Did the superlatively dignified notary of Badalona ever read Les Misérables, or does he belong to that portion of humanity that believes that life is learned and led only according to the law? The question is—obviously—rhetorical, and I only raised it to afford myself a way into the topic. Thus the reader will already know that the aforementioned notary could, with complete justice, be one of the characters described in Victor Hugo’s novel, that is, the public prosecutor. The book’s protagonist, Jean Valjean (do you recognize this name, Senhor Inspector?), was accused of having caused to be stolen (or of having himself stolen) a loaf of bread, a crime that cost him almost a lifetime in solitary confinement, thanks to a succession of sentences imposed to punish his repeated attempts at escape, some more successful than others. Jean Valjean suffered from a disease that affects prison populations in particular, which one might call an anxiety—or a longing—for liberty. The book is hefty, among those that today we would describe as over-endowed with pages, and most certainly would not be of interest to the Senhor Inspector, who most probably is not the right age to appreciate Les Misérables. This novel is to be read in one’s youth, before cynicism sets in; there are few adults who would be interested in the poverty and antiheroic adventures of Jean Valjean. For all this, there is always the possibility that I could be mistaken: maybe the Senhor Inspector has after all read Les Misérables. . . Should that be the case, please allow me a question: How was it that he then dared (if the verb seems a little strong to you, please select your preferred alternative) to demand a year and a half in jail for the beggar who, in Badalona, attempted to steal a baguette, and I say “attempted” advisedly, since he only succeeded in stealing half of it? How come? Was it because the inspector had only a code in place of a brain inside his skull? Kindly explain it to me, please, so that I can immediately begin preparing my defense, just in case one day I find myself up before someone like him.
I have read that this year’s gathering at Davos was not exactly a success. A lot of people didn’t turn up; the shadow of the crisis pitilessly froze the smiles on the faces of those who did; the debates lacked any real interest, possibly because no one there really knew what to say, fearful that the hard facts to come the following day would make their analyses and proposals appear ridiculous, however much effort they poured into engendering them, which in the end came up to even the most modest expectations only by mere accident. Above all, there was much talk of the disturbing dearth of ideas, and participants went so far as to admit that the “spirit of Davos” was dead. Personally, I never myself saw any sign of a “spirit” putting in an appearance, or anything even remotely resembling one. As to the alleged lack of ideas, I’m surprised that reference is being made to such a thing only now, since no ideas—or what, with all due respect, we are pleased to call ideas—ever came out of there that anyone could point to. For over thirty years, Davos has been the neocon academy par excellence, and, as far as I can recall, not a single voice was raised inside that heavenly Swiss hotel to point out how dangerous were the paths taken by the economy and the financial services. The winds were getting up, but not one of them wanted to notice that storms were on the way. And now they tell us they are running out of ideas. Let us watch and see if ideas arise, now their one line of thought has run out of lies to tell us.
What can be done about the bankers? They tell us that the founders of the banking system, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at least in Central Europe, were in general Calvinists, folk with an exigent moral code who, at least for a while, had the laudable scruple to labor honestly at their profession. That period must have been short, given the infinite power of money to corrupt. Gradually, the banks changed a great deal, and always for the worse. Now, in the midst of an economic crisis affecting financial systems around the world, we are beginning to experience the uncomfortable sensation that those who are going to come off best from the financial storms are precisely our Senhores Bankers. Everywhere governments, following the logic of the absurd, rushed to rescue the banks from losses for which, for the most part, those self-same bankers were responsible. Millions of millions left state coffers (or the accounts of the bankers’ clients) in order to keep hundreds of major banks afloat and to allow them to resume one of their principal functions, that of providing credit. It would seem there are serious signs that bankers had their wits about them, abusively assuming that the money was theirs simply because it happened to be in their grasp and, as if all this weren’t already more than enough, reacting coldheartedly to pressure from their governments to put the cash rapidly into circulation, the one way to save thousands of businesses from failure and millions of workers from unemployment. It is now clear that bankers are not men to be trusted, the proof being the disdain with which they bite the hand that feeds them.
At the start of the 1960s, when I worked at a publisher’s in Lisbon, I edited a book with the title Seis milhoes de mortos (Six Million Dead), which told the story of Adolf Eichmann, the principal executor of the plan to exterminate the Jews (six million of them), which he systematically carried through to the bitter and almost scientific end, in the Nazi concentration camps. Critical as I have always been of the oppression and repression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state, my main argument in condemning them was and continues to be on a moral plane: the unspeakable sufferings inflicted on the Jews throughout history, and most especially as part of what is called the final solution, ought to afford the Israelis of today (or of the past sixty years, to be precise) the best possible reason not to commit their very own tyrannies on Palestinian land. What Israel needs above all else is a moral revolution. Firm in this conviction, I will never deny the Holocaust. I only wish to extend the concept to the outrage, humiliation, and violation of every kind to which the Palestinian people have been subjected. That is, after all, my right for as long as the facts bear me out as they do. I am a free writer who expresses himself as freely regarding our world as it permits. I do not have available to me as much information on this subject as the pope—or the Catholic Church in general—is able to access. What I know of these matters from the early 1960s onwards is adequate for my purposes. All the same, it seems to me highly reprehensible the Vatican should behave so ambiguously over the question of the bishops who have sworn obedience to the Lefebvrists, formerly excommunicated but now cleansed of their sins by papal fiat. Ratzinger was never a man with whom I shared any intellectual sympathies. I view him as someone who makes great efforts to disguise, even to hide, what he actually thinks. This is hardly unusual behavior on the part of church congregations, but when it becomes that of a pope, even an atheist such as I should have the right to demand directness, coherence, and a critical conscience. A self-critical one wouldn’t go amiss, either.
It was a pleasure to see him. He remains the same sober, intelligent, and sensitive man as ever. Twenty years ago we campaigned together in the nongovernmental elections, which we succeeded first in winning and then in celebrating. He won the position of president of the Lisbon town council, an office he went on to exercise with consummate competence and innovation, while I went on to perform the luckless task of being president of a regional town hall of poor repute. We courageously went up and down the streets, squares, and market places of Lisbon asking for votes even though—I suspect out of modesty—we did so as unobtrusively as possible. As has already been mentioned, we won, although the real winner was the city of Lisbon, which should be proud of itself for making Sampaio its representative at the highest level of the National Council Chamber. That president in turn became president of the republic for two terms, and left his mark as a personality born to civilized dialogue, to a free solicitation of open consensus, never overlooking the fact that politics, or service to the community, should be a loyal and coherent service, otherwise it risks becoming the mere instrument of personal and partisan interests, not necessarily of the cleanest reputation. We promised to meet again when we had greater leisure, a mutual promise that I hope to see fully accomplished in the near future, despite the intense activity around the project called Alianca de Civilizacões (Alliance of Civilizations), of which he is the chief representative. You know that with Jorge Sampaio there are no false words, and we know we can trust in his words because they are an accurate depiction of what he thinks.
Or Vaticanisms. I cannot bear to see those cardinals and bishops decked out with a luxury that would scandalize poor Jesus of Nazareth, humbly dressed in his seamless tunic of the cheapest fabric. It matters not how inconsequential such a thing might appear, though it is hard not to be reminded of the crazy parade of ecclesiastical fashions that Fellini brilliantly inserted into his 8½ for his and our delectation. Those gentlemen appear to believe they are cloaked in power, a power that has only persisted thanks to our tolerance. They call themselves the representatives of God on earth (not that they have either seen Him or presented the least proof of His existence), but pass through the world sweating hypocrisy from every pore. Whether or not they always lie, every word they either speak or write has behind it another word that negates or delimits, corrupts or perverts it. Many of us were more or less used to all this before growing up to become either indifferent or, worse still, contemptuous of it. It has become commonplace to say that Mass and church attendances are rapidly falling, but permit me to suggest that numbers are also falling among those who, while not necessarily believers themselves, used to go into a church to enjoy its architectural beauty and that of its paintings and sculptures—in sum, a setting of which the falsity of the doctrine that sustains it is hardly worthy.
Cardinals and bishops, and naturally also the pope who governs them, are now getting off lightly. They live as parasites on civil society and are not obliged to account for themselves. Throughout the lengthy but implacable sinking of this Titanic that is the Catholic Church, the pope and his acolytes, steeped in nostalgia for the time when they wielded real power, thanks to a criminal complicity between throne and altar, are now attempting by whatever means, not excluding moral blackmail, to insinuate themselves into various governments, in particular those that for social and historical reasons remain reluctant to abandon the submissiveness that persists in all their dealings with Vatican institutions. This type of (religious?) intimidation makes me sad when it threatens to paralyze the Spanish government, which has always had to confront not only papal emissaries but also their very own domestic “popes.” And there’s something more: as a person, an intellectual, and a citizen, I am deeply offended by the way the pope and his cohorts disregard Rodríguez Zapatero’s government, which the Spanish people wholeheartedly elected. It would appear that someone urgently needs to throw a shoe at one of these cardinals.
Sigifredo López is the name of a Colombian member of parliament held hostage by the FARC1 for over seven years, and who has just regained his freedom thanks to the courage and persistence of, among others, Señora Piedad Córdoba, director of the social and humanitarian movement Colombians for Peace. Thanks also to an unforeseeable set of circumstances, Sigifredo López was the sole survivor of a group of eleven kidnapped MPs, ten of whom were recently murdered by the terrorist organization. He managed to escape and now is at liberty. At a press conference just held in the city of Cali, he thanked Piedad Córdoba in terms that moved all who heard him, and his powerful words and images reached out to us here. It’s not for me to boast of my emotional control. I cry easily, and it has nothing to do with my age. But on this occasion I was obliged to break with custom when Sigifredo, in order to express his infinite gratitude to Piedad Córdoba, compared her to the wife of the doctor in my Ensaio sobre a cegueira. Kindly put yourselves in my place: thousands of kilometers between me and those words and images, and poor me, dissolved in floods of tears, and with no other recourse than to take refuge on Pilar’s shoulder and let them flow freely. My entire existence as a man and a writer was justified by that moment. Thank you, Sigifredo.
Let us face facts. Some years ago (already a great many) the famous Swiss theologian Hans Küng wrote this maxim: “Religions never served to bring people closer together.” No truer word was ever spoken. That is not to say (it would be absurd even to think so) that you haven’t the right to adopt whatever religion most appeals to you, from the best-known to the least-heard-of, or to follow its precepts and dogmas (whatever they might be), without questioning a recourse to faith, which is its own supreme justification and by definition (as we know all too well) entirely closed to the most elementary powers of reasoning. It is indeed possible that faith moves mountains, even without the confirmation that something similar ever actually occurred, for God has never appeared disposed to experiment in that kind of way, or to employ his powers in such a geological undertaking. What we do know is that religions not only fail to bring people closer together, but actually exist—these religions—in a state of mutual enmity, despite all the pseudoecumenical speeches which the rank opportunism of one lot or another deems profitable for occasional and generally fleeting tactical and strategic reasons. Things have been this way ever since the world has been the world, and there is no clear prospect that it might change to any degree. Apart, that is, from the obvious notion that the planet would be a far more peaceful place if we were all atheists. Of course, human nature being the way it is, there is no lack of other motives for every kind of disagreement, but at least we would be free of the infantile and ridiculous notion of believing that our god is the best of any number of others on offer, and that Heaven awaits us in a five-star hotel. More even than this, I believe we would start reinventing philosophy.
As we usually say to someone who is feeling confused, “Learn to know yourself”—as if self-knowledge were not the fifth most difficult operation of human arithmetic to acquire. In the same way, we generally remind someone who is feeling apathetic, “To want is to get”—just as if the world’s beastly realities did not have more fun with their daily inversion of the relative position of the two verbs. Similarly, it is common to say to someone indecisive, “Begin at the beginning,” as if this beginning were the obvious starting point of a knotted ball of yarn, and we could unravel it until the very end was as clearly in view. As if between the former and the latter—the beginning and the end—we had a smooth and continuous line between our fingers, with no knots to unravel or disentangle, something that would indeed be unthinkable in the life of a ball of yarn. And, if the reader will permit me another phrase written to inverted effect, in the yarns of our lives.
It is an ancient culinary practice of the Western world to toss a live lobster into boiling water and cook it in a pot. Apparently, if an already dead lobster were conveyed to the pan, the ultimate flavor would change, and for the worse. There are those who insist that the bright red color the crustacean acquires on cooking is exclusively due to the exceptionally high water temperature. I don’t know about this; I speak only of what I have heard, since I am incapable even of boiling an egg. One day I watched a documentary about what hens are fed on and how slowly they are brought to be killed and the methods used, and it almost made me vomit. On another occasion I cannot expunge from my memory, I read a magazine article about the use of rabbits in the cosmetics industry, which informed me that, in order that no irritation might be caused to my eyes by the contents of my shampoo bottle, its formula was first squirted into the eyes of these small animals, the way the black-hearted Dr. Death injected petrol into his victims’ hearts. Today a brief insert in my newspaper informs me that in China, bird feathers, the kind used for stuffing pillows, are plucked from live birds, before being cleaned, disinfected, and exported to bring pleasure to civilized Western societies, who know what is best for us and what is in the latest fashion. I make no comment, for there is no need: these feathers speak for themselves.
I am generally described as pessimistic. In spite of how I might formerly have appeared, and the emphasis I usually accord my radical skepticism as to the possibility of any effective and substantive improvement in our species regarding what used to be known as moral progress, I would actually prefer to be optimistic, even if only to retain a hope that the sun, having risen every day up until today, will also rise tomorrow. And so it will, but there will also be a day when it no longer rises. These opening reflections are prompted by a consideration of the subject of domestic abuse, the insane ill treatment of a woman by a man, whether he is her husband, fiancé, or lover. Woman, subjugated throughout history to male power, became reduced to a thing without greater prestige than a servant—a man’s servant, in charge of nothing more than the responsibility of restoring a man, exhausted from his physical labor, to sufficient strength to return to work again. Even today, when she has access to every place outside the home, is free of all constraints, and engages in activities that men once deemed exclusively masculine, it would appear, though we still do not wish to confront the fact, that the overwhelming majority of women continue to live inside a system of relationships that could well belong to the Middle Ages. They are beaten, brutalized, sexually exploited, enslaved to traditions, customs, and obligations that they never chose and that continue to maintain them in submission to male tyranny. And, when the hour arrives, they risk death by murder.
Schools affect to ignore that reality, which is hardly surprising, since we know that the teaching capacity of our educational system is a shadow of what it was. The family, the perfect home to every contradiction, the cradle of all egotism, an institution in permanent failure, is undergoing the gravest crisis in its entire history. The state starts from a first principle that all of us will die sooner or later, and that women cannot be treated as an exception. To some delirious imaginations, to die at the hands of your husband, fiancé, or lover, whether by gun or knife, might just be a better proof of mutual love than any other: him killing and her dying. In the darkest recesses of the human mind, all is indeed possible.
What can be done? Others may know better than we do, but may not say so. Since the fragile society in which we live would be scandalized at the introduction of measures to inflict permanent social exile for this type of crime, at the very least prison terms should be increased to the maximum, with no possibility of sentence reduction for good behavior. Good behavior? Please don’t make me laugh.
As luck would have it, the door of the house on Lanzarote was on its way to becoming the entrance to their new home. They were only twenty yards away from the shore, at Costa Teguise, and at the sight no doubt merry smiles and words of joy passed between them at having finally reached safe haven, when a sudden squall overturned their raft. They had crossed over fifty miles from the African coast and probably met their death that mere twenty yards from salvation. Of the more than thirty immigrants—mainly youngsters and teenagers—whose extreme need forced them to brave the dangers of the deep, twenty-four drowned, including a pregnant woman and several small children. Six were saved, thanks to the courage and self-sacrifice of two surfers, who plunged into the water and rescued them from certain death.
This is, in the most simple and direct words I can find, the account of what happened here. I don’t know what more I can say. Today I lack the words and am overwhelmed by the emotion. How long can such a situation go on?
I recognize that such a question could sound somewhat offensive to sensitive ears. What does it mean? It is simply an appeal to the entire population, and begs them to account for the use of their vote to crown, at every available opportunity, the increasingly flagrant right-wing party whose head is Berlusconi, who has been granted the powers of absolute lord and master of Italy and of millions of Italians. The truth also being, as I may have already indicated, that the most offended party in all this is me. Yes, specifically me. My love for Italy is offended, along with my love for Italian culture and Italian history. Even my tenacious hope that the nightmare will somehow end and Italy will return to the exalted spirit inspired by Verdi, who was, in his time, its best manifestation, is offended. And to those intending to accuse me of gratuitously mixing music and politics, I say that every cultured and honorable Italian understands not only that I am right, but also the grounds on which I am right.
The news of Walter Ventroni’s sacking has just reached us here. Welcome news indeed, since his Democratic Party began as the caricature of a party and has ended, lacking either a manifesto or a program, as a dead weight on the political scene. The hopes we had vested in him were undermined by his ideological vagueness and the weakness of his personality. Veltroni is mainly, although not uniquely, responsible for the debilitation of the left-wing alternative of which he purported to be the savior. May he rest in peace.
Yet not all is lost. Or so the writer Andrea Camilleri and the philosopher Paolo Flores d’Arcais have just told us in an article recently published in El País. There is work to do, alongside the millions of Italians who have already lost patience at seeing their country daily held up to public ridicule. The small party headed by Antonio di Pietro, the former magistrate in the Clean Hands2 campaign, could turn the emetic situation of present-day Italy into an awakening collective catharsis ready to be harnessed to civic action for the betterment of Italian society. It is high time. Let us hope it really is.
If I could, I would close all the zoos in the world. If I could, I would also forbid the use of circus animals. I can’t be the only person to think as I do, but I would willingly risk the protests, outrage, and the ire of the majority who still enjoy seeing animals behind bars or in cages where they cannot move about according to their nature. This is what it’s like in zoos. Even more depressing than these kind of parks are the circus spectacles which serve to make animals into objects of ridicule, with pathetic small dogs dressed in skirts; seals obliged to applaud with their flippers; horses to wear feathers in their bridles; monkeys to ride bicycles; lions to jump through hoops; mules trained to chase black-clothed dwarfs; elephants forced to balance unsteadily on metal balls. “How much fun it all looks, and the children adore it,” say their parents, who to complete their children’s education should also bring them to the training (or torture?) sessions to witness the agonies inflicted on these poor animals, the hapless victims of human cruelty. Parents also used to say that visits to the zoo were equally instructive. Perhaps they were in the past, however much I doubt it. But they are hardly so today, thanks to the numerous documentaries about animals’ lives and habitats continually available on television. If education is what it’s about, let them be better educated this way.
