On the eve of the presidential elections in the United States, this little observation is not, I think, out of place. Some time back a Portuguese politician, then in government, said to anyone prepared to listen that politics is primarily the art of not telling the truth. The worst thing was that after he said it there wasn’t, as far as I know, a single politician, left or right, who corrected him, saying absolutely not, truth should be the first and last aim of politics, for the simple reason that this is the only way that both can be saved—truth saved by politics, and politics saved by truth.
And what about this? In March 1975, and increasingly the following month, rumors reached us in Portugal of the displeasure of the Spanish government—at the time led by Carlos Arias Navarro—at the path, dangerous in Navarro’s view, that was being taken by the Portuguese revolution. The defeat of the right-wing military coup of March 11, whose inspiration and leader had been General Spínola, had as its immediate consequence the reinvigorating of the political forces of the left, including trade unions. Arias Navarro, it would appear, went into a panic, to the point where in a meeting with the North American Deputy Secretary of State, Robert Ingersoll, he raised the idea that Portugal was a serious threat to Spain, not only because of the way in which the situation there was developing but also because of the external support the country would be able to obtain from quarters hostile to Spain. The next development—according to Arias Navarro—might be war. In his report to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, made immediately after this meeting, Ingersoll said that “Spain would be prepared to launch itself into combat against communism on its own if needs be. It is a strong and prosperous country. Arias Navarro doesn’t want to ask for help, but trusts that they would have the cooperation and understanding of their friends, not only in Spain’s interests but in the interests of all those who think in the same way.” In another conversation, on April 9, with Wells Stabler, United States ambassador to Spain, Arias Navarro said that “the Spanish army is aware of the dangers of communism through its experience of the Civil War, and it is absolutely united.”
And what about this? Here we were, concerned about establishing a more worthy future for Portugal against the thousand internal winds and tides, and other forces prepared against us from outside, and our neighbors, our brothers, were plotting with the United States to fight a war that would probably ruin us and no doubt would leave Spain herself badly injured too. Ever since the conversations that Franco had with Hitler with a view to sharing out—one for me, one for you—the Portuguese colonies, the explicit threat of an invasion had hovered over our heads, an invasion that might have needed no more than a yes from the United States.
Do I have to tell you that this was not the reason I wrote A Jangada de Pedra [The Stone Raft]?
As I write, the Electoral College still has a few more hours of work ahead. It will not be till the early hours of the morning that the first projections of who will be the next president of the United States will start emerging. In the deeply unappealing event that it is Senator McCain who wins, what I’m writing will seem like the work of someone whose ideas about the world in which he lives suffer from a complete lack of realism, a complete ignorance of the threads with which political facts are woven and of the planet’s various strategic objectives. Senator McCain, especially because (as the propaganda never tires of saying, and a wretched civilian such as myself would never dare to dispute) he is a war hero, a veteran of Vietnam, would never knock down the concentration and torture camp installed in the Guantánamo military base and dismantle the base itself, down to the very last screw, returning the space it occupied to its legitimate owners, the Cuban people. Because, like it or not, though the habit certainly doesn’t always make the monk the uniform really does always make the general. Knock down? Dismantle? What kind of naïve person had that idea?
And yet this is precisely the issue. A few minutes ago a Portuguese radio station wanted to know what would be the first act of government I would propose to Barack Obama in the event of his being—as so many of us have been dreaming for a year and a half—the new president of the United States. I was able to answer quickly: dismantle the military base at Guantánamo, send back the marines, destroy the shame that the concentration camp (and torture camp, let’s not forget) represents, turn the page and ask Cuba’s forgiveness. And while he’s at it, end the blockade, the garrote with which the US tried—uselessly—to strangle the will of the Cuban people. It might happen—and here’s hoping that it will—that the final results of this election will invest the North American population with a new dignity and a new respect, but I would like to remind those who pretend not to be paying attention what genuinely dignified lessons, from which Washington could have learned, the people of Cuba have been giving on a daily basis during almost fifty years of patriotic resistance.
But surely it’s not possible to do everything, just like that, in a single sitting? True, perhaps it isn’t possible, but please, Mr. President, at least do something. Contrary to what you might have been told in the corridors of the Senate, that island is more than just a dot on the map. I hope, Mr. President, that one day you will want to visit Cuba to meet those who live there. At last. I assure you that no one there will hurt you.
