Why this book

Saramago won the Nobel Prize, and many call this his masterwork. Its Portuguese title, Memorial do Convento, names its dark heart — the vast convent-palace of Mafra, raised by the sweat and blood of thousands so one king might keep a single vow.

The Story

Portugal's King João the Fifth has no heir, therefore the Franciscans strike a bargain: build them a convent, and God will grant a child. His queen soon conceives. So the king vows a monument at Mafra so vast it will beggar a kingdom and swallow thousands of lives.

King João pours his gold into stone. His queen, Dona Maria Ana, prays in cold devotion while he visits her bed only to sire heirs and dreams instead of the grandest convent in Europe. But far below the palace, the people who must build it go hungry.

In Lisbon, the Inquisition parades its condemned through jeering crowds. Among them walks Sebastiana Maria de Jesus, sentenced for her visions and banished forever. Her daughter watches, silent — Blimunda, a pale young woman with strange, seeing eyes. But before they part, the mother whispers her into a stranger's care.

That stranger is Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço, a priest with impossible dreams. Nearby stands Baltasar Mateus, called Sete-Sóis — Seven-Suns — a soldier lately home from war, his left hand lost to a cannon. But when Baltasar's eyes meet Blimunda's, neither looks away, and he follows her home.

Baltasar had marched in the king's war against Spain, but a cannon-blast tore away his left hand and cast him from the army with nothing. Therefore he came home to Lisbon a beggar-soldier, fitting himself an iron spike and hook to do the work his lost hand once did.

Blimunda and Baltasar become lovers and live as husband and wife — But they take no vows in any church, and no priest sanctifies them. Padre Bartolomeu blesses their union with his own quiet words, therefore their bond belongs to them alone, not to the Inquisition's God.

The priest gives Blimunda a second name to match her man. Since Baltasar is Seven-Suns, therefore she shall be Sete-Luas — Seven-Moons — sun and moon bound together. So the two of them become a single sky, and their strange fortunes are joined for good.

By day Baltasar hires out his strong arm and the iron spike where his hand once was; by night he and Blimunda lie close in their small room. Therefore two poor, scarred people make of each other a home that the great world would never grant them.

Blimunda carries a secret. Each dawn, before she breaks her fast with bread, she can see through skin and stone — into bodies, into the hidden will that glows within every living soul. But she never looks at Baltasar fasting, for love is afraid of what it might see.

Padre Bartolomeu secures the loan of a nobleman's shuttered estate outside the city, and there, behind locked gates, the three conspirators labor in secret. Therefore Baltasar's forge glows through the nights as the iron ribs of the passarola slowly take the shape of a monstrous bird.

Therefore Blimunda takes up the terrible task. Fasting, she walks among the sick and dying, and where a soul is loosening she draws its will out like a closed cloud, sealing each one in a glass vial. Baltasar forges the machine; the priest prays over his drawings.

Bartolomeu names the number he needs — two thousand wills to fill the vials and raise the craft. But gathering them is slow and grievous work, therefore the machine waits half-alive while Blimunda hunts the dying of the city, one fading soul at a time.

They labor for years in the shuttered estate barn. The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti finds them, and though he cannot explain the machine, he plays his harpsichord among the iron struts, therefore his music seems to steady their hands and hearten their strange, lonely work.

But then plague sweeps Lisbon. Blimunda must walk the death-carts and plague-houses to gather wills by the thousand, fasting for days among the rotting dead. Therefore the horror and hunger poison her own body, and she collapses, burning with fever, herself close to death.

For weeks Baltasar refuses to leave her side, feeding her and holding her through the fever with his one good hand. Slowly Blimunda returns to him, thinner and graver, therefore the machine's cost is now written in her own flesh, not only in strangers' deaths.

At last the passarola stands finished, its vials brimming with will, its amber set to catch the sun. But rumor of the priest's contraption is spreading, and the Inquisition's suspicion is turning toward them. Therefore they resolve to fly at once, before they can be seized.

But no one can steer a dream. The wind carries them helpless across the country until the amber cools, and the passarola sinks down into the wild mountains near Monte Junto. Therefore they hide the wounded machine among the rocks and swear to tell no one.