Ask me the reason for the above and I will tell you right away. At Barcelona Zoo there is a lonely female elephant, dying painfully of various ailments, mostly intestinal infections, which sooner or later attack animals deprived of their freedom. The additional emotional pain she suffers isn’t hard to imagine, and is intensified by the recent death of her sister elephant, who with Susi (for that is the name given to this sad and lonely survivor) shared a miserably restricted space. The floor Susi walks on is made of concrete, absolutely the worst material for the sensitive feet of these creatures, who perhaps retain a vestigial memory of the secure ground of the African savannah underfoot. I am already well aware that the world has more acute problems to worry about than the well-being of a cow elephant, but the fine reputation Barcelona enjoys entails certain obligations, and whether or not my assertion seems just a personal eccentricity, I say that this happens to be one of them. Taking proper care of Susi would involve awarding her a more dignified end to a life than that of seeking refuge in such a depressingly confined space, or of having to tread on a concrete floor that is a very hell to her. To whom should I speak? To the director of the Barcelona Zoo? To the town hall? Or to the Generalitat of Catalonia?
Ibañez, of course. Who else? I can recognize his voice in any place or at any time it reaches my ears. I first came to know his voice at the start of the 1970s, when a friend sent one of his records to me in Paris, a piece of now ancient vinyl that years of technological improvements have rendered long since out of fashion, but which I retain as a treasure without price. I am not exaggerating: at that period of political oppression at home in Portugal, the record appeared to me as made of magic, its sounds almost transcendent, bringing me the sonorous glories of the best of Spanish poetry, and that voice (Paco’s unmistakable voice) was its perfect vehicle, the vehicle par excellence of the most profound human fraternity. Today, as I was at work in my library, Pilar put on his last recording of the Andalusian poets. I stopped what I was writing and surrendered myself to the pleasures of the moment and of the memory of that initial instant of discovery when I first heard him. With age (which has to have something—for once something good—to do with it), Paco’s voice has gained a particular velvety quality, fresh powers of expression, and a warmth that envelops your heart. Tomorrow, Saturday, Paco Ibañez will sing at Argèles-sur-Mer, on the coast of Provence, in homage to the memory of the Spanish Republicans, among them his father, who suffered torments, humiliations, ill treatment of every kind, in one of the concentration camps the French built to incarcerate the refugee Republicans. To them la douce France was as bitter as their worst enemies. May Paco’s voice soften the echoes of those sufferings; may it be capable of opening up paths of genuine fraternity in the spirits of those who hear it. It is something we all really need.
Antonio Machado died seventy years ago today. Beside his resting place in the cemetery at Collioure there is a letter box that daily receives mail addressed to him, written by people filled with a tireless love that refuses to accept that the poet of Campos de Castilla could be dead. They are right, for few people are as alive as he. With the text below, composed for the fiftieth anniversary of Machado’s death, and for the International Congress that took place in Turin, organized by Pablo Luis Avila and Giancarlo Depretis, I took my modest place in the queue. One more letter to Antonio Machado. I remember, as clearly as if it were today, that man called Antonio Machado. At the time I was fourteen years old and going to school to acquire skills that would later be of little use to me. Spain was at war. The combatants on one side were called the reds, and the other side, according to the generosity that was their hallmark, chose a color like that of the skies when the weather is good. The dictator of my country so loved this blue army that he ordered the newspapers to publish reports couched in such terms as to convince the naïve that every combat ended in the victory of his friends. I had a map where I planted little flags of glossy paper stuck to pins. That was the front line. This proved that I knew Antonio Machado without even needing to read him, something we have to forgive, given my extreme youth at the time. One day, when I thought I might be discovered by the officers of the Portuguese armed forces responsible for press censorship, I threw out the map with the little flags on it. I unthinkingly allowed myself to be led by a sort of rashness, a youthful impatience, that Antonio Machado had done nothing to deserve and of which I repent today. And so the years rolled on. At what point I don’t recall, but at some point I learned that this man was a poet, and I felt so excited by this that, without any hope of vainglorious future reward, I set to reading everything he had written. At precisely that moment, I also learned that he had just died, so naturally I went to place a flag at Collioure. If I am correct, it is high time for us to plant this flag in the heart of Spain. However, we can leave his bones precisely where they are.
