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    Death with Interruptions
    Death with Interruptions
    Death with Interruptions
    Ebook230 pages4 hours

    Death with Interruptions

    By José Saramago

    3.5/5

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    This novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author asks what happens when the grim reaper decides to stop reaping: “A novel to die for.”—The Washington Post
     
    On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration—flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life.
     
    Then reality hits home—families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots. Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small d, were to become human and fall in love?
     
    “This novel has many pleasures.”—The New York Times
     
    “Arguably the greatest writer of our time.”—Chicago Tribune
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 2, 2009
    ISBN9780547391601
    Death with Interruptions
    Author

    José Saramago

    JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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    Reviews for Death with Interruptions

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Death cannot be interrupted for too long
    • 1/5
      Another book I couldn't get into.
    • 5/5
      Vintage Saramago: simultaneously political satire and a wistful, touching, tender, sad, witty love story.
    • 4/5
      I have been reading alot lately...instead of eating, I just devour mainly books now. Anyhow, I'd like to catch up from the past months in the next few days and Saramago seems like a good place to start, especially seeing as how he oddly passed away after I had finished reading his novel Death With Interruptions.

      Saramago is no stranger to writing epic stories about massive events befalling Portugal such as Blindness and massive political upheaval, for instance. This story is no different and yet it is quite a bit different at the same time. death decides to take a vacation here (Death is the massive death of the population while death affects individuals.) In any case, both cease for a period of time and Saramago spends a great amount of detail delving into the logistics of what that means for the church, government, and industry (from nursing homes to funeral parlors) In the novel, people don't get better...they just don't die.

      I think as it's fault, it should have delved more into the human psyche and gets too laborious with trying to make this a realistic seeming occurrence that the magic is a little lost.

      Another jarring thing about this novel is that it goes into great lengths while examining the loss of death on a mass scale and what families will do to get their sick loved ones across the border (as soon as they get across the border to another country, they then die). Suddenly, it switches pace and examines a second approach from death and instead explores a very personal and specific instance vs. the whole country. The problem is, too much time was wasted on the mass scale that the personal examination isn't as effective in my opinion. Still, some very insightful and innovative thinking here as always. I also liked the rich characterizations of death as a woman.

      Some quotes I liked:

      p.67 "One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do."

      p.123 "...words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be..."

