The History of the Siege of Lisbon

Raimundo Silva has risen from his desk, he paces up and down the tiny space left in his study, moves into the corridor to rid himself as quickly as possible of another kind of tension that is getting a grip on him, and thinks aloud, This is not the problem, even though it may have provoked the conflict between the crusaders and the king, it is much more likely that all those disagreements, insults and feelings of mistrust, should we help, should we not help, stemmed from the question of payment for services, the king wants to make savings, the crusaders want rewards, but the problem I have to solve is different, when I wrote Not

the crusaders went away, therefore my looking for an answer to the question is pointless, Why, in this history accepted as being true, must I myself invent another history so that it might be false and false so that it may be different. He got tired of pacing up and down the corridor, returned to his study, but did not sit down, scanned with nervous irritation the few lines that had survived the damage, six pages, one after the other had been torn up, and as for the amendments, they were like scars still waiting to heal. He realised that until he overcame the problem he would make no progress, and was surprised, accustomed as he was to books in which everything seemed fluent and spontaneous, almost essential, not because it was effectively true, but because any piece of writing, good or bad, always ends up appearing like a predetermined crystallisation, although no one can ever say how or when or why or by whom, he was surprised, as we said, for the following idea had never occurred to him, an idea which should have stemmed naturally from the previous idea, but, on the contrary, refused to emerge, or perhaps not even that, it simply was not there, did not exist even as a possibility. The seventh page was also torn up, the desk once more was clear, smooth, a

tabula

twice rasa, a desert, not a single idea. Raimundo Silva reached out for the proofs of the book of poems, he wavered for several more minutes between that nothing and this something, then, little by little, he began to concentrate on his work, time passed, before lunch the proofs had been revised and given another reading, ready for the publishers. Throughout the morning, the telephone had not rung, the postman scarcely ever calls at this address, and the calm in the street was rarely disturbed by the cautious passing of a car, tourist buses never come through this way, they turn into the Largo dos Lóios, and with all the rain there has been recently, few must have ventured all the way up here where there has been nothing to see except overcast skies. Raimundo Silva got to his feet, time to eat, but first he went to the bedroom window, the sky has finally cleared, it is no longer raining, and amidst the fleeting clouds patches of blue sky appear and disappear, a blue as intense as it must have been on that day, despite the difference in the time of year. For a moment, Raimundo Silva could not bring himself to go into the kitchen, heat up that eternal soup, forage amongst the tins of tuna and sardines, play about with a frying-pan or saucepan, not because he fancied eating something more elaborate, but simply, as it were, because of a sudden bout of mental apathy. But neither did he feel like going out to find a restaurant To have to study the menu, to choose between a dish and the price, to sit amongst total strangers, to handle a knife and fork, all these actions, so easy, so commonplace, struck him as being intolerable. He remembered the nearby Café Graciosa where they serve toasted sandwiches with a cheese and ham filling, acceptable even for palates more discriminating than his, and with a glass of wine and coffee to finish off, his appetite will certainly be satisfied.