Jose Saramago: Seeing

Nearly an hour later, the first voter arrived. Contrary to the general expectation, and much to the dismay of the clerk who had gone over to the door earlier on, it was a stranger. He left his dripping umbrella at the entrance to the room and, still wearing his plastic cape glistening with water and his plastic boots, went over to the table. The presiding officer looked up at him with a smile on his lips, for this voter, a man of advanced years, but still robust, signaled a return to normality, to the usual line of dutiful citizens moving slowly and patiently along, conscious, as the representative of the p.o.t.r. had put it, of the vital importance of these municipal elections. The man handed his identity card and voter's card to the presiding officer, the latter then announced in a sonorous, almost joyful voice the number on the card and its owner's name, the clerks in charge of the electoral roll leafed through it and, when they found both name and number, repeated them out loud and drew a straight line against the entry to indicate that the man had voted, then, the man, still dripping, went into a voting booth clutching his ballot paper, returned shortly afterward with the piece of paper folded into four, handed it to the presiding officer, who slipped it solemnly into the ballot box, retrieved his documents and left, taking his umbrella with him. The second voter took another ten minutes to appear, but from then on, albeit unenthusiastically, one by one, like autumn leaves slowly detaching themselves from the boughs of a tree, the ballot papers dropped into the ballot box. However long the presiding officer and his colleagues took to scrutinize documents, a queue never formed, there were, at most, at any one time, three or four people waiting, and three or four people, try as they might, can never make a queue worthy of the name. I was quite right, commented the representative of the p.i.t.m., the abstention rate will be enormous, massive, there'll be no possible agreement on the result after this, the only solution will be to hold the elections again, The storm might pass, said the presiding officer and, looking at his watch, he murmured as if he were praying, It's nearly midday. Resolutely, the man to whom we have been referring as the clerk who had gone over to the door earlier on got up and said to the presiding officer, With your permission, sir, since there are no voters here at present, I'll just pop out and see what the weather's doing. It took only an instant, he was there and back in a twinkling, this time with a smile on his face and bearing good news, It's raining much less now, hardly at all really, and the clouds are beginning to break up too. The poll clerks and the party representatives very nearly embraced, but their happiness was not longlived. The monotonous drip-drip of voters did not change, one came, then another, the wife, mother and aunt of the officer who had gone over to the door came, the elder brother of the representative of the p.o.t.r. came, so did the presiding officer's mother-in-law, who, showing a complete lack of respect for the electoral process, informed her crestfallen son-in-law that her daughter would only be coming later in the afternoon and added cruelly, She said she might go to the cinema, the deputy presiding officer's parents came, as well as other people who were members of none of their families, they entered looking bored and left looking bored, the atmosphere only brightened somewhat when two politicians from the p.o.t.r. arrived and, minutes later, one from the p.i.tm., and, as if by magic, a television camera appeared out of nowhere, filmed a few images and returned into nowhere, a journalist asked if he could put a question, How's the voting going, and the presiding officer replied, It could be better, but now that the weather seems to be changing, we're sure the flow of voters will increase, The impression we've been getting from other polling stations in the city is that the abstention rate is going to be very high this time, remarked the journalist, Well, I prefer to take a more optimistic line, a more positive view of the influence of meteorology on the way the electoral mechanisms work, and as long as it doesn't rain this afternoon, we'll soon make up for what this morning's storm tried to steal from us. The journalist left feeling contented, it was a nice turn of phrase, he could even use it as a subtitle to his article. And because the time had come to satisfy their stomachs, the electoral officers and the party representatives organized themselves so that, with one eye on the electoral roll and the other on their sand wiches, they could take turns to eat right there.

