Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by José Saramago Read Free Book Online Page B

some friends who had called for a chat after dinner brought Adelina with them, a long-standing friend, the hours passed, eventually everyone left except Adelina, her idea or my silent insistence, and once we were alone we discovered we had been interested in each other for a while, and things being what they are, she stayed and slept what was left of the night after we had made love. She lives with her widowed mother, who does not ask too many questions if Adelina returns home in the early hours, but to stay out all night looks bad. And Adelina tells me she tries not to upset the old girl. I pray in silence that her dear old mother will not change her mind, but to keep the fire burning I periodically throw a tantrum. Poor Adelina, torn between a false lover and a mother who has relinquished all her authority except for this nightly vigil. So far, this triangular situation has worked to perfection.
    Anxious to speak about S., since the objective of this inquiry is to find out what has been lost between the first and the second portrait, or what was already lost forever (what had been forever lost in me), I must probe the meaning of this complacency which brings me to discuss Adelina when it has nothing to do with Adelina. But perhaps there is no point in drawing up an inventory of someone’s strengths and weaknesses in order to fight them, or to record statistics without first examining our own strengths and weaknesses. Any such examination will make it impossible for us to ignore those which weigh on us like lead pellets revolving inside a cylinder moved by some other force, within whose movement those same lead pellets are activated without affecting the cylinder or the effective force. Poor Adelina, as I jokingly think of her, is much less “poor” than I have suggested. She comes into my bed, consents and demands that I enter her (this ingenious transposition results in total obscenity, because entering her literally means that I have reduced myself to minute proportions in order to be able to press [or should I say regress] inside her or, on the contrary, that this same interior has become as big as a cathedral, the Basilica of St. Peter, the Church of Notre Dame, the greenish gold grotto of Aracena through which I pass [penetrate] in my natural size, splashing about amid humors and secretions, resting on swollen mucous membranes, and ever advancing toward the secret of the universe, toward the laboratory of the ovaries, the stentorian cry of [mute] Fallopian tubes, inhaling the earth’s primordial odors stored there in all female sexual organs, no longer obscene because sex is not obscene, as I have come to know). And because I am entering her and she is, however involuntarily, a part of this life in which she and I participate and where we are both on the same ledge, on the same narrow ridge of Chartres, I can neither say “Poor Adelina” nor forget her. Inside her I am forever spilling millions of spermatozoa already condemned to death, trapped in a viscous fluid which pours from me as I lie there panting, and even though I do not love her nor she love me, neither of us escapes the fleeting moment when our weary and sated bodies rest, mine nearly always on top of hers, hers sometimes on top of mine, and as we lie, the one on top of the other, our united bodies support each other. At the end of the sexual act (also known as making love) the body underneath weighs on the one on top, and anyone who has failed to discover this possesses neither body nor sex nor self-awareness. The force of gravity is therefore exercised twice, not in order to annul itself but to ensure complete prostration. For the levitation of bodies is impossible when the male organ is still deeply anchored inside a woman’s body, spilling or having spilled the white secretion from the testicles and is washing itself between the red or rosy inflamed walls at the same time as the remote sadness of copulation enshrouds the mind in veils and