Free Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by José Saramago

pulled out the plug. The water quickly disappeared right down to the final gurgle coming from that antiquated plumbing. Then, saved from death, I turned on the shower and washed myself. Quickly. And within minutes, half dried and wrapped in a dressing gown, I looked through one of the studio windows at the night sky and the lights on the river. Darkness everywhere. “What’s happening?” I asked myself.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    T WENTY-THREE DAYS have passed since I wrote “I shall go on painting the second picture,” and today I ask myself, Should I carry on? In between (separating us) is the distance covered in these pages, and I never imagined I should be able to write so easily. At this stage, many things which seemed important have undoubtedly lost any value or meaning, especially the second portrait. As the painter mentioned in the opening pages, I can now see that this picture is a mistake: no one can be and not be at the same time. I cannot be the painter capable of achieving his objective in the second portrait if I have gone on, submissive and salaried, painting the first one. As a portrait painter, I am and will remain simply the painter of the first portrait; I am not allowed a second portrait. So when I admitted that the attempt had failed, I was also admitting that I could nevertheless carry on with it, as if at heart I felt incapable of giving up the possibility, however remote, of becoming the painter who is real because hidden. I would relish my triumph on my own, finally rid of that vulgar portrait I had sold, engaged in dialogue with the portrait in reserve which no amount of money could ever buy. Now I know it will never happen. Using a spray gun, I covered the second portrait with black paint. I banished the colors of error and the false gestures which put them there into a superficial but eternal night. Covered in black paint, the canvas is still mounted on the easel and consigned to the shadows of the storeroom, like a blind man fumbling in the dark to retrieve the black hat he removed an hour ago. I can visualize the canvas from here, invisible, black over black, fettered to the skeleton of the easel like a condemned man to the gallows. And between the true image I attempted of S. and the world of light (or the passing darkness of these nocturnal hours) there is a membrane formed by millions of tiny drops, hard and resistant as a black mirror. I did all this as if I were carefully dissecting a limb, gently cutting into the fiber of the muscular tissue, tying up veins and arteries with the dry, meticulous gestures of someone tightening a garrote or like the skillful executioner who knows precisely how much force to exert in order to dislocate the vertebrae and sever the spinal cord. There is only one portrait of S., the only one I am capable of painting, which conforms not to what I am but to what is expected of me, although it might be truer to say that I am precisely what is expected of me and nothing else. If these words are true and I am not mistaken, then I exist merely within the dimensions of the picture they buy from me. I am the object bought and fully satisfy the client’s needs. Once the natural buyers (assuming it is natural to buy such things) have departed this world, who else is likely to want such pictures? Who else will commission them? Once there is no longer any public for this art, what am I to do with art or myself? In the storeroom the second portrait gives me one half of the answer: the attempt to sell something else has started to fail and is now simply an attempt which has ended in frustration. I certainly did not erase it from myself but withdrew it from the time of others. It is a sign of prohibition which only I can see, but it closes a path I thought I was opening to the world.
    These sheets of paper remain. This new method of drawing remains, coming to life without my having memorized it. At each moment, even when I break off, it offers me the emerging scroll, and