Half an hour later, the ministers resumed their places round the table. The absences went unnoticed. The president of the republic came in looking utterly perplexed, as if he had just been given a piece of news whose meaning was completely beyond his comprehension. The prime minister, on the other hand, seemed very pleased with himself. The reason would soon become clear. When, earlier on, I brought to your attention the urgent need for a change of strategy, given the failure of all the actions drawn up and executed since the beginning of this crisis, he began, I never for one moment expected that an idea capable of carrying us forward to victory would come precisely from a minister who is no longer with us, I refer, as you will doubtless have surmised, to the ex-minister of culture, who has shown once again how important it is to examine the ideas of your adversary in order to discover which aspects of those ideas can be used to your advantage. The ministers of defense and of the interior exchanged indignant glances, that was all they needed, to hear the intelligence of a despised traitor being praised to the skies. The interior minister scribbled a few rapid words on a piece of paper and passed it to his colleague, My instinct was right, I distrusted those guys right from the start, to which the minister of defense replied by the same means and with the same emotion, There we were trying to infiltrate them, and it turns out they had infiltrated us. The prime minister was continuing to discuss the conclusions he had reached based on the ex-minister of culture's sibylline statement about how we had all been blind yesterday and continued to be blind today, Our mistake, our great mistake, for which we are paying right now, lay in that attempt at obliteration, not of our memories, since we would all of us be capable of recalling what happened four years ago, but of the word, the name, as if, as our ex-colleague remarked, in order for death to cease to exist, we would simply have to stop saying the word we use to describe it, Aren't we getting away from the main problem, asked the president of the republic, we need concrete proposals, objectives, the cabinet is going to have to take some important decisions, On the contrary, president, this is the main problem, and if I'm right, this is the idea that will give us, on a plate, the possibility of resolving once and for all a problem which we have, at most, managed only to patch up here and there, but those patches quickly come unstitched and leave everything exactly as it was, What are you getting at, explain yourself, please, President, gentlemen, let us dare to take a step forward, let us replace silence with words, let us put an end to this stupid, pointless pretence that nothing happened four years ago, let us talk openly about what life, if it can be called a life, was like during the time that we were blind, let the newspapers report it, let writers write about it, let the television show us images of the city taken immediately after we recovered our sight, let's encourage people to talk about the many and various evils we had to endure, let them talk about the dead, the disappeared, the ruins, the fires, the rubbish, the putrefaction, and then, when we have torn off the rags of false normality with which we have tried to bind up the wound, we will say that the blindness of those days has returned in a new guise, we will draw people's attention to the parallel between the blankness of that blindness of four years ago and the blind casting of blank ballot papers now, the comparison is crude and fallacious, as I would be the first to recognize, and there will be those who will reject it at once as an offence to intelligence, to logic and to common sense, but it is just possible that many people, and I hope they will soon become the overwhelming majority, will be convinced, will stand before the mirror and ask themselves if they are, again, blind, if this blindness, more shameful than the other blindness, is not leading them from the straight and narrow, propelling them toward the ultimate disaster which would be the possibly definitive collapse of a political system which, without our even noticing the threat, carried within it, right from the start, in its vital nucleus, in the voting process itself, the seeds of its own destruction or, a no less disquieting hypothesis, of a transition to something entirely new and unknown, so different that we would probably have no place in it, raised as we were in the shelter of an electoral routine which, for generations and generations, managed to conceal what we now realize was one of its great trump cards. I firmly believe, the prime minister continued, that the strategic change we needed is in sight, yes, the restoration of the system to the status quo ante is within our grasp, however, I am the prime minister of this country and not some vulgar snake-oil salesman promising miracles, but I will say that, while we may not get results in twenty-four hours, I am sure we will begin to see them within twenty-four days, the struggle, though, will be long and hard, because sapping the energy of this new blank plague will take time and much effort, not forgetting, ah, not forgetting the dreaded head of the tapeworm, which can hide itself away anywhere, for until we can locate it in the foul innards of the conspiracy, until we can drag it out into the light of day to be given the punishment it deserves, that fatal parasite will continue to produce its rings and to undermine the strength of the nation, but we will win the final battle, my word and your word, now and until the final victory, will be the guarantee of that promise. Pushing back their chairs, the ministers rose as one man and stood applauding enthusiastically. Purged of its troublesome members, the cabinet was, at last, a cohesive whole, one leader, one will, one plan, one path. Seated in his armchair, as befitted the dignity of his office, the president of the republic was clapping too, but only with the tips of his fingers, thus letting it be known, as well as by the stern look on his face, how piqued he was not to have been the object of some reference, however minimal, in the prime minister's speech. He should have known better who he was dealing with. When the clamorous crackle of applause was beginning to subside, the prime minister raised his right hand to call for silence and said, Every voyage needs a captain, and during the dangerous voyage on which the country is now embarked, that captain is and must be your prime minister, but woe betide the ship that does not carry a compass to guide it over the vast ocean and through the storms, well, gentlemen, the compass that guides me and the ship, the compass, in short, that guides us all, is here, by our side, always keeping us on course with his vast experience, always encouraging us with his wise advice, always instructing us with his peerless example, a thousand rounds of applause, then, and a thousand thanks to his excellency the president of the republic. The ovation was even warmer than the first and seemed as if it would never end, nor would it end as long as the prime minister continued to clap his hands or until the clock in his head said, Enough, stop there, he's won. Just two minutes more to confirm that victory and, at the end of those two minutes, the president of the republic, with tears in his eyes, was embracing the prime minister. Perfect, nay, even sublime moments can occur in the life of a politician, he said afterward, his voice choked with emotion, but whatever tomorrow may hold for me, I assure you that this moment will never be erased from my memory, it will be my crowning glory in happy times, my consolation in sad ones, I thank you with all my heart, with all my heart, I embrace you. More applause.