      p.160 "...to be honest, we human beings can't do much more than stick out our tongues at the executioner about to chop off our head...Death is angry. It's high time we stuck out our tongues at her."
    • 2/5
      Death is a dull mistress in this far too long story. Reminds me of Borges or Beckett, but much less interesting. And what's up with all the weak jokes and corny verbal exchanges? Maybe a translation issue.
    • 4/5
      When one thinks of immortality, they tend to pair it with agelessness - maintaining health, maintaining beauty, maintaining vitality for an eternity. Jose Saramago lends a new version of mortality when death (without a capital D) takes a vacation and allows people to continue living. However, they continue to age without reparation of health of vitality. If the individual was weakened, in a vegetative state when death decided a hiatus was in need, that is how the individual remained - forever in need of external life-supporting machines and persons, only now life is supported solely due to the lack of death. Turns out, people are not as happy with this type of immortality and are once again struggling with euthanasia. Saramago brings forth the logistics of the current health care, insurance and industry associated with the end of life that are now no longer needed. The discussion of the majority of these industries can even apply to modern reality.When death reintroduces the concept of ending life, she does so with a twist. Eventually, death must understand what the end of the life means and is forced to confront new emotions associated with the gravity of this realization of responsibility.
    • 4/5
      As the New Year begins, Death decides to take a holiday. It takes a while before people notice that no one is dying--those on their death beds remain suspended in a near death state, those in accidents which should have killed them, remain alive maimed or horribly injured.After brief rejoicing, people begin to realize that it might not be such a good thing if nobody ever dies: What happens to the funeral and life insurance businesses? What happens to religion without a heavenly afterlife to look forward to?Fortunately, Death is not on holiday in surrounding countries, and people begin to take their near-dead across the border, where they die instantly. Neighboring countries don't like this, however, and a whole industry of smuggling people across the border to die develops.Like many of Saramago's books, this book raises a "What if?" question about something that is not possible, and follows it through a winding path to consider issues important to the world today. It is written in Saramago's characteristic style. For the most part it is not plot driven, and initially there are no "main characters". But who could resist reading a book that begins:"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, a successful suicide, not one, not a single one."Recommended.
    • 5/5
      This is a bit of a black comedy. Looking comically at the idea of people living forever, and how that may not be such a good thing. Along the way, Saramago examines the nature of life and death and love.So one day, death stops her scythe and people stop dying. An experiment by death to see what happens. It isn't all over the world, just in one small nation. It would seem that this would be a great thing a revelation, people could live forever, but things aren't so simple. People still age and become infirm, they don't remain in a perpetual state of youth, but continue to age until the retirement homes and hospice fill up. Those who would welcome death to end their suffering cross the border and die. The government hires the maphia to take those who wish to die over the border. It becomes a bit of a crisis as people can't afford to take care of their old, frail, and infirm members of their family. death returns to killing, abruptly, but decides to send out a violet letter to warn those chosen they have a week to live. Causing an entirely different sort of calamity. Yet, one letter is returned to sender. death it seems, and it is death with a lower case d, has fallen in love. Favorite passagesI never imagined that their death would be the same death that I would one day die, because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it. P76The calculations were very easy to make, if a certain proportion of the active population are paying their national insurance, and a certain proportion of the inactive population are retired, either for reasons of old age or disability, and therefore drawing on the active population for their pensions, and the active population is constantly on the decrease with respect to the inactive population, and the inactive population is constantly on the increase, it's hard to understand why no one saw at once that the disappearance of death, apparently the peak, the pinnacle, the supreme happiness, was not, after all, a good thing. P83By the way, we feel we must mention that death, by herself and alone, with no external help, has always killed far less than mankind has. P117...the living should never be separated from the dead and that, if they are, not only will the dead remai forever dead, the living will only live half their lives... P 178
    • 2/5
      In which a bemused nation finds that nobody there dies any more. This is a very familiar premise to fans of interwar drama and movies such as "On Borrowed Time" and "Death Takes a Holiday", but this is a very different beast. The first half of the book is mostly a series of vignettes which the author uses as a launching pad to ruminate on various social institutions such as church, crowd, and state. The second half of the book resembles a novel a little more closely. I found this very non-entertaining, and although it was at times thought-provoking, his lucubrations on this-n-that are extremely involuted. In addition, his style is abrasively off-putting. The book is underpunctuated (I had my fill of e. e. cummings in junior high, thank you very much) and he revels in stylistic tics such as misspelling one of his most frequently used words throughout.
    • 4/5
      I love the premise of this book. One day, in a particular country, people stop dying. They still get old, get sick, get mangled in car accidents, etc., but they can’t die.At first this news is greeted with elation. It’s the end of Death’s age-old tyranny, the greatest fear suddenly removed. But then the complications begin. People still suffer, old people lie in bed on the verge of death but unable to cross over. Retirement homes go into crisis, as people continue to arrive but nobody leaves. Funeral homes and life insurance companies are also distraught, although the insurance people manage to land on their feet as always. Bishops and philosophers meet to discuss the implications of death’s disappearance. The fear of death has long been the basis of morality and religion, after all.Meanwhile, some people take matters into their own hands. A family decides to put its terminally ill father out of his misery by taking him across the border into the neighbouring country where death is still operating as usual. This becomes a trend and then starts a whole industry, which is soon taken over by the mafia. Then, after a while, death reappears…It’s an incredibly imaginative story, and well told. The style is very wordy, with some sentences stretching over pages, and multiple sub-clauses. The dialogue is also not separated by paragraphs or inverted commas, so it can be quite hard to follow sometimes. In general the wordiness works, simply because it is so well-written, but at times I wished he would just get on with it. I do have to put in a mention for the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, as well. This must have been a tough book to translate, and the fact that those long sentences are at all intelligible is a tribute to her ability.This is the second book I’ve read by 1998 Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, the other one being The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. I enjoyed this one more, perhaps because of the fascinating premise and the deft way in which it was handled, or perhaps simply because his style takes some getting used to. I’d definitely like to read more of his work now.
    • 5/5
      Near perfect. This was a challenging and sophisticated novel that I might normally have found pretentious except Saramago blends just the right amount of humor and poignancy to keep it grounded and engaging.The story is split into two parts. In the first, death (yes, with a small "d") takes a holiday. In a small, unnamed European country, no one dies for several months. The narrator tells us what this means - for ordinary people, for the government, for the undertakers and insurance companies, etc. It's a kind of meta-narrative, where the few "characters" are unnamed - the prime minister, the king, the head of state television. It's very theoretical and cerebral.And then Saramago changes gear, focuses in on death herself as a character and her relationship with one individual who is supposed to die. It's a beautiful and bittersweet second part of the novel that raised the book to a near 5-star read for me. For all of the focus on death as the main driver in the novel, it is really about life and what it means to live and to live well and meaningfully.I am so pleased I stuck with this one. It was a rewarding read.
    • 3/5
      This book left me wanting more, and perhaps not in a good way. Because of the distance between the reader and the events of the first section -- we see a series of vignettes around events related to the dearth of death, but all we really do is see them; we aren't immersed -- this feels like it should be a sociology text about the events a bureaucracy would have to deal with in the event of stoppage of death.** As a result, that is what I wanted. I wanted to see a by-sector breakdown of the economic impact or demographic calculations by month. When there's no emotional impact to the story, I don't want to read this as a novel. I wanted to read this as a social scientist. (**There is a bit of a cottage industry in political science and related fields around this, dominated by government agency authors, actually: assessments and contingency plans around seemingly impossible events. Did you think FEMA doesn't have a plan for a zombie invasion? Or the political economy literature hasn't calculated what would happen if the birth rate dropped to zero? Oh, friends, these all exist. I have read many of them. A good speculative paper in a peer-reviewed academic journal by an EPA deputy director comes out and I am all in.) Death with Interruptions could have been more compelling if it had taken its distance to a logical conclusion and included some semblance of accuracy in terms of numbers or complexity or completeness. We get a tiny glimpse. But we don't get a tiny glimpse in a family of characters we love, where macrocosm is shown through microcosm. We get an attempt at a variety of sectors but with no context or completeness. Did you know what the magnitude of this was? I didn't. I wanted to see a report.You might think that because I am a social scientist by training, I want this always. Not so. I read Children of Men and never thought that the second half of the book should include regressions. Children of Men packs an emotional punch. I have thought to myself, in the years since I read the book and saw the movie, I wonder what a Western government would do about this as a public policy issue, but I never wondered it during the book or movie. (By the way, there are journal articles by economists, sociologists, and others taking this issue from different viewpoints, and they are all excellent-slash-horrifying.) I was immersed in that tale as a reader and my statistical mind was dormant. This one didn't immerse me the same way. Each time a new group of people popped up -- for instance, the "maphia" or the undertakers -- I just wanted to see some numbers about mortality rates so I could estimate timeframes for policy impact. How much could the "maphia" actually be expected to make? How many public servant FTEs was the "maphia" actually taking over? What is the density of undertaking compared to population in urban versus rural areas? How many bodies would we even be expecting, in the first place? The NIH has a fantastic epidemiological model for pandemics where you can insert your own estimates around mortality, time period, population density, and other factors, and I wanted Saramago to have presented some charts at the end of the book so I could understand the magnitude of the issue. Instead it all felt distant, incomplete, and hard to quantify. But not hard to quantify in the way that emotional, character-driven books like these can be where you don't care that you don't know any numbers. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're going distant, go full robot. If you're going novel, give me something to hold on to.
    • 4/5
      The first half was almost irritating, then poetry and a subtle irony just came into play and saved the day. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      A surreal modern parable full of imagination and quirky black humour. If, like me, you have read Saramago's earlier novel Blindness, this one has a similar structure. This one starts with the premise that in a small country, all death suddenly stops. The first half of the book explores the consequences of this, and the second half introduces the traditional personication of death, who realises that her work is not being monitored and starts to rebel. Saramago's style involves long convoluted sentences, but this is not a difficult book to read.
    • 2/5
      Surprisingly, I liked the massively long paragraphs - once I got used to it, I think it gave the narration a great, almost bouncy, rhythm. The ideas behind and in this book are intriguing and humorous, but the story itself is so impersonal and rushed feeling that it overwhelms the positives, making this book a boring slog that I would dread picking up each time I put it down.
    • 4/5
      First Saramago, slow start interesting finish. Humorous, plan to read 'Blindness' next.
    • 4/5
      A wry and humorous tale, 'sticking its tongue out at death', and all of our follies, too. His style is something you either live with or you don't, but the rest is brilliant subversive fable.

