Excerpt of Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
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Death with Interruptions
THE FOLLOWING DAY, NO ONE DIED. THIS FACT, BEING ABSOLUTELY
contrary to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances,
perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s minds, for we have only to
consider that in the entire forty volumes of universal history there is
no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such a phenomenon ever
having occurred, for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance
of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and
vespertine, without one death from an illness, a fatal fall, or a
successful suicide, not one, not a single one. Not even from a car
accident, so frequent on festive occasions, when blithe irresponsibility
and an excess of alcohol jockey for position on the roads to decide
who will reach death first. New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it
the usual calamitous trail of fatalities, as if old Atropos with her great
bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day. There was,
however, no shortage of blood. Bewildered, confused, distraught,
struggling to control their feelings of nausea, the firemen extracted
from the mangled remains wretched human bodies that, according to
the mathematical logic of the collisions, should have been well and
truly dead, but which, despite the seriousness of the injuries and
lesions suffered, remained alive and were carried off to hospital,
accompanied by the shrill sound of the ambulance sirens. None of
these people would die along the way and all would disprove the most
pessimistic of medical prognoses, There’s nothing to be done for the
poor man, it’s not even worth operating, a complete waste of time,
said the surgeon to the nurse as she was adjusting his mask. And the
day before, there would probably have been no salvation for this
particular patient, but one thing was clear, today, the victim refused
to die. And what was happening here was happening throughout the
country. Up until the very dot of midnight on the last day of the year
there were people who died in full compliance with the rules, both
those relating to the nub of the matter, i.e. the termination of life, and
those relating to the many ways in which the aforementioned nub,
with varying degrees of pomp and solemnity, chooses to mark the
fatal moment. One particularly interesting case, interesting because
of the person involved, was that of the very ancient and venerable
queen mother. At one minute to midnight on the thirty-first of
December, no one would have been so ingenuous as to bet a spent
match on the life of the royal lady. With all hope lost, with the doctors
helpless in the face of the implacable medical evidence, the royal
family, hierarchically arranged around the bed, waited with
resignation for the matriarch’s last breath, perhaps a few words, a
final edifying comment regarding the moral education of the beloved
princes, her grandsons, perhaps a beautiful, well-turned phrase
addressed to the ever ungrateful memory of future subjects. And
then, as if time had stopped, nothing happened. The queen mother
neither improved nor deteriorated, she remained there in suspension,
her frail body hovering on the very edge of life, threatening at any
moment to tip over onto the other side, yet bound to this side by a
tenuous thread to which, out of some strange caprice, death, because
it could only have been death, continued to keep hold. We had passed
over to the next day, and on that day, as we said at the beginning of
this tale, no one would die.
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From Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, copyright © José Saramago
and Editorial Caminho S.A., Lisbon 2005, English translation copyright © Margaret Jull
Costa 2008. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. All rights reserved.