It had stopped raining, but nothing seemed to indicate that th civic hopes of the presiding officer would be satisfactorily fulfille by a ballot box in which, so far, the votes barely covered the bottom All those present were thinking the same thing, the election so far had been a terrible political failure. Time was passing. The clock on the tower had struck half past three when the secretary's wife came in to vote. Husband and wife exchanged discreet smiles, but there was also just a hint of an indefinable complicity, which provoked in the presiding officer an uncomfortable inner spasm, perhaps the pain of envy, knowing that he would never exchange such a smile with anyone. It was still hurting him in some fold of his flesh when, thirty minutes later, he glanced at the clock and wondered to himself if his wife had, in the end, gone to the cinema. She'll turn up, if she ever does, at the last possible moment, he thought. The ways of warding off fate are many and almost all are useless, and this one, forcing oneself to think the worst in the hope that the best will happen, is one of the most commonplace, and might even be worthy of further consideration, although not in this case, because we have it from an unimpeachable source that the presiding officer's wife really has gone to the cinema and, at least up until now, is still undecided as to whether to cast her vote or not. Fortunately, the oft-invoked need for balance which has kept the universe on track and the planets on course means that whenever something is taken from one side, it is replaced by something else on the other, something that more or less corresponds, something of the same quality and, if possible, the same proportions, so that there are not too many complaints about unfair treatment. How else can one explain why it was that, at four o'clock in the afternoon, an hour which is neither late nor early, neither fish nor fowl, those voters who had, until then, remained in the quiet of their homes, apparently blithely ignoring the election altogether, started to come out onto the streets, most of them under their own steam, but others thanks only to the worthy assistance of firemen and volunteers because the places where they lived were still flooded and impassable, and all of them, absolutely all of them, the healthy and the infirm, the former on foot, the latter in wheelchairs, on stretchers, in ambulances, headed straight for their respective polling stations like rivers which know no other course than that which flows to the sea. It will probably seem to the sceptical or the merely suspicious, the kind who are only prepared to believe in miracles from which they hope to gain some advantage, that the present circumstance has shown the above-mentioned need for balance to be utterly wrong, that the trumped-up question about whether the presiding officer's wife will or will not vote is, anyway, far too insignificant from the cosmic point of view to require compensation in one of Earth's many cities in the form of the unexpected mobilization of thousands and thousands of people of all ages and social conditions who, without having come to any prior agreement as to their political and ideological differences, have decided, at last, to leave their homes in order to go and vote. Those who argue thus are forgetting that not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding, and if, at this particular point, the scandalous disproportion between something which might, but for now only might, have seen the ballot box deprived of, in this case, the vote cast by the presiding officer's supposedly unpleasant wife and the tide of men and women now on the move, if we find this difficult to accept in the light of the most elementary distributive justice, prudence warns us to suspend for the moment any definitive judgement and to watch with unquestioning attention how events, which have only just begun to unfold, develop. Which is precisely what the newspaper, radio and television journalists, carried away by professional enthusiasm and by an unquenchable thirst for news, are doing now, racing up and down, thrusting tape-recorders and microphones into people's faces, asking What was it made you leave your house at four o'clock to go and vote, doesn't it seem extraordinary to you that everyone should have come out onto the street at the same time, and receiving in return such abrupt or aggressive replies as, It just happened to be the time I'd decided to go and vote, As free citizens, we can come and go as we please, we don't owe anyone an explanation, How much do they pay you to ask these stupid questions, Who cares what time I leave or don't leave my house, Is there some law that obliges me to answer that question, Sorry, I'm only prepared to speak with my lawyer present. There were polite people too, who replied without the reproachful acrimony of the examples given above, but they were equally unable to satisfy the journalists' devouring curiosity, merely shrugging and saying, Look, I have the greatest respect for the work you do and I'd love to help you publish a bit of good news, but, alas, all I can tell you is that I looked at my watch, saw it was four o'clock and said to the family Right, let's go, it's now or never, Why now or never, That's the funny thing, you see, that's just how it came out, Try to think, rack your brains, No, it's not worth it, ask someone else, perhaps they'll know, But I've asked fifty people already, And, No one could give me an answer, Exactly, But doesn't it strike you as a strange coincidence that thousands of people should all have left their houses at the same time to go and vote, It's certainly a coincidence, but perhaps not that strange, Why not, Ah, that I don't know. The commentators, who were following the electoral process on the various television programmes and, for lack of any firm facts on which to base their analyses, were busily making educated guesses, inferring the will of the gods from the flight and the song of birds, regretting that animal sacrifice was no longer legal and that they were thus prevented from poring over some creature's still twitching viscera to decipher the secrets of chronos and of fate, these commentators woke suddenly from the torpor into which they had been plunged by the gloomy prospects of the count and, doubtless because it seemed unworthy of their educational mission to waste time discussing coincidences, hurled themselves like wolves upon the fine example of good citizenship that the population of the capital were, at that moment, setting the rest of the country by turning up en masse at polling stations just when the specter of an abstention on a scale unparalleled in the history of our democracy had seemed to be posing a grave threat to the stability not just of the regime but, even more seriously, of the system itself. The statement emanating from the ministry of the interior did not go quite that far, but the government's relief was evident in every line. As for the three parties involved in the election, the parties on the right, in the middle and on the left, they, having first made rapid calculations as to the losses and gains that would result from this unexpected influx of voters, issued congratulatory statements in which, along with other stylistic niceties, they affirmed that democracy had every reason to celebrate. With the national flag draped on the wall behind them, the president in his palace and the prime minister in his mansion both expressed themselves in similar terms, give or take a comma. At the polling stations, the lines of voters, standing three deep, went right round the block and as far as the eye could see.