Skylight: A Novel
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The denizens of a rundown building in 1940s Lisbon come to sparkling life in this lost early novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Blindness.
The renowned Portuguese author Jose Saramago was at the beginning of his career when he submitted his novel Skylight for publication in 1953. It then sat lost among stacks of manuscripts for thirty-six years. Published posthumously according to Saramago’s wishes, the world can finally enjoy this “fascinating and startlingly mature work” set in 1940’s Lisbon (Boston Globe).
The inhabitants of a faded apartment building are struggling to make ends meet: Silvio the cobbler and his wife take in a disaffected young lodger; Dona Lídia, a retired prostitute, is kept by a businessman with a roving eye. Humble salesman Emilio’s Spanish wife is in a permanent rage; beautiful Claudinha’s boss lusts for her; Justina and her womanizer husband live at war with each other.
Happy marriages, abusive relationships, jealousy, gossip, love—Skylight is a portrait of ordinary people painted by the master of the quotidian, a great observer of the immense beauty and profound hardship of the modern world.
“There is no shortage of wonders to be found in [Skylight].” —Washington Post
José Saramago
JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Skylight - José Saramago
Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Book Lost and Found in Time
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
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35
Translator’s Acknowledgments
About the Author
First Mariner Books edition 2015
Copyright © 2011 by the Estate of José Saramago, Lisbon, by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin, Inh. Nicole Witt e.K., Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Foreword copyright © 2014 by Pilar del Río
English translation copyright © 2014 by Margaret Jull Costa
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
First published with the title Clarabóia in 2011 by Editorial Caminho, SA, Lisbon
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Harvill Secker Random House
hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Saramago, José.
[Clarabóia. English]
Skylight / Jose Saramago ; Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.
p. cm
ISBN 978-0-544-09002-6 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-544-57037-5 (trade paper)—ISBN 978-0-544-08498-8 (ebook)
I. Costa, Margaret Jull, translator. II. Title.
PQ9281.A66C5313 2014
869.3'42—dc23 2014034511
Cover design by Michaela Sullivan
Cover photograph © Design Pics/Chris Upton/Getty Images
v3.0521
This publication was assisted by a grant from the Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas / Portugal.
The excerpt on pages 98–103 is from Memoirs of a Nun (La Religieuse) by Denis Diderot, translated by Francis Birrell (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., and Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., 1928).
In memory of Jerónimo Hilário, my grandfather
In all souls, as in all houses, beyond the façade lies a hidden interior.
—RAUL BRANDÃO
The Book Lost and Found in Time
Saramago was shaving when the phone rang. He held the receiver to the unsoaped side of his face and said, Really? How amazing. No, don’t bother. I’ll be there in about half an hour.
And he hung up. I had never known him to take a shower so quickly. Then he told me that he was going to collect a novel he wrote in the 1940s or 1950s and which had been lost ever since. When he returned, he had under his arm Clarabóia (Skylight), or, rather, a bundle of typewritten pages, which had somehow not grown yellow or worn with time, as if time had proved more respectful of the original than the people to whom it was sent in 1953. It would be a great honor for us to publish this manuscript, which we found when we moved offices,
they said graciously in 1989, when José Saramago was working hard on finishing The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Thank you, but no,
he said and left, taking with him the rediscovered novel and having finally received an answer that had been denied to him thirty-six years before, when he was thirty-one and still full of dreams. Being ignored by that publishing house had plunged him into a painful, indelible silence that lasted decades.
The book lost and found in time
is how we used to refer to Skylight at home. Those of us who read the novel tried to persuade its author to publish it, but Saramago stubbornly refused, saying that it would not be published during his lifetime. His sole explanation—his main principle of life, often spoken and often written—was this: no one has an obligation to love anyone else, but we are all under an obligation to respect each other. According to this logic, Saramago considered that while a publishing house is clearly under no obligation to publish every manuscript it receives, it does have a duty to respond to the person waiting impatiently and even anxiously day after day, month after month. After all, the book a writer submits in the form of a typescript is much more than just a collection of words; it carries within it a human being, with all his or her intelligence and sensibility. It occurred to us that perhaps each time Saramago saw a copy in print, it would be like reliving the humiliation of not receiving so much as a few short lines—even a brief, formal we currently accept no submissions
—and so we, his friends and family, did not insist. We likewise attributed to that ancient grief the fact that he simply left the typescript on his desk to languish among all his other papers. José Saramago did not reread Skylight and did not miss it when I carried it off to have it bound in leather; when I presented him with the bound edition, he said I was being over the top, extravagant. And yet he knew—because he was the author—that the book was certainly not a bad one, that it contained themes that recurred in his later novels, and that in its pages one could already hear the narrative voice he would go on to develop more fully.