      Good thing Mr. Saramago had more than the usual time before he recieved his violet envelope - his stories are charming and skeptical as ever.
    • 4/5
      "Death with Interruptions" is the lightest of Saramago's books I have read and the most pointedly witty in its social criticism. Perhaps attempting to embody so serious an abstraction as death invariably leads to a degree of frivolity--there are certainly precedents in this case, to which Saramago doesn't cease to delight in gesturing. I found this a quick, fun and thought-provoking read.
    • 4/5
      The latest of my favorite author's book translated into English. As usual, his prose is wonderful as only he can write, one grasps quickly his witty humor and profound wisdom of human nature. This time, the story is about the withdrawal/suspension of death (a she) where suddenly on the 1st day of the year, no one dies, and the day after, and the next, and so on. The first half of the story deals with the country's reaction - the chaos and confusion which follow, and how everybody in his/her own way dealt with the it (the government, the citizens, the church --- this one i found funny but indeed rings true, for they say, if there is no death, there can be no resurrection, and then what will be the church's own justification for existence? Indeed, the absence of death was a threat to the existence of the church itself! (this by the Archibishop). The second half is the story of death herself --- death is restored, but at intervals... i found the ending of the novel a bit weak, though, and tending towards kitschy.While entertaining and a pleasure to read, i think this is not the Nobel Prize winner's best.
    • 5/5
      Satire is the use of humor to promote improvement in an individual, the government, or an institution. I have always considered Saramago’s novels to be satiric, but with a subtle streak of fun. Death with Interruptions is no exception, but the final chapters are really a hoot!Saramago’s Blindness was a little like Camus’ The Plague, and Death is a little like Blindness in some respects. Like several of his novels, it is set in an unnamed country, and this time the characters have no names, only titles: president, director, minister, cellist, king, and prime minister. Saramago uses long, complicated sentences with commas, periods, and an occasional apostrophe. He never uses question marks, exclamation points, or colons, semi or otherwise. The only letters capitalized are those following a period, those beginning a new statement in a conversation, and the letter I when death (not capitalized) refers to herself. Here is an example of what I mean: “Death is sitting there, on a narrow crimson-upholstered chair, and starring 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 the 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 becomes she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given” (188-89). Death has decided to send violet colored letters to individuals whom she has scheduled for death in seven days.This excerpt constitutes two-thirds of a page of a five-page paragraph. Not exactly stream of consciousness, but it does require close attention to stay on Saramago’s wagon.His dialogue is not broken into individual statements but is simply blended into the paragraph. Here follows a brief example of a conversation between the scythe and death, who has made a mistake and failed to deliver a letter to a man while he was forty-nine. The birthday has passed and he is still alive: “You can’t do that, said the scythe, It’s done, There’ll be consequences, Only one, What’s that, The death, at last, of that wretched cellist who’s been having a laugh at my expense. But the poor man doesn’t know he is supposed to be dead, As far as I’m concerned, he might as well know it, Even so, you don’t have the authority to change an index card, That’s where you’re wrong, I have all the power and authority I need, I’m death,” (184).Saramago is always great fun. He also wrote The Stone Raft (Spain and Portugal float off into the Atlantic), and All the Names about a clerk in a government ministry in charge of vital statistics, who becomes obsessed with a stranger on a card stuck to one he was updating. Saramago won the Nobel Prize a few years back, and I highly recommend him for some fun, absorbing reading. 5 stars--Jim, 5/6/09
