José Saramago - Skylight

“Fancy a good time, dearie?” said a woman’s voice in the darkness. Abel smiled sadly.

“What an admirable society this is, providing, as it does, for everything and everyone, even the poor unhappy bachelors who need an outlet for their sexual urges! Even happily married husbands who like a bit of variety for not much outlay! Ah, Society, you loving mother!”

In the streets of the city’s outlying areas, rubbish bins stood outside every door. The dogs look for bones there, the rag-and-bone men for rags and paper. “Nothing is wasted,” murmured Abel. “In Nature nothing is created and nothing is lost. Poor dear Lavoisier, I bet you never thought that the proof of your words would be found in a rubbish bin!”

He went into a café: tables, some occupied, others not, yawning waiters, clouds of cigarette smoke, the hum of conversations, the clink of cups — stagnation. And there he was alone. He left, filled with anguish. The warm April night greeted him. The tall buildings were showing him the way. Straight on, always straight on. He turned to left or right only when the street decided for him. The street and the need, sooner or later, to go home. And sooner or later, Abel did go home.

He had taken to speaking very little. And Silvestre and Mariana found this odd. They had grown used to considering him a member of the household, almost one of the family, and they felt hurt, their confidence betrayed. One night Silvestre went into Abel’s room on the pretext of showing him some article in the newspaper. Abel was lying on the bed, reading a book and smoking a cigarette. He read the article, which did not interest him in the least, then handed the newspaper back to Silvestre, muttering a few distracted words of thanks. Silvestre stayed where he was, leaning on the foot of the bedstead, looking at Abel. Seen from that angle, Abel looked smaller and, despite the cigarette and his five o’clock shadow, rather childlike.

“Are you feeling trapped?” asked Silvestre.

“Trapped?”

“Yes, you know, the tentacle…”

“Ah.”

This exclamation was spoken in an indefinable, almost absent tone. Abel sat up, looked hard at Silvestre and added slowly:

“No, perhaps I’m feeling the lack of a tentacle. The conversations we’ve had have made me think about things I thought had long since been safely filed away.”

“I don’t think they could have been filed away, or only very haphazardly. If you really were the kind of person you try so hard to appear to be, I would never have told you about my life.”

“You should be pleased, then.”

“Pleased? On the contrary. I think you’re in the grip of tedium. You’re tired of life, you think you’ve learned all there is to learn, and everything you see around you only increases your sense of tedium. Why, then, should I feel pleased? It isn’t always easy to cut off a tentacle. You can always leave a boring job and, even more easily, a boring woman, but tedium, how do you cut yourself off from that?”

“You’ve said all this before, you’re surely not going to repeat—”

“I’m obviously annoying you.”

“No, not at all!”

Abel leapt to his feet and reached out one arm to Silvestre, who, having made as if to leave the room, now remained where he was. Abel sat down on the edge of the bed, half turned toward Silvestre. They were looking at each other, unsmiling, as if waiting for something important to happen. Then Abel said:

“You do know, don’t you, that I’m your friend?”

“I do,” answered Silvestre. “And I’m your friend too, but we seem to have had a falling-out.”

“That’s my fault.”

“Perhaps it’s mine. You need someone who can help you, and I don’t seem to be that person.”

Abel got up, put on his shoes and went over to a trunk in one corner of the room. He opened it and, pointing to the books almost filling it, said:

“Even in my worst moments it never once occurred to me to sell them. These are all the books I brought from home, plus others I’ve bought over the past twelve years. I’ve read and reread them all. I’ve learned a lot from them. Half of what I learned I’ve forgotten, and the other half might be quite wrong, but right or wrong, the truth is that they have only contributed to making my own uselessness more obvious.”

“But you were quite right to read them. Think of all the people who live their entire lives without ever realizing how useless they are. In order for someone to be truly useful, he must, at some point, feel his own uselessness. At least then he’s less likely to go back to being useless…”

“Be useful, that’s all you ever say to me. But how can I be useful?”

“That’s something you have to discover for yourself, like everything else in life. No one can give you advice about that. I’d really like to — if I thought it would do any good.”

“And I’d like to know what you really mean.”

Silvestre smiled:

“Don’t worry. All I mean is that we won’t become what we are meant to be in life by listening to other people’s words or advice. We have to feel in our own flesh the wound that will make us into proper men. Then it’s up to us to act…”

Abel closed the trunk. He turned to Silvestre and said in a dreamy tone:

“To act… If everyone acted as we have done, there would be no proper men…”

“My time is past,” said Silvestre.

“That’s why it’s so easy for you to criticize me. Listen, how about a game of checkers?”

That night, Paulino had arrived late, at around eleven o’clock. He gave Lídia a peck on the cheek, then went over to his favorite sofa, where he sat smoking his usual cigarillo.

As it happened, Lídia was not wearing the obligatory negligee, which may have contributed to Paulino’s unspoken irritation. Even the way he gripped his cigarillo between his teeth and drummed his fingers on the arm of the sofa were signs of his displeasure. Sitting at his feet on a low stool, Lídia was doing her best to amuse him by recounting the minutiae of her day. She had begun to notice a change in her lover some nights before. He no longer “devoured” her with his eyes, and while this could be attributed to long familiarity, it could also mean that he was losing interest in her for some other reason. Lídia’s permanent feeling of insecurity meant that she always feared the worst. Apparently insignificant details, a certain degree of inattentiveness and brusqueness on his part, a slightly abstracted air, only added to her anxiety.

Paulino was doing nothing to keep the conversation going. There were long pauses during which neither of them knew what to say, or, rather, during which Lídia didn’t know what to say, for it seemed Paulino preferred to remain silent. She racked her brain for ways to keep the conversation alive, but he responded only distractedly. And the conversation, for lack of substance, was burning out like a lamp with no oil in it. That evening, Lídia’s clothes seemed a further motive for his distant behavior. Paulino kept blowing out great clouds of smoke with a long, impatient sigh. Abandoning her attempt to find a subject that might interest him, Lídia said, almost casually:

“You seem a bit preoccupied.”

“Hm.”

Such a vague response could mean anything. He appeared to be waiting for Lídia to decide what he meant. Gripped by the vague fear of the unknown that lurks both in dark houses and in imprudent words whose consequences one can never predict, Lídia added:

“You’ve been behaving differently for a few days now. You always used to tell me your problems. I don’t wish to be indiscreet, of course, but it might help you to talk about them.”

Paulino stared at her in amusement. He even smiled. Lídia found both look and smile terrifying. She regretted having spoken. Seeing her shrink back, and not wishing to miss the opportunity she was offering him, Paulino said only: