Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago

Every man follows his own path in search of grace, whatever that grace may be, a simple landscape with the sky overhead, a certain hour of the day or night, two trees, three if they are painted by Rembrandt, a sigh, without our knowing whether this closes or finally opens the path or where the path my lead us, whether to some other landscape, hour, tree, or sigh, behold this priest who is about to cast out one God and replace him with another, without knowing whether this new allegiance will do him any good in the end, behold this musician who would find it impossible to compose any other kind of music and who will no longer be alive a hundred years from now to hear that first symphony, which is mistakenly referred to as the Ninth, behold this one-handed soldier who has ironically become a manufacturer of wings, though he has never risen to being more than a common foot soldier, man rarely knows what to expect from life, this man least of all, behold this woman with those extraordinary eyes, who was born to perceive wills...

Medieval Portugal. Baltasar is a former soldier who has lost his hand in Portugal's wars, replacing it with a spike or a hook, whichever is most useful. Blimunda is the daughter of a woman exiled by the Inquisition, and she has her own secret that it would be best that the Inquisitors not discover: she can see into people. When she looks into a person--which she must be fasting to do, therefore she eats a crust of bread every morning before opening her eyes so she will not pry into Baltasar--she sees mostly guts, but also a black cloud that is the human will. These two unlikely people find each other and fall in love.

This romance is set against the construction of a great cathedral in Baltasar's hometown of Mafra, to celebrate the birth of the princess of Portugal. It's a process that takes years and a lot of labor; one of the best scenes--if something as long as the Saramagian single-sentence gauntlets can be called a "scene"--is when Baltasar is put in charge of moving a giant stone miles and miles from the quarry to the cathedral, a task that crushes a man to death and maims others. Much of the historical background is drawn from life, including the figure of Dominic Scarlatti, the famous musician who spent time at Portugal's court, and Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Brazil-born priest who invented a primitive flying machine called the Passarola. Baltasar and Blimunda become Father Lourenço's accomplices, and they alone know how the machine really works: with the upward thrust of the wills that Blimunda has collected from the dying.

The Passarola flies only a couple of times, partly because it seems to be impossible to steer, or land. But long after it's crashed in the woods outside of Mafra and the Father Lourenço disappeared, Baltasar and Blimunda continue to tend to it, repairing it and restoring it. For what? Perhaps its power is mostly symbolic: it represents a kind of dream kept in reserve, the power of the will to help one rise above the station of the common person, who is so pushed around by the powerful, as Baltasar is with his heavy stone, or Blimunda, with her mother in exile. For these themes, I found Baltasar and Blimunda very moving, and I enjoyed the richness of its evocation of medieval Portugal, though Saramago is not an easy read, and the circuitous, comma-packed sentences keeps one at a remove from the immediacy of the story. Still, it's hard to emerge from Baltasar and Blimunda without feeling as if you've been invested in something both impossibly clever and impossibly rich, and the ending, I felt, was remarkably affecting and sad.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, said the doctor. And what about people, asked the girl with the dark glasses, People, too, no one will be there to see them...

A man is stopped in his car at a red light when his vision goes suddenly white. A good samaritan slips in the driver's seat and takes him home, but instead of parking his car nearby, he decides on the spur of the moment to steal it, only to go blind himself moments later. The first blind man goes to see an ophthalmologist, who is baffled by the condition--and then he, too, goes blind. Soon dozens are stricken by the "white sickness," and the government panics. The doctor, the first blind man, the car thief, and several others--all of whom remain identified in this way, without names--are quarantined in a dilapidated mental hospital where they are guarded by armed soldiers but otherwise left to fend for themselves.

I didn't really think about the fact that Blindness, like Pale Horse, Pale Rider and The Plague, is a piece of plague literature. It captures something true about our own pandemic even better than those other books: the way contagion makes other people objects of fear and hatred, and how this fact threatens the stability of social bonds. The second man to go blind was first charitable, then predatory; his blindness is the result of his interaction with the first blind man but it cannot be said that he went blind because he treated him kindly or cruelly. A pandemic, as we know all too well, complicates our understanding of good and evil, and how link these to causality:

It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves and ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim this is the much-talked-of immortality. Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.

Blindness is as chilling a dystopian novel as I've ever read. The conditions under which the blind are quarantined are remarkably vile: food is dropped off in a distant hallway and left to the blind to retrieve and distribute; hygiene and medical care are not provided; the stumbling blind are shot indiscriminately by terrified soldiers; they must bury their own dead--how?--and they are told that, in the case of a fire, their lives will not be saved. You might call that last one Chekhov's match. It's sort of funny in the year 2021 to think of the government taking a pandemic this seriously, but the "plan" seems to be to put a bottle on the problem and hope it goes away. Yet there is no severing the ties that bind people, another lesson we learned well when supply chains began to fail and essential workers bore the brunt of our fear in the spring of 2020.

The quarantined are essentially left to starve and die in their own literal filth. (For obvious reasons, the quarters begin to fill with human excrement.) A gang of thugs manages to sneak in a gun and command the distribution of food; when valuables run out they demand to be paid in rape. To show this, Saramago makes a clever choice: he lets one character see, the doctor's wife, who has lied and claimed that she has gone blind in order to stay with her husband. She becomes, to the extent that she can, a kind of seeing angel, guiding the small band of protagonists through the horrible gauntlet of blindness and squalor. When the hospital burns down, she is the one who guides the survivors through the harrowing landscape of a world in which everyone has gone blind.

Blindness is an antidote to the idea that a book can't be both literary and have a thrilling plot. I never believed that, but a bunch of Young Adult fans on Twitter seem to think so. I was fascinated by Saramago's style, which does away with sentence breaks and punctuation in favor of long run-on sentences governed by commas. It's frenetic and effective, though I suspect it should not be tried at home, and does a good job in this book at least of capturing the sense of chaos in which the newly blind find themselves.

Postscript: One of my new goals is to be better about reading international literature. I recently tallied up the number of countries from which I can say I have read at least one writer, and while I think I probably have done better than most, there are so many holes in my reading history. Saramago is officially the first Portuguese author I've read, so that's one more for the list!