    • 5/5
      It's a paradox: a book that has the word "death" as part of its title leaves me with a wonderful feeling upon reading it... Jose Saramago has his unique style and touch. He turns the most ubiquitous of situations into something that stuns you and makes you pause and think...
    • 2/5
      Great at some points, but often boring and long-winded story.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating story, I was amazed and how he gradually revealed the various consequences that occur when people no longer are dying.The introduction of the devil, her new approach to death and what happens when one death announcement letter keeps coming back; and the ending of the book kept me guessing. One of my all-time favourite reads.
    • 5/5
      This is a great book!! Saramoago is a writer that demands a great deal from his reader, but he gives even more. In a small un named European country, death stops, that is the first part of this very small novel. At first there is joy then there is chaos. That inself is interesting but in a strange way ordinatory. Where the book becomes very interesting, when we meet the character death, now the novel becomes a rich myth. Myth in the way that Joseph Campbell wrote about myth a way to talk about something that we can't talk about in ordinatory ways. Death falls in love. I love this book
    • 3/5
      I was enthralled by the Cave and Blindness by Saramago, so I was prepared for his style. But I was disappointed by the failure to make his wonderful beginning as compelling as his other books. The premise had such possibilities, but it felt like he wrote an essay on the effect of (the absence of) death on society rather than a novel peopled with characters. Although his tongue is still firmly planted in his cheek, and I found myself 'whooping' out loud several times with sheer delight at a ludicrous touch, the first part of the book is too dry and impersonal. Most people I know preferred the first half, especially for the ideas debated. And they were truly intriguing. But ironically, the book only came 'alive' for me when death entered as a character. I couldn't believe I was empathizing with She Who Must be Avoided, but I certainly was. And as her dilemma grew, so did my compassion.Yes, these seem like two folk-tales loosely bound together, very different in mood and challenge. Overall, I was quite disappointed until the last third, even though in retrospect the ending seems somewhat inevitable, I couldn't help saying out loud "Oh Cool!"My book group much preferred the first half, at least those who bothered to finish and I can certainly understand why. But I was able to relate to the second tale and I can't wait to hear what others thougt of The End.
    • 3/5
      Death with Interruptions is an imagined love letter, of sorts, from death to mankind. Jose Saramago magically blends traditional realism with characteristics of myth and fable, to make an elixir to post 9-11 blues. He proclaims that life will be wasted by those who live in order to not play too many wrong notes. Recommended to Fans of M. Night Shyamalan.
    • 3/5
      Interesting premise, drags a bit when focused on the government response to Death's diappearance, then perks up when Death reappears.
    • 4/5
      This was a very different (for me) kind of book in style. Starting on the first day of the new year, in a Catholic landlocked country, no one died. This story is about how this impacted all parts of society from the royal family to peasant families, and government and business. After a while, death (with a lower case d) allowed people to die and would inform them a week ahead with a letter on violet colored paper. Except one person's letter kept coming back.The style takes a little getting used to. Sentences go on for paragraphs, paragraphs go on for pages, dialogue lacks punctuation. Since this is a relatively short book the style was not a difficulty.
    • 4/5
      I like the beginning better than the end, but enjoyed the logistical implications of death's non-arrival the best. A dark humor is needed.
    • 5/5
      Look man you do not understand. This guy, this Saramago, He understands you need to read him until you do too.

