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though he had been replaced by another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.