriousness, told us that some professor cousin of his—a professor of physics, apparently—told him that this business with global warming was nonsense, this ever so daring statement was merely the fruit of an overheated Celtic imagination that had been unable to understand what was being explained to it. That dialectic egg is now a doctrine, a rule, a principle recorded in small print in the Partido Popular’s primer; and in that case, if Rajoy had just unfortunately repeated the words of the professor cousin, then his former boss turned oracle clearly didn’t want to miss an opportunity to teach the ignorant people one more lesson.
I have little space remaining, but perhaps there is room for a brief appeal to common sense. Since we know that our planet has already been through six or seven ice ages, could we not be on the threshold of another? Could it not be that the coincidence between this possibility and the ongoing activities carried out by human beings against their environment is very like those common examples of one illness hiding another illness? Please think about this. In the next ice age, or in this one that is just beginning, the ice will cover Paris. We can relax; it will not happen tomorrow. But we do at least have a duty for today: Let’s not help the forthcoming ice age along. And don’t forget, Aznar is merely a brief episode. Don’t be afraid.
September 23: Biographies
I believe that all of the words we speak, all of the movements and gestures we make, whether completed or merely sketched, can each and every one of them be understood as stray pieces of an unintended autobiography, which, however involuntary, or perhaps precisely because it is involuntary, is no less sincere or truthful than the most detailed account of a life put into writing and onto paper. This conviction that over time everything we say and do, however devoid of significance and importance, is—cannot but be—a biographical expression once led me to suggest, with more seriousness than might have appeared at first sight, that every human being should leave a written account of his or her life, and that these thousands of millions of volumes, when there is no longer room for them on earth, should be taken to the moon. This would mean that the big, enormous, gigantic, vast, immense library of human existence would have to be split first into two parts, and then, as time went on, into three, then four, or even into nine, assuming that the eight other planets of the solar system had atmospheres benign enough to respect the fragility of paper. I would imagine that accounts of the many lives that, being simple and modest, would fit on a mere half-dozen pages, or even fewer, would be dispatched to Pluto, the most distant of the sun’s children, where researchers would doubtless want to travel only rarely.
I am sure that a number of problems and doubts would arise when the time came to establish and define the criteria for making up these so-called libraries. It would be beyond dispute, for example, that books like the diaries of Amiel, Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, Cellini’s autobiography, Casanova’s memoirs, Rousseau’s confessions and many other works of comparable human and literary significance ought to remain on the planet on which they were written, in order to bear witness to the passage through this world of men and women who for good or bad reasons have not only lived but also left a mark, a presence, an influence, which, having survived to this day, will continue to affect generations to come. The problems will arise when the choice of what will stay and what will be sent into space begins to reflect the inevitably subjective value judgments, prejudices,