But there is another way of speaking of all this,
as Saramago would say when he had crossed deserts and navigated dark waters. If, after presenting all these facts and suppositions, we accept that statement, then we must interpret all the various signs and his apparent obstinacy in the light of a whole life marked by a pressing need to share and communicate. Dying means that we were and no longer are,
said Saramago. And it’s true that he died and is no longer here, but suddenly, in the countries where Skylight has been published, in Portugal and Brazil, the countries that speak his language, people are talking excitedly about this new book. Yes, Saramago has actually brought out a new book, a fresh, illuminating work that touches our hearts and elicits cries of joy and astonishment, and then we realize that this is the gift the author wanted to leave to us so that he could continue to share his words with us now that he’s no longer here. People keep saying: this book is a real gem; it contains all his later literary obsessions; it’s like a map of the work to come; how could such a young man have written with such maturity, such confidence? Yes, that is the question his readers keep asking. Where did Saramago get his wisdom from, his ability to portray characters with such subtlety and economy, to reveal the profundity and universality of the most banal situations, to trample on convention in such a serenely violent way? This is a young man, remember, who had never been to university, the son and grandson of illiterates, a mechanic by trade and, at the time, an office worker, daring to take on the cosmos of an apartment building and its inhabitants, guided only by his own instincts and in the enjoyable company of Pessoa, Shakespeare, Eça de Queiroz, Diderot and Beethoven. This is our entry into Saramago’s universe, which is already clearly delineated here.
In Skylight we find the prototypes of some of Saramago’s male characters: the man known simply as H in Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, Ricardo Reis in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Raimundo Silva in The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Senhor José in All the Names, the cellist in Death with Interruptions, Cain, Jesus Christ, Cipriano Algor—that whole tribe of silent men, free, solitary beings who need to find love in order, however briefly, to break out of their focused, introverted way of being in the world.
In Skylight we also find some of Saramago’s characteristically strong women. His treatment of them is even more unconventional: Lídia, for example, is a kept woman who gives lessons in dignity to her businessman lover; lesbian love is treated with remarkable frankness, as are the inherited submissiveness handed down within families, the fear of what others might say, rape, blind instinct, the struggle for power, narrow lives lived honestly despite straitened circumstances and sundry misfortunes.
Skylight is a novel of characters. It is set in the Lisbon of the early 1950s, when the Second World War has ended, but not the Salazar dictatorship, which hangs over everything like a shadow or a silence. It is not a political novel, and we should not, therefore, necessarily conclude that the reason it remained unpublished was because it fell victim to the censors. And yet, given the prudish times in which it was written, its content must have had some bearing on that decision not to publish. The novel rejects established values: the family is not a symbol of hearth and home, but of hell; appearances count for more than reality; apparently praiseworthy utopian dreams are revealed for the hollow things they really are. It is a novel that explicitly condemns the mistreatment of women, but treats love between two people of the same sex as natural, albeit, in the circumstances, anguishing. Coming from an unknown author, such a strong-minded book would have taken a lot of defending for very little reward. That is probably why the book was relegated to a drawer, without a firm yes or no. Perhaps—and again we are conjecturing—they put it off until later on, when times would have changed, never imagining that it would take decades for any so-called liberalization to begin to make its mark, and meanwhile, in both the world and the publishing house, generations passed and any such good intentions were left to molder in a drawer along with the typescript. Saramago, by then, had a new profession, that of editor. Having made his journey through silence and solitude, he was preparing to write other books.
Life was not easy for Saramago. Not only was his book ignored by the publishers—a book written at night, after days spent engaged in unrewarding tasks—he was ignored too, because he was unknown, had no university education, and wasn’t one of the intellectual elite, all of which were important factors in the small world of 1950s and ’60s Lisbon society. Those who later became his colleagues made fun of him because he stammered, and his stammer, which he eventually managed to overcome, made him rather withdrawn; he let others do the talking while he watched, living very much in his own inner world, which is perhaps why he was able to write so much. After Skylight, he published nothing for another twenty years. He began again with poetry—Os poemas possíveis (Possible Poems) and Provavelmente alegria (Joy Probably)—then wrote O ano de 1993 (The Year of 1993), which is already on its way to becoming a narrative, followed by two collections of his newspaper articles, which are also fictions in embryo. Skylight is there in his articles too—even though no one knew it existed—waiting for the moment when it would reach the reader as something more than just a lost book.