The 106-year-old woman, Ann Nixon Cooper, whom Obama referred to while delivering his first speech as president-elect of the United States, might come to occupy a place in the gallery of characters beloved by North American readers, beside the woman who refused to stand up and give up her place on a bus to a white man. Not a lot has been written about the heroism of women. What Obama told us about Ann Nixon Cooper included no acts of public heroism, only everyday ones, but the lessons of silence can be every bit as powerful as those of words. One hundred and six years of watching the world go by, watching its convulsions, its successes and its failures, its lack of piety, its joy at being alive in spite of everything. Last night this woman saw the picture of one of her race on a thousand posters and understood—she couldn’t not have understood—that something new was happening. Or she simply kept the repeated image in her heart, in the hope that her joy would be justified and confirmed. Old people are like that sometimes: they suddenly abandon commonplaces and go against the tide, asking impertinent questions and maintaining stubborn silences that spoil the party. Ann Nixon Cooper suffered slavery of various kinds—being black, being a woman, being poor. She lived a life of submission; laws may have changed in the outside world but they didn’t change the things she feared, as she looked around her and saw women mistreated, used, humiliated, and murdered, always by men. She saw that women were paid less than men for the same work; that they had to take on domestic responsibilities that kept them invisible, necessary though those duties were; she saw how their determined steps were obstructed, and how still they continued to walk forward, or refused to stand up on the bus—we should mention her again, that other black woman, Rose Banks, who made history, too.
A hundred and six years watching the world go by. Perhaps she sees it as beautiful, as did my grandmother, not long before she died, old and lovely and poor. Perhaps the woman Obama told us about yesterday felt the serenity of perfect joy, a loveliness that perhaps we, too, will know one day. However, we congratulate the president-elect for having offered her a tribute that she probably didn’t need, but we did. As Obama was talking about Ann Nixon Cooper, we understood that with each word her example made us better, more human, closer to the verge of absolute brotherhood. Whether we know how to make this feeling last is up to us.
Fortunately there are words for everything. Fortunately there are words that will always say that he who gives should give with both hands, so that his hands retain nothing that rightfully belongs to someone else. Just as kindness should not be ashamed of being kindness, so justice should never forget that above all it is restitution, the restitution of rights. All of them, beginning with the basic right to live in dignity. If I were asked to put charity, kindness, and justice in order of precedence, I would give first place to kindness, second to justice, and third to charity. Because kindness already dispenses justice and charity of its own accord, and because a fair system of justice already contains sufficient charity within it. Charity is what is left when there is neither kindness nor justice.
Rosa Parks, not Rose Banks. A regrettable lapse of memory, which wasn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last, made me perpetrate one of the worst slips that it is possible to make in the always complex system of interpersonal relations: giving someone a name that is not hers. Apart from the patient reader of these modest lines, I have no one to ask for forgiveness, but I am punished enough for the error by the sense of intense embarrassment that seized me when I immediately realized the seriousness of my mistake. I even contemplated letting it go, but I pushed the temptation away and here I am to confess the mistake and promise that henceforth I’ll be careful to check everything, even things of which I think I am certain.
Good things can come of bad, according to popular wisdom, and perhaps it’s true. So I have the opportunity to return to Rosa Parks, that forty-two-year-old seamstress who, traveling on a bus in Montgomery, in the state of Alabama, on December 1, 1955, refused to give her place up to a white person as the driver had told her to. This crime got her sent to prison on a charge of having disturbed public order. It should be made clear that Rosa Parks was sitting in the part of the bus reserved for black people, but since the whites’ section was fully occupied, the white person wanted her seat.
In response to the imprisonment of Rosa Parks, a relatively unknown Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., led the protests against the Montgomery bus company, which forced the public transport authority to end the practice of racial segregation in those vehicles. It was the signal that triggered other protests against segregation. In 1956 the Parks case finally reached the US Supreme Court, which declared segregation on the buses to be unconstitutional. Rosa Parks, who had been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since 1950, found herself transformed into an icon of the civil rights movement, for which she continued to work throughout her life. She died in 2005. Without her, Barack Obama might not be president of the United States today.
The reference to Martin Luther King in the last post reminded me of a column published in 1968 or 1969 under the title “Recipe for Killing a Man.” I include it here again as a tribute to a true revolutionary who opened the way for the imminent and definitive end to racial segregation in the United States.
Take a few dozen kilos of flesh, bones, and blood, according to the relevant patterns. Arrange them harmoniously into head, torso, and limbs, fill them with innards and a network of veins and nerves, being careful to avoid the manufacturer’s flaws that can result in the appearance of teratological phenomena. The color of the skin has no significance whatsoever.