    Book preview

    Death with Interruptions - José Saramago

    title page

    Contents

    Title Page

    Contents

    Copyright

    Dedication

    Epigraph

    Death with Interruptions

    Translator’s Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    Connect with HMH

    Copyright © José Saramago and Editorial Caminho S.A., Lisbon 2005

    English translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa 2008

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    hmhbooks.com

    This is a translation of As intermitências da morte.

    First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Harvill Secker, a division of Random House.

    Funded by the Portuguese Institute for Books and Libraries.

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

    Saramago, José.

    [Intermitências da morte. English]

    Death with interruptions/José Saramago; translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

    p. cm.

    I. Costa, Margaret Jull. II. Title.

    PQ9281.A66I6813 2008

    869.3'42-dc22 2008010088

    ISBN 978-0-15-101274-9

    Cover design by Christopher Moisan

    Author photograph © José Frade

    eISBN 978-0-547-39160-1

    v6.1118

    For Pilar, my home

    We will know less and less what it means to be human.

    —Book of Predictions

    If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.

    —WITTGENSTEIN

    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.

    It was already late afternoon when the rumor began to spread that, since the beginning of the new year, or more precisely since zero hour on this first day of January, there was no record in the whole country of anyone dying. You might think, for example, that the rumor had its origins in the queen mother’s surprising resistance to giving up the little life that was left to her, but the truth is that the usual medical bulletin issued to the media by the palace’s press office not only stated that the general state of the royal patient had shown visible signs of improvement during the night, it even suggested, indeed implied, choosing its words very carefully, that there was a chance that her royal highness might be restored to full health. In its initial form, the rumor might also have sprung, naturally enough, from an undertaker’s, No one seems to want to die on this first day of the new year, or from a hospital, That fellow in bed twenty-seven can’t seem to make up his mind one way or the other, or from a spokesman for the traffic police, It’s really odd, you know, despite all the accidents on the road, there hasn’t been a single death we can hold up as a warning to others. The rumor, whose original source was never discovered, although, of course, this hardly mattered in the light of what came afterward, soon reached the newspapers, the radio and the television, and immediately caused the ears of directors, assistant directors and editors-in-chief to prick up, for these are people not only primed to sniff out from afar the major events of world history, they’re also trained in the ability, when it suits, to make those events seem even more major than they really are. In a matter of minutes, dozens of investigative journalists were out on the street asking questions of any joe schmo who happened by, while the ranks of telephones in the throbbing editorial offices stirred and trembled in an identical investigatory frenzy. Calls were made to hospitals, to the red cross, to the morgue, to funeral directors, to the police, yes, all of them, with the understandable exception of the secret branch, but the replies given could be summed up in the same laconic words, There have been no deaths. A young female television reporter had more luck when she interviewed a passer-by, who kept glancing alternately at her and at the camera, and who described his personal experience, which was identical to what had happened to the queen mother, The church clock was striking midnight, he said, when, just before the last stroke, my grandfather, who seemed on the very point of expiring, suddenly opened his eyes as if he’d changed his mind about the step he was about to take, and didn’t die. The reporter was so excited by what she’d heard that, ignoring all his pleas and protests, No, senhora, I can’t, I have to go to the chemist’s, my grandfather’s waiting for his prescription, she bundled him into the news car, Come with me, your grandfather doesn’t need prescriptions any more, she yelled, and ordered the driver to go straight to the television studio, where, at that precise moment, everything was being set up for a debate between three experts on paranormal phenomena, namely, two highly regarded wizards and a celebrated clairvoyant, hastily summoned to analyze and give their views on what certain wags, the kind who have no respect for anything, were already beginning to refer to as a death strike. The bold reporter was, however, laboring under the gravest of illusions, for she had interpreted the words of her interviewee as meaning that the dying man had, quite literally, changed his mind about the step he was about to take, namely, to die, cash in his chips, kick the bucket, and so had decided to turn back. Now, the words that the happy grandson had pronounced, As if he’d changed his mind, were radically different from a blunt, He changed his mind. An elementary knowledge of syntax and a greater familiarity with the elastic subtleties of tenses would have avoided this blunder, as well as the subsequent dressing-down that the poor girl, scarlet with shame and humiliation, received from her immediate superior. Little could they, either he or she, have imagined that these words, repeated live by the interviewee and heard again in recorded form on that evening’s news bulletin, would be interpreted in exactly the same mistaken way by millions of people, and that an immediate and disconcerting consequence of this would be the creation of a group firmly convinced that with the simple application of will-power they, too, could conquer death and that the undeserved disappearance of so many people in the past could be put down solely to a deplorable weakness of will on the part of previous generations. But things would not stop there. People, without having to make any perceptible effort, continued not to die, and so another popular mass movement, endowed with a more ambitious vision of the future, would declare that humanity’s greatest dream since the beginning of time, the happy enjoyment of eternal life here on earth, had become a gift within the grasp of everyone, like the sun that rises every day and the air that we breathe. Although the two movements were both competing, so to speak, for the same electorate, there was one point on which they were able to agree, and that was on the nomination as honorary president, given his eminent status as pioneer, of the courageous veteran who, at the final moment, had defied and defeated death. As far as anyone knows, no particular importance would be given to the fact that grandpa remained in a state of profound coma, which everything seems to indicate is irreversible.

