Catarina Pais – Death at intervals (Excerpt)

Catarina Pais – Assistant, Dean’s Office. IE School of Architecture & Design.

Reading:

Death at intervals (As intermitências da morte) – (Excerpt) by José Saramago (2005).

She wrote and wrote, the hours passed, and she kept writing, there were letters, there were envelopes, and there was the folding, and the sealing, you might wonder how she managed it without a tongue or any source of saliva, well, my dear sirs, that was back in the happy days of craftsmanship, when we still lived in the caves of a modernity that was barely beginning to emerge, now the envelopes are the self-adhesive kind; you just remove the strip of paper, and that’s it, of all the many tasks the tongue used to have, you could say that this one ceased to exist.

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Escreveu, escreveu, passaram as horas e ela a escrever, e eram as cartas, e eram os sobrescritos, e era dobrá-las, e era fechá-los, perguntar-se-á como o conseguia se não tem língua nem de onde lhe venha a saliva, isso, meus caros senhores, foi nos felizes tempos do artesanato, quando ainda vivíamos nas cavernas de uma modernidade que mal começava a despontar, agora os sobrescritos são dos chamados autocolantes, retira-se-lhes a tirinha de papel, e já está, dos múltiplos empregos que a língua tinha, pode dizer-se que este passou à história.