the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt eight)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

62. When I played darts I was calm and relaxed. I felt pacified. Little by little, emptiness would creep over me and I would steep myself in it until the last trace of tension vanished from my mind. Then—in one blazing movement—I would launch the dart at the target.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt seven)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

57. We had left the café and were going back to the hotel. Hands in my coat pockets, I walked head down, pressing my feet down hard on the pavement to push the city under water. Every time I came to the bottom of a staircase I jumped unobtrusively to the ground with both feet together and, waiting for Edmondsson at the bottom of the steps, asked her to do the same. With the town sinking at the rate of thirty centimeters a century, I explained, or three millimeters a year, or point zero zero eighty-two millimeters a day, or point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one millimeters= a second, one might reasonably hope, by pressing our feet down hard on the pavement as we walked, to play some part in the drowning of the town.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt six)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

46. Leaning toward the plate-glass window with my hands cupped around my eyes, I looked into the Standa department store, which was still closed, and tried to attract a saleswoman’s attention by tapping on the glass with a fist. When one of them finally looked my way I waved a greeting respectfully and pointed to my watch to ask what time the store would open. After one or two unproductive exchanges in sign language, she shuffled over to me and, stretching her fingers wide apart, showed me nine of them. Then, coming still closer, her chest and stomach pressed against the pane of glass so slightly separating us, her mouth almost against mine, she articulated lasciviously, Alle nove, creating a little cloud of steam between us. I looked at my watch: it was half past eight. I turned away, started walking through the nearby streets. In the end I found tennis balls somewhere else.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt five)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

22. Little by little, I began to make friends with the barman. We exchanged nods whenever we met on the stairs. Occasionally, when I went for my late-afternoon coffee, we’d have a conversation. We talked about soccer, automobile racing. The absence of a common language did not bother us; on cycling, for example, we could go on forever. Moser, he’d say. Merckx, I’d remark, after a little silence. Coppi, he’d say, Fausto Coppi. I’d stir my spoon in the coffee, nodding, thoughtful. Bruyère, I’d murmur. Bruyère? he’d say. Yes, yes, Bruyère. He seemed unconvinced. I thought the conversation at an end, but just as I was preparing to leave the counter, he grabbed me by the arm and said, Gimondi. Van Springel, I replied. Planckaert, I added, Dierieckx, Willems, Van Impe, Von Looy, de Vlaeminck: Roger de Vlaeminck and his brother, Eric. What could anyone say to that? He gave up. I paid for the coffee and went upstairs to my room.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt four)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

17. When leaving the hotel, I seldom went far. I’d stick to the streets nearby. Once, however, I had to return to the Standa department store: I needed shirts; my new underpants were getting dirty. The store was full of light. I walked slowly down the aisles, like an inspector, occasionally patting a child’s head. I lingered in front of the clothes racks, selected shirts, felt the wool of the sweaters. In the toy department I bought a set of darts.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt three)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

34. The rain had become a downpour, as though all the rain were going to fall: all. Cars slowed on the drenched roadway; sheaves of dead water rose on each side of the tires. Except for one or two umbrellas fleeing horizontally, the street looked immobile. People had taken refuge outside the post office door and, huddled together on the narrow stoop, were awaiting a lull. I turned around and went to open the clothes cupboard; I pawed through the drawers. Underwear, shirts, pajamas. I was looking for a sweater. Was there no sweater anywhere? I came out of the bedroom and, using my foot to push aside the cans of paint that cluttered the passageway, opened the closet door. Leaning forward into it, I began shoving at crates, opening suitcases, in search of a warm garment.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt two)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

7. Twice a week I would listen to the radio broadcast of the day’s play for the French soccer championship. The program lasted two hours. From a studio in Paris the announcer would orchestrate the voices of the reporters covering the matches in the different stadiums. Believing that soccer gains in the imagining, I never missed these dates. Lulled by warm human voices, I would listen to their reports with the lights off, sometimes with my eyes closed.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt one)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

1. When I began to spend my afternoons in the bathroom I had no intention of moving into it; no, I would pass some pleasant hours there, meditating in the bathtub, sometimes dressed, other times naked. Edmondsson, who liked to be there with me, said it made me calmer: occasionally I would even say something funny, we would laugh. I would wave my arms as I spoke, explaining that the most practical bathtubs were those with parallel sides, a sloping back, and a straight front, which relieves the user of the need for a footrest.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt fourteen)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Despite this progress, Apple is only in the earliest phases of diversifying iPhone production. As Morgan Stanley analysts estimated in mid-2023: “90-95% of Apple’s production is still in China; we believe a full decoupling would likely require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment at least, which would prove an outsize burden for the supply chain.” Indeed, the pace of growth in Apple’s operations in India is nothing like that of China a decade earlier. From 2016 to 2023, iPhone production in India grew from zero to around 15 million units, accounting for 7 percent of global shipments. China, between 2006 and 2013, ramped production from zero to 153 million units. So, at best, India is taking on iPhone orders at one-tenth the rate China did a decade earlier.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt thirteen)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

When Trump entered office in early 2017, Cupertino was on high alert. Executives were far more concerned about Trump than they ever were about Xi Jinping. Beijing’s ruler was a despot, sure, but he was a rational actor whose interests, broadly speaking, neatly aligned with Apple’s. Neither Beijing nor Cupertino wanted iPhone product to be shifted out of China. But that’s precisely what Trump wanted. “Tim, unless you start building your plants in this country, I won’t consider my administration an economic success,” Trump said he told the Apple CEO, in July 2017. Cook, according to Trump, had promised Apple would build “three big plants, beautiful plants.” Clearly understanding the risks of the insurgent presidency, Cook made a point of calling Trump, even visiting the president every four to six weeks. “Cook, this big southerner, was calling Trump all the time—he was nice to him,” says Margaret O’Mara, tech historian and author The Code. “He was so savvy navigating the broader currents of global trade.”

His diplomatic overtures climaxed in November 2019 when Cook personally gave President Trump a tour of a Texas factory churning out Apple’s Pro lineup of Macs. After the event, Trump tweeted: “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plan in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America.” The tweet was patently false. The owner of the plant was contract manufacturer Flex, not Apple; it had been assembling Macs for six years; and rather than representing some milestone, the factory had been demonstrating just how difficult it was to make computers in America.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt twelve)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

What Apple didn’t tell investors in November 2018, or say in its January 2019 revenue warning, was that sales of the XR weren’t simply attributable to a cooling Chinese economy. Instead, Chinese consumers were choosing to buy phones from Huawei. Apple had dealt with copycats since the earliest days of the iPhone, but most Chinese rivals could be ignored—they catered to the low end of the market. Huawei was different. It competed with Apple in the top tier, and in 2018, Apple executives began observing that Huawei’s latest Mate phone was awfully good, outshining Apple in features rather than just price.

Four days before the November 1 earnings call, Cook had held a Sunday meeting with other executives. “In China, we’re worried about the new Mate devices,” he told the team. He was right to be concerned. Just a few years earlier, the gap in quality between iPhones and Chinese handsets was stark. But Apple had brought up quality across the region, and the gaps were closing. Within a year, Huawei would be outselling Apple not just in China but globally.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt eleven)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Every supplier knows that if it can’t meet its commitments to deliver a defined number of units, it faces a legal fight with Apple or risks not being chosen for the next product. So when push came to shove, suppliers knew what to prioritize. “They were always willing to do the right thing until it wasn’t economically feasible to continue to do the right thing,” says an Apple engineer who managed product launches. “If you make an organization choose, they will choose profits.”

Another Apple executive referred to the statistic that iPhone account for less than a fifth of global smartphone shipments but garners 80 percent of industry profits. “To do that, you need to be creating competition at every level in the supply chain. You need to be ruthless,” this person says. “But you can’t do that and also be compliant.” A manufacturing design engineer at Apple recalled a day when Cook sent a note about the importance of corporate social responsibility. Such notes were meant to convey something important: We care about this at the highest level of Apple. But that same day his more direct bosses were demanding improvements to output. “The two messages were opposed to each other,” he says. But there was no genuine recognition of that. Apple as an organization was a living, breathing manifestation of cognitive dissonance.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt ten)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The risk of this approach is that it gives too much power to the supplier. So under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple had built redundancy into the supply chain, teaching multiple vendors how to do the same thing to mitigate risks of overdependence. “Every year there’d be discussion about our huge reliance on a small number of companies. What would happen if one of these companies were to stumble?” says one manufacturing design engineer. “Certainly at the component level,” this person adds, “even Foxconn didn’t have the space for the machines to make the components we needed, so we were kind of forced to find second sources, third sources.”

Given Apple’s scale and manufacturing concentration, the result of this strategy is that Apple spawned the formation of major industrial clusters in which engineers from Cupertino would teach multiple factories how to, say, shape glass for the iPhone. So instead of being beholden to Len Technology—the company that cut and tempered Corning class for the first iPhone—Apple would constantly send engineers form Cupertino to train its rivals. That kept Lens on its toes, lest Apple choose a different supplier for the next-generation iPhone—a potential catastrophe as Apple, by 2015, was producing a quarter billion iPhones per year. Moreover, it kept Lens from raising its prices. So any company supplying Apple with some component was preemptively thwarted from believing it had any power to exert, because Apple made it known it had options.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt nine)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

By the end of 2010, the number of attempted suicides rose to eighteen. Foxconn became a household name for all the wrong reasons, and Apple was accused of ‘iSlavery.” Whatever his other skills, Terry Gou didn’t exactly come out of this crisis looking like a media-savvy CEO. He installed nets all around the factories, to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths, and compelled workers to sign a pledge not to commit suicide. Describing his hopes for the new factories in Zhengzhou and Chengdu, Gou said that workers living inland and closer to their families would feel less anxiety. “There will be hospitals, there will be other facilities, there will be sources of entertainment,” Gou said in September 2010. “And if people still decide to kill themselves, then no one can blame me.”

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt eight)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

MacKay had first visited China as a nineteen-year-old in 1979 and attended university there in the 1980s. When he was a student, he says, everyone dressed in proletariat blue or People’s Liberation Army green. “There were no private cars, very few private restaurants. If they had ten items on the menu, they may have actually had two in the restaurant.” So when people in China started to make money, he says, “they really didn’t know how to display it, how to control it. And Apple,” he goes on, “was in the middle of that. Not only were they manufacturing there, but they were selling this product on a retail level that was in such high demand. And it was every time Apple launched something. It was what the Chinese with money wanted. Because it was a symbol. It wasn’t even the phone—it was the symbol of the phone.” MacKay tries to think of a Western analogy that might convey the feeling but can’t. “You’d have to go back to the 1880s, when the first cars came out,” he says. “It’d be like being one of the first people with a car instead of riding a horse on a muddy stream.”

Thousands of people who couldn’t afford iPhone found ways to buy them anyway. China Daily reported that a study of college students in Wuhan found that 20,000 had taken out loans with twelve-month interest rates as high as 47 percent to buy “fancy electronic products,” 90 percent of which were Apple. Perhaps the most widely publicized incident was that of a seventeen-year-old who underwent black market surgery to sell his kidney in exchange for enough cash to buy a new iPhone and an iPad.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt seven)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The first major report was in the UK’s Daily Mail, published in August 2006. It described workers at Foxconn’s Longhua factory living in high-security dorms “100 to a room, arriving with a few possessions and a bucket to wash their clothes.” Overtime, laborers told the journalists, was mandatory, and shifts could last fifteen hours a day. “We have to work too hard, and I am always tired,” one worker said. “It’s like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours. If we move we are punished by being made to stand still for longer.”

The article went viral, and after conducting an audit, Apple acknowledged that more than a third of workers exceeded its maximum workweek of sixty hours. Within a month Cupertino established a Supplier Responsibility team, vowing to improve conditions and hold vendors to account. This cat-and-mouse pattern—of the media finding problems in the supply chain and Apple pledging to do better—would be replicated over and again in the decade plus to follow. The periodic exposes helped to shine a light on working conditions and likely caused some positive change. But the media’s forays into what Apple was up to overlooked wider questions of company strategy, business development, and the management of product cycles. In histories of Apple, both in articles and books, China usually enters the conversation to explain the company’s problems, not its successes. But an early exception emerged in a wonky report on supply chain efficiency that came out just before the iPhone went on sale.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt six)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The no-quibble terms were a legacy of the iPod, a relatively simple product and one for which Foxconn was directly sourcing many of the parts. Apple had taken control of the more strategic and high-value-added items, but Foxconn had sourced commodity components on its own. Lacking any data on the iPhone before it was released, Foxconn treated it like an iPod and agreed to the same terms. But consenting to the same clause for such a different product proved to be a disaster. For the first iPhone, the percentage of units that came back within twelve months—what Apple calls TWR, standing for total warranty repair—was around one in seven. There were problems with the home button and the volume controls, and a spate of issues that didn’t meet standards from the perspective of field durability. Foxconn wasn’t necessarily building it poorly; it was simply the first consumer electronics product of that complexity to be used multiple hours a day. Apple’s quality standards were high, but they weren’t built to meet smartphone addiction—a concept that hadn’t really existed before. “You use an iPod occasionally, but you use the iPhone all the fucking time,” says an executive involved in manufacturing the original unit. The no-quibble clause was maintained for at least two to three generations of iPhone, until it got to a point where Foxconn was losing money and they had to plead with Cupertino to amend the contract. “It became untenable from a business standpoint,” says a person familiar with the change.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt five)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The eighty-hour workweeks and increasing need to be in Asia at inconsistent times, with little warning and often for unknown durations, caused massive stress on the engineers’ mental health and their marriages. They were primarily men, and some of their wives took to calling themselves “Apple widows” because their husbands were around so infrequently.

So many marriages were broken up during the first years of Jobs’s comeback that informal preventive measures were established to contain further damage. Engineers called it the DAP, or Divorce Avoidance Program. In the late 1990s, the acronym referred to when an engineer couldn’t come in to work that day because his marriage was on the line. “It was like, ‘Where’s Glen this weekend? Why isn’t he working?’” one engineer recounts. “And a colleague would reply, ‘Oh, he’s on the DAP.’ The basic meaning was: Glen’s about ready to get a divorce if he doesn’t have a weekend with his wife. So Glen wasn’t working that weekend. That kind of stuff happened on the team all the time.”

Then the DAP evolved. The necessity of giving engineers respite to save their marriage was understood, but with Apple’s ID studio continuing to push the boundaries of what was possible, workers were under constant pressure to perform. So instead of giving time off, Apple started to give out bonuses meant to assuage spouses. One engineer with more than two decades of Apple experience recalls calling his wife from the Apple office and telling her that he had to take another trip to Asia the following week. “And she just blew up. You could hear her on my phone speaker two offices away,” he says. “The thing that made her calm down was that whenever I’d go to China on a project, if that project was completed and went to production, we got a $10,000 bonus.” Engineers had a name for these bonuses: “Dan bucks” or “Danny bucks,” in reference to Dan Riccio, the VP of Product Design. He’d played a role in negotiating for the bonuses. “We had these fake little vouchers that had Dan on them—he didn’t look happy,” an engineer says.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt four)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Organized crime was a major problem in Taiwan, with underworld gangs dating back to Japanese occupation in the early twentieth century. By the early 1980s they’d penetrated the legitimate business sector. When the government launched a series of harsh crackdowns, some gangsters responded by running for office and winning elections. By the early 2000s, business, politics, and organized crime were so intertwined that the lines separating legitimacy from illegitimacy were blurry at best. Apple had been paying its contract manufacturer directly, which in turn was supposed to pay these sub-suppliers—vendors a tier or two down in the supply chain. Apple engineers had been, as one of them put it, “beating up on” vendors the past few days, pressuring them to work harder, work smarter, and now they were realizing these vendors hadn’t even been compensated. “Apple writes a check, the supplier is supposed to have the vendor make the change, and you go to the vendor as an engineer to see the effects,” Hillman says. “And you find out they haven’t even been paid a dime because it all went to the mafia.”

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt three)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Cook’s spirit is kindred to that of Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher whose daily routine was so consistent that residents could set their watch to when he strolled by. His zeal for order is exactly what Apple operations needed. Compaq was a well-run business, but Apple was an absolute mess. Cook could make his mark immediately. Joe O’Sullivan, by then the acting head of operations, was tasked with teaching Cook the ropes. His goal was to distill his eleven years of experience into eight weeks of on-the-job training, beginning around April 1998. After just two weeks of on-the-job training, beginning around April 1998. After just two weeks, the two men agreed no more time was necessary. “By the time I left him, he knew more than I did about Apple,” O’Sullivan says. “That man has a fast mind. And a grasp. And a memory—honestly, it’s borderline photographic.”

Cook established exceedingly high expectations the first time he held an operations meeting of worldwide managers. In the weekly review, attendees went over what had gone wrong in the prior days, what needed to be fixed immediately, and what was coming up. These meetings were typically ninety minutes; sometimes they could stretch beyond two hours. On the day Cook took over, the weekly review went nearly thirteen hours. He insisted on a granular level of understanding and demanded fluency in the intricacies of every project. If a manager one week, in a lengthy presentation, projected that their team would ship 200,050 of something by Friday, Cook would remember. So the next week, if the manager said, “Yep, we met our numbers. We did two hundred thousand,” Cook would look at them and ask, with deadly seriousness: “And fifty?”

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt two)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The technique Apple would use to build the iMac enclosure dates back to a shortage of billiard balls in the late nineteenth century. The balls were typically made of ivory sourced from tusks, but the game’s popularity was growing faster than hunters could kill elephants. When a billiard equipment maker offered a $10,000 prize—more than $3 million today—for someone to come up with an alternative, an American inventor took up the challenge. He melted plastic, then injected it into a casing—a metal mold in the shape of a small sphere—and let it cool. Once the plastic solidified, he removed the casing and out popped a billiard ball. A patent for plastic injection molding was granted in 1872, and over the next 125 years the process became more intricate, automated, and repeatable. There was nothing unique about plastic injection molding the case of a computer, but Apple’s Industrial Design studio was intent on pushing the boundaries of what was possible.

Novak liked a challenge, but as he squinted at the horizontal lines on the front cover that wrapped around the display, he concluded the design just wasn’t possible. When molding plastic, the steel moves in one direction, but the horizontal texture lines ID had drawn up ran in perpendicular fashion. Technically you could mold one—but just one, because it was never going to come out of the mold. Novak experimented. Failed. Then experimented again.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt one)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Apple’s pioneering strategy to build circuit boards was to employ Jobs’s younger, pregnant sister Patty, paying her a dollar for every board she assembled. Patty “settled on the living-room couch of her apartment, the boards on the coffee table before her, the soaps on the TV and a phone cradled on her shoulder talking to friends, jamming the rows of little caterpillar-shaped integrated circuits into the holes on the surface of the green placemat-sized fiberglass printed circuit boards,” writes Malone. “She wasn’t very good at it, with a tendency to jam the chips down when they didn’t fit just right—thus bending their little gold legs and setting the stage for future short circuits—but she was cheap, methodical and, most of all, available.

For the more popular Apple II, a small team took all the parts and separated them into little kits. Every few days they gave the kits to a Los Altos housewife, who coordinated a fragmented network of assembly operations spanning houses and apartments crowded with immigrant women from Southeast Asia and undocumented Mexicans. “No one ever mentioned minimum wage, or Social Security, or workplace safety laws,” Malone writes. “And thus, for more than a year, the Apple II, promoted as the machine to liberate people from the slavery of bureaucracies and office work, was in fact being partially assembled in sweatshops.”