    Although the word crisis is clearly not the most appropriate one to describe these extraordinary events, for it would be absurd, incongruous and an affront to the most basic logic to speak of a crisis in an existential situation that has been privileged by the absence of death, one can understand why some citizens, zealous of their right to know the truth, are asking themselves, and each other, what the hell is going on with the government, who have so far given not the slightest sign of life. When asked in passing during a brief interval between two meetings, the minister for health had, it is true, explained to journalists that, bearing in mind that they lacked sufficient information to form a judgment, any official statement would, inevitably, be premature, We are collating data being sent to us from all over the country, he added, and it’s true to say that no deaths have been reported, but, as you can imagine, we have been as surprised as everyone else by this turn of events and are not as yet ready to formulate an initial theory about the origins of the phenomenon or about its immediate and future implications. He could have left the matter there, which, considering the difficulties of the situation, would have been a cause for gratitude, but the well-known impulse to urge people to keep calm about everything and nothing and to remain quietly in the fold whatever happens, this tropism which, among politicians, especially if they’re in government, has become second nature, not to say automatic or mechanical, led him to conclude the conversation in the worst possible way, As minister responsible for health, I can assure everyone listening that there is absolutely no reason for alarm, If I understand you correctly, remarked the journalist in a tone that tried hard not to appear too ironic, the fact that no one is dying is, in your view, not in the least alarming, Exactly, well, those may not have been my precise words, but, yes, that, essentially, is what I said, May I remind you, minister, that people were dying even yesterday and it would never have occurred to anyone to think that alarming, Of course not, it’s normal to die, and dying only becomes alarming when deaths multiply, during a war or an epidemic, for example, When things depart from the norm, You could put it like that, yes, But in the current situation, when, apparently, no one is prepared to die, you call on us not to be alarmed, would you not agree with me, minister, that such an appeal is, at the very least, somewhat paradoxical, It was mere force of habit, and I recognize that I shouldn’t have applied the word alarm to the current situation, So what word would you use, minister, I only ask because, as the conscientious journalist I hope I am, I always try, where possible, to use the exact term. Slightly irritated by the journalist’s insistence, the minister replied abruptly, I would use not one word, but six, And what would those be, minister, Let us not foster false hopes. This would doubtless have provided a good, honest headline for the newspaper the following day, but the editor-in-chief, having consulted his managing editor, thought it inadvisable, from the business point of view as well, to throw this bucket of icy water over the prevailing mood of enthusiasm, Let’s go for the usual headline, New Year, New Life, he said.