Give the product of this tricky piece of work the name Man. Serve hot or cold, depending on the latitude, the season of the year, age, and temperament. When you mean to launch your prototypes on the market, instill in them a few qualities that will make them stand out from the common stock: courage, intelligence, sensitivity, character, a love of justice, active kindness, a respect for one’s neighbor and for those further away. Second-rate products will have one or another of these positive attributes, to a greater or lesser degree, alongside those opposite qualities that tend to predominate. Modesty demands that we do not consider products that are wholly positive or wholly negative as viable. In any case, be aware that in these matters the color of the skin still has no significance whatsoever.
But a man is classified by a personal label, so as to distinguish him from his associates who have come off the production line just like him, and assigned to live in a building called Society. He will occupy one or another of the floors of this building, but only rarely will he be allowed to go up the stairs. Going down is permitted, and at times even facilitated. The floors of the building contain many homes, assigned sometimes by social standing, at other times by profession. Movement comes about through channels called habit, custom, and prejudice. It is dangerous to swim against this current, though some men do so their whole lives. These men, into whose fleshly mass are born the qualities that almost touch perfection, or who have chosen these qualities deliberately, cannot be distinguished by the color of their skin. There are some who are white and some who are black, some who are yellow and some who are brown. There are fewer copper-colored ones, these being a near-extinct species.
Man’s ultimate destiny, as we have known since the beginning of the world, is death. At its precise moment, death is the same for everyone. What immediately precedes it is not. One can die simply, like someone falling asleep; one can die in the clutches of one of those illnesses said euphemistically to be unforgiving; one can die under torture, in a concentration camp; one can die vaporized inside an atomic sun; one can die at the wheel of a Jaguar, or run over by one; one can die of hunger or indigestion; one can also die of a rifle shot, in the late afternoon, when it is still daylight and you don’t think death is near. But the color of a man’s skin has no significance whatsoever.
Martin Luther King was a man like any of us. He had the virtues we know of, and doubtless some defects that in no way diminish his virtues. He had work to do—and he was doing it. He was fighting against the currents of custom, habit, and prejudice, in them up to his neck. Until the rifle shot came to remind the absent-minded people we are that the color of a man’s skin is very important indeed.
Some would say that cynicism is an illness afflicting the elderly, an ailment of one’s final days, a sclerosis of the will. I wouldn’t dare to say that this diagnosis is completely wrong, but what I would say is that it is too easy to dismiss our problems that way, as though the current state of the world were a mere consequence of the fact that old people are old . . . To this day the hopefulness of young people has never succeeded in making the world a better place, and old people’s ever increasing acerbity has never been so bad that it has made it worse. Of course the world—poor old thing—isn’t responsible for the ills it suffers. What we call the state of the world is the state of ourselves, wretched humanity, inevitably made up of old people who were once young, young people who will be old, and those who are no longer young but are not yet old. And the blame? I have heard it said that we are all to blame, that there is no one who can boast of being innocent, but it seems to me that such statements, which appear to distribute justice evenly, serve only to dilute and conceal in some imaginary collective guilt the responsibilities of those who really are to blame. Not for the state of the world but for the state of life.
I write this on a day on which hundreds of men, women and children have arrived in Spain and Italy on the fragile crafts they usually employ to reach the supposed paradises of a wealthy Europe. One of these boats reached the island of Hierro, in the Canaries, carrying a dead child, and some of the shipwrecked people said that during the journey twenty more of their fellow martyrs had died and been thrown into the sea . . . Just please don’t talk to me about cynicism . . .
The most harmful dogmas are not really those that have been explicitly declared as such, as is the case with religious dogmas, because they appeal to faith, and faith doesn’t know and cannot discuss itself. What is bad is the transformation into dogma of a secular system or theory that never aspired to be a dogma at all. Marx, for example, was not dogmatic, but straightaway there was no shortage of pseudo-Marxists to convert Das Kapital into a new Bible, exchanging active thought for sterile commentary or perverse interpretation. And you saw what happened. One day, if we are able to break free of ancient iron molds, to slough off an old skin that doesn’t allow us to grow, we will meet Marx again; perhaps a Marxist re-reading of Marxism would help us to open up more generous pathways into the act of thinking. Then we would have to start by looking for an answer to the fundamental question: “Why do I think the way I think?” In other words, “What is ideology?” Such questions may seem to be of little importance, but I don’t think there are any that matter more. . .
