The most curious thing happened to me while buying a book, Seeing by Jose Saramago, at Bridge Street Books in Georgetown this evening. Seeing, the dust cover explains, is about an election in the capital, where more than 70 percent of the final votes cast are actually blank. “The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. The president proposes that a wall be built around the city to contain the revolution. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that had hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? Is she the organizer of a conspiracy against the state?”

I was debating whether to get the hardback of Seeing, which I had found on the table outside of the bookshop, or the more expensive paperback of Blindness, Saramago’s earlier book, and widely accepted as a classic. While in debate, one shop assistant pegged me, without hesitation, as a spend thift, and didn’t mind saying so, in case I didn’t know myself. “We have Blindness, but not at a price like that. It’s 14.99 I think.” He calls upstairs, “Do we have Blindness up there, Cory?”

Cory walks down with the book, and I sit down to compare the two. Saramago, apparently, is a Nobel Prize winner (as I learn from the cover of Seeing), and I ask if he won it for Blindness. The assistant behind the desk, who is sorting through some files–not in a determined way, but in an end-of-the-day kind of way–scoffs (lightly), “You don’t win the Nobel for one work.” Satisfied that I know nothing about literature, he returns to his assumption of my thrift.

I end up deciding on Seeing, for its seemingly more political connotations. Cory rings me up, and asks if I want a bag. “No thanks,” I say. “Alright, going to show it off, then,” he replies, not in a condescending way, but more matter of fact. Perplexed by such a comment, a once-more immediate judgement, I can only reply, “No need to show off.” Leaving the shop, I walk a few steps on the brick-laid sidewalk and think of a better reply. “Actually, I intend to read it. That is what you do with books, isn’t it?”

How can anyone be happy in a town where the workers at a bookshop believe the books are bought only for ornament? And did they not see an ounce of irony in selling me a book entitled Seeing?