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt thirteen)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

The hours passed, the hours necessary for the sun to come up outside, not here in this cold, white room, where the pale bulbs, which are always lit, seem to have been placed to fend off the shadows from a corpse who is afraid of the dark. It is still too early for the scythe to give the order that will make the second pile of letters vanish from the room, and so it can sleep a little more. This is what insomniacs say when they have not slept a wink all night, thinking, poor things, that they can fool sleep by asking for a little more, just a little more, when they have not yet been granted one minute of repose. Alone for all those hours, the scythe tried to find an explanation for the remarkable fact that death had made her exit through a sealed door, one that had been eternally condemned, certainly for as long as the scythe has been here. In the end, it gave up any attempt to understand, sooner or later, it will find out what’s going on behind that door, for it’s almost impossible for there to be secrets between death and the scythe, just as there are no secrets between the sickle and the hand that wields it. The scythe did not have to wait long. Only half an hour of clock time could have passed when the door opened and a woman appeared. The scythe had heard that such a thing was possible, that death could transform herself into a human being, preferably female, this being her normal gender, but had always thought it a mere tale, a myth, a legend like so many others, for example, the phoenix reborn from its own ashes, the man in the moon carrying a bundle of firewood on his back because he had worked on the sabbath, baron munchausen saving himself and his horse from drowning in a swamp by pulling on his own hair, the dracula of transylvania who cannot die, however many times he is killed, unless a stake is driven through his heart, and some people even doubt he’ll die then, the famous stone in old Ireland that cried out when the true king touched it, the fountain of epyrus that could douse lit torches and light unlit ones, women who anointed the fields with their menstrual blood to increase the fertility of the sown seeds, ants the size of dogs, dogs the size of ants, the resurrection on the third day because it couldn’t have been on the second. You look very pretty, said the scythe, and it was true, death did look very pretty and she was young, about thirty-six or thirty-seven just as the anthropologists had calculated, You spoke, exclaimed death, There seemed to me to be a good reason, it isn’t every day one sees death transformed into the species of which she is the enemy, So it wasn’t because you thought I looked pretty, Oh, that too, that too, but I would have spoken even if you’d emerged in the guise of a fat woman in black like the one who appeared to monsieur marcel proust, Well, I’m not fat and I’m not dressed in black, and you have no idea who marcel proust was, For obvious reasons, we scythes, both those who cut down people and those who cut down grass, have never been taught how to read, but we have good memories, mine of blood and theirs of sap, and I’ve heard proust’s name several times and put together the facts, he was a great writer, one of the greatest who ever lived, and his file must be somewhere in the old archives, Yes, but not in mine, I wasn’t the death who killed him, So this monsieur marcel proust wasn’t from here, then, asked the scythe, No, he was from another country, a place called france, replied death, and there was a touch of sadness in her words, Don’t worry, you can console yourself for the fact that it wasn’t you who killed proust by how pretty you look today, said the scythe helpfully, As you know, I’ve always considered you to be a friend, but my sadness has nothing to do with not having been the one to kill proust, What then, Well, I’m not sure I can explain. The scythe gave death a bemused look and thought it best to change the subject, Where did you find the clothes you’re wearing, it asked, There are plenty to choose from behind that door, it’s like a warehouse, like a vast theater wardrobe, there are literally hundreds of wardrobes, hundreds of mannequins, thousands of hangers, Take me there, pleaded the scythe, What’s the point, you know nothing about fashions or style, Well, one look at you tells me that you don’t know much more than I do, the clothes you’re wearing don’t seem to go together at all, Since you never leave this room, you have no idea what people are wearing these days, That blouse looks very like others I can remember from when I led an active life, fashions go in cycles, they come and go, they go and come, if I were to tell you what I see out in those streets, No need to tell me, I believe you, Don’t you think this blouse goes well with the color of the trousers and the shoes, Yes, agreed the scythe, And with this cap I’m wearing, Yes, that too, And with this fur coat, Yes, And with this shoulder bag, Yes, you’re quite right, And with these earrings, Oh, I give up, Go on, admit it, I’m irresistible, That depends on the kind of man you hope to seduce, But you think I look pretty, That’s what I said to begin with, In that case, goodbye, I’ll be back on sunday, or monday at the latest, don’t forget to send off the mail each day, that shouldn’t be too hard a task for someone who spends all his time leaning against the wall, You’ve got the letter, asked the scythe, deciding not to rise to such sarcasm, Yes, it’s in here, said death, tapping her bag with the tips of slender, well-manicured fingers, which anyone would be pleased to kiss.

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt twelve)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