The initials stand for Rádio Clube Português—Portuguese Radio Club—and I don’t think there can be a single Portuguese person who doesn’t know it. Today, November 13, the day I write these brief lines, the R.C.P. has decided to dedicate part of its broadcast to the première of Blindness, directed by Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and based on my novel Ensaio sobre a Cegueira [Essay on Blindness, published in English as Blindness]. Pilar, who has only good ideas, thought we ought to pay a courtesy visit to the channel and to the presenters of Janela Aberta—“Open Window”—which is what the program in question is called. We went there in the greatest secrecy, sure of giving them a not unpleasant surprise. What we didn’t expect was how much better than ours the surprise they gave us would be. The two presenters were blind—their eyes blindfolded with a black cloth. . . There are moments that manage to be both moving and pleasing, and this was one of them. I would like to record my gratitude and my profound recognition of the proof of friendship they gave us.
I’m told that the interviews were worth doing. I, as usual, tend to doubt this, perhaps because I’m tired of listening to myself. What might seem new to other people has with the passing of time turned into a reheated soup for me. Or, worse still, I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth due to the certainty that the handful of sensible things I’ve said in my life have turned out after all to be of absolutely no consequence. And why should they be of consequence? What significance does the buzzing of bees inside the hive have? Do they use it to communicate with one another? Or is it a simple effect of nature, merely a consequence of being alive, with no pre-existing consciousness or intent, like an apple tree bearing apples without any concern for whether someone might come and eat them or not? And what about us? Do we talk for the same reason we perspire? Just because we do? Sweat evaporates, is washed away, disappears, sooner or later ends up in the clouds. And words? Where do they go? How many of them remain? And for how long? And what for, after all? I know, these are idle words, appropriate for someone turning eighty-six. Or perhaps not so idle when I think of my grandfather Jerónimo, who in his final hours went to bid farewell to the trees he had planted, embracing them and weeping because he knew he wouldn’t see them again. It’s a lesson worth learning. So I embrace the words I have written, I wish them long life, and resume my writing where I left off. There can be no other response.
I do try to be a practical kind of stoic, in my own way, but indifference as a condition for happiness has never been a part of my life, and if it’s true that I stubbornly seek spiritual peace, it’s also true that I have not liberated myself—nor do I mean to liberate myself—from passions. I try to get myself used to the idea (without too much drama) that not only must the body perish one day but that in a certain respect it is already, at every moment, perishing. What does this matter, however, if each gesture, each word, each emotion is capable of denying this mortality, also at every moment? The truth is, I feel myself alive, very much alive, whenever for one reason or other I have to talk about death . . .
I have just come back from the Casa do Alentejo where I took part in an act of solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for their complete sovereignty and freedom from the senseless acts and crimes perpetrated by Israel. I made a suggestion there—that from January 20, the date Barack Obama assumes power, the White House should be flooded with messages of support for the Palestinian people, demanding a rapid solution to the confl ict. If Barack Obama wants to rid his country of the disgrace of racism, he should do the same in Israel. For sixty years the Palestinian people have been made to suffer in cold blood with the tacit or active complicity of the international community. It’s time to put a stop to it.
I’ve been signing copies of A Viagem do Elefante [The Elephant’s Journey]1 at the publisher’s for a good part of the morning. Most will remain in Portugal, as gifts for friends and colleagues, but others will travel to distant lands, such as Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania, and Sweden—where the recipients were Amadeu Batel, our compatriot and professor of Portuguese literature at Stockholm University, and the poet and novelist Kjell Espmark, a member of the Swedish Academy. As I was dedicating the book to Espmark I remembered what he told me and Pilar about the backstage goings-on over the prize that was awarded to me. Ensaio sobre a Cegueira [Blindness] had already been translated into Swedish and made a good impression on the members of the Academy, so good in fact that they had almost decided among themselves that the Nobel Prize that year, 1998, would be mine. It so happened, however, that the previous year I had published another book, Todos os Nomes [All the Names], which in principle, of course, shouldn’t have posed any obstacle to the decision taken, apart from a question raised by the scruples of my judges: “And what if this new book is bad?” They charged Kjell Espmark to find an answer to this question, giving him the responsibility of reading the book in its original language. Espmark, who has a certain familiarity with Portuguese, fulfilled his mission with great discipline. With the help of a dictionary, at the height of August, when it would have been more appealing to sail among the islands that cluster around the Swedish coast, he read, word by word, the story of the clerk José and the woman whom he loved without ever having seen her. I passed my exam: the little book was no less good than Blindness after all. Phew.
