Most second hand books, in my experience,
except perhaps for a certain easement
in their binding, show no perceptible signs of
previous owners, and those that do offer
only glimpses of the lives of others –
a fatuous marginal note, a Madras
curry stain. Some, however, present
a mystery of sorts – for instance,
I have arrived at page 15 of an English
translation of José Saramago’s
short story, The Chair – in his collection
The Lives of Things – to find somebody
has been there before me. A page corner –
dreadful habit! – has been turned down or rather
up, since it is the bottom corner,
and so obscured some text. In addition
the page has been marked by the stub of a ticket
for the Pompidou Centre, Paris, France,
11.40, March 1st, 2014.
We are at the point in the story
where the woodworm has thoroughly done its job.
The chair finally collapses when
the old man, whose chair it is, sits on it
for what will be the last time. He begins
to fall, and, on the next page, will bang his head
on the floor, and thus begin his slow demise.
The story ends: ‘Let us go to the window.
What do you think of this month of September?
We have not had such weather in a long time’.
The tale, which is a sort of allegory,
and also a protracted joke, is about
the death of Oliveira Salazar,
Portugal’s dictator of more than
thirty five years. Despite Saramago,
however, there are some who claim a deck chair
collapsed under the tyrants’ weight, others
that he slipped in the bath. The haemorrhage
that resulted from hitting his head
took nearly two years to kill him. He believed,
though he had been replaced by another
the September he hit the floor,
he was still in office. Power seems to be
an illusion encouraged by others.
For whatever reason the visitor
to Centre Pompidou that Saturday
will have learned none of this, not only
leaving this particular yarn unfinished
but the whole collection of which it is the first.
Possibly he or she was distracted
by the exhibition in Gallerie 3,
PAPARAZZI! – the power of illusion.
By David Selzer