Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 38

The Portuguese Constitution came into effect on April 25, 1976, two years after the revolution and the end of a troubled period of partisan struggles and social unrest. Since then it has been through seven revisions, the most recent in 2005. In many of its constituent articles, a political constitution is a declaration of intent. Constitutionalists should not rend their garments when I say this: I am not trying to minimize the importance of these documents, which I am considering here along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has been in force (or rather, we should say, in latency) since 1948. As we all know, changes to a constitution are a form of operational correction, adjustments to social reality, when they are not simply the result of the political will of a parliamentary majority that is able to promote or impose its own preferences. On the other hand, maybe through superstition or inertia, it is not unusual for constitutions, or at least some of them, to retain fossilized remains of articles that have entirely or partly lost their original meaning. There is no other way to explain how the preamble to the Portuguese Constitution has retained, as if untouchable, even if as a purely rhetorical concession, the phrase “to open a path to socialism.” In a world dominated by the cruelest economic and financial liberalism ever imagined, this reference, the last echo of a thousand popular aspirations, risks raising a smile. A tearful smile, that is. Constitutions exist, and it is by their light that I believe we should judge the administration of our governments. The law of the jungle that has ruled these past thirty years would not have produced the consequences we see today if governments, all of them, had each made the constitution of its country into a vade mecum to be used day and night, the primer for all good citizens. It may be that the terrible shock the world is experiencing will lead us to treat our constitutions as something more than the simple declarations of intent they remain in so many respects. Let us hope so.