We’re traveling to Brazil,2 where we are awaited by a program as heavily laden as a sky threatening rain. I trust, however, that some opportunity can be arranged so that this conversation doesn’t need to be suspended for a week, which is how long my absence will last. Being in Brazil, we know there won’t be any lack of material, so if there is a problem it will be a shortage of available time. We’ll see. Wish us bon voyage, and from now on do please be so kind as to look after the elephant for us while we’re away.
It wasn’t easy getting to Brazil. It wasn’t even easy leaving the airport. Portela is crawling with people of both sexes who look at us with mistrust, as though we had a history of actual or potential terrorism written on our faces, denouncing us. These people are called security, which is quite ironical, since judging by my own experience and that of those I can see around me there are no travelers who feel even a tiny bit secure in their presence. We encountered our first problem when our hand luggage was being checked. As I am still on the rebound from an illness I suffered and from which, fortunately, I’ve been recovering, I have to take regular medication—every two weeks—that has to be accompanied by a medical statement when I pass through the airport. We presented this statement, stamped and signed just as the regulations demand, thinking that within a minute we’d be allowed through. But that was not what happened. The piece of paper was laboriously read through by “security” (a woman), who thought it best to call one of her superiors, who read the statement with furrowed brow, perhaps waiting for some revelation to appear to him between the lines. Then began a game of pushing and shoving. The “security” woman had already two or three times made the worrying pronouncement, “We will have to check,” a statement backed up by her boss, who repeated it not twice or three times, but five or six times. What they had to check was right there before their eyes, a piece of paper and the medication; there was nothing else to see. It was an animated discussion, only brought to an end when I—impatient and irritated—said, “Well, if you’ve got to check, then check, and be done with it.” The boss shook his head and replied, “I’ve checked already, but this bottle has got to stay.” The bottle—if we can give the name to a little plastic yogurt jar—was taken off to join other dangerous explosives that had been previously apprehended. As we were leaving I couldn’t help thinking that responsibility for airport security, at this rate, would yet end up being handed over to the Worshipful Company of Nightclub Bouncers . . .
The worst, however, was yet to come. For more than half an hour I don’t know how many of us passengers were packed together, crammed like canned sardines in the bus that was meant to be taking us to the plane. For more than half an hour, so tightly packed we could hardly move, with the doors open so that the cold morning air could circulate at will. No explanation, no word of apology. We were treated like cattle. If the plane had crashed, one might very well have said that this bus ride was our trip to the slaughterhouse.
In Brazil, between one interview and the next, I learned two pieces of news: one of them, the bad, terrible news, was that the storm that occasionally breaks over São Paulo, and a few raging minutes later leaves a clear sky and the feeling that nothing has happened, has caused at least fifty-nine deaths in the south, and left thousands of people without a home, without a roof over their heads to sleep tonight, without a place to live. We cannot be indifferent to stories like these, however many times we read them. Quite the contrary—each time we hear of some new natural disaster our pain and impatience increases. And we ask the question no one can answer, even though we know an answer exists: How long will we live, or how long will the poorest live, at the mercy of the rains, winds, and drought, when we know that a solution to all these phenomena can be found in the way our lives are arranged? How long will we avert our eyes, as though human beings didn’t matter? These fifty-nine people who died in Santa Catarina, Brazil, the country where I am now, needn’t have died such a death. This is something we all know.
The other piece of news is that the Spanish National Prize for Letters has been awarded to Juan Goytisolo, who today I recall from the time he was in Lanzarote, with Monique, with Gómez Aguilera, talking together about their books and the task of writing. Monique is no longer with us; she can’t see this prize that is finally awarded to Goytisolo, so long after we read his fi rst book, which then had just been published. Juan, I send you a hug and my congratulations.
We have just come out of a press conference in São Paulo—a group interview, as they call it here.
I was surprised that several journalists wanted to ask me about my role as blogger, when we had a poster behind us for a superb exhibition, organized by the César Manrique Foundation in the Tomie Ohtake Institute, with the most important delegates and sponsors, and with the presentation of the new book on display. But many journalists were interested by my decision to write on “the infinite page of the Internet.” Could it be, to put it more clearly, that it’s here that we all most closely resemble one another? Is this the closest thing we have to citizen power? Are we more companionable when we write on the Internet? I have no answers; I’m merely stating the questions. And I enjoy writing here now. I don’t know whether it is more democratic, I only know that I feel just the same as the young man with the wild hair and the round-rimmed glasses, in his early twenties, who was asking me the questions. For a blog, no doubt.
