José Saramago - Skylight

Emílio Fonseca closed the case with a loud snap. It was not entirely clear what his wife meant, but he could see what she was getting at. He looked at her with his cold, pale eyes and said:

“And if it had been a man, should I then immediately have assumed that you had put the advertisement in?”

Carmen blushed, offended:

“You brute!”

Henriquinho, who was listening to the conversation unblinking, stared at his father to see how he would react. Emílio, however, merely shrugged and murmured:

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want your apologies,” retorted Carmen, already getting agitated. “Whenever you apologize, what you’re actually doing is making fun of me. I’d rather you hit me!”

“I’ve never hit you.”

“And don’t you dare, either.”

“Don’t worry. You’re taller and stronger than me. Allow me at least to preserve the illusion that I belong to the stronger sex. It’s the only illusion left to me. And, please, let’s not argue.”

“And what if I want to argue?”

“There would be no point. I always have the final word. I’m going to put on my hat now and leave, and I won’t be back until tonight. Always assuming I do come back, of course.”

Carmen went into the kitchen to fetch her purse. She gave some money to her son and sent him off to the grocer’s to buy some sweets. Henriquinho tried to resist, but the pull of the sweets proved stronger than his curiosity and his courage, which was telling him to take his mother’s side. As soon as the front door had closed, Carmen returned to the dining room. Her husband had sat down at one end of the table and was lighting a cigarette. His wife plunged straight into the argument:

“So you’re not coming back, eh? I knew it. You’ve got somewhere else to stay, haven’t you? So the little god has clay feet, has he? Y aquí estoy yo, the skivvy, the slave, working away all day for whenever his majesty chooses to come home!”

Emílio smiled. His wife grew more furious still:

“Don’t you laugh at me!”

“Why shouldn’t I laugh? What do you expect? This is all complete nonsense. There are plenty of boarding houses in the city. What’s to prevent me staying in one of those?”

“ ¡Yo! Me!”

“You? Oh, don’t be silly! Look, I have things to do. Just stop all this nonsense, will you?”

“Emílio!”

Carmen barred the way, trembling with rage. She was slightly taller than he; she had a square face and a strong jaw, and despite the two deep lines that ran from the sides of her nose down to the corners of her mouth, there was still the remnant of a now almost faded beauty, of warm, luminous skin, velvety, liquid eyes, youth. For a moment Emílio saw her as she had been eight years before. It was only a moment, a flash, then the memory flickered and burned out.

“You’ve been fooling around with someone else, Emílio!”

“Rubbish. Of course I haven’t. I can swear on the Bible if you like. But even if I had been, what would you care? It’s no good crying over spilled milk. We’ve been married for eight years and have we ever really been happy? There was the honeymoon, I suppose, but even then… We fooled ourselves, Carmen. We played with life and now we’re paying for it. You really shouldn’t play with life, don’t you agree?”

His wife had sat down and was crying. Still sobbing, she exclaimed:

“¡Soy una desgraciada!”

Emílio picked up the sample case and with his free hand stroked his wife’s head with a rare and now forgotten tenderness, murmuring:

“We’re both of us unfortunate, each in our own way, but believe me, we both are, me possibly even more than you. At least you have Henrique…” The affectionate tone grew suddenly hard: “Anyway, enough of that. I might not be back for lunch, but I’ll definitely be here for supper. See you later.”

Out in the corridor, he turned and added, with a hint of irony in his voice:

“And as for the advertisement, it’s obviously a mistake. Maybe it’s meant for the neighbors.”

He opened the front door and went out onto the landing, holding the case in his right hand, his right shoulder pulled slightly down by the weight. Without thinking, he adjusted his hat, a gray, broad-brimmed affair that cast a shadow over his pale, distant eyes and made his face and body look smaller.

Dona Carmen had sent two more would-be lodgers packing before she decided to test out her husband’s idea. And when she did, still fuming from that earlier domestic dispute and from arguing with the various candidates for the room, she spoke very sharply to Silvestre. He, however — suddenly understanding the inexplicable absence of applicants — replied in the same vein, and Carmen was forced into retreat when she saw the plump, round figure of Mariana — sleeves rolled up and hands on her hips — hove into view behind Silvestre. To avoid any further confusion, Silvestre suggested that he put a notice on her door sending any more hopeful candidates to him. Carmen grumbled that she wasn’t prepared to have bits of paper stuck on her front door, to which Silvestre replied that she would be the one to suffer then, because she would have to answer the door to anyone responding to the ad. Reluctantly she agreed, and Silvestre wrote an appropriate note on half a sheet of letter paper. Carmen, however, would not allow him to affix it to the door, and did the job herself with a dab of glue. Even so, she was faced by one more person asking the same question and brandishing the same newspaper as proof, for the simple reason that the interested party was unable to read. What she thought of Silvestre and his wife went far beyond what she said, but what she said also went far beyond what was right and just. Had Silvestre been of a bellicose nature, we could have had an international incident on our hands. Mariana, it’s true, was spitting feathers, but her husband calmed her violent impulses and her desire to imitate that heroine of the Battle of Aljubarrota, who slew seven Castilians with her baker’s shovel.

Silvestre returned to his place at the window, wondering how the mistake could possibly have arisen. He knew full well that his handwriting was not of the finest, but it was, he thought, pretty good for a cobbler, especially when compared with that of certain doctors. The only explanation seemed to be that the newspaper had got it wrong. He was sure it hadn’t been his mistake; he could see in his mind’s eye the form he had filled in, and he had definitely put ground floor, right. While engaged in these thoughts, he remained focused on his work, glancing out at the street now and then with the aim of spotting among the few passersby anyone who might be coming to see the room. The advantage of this tactic was that by the time he came to speak to the interested party, he would already have reached a decision, for he held himself to be a good judge of faces. As a youth, he had gotten used to studying other people, in order to know who they were and what they were thinking, at a time when knowing whom to trust was almost a matter of life or death. These thoughts, drawing him back along the path his life had taken, distracted him from his role as observer.

The morning was nearly over, the smell of lunch was already filling the apartment, and no one suitable had as yet turned up. Silvestre now regretted being so particular. He had spent good money on an advertisement, got into an argument with his neighbor (who, luckily, was not also a customer) and still they had no lodger.

He had just started nailing metal heel and toe taps onto a pair of boots when he saw a man walking slowly along on the pavement opposite, looking up at the buildings and at the faces of the other people passing by. He didn’t have a newspaper in his hand or, it would seem, in his pocket. He stopped opposite Silvestre’s window to study the building floor by floor. Pretending to be absorbed in his work, Silvestre continued to watch him out of the corner of his eye. The man was of medium height, dark-complexioned and probably not yet thirty. He was dressed in the unmistakable manner of someone caught midway between poverty and earning a modest income. His suit was well cut, but rather shabby. The creases in his trousers would have been the despair of Mariana. He was wearing a polo-neck sweater and no hat. Despite appearing quite satisfied with the results of his inspection, he still did not move.