Seeing by José Saramago — Read

FEELINGS OF CONFUSION AND STUPEFACTION, BUT ALSO OF MOCKERY AND scorn swept the country from north to south. The provincial town councils, where the elections had taken place without incident or upset, apart from the occasional delay caused by the bad weather, and which had obtained results that differed little from the norm, the usual number of straightforward voters, the usual number of inveterate abstainers, and no very significant number of spoiled or blank votes, these councils, who had felt humiliated by the display of centralist triumphalism that had been paraded before the rest of the country as an example of the purest electoral public spirit, could now return that slap in the face and laugh at the foolish presumption of those ladies and gentlemen who thought they were the cat's meow simply because they happened to live in the country's capital.

The words Those ladies and gentlemen, pronounced with a curl of the lips that oozed disdain with every syllable, if not with every letter, were directed not at the people who had remained at home until four in the afternoon and then suddenly rushed out to vote as if they had received some irresistible order, but at the government who had hung out the flags too soon, at the political parties who had pounced on the blank votes as if they were a vineyard to be harvested and they were the harvesters, at the newspapers and the other media for the ease with which they moved from applause on the capitoline hill to having people hurled from the tarpeian rock, as if they themselves did not play an active part in the genesis of such disasters.