Skylight is the gift that Saramago readers deserved to receive. It is not the closing of a door; on the contrary, it flings the door wide open so that we can go back inside and read or reread his other novels in the light of what he was writing as a young man. Skylight is the gateway into Saramago’s work and will be a real discovery for its readers. As if a perfect circle had closed. As if death did not exist.
Pilar del Río
President, José Saramago Foundation
1
Through the swaying veils filling his sleep came the clatter of crockery, and Silvestre could almost swear that light was beginning to filter through the loose weft of those veils. Just as he was starting to feel slightly irritated, he realized suddenly that he was waking up. He blinked several times, yawned, then lay quite still, as he felt sleep slowly moving off. Then he quickly sat up in bed and stretched, making the joints in his arms crack. Beneath his vest, the muscles in his back rolled and rippled. He had a powerful chest, solid, sturdy arms and sinewy shoulder blades. He needed those muscles for his work as a cobbler. His hands were as hard as stone and the skin on his palms so thick that he could pass a threaded needle through it without drawing blood.
Then, more slowly, he swung his legs out of bed. Silvestre was always deeply grieved and saddened by the sight of his scrawny thighs and his kneecaps worn white and hairless by constant friction with his trousers. He was proud of his chest, but hated his legs, so puny they looked as if they belonged to someone else.
Gazing glumly down at his bare feet on the rug, Silvestre scratched his graying head of hair. Then he ran one hand over his face, feeling his bones and his beard. Finally, reluctantly, he got up and took a few steps across the room. Standing there, in vest and underpants, perched on those long, stilt-like legs, he bore a faint resemblance to Don Quixote, with that tuft of salt-and-pepper hair crowning his head, his large, beaked nose and the powerful trunk that his legs seemed barely able to sustain.
He looked for his trousers and, failing to find them, peered around the door and shouted:
Mariana! Where are my trousers?
From another room, a voice called:
Hang on!
Given the slow pace of the approaching footsteps, one sensed that Mariana was fairly plump and could not walk any faster. Silvestre had to wait some time, but he did so patiently. At last she appeared at the door.
Here you are.
The trousers were folded over her right arm, which was considerably stouter than one of Silvestre’s legs. She said:
I don’t know what you do with the buttons on your trousers to make them disappear every week. I’m going to have to start sewing them on with wire . . .
Mariana’s voice was as plump as its owner and as kindly and frank as her eyes. She certainly hadn’t intended her remark as a joke, but her husband beamed at her, revealing every line on his face as well as his few remaining teeth. He took the trousers from her and, under his wife’s benign gaze, put them on, pleased with the way his clothes restored proportion and regularity to his body. Silvestre was as vain about his body as Mariana was indifferent to the one Nature had given her. Neither of them had any illusions about the other, and both were more than aware that the fire of youth had long since burned out, but they loved each other dearly, as much today as they had thirty years ago, when they got married. Indeed, their love was perhaps even greater now, because it was no longer fueled by real or imagined perfections.
Silvestre followed his wife into the kitchen. Then he slipped into the bathroom and returned ten minutes later, having washed. He was still not particularly kempt, however, because it was impossible to tame the tuft of hair that dominated his head (and dominate
is the right word)—his cockscomb,
as Mariana called it.
Two steaming bowls of coffee stood on the table, and the kitchen smelled fresh and newly cleaned. Mariana’s round cheeks glowed, and her whole large body trembled and shook as she moved about the kitchen.
You get fatter by the day, woman!
And Silvestre laughed, and Mariana laughed with him. They were like two children. They sat down at the table and drank the hot coffee, making playful, slurping noises, each trying to outslurp the other.
So, what’s it to be, then?
Silvestre was no longer laughing. Mariana had grown serious too. Even their faces seemed paler.
I don’t know. You decide.
