The Double: A Novel

by José Saramago

Everything in its place and a place for everything has always been the golden rule in prosperous families, just as, time and again, do what you have to do in good order has been shown to be the most solid insurance policy against the phantoms of chaos.

You know perfectly well that being of one mind doesn’t always mean being in the right, what tends to happen is that people gather together under an opinion as if it were an umbrella.

Indeed, common sense has often been mistaken about consequences, badly so when it invented the wheel, disastrously so when it invented the atomic bomb.

There are some things you just can’t explain in words.

The smug half smile and dreamy expression we noticed last night when he listened to the messages were, after all, just a reprehensible sign of pride, and pride, especially among the male half of the world, is like one of those supposed friends who, at the first hint of trouble in our life, make themselves scarce or look the other way, whistling loudly.

The wine has been poured and, in its time, savored, now he has to drink the bitter dregs in the bottom of the glass.

I married you because I loved you, she said one famous day, but the only reason I would continue in this marriage now would be out of cowardice, And you’re no coward, he said. No, she said, I’m not.

Don’t be deceived, common sense is much too common to really be sense, it’s just a chapter from a statistics book, the one everyone always trots out,

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso was still unclear about the terms in which he should respond to the message, he had begun by thinking that a simple reply would be best, affectionate and natural, but, as we all know, the subtle shades of meaning between affectionate and cool and between natural and artificial are little less than infinite,

The eloquent silence, long favored by a particularly lazy kind of literature, does not exist, eloquent silences are just words that have got stuck in the throat, choked words that have been unable to escape the embrace of the glottis.

Up until now we have not needed to know on which day of the week these intriguing events are taking place, but Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s next actions, if they are to be understood, demand the information that today is a Friday, from which one will easily draw the conclusion that yesterday was Thursday and the day before that was Wednesday.

From now on, whenever we use the word “inanimal,” we will do so with the intention of being as clear and precise as when, in the other kingdom, where the novelty of being and all its designations has entirely worn off, we used to refer to both man and dog as animals.

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, despite being a teacher of history, has never understood that everything that is animal is destined to become inanimal and that, however great the names and deeds inscribed by human beings on History’s pages, it is from the inanimal that we come and toward the inanimal that we are going.

Meanwhile, though, between the lashes, as the above-mentioned country people used to say, meaning that in the briefest of brief intervals between one lash and the next the back had time to rest, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is driving to the video-rental sho...

Let us not forget that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, who is, as we know, a respected teacher of history and a renowned scholar of serious audiovisual matters, is also a large-scale renter of videos, as was shown yesterday and as will be shown again today.

Business life is full of trapdoors and pitfalls, a real lucky dip, although not always so lucky, you have to play your cards close to your chest, you have to be sly and calculating but without the client noticing your subtle maneuverings, you have to wear away at any preconceived ideas he may have brought with him to protect himself, to lay siege to any show of resistance, and to probe his innermost desires, in short, the new assistant will have to eat a lot of bread and a lot of salt if she is ever to reach such heights.

Exactly, echoed the assistant, caught, in his mind, between contentment at having won without a struggle and disappointment at not having had to struggle in order to win,

No, history, not mathematics, in fact, I’ve never been much good at figures, Well, you’d never know it, knowledge really is a wonderful thing, It depends what you know, It depends too, I think, who knows it,

People may say that it’s first impressions that count, but here’s a person whom I didn’t take to at all to start with, and yet.

And afterward, asked the history teacher, like a child who does not know that there is no point asking about something that has not yet happened, what will I do afterward,

Although, as we know, his addiction to the seventh art is very recent and his ignorance about anything to do with the image industry unchanged, he knew, assumed, imagined, or guessed that any new releases would not be launched immediately onto the video market.

If anyone were to ask Tertuliano Máximo Afonso why he was doing this, if he intended going to those cinemas to see films he already had on video, he would probably look at us surprised, astonished, perhaps offended that we judged him capable of such an absurd act, not that he would give us an acceptable explanation either, apart from the one that erects walls to keep out other people’s curiosity and which in two words says, Just because.

Life, however, is made in such a way that even doors we considered firmly locked and bolted against the world find themselves at the mercy of the modest, solicitous errand boy who has just come into the room to announce to the history teacher that the headmaster would very much like to see him in his office.