    In the official communiqué, broadcast late that night, the prime minister confirmed that no deaths had been recorded anywhere in the country since the beginning of the new year, he called for moderation and a sense of responsibility in any evaluations and interpretations of this strange fact, he reminded people that one could not exclude the hypothesis that this was merely a fluke, a freak cosmic change that could not possibly last, an exceptional conjunction of coincidences impinging on the space-time equation, but that, just in case, the government had already begun exploratory talks with the relevant international organizations to enable the government, when necessary, to take efficient, coordinated action. Having uttered this pseudoscientific flim-flam, whose very incomprehensibility was intended to calm the commotion gripping the nation, the prime minister ended by stating that the government was prepared for all humanly imaginable eventualities, and determined to face with courage and with the vital support of the population the complex social, economic, political and moral problems that the definitive extinction of death would inevitably provoke, if, as everything seemed to indicate, this situation was confirmed. We will accept the challenge of the body’s immortality, he exclaimed in exalted tones, if that is the will of god, to whom we will always offer our grateful prayers for having chosen the good people of this country as his instrument. Which means, thought the prime minister when he finished reading the statement, that the noose is well and truly round our necks. Little did he imagine how tightly that noose would be drawn. Not half an hour had passed when, sitting now in the official car taking him home, he received a call from the cardinal, Good evening, prime minister, Good evening, your eminence, Prime minister, I’m phoning to tell you that I feel profoundly shocked, Oh, so do I, your eminence, it’s an extremely grave situation, the gravest situation the country has ever had to confront, That’s not what I mean, What do you mean, your eminence, It is utterly deplorable that when you wrote the statement I have just listened to, you failed to remember what constitutes the foundation, the main beam, the cornerstone, the keystone of our holy religion, Forgive me, your eminence, but I can’t quite see what you’re driving at, Without death, prime minister, without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no church, Hell’s bells, Sorry, I didn’t quite hear what you said, could you say that again, please, Me, no, I said nothing, your eminence, it was probably some interference on the line caused by atmospheric electricity, by static, or even a problem with reception, the satellite does sometimes cut out, but you were saying, your eminence, Yes, I was saying that any catholic, and you are no exception, must know that without resurrection there is no church, more than that, how could it even occur to you that god would ever will his own demise, such an idea is pure sacrilege, possibly the very worst of blasphemies, Your eminence, I didn’t say that god had willed his own demise, Not in those exact words, no, but you admitted the possibility that the immortality of the body might be the will of god, and one doesn’t need a doctorate in transcendental logic to realize that it comes down to the same thing, Your eminence, believe me, I only said it for effect, to make an impression, it was just a way of rounding off the speech, that’s all, you know how important these things are in politics, Such things are just as important in the church, prime minister, but we think hard before we open our mouths, we don’t just talk for talking’s sake, we calculate the long-term effects, indeed, our specialty, if you’d like me to give you a useful image, is ballistics, Well, I’m very sorry, your eminence, If I was in your shoes, I’d be sorry too. As if estimating how long the grenade would take to fall, the cardinal paused, then, in a gentler, friendlier tone, went on, May I ask if you showed the statement to his majesty before reading it out for the media, Naturally, your eminence, dealing, as the statement did, with such a very ticklish subject, And what did the king say, assuming, of course, that it’s not a state secret, He thought it was fine, Did he make any comment after he’d read it, Excellent, What do you mean excellent, That’s what his majesty said, excellent, Do you mean that he, too, blasphemed, Your eminence, it is not up to me to make such judgments, living with my own mistakes is quite hard enough, Well, I will have to speak to the king and remind him that in a confusing and delicate situation like this, only faithful, unswerving observance of the proven doctrine of our holy mother church can save the country from the dreadful chaos about to overwhelm us, That is up to you, your eminence, that is your role, Yes, I will ask his majesty which he prefers, to see the queen mother forever dying, prostrate on a bed from which she will never again rise, with her earthly body shamefully clinging to her soul, or to see her, by dying, triumph over death, in the eternal, splendid glory of the heavens, Surely no one would hesitate over which answer to give, Probably not, but, contrary to what you may think, prime minister, I care less about the answers than I do about the questions, notice that our questions have both an obvious objective and a hidden intention, and when we ask them, it is not only so that the person being questioned gives the answers which, at that moment, we need him to hear himself saying, it is also in order to prepare the way for future answers, A bit like politics, your eminence, Exactly, except that unlikely though it may seem, the advantage the church has is that by managing what is on high, it governs what is down below. There was another pause, which was

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