Like I said yesterday, the leather for soling is getting more and more expensive. My customers keep complaining about the price, but that’s how it is. I can’t perform miracles. Where are they going to find anyone to do the work more cheaply, that’s what I’d like to know, but that doesn’t stop them complaining.
Mariana interrupted him, saying that moaning would get them nowhere. What they had to do was decide whether or not to take in a lodger.
It would certainly be useful. It would help us pay the rent, and if he’s a man on his own and you don’t mind doing his laundry for him, we could just about break even.
Mariana drained the last sugary drop of coffee from her bowl and said:
That’s fine by me. Every little bit helps.
I know, but it does mean taking in lodgers again, when we’ve only just managed to rid ourselves of that so-called gentleman . . .
Oh well, maybe the next one will be a decent sort. I can get on with anyone, as long as they get on with me.
Let’s give it another go, then. A man on his own, who just needs a bed for the night, that’s what we need. I’ll put an ad in this afternoon.
Still chewing his last piece of bread, Silvestre stood up and declared: Right, I’m off to work.
He went back into the bedroom and walked over to the window. He drew aside the curtain that acted as a screen separating the window area from the rest of the room. Behind it was a high platform on which stood his workbench. Awls, lasts, lengths of thread, tins full of tacks, bits of sole and scraps of leather and, in one corner, a pouch containing French tobacco and matches.
Silvestre opened the window and looked out. Nothing new to be seen. A few people walking along the street. Not far off, a woman was crying her wares, selling a kind of bean soup that people used to eat for their breakfast. Silvestre could never understand how she could possibly make a living. No one he knew ate bean soup for breakfast anymore; he himself hadn’t eaten it for more than twenty years. Different times, different customs, different food. Having thus neatly summed the matter up, he sat down. He opened his tobacco pouch, rummaged around for his cigarette papers among the hotchpotch of objects cluttering the bench and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it, inhaled the smoke and set to work. He had some uppers to put on, a job requiring all his knowledge and skill.
Now and then he would glance out at the street. The morning was gradually brightening, although the sky was still cloudy and a slight mist blurred the edges of things and people alike.
From among the multitude of noises already filling the building, Silvestre could make out the sound of an immediately identifiable pair of heels clicking down the stairs. As soon as he heard the street door open, he leaned forward.
Good morning, Adriana!
Good morning, Senhor Silvestre.
The girl stopped beneath the window. She was rather short and dumpy and wore thick glasses that made her eyes look like two small, restless beads. She was nearly thirty-four years old and her modest hairstyle was already streaked with the odd gray hair.
Off to work, eh?
That’s right. See you later, Senhor Silvestre.
It was the same every morning. By the time Adriana left the house, the cobbler was already seated at the ground-floor window. It was impossible to escape without seeing that unruly tuft of hair and without hearing and responding to those inevitable words of greeting. Silvestre followed her with his eyes. From a distance, she resembled, in Silvestre’s colorful phrase, a sack of potatoes tied up in the middle.
When she reached the corner of the street, Adriana turned and waved to someone on the second floor. Then she disappeared.
Silvestre put down the shoe he was working on and craned his neck out of the window. He wasn’t a busybody, he just happened to like his neighbors on the second floor; they were good customers and good people. In a voice constrained by his somewhat awkward position, he called out:
Hello there, Isaura! What do you make of the weather today, eh?
From the second floor came the answer, attenuated by distance:
Not bad, not bad at all. The mist . . .
But we never found out whether she thought the mist spoiled or embellished the beauty of the morning. Isaura let the conversation drop and slowly closed the window. It wasn’t that she disliked the cobbler, with his simultaneously thoughtful and cheery air, she simply wasn’t in a mood to chat. She had a pile of shirts to be finished by the weekend, by Saturday at the very latest. Given the choice, she would have carried on with the novel she was reading. She only had another fifty pages to go and had reached a particularly interesting part. She found them very gripping, these clandestine love affairs, buffeted by endless trials and tribulations. Besides, the novel was really well written. Isaura was an experienced enough reader to be a judge of this. She hesitated for a moment, but realized at once that she did not even have time to do that. The shirts were waiting. She could hear the murmur of voices inside: her mother and aunt talking. They talked a lot. Whatever did they find to talk about all day that they hadn’t already said a hundred times before?
