Among the new generation of Portuguese romantic novelists, meaning those aged between approximately thirty and forty, we have Gonçalo M. Tavares, one of the most distinguished and original writers. Author of an impressively extensive body of work, in the main the outcome of long and meticulous labor undertaken away from the world’s gaze, the writer of O Senhor Valery [Mr. Valery], a small book that spent many months on my bedside table, burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with a wholly unique imagination that broke every link with what was current in imaginative fiction. Besides this, he is the master of a very particular use of language, a vernacular that he deploys in such a manner that it is no exaggeration to say—with no trace of scorn for the excellent young novelists whose talents we enjoy nowadays—that he has become the benchmark, and there is now a pre-Gonçalo and a post-Gonçalo in fiction writing. I consider that this is the greatest praise I can offer him. I have made a prophecy that he will receive the Nobel Prize thirty years hence, or even before, and I think I will be proved right. My one regret is that I won’t be around to offer him a congratulatory hug when this happens.
As always, some won and others lost. These election campaigns are so monotonous and repetitive and—perhaps their greatest sin—utterly predictable. It is the same here as anywhere else. Once the votes were counted, some laughed while others cried. The victors are generous, greeting citizens on all sides, including the defeated, and this despite the lack of effusion, caused by the pain of losing, on the part of the latter. The winners do not give thanks to God, for nowadays it’s old-fashioned to do so, yet they will kiss a bishop’s hand at the first opportunity.
If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe.
So I wrote in Blindness2 some years ago. Today, in Spain, at the launch of the film based on my novel, I found this refrain on the bags provided by the bookshop Ocho y Medio, and again on the dust jacket of Fernando Meirelles’s book, Diario de Rodaje,3 which the same book-shop-publisher has issued in a beautiful new edition. It is my custom sometimes to say, “Read the epigraphs in my novels and you already know the rest.” Seeing this one today, I don’t know why, I had a sudden insight as to the urgency of restoring sight and fighting blindness. Can it be because I have just seen these words written on a book in which they are not written? Or is it because in today’s world it has become necessary to fight shadows? I don’t know. But if you can see, observe.
Yesterday, in the course of a conversation with Luis Vásquez, a particularly dear friend and the healer of my various ills, we discussed Fernando Meirelles’s film, which is now showing in Madrid and which we were unable to attend, Pilar and I, as we had intended, because a sudden cold obliged me to retreat to bed, or to retire between the sheets, as they elegantly used to say in not-so-distant times. Our talk began by considering the public’s reaction to the screening: greatly positive, according to Luis and other trustworthy commentators, whose impressions, relayed to us, proved them worthy of the faith we had put in them. After this, we naturally began discussing the book itself, and Luis requested that we examine the epigraph on the frontispiece (If you can see, look / If you can look, observe), since, in his opinion, the action of looking was previous to that of seeing, and the first injunction could have been omitted without prejudicing the meaning of the epigraph as a whole. I could not avoid conceding the correctness of his opinion, but I knew that I had had other reasons in mind, for example the process of vision as it passes through three tenses, sequential yet somehow autonomous, that can be expressed as follows: it is possible to see without looking at anything; and it is possible to look without observing, depending on the degree of attention we afford to each stage of the process. We are all familiar with the way a person will look at his watch and then, if someone asks him the time no more than a second later, has to consult it all over again. That was when the light bulb went on in my mind, regarding the first origin of this famous epigraph. When I was a child, the words to observe (or to restore, as in sight) meant little to me, assuming I was even familiar with them. They only became an object of predominant interest the day one of my uncles (I think it must have been Francisco Dinis, of whom I wrote in my Pequenas Memorias)4 called my attention to the particular way bulls almost always had, I was given to understand, of holding their heads up. My uncle used to tell me, “He sees you, and when he has seen you, he looks at you, and this time there’s something different about it: he observes you.” This was the story I recounted to Luis, who immediately conceded the argument, not so much—I’d guess—because I had really succeeded in convincing him, but because his memory was jogged into recalling a similar situation. There had been just such another bull that had looked at him in the same way, with the same raised tilt of the head, and a look that was not merely seeing, but also observing. Finally, we were in agreement.
On tonight’s television news, I have just seen demonstrations by women across the world, and I’m asking myself once again what kind of a vile world we inhabit, in which half the population has to go out into the streets in order to claim a right that obviously ought to belong to everyone. . .
Official information has reached me of serious institutions that admit their women employees are paid 16 percent less for doing exactly the same job as men, and doubtless this statistic has been falsified to avoid the shame of a still higher differential. They say that administrative policies always work better when they are composed by women, but company boards do not dare to recommend that 40 percent, or more likely 50 percent, of their members should be women, so that, when the coming collapse arrives, as it has in Iceland, these women can be called on to take over running the banks and the country. They say furthermore that in Lima, in order to avoid corruption in the transport system, they are going to employ women guards, since experience shows that they do not accept payoffs, nor do they ask for bribes. We know that society could not function without women’s work, and that without women’s conversation, as I wrote a while ago, the planet would leave its orbit, and that neither the home nor those who inhabit it would enjoy the same quality of life without them, however frequently men pass women by without noticing what they do, or in spite of noticing still fail to take note of what it means to be half of a couple—even though the male half no longer serves as a role model.
I continue watching the women demonstrating on the street. They know what they want, which is not to be humiliated, objectified, despised or, finally, murdered. They want to be properly esteemed in their working lives, for their work, not for the everyday abuse they put up with.
I’m told my strongest characters are women, and I believe it. Sometimes I consider the women I have described set examples that I myself would like to follow. Sometimes they are no more than examples, sometimes they don’t really exist, but of one thing I am certain: with women like these, we would not have had this chaos in the world, because they would always have remembered what it means to be human.
More than thirty years ago, when I was still an intrepid young writer filled with hopes, on the brink of entering my sixth decade, I wandered to the lands of Mirando do Douro, the point of departure for the unforgettable adventure that was going to form the elaborate account of my Journey to Portugal.5 This title was no accident. It was intended to make the reader understand, from the first page onward, that the book’s theme was a journey to somewhere, in this case, to Portugal. To reinforce my intended meaning, I left this native country of mine via Monção and spent a week traveling through Galicia and León until, with my sight finally cleared of more familiar images, I went forward to my encounter with the land of my birth. I remember pausing in the middle of the bridge between the two river banks—on one side the Douro, and the other the Duero—and trying in vain, or pretending to try, to find the fine line of the frontier that while appearing to divide in fact ultimately unites our two countries. It then struck me that a good way of opening my book would be to start with a gloss of the famous Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes, by Father Antonio Vieira, who addresses the fish that swim in the waters of the Douro, asking them whose side they think they are on, thus expressing (in however obvious a manner) the innocent dream of friendship, companionship, and mutual collaboration between Spain and Portugal. I did not entirely fall into the trap of making such a utopian proposal. In that same part of the river, surrounded by the same indivisible water, representatives of 175 river communities just came together, from both banks, to discuss the creation of a joint endeavor able to coordinate programs of development and propose viable plans for the future. Perhaps none of those present heard my rendition of Father Antonio Vieira’s sermon, but the spirit of the place called to them across thirty years, and they came. Welcome, one and all.
The global media all carried the news: Obama proclaims an end to the ideological barriers to the progress of research into the many diseases that spell true martyrdom for individual human beings. Some reports highlight President Obama’s decision to base scientific decisions on science, on the reports of experts with credentials and experience rather than according to their political and ideological affiliations. In more or less these words, Obama says that to suppress or alter scientific discoveries or conclusions or to promote technologies based on ideas or beliefs is a sin against honesty. For others, however, the real mortal sin is the investigation of stem cells, which is why the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, sought to remind us all that human dignity should be accorded at every stage of human existence, whatever that may mean, while bishops in the United States commented that this was a sad victory of politics over science and ethics, which is really something beyond meaning, since it plays with all kinds of variables, including those of dogma, faith and mystery, all too much at this late hour.
So, while we are in the realms of religion, I ought to confess that what I would have enjoyed reading today would have been an account of the symptoms of happiness on the part of legions of people afflicted with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or diabetes. What a great day for them, and what a great day for common sense.
