Skylight

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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.

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