The Collected Novels of José Saramago (366 page)

Then it was that the prime minister revealed his plan to the government, who had been brought together in plenary session and with the president in the chair, The time has come to break the back of the resistance, he said, let’s call a halt to all the psychological game-playing, to the espionage, the lie detectors and the other technological contraptions, since, despite the interior minister’s worthy efforts, these methods have all proved incapable of solving the problem, I must add, by the way, that I also consider inappropriate any direct intervention by the armed forces, given the more than likely inconvenience of a mass slaughter which it is our duty to avoid at all costs, what I have to offer you instead is neither more nor less than a proposed multiple withdrawal, a series of actions which some may perhaps feel to be absurd, but which I am sure will lead us to total victory and a return to democratic normality, these actions are, namely, the immediate removal of the government to another city, which will become the country’s new capital, the withdrawal of all the armed forces still in place, and the withdrawal of all police forces, this radical action will mean that the rebel city will be left entirely to its own devices and will have all the time it needs to understand the price of being cut off from the sacrosanct unity of the nation, and when it can no longer stand the isolation, the indignity, the contempt, when life within the city becomes a chaos, then its guilty inhabitants will come to us hanging their heads and begging our forgiveness. The prime minister looked about him, That is my plan, he said, I submit it to you for your examination and discussion, but, needless to say, I am counting on your unanimous approval, desperate diseases must have desperate remedies, and if the remedy I am prescribing is painful to you, the disease afflicting us is, quite simply, fatal.

IN WORDS THAT CAN BE GRASPED BY THE INTELLIGENCE OF THOSE CLASSES
, who, though less educated, are nonetheless not entirely ignorant of the gravity and diversity of the many and various ailments that threaten the already precarious survival of the human race, what the prime minister had proposed was neither more nor less than a flight from the virus that had attacked the majority of the capital’s inhabitants and which, given that the worst is always waiting just behind the door, might well end up infecting all the remaining inhabitants and even, who knows, the whole country. Not that he and his government were themselves afraid of being contaminated by the bite of this subversive insect, for apart from a few clashes between certain individuals and a few very minor differences of opinion, which were, anyway, more to do with means than ends, we have had ample proof of the unshakeable institutional cohesion of the politicians responsible for the running of a country which, without a word of warning, had been plunged into a disaster never before seen in the long and always troubled history of the known world. Contrary to what certain ill-intentioned people doubtless thought or suggested, this was not the coward’s way out, but rather a strategic move of the first order, unparalleled in its audacity, one whose future results can almost be touched with the hand, like ripe fruit on a tree. Now all that was needed for the task to be crowned with success was that the energy put into carrying out the plan should be up to the resolve of its aims. First, they will have to decide who will leave the city and who will stay. Obviously, his excellency the president and the whole of the government down to under-secretary level will leave, along with their closest advisors, the members of the national parliament will also leave so that the legislative process suffers no interruption, the army and the police will leave, including the traffic police, but all the members of the municipal council will remain, along with their leader, the fire fighters’ organizations will stay too, so that the city does not burn down because of some act of carelessness or sabotage, just as the staff of the city cleansing department will stay in case of epidemic and, needless to say, the authorities will ensure continued supplies of water and electricity, those utilities so essential to life. As for food, a group of dieticians, or nutritionists, have already been charged with drawing up a list of basic dishes which, while not bringing the population to the brink of starvation, would make them aware that a state of siege taken to its ultimate consequences would certainly be no holiday. Not that the government believed things would go that far. It would not be many days before the usual delegations appeared at a military post on one of the roads out of the city, bearing the white flag, the flag of unconditional surrender not the flag of insurgency, the fact that both are the same color is a remarkable coincidence upon which we will not now pause to reflect, but there will be plenty of reasons to return to the matter later on.