When Argentina inaugurated the memorial to the victims of military dictatorship, the mothers who were our guides showed us—one could almost say with the pride with which mothers customarily refer to their sons—“Look here, this is my son’s name, there is Juan Gelman’s,6 this one is of a nephew of mine. . .” They were just names inscribed in stone, names that had been kissed a thousand times, and I, too, kissed them, as in Madrid people kissed the names of the victims of the worst atrocity committed in contemporary Europe, on March 11, now five years ago, a day we can scarcely forget, since the terror went so deep, right into the heart of Spanish society. Surely we do this in order to ensure that we never again forget the reasons for that attack and, once and for all, the method used: terror, their only means of argument. May they be cursed.
Today one could see the mothers embracing, the victims looking at one another, perhaps wishing not to see the others actually there but to see some of those disappeared. I remembered that a while back we heard of the lacerating beauty of this image. Pilar asked me to recall the memory, with my hugs for the victims and my kiss on the inscribed names also inscribed in my memory.
In Spain, to act in solidarity (solidarizarse) is a verb daily conjugated in three tenses: present, past, and future. A memory of past solidarity reinforces the solidarity demanded by the present, and both together pave the way for future solidarity to return and show itself in its fullest glory. March 11 was not only a day of pain and tears but also a day on which the Spanish people’s spirit of solidarity touched the sublime, with a dignity that moved me profoundly and that even now touches me whenever I remember it. Beauty doesn’t merely belong to the category of what we call aesthetic, it can equally be found in moral undertakings. This is why I’ve said that rarely, anywhere in the world, has the countenance of a people wounded by tragedy been endowed with such beauty.
The eminent Italian statesman who goes by the name of Silvio Berlusconi, also known by the nickname Il Cavaliere, has just finished mulling over in his exquisitely privileged brain an idea that places him definitively at the head of the squad of great political thinkers. What he wants is to avoid long, monotonous, and time-consuming parliamentary debates and to facilitate processes in both the senate and chamber of deputies, since the leaders of the parliament have now assumed the powers of the members, at a stroke doing away with the dead weight of however many hundreds of deputies and senators, who in most cases never actually open their mouths during the passing of legislation except to yawn. I have to admit this is fine by me. The deputies of the principal parties, let us say three or four of them, get together in a taxi on the way to a restaurant, where, sitting around a well-laden table, they take the pertinent decisions. Behind them will arrive, traveling by bicycle, the deputies of the smaller parties, who proceed to eat outside on the balcony, or else in a canteen in the immediate vicinity. Nothing more inherently democratic than this. En route they can even begin to discuss removing these impotent, arrogant, and pretentious structures we call parliaments and congresses, sources of incessant discussion and colossal expense, never approved of by the people. As one reduction succeeds the next, I can tell you that soon we will arrive at the condition of the ancient Greeks. Of course, this time we will also have got rid of the Greeks. Clearly this is not a Cavaliere to be taken seriously. No, but the danger is that we’ll end up not taking seriously the people who elected him.
This blog is nearing the end of its first six months’ work. Other blogs and years will follow, assuming the Fates permit. Today, which happens to be her birthday, my theme is Pilar. Nothing surprising there for anyone who wishes to be reminded of all that I have spoken and written about her for the near quarter-century we have spent together. This time, however, I want to bear witness, more than ever, to what she means to me, not simply for being the woman I love (for this needs to be confessed as we recite the beads on our personal rosary), but also for her intelligence, her creative ability, her sensitivity, and also her tenacity. Thanks to her, the life of this writer has fulfilled its potential to be something even more important than that of a reasonably successful author, a life of continual human ascendance. It lacked only one thing, even though such a lack was unimaginable to me: the conception and creation of something that transcended the sphere of my professional activities or that could offer itself as its natural continuation. That was how our Foundation came to be born, entirely due to Pilar’s labor, and its future would have been inconceivable, in my view, without her presence, her actions, her particular genius. I leave the destiny of this work she created, its progress and development, in her hands. Nobody could ever be more worthy than she of such a task. This Foundation is a mirror in which we can see ourselves, but the hand holding up the mirror, the firm hand that holds it steady, is Pilar’s. I trust her in a way I could no one else. I am almost tempted to say: this is my will and testament. Let us not be afraid, however. I am not about to die, Madam President will not permit it. I have already escaped death once thanks to her, and it is now the life of the Foundation that she needs to protect and defend. Against everyone and everything, and if need be, without pity.