Death has a plan. Changing the musician’s year of birth was only the opening move in an operation which, we can tell you now, will deploy some quite exceptional methods never before used in the history of the relationship between the human race and its oldest, most mortal enemy. As in a game of chess, death advanced her queen. A few more moves should open the way to a checkmate, and the game will end. One might now ask why death doesn’t simply revert to the status quo ante, when people died simply because they had to, with no waiting around for the postman to bring them a violet-colored letter. The question has its logic, but the reply is no less logical. It is, firstly, a matter of honor, determination and professional pride, for if death were to return to the innocence of former times, it would, in the eyes of everyone, be tantamount to admitting defeat. Since the current process involves the use of violet-colored letters, then these must be the means by which the cellist will die. We need only put ourselves in death’s place to understand the rationale behind this. As we have seen on four previous occasions, there remains the principal problem of delivering that now weary letter to its addressee, and if the longed-for goal is to be achieved, that is where the exceptional methods we referred to above come in. But let us not anticipate events, let us see what death is doing now. At this precise moment, death is not actually doing anything more than she usually does, she is, to use a current expression, hanging loose, although, to tell the truth, it would be more exact to say that death never hangs loose, death simply is. At the same time and everywhere. She doesn’t need to run after people to catch them, she will always be where they are. Now, thanks to this new method of warning people by letter, she could, if she chose to, just sit quietly in her subterranean room and wait for the mail to do the work, but she is, by nature, strong, energetic and active. As the old saying goes, You can’t cage a barnyard chicken. In the figurative sense, death is a barnyard chicken. She won’t be so stupid, or so unforgivably weak, as to repress what is best in her, her limitlessly expansive nature, therefore she will not repeat the painful process of concentrating all her energies on remaining at the very edge of visibility without actually going over to the other side, as she did the previous night, and at what a cost, during the hours she spent in the musician’s apartment. Since, as we have said a thousand and one times, she is present everywhere, she is there too. The dog is sleeping in the garden, in the sun, waiting for his master to come home. He doesn’t know where his master has gone or what he has gone to do, and the idea of following his trail, were he ever to try, is something he has ceased to think about, for the good and bad smells in a capital city are so many and so disorienting. We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion. Death, however, knows that the cellist is sitting on the stage of a theater, to the right of the conductor, in the place that corresponds to the instrument he plays, she sees him moving the bow with his skillful right hand, she sees his no less skillful left hand moving up and down the strings, just as she herself had done in the half-dark, even though she has never learned music, not even the basics of music theory, so-called three-four time. The conductor stopped the rehearsal, tapping his baton on the edge of the music stand to make some comment and to issue an order, in this passage, he wants the cellists, and only the cellists, to make themselves heard, while, at the same time, appearing not to be making a sound, a kind of musical charade which the musicians appear to have mastered without difficulty, that is what art is like, things that seem impossible to the layperson turn out not to be. Death, needless to say, fills the whole theater, right to the very top, as far as the allegorical paintings on the ceiling and the vast unlit chandelier, but the view she prefers at the moment is the view from a box just above the stage, very close, and slightly at an angle to the section of strings that play the lower notes, the violas, the contraltos of the violin family, the cellos, which are the equivalent of the bass, and the doublebasses, which have the deepest voice of all. Death is sitting there, on a narrow crimson-upholstered chair, and staring fixedly at the first cellist, the one she watched while he was asleep and who wears striped pajamas, the one who owns a dog that is, at this moment, sleeping in the sun in the garden, waiting for his master to return. That is her man, a musician, nothing more, like the almost one hundred other men and women seated in a semicircle around their personal shaman, the conductor, and all of whom will, one day, in some future week or month or year, receive a violet-colored letter and leave their place empty, until some other violinist, flautist or trumpeter comes to sit in the same chair, perhaps with another shaman waving a baton to conjure forth sounds, life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again, singing the evocative song sung by the waters as they cascade from her decks, like the watery song, dripping like a murmuring sigh over her undulating body, sung by the goddess amphitrite at her birth, when she became she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given. Death wonders where amphitrite is now, the daughter of nereus and doris, where is she now, she who may never have existed in reality, but who nevertheless briefly inhabited the human mind in order to create in it, again only briefly, a certain way of giving meaning to the world, of finding ways of understanding reality. But they didn’t understand it, thought death, nor will they, however hard they try, because everything in their lives is provisional, precarious, transitory, gods, men, the past, all gone, what is will not always be, and even I, death, will come to an end when there’s no one left to kill, either in the traditional manner, or by correspondence. We know that this is not the first time such a thought has passed through whatever part of her it is that thinks, but it was the first time that thinking it had brought her such a feeling of profound relief, like that of someone who, having completed a task, slowly leans back to take a rest. Suddenly the orchestra fell silent, all that can be heard is the sound of a cello, it’s what they call a solo, a modest solo that will last, at most, two minutes, it’s as if from the forces invoked by the shaman a voice had arisen, speaking perhaps in the name of all those who are now silent, even the conductor doesn’t move, he’s looking at the same musician who left open on a chair the sheet music of suite number six opus one thousand and twelve in d major by johann sebastian bach, a suite he will never play in this theater, because he is merely a cellist in the orchestra, albeit the leader of his section, not one of those famous concert artistes who travel the world playing and giving interviews, receiving flowers, applause, plaudits and medals, he’s lucky that he occasionally gets a few bars to play solo, thanks to some generous composer who happened to remember the side of the orchestra where little of anything out of the ordinary tends to happen. When the rehearsal ends, he’ll put his cello in its case and take a taxi home, a taxi with a large trunk, and maybe tonight, after supper, he’ll put the sheet music for the bach suite on the stand, take a deep breath and draw the bow across the strings so that the first note thus born can console him for the irredeemable banalities of the world and so that the second, if possible, will make him forget them, the solo ends, the rest of the orchestra covers the last echo of the cello, and the shaman, with an imperious wave of his baton, has returned to his role as invoker and guide of the spirits of sound. Death is proud of how well her cellist played. As if she were a family member, his mother, his sister, his fiancée, not his wife, though, because this man has never married.

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt eleven)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

If death had dreamed hopefully of some surprise to distract her from the boredom of routine, she was well served. Here was that surprise, and it could hardly be bettered. The first time the letter was returned could have been put down to a mere accident along the way, a castor come off its axle, a lubrication problem, a sky-blue letter in a hurry to arrive that had pushed its way to the front, in short, one of those unexpected things that happen inside machines, or, indeed, inside the human body, and which can throw off even the most exact calculations. The fact that it had been returned twice was quite different, it clearly showed that there was an obstacle at some point along the road that should have taken it straight to the home of the addressee, an obstacle that sent the letter rebounding back to where it had come from. In the first instance, given that the return had taken place on the day after it had been sent, it was still possible that the postman, having failed to find the person to whom the letter should have been delivered, instead of putting the letter through the mailbox or under the door, had returned it to the sender, but omitted to give a reason. All this was pure supposition, of course, but it could explain what had happened. Now, however, things were different. Between coming and going, the letter had taken less than half an hour, probably much less, for it was there on the desk when death raised her head from the rather hard resting-place of her forearms, that is from the cubit and the radius, which are intertwined for that very purpose. A strange, mysterious, incomprehensible force appeared to be resisting the death of that person, even though the date of his demise had been fixed, as it had for everyone, from the day of his birth. It’s impossible, said death to the silent scythe, no one in this world or beyond has ever had more power than I have, I’m death, all else is nothing. She got up from her chair and went over to the filing cabinet, from which she returned with the suspect file. There was no doubt about it, the name agreed with that on the envelope, so did the address, the person’s profession was given as cellist and the space for civil status was blank, a sign that he was neither married, widowed nor divorced, because in death’s files the status of bachelor is never recorded, well, you can imagine how silly it would be for a child to be born, an index card filled out, and to note down, not his profession, because he wouldn’t yet know what his vocation would be, but that the newborn’s civil status was bachelor. As for the age given on the card that death is holding in her hand, we can see that the cellist is forty-nine years old. Now, if we needed proof of the impeccable workings of death’s archives, we will have it now, when, in a tenth of a second, or even less, before our own incredulous eyes, the number forty-nine is replaced by fifty. Today is the birthday of the cellist whose name is on the card, he should be receiving flowers not a warning that in a week’s time he’ll be dead. Death got up again, walked around the room a few times, stopped twice as she passed the scythe, opened her mouth as if to speak or ask an opinion or issue an order, or simply to say that she felt confused, upset, which, we must say, is hardly surprising when we think how long she has done this job without, until now, ever having been shown any disrespect from the human flock of which she is the sovereign shepherdess. It was then that death had the grim presentiment that the incident might be even more serious than had at first seemed. She sat down at her desk and started to leaf back through last week’s list of the dead. On the first list of names from yesterday, and contrary to what she had expected, she saw that the cellist’s name was missing. She continued to turn the pages, one, then another, then another and another, one more, and only on the eighth list did she find his name. She had erroneously thought that the name would be on yesterday’s list, but now she found herself before an unprecedented scandal: someone who should have been dead two days ago was still alive. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The wretched cellist, who, ever since his birth, had been marked out to die a young man of only forty-nine summers, had just brazenly entered his fiftieth year, thus bringing into disrepute destiny, fate, fortune, the horoscope, luck and all the other powers that devote themselves by every possible means, worthy and unworthy, to thwarting our very human desire to live. They were all utterly discredited. And how am I going to put right a mistake that could never have happened, when a case like this has no precedents, when nothing like it was foreseen in the regulations, thought death, especially when the man was supposed to have died at forty-nine and not at fifty, which is the age he is now. Poor death was clearly beside herself, distraught, and would soon start beating her head against the wall out of sheer distress. In all these thousands of centuries of continuous activity, there had never been a single operational failure, and now, just when she had introduced something new into the classic relationship between mortals and their one and only causa mortis, her hard-won reputation had been dealt the severest of blows. What should I do, she asked, what if the fact that he didn’t die when he should have has placed him beyond my jurisdiction, how on earth am I going to get out of this fix. She looked at the scythe, her companion in so many adventures and massacres, but the scythe ignored her, it never responded, and now, oblivious to everything, as if weary of the world, it was resting its worn, rusty blade against the white wall. That was when death came up with her great idea, People say that there’s never a one without a two, never a two without a three, and that three is lucky because it’s the number god chose, but let’s see if it’s true. She waved her right hand, and the letter that had been returned twice vanished again. Within two minutes it was back. There it was, in the same place as before. The postman hadn’t put it under the door, he hadn’t rung the bell, and there it was.

