The demonstration remains peaceful.Īt this point the government receives a letter that sends its ministers back to their memories of the plague of blindness in the same city four years earlier-and that sends the readers back to Saramago’s earlier novel. The government’s next hope is that a huge, peaceful demonstration will turn sour or violent, and the press does everything it can to encourage this possibility. The government blows up a railway station, hoping the citizens will blame it on terrorists and/or foreign agitators. Thinking the problem is confined, or can be confined, to the city, they declare a state of emergency in the capital then a state of siege then the government and all governmental services except firefighters leave the city then the city is sealed off. One editorial writes of a “dissolute use of the vote.” The minister of the interior speaks of the need to make the populace “realize that the unfettered use of the blank ballot paper would make the democratic system unworkable.” The first half of the novel recounts the government’s unavailing maneuvers in the face of the situation. This is not, of course, how the government sees it, and the press dutifully follows the government’s line.
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