Seeing by José Saramago Page A

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 godwere 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,
andfinally, 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