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt ten)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

According to the wisdom of the nations, there is an exception to every rule, even rules that would normally be considered utterly inviolable, as for example, those regarding the sovereignty of death, to which, by definition, there never could be an exception, however absurd, and yet it really must be true because, as it happened, one violet-colored letter was returned to sender. Some will object that such a thing is impossible, that death, being ubiquitous, cannot therefore be in any one particular place, from which one can deduce the impossibility, both material and metaphysical, of locating and defining what we normally understand by the word sender, or, in the meaning intended here, the place from which the letter came. Others will also object, albeit less speculatively, that, since a thousand policemen have been looking for death for weeks on end, scouring the entire country, house by house, with a fine-tooth comb, as if in search of an elusive louse highly skilled in evasive tactics, and have still found neither hide nor hair of her, it is as clear as day that if no explanation has yet been given as to how death’s letters reach the mail, we are certainly not going to be told by what mysterious channels the returned letter has managed to reach her hands. We humbly recognize that our explanations about this and much more have been sadly lacking, we confess that we are unable to provide explanations that will satisfy those demanding them, unless, taking advantage of the reader’s credulity and leaping over the respect owed to the logic of events, we were to add further unrealities to the congenital unreality of this fable, now we realize that such faults seriously undermine our story’s credibility, however, none of this, we repeat, none of this means that the violet-colored letter to which we referred was not returned to its sender. Facts are facts, and this fact, whether you like it or not, is of the irrefutable kind. There can be no better proof of this than the image of death before us now, sitting on a chair while wrapped in her sheet, and with a look of blank amazement on the orography of her bony face. She eyes the violet envelope suspiciously, studies it to see if it bears any of the comments postmen usually write on envelopes in such cases, for example, returned, not known at this address, addressee gone away leaving no forwarding address or date of return, or simply, dead, How stupid of me, she muttered, how could he have died if the letter that should have killed him came back unopened. She had thought these last words without giving them much importance, but she immediately summoned them up again and repeated them out loud, in a dreamy tone of voice, Came back unopened. You don’t need to be a postman to know that coming back is not the same thing as being sent back, that coming back could merely mean that the violet-colored letter failed to reach its destination, that at some point along the way something happened to make it retrace its steps and return whence it had come. Letters can only go where they’re taken, they don’t have legs or wings, and, as far as we know, they’re not endowed with their own initiative, if they were, we’re sure that they would refuse to carry the terrible news of which they’re so often the bearers. Like this news of mine, thought death impartially, telling someone that they’re going to die on a particular date is the worst possible news, it’s like spending long years on death row and then having the jailer come up to you and say, Here’s the letter, prepare yourself. The odd thing is that all the other letters from the last batch were safely delivered to their addressees, and if this one wasn’t, it can only have been because of some chance event, for just as there have been cases of a love letter, god alone knows with what consequences, taking five years to reach an addressee who lived only two blocks and less than a quarter of an hour’s walk away, it could be that this letter passed from one conveyor belt to another without anyone noticing and then returned to its point of departure like someone who, lost in the desert, has nothing more to go on than the trail he left behind him. The solution would be to send it again, said death to the scythe that was next to her, leaning against the white wall. One wouldn’t expect a scythe to respond, and this one proved no exception. Death went on, If I’d sent you, with your taste for expeditious methods, the matter would have been resolved, but times have changed a lot lately, and one has to update the means and the systems one uses, to keep up with the new technologies, by using e-mail, for example, I’ve heard tell that it’s the most hygienic way, one that does away with inkblots and fingerprints, besides which it’s fast, you just open up outlook express on microsoft and it’s gone, the difficulty would be having to work with two separate archives, one for those who use computers and another for those who don’t, anyway, we’ve got plenty of time to think about it, they’re always coming out with new models and new designs, with new improved technologies, perhaps I’ll try it some day, but until then, I’ll continue to write with pen, paper and ink, it has the charm of tradition, and tradition counts for a lot when it comes to dying. Death stared hard at the violet-colored envelope, made a gesture with her right hand, and the letter vanished. So now we know that, contrary to what so many thought, death does not take her letters to the post office.

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt nine)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

Finally, last but not least, the catholic apostolic church of rome had many reasons to feel pleased with itself. Convinced from the start that the abolition of death could only be the work of the devil and that to help god fight the demon’s works there is nothing more powerful than perseverance in prayer, they had set aside the virtue of modesty which, with no small effort and sacrifice, they usually cultivated, to congratulate themselves unreservedly on the success of the national campaign of prayer whose objective, remember, had been to ask the lord god to bring about the return of death as quickly as possible so as to save poor humanity from the worst horrors, end of quote. The prayers had taken nearly eight months to reach heaven, but when you think that it takes six months to reach the planet mars, then heaven, as you can imagine, must be much farther off, three thousand million light-years from earth, in round numbers. A black cloud, therefore, hung over the church’s legitimate satisfaction. The theologians argued and failed to reach agreement on the reasons that had led god to order death’s sudden return, without at least allowing time for the last rites to be given to the sixty-two thousand dying, who, deprived of the grace of the last sacrament, had expired in less time than it takes to say so. Worrying thoughts as to whether god had authority over death or if, on the contrary, death was above god in the hierarchy quietly gnawed away at the hearts and minds of that holy institution, where the bold affirmation that god and death were two sides of the same coin had come to be considered not so much heresy as an abominable sacrilege. At least that was what was really going on beneath the surface, whereas to others it seemed that the church’s main preoccupation was their participation in the queen mother’s funeral. Now that the sixty-two thousand ordinary dead were safely in their final resting place and no longer holding up the traffic in the city, it was time to bear the venerable lady, suitably enclosed in her lead coffin, to the royal pantheon. As the newspapers all agreed, it was the end of an era.

