The History of the Siege of Lisbon

It was five to four when he walked into the publishers. This time he found all the things he had been looking for last time, whispering, furtive glances, sniggering, and also, on several faces, simply the puzzled expression of someone who is not entirely satisfied with the evidence, although forced to accept it. They showed him into the waiting-room outside the director's office and left him sitting there for more than a quarter of an hour, which goes to show the futility of fears which are in no sense punctual. He looked at his watch, the lion had obviously been delayed, nowadays it is extremely difficult to drive in the jungle even with Roman roads, but in this case, it is much more likely that someone may have thought it a good idea to have recourse to proven psychological tactics, to make him wait until his nerves became frayed, to push him to the edge of crisis, and leave him defenceless against the very first attack. Raimundo Silva considers that even so, taking into account the circumstances, he is reasonably calm, as if he had spent his entire life doing nothing except replacing true facts with lies, without really noticing the difference and learning to choose between the arguments for and against, accumulated throughout the ages by the endless discourse and sophistry that have flourished in the mind of homo sapiens. All of a sudden, the door was flung open and there stood, not the director's secretary as one might have expected, but the secretary of the Editorial Director. Please to accompany me, she said, and Raimundo Silva, despite having noticed the faulty syntax, perceived that his imagined calm was merely superficial, and tenuous, his knees were shaking as he rose from the sofa, the adrenalin stirring in his blood, the sweat oozing from the palms of his hands and from his armpits, and he could even feel a diffused colic, a sign that his entire digestive system was trying to expand, I am like a calf being led to the slaughterhouse, he thought to himself, and fortunately he was capable of self-disparagement.