We are still in Brazil, Pilar and I, and moved by the Santa Catarina tragedy, in which the number of dead and missing keeps going up, as do the human interest stories, of the desolation and despair of the survivors, that are coming to us from there. We crossed paths with President Lula, on his way to visit the area hit by the tragedy. He has to bring a great deal of consolation in order to persuade people that the State is useful. Consolation in words and in deeds. We human beings need both of these. They tell us that people who work in companies are spontaneously organizing collections to help the victims. For those who, like us, haven’t experienced the tragedy directly, gestures like these console us too; they make us believe that the young woman from the publisher’s is concerned with the fate of people she has never met. This is an image of the world that is possible.
This afternoon I presented A Viagem do Elefante [The Elephant’s Journey] at the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In his speech Alberto da Costa e Silva said that we are all libraries, because we keep what we read inside us like the best parts of ourselves. Alberto and I are old friends, which is why this former president of the Academy and former ambassador wanted to present my book as something with which he had a connection. Beforehand we had a meeting with members of the Academy, attended by generous friends like Cleonice Berardineli and Teresa Cristina Cerdeira da Silva, who are not members, though they are a part of the spiritual aristocracy, something that is truly necessary for social evolution. Before that we were with Chico Buarque, who is about to finish a new book. If it is anything like Budapest, we’ll have quite a piece of work. Chico, the singer, the musician, the writer, is one of those all-round men who combine doing quality work with being good guys. Today was a worthwhile day. No doubt.
“Sexual exploitation is such an important subject for humanity that there can be no hypocrisy about it. We must convince the world’s parents that sex education at home is as important as food on the table. If we don’t teach sex education in schools, our adolescents will learn like animals out on the streets. We must eliminate religious hypocrisy, and that goes for all religions.”
The words I quote above are those of Lula da Silva, president of Brazil. He was speaking at a global congress, the third that has been called to confront the problem of the sexual exploitation to which children and adolescents all over the world are subjected. The Queen of Sweden also made an appeal for action that will put an end to the delinquent behavior against young people that has taken over the Internet. Both spoke of these serious problems affecting a vulnerable portion of society, predominantly harming the child and adolescent populations in the poorest regions of the planet, where there is a lack of schools, the concept of the family simply doesn’t exist, and people are ruled by a television that broadcasts violence and sex twenty-four hours a day. Who will hear the wise words spoken at the Congress against Sexual Exploitation?
Anyway, I wanted to talk about the presentation of A Viagem do Elefante in São Paulo, but this subject got in my way and it takes precedence. We’ll leave the book for tomorrow.
The last image we will take with us from Brazil is of a lovely bookshop, a cathedral for books—modern, efficient, beautiful. It is the Livraria Cultura—the Cultura Bookshop—in the Conjunto Nacional. It is a bookshop for buying books, of course, but also for appreciating the impressive sight of so many titles arranged in such an attractive way, as though it weren’t a warehouse, as though what we are dealing with were a work of art. The Livraria Cultura is a work of art.
My editor, Luis Schwarcz from Companhia das Letras, knew that I would be moved by this marvel, which was why he brought me there. I was also quite moved by the Companhia bookshop, seeing those glowing shelves with essential texts, with timeless classics displayed just as new books are displayed elsewhere. And all together offered up to the reader, who is left with the difficult but interesting dilemma of not knowing what to choose.
A good send-off from São Paulo. Last night, before having dinner at the house of Tomie Ohtake, we went to see the “Consistency of Dreams” exhibition. We were the last of the 700 people to pass through in the course of the day to see the exhibition that the César Manrique Foundation, under Fernando Gómez Aguilera, put together about the author of A Viagem do Elefante, which has already been seen in Lanzarote and Lisbon. Aguilera should be pleased: his own work is just as familiar on its own continent, just as interesting, as precise as a watch, as beautiful as the Livraria Cultura. Sometimes pieces of good news just keep accumulating. We put our faith in them.
1 Saramago’s new novel. Portuguese edition published in 2008 by Caminho. English edition to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (US) and Harvill Secker (UK).
2 On a book tour for A Viagem do Elefante.