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt eight)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

It was this violent attack by the republicans, but, more important, the article’s worrying prediction that, very soon, the aforementioned state coffers would be unable, with no end in sight, to continue paying old age and disability pensions, that prompted the king to let the prime minister know that they needed to have a frank conversation, alone, without tape recorders or witnesses of any kind. The prime minister duly arrived, inquired after the royal health, in particular after that of the queen mother, who, at new year, had been on the point of dying, but who nonetheless, like so very many others, still continued to breathe thirteen times a minute, even though her prostrate body beneath the canopy covering her bed showed few other signs of life. His majesty thanked him and said that the queen mother was bearing her sufferings with the dignity proper to the blood that still ran in her veins, and then turned to the matters on the agenda, the first of which was the republicans’ declaration of war. I just don’t understand what these people can be thinking of, he said, here’s the country plunged in the worst crisis of its entire history, and there they are talking about regime change, Oh, I wouldn’t worry, sir, all they’re doing is taking advantage of the situation to spread what they call their plans for government, deep down, they’re nothing but poor anglers fishing in some very murky waters, And, let it be said, showing a lamentable lack of patriotism. Indeed, sir, the republicans have ideas about the nation that only they can understand, if, that is, they do understand them, Their ideas don’t interest me in the least, what I want to hear from you is if there’s any chance they might force a change of regime, They don’t even have any representation in parliament, sir, What I’m referring to is a coup d’etat, a revolution, Absolutely not, sir, the people are solidly behind their king, and the armed forces are loyal to the legitimate government, So I can rest easy, Completely, sir. The king made a cross in his diary next to the word republicans, and said, Good, then he asked, And what’s all this about pensions not being paid, We are paying them, sir, but prospects do look pretty bleak, So I must have misread it, I thought there had been, shall we say, a suspension of payments, No, sir, but, as I say, the future is very worrying indeed, Worrying in what respect, In every respect, sir, the state could simply collapse like a house of cards, Are we the only country that finds itself in this situation, asked the king, No, sir, in the long term, the problem will affect everyone, but what counts is the difference between dying and not dying, a fundamental difference, if you’ll forgive me stating the obvious, Sorry, but I don’t quite understand, In other countries, it’s normal for people to die, but here, sir, in our country, no one dies, think only of the queen mother, it seemed certain she was dying, but, no, she’s still here, happily for us, of course, but really, I’m not exaggerating, the noose is well and truly around our necks, And yet I’ve heard rumors that some people are dying, That’s true, sir, but it’s merely a drop in the ocean, not all families can bring themselves to take that step, What step, Handing over their dying to the organization in charge of the suicides, But I don’t understand, what’s the point of them committing suicide if they can’t die, Oh, they can, sir, And how do they manage it, It’s a complicated story, sir, Well, tell it to me, we’re alone, On the other side of the frontier, sir, people are still dying, You mean that this organization takes them there, Exactly, Is it a charitable organization, It helps us a little to slow down the mounting numbers of the terminally dying, but, as I said before, it’s a drop in the ocean, And what is this organization. The prime minister took a deep breath and said, The maphia, sir, The maphia, Yes, sir, the maphia, sometimes the state has no alternative but to find someone else to do its dirty work, You’ve never said anything to me about this before, No, sir, I wanted to keep you out of a situation for which I take full responsibility, And the troops who were on the frontier, They had a job to do, What job was that, Of appearing to be an obstacle to the transportation of suicides, but not, in fact, being an obstacle at all, But I thought they were there to prevent an invasion, There never was such a danger, and, besides, we’ve made agreements with the governments of those other countries, and everything’s under control, Apart from the matter of pensions, Apart from the matter of death, sir, if we don’t start dying again, we have no future. The king made a cross beside the word pensions and said, Something needs to happen, Indeed, sir, something needs to happen.

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt seven)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

