The History of the Siege of Lisbon

Raimundo Silva put down his biro, rubbed his fingers where the pen had left a crease, then with a slow, weary movement, he leaned back in his chair. He is in the room where he sleeps, seated at a small table which he has placed beside the window, so that by looking to the left he can see the surrounding roof-tops, and here and there, between the gables, the river. He has decided that when proof-reading the work of others he will go on using the study which has no windows, but what he is writing at present, whether it turns out to be the history of the siege of Lisbon or not, he will write in daylight, the natural light falling on to his hands, on to the sheets of paper, on to any words that might appear and remain, for not all words that appear remain, in their turn casting light on our understanding of things, as far as possible, and where, were it not for them, we would never arrive. He jotted down this thought, if it can be called that, on a loose sheet of paper, hoping to use it later, perhaps in some pondered statement about the mystery of writing which will probably culminate, following the definitive lesson of the poet, in the precise and sober declaration that the mystery of writing lies in the absence of any mystery whatsoever, which if accepted, might lead us to the conclusion that if there is no mystery about writing, neither can there be any mystery about the writer. Raimundo Silva amuses himself with this farcical display of profound meditation, his memory as a proof-reader is filled with snatches of verse and prose, the odd line or fragment, and even whole sentences with meaning, hover in his memory like tranquil and resplendent cells coming from other worlds, the sensation is that of being immersed in the cosmos, of grasping the real meaning of everything, without any mystery. If Raimundo Silva could line up in the correct order all the separate words and phrases he has memorised, he would only have to say them, record them on tape, and there he would have, without the tiresome effort of having to write it, the History of the Siege of Lisbon he is still pursuing, and, were the order different, the history, too, would be different, and the siege, and Lisbon, and so on and so forth.

The crusaders are already on the open sea, ridding us of the pressing and awkward presence of thirteen thousand participants, however Raimundo Silva's task was not made much easier for there are at least as many Portuguese, and, if their numbers were to be combined, they are still greatly outnumbered by the Moors inside the city, including the fugitives from Santarém who have finished up here, trying to take shelter behind these fortifications, poor wretches, wounded and humiliated. How is Raimundo Silva to cope with all these people, is the formal question. We suspect he would prefer to take each of them separately, study their lives, their precedents and consequents, their loves, quarrels, the good and bad in them, and he would pay special attention to those who are soon to die, because who could foresee that closer to our own time there would be another opportunity to leave some written record of who they were and what they did. Raimundo Silva is well aware that his limited gifts do not match up to the task, in the first place because he is not God, and even if he were, neither God nor Jesus for all his fame never achieved anything like this objective, in the second place because he is not a historian, a human category which is closer to divinity in its way of looking at things, and in the third place, an initial confession, he never had any talent for writing creative literature, a weakness that will obviously make it difficult for him to manipulate with any conviction this imaginary fable in which we all participate. On the Moorish side, the most he has achieved so far is to have a muezzin appear from time to time and who finds himself in the least favourable situation possible, because being something more than a minor figure, there is not enough to transform him into a character. On the Portuguese side, leaving aside the king, the archbishop, the bishop and a number of well-known nobles who only intervene as the bearers of aristocratic names, what is patent and indiscernible is a great confusion of faces that cannot be identified, thirteen thousand men who speak who knows how and who, presumably possessed of feelings, express them so remotely from our way of thinking that they are closer to their Moorish enemies than they are to us who are their legitimate descendants.