Baltasar and Blimunda

Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a real eighteenth-century Jesuit inventor Saramago fictionalizes wholesale, designs the Passarola, a flying machine that will run not on any conventional fuel but on human wills, captured at the instant of death and sealed into amber globes. Only Blimunda can gather them, seeing what leaves a dying body when she looks on an empty stomach, a gift inherited from a mother the Inquisition has already condemned to exile. Saramago stages the whole project as a quiet theological heist, wringing flight, something that should belong to angels or to God, out of the one human resource the Church has no procedure for confiscating.

The marvel of the Passarola runs directly against the brutal historical fact of Mafra, King João V's vow-driven convent-palace, built by forced labor at ruinous human cost, the hauling of an immense foundation stone, the casting of an enormous bronze bell, workers crushed and starved in the service of royal piety. Saramago intercuts the fantastical machine with unsparing realism about Mafra's construction so that the reader never mistakes one for an escape from the other: both projects are built by ordinary bodies, and only one of them will ever be thanked for it.

Baltasar Sete-Sois, who lost a hand fighting Spain, and Blimunda Sete-Luas, marked from childhood by her mother's condemnation, marry each other rather than the Church or the Crown, and their fidelity across the novel's decades becomes Saramago's real counterweight to Mafra's monument: an unrecorded, working-class loyalty that outlasts the reign built to outlast everyone.

The real composer Domenico Scarlatti, harpsichordist at the Portuguese court, moves through the novel as Baltasar's unlikely friend, one more craftsman whose work the crown consumes without asking what it costs him to make it. Saramago uses Scarlatti's music, built and gone in the same instant it's played, as a smaller echo of the Passarola itself: something made by human hands that outlives the patrons who commissioned it, if it survives at all.