Jose Saramago - Seeing

The information received by the ministry of the interior was correct, the city was preparing for a demonstration. The final death toll had risen to thirty-four. No one knows where or how the idea came about, but it was immediately taken up by everyone, the bodies were not to be buried in cemeteries like the ordinary dead, their graves were to remain per omnia saecula saeculorum in the landscaped area opposite the station. However, a few families known for their right-wing allegiances and who were utterly convinced that the attack had been the work of a terrorist group with, as all the media affirmed, direct links to the conspiracy against the present government, refused to hand over their innocent dead to the community. Yes, they clamored, they truly were innocent of all guilt, because they had all their lives respected their own rights and those of others, because they had voted as their parents and their grandparents had, because they were orderly people and had now become the victims and martyrs of this murderous act of violence. They also alleged, in another tone entirely, perhaps so as not to scandalize anyone with such a lack of civic solidarity, that they had their own historical family vaults and it was a deep-rooted family tradition that those who had always been united in life should remain so after death, again per omnia saecula saeculorum. The collective burial would not, therefore, be of thirty-four bodies, but twenty-seven. This was still a large number of people. Sent by who knows who, but certainly not by the council, which, as we know, will be without a leader until the interior minister approves the necessary appointment of a replacement, anyway, as we were saying, sent by who knows who, there appeared in the garden a vast machine with many arms, one of those so-called multipurpose machines, like a gigantic quick-change artist, which can uproot a tree in the time it takes to utter a sigh and which would have been capable of digging twenty-seven graves in less time that it takes to say amen, if the gravediggers from the cemeteries, who were equally attached to tradition, had not turned up to carry out the work by hand, that is, using spade and shovel. What the machine had, in fact, come to do was to uproot half a dozen trees that were in the way, so that the area, once trodden down and leveled, looked as if it had been born to be a cemetery and a place of eternal rest, and then it, the machine that is, went off and planted the trees and the shade that they cast elsewhere.

Three days after the attack, in the early morning, people started to flood out into the streets. They were silent and grave-faced, many carried white flags, and all wore a white armband on their left arm, and don't let any experts in the etiquette of funeral rites go telling you that white cannot be a sign of mourning, when we are reliably informed that it used to be so in this very country, and we know that it has always been so for the Chinese, not to mention the Japanese, who, if it was left up to them, would all be wearing blue. By eleven o'clock, the square was already full, but all that could be heard was the great breathing of the crowd, the dull whisper of air entering and leaving lungs, in and out, feeding with oxygen the blood of these living beings, in, out, in, out, until suddenly, we will not finish the phrase, that moment, for those who have come here, the survivors, has not yet come. There were innumerable white flowers, quantities of chrysanthemums, roses, lilies, especially arum lilies, the occasional translucent white cactus flower, and thousands of marguerites which were forgiven their black hearts. Lined up twenty paces apart, the coffins were lifted onto the shoulders of the relatives and friends of the deceased, those who had them, and carried in procession to the graves, where, under the skilled guidance of the professional gravediggers, they were slowly lowered down on ropes until, with a hollow thud, they touched bottom. The ruins of the station still seemed to give off a smell of burned flesh. It will seem incomprehensible to some that such a moving ceremony, such a poignant display of collective grief, was not graced by the consolatory influence that would doubtless have come from the ritual practices of the country's sundry religious institutions, thus depriving the souls of the dead of their most certain viaticum and depriving the community of the living of a practical demonstration of ecumenicalism that might have contributed to leading the straying population back to the fold. The reason for this deplorable absence can only be explained by the various churches' fear that they might become the focus of suspicions, possibly tactical, or at worst strategic, of conniving with the blank-voting insurgency. This absence might also have to do with a number of phone calls, with minimal variations on the same theme, made by the prime minister himself, The nation's government would find it deeply regrettable if the chance presence of your church at the funeral service, while, of course, spiritually justified, should come to be considered, and subsequently exploited, as evidence of your political, and even ideological, support for the stubborn and systematic disrespect with which a large part of the capital's population continues to treat the legitimate and constitutional democratic authority. The burials were, therefore, purely secular, which is not to say that, here and there, a few private, silent prayers did not rise up to the various heavens to be welcomed there with benevolent sympathy. The graves were still open, when someone, doubtless with the best of intentions, stepped forward to give a speech, but this was immediately repudiated by the other people present, No speeches, we each have our own grief and we all feel the same sorrow. And the person who came up with this clear formulation of feelings was quite right. Besides, if that were the intention of the frustrated orator, it would be impossible to make a funeral oration for twenty-seven people, both male and female, not to mention some small child with no history at all. Unknown soldiers do not need the names that they used in life in order to be showered with the right and proper honors, and that's fine, if that's what we agree to do, but if these dead, most of them unrecognizable, and two or three of them still unidentified, want anything, it is to be left in peace. To those punctilious readers, showing a praiseworthy concern for the good ordering of the story, who want to know why the usual, indispensable DNA tests were not carried out, the only honest answer we can give is our own total ignorance, allow us, however, to imagine that the famous and much-abused expression, Our dead, so commonplace, so much part of the routine patter of patriotic harangues, were to be taken literally in these circumstances, that is, if these dead, all of them, belong to us, we should not consider any of them exclusively ours, which would mean that any DNA analysis which took into account all the factors, including, in particular, the non-biological ones, and however hard it rummaged around inside the double helix, would only succeed in confirming a collective ownership which required no proof anyway. That man, or perhaps woman, had more than enough reason to say, as we noted above, Here, we each have our own grief and we all feel the same sorrow. Meanwhile, the earth was shoveled back into the graves, the flowers were shared out equally, those who had reasons to weep were embraced and consoled by the others, if such a thing is possible with such a recent grief. The loved one of each person, of each family, is here, although one does not know quite where, perhaps in this grave, perhaps in that, it would be best if we wept over all of them, as a shepherd once so rightly said, although heaven knows where he learned it, One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

