television programmes, memories of the time when we were blind, stories by writers, etc., by the way, I would just mention that my ministry has its own team of writers, people highly trained in the art of persuasion, which, as I understand it, writers normally achieve only briefly and after much effort, It seems an excellent idea to me, said the president of the republic, but obviously the text would have to be submitted to me for my approval so that I could make any changes I deem appropriate, but, on the whole, I like it, it's a splendid idea, which, above all, has the enormous political advantage of placing the figure of the president of the republic in the front line of battle, oh, yes, a fine idea. The murmur of approval in the room indicated to the prime minister that this last move had been won by the interior minister, So be it, then, take all the necessary steps, he said, and on the appropriate page in the government's school progress report he mentally added another black mark against the minister's name.
...
THE REASSURING IDEA THAT, LATER OR SOONER, AND, MORE LIKELY, sooner than later, fate will always strike down pride, was roundly confirmed by the humiliating opprobrium suffered by the interior minister, who, believing that he had, in extremis, won the latest round in the pugilistic battle in which he and the prime minister had been engaged, saw his plans fizzle out after an unexpected intervention from the skies, which, at the last moment, decided to change sides and join the enemy. However, in the final analysis and, indeed, in the first, the blame for this, in the view of the most attentive and competent of observers, lay entirely with the president of the republic for having delayed his approval of the manifesto which, bearing his signature and intended for the moral edification of the city's inhabitants, should have been distributed by the helicopters. During the three days that followed the cabinet meeting the celestial vault revealed itself to the world in its magnificent suit of seamless blue, perfect weather, smooth and faultless, and above all with no wind, ideal for hurling papers out into the air and watching them float down, dancing the dance of the elves, to be picked up by anyone who happened to be passing or who had come out into the street curious to learn what news or orders were drifting down from above. During those three days, the much-thumbed text traipsed back and forth between the presidential palace and the ministry of the interior, sometimes more profuse in arguments, sometimes more concise in ideas, with words crossed out and replaced by others that would immediately suffer the same fate, with phrases which, shorn of what went before, no longer fitted what came after, so much wasted ink, so much torn-up paper, this, we will have you know, is what is meant by the torment of writing, the torture of creation. On the fourth day, the sky, grown tired of waiting, and seeing that things down below still kept chopping and changing, decided to start off the morning covered by a layer of low, dark clouds, of the sort that usually bring the rain they promise. By late morning, a few sparse droplets had begun to fall, stopping now and then and starting up again, an irritating drizzle which, despite threatening more, seemed unlikely to get much worse. This on-off state of affairs continued until mid-afternoon, and then, suddenly, without warning, like someone who has grown weary of hiding his true feelings, the heavens opened to give way to a continuous, steady, monotonous rain, intense but not violent, the kind of rain that can continue falling for a whole week and for which farmers are generally grateful. Not so the ministry of the interior. Even assuming that the air force's supreme command would authorize the helicopters to take off, which, would, in itself, be highly problematic, hurling papers down from above in weather like this would be utterly ridiculous, and not just because there would be hardly any people in the streets, and the main concern of the few who were would be to remain as dry as possible, even worse was the thought that the presidential manifesto might land in the mud, be swallowed up by the devouring drains, might crumble and dissolve in the puddles that the wheels of cars splash rudely through, throwing up fountains of grubby water as they go, in truth, in truth I say to you, only a fanatical believer in legality and the respect one owes to one's superiors would bother to stoop down and rescue from the ignominious slime an explanation about the relationship between the general blindness of four years ago and this majority blindness now. To the interior minister's vexation, he had to stand by and watch, powerless, as, on the pretext of the on-going and unpostponable national emergency, the prime minister, with, moreover, the reluctant agreement of the president of the republic, set in motion the media machinery, encompassing press, radio, television and all the other written, aural and visual submedia available, both current and concurrent, whose task it would be to persuade the capital's population that it was, alas, once more blind. When, days later, the rain stopped and the upper air had once more clothed itself in azure, only