After the plenary meeting of the government, to which we assume sufficient reference was made on the last page of the previous chapter, the inner ministerial cabinet or emergency council discussed and took a handful of decisions which will, in the fullness of time, be revealed, always assuming, as we believe we have warned on a previous occasion, that events do not develop in a way that renders those decisions null and void or requires them to be replaced by others, for, as it is always wise to remember, while it is true that man proposes, it is god who disposes, and there have been very few occasions, almost all of them tragic, when both man and god
were in agreement and did all the disposing together. One of the most hotly disputed matters was the government’s withdrawal from the city, when and how it should be done, with or without discretion, with or without television coverage, with or without military bands, with or without garlands on the cars, with or without the national flag draped over the bonnet, and an endless series of details which required repeated discussions about state protocol which had never, not since the founding of the nation itself, known such difficulties. The final plan for the withdrawal was a masterpiece of tactics, consisting basically of a meticulous distribution of different itineraries so as to make things as hard as possible for any large concentrations of demonstrators who might gather together to express the city’s possible feelings of displeasure, discontent or indignation at being abandoned to its fate. There was one itinerary for the president, one for the prime minister and one for each member of the council of ministers, a total of twenty-seven different routes, all under the protection of the army and the police, with assault vehicles stationed at crossroads and with ambulances following behind the cortèges, ready for all eventualities. The map of the city, an enormous illuminated panel over which, with the help of military commanders and expert police trackers, they had labored for forty-eight hours, showed a red star with twenty-seven arms, fourteen turned toward the northern hemisphere, thirteen toward the southern hemisphere, with an equator dividing the capital into two halves. Along these arms would file the black automobiles of the public institutions, surrounded by bodyguards and walkie-talkies, antiquated contraptions still used in this country, but for which there was now an approved budget for modernization. All the people involved in the various phases of the operation, whatever the degree of their participation, had to be sworn to absolute secrecy, first with their right hand placed on the gospels, then on a copy of the constitution bound in blue morocco leather, and
finally, completing this double commitment, by uttering a truly binding oath, drawn from popular tradition, If I break this oath may the punishment fall upon my head and upon that of my descendants unto the fourth generation. With secrecy thus sealed for any leaks, the date was set for two days hence. The hour of departure, which would be simultaneous, that is, the same for everyone, was three o’clock in the morning, a time when only the seriously insomniac are still tossing and turning in their beds and saying prayers to the god hypnos, the son of night and twin brother of thanatos, to help them in their affliction by dropping on their poor, bruised eyelids the sweet balm of the poppy. During the remaining hours, the spies, who had returned en masse to the field of operations, did nothing but pound, in more than one sense, the city’s squares, avenues, streets and sidestreets, surreptitiously taking the population’s pulse, probing ill-concealed intentions, connecting up words heard here and there, in order to find out if there had been any leak of the decisions taken by the council of ministers, in particular the government’s imminent withdrawal, because any spy worthy of the name must take it as a sacred principle, a golden rule, the letter of the law, that oaths are never to be trusted, whoever made them, even an oath sworn by the very mother who gave them life, still less when instead of one oath there were two, and less still when instead of two there were three. In this case, however, they had no alternative but to recognize, with a certain degree of professional frustration, that the official secret had been well kept, an empirical truth that tallied with the ministry of the interior’s central system of computation, which, after much squeezing, sieving and mixing, shuffling and reshuffling of the millions of fragments of recorded conversations, found not a single equivocal sign, not a single suspicious clue, not even the tiniest end of a thread which, if pulled, might have at its other end a nasty surprise. The messages despatched by the secret service to the ministry of the interior were wonderfully reassuring, as were the messages sent to the defense ministry’s colonels of information and psychology by the highly efficient military intelligence, who, without the knowledge of their civilian competitors, were carrying out their own investigation, indeed, both camps could have used that expression which literature has made into a classic, All quiet on the western front, although not, of course, for the soldier who has just died. Everyone, from the president to the very least of government advisors, gave a sigh of relief. The withdrawal, thank god, would take place quietly, without any undue trauma to a population who had perhaps already, in part, repented their entirely inexplicable seditious behavior, but who, despite this, in a praiseworthy display of civic-mindedness, which augured well for the future, seemed to have no intention of harming, either in word or deed, their legitimate leaders and representatives at this moment of painful, but necessary, separation. This was the conclusion drawn from all the reports, and so it was.

At half past two in the morning everyone was ready to cut the ropes still attaching them to the president’s palace, to the prime minister’s mansion and to the various ministerial buildings. The gleaming black automobiles were lined up waiting, the trucks containing all the files were surrounded by security guards armed to the teeth and who were, incredible though it may seem, capable of spitting poisoned darts, the police outriders were in position, the ambulances were ready, and inside, in the offices, the fugitive leaders, or deserters, whom we should, in more elevated language, describe as tergiversators, were still opening and closing the last cupboards and drawers, sadly gathering up a final few mementos, a group photograph, another bearing a dedication, a ring made out of human hair, a statuette of the goddess of happiness, a pencil sharpener from schooldays, a returned cheque, an anonymous letter, an embroidered handkerchief, a mysterious key, a redundant pen with a name engraved on it, a compromising piece of paper, another compromising piece of paper, but the latter is only compromising for a colleague in the next department. A few people were almost in tears, men and women barely able to control their emotions, wondering if they would ever return to the beloved places that witnessed their rise up the hierarchical ladder, others, to whom the fates had proved less helpful, were dreaming, despite previous disappointments and injustices, of different worlds and new opportunities that would place them, at last, where they deserved to be. At a quarter to three, when the army and the police were already strategically stationed along all twenty-seven routes, not forgetting the assault vehicles guarding all the major crossroads, the order was given to dim the street lights as a way of covering the retreat, however harshly that last word may grate on the ear. In the streets along which the cars and trucks would have to pass, there was not a soul, not one, not even in plain clothes. As for the continual flow of information from the rest of the city, this remained unchanged, no groups were gathering, there was no suspicious activity, and any nightbirds returning to their homes or leaving them did not seem a cause for concern, they were not carrying flags over their shoulders or concealing bottles of petrol with bits of rag protruding from the neck, they weren’t whirling clubs or bicycle chains above their heads, and if the occasional one appeared to stray from the straight and narrow, there was no reason to attribute this to deviations of a political nature, but to perfectly forgivable alcoholic excesses. At three minutes to three, the engines of the cars in the convoys were started up. At three o’clock on the dot, precisely as planned, the retreat began.