The Double

by José Saramago

Like most ordinary people, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a mixture of courage and cowardice, he isn’t one of those invincible cinema heroes, but neither is he a wimp, the kind who pees his pants when, at midnight, he hears the door of the castle dungeon creak open. True, he felt all the hairs on his body prickle, but that even happens to wolves when faced by danger, and no-one in their right mind would describe wolves as pathetic cowards.

We all know that each day that dawns is the first for some and will be the last for others, and that for most people it will be just another day.

The fact that history does not record a fact doesn’t mean the fact did not exist.

However great an effort it may take, we know that all it requires to escape from a nightmare is to open our eyes,

do what you have to do in good order has been shown to be the most solid insurance policy against the phantoms of chaos.

the number ten is stubbornly invariable, it didn’t even have to be a nine first nor is it consumed with ambition to be an eleven.

We all know, however, that the enormous weight of tradition, habit and custom that occupies the greater part of our brain bears down pitilessly on the more brilliant and innovative ideas of which the remaining part is capable, and although it is true that, in some cases, this weight can balance the excesses and extravagances of the imagination that would lead us God knows where were they given free rein, it is equally true that it often has a way of subtly submitting what we believed to be our free will to unconscious tropisms, like a plant that does not know why it will always have to lean towards the side from which the light comes.

haste always brings complications in its wake, no doubt about it.

Although he knows he is going to lie, he thinks, nevertheless, that this lie will be a kind of warped version of the truth, that is, although the explanation may be completely false, the mere fact of repeating it will, in a way, make it plausible, and all the more plausible if Tertuliano Máximo Afonso does not stop at this first attempt.

she had noticed a kind of embarrassed catch in his voice, a disharmony that occasionally distorted his delivery,

however we try, however hard we struggle, we always find ourselves outside the feelings we so ingenuously hoped to describe, as if a feeling were like a landscape with mountains in the distance and trees in the foreground,

Impossible though it may seem, it is this silence full of unspoken words that saves what had been judged to be lost,

there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

all you did was repeat what I said, Tell me why those words shouldn’t serve me as well as they served you, Because in being repeated they lose some of the conviction they would have carried if they had been spoken first,

Then I don’t really know how you’re going to resolve a difficulty that you yourself are creating,

Life, my dear Máximo, has taught me that nothing is simple, it just seems simple sometimes, and it’s always when it looks simplest that we should most doubt it, You’re being very sceptical, As far as I know,

cruelty can take many forms, sometimes it even comes disguised as indifference or indolence, shall I give you an example, delaying a decision can become a conscious weapon of mental aggression against other people,

he’s an actor, and therefore a public figure, So are we all, we are all more or less public figures, it’s only the number of spectators that varies,

She was not ashamed of herself because these ideas did not really belong to her, they were the ambiguous fruit of an imagination which, shaken by unusual, violent emotions, had jumped the rails, what matters is that she is lucid and alert now, the mistress of her thoughts and her desires, the hallucinations of the night, be they of the flesh or of the spirit, always dissolve into air with the first light of morning, the light that reorders the world and restores it to its usual orbit, once more rewriting the books of the law.

the arrival of this man is a fact which we can neither erase nor remove, even if we don’t let him in, even if we close the door on him, he’ll be there waiting on the other side until we can’t stand it any more,

all fate’s reasons are human, purely human, and anyone, basing themselves on the lessons of the past, who says otherwise, be it in prose or in verse, doesn’t know what he or she is talking about,

a mind dominated by base feelings can make its own conscience fall in with them, slyly forcing it to reconcile the worst actions with the best reasons and to use both to justify each other, in a kind of double game in which the same player will always win or lose.

that’s because children are all such ungrateful creatures.

if you sleep in the same bed as a woman who loves you, but you’re not open with her, what business have you to be there,

Teach me then because, as I understand it, teaching someone who doesn’t know something is an act of charity,

he was driven by necessity, which is one of the names adopted by fate when it suits it to go in disguise.