Someone once said that all the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion, Who said that, A German, a man called Schlegel, but others probably said it before him,

When the headmaster went back to his desk to fetch his glasses, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso looked around the room, saw the curtains, the black leather armchair, the carpet, and again thought, I’ve been here before. Then, perhaps because someone had suggested that he might merely have read somewhere a description of an office similar to this, he added another thought, Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso just managed to pick up the thread at the very last moment, Great truths, great lies, I suppose in time everything becomes trivial, the usual dishes with the same old sauce, he replied, Now I hope that isn’t a criticism of our kitchens, joked the headmaster, Certainly not, I’m a regular customer, responded Tertuliano Máximo Afonso in the same vein.

The mathematics teacher said, smiling, I don’t think these methods would work with arithmetic, 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.

A single passing reference to historical films was greeted with passionate interest by the class, but that was as far as the divertimento went, there was no mention of Cleopatra or Spartacus, nor of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, nor even of the everreliable Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte.

The restaurant is close by, last time he was there he ate meat, this evening he will eat fish, it’s good to make changes, if we’re not careful, life can quickly become predictable, monotonous, a drag.

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 toward the side from which the light comes.

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant.

Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

Like nature, they say, a narrative abhors a vacuum, which is why, since Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has, in this interval, done nothing worth telling, we had no option but to improvise some padding to more or less fill up the time required by the situation.

Beware of pride, Tertuliano, think of what you’ve missed by not being an actor, they could have made your character a headmaster, a teacher of mathematics, but since you obviously couldn’t be an English teacher of the female sex, you’ll just have to be a plain old male teacher.

I’m not going to kill myself over this, he thought, the world won’t end if I don’t manage to watch all the videos this weekend, and if it did end, this wouldn’t be the only mystery left unresolved.

Vaguely, as the first tangled mesh of sleep was wrapping around him, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso replied that it was a stupid idea, far too simple, too humdrum, I didn’t study history just to come up with ideas like that, he added. These last words had nothing to do with anything, they were just another display of pride, but we must forgive him, it’s the sleeping tablet talking, not the person who took it.

You’re right, I do exaggerate and I do dramatize, I exaggerated in coming to your apartment, I dramatized by embracing a man who no longer loves me, I should leave this very instant, regretful and ashamed, despite all those charitable phrases about how it really doesn’t matter.

In matters of the heart, about which you know so little, even the most obtuse of intelligences can understand what wasn’t said.

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.

However, throughout Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s speech, she had noticed a kind of embarrassed catch in his voice, a disharmony that occasionally distorted his delivery, like the characteristic vibrato produced by a cracked water jar when struck with the knuckles, quick, someone, go to Maria da Paz’s aid and tell her that it is with precisely this sound that our words leave our mouth when the truth we appear to be saying is the lie we are concealing.

Contrary to popular belief, the helpful words that open the way to great, dramatic dialogues are, in general, modest, ordinary, banal, no one would think that Would you like a cup of coffee could serve as an introduction to a bitter debate about feelings that have died or to the sweetness of a reconciliation that neither person knows how to bring about.

Maria da Paz should have responded with due coolness, I didn’t come here to drink coffee, but, looking inside herself, she saw that this wasn’t true, she saw that she really had come there to drink coffee, that her own happiness, imagine, depended on that coffee.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered,

There’s no need to be ironic, I’ve never once thought you were less intelligent than me, I just meant that your idea is really original, And you didn’t expect such originality from me, No, in a way, I didn’t,

You’re the historian, but I would say that it was only after our ancestors had had the ideas that made them intelligent that they actually began to be intelligent enough to have ideas,

Experience has taught us, however, that there are always a few ends left untied, always some milk spilled along the way, always a line that comes out of alignment, which, when applied to the situation under scrutiny, means that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is aware that his war is lost even before it’s begun.

According to popular wisdom, you can’t have everything, and there’s a good deal of truth in that, the balance of human lives is constantly swinging back and forth between what is gained and what is lost, the problem lies in the equally human impossibility of coming to an agreement on the relative merits of what should be lost and what should be gained, which is why the world is in the state it’s in.

That’s another matter, let’s leave for tomorrow what belongs to the morrow,

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

DISCOVERIES MADE OVER THE WEEKEND ARE NO LESS VALID or valuable than those that first find being or expression on other, so-called working days.