José Saramago: Skylight

Now and then he would glance out at the street. The morning was gradually brightening, although the sky was still cloudy and a slight mist blurred the edges of things and people alike.

From among the multitude of noises already filling the building, Silvestre could make out the sound of an immediately identifiable pair of heels clicking down the stairs. As soon as he heard the street door open, he leaned forward.

“Good morning, Adriana!”

“Good morning, Senhor Silvestre.”

The girl stopped beneath the window. She was rather short and dumpy and wore thick glasses that made her eyes look like two small, restless beads. She was nearly thirty-four years old and her modest hairstyle was already streaked with the odd gray hair.

“Off to work, eh?”

“That’s right. See you later, Senhor Silvestre.”

It was the same every morning. By the time Adriana left the house, the cobbler was already seated at the ground-floor window. It was impossible to escape without seeing that unruly tuft of hair and without hearing and responding to those inevitable words of greeting. Silvestre followed her with his eyes. From a distance, she resembled, in Silvestre’s colorful phrase, “a sack of potatoes tied up in the middle.” When she reached the corner of the street, Adriana turned and waved to someone on the second floor. Then she disappeared.

Silvestre put down the shoe he was working on and craned his neck out of the window. He wasn’t a busybody, he just happened to like his neighbors on the second floor; they were good customers and good people. In a voice constrained by his somewhat awkward position, he called out:

“Hello there, Isaura! What do you make of the weather today, eh?”

From the second floor came the answer, attenuated by distance:

“Not bad, not bad at all. The mist…”

But we never found out whether she thought the mist spoiled or embellished the beauty of the morning. Isaura let the conversation drop and slowly closed the window. It wasn’t that she disliked the cobbler, with his simultaneously thoughtful and cheery air, she simply wasn’t in a mood to chat. She had a pile of shirts to be finished by the weekend, by Saturday at the very latest. Given the choice, she would have carried on with the novel she was reading. She only had another fifty pages to go and had reached a particularly interesting part. She found them very gripping, these clandestine love affairs, buffeted by endless trials and tribulations. Besides, the novel was really well written. Isaura was an experienced enough reader to be a judge of this. She hesitated for a moment, but realized at once that she did not even have time to do that. The shirts were waiting. She could hear the murmur of voices inside: her mother and aunt talking. They talked a lot. Whatever did they find to talk about all day that they hadn’t already said a hundred times before?

She crossed the bedroom she shared with her sister. The novel was there on her bedside table. She cast a greedy, longing glance at it, then paused in front of the wardrobe mirror, which reflected her from head to toe. She was wearing a housecoat that clung to her thin, yet still flexible, elegant body. She ran the tips of her fingers over her pale cheeks, where the first fine, barely visible lines were beginning to appear. She sighed at the image shown her by the mirror and fled.

In the kitchen the two old ladies were still talking. They were very similar in appearance — white hair, brown eyes, the same simple black clothes — and they spoke in shrill, rapid tones, without pauses or modulation.

“I’ve told you already. The coal is nothing but dust. We should complain to the coal merchant,” one was saying.

“If you say so,” said the other.

“What are you talking about?” asked Isaura, entering the room.

The more erect and brighter-eyed of the two old ladies said:

“This coal is just terrible. We should complain.”

“If you say so, Auntie.”

Aunt Amélia was, so to speak, the household administrator. She was in charge of the cooking, the accounts and the catering generally. Cândida, the mother of Isaura and Adriana, was responsible for all the other domestic arrangements, for their clothes, for the profusion of embroidered doilies decorating the furniture and for the vases full of paper flowers, which were replaced by real flowers only on high days and holidays. Cândida was the elder of the sisters and, like Amélia, she was a widow, one whose grief had long since been assuaged by old age.

Isaura sat down at the sewing machine, but before starting work, she looked out at the broad river, its farther shore hidden beneath the mist. It looked more like the sea than a river. The rooftops and chimney pots rather spoiled the illusion, but even if you did your best to blot them out, the sea was right there in those few miles of water, the white sky somewhat sullied by the dark smoke belching forth from a tall factory chimney.

Isaura always enjoyed those few moments when, just before she bent her head over her sewing machine, she allowed her eyes and thoughts to wander over the scene before her. The landscape never varied, but she only ever found it monotonous on stubbornly bright, blue summer days when everything was too obvious somehow, too well defined. A misty morning like this — a thin mist that did not entirely conceal the view — endowed the city with a dream-like imprecision. Isaura savored all this and tried to prolong the pleasure. A frigate was traveling down the river as lightly as if it were floating on a cloud. In the gauze of mist, the red sail turned pink, then the boat plunged into the denser cloud licking the surface of the water, reappeared briefly, then vanished behind one of the buildings obscuring the view.

Isaura sighed, her second sigh of the morning. She shook her head like someone surfacing from a long dive, and the machine rattled furiously into action. The cloth ran along beneath the pressure foot, and her fingers mechanically guided it through as though they were just another part of the machine. Deafened by the noise, Isaura suddenly became aware that someone was speaking to her. She abruptly stopped the wheel, and silence flooded back in. She turned around.

“Sorry?”

Her mother said again:

“Don’t you think it’s a bit early?”

“Early? Why?”

“You know why. Our neighbor…”

“But what am I supposed to do? It’s hardly my fault the man downstairs works at night and sleeps during the day, is it?”

“You could at least wait until a bit later. I just hate to annoy people.”

Isaura shrugged, put her foot down on the pedal again and, raising her voice above the noise of the machine, added:

“Do you want me to go to the shop and tell them I’m going to be late delivering?”

Cândida slowly shook her head. She lived in a constant state of perplexity and indecision, under the thumb of her sister — three years her junior — and keenly aware that she was dependent financially on her daughters. She wanted, above all, not to inconvenience anyone, wanted to go unnoticed, to be as invisible as a shadow in the darkness. She was about to respond, but, hearing Amélia’s footsteps, said nothing and went back to the kitchen.

Meanwhile, Isaura, hard at work, was filling the apartment with noise. The floor vibrated. Her pale cheeks gradually grew red and a bead of sweat appeared on her brow. She again became aware of someone standing beside her and slowed down.

“There’s no need to work so fast. You’ll wear yourself out.”

Aunt Amélia never wasted a word. She said only what was absolutely necessary, but she said it in a way that made those listening appreciate the value of concision. The words seemed to be born in her mouth at the very moment they were spoken and to emerge replete with meaning, heavy with good sense, virginal. That’s what made them so impressive and convincing. Isaura duly slowed her pace of work.