We are correct, and being correct helps those who propose to construct a better world before it is too late. However, either we don’t know how to communicate to others the substance of our ideas, or we come up against a wall of suspicion, or of ideological preconceptions or social or class prejudice that, if it doesn’t succeed in stopping us completely, ends—in the worst-case scenario—by arousing in many of us all kinds of doubts and worries, which can themselves prove paralyzing. If one day the world is to succeed in becoming a better place, I know it will only result through our own actions. Let us become more conscious and proud of our part in history, for there are instances in which humility is our worst counsel. Let us be heard saying the word left aloud and loudly. Let others hear and take note.
I have written these reflections for an election pamphlet for the United Left of Euzkadi,3 but I have written it while thinking also of the left in my own country, of the left in general. Despite what the world is going through, the left continues not to raise its head. As if it had no right to.
On July 22, 2005, a Brazilian citizen, Jean-Charles de Menezes, by profession an electrician, was murdered at a tube station in London by officers of the Metropolitan Police, who took him—or so they say—for a terrorist. He got into a tube compartment, sat down quietly, and it would seem he even had time to open the free newspaper he had picked up at the station, when the police burst in and dragged him onto the platform.4 Then they knocked him to the ground and fired on him ten times, with seven shots to the head. From day one, Scotland Yard has done nothing but create obstacles to a proper investigation. There was no judgment given. The prosecution prevented the police from being implicated and the judge forbade the jury to return a guilty verdict. You will therefore be ready, if one day you see a white wig appear before you—just like in the movies—to kindly tell the wearer what honest people like you think of this form of justice.
When Camões appeared in these parts around fourteen years ago, with the black coat and white tie that so distinguish him from all other examples of the canine species, all those of the human variety in the house pronounced on the newcomer’s presumed breed: he was a poodle. I was alone in insisting that he was not a French poodle but a Portuguese water dog. Since I am not particularly a dog expert it would hardly be surprising if I had got it wrong, but when the rest of them declared him to be a poodle, I remained firm in my convictions. Over time, the matter ceased to be of interest: poodle or water dog, former companion to Pepe and Greta (who have already ascended to Dog Heaven), he became merely Camões. Dogs live too short a time for the amount of love they bestow on us, and Camões, this last repository of the love we have lavished on all three, has already lived for fourteen years, and the ailments of old age have begun to bother him. Nothing too serious, as it happens, but yesterday he gave us a shock: Camões was running a fever, he was droopy, he huddled in corners, and from time to time let out a high, weird wail. Strangest of all, despite seeming devoid of all strength, he went down to the end of the garden and started scrabbling in the soil, excavating a pit, which in Pilar’s imagination was the most sinister symptom of all. Happily, the bad phase has passed, at least for the time being. The vet couldn’t find anything seriously wrong, and Camões, as if to placate us, has recovered his agility, his appetite, and his characteristic good humor, and now walks about joyful as a flower with his lady friend Boli, who spends a fair amount of time at our home.
By coincidence, it was today that news came that the dog promised by Obama to his daughters was to be just such another Portuguese water dog. No doubt this has to be a significant diplomatic triumph for Portugal, from which our country should draw maximum benefit in terms of our bilateral relations with the United States, so unexpectedly facilitated by one of our most obviously direct representatives—I would even be tempted to say our ambassador—to the White House. New times are on their way. I am absolutely certain that now, were Pilar and I to return to the United States, the border police would no longer impound our computers in order to take copies of the hard drives.
1 The guerrilla movement Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, which has intermittently controlled whole regions of the Colombian countryside.
2 With an anti-Mafia platform.
3 The Basque country.
4 Jean-Charles de Menezes was in fact put down on the floor of the train carriage and shot seven times at point-blank range. All the witnesses present on the crowded tube train insisted in their evidence that no police warning had been given before the plainclothes officers shot him dead.