She crossed the bedroom she shared with her sister. The novel was there on her bedside table. She cast a greedy, longing glance at it, then paused in front of the wardrobe mirror, which reflected her from head to toe. She was wearing a housecoat that clung to her thin, yet still flexible, elegant body. She ran the tips of her fingers over her pale cheeks, where the first fine, barely visible lines were beginning to appear. She sighed at the image shown her by the mirror and fled.
In the kitchen the two old ladies were still talking. They were very similar in appearance—white hair, brown eyes, the same simple black clothes—and they spoke in shrill, rapid tones, without pauses or modulation.
I’ve told you already. The coal is nothing but dust. We should complain to the coal merchant,
one was saying.
If you say so,
said the other.
What are you talking about?
asked Isaura, entering the room.
The more erect and brighter-eyed of the two old ladies said:
This coal is just terrible. We should complain.
If you say so, Auntie.
Aunt Amélia was, so to speak, the household administrator. She was in charge of the cooking, the accounts and the catering generally. Cândida, the mother of Isaura and Adriana, was responsible for all the other domestic arrangements, for their clothes, for the profusion of embroidered doilies decorating the furniture and for the vases full of paper flowers, which were replaced by real flowers only on high days and holidays. Cândida was the elder of the sisters and, like Amélia, she was a widow, one whose grief had long since been assuaged by old age.
Isaura sat down at the sewing machine, but before starting work, she looked out at the broad river, its farther shore hidden beneath the mist. It looked more like the sea than a river. The rooftops and chimney pots rather spoiled the illusion, but even if you did your best to blot them out, the sea was right there in those few miles of water, the white sky somewhat sullied by the dark smoke belching forth from a tall factory chimney.
Isaura always enjoyed those few moments when, just before she bent her head over her sewing machine, she allowed her eyes and thoughts to wander over the scene before her. The landscape never varied, but she only ever found it monotonous on stubbornly bright, blue summer days when everything was too obvious somehow, too well defined. A misty morning like this—a thin mist that did not entirely conceal the view—endowed the city with a dream-like imprecision. Isaura savored all this and tried to prolong the pleasure. A frigate was traveling down the river as lightly as if it were floating on a cloud. In the gauze of mist, the red sail turned pink, then the boat plunged into the denser cloud licking the surface of the water, reappeared briefly, then vanished behind one of the buildings obscuring the view.
Isaura sighed, her second sigh of the morning. She shook her head like someone surfacing from a long dive, and the machine rattled furiously into action. The cloth ran along beneath the pressure foot, and her fingers mechanically guided it through as though they were just another part of the machine. Deafened by the noise, Isaura suddenly became aware that someone was speaking to her. She abruptly stopped the wheel, and silence flooded back in. She turned around.
Sorry?
Her mother said again:
Don’t you think it’s a bit early?
Early? Why?
You know why. Our neighbor . . .
But what am I supposed to do? It’s hardly my fault the man downstairs works at night and sleeps during the day, is it?
You could at least wait until a bit later. I just hate to annoy people.
Isaura shrugged, put her foot down on the pedal again and, raising her voice above the noise of the machine, added:
Do you want me to go to the shop and tell them I’m going to be late delivering?
Cândida slowly shook her head. She lived in a constant state of perplexity and indecision, under the thumb of her sister—three years her junior—and keenly aware that she was dependent financially on her daughters. She wanted, above all, not to inconvenience anyone, wanted to go unnoticed, to be as invisible as a shadow in the darkness. She was about to respond, but, hearing Amélia’s footsteps, said nothing and went back to the kitchen.
Meanwhile, Isaura, hard at work, was filling the apartment with noise. The floor vibrated. Her pale cheeks gradually grew red and a bead of sweat appeared on her brow. She again became aware of someone standing beside her and slowed down.
There’s no need to work so fast. You’ll wear yourself out.
Aunt Amélia never wasted a word. She said only what was absolutely necessary, but she said it in a way that made those listening appreciate the value of concision. The words seemed to be born in her mouth at the very moment they were spoken and to emerge replete with meaning, heavy with good sense, virginal. That’s what made them so impressive and convincing. Isaura duly slowed her pace of work.
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. Cândida went to answer it, was gone for a few seconds, then returned looking anxious and upset, muttering:
Didn’t I tell you, didn’t I tell you?
Amélia looked up:
What is it?
It’s the downstairs neighbor come to complain about the noise. You go, will you?
Amélia stopped doing the washing, dried her