On José Saramago’s O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo

A Windmill Behind Golgotha

The first thing this novel shows you is a mill on a hill, and the sails are not turning.

Saramago opens O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo — The Gospel According to Jesus Christ — by describing a picture. Not a scene, not a memory, not a landscape seen by any character: a rectangle with corners, a sun in one upper quadrant and a moon in the other, both shining at once on a world where nothing casts a shadow. In the distance there are towers and walls, a drawbridge over a moat with water glittering in it, some Gothic gables, and on the crest of the last hill the stopped sails of a windmill. This is Golgotha as northern Europe engraved it fifteen centuries after the fact — a Judea with battlements and a miller. Portuguese critics have long recognized the print behind the prose, Dürer’s Passion or something very close to it, though the attribution matters less than what the description contains. In the opening pages of the most contested book of his career, Saramago has planted a piece of devotional printmaking, itemized it patiently, and let it do its own damage.

Because everyone knows the crucifixion did not happen beside a drawbridge, and nobody has ever filed a complaint. For five hundred years European Christianity has pictured its founding atrocity in the costume and masonry of whoever held the burin, giving the executed Galilean the cheekbones of a Rhineland burgher and stocking the sky with two bodies that could not have been visible together. Among the devout, this kind of liberty has never counted as error. It counts as ownership: the image belongs to whoever is cutting the plate. Before a word has been written about God, the argument that will run under the whole book has been laid down like a drain — this story has always been told by somebody, from somewhere, for reasons, and the people most insistent that it be left alone have already reworked it more thoroughly than any novelist would attempt.

He moves through the picture with a guide’s stick. The naked man on the trunk, a cloth over the hips covering what the narrator calls, with a small shrug at the vocabulary he has inherited, the parts we name shameful. The nails, two of them, fixing the feet to the stump of a lopped branch. The woman in the foreground with her hair loose and her bodice laced so tight that the roundness of her breasts is pushed up and forward, catching the eyes of passing men and dragging their souls to ruin: Mary Magdalene, whom the narrator finds implausible on the grounds of costume, since a woman with her history would surely have dressed down for a funeral. The joke is precise and it is not aimed at her. It is aimed at the engraver, and at the centuries of image-makers who needed the penitent whore to be legibly a whore so that the penitence would register, and at a market in pious pictures where a little décolletage never hurt the print run.

Then, without raising his voice, the narrator turns to the thief on the left. Thin, straight-haired, his head fallen toward the earth that will eat him, twice condemned — to death and to hell — and the narrator calls him rectíssimo homem, a most upright man, who had conscience enough not to pretend to believe, under cover of divine and human law, that a minute of repentance redeems a whole life of wickedness or even one simple hour of weakness.

That sentence arrives four pages into a four-hundred-page book, inside what looks like neutral description, and it takes apart the machinery of last-minute salvation without announcing that it intends to. Consider the proposition. The Good Thief, promised paradise that same afternoon, made an arrangement. The Bad Thief, who does not repent, is the only man on the hill who refuses to insult the weight of a life by pretending it can be settled in sixty seconds. He is not defiant; he is not brave. He declines to perform a conversion he does not feel in order to obtain a result he cannot verify. The rest of the novel will keep asking what sort of divinity designs a system in which honesty is penalized and last-second compliance rewarded, and the question has already been asked here, in a murmur, by a man with his hands behind his back.

This opening is easy to underrate because it looks like throat-clearing. By beginning inside a print, Saramago begins at the end — with the framed and marketable image, the finished product of everything the novel will then go back and dramatize. Most historical novels travel from event toward meaning. This one starts with the meaning already engraved, hung, and sold, and works backward toward the event it claims to represent, on the suspicion that the event was trimmed to fit the picture rather than the other way around. The man at the center is not yet a character. He has been through the workshop.

One more object in that rectangle deserves attention, because the story will eventually turn on it. Above the head of the crucified man there is a board, and on the board there is writing.

Crucify me

Before going further I should say ...