Jose Saramago: Seeing

Like all the other presiding officers in the city, the one at polling station number fourteen was all too aware that he was living through a unique moment in history. When, late that night, after the ministry of the interior had extended the deadline for voting by two hours, a period that had to be extended by a further half an hour so that the voters crammed inside the building could exercise their right to vote, when, at last, the poll clerks and the party representatives, exhausted and hungry, stood before the mountain of ballot paper that had been emptied out of the two ballot boxes, the second on had been an emergency requisition from the ministry, the immensity of the task that lay before them made them tremble with an emotion we would not hesitate to describe as epic or heroic, as if the nation's honored ghosts, brought back to life, had magically rematerialized in those ballot papers. One of the ballot papers belonged to the presiding officer's wife. She had been propelled out of the cinema by some strange impulse, she had then spent hours in a queue that advanced at a snail's pace, and when she finally found herself face to face with her husband, when she heard him speak her name, she felt in her heart something that was perhaps the shadow of a former happiness, only the shadow, but even so, she felt it had been worth going there just for that. It was gone midnight when the counting finished. The number of valid votes did not quite reach twenty-five percent, with the party on the right winning thirteen percent, the party in the middle nine percent and the party on the left two and a half percent. There were very few spoiled ballots and very few abstentions. All the others, more than seventy percent of the total votes cast, were blank.

FEELINGS OF CONFUSION AND STUPEFACTION, BUT ALSO OF MOCKERY AND scorn swept the country from north to south. The provincial town councils, where the elections had taken place without incident or upset, apart from the occasional delay caused by the bad weather, and which had obtained results that differed little from the norm, the usual number of straightforward voters, the usual number of inveterate abstainers, and no very significant number of spoiled or blank votes, these councils, who had felt humiliated by the display of centralist triumphalism that had been paraded before the rest of the country as an example of the purest electoral public spirit, could now return that slap in the face and laugh at the foolish presumption of those ladies and gentlemen who thought they were the cat's meow simply because they happened to live in the country's capital. The words Those ladies and gentlemen, pronounced with a curl of the lips that oozed disdain with every syllable, if not with every letter, were directed not at the people who had remained at home until four in the afternoon and then suddenly rushed out to vote as if they had received some irresistible order, but at the government who had hung out the flags too soon, at the political parties who had pounced on the blank votes as if they were a vineyard to be harvested and they were the harvesters, at the newspapers and the other media for the ease with which they moved from applause on the capitoline hill to having people hurled from the tarpeian rock, as if they themselves did not play an active part in the genesis of such disasters.

The provincial scoffers were right to some extent, but not as right as they thought there were. Beneath the political agitation that is racing through the capital like a gunpowder trail in search of a bomb one can sense a disquiet that avoids being spoken out loud, unless in a discussion amongst peers, or between individuals and their closest friends, members of a political party and the party machinery, or the government and itself. What will happen when the election is held again, that is the question everyone is asking in a quiet, controlled whisper, so as not to wake the sleeping dragon. There are those who feel that the best plan would be to resist sticking the spear between the creature's ribs and leave things as they are, with the p.o.t.r. in government and the p.o.t.r. on the city council, to pretend that nothing has happened, to imagine, for example, that the government has declared a state of emergency in the capital and that, consequently, all constitutional guarantees are suspended, and then, after a time, when the dust has settled and the whole tragic incident has entered the list of long-forgotten past events, to prepare for new elections, starting with a carefully planned electoral campaign, full of solemn oaths and promises, at the same time trying to prevent, at all costs, without worrying too much about any minor or major illegalities, the possibility of the repetition of a phenomenon which a celebrated expert on such matters has already rather harshly dubbed socio-political teratology. There are also those who take an entirely different view, they protest that the laws are sacred, that what is written is there to be obeyed, regardless of who gets hurt in the process, and that if we follow the path of subterfuges and take the short-cut of under-the-table deals we will be heading straight for chaos and an end to conscience, in short, if the law stipulates that in the event of a natural disaster, the elections should be repeated eight days later, then they must be repeated eight days later, that is, on the following Sunday, and may god's will be done, since that is what he's there for. It should be noted, however, that when expressing their opinions, the political parties prefer not to take too many risks, in the spirit of trying to please everyone all the time, they say yes, but then again no. The leaders of the party on the right, which is in government and runs the city council, start by assuming that this undoubted trump card will hand them victory on a silver platter, and so they have adopted a tactic of serenity tinged with diplomacy, trusting to the judgement of the government upon whom it is incumbent to see that the law is respected, As is only logical and natural in a long-standing democracy like ours, they conclude. The leaders of the party in the middle also want the law to be obeyed, but are asking the government for something which they know to be totally impossible, that is, the establishment and application of rigorous measures to ensure that the next election takes place absolutely normally and, presumably, produces absolutely normal results, In order, they allege, that there will be no repetition in this city of the shameful spectacle it has just presented to the country and to the world. As for the party on the left, they have gathered together all their top people and, after a long debate, drawn up and published a statement in which they express their firm and genuine hope that the approaching election will bring into being the necessary political conditions for the advent of a new era of development and social progress. They don't actually say that they're hoping to win the next election and take over the city council, but the implication is there. That night, the prime minister went on television to announce to the people that, in accordance with the current legislation, the municipal elections would be held again on the following Sunday, and a new period of electoral campaigning, of four days only, would begin at midnight and end at midnight on Friday. Putting on a grave face and speaking with great emphasis, he added that the government was sure that the capital's population, when called upon to vote again, would exercise their civic duty with the dignity and decorum they had always shown in the past, thus declaring null and void the regrettable event during which, for reasons that have yet to be clarified, but into which investigations are already fairly well advanced, the usual clear judgement of the city's electorate had become unexpectedly confused and distorted. The message from the president will be kept back until the close of the campaign on Friday night, but its concluding phrase has already been chosen, Sunday, my dear compatriots, will be a fine day.