Read Online Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by José Saramago - Free Book Online

for both of us and on two occasions.
    I asked her if she would like a drink and she accepted a whisky. She wanted to know if she could be of any assistance and I said no thank you, mine was a bachelor establishment, rarely tidy or clean, and my domestic skills did not go beyond removing ice from the fridge. She found that amusing, although it was not my intention. Now I really was distracted, without knowing how to make conversation. As we drank, I reminded her of the offhand manner in which she had received me at SPQR. She could not remember, she could not remember at all, she assured me. Perhaps she had been worried about something at work, letters waiting to be typed, behind with her filing. That was obviously the explanation, I agreed. Then it was her turn to ask if she could see her employer’s portrait. From where she was sitting one could only see the back of the canvas. I held her by the elbow as she got to her feet and squeezed it a little more tightly than was necessary. She did not react and allowed herself to be led in this manner. We both looked at the portrait, with me right behind her as she stood there quivering with excitement and curiosity. She found a remarkable likeness and asked how much longer it would take to finish the portrait. “That depends,” I told her. “If your boss goes on missing appointments, it could take some time.” Ever the loyal secretary, she embarked on some garbled explanation about S. being so busy, not to mention his golf and the factory, his bridge and the new factory under construction. I sat her in the chair reserved for my clients and I perched on a high stool. I could see quite clearly that she was ready for a sudden affair and sensed it in her every movement, as if the unfinished portrait of S. were inciting some kind of incestuous passion. Or perhaps she, too, had some wrong to redress in order to be able to live in peace. Human behavior resides in a world of hypotheses. If, in Eça de Queirós’s novel, Padre Amaro dressed Amelia in the Virgin’s mantle, why should Olga the secretary not make love to me before the portrait of her employer (patron, father, sugar daddy), who had started an affair with her and then lost interest?
    I never cease to be amazed at the freedom women enjoy. We men regard them as inferior beings, we are amused by their little foibles, we sneer when they get things wrong, yet every one of them is capable of surprising us, laying before us vast territories of freedom, as if in the depths of their servitude, with an obedience which gives the impression of being in pursuit of itself, they were putting up the defenses of a harsh independence without restraints. Confronted by these defenses, we men, who think we know everything about this lesser being we have been taming or thought we had tamed, find ourselves disarmed, powerless and terrified; the lapdog which was so endearingly wriggling on its back and showing its tummy suddenly jumps to its feet, its limbs trembling with rage, its eyes full of mistrust, irony and indifference. When Romantic poets compared (or still compare) woman to a sphinx, how right they were, bless them. Woman is a sphinx who had to exist because man appropriated science, knowledge and power. But such is the fatuousness of men that women were content to put up the defenses of their final refusal in silence, so that man, resting in the shade as if stretched out under the penumbra of submissive eyelids, could say with conviction, “There is nothing beyond this wall.”
    A grim miscalculation from which we are still trying to recover. Olga the secretary made love to me, but not out of obedience to the male or because used to submission, much less because she found me attractive. She accepted me because she chose to and had prepared herself for any eventuality. And if it is true that the half-hour which elapsed between her arrival and the moment when she crossed her arms and pulled her blouse over her head was taken up with the