We cannot leave to see in this fact the idea of the writing as crucial instrument to resist the esquecimento, since it is a way for which the men can perpetuate its memory and form its conscience. When bringing, in its narrative, a personage worried about the written register, Saramago disclose to its concern with history human being and the permanence of the memory before the esquecimento promoted for the barbarity. The old one of the black sales is a personage who, symbolically, represents that one that possesss wisdom and power of analysis, when reflecting regarding the blindness and of the installed chaos. Beyond the oldness, that accumulates it experience, the personage uses sales, loaded of significao, therefore, for being a blindness symbol, it is also a form to show that she is immune to the superficiality of the physical appearances. This makes with that it if interiorize, therefore its sales cover the emptiness in its face, left for the loss of an eye, as well as protect the personage of judgments based on the corporal aspect. This still more is strengthened by the fact of the old one of the black sales to suffer from cataract in the eye that remains to it. Old, blind of an eye and still cataract victim, the old one of the black sales is closed to the world corrupted for social masks and, even so victim of the white blindness, conserves conscience on the horror the one that it and the excessively blind ones are submitted.
Bosi (1998, P. 60) makes the following commentary: A true test for the psicossocial hypothesis of the memory meets in the study of the souvenirs of the aged people. In them it is possible to verify a well developed social history: they already had crossed one definitive type of society, with marked and well known characteristics; they already had had equally reconhecveis pictures of familiar and cultural reference: at last, its current memory can be drawn on a defined cloth of deep more of what the memory of a young person, or exactly adult, who, in some way, still is absorbed in the fights and contradictions of a gift much more intensely requests that it of what an age person.