José Saramago - Skylight

“Hm, lucky you’re not asleep. That saves me the trouble of having to wake you up. Read this!”

He threw the letter at her. Justina slowly picked up the envelope. As she did so, she thought it must contain the explanation for her husband’s sudden change in behavior. She removed the letter from the envelope and tried to read it; however, the abrupt shift from darkness to light, combined with the bad handwriting, meant that she failed at the first attempt. She changed position, rubbed her eyes and raised herself on one elbow. Caetano found these delays exasperating: nothing was going according to plan.

Justina was now reading the letter. Her husband anxiously followed her every change of expression. The absurd thought came into his head: “What if it were true?” He did not have time to follow this idea through, because Justina fell back on the pillow, roaring with laughter.

“Oh, you’re laughing, are you?” bellowed Caetano, but in fact he felt utterly confused.

She could not reply. She was laughing like mad, a sarcastic laugh; she was laughing at her husband and at herself, but more at herself than at him. She was convulsed with laughter, her body heaving; she was laughing as if she were, at the same time, crying. Her eyes were quite dry, though, and out of her gaping mouth poured forth a hysterical, uninterrupted stream of guffaws.

“Shut up! This is disgraceful!” exclaimed Caetano, walking over to her. Given that it had all begun so badly, he wasn’t sure whether or not to continue the performance. His wife’s reaction was sabotaging his carefully laid plans.

“Shut up!” he said again, bending over her. “Shut up!”

Now only the occasional tremor of laughter ran through Justina. She was gradually calming down. Caetano tried to pick up the fast disappearing thread of his plot:

“Is that how you respond to such an accusation? It’s worse than I thought, then!”

At these words, Justina abruptly sat up in bed. She did this so quickly that Caetano drew back. His wife’s eyes glittered:

“This whole thing is a farce, but what you’re hoping to gain from it I have no idea.”

“A farce, is it? Oh, please! I demand an explanation for what’s in that letter!”

“Ask the person who wrote it!”

“It’s anonymous.”

“I can see that. But I’m not giving you any explanation.”

“You dare to say that to me?”

“What do you expect me to say?”

“To tell me whether or not it’s true.”

Justina looked at him in a way he found unbearable. He averted his gaze and his eyes fell on the photo of their daughter. Matilde was smiling at her parents. His wife followed his gaze, then said softly, slowly:

“You want to know if it’s true, do you? You want me to tell you if it’s true? You want me to tell you the truth?”

Caetano hesitated. The idea that had occurred to him in his disoriented state of mind resurfaced: “What if it was true?” Then Justina said again:

“You want to know the truth, do you?”

She grasped the hem of her nightdress and, in one rapid movement, pulled it up over her head. She stood there before her husband, naked. Caetano opened his mouth to say something, although quite what he had no idea. He could not utter a single word. His wife was speaking again:

“Here it is! Look at me! Here’s the truth you wanted. Look at me, go on! Don’t look away! Take a good long look!”

As if obeying the orders of a hypnotist, Caetano opened his eyes very wide. He saw the scrawny brown body, made darker by its very thinness, the angular shoulders, the flaccid, pendant breasts, the convex belly, the thin thighs jutting from the torso, the large, misshapen feet.

“Take a good look,” Justina repeated in a tense voice that threatened to break at any moment. “Take a good long look. If even you don’t want me, you who will go with any woman, who else is going to want me? Take a long hard look! Shall I stay like this until you say you’ve seen enough? Quickly, tell me!”

Justina was trembling. She felt debased, not because she had revealed herself to her husband naked, but for having given in to her indignation, for not having responded to him with silent scorn. It was too late now to show him what she really felt.

She walked over to her husband:

“Nothing to say? Is this why you dreamed up this whole comedy? I should feel ashamed to stand before you in this state. But I don’t. That shows you just how much I despise you!”

Caetano turned abruptly and left the room. Justina heard him open the front door and race down the stairs. Then she slumped onto the bed again and, totally drained, began to cry noiselessly. As if ashamed of her nakedness now that she was alone, she pulled the bedclothes up about her.

In the photo, Matilde’s smile was unaltered. A happy smile, the smile of a child who has been taken to the photographer’s studio, and to whom the photographer has said: “That’s it, hold it there! Say ‘cheese’! Lovely!” And afterward Matilde went out into the street, hand in hand with her mother, happy because she had been told that she looked lovely.

Anselmo was none too pleased at the prospect of another three whole months of receiving only the five hundred escudos that Paulino Morais had agreed to pay his daughter, an amount that would, after tax, come to a mere four hundred and fifty escudos. After those three months were up, what guarantee did they have that he would, as agreed, increase her wages? What if he took against her, decided he didn’t want her? After thirty years of working in an office, this was something Anselmo knew all about. He knew that once an employee fell from grace, there was no way back. His own case was proof of that. How many younger men, who had joined the company after him, had been promoted over his head? They were no more competent than he, and yet they had risen up the ladder far more quickly.

“Plus,” he said to his wife, “she was used to her old job and might find it hard to adapt. She had a certain seniority there, which always counts for something. Not in my case, it’s true, but there are some decent bosses.”

“But how do you know Senhor Morais isn’t one of them? And you’re forgetting that we have an ally in Dona Lídia. Besides, Claudinha’s no fool!”

“She’s certainly her father’s daughter in that respect…”

“Exactly.”

But Anselmo still did not rest easy. He wanted to free his daughter from a commitment she had taken on without first seeking his advice, and the only reason he refrained from doing so was seeing how much Claudinha was enjoying her new job. She had promised him that she would work hard at learning shorthand and that, in three months’ time, her wages would be increased. She had said this with such confidence that Anselmo had refrained from mentioning his own anxieties.

In the evenings, while Rosália darned socks and Anselmo filled up columns with soccer-related names and numbers, Claudinha was becoming initiated into the mysteries of shorthand.

He did not say as much, but Anselmo was filled with admiration for his daughter’s abilities. No one knew shorthand at his office, which was an old-fashioned place, with no modern metal furniture and where they had only recently acquired an adding machine. Claudinha’s apprenticeship cheered their evenings together at home, and there was general rejoicing when she managed to teach her father to write his name in shorthand. Rosália wanted to learn too, but, being illiterate, she took far longer.

Once he had gotten over the novelty of the situation, Anselmo resumed his interrupted task, that of selecting the national team, his own personal selection. He had worked out a sure and simple method: in goal he would place the player who had let in the fewest balls during the season, and as strikers, logically enough, he quite rightly chose those players who had scored the most goals. The remaining positions he filled with his personal club favorites, deviating from this only when it came to players who were, according to newspaper reports, essential components of any team. This was an ongoing project, because week by week the best scorers would move up and down the ranks. However, since those changes, which he noted on a diagram of his own invention, were not particularly radical, he felt he was very close to choosing the perfect team. Once he had done this, he would await the decision of the official selection committee.