But their flight did not go unseen. Herdsmen swear a black bird carried devils across the sky, and soon the Holy Office is hunting for sorcery. Padre Bartolomeu grasps that his miracle will be named witchcraft and himself burned, therefore, terrified, he flees toward Spain.

In exile at Toledo, hunted and friendless, the priest cannot prove that men have flown, and the Church he served now hungers to destroy him. Believing God has abandoned his great dream, his mind gives way, therefore Bartolomeu dies alone in a Spanish madhouse.

Baltasar and Blimunda return to their ordinary days. But the king's convent at Mafra keeps rising, therefore Baltasar joins the vast army of laborers dragged from every corner of the land, breaking their backs so that one man may keep a vow he made to God.

The years grind on. Baltasar grows grey hauling stone at Mafra, and Blimunda quietly waits out each long absence, therefore the soaring wonder of their single flight recedes into memory — a secret miracle carried inside two aging, ordinary hearts.

Through all these years Baltasar never forgets the passarola. Now and then he climbs alone to Monte Junto to tend the hidden machine and guard its sleeping vials, therefore one fragile thread still binds their small, worn lives to the impossible thing they made fly.

But one day, when Baltasar goes up to the machine, sunlight catches the old iron and stirs the sleeping wills. The passarola shudders, lifts, and carries him off into the sky before he can leap free — and then Baltasar is simply gone.

When Baltasar does not return, Blimunda sets out to find him. For nine long years she walks the roads of Portugal, always fasting, always looking with her secret sight into every face, therefore searching each living body — and each dying one — for the man she will not surrender.

She begs her bread and sleeps in ditches, and everywhere she goes she looks inside the living for the shape of the will she knows by heart. Some call her a saint, some a witch, but Blimunda only walks on, refusing to believe that Baltasar is truly lost.

At last, in a Lisbon square, she comes upon another auto-da-fé — the Inquisition burning its heretics. But among the condemned in the flames she sees Baltasar Sete-Sóis at last, dying in the very fire she has searched nine years to reach.

What it means

Padre Bartolomeu reveals his true labor: a great bird of iron and wicker, the passarola, that he swears will carry men into the heavens. But he lacks its fuel. The engine, he believes, must be driven by human will itself — thousands of wills, gathered and sealed in glass.

He explains his design: the sun's warmth on amber will draw up the ether, but ether alone cannot lift them. Only the will — that closed cloud each dying person surrenders — has the hunger to climb toward heaven. Therefore Blimunda alone holds the power to make it fly.

Before Scarlatti must leave, he plays once more beneath the finished machine, filling the barn with music like poured light. Therefore something of his art seems sealed into the craft, as though beauty itself had lent its weight to the dream of flight.

On a clear morning the sun strikes the amber, the sealed wills strain upward, and the great machine tears free of the earth. Baltasar, Blimunda, and Bartolomeu rise trembling above the rooftops — the first souls in all Portugal to look down upon the world from the sky.

For a few soaring minutes the three of them hang between earth and sun, weeping and laughing, the whole kingdom of misery shrunk to a map below. But such wonder cannot last, for no hand aboard can command the wind or bring the machine safely down.

Saramago lingers on their toil — above all the day six hundred oxen and hundreds of men haul one monstrous stone toward Mafra. A worker is crushed beneath it, unmourned, therefore the convent's every wall stands revealed as a grave of the forgotten poor.

When the convent is at last consecrated, the king and his court parade in gold and incense to claim their glory before God. But Saramago keeps our eyes on the maimed, the crippled, and the buried workmen, therefore the truest monument is their suffering, not the king's proud prayer.

As the flames rise, Blimunda looks into him one last time and calls. Therefore the will of Baltasar does not fly up to the stars with the smoke — it comes to her, and stays, for it belongs to Blimunda, and to the earth.

So Saramago shows us where power truly lives: not in kings or convents, which rise on stolen lives, but in the will and love of ordinary people. The mighty build monuments to themselves, but it is the nameless who dream, who labor, and who fly.

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