Lovers of concision, laconicism and economy of language will doubtless be asking, if the idea is such a simple one, why did we need all this waffle to arrive, at last, at the critical point. The answer is equally simple, and we will give it using a current and very trendy term, that will, we hope, make up for the archaisms with which, in the likely opinion of some, we have spattered this account as if with mold, and that term is context. Now everyone knows what we mean by context, but there could have been doubts had we rather dully used that dreadful archaism background, which is, moreover, not entirely faithful to the truth, given that the context gives not only the background, but all the innumerable other grounds that exist between the subject observed and the line of the horizon. It would be better then if we called it a framework. Yes, a framework, and now that we finally have it well and truly framed, the moment has come to reveal the nature of the trick that the maphia thought up to avoid any chance of a conflict that might prejudice their interests. As we have said, a child could have come up with the idea. It was this, to take the sufferer across the frontier, and, once he or she had died, to bring him or her back to be buried in the maternal bosom of his country of origin. A perfect checkmate in the most rigorous, exact and precise meaning of the word. As we have seen, the problem was resolved without discredit to any of the parties, and the four armies, who now had no reason to remain at the frontier on a war footing, could withdraw peacefully, since the maphia proposed simply to enter and then leave again, for, as we have said before, the dying expired the moment they were transported to the other side, and now there will be no need for them to linger even for a minute, merely the time it takes to die, and that, which has always been the briefest of moments, just a sigh, that’s all, so you can imagine how it would be in this case, a candle that suddenly burns itself out without anyone even having to blow. Not even the gentlest of euthanasias could be as easy or as sweet. The most interesting aspect of the new situation is that the justice system of the country in which people do not die finds itself without any legal basis on which to take action against the buriers, always supposing they really wanted to, and not just because of the gentlemen’s agreement that the government was forced to make with the maphia. It can’t accuse them of homicide because, technically speaking, no homicide takes place, and also because the reprehensible act, and if anyone can find a better way of describing it, then please do, takes place abroad, and they can’t even accuse them of burying the dead, since that is the natural fate of the dead, and they should be grateful that there is someone prepared to take on a task which, however you look at it, is a painful one, both from the physical and the psychological viewpoint. They could, at most, allege that no doctor was present to record the death, that the burial did not fulfill the regulations set down for a correct interment and that, as if such a thing were quite unheard of, the grave is not only unmarked, but will certainly be lost from view once the first heavy rains come and the plants push up, tender and joyful, through the fertile soil. Having considered all the difficulties, and concerned that it might be plunged into the swamp of appeals in which, the maphia’s clever lawyers, inveterate intriguers, would mercilessly drown them, the law decided to wait patiently to see how things turned out. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most prudent attitude to take. The country is in an unparalleled state of unrest, the powers-that-be are confused, authority undermined, moral values are rapidly being turned on their head, and a loss of any sense of civic respect is sweeping all sectors of society, probably even god has no idea where he’s taking us. There is a rumor that the maphia is negotiating another gentlemen’s agreement with the funeral industry in the hope of rationalizing their efforts and spreading the workload, which means, in ordinary, everyday language, that they will supply the dead, and the undertakers will contribute the means and the technical expertise for burying them. It is also said that the maphia’s proposal was welcomed with open arms by the undertakers, weary of wasting their millennia of knowledge, their experience, their know-how, and their choirs of professional mourners, on arranging funerals for dogs, cats and canaries, as well as the occasional cockatoo, a catatonic tortoise, a tame squirrel and a pet lizard whose owner used to carry it around on his shoulder. We have never sunk so low, they said. Now the future looked bright and cheerful, hopes bloomed like flowerbeds, indeed, one might even say, at the risk of the obvious paradox, that the funeral industry was reborn. And all thanks to the good offices and inexhaustible money vaults of the maphia. It provided subsidies to businesses in the capital and in other cities round the country for them to set up new branches, and the maphia was, of course, duly recompensed, in localities near the frontiers, it made arrangements for a doctor to be present when the dead person was brought back across the border and someone was required to declare them dead, and agreements were reached with local councils that the burials in the maphia’s charge should have absolute priority, regardless of the hour of day or night when it chose to carry these out. Naturally, all of this cost a lot of money, but now that the extras and the supplementary services accounted for most of the bill, the business continued to be profitable. Then, without warning, the tap from which had flowed a constant, generous supply of the terminally dying was turned off. It seemed that families, suffering an attack of conscience, had passed the word from one to the other that they were no longer going to send their loved ones far away to die, that if, in the figurative sense, we had eaten of their flesh, then now we would have to gnaw on their bones as well, that we are not here just for the good times, when our loved ones had strength and health intact, we are here, too, for the bad times and the worst, when they have become little more than a stinking rag that there is no point in washing. The undertakers went from euphoria to despair, were thrown back into ruin and the humiliation of burying canaries and cats, dogs and the rest of the menagerie, the turtle, the cockatoo, the squirrel, but not the lizard because that had been the only one that let its owner carry it about on his shoulder. The maphia remained calm, kept their nerve, and immediately set out to investigate what was going on. It was quite simple. The families told them, although not always in so many words, that acting in secret had been one thing, with their loved ones carried off at dead of night, and when there was no way the neighbors could know if they were still lying racked on their bed of pain or had simply evaporated. It was easy to lie, to say sadly, Still here, poor thing, when you met your next-door neighbor on the landing and she asked, So how’s grandpa these days. Now everything would be different, there would be a death certificate, there would be plaques in the cemeteries engraved with names and surnames, in a matter of hours the whole envious, slanderous neighborhood would know that grandpa had died in the only way he could die, which meant, quite simply, that his own cruel, ungrateful family had dispatched him to the frontier. It makes us feel ashamed, they confessed. The maphia listened and listened and said they would think about it. This took no more than twenty-four hours. Following the example of the old gentleman on page thirty-three, the dead had wanted to die and their deaths would, therefore, be recorded on death certificates as suicides. The tap was turned on again.

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt six)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

For two weeks, the plan worked more or less perfectly, but, after that, some of the vigilantes started complaining that they were receiving threatening phone calls, warning them that, if they wanted to live a nice quiet life, they had better turn a blind eye to the clandestine traffic of the terminally ill, and even close their eyes completely if they didn’t want to add their own corpse to the number of people with whose surveillance they had been charged. These were not empty threats, as became clear when the families of four vigilantes were told by anonymous callers that they should pick their loved ones up at such and such a place. And there they were, not dead, but not alive either. Given the gravity of the situation, the interior minister decided to show his power to the unknown enemy, on the one hand, by ordering his spies to intensify their investigations, and, on the other, by cancelling the drip-drip system of letting this one through, but not that one, which had been applied in accordance with the prime minister’s tactics. The response was immediate, four more vigilantes suffered the same sad fate as the previous four, but, in this case, there was only one telephone call, intended for the interior minister himself, which could be interpreted as a provocation, but also as an action determined by pure logic, like someone saying, We exist. The message, however, did not stop there, it brought with it a constructive proposal, Let’s come to a gentlemen’s agreement, said the voice on the other end, you order your vigilantes to withdraw and we’ll take charge of discreetly transporting the dying to the border, Who are you, asked the department head who answered the call, Just a group of people who care about order and discipline, all of us highly competent in our field, people who hate confusion and always keep our promises, in short, we’re honest folk, And does this group have a name, asked the civil servant, Some call us the maphia, with a ph, Why the ph, To distinguish us from the original mafia, The state doesn’t make agreements with mafias, Not on documents signed by a notary, no, Nor on any others, What position do you hold, Department head, That is, someone who knows nothing about real life, But I know my responsibilities, All that interests us at the moment is that you present our proposal to the person in authority, to the minister, if you have access to him, No, I don’t have access to the minister, but this conversation will be passed on immediately to my superiors, The government will have forty-eight hours to study the proposal, not a minute more, but warn your superiors that if we don’t get the answer we want, there will be more vigilantes in a state of coma, Right, I’ll do that, So I’ll phone again the day after tomorrow at the same time to find out what their decision is, Fine, I’ll make a note, It’s been a pleasure talking to you, If only I could say the same, Oh, I’m sure you’ll change your tune when you hear that the vigilantes have returned home safe and sound, and if you haven’t yet forgotten your childhood prayers, start praying now that they do just that, I understand, I knew you would, Right then, Forty-eight hours and not a minute more, But I certainly won’t be the person who speaks to you, Oh, I’m certain you will be, Why’s that, Because the minister won’t want to speak to me directly, besides, if things go wrong, you’ll be the one to take the rap, after all, what we’re proposing is a gentlemen’s agreement, Yes, sir, Goodbye, Goodbye. The department head removed the tape from the tape recorder and went to speak to his immediate superior.