Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 23

Three or four years ago, in an interview with a South American newspaper, from Argentina, I think, I came out with a statement I subsequently thought would provoke discomfort, discussion, even a scandal (such was my naïveté), beginning with local left-wing groups and continuing, who knows, like a wave growing in concentric circles, out into the international media—at least such political, trade union or cultural organs of the media that are the tributaries of the said left. The paper reproduced my argument word for word, in all its harshness, not shying away from actual obscenities, as in the following: “The left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in.”

The left responded to my deliberate challenge with the iciest of silences. No communist party, for instance, beginning with the one of which I’m a member, emerged from its stockade to refute what I had said or simply to argue about the propriety or the lack of propriety of my language. Even more to the point, nor did any of the socialist parties then in government in their respective countries—I’m thinking especially of those in Portugal and Spain—consider it necessary to demand a clarification from the impudent writer who had dared to throw a stone into a fetid swamp of indifference. Nothing of anything at all, absolute silence, as if there were nothing but dust and spiders in the ideological tombs where they had taken refuge, or nothing more than an ancient bone that was no longer solid enough for a relic. For several days I felt as excluded from human society as if I were carrying the plague, or were the victim of a kind of cirrhosis of the mind, no longer able to speak coherently. I even ended up thinking that the compassionate line going the rounds among those people who were keeping so quiet was something like, “Poor thing, what can you expect at his age?” It was clear that they didn’t think my opinions worthy of their consideration.

Time went on, and on, the state of the world grew increasingly complicated, and the left continued fearlessly to play out the roles, whether in power or in opposition, that had been handed to them. I, who had in the meantime made another discovery, that Marx was never so right as he is today, imagined, when the cancerous mortgage scam broke in the United States a year ago, that the left, wherever it was, if it was still alive, would finally open its mouth to say what it thought of the matter. I already have an explanation: the left doesn’t think. It doesn’t act, it doesn’t risk taking a step. What happened then has gone on happening, right up to today, and the left has continued in its cowardly fashion not thinking, not acting, not risking taking a step. Which is why the insolent question in my title should not cause surprise: “Where is the Left?” I am not suggesting any answers; I have already paid too dearly for my illusions.