It is now many years since we broke a journey from Canada to Cuba with stops in Costa Rica and El Salvador. It is concerning the latter that I would like to speak today. As always happens on my travels, I gave a number of interviews, the most significant of which was with Martin Funes, now El Salvador’s president-elect. I hadn’t met him before, and it was an unexpected pleasure to encounter a competent journalist who had not been charged with convincing a newly arrived author of the virtues of a system based on the most ferocious repression, nor was directly responsible, as governor of the armed forces, for the abuses, arbitrary acts, and crimes committed by the state and by the most powerful landowning families, who were absolute lords over the state economy. Instead he was a well-informed and cultured conversationalist, not only on the subject of the long martyrdom suffered by the people of his country, but also on the potential problems of a change, which was as yet still not clearly visible on the social or political horizon of Salvadorean society. We did not see one another again, but ever since—including through periods that have proved personally and politically hard for them both—Pilar has maintained an assiduous correspondence with Vanda Pignato, Mauricio’s wife. One that as of now is likely only to increase in intensity.
The other Funes, who appears in one of Borges’s book titles, is a man endowed with a memory that can absorb everything, and can register facts and images, all he reads and feels, down to the dawning light of day and a ripple on the surface of a lake. I just wish to ask the new president of El Salvador not to forget a single one of the words he spoke on the night of his triumph, in front of thousands of men and women who finally saw their hopes being realized. Do not deceive them, Senhor Presidente:7 the political history of South America is filled with frustration and deception, wearying entire populations with lies and trickery, and it is high time to change all this. In Daniel Ortega, we already have a man of this ilk.
History, most often handed down by the grandfather of the family, was an infallible resource for the night workers in our province, not just as basic entertainment for innocent children, but also as a fundamental element in a sound education system—the precursor, in some sense, of what a witness swears in avowing to tell only the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The only doubt I have regarding this comparison arises from my lack of regular experience of the jury system, and my lack of curiosity as to the variety of demonstrations of human nature—a deficiency that scarcely tempts me to stick my nose into other people’s business, even the business of the greatest criminal of the century. Now, a story once relayed by a grandfather, perhaps to while away the lonely night hours up on the mountainside, was about the day a young shepherd suddenly decided to cry, “Wolf! Here comes the wolf!” so loudly that all the villagers came out in droves, equipped with clubs, cudgels and the odd blunderbuss from the war before last, to defend the boy and his sheep. There was no wolf, however, and the lad said it “must have run away when it heard all the shouting.” This was not the truth, but a lie carried off with an air of conviction. Satisfied with the outcome of his deception, our young shepherd decided to repeat the experiment, and, once again, the village rallied in force to his cries. There was nothing to be seen of the wolf and not a whiff of its scent. The third time, however, nobody was willing to set foot out of doors: it was clear the lad’s mouth was as full of lies as teeth, so let him yell, he would soon grow tired of it. The wolf carried off as many sheep as he wanted, while the lad looked on helplessly at the catastrophe from his retreat up a tree. While this may not be our chosen theme today, it is important to remind ourselves of the number of occasions on which we ourselves also cry wolf. There were also many more who denied the wolf was coming before it indeed descended upon us, and when in the end it did, I saw and traced the word on its collar: crisis.
Let’s take a look at what will happen following the recent news that many, many Portuguese have decided to learn Spanish, and are taking the decision very much to heart. I am afraid that those patriots who rush to the defense of every national custom are starting to cry out that they have spotted a wolf over there. I grant that they have spotted something, and this is the reason for the need for the people of our peninsula, some from here and others from there, to approach closer to one another. History, when it so wishes, can push hellishly hard.
A few days ago I read an article by Nicolas Ridoux, author of Menos é mais. Introdução à filosofia do decrescimento (Less Is More: Introduction to the Philosophy of Decline). It made me remember how some years back, on the eve of the millennium we are now living in, I took part at a meeting in Oviedo where certain writers were proposing that we draw up aims and objectives for the new millennium. It seemed to me somewhat ambitious to be discussing impromptu an entire millennium, so I proposed that we should defer discussion until the following day. I remember making specific suggestions, one of which is now being put forward by Ridoux in the body of his Menos é mais. I searched my computer hard drive, and decided to retrieve some of what I wrote that day, at a time when it now seems more relevant than ever.
Regarding visions of the future, I consider that it would be preferable to concern ourselves with no more than tomorrow, when, we trust