the stubborn and ultimately angry insistence of the president of the republic managed to get the postponed first part of the plan put into action, My dear prime minister, said the president, do not think for a moment that I have reneged on or am even considering reneging on the decision taken by the cabinet, I continue to believe that it is my duty to address the nation personally, But, sir, it really isn't worth it, the clarification process is already underway and I'm sure we'll soon be getting results, Those results could be about to appear around the corner the day after tomorrow, but I want my manifesto to be launched first, The day after tomorrow is, of course, just a manner of speaking, All the better, get that manifesto distributed now, Believe me, sir, A word of warning, if you don't do it, I'll blame you for the inevitable loss of personal and political trust between us, Allow me to remind you, sir, that I still have an absolute majority in parliament, any threatened loss of trust would be merely personal in nature and would have no political repercussions, It would if I made a statement to parliament declaring that the word of the president of the republic had been hijacked by the prime minister, Please, sir, that isn't true, It's true enough for me to say so, in parliament or out of it, Distributing the manifesto now, The manifesto and the other papers, Distributing the manifesto now would be pointless, That's your opinion, not mine, But president, The fact that you call me president means that you recognize me as such, so do as I say, Well, if you put it like that, Oh, I do, and another thing, I'm tired of watching your battles with the interior minister, if you think he's no good, then sack him, but if you don't want to sack him or can't, then put up with it, if you yourself had come up with the idea of a manifesto signed by the president, you would probably have issued orders for it to be delivered door to door, Now that's unfair, sir, Maybe it is, I don't deny it, but people get upset and lose their temper and end up saying things they didn't intend to or hadn't even thought, Let's consider the matter closed, All right, the matter is closed, but tomorrow morning I want those helicopters in the air, Yes, president.
If this acerbic exchange had not taken place, if the presidential manifesto and the other leaflets had, because unnecessary, ended their brief life in the rubbish, the story we are telling would have developed quite differently from this point on. We can't imagine exactly how or in what way, we just know it would have been different. Obviously, any reader who has been paying close attention to the meanderings of the plot, one of those analytical readers who expects a proper explanation for everything, would be sure to ask whether the conversation between the prime minister and the president of the republic was simply added at the last moment to justify such a change of direction, or if it simply had to happen because that was its destiny, from which would spring soon- to-be-revealed consequences, forcing the narrator to set aside the story he was intending to write and to follow the new course that had suddenly appeared on his navigation chart. It is difficult to give such an either-or question an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally. Unless, of course, the narrator were to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale of a city which, en masse, decided to return blank ballot papers, in which case this violent exchange of words between the prime minister and the president of the republic, which ended so happily, would have been as welcome to him as flowers in May. What other explanation is there for his abrupt abandonment of the complex narrative thread he had been developing merely in order to set off on gratuitous digressions not about what-did-not-happen-but- might-have, but about what-did-happen-but-might-not-have. We are referring, to put it plainly, to the letter which the president of the republic received three days after the helicopters had showered the capital's streets, squares, parks and avenues with the colored leaflets in which the ministry of the interior's writers set out their conclusions about the likely connection between the tragic collective blindness of four years ago and the present-day electoral madness. The signatory was fortunate in that his letter fell into the hands of a particularly scrupulous clerk, the sort who looks at the small print before he starts reading the large, the sort who is capable of discerning amongst the untidy scrawl of words the tiny seed that requires immediate watering, if only to find out what it might grow into. This is what the letter said, Your excellency, Having read, with due and deserved attention, the manifesto addressed by you to the people and, in particular, to the inhabitants of the capital, and being keenly aware both of my duty as a citizen of this country and of the need, during the crisis into which the nation is currently plunged, for every one of us to maintain a close, constant, zealous watch for anything strange that we might see now or might have seen in the past, I wish to bring to the attention of your excellency's renowned powers of judgement a few