The trouble with these narrative digressions, taken up as we have been with bothersome detours, is that one can find, too late, of course, almost without noticing, that events have moved on, have gone on ahead, and instead of us announcing what is about to happen, which is, after all, the elementary duty of any teller of tales worth his salt, all we can do is to confess contritely that it already has. Contrary to what we had supposed, the crowd has not dispersed, the demonstration continues and is now advancing en masse, filling the streets, in the direction, as the shouts are telling us, of the presidential palace. And on the way lies neither more nor less than the prime minister's official residence. The journalists from press, radio and television, who are at the head of the demonstration, take nervous notes, describe the events over the phone to the offices where they work, and excitedly unburden themselves of their professional and citizenly disquiets, No one seems to know quite what is going to happen, but we have reason to fear that the crowd is preparing to storm the presidential palace, which does not exclude, indeed we would say it remains highly likely, the possibility that they will also sack the prime minister's official residence and any ministerial buildings they pass on the way, this is not some apocalyptic vision, the mere fruit of our own fears, you have only to see the people's distraught faces, it would be no exaggeration to say that each of those faces is calling for blood and destruction, and thus, although it pains us to have to say this out loud and to the whole country, we reach the dreadful conclusion that the government, which has shown itself to be so efficient in other ways and was, for that very reason, applauded by all honest citizens, acted with a reprehensible lack of caution when it decided to abandon the city to the instincts of the angry mob, without the fatherly, dissuasive presence of the police on the streets, with no riot squads, with no tear-gas, no water-cannon, no dogs, in a word, unchecked. This speech warning of certain disaster reached a peak of media hysteria when they came in sight of the prime minister's residence, a bourgeois mansion, late-eighteenth-century in style, where the journalists' shouts became screams, Now, now, anything could happen, may the holy virgin protect us all, may the glorious and revered spirits of our nation, up there in the empyrean into which they ascended, quell the wrathful hearts of these people. Anything could have happened, it's true, but, in the end, nothing did, apart from the demonstration, the small section of it that we can see, coming to a halt at the crossroads where the mansion, with its small surrounding park, occupies one corner, the rest of the crowd spilled over onto the pavements, into the adjoining squares and streets, if the police arithmeticians were here, they would say that, all in all, there were only about fifty thousand people, when the exact number, the real number, because we counted them all, one by one, was ten times higher.