Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by José Saramago

looking for her clothes.
    I felt much too weary to try to understand. I just lay there, stretched out on top of the sheets because I like being naked and know that mine is not one of those bodies that inevitably clutters space. Age has not ravaged everything. Olga the secretary (why do I refuse to separate her name from her profession? the name of her profession?) finished dressing, and at that moment the picture we presented became incongruous, just like the
Fête Champêtre
(Giorgione) or its nineteenth-century counterpart
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
(Manet) or the lunar pictures of Delvaux, with the one difference that here it was the gentleman (or monsieur) who was naked. The incongruity of the picture (my picture) and the pictures (Giorgione, Manet, Delvaux) was, in my perception, the same incongruity which assembled the umbrella and sewing machine on top of the dissecting table (Lautréamont). I asked Olga the secretary if she had heard of Lautréamont and she simply said no, without even bothering to inquire why I had raised the question. In return, she asked me the time because her watch had stopped, and I replied that there inside that room it was ten to one but as for outside, I really could not say, no doubt it was much later, since my clock was (often) slow. She wanted to know the difference and I replied, smiling, “Had you been outside, you would probably have left by now, but inside this room you are still here.” Tempering my impudence at the last moment, I hastened to add, and just as well, “so that I might enjoy your company a little longer.” She made a vague gesture like a conditioned reflex, not (entirely) conscious, the gesture of someone about to start removing her clothes again with weary resignation. Then she appeared to change her mind (perhaps even unconsciously), lifted the supper tray from the floor and carried it into the kitchen. She called through and asked if she should wash up, but I told her not to bother; there was no need for her to wash either the dishes or the soiled sheets. I kept these last words to myself and began to feel sleepy, longing to escape this world. I could hear Olga the secretary in the bathroom, probably applying her makeup, and I wished she would go, descend the steep spiral of my staircase, drawn by the weight of the sewing machine, which was working rapidly and sewing the steps while the umbrella, rolled up and sinister, pierced the eyes of the people in the pictures hanging on the wall of the staircase and forming another spiral, while I, still lying there stark naked on the dissecting table, awaited the inevitable. I awoke from my dream and saw Olga the secretary in the doorway of the bedroom, ready to leave. She told me, “I’m going now; you can adjust your clock.” I made as if to get up and detain her but she waved goodbye without coming near me, disappeared into the narrow corridor, opened the door and closed it quietly behind her as she must have learned from her mother. Then I could hear her heels tapping on the steps like the needle of a sewing machine. Would the neighbors think it was Adelina leaving? I dialed fifteen (the speaking clock) and then rang Adelina to tell her how much I loved her (she was already asleep). Next day my cleaner would change the sheets. I got up to look for a book to read before falling asleep and chanced upon the
Roman Dialogue
by that ingenuous, good-natured fellow Francisco de Holanda, which he wrote in honor of the fatherland (not this fatherland, which is fast asleep). I opened the book at random and began reading until I came to that passage in the second dialogue when Messer Lactantio Tollomei answers Michelangelo: “I am satisfied,” replied Lactantio, “and now understand more clearly the powerful influence of painting which, as you have observed, can be recognized in all the achievements of the ancients as well as in their prose and verse. And perhaps with your great works you will not have probed as deeply as I have