The Elephant's Journey & My Black Raleigh
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
This maxim about cycling does not apply to
other things I have learned. If I happen to attempt to print a photograph in
someone else’s darkroom I will fumble in the dark as nothing will be were it is
supposed to be.
A few weeks ago when I was snapping
pictures of Yuliya the Dominatrix in my Malibu
with two Nikons and one Pentax. I was having trouble navigating what is
supposed to be easy which is the removal of the lens from the body. With the
Nikon you remove it in one direction with the Pentax in the other. In the
distant past I used Pentaxes and then I retired them for the Nikons. Now with
the advent of my newly purchased Fuji X-E1 it would seem that I counter digital
ignorance and confusion with an attempt to reconcile all the machines of my
past.
But there is one chore that I learned once.
It was hard the first time. This is the reading of any novel by José Saramago either in English or in my preferred
translation from the Portuguese to the Spanish.
The first novel of
Saramago’s that I ever read was The History of the Siege of Lisbon. The first
chapter consists of a six-page paragraph with minimal punctuation and is a
conversation between two men.
After reading that,
the next chapter was like finally knowing how to ride a bicycle. It was
effortless. That novel was the last novel of Saramago’s that I read in English. Now
that I do not buy books and depend on the excellent Vancouver Public Library I
tackled The Elephant’s Journey in English. Within a couple of sentences I was zooming down
in my black Raleigh
of old with an exhilaration that felt brand new. Reading Saramago is unlike
anything or anybody else. Here is a sample that I marveled at:
The dawn was a foggy
one, but despite a mist almost as thick as soup made solely of boiled potatoes,
no one had got lost, everyone had found their way to the church just as the
guests to whom the villagers had given shelter had found their way back to the
encampment earlier. The whole village was there, from the tiniest babe-in-arms
to the oldest man still capable of walking, thanks to the aid of a stick that
functioned as his third leg. Fortunately he didn’t have as many legs as a
centipede, for centipedes when they get old, require an enormous number of
sticks, a fact that tips the scales in favour of the human species, who need
only one, except the very gravest of cases, when the aforementioned sticks
change their name and become crutches. Of these, thanks to the divine
providence that watches over us all, there were none in the village.
The Elephant's Journey
José Saramago
Translated from the
Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Tonight I finished The
Elephant’s Journey. I felt that closing the book was like sadly putting away that
black Raleigh
of my youth. Perhaps a new bicycle might in some way temper the loss of knowing
that I have read the last Saramago novel and that he is not alive to write
another.
José Saramago
José Saramago
