Read Online The Stone Raft (Harvest Book) by José Saramago - Free Book Online Page A

water couldn't cause a continent to crack up, I have no desire to engage in idle philosophizing, but do you see any connection between a monkey's descending from a tree twenty million years ago and the making of a nuclear bomb, The connection is, precisely, those twenty million years, Good answer, but now let's suppose that it might be possible to reduce to hours the time between a cause, which in this case would be the throwing of a stone, and an effect, such as the peninsula's separation from Europe, in other words, let us suppose that, under normal conditions, that stone thrown into the sea would only produce its effect twenty million years hence, but that, under other conditions, precisely those of the phenomenon we are now investigating, the effect is observed some hours, or days, later, That's pure speculation, the cause might well be something else, Or a combination of this and another, concurrent, event, Then other unusual events
would have to be investigated, That's what we're in the process of doing, and the Spaniards, too, as in the case of the man who could feel the earth shaking, By adopting this method, once you have examined the unusual events, you will have to proceed to the usual ones, The what ones, The usual ones, What do you mean by usual, Usual is the opposite of unusual, its antonym, If necessary, we shall pass from the unusual to the usual events, but we must discover the cause, You have a lot of investigating ahead of you, We're making a start, tell me where you found the strength. Joaquim Sassa made no reply, he silenced his imagination, all the more so since the dialogue was threatening to go around in circles, now he would have to repeat, I don't know, and the rest would be as before, with some minor variations, albeit mostly of form, yet this was precisely where he would have to be careful, because, as we know, through form one arrives at the substance, through the wrapping at the contents, through the sound of the word at its meaning.
    He put his Deux Chevaux into gear, into step, if such a thing might be said of a car, he wanted time to think, he needed to give the matter some serious thought. He had been an ordinary traveler heading for the border, a simple man with no particular qualities or importance, that was no longer so, at this very moment they were probably printing posters with his photograph and vital statistics,
Wanted
in big red letters, a manhunt. He looked into his rearview mirror and saw a police car, it was coming so quickly that it looked as if the car were about to come through the back window, They've caught up with me, he accelerated, then quickly slowed down without braking, all quite unnecessary, the police car overtook him in a flash, it must be rushing to some emergency, they did not so much as look at him, if only those speeding policemen knew who was driving along there, but of course there are lots of Deux Chevaux on the road, the expression is awkward but there is no mathematical contradiction. Joaquim Sassa took another look in the mirror, this time to have a good look at himself, to acknowledge the relief in his eyes, the mirror reflected little else, a tiny bit of his face, which makes it difficult to know to whom the face belongs, to Joaquim Sassa, as we already know, but who is Joaquim
Sassa, a man who is still young, in his thirties, closer to forty than to thirty, the day inevitably comes, his eyebrows are black, his eyes brown like those of most Portuguese, his nose sharply outlined, his features really quite unexceptional, we shall learn more about him when he turns toward us. For the moment, he thought to himself, It's only an appeal over the radio, the worst is still ahead of me, at the frontier, and as if that weren't enough, there's this name of mine, Sassa, which unfortunately means stone, when what I need right now is to be any old Sousa, like that other one from Coll de Pertus, one day he consulted the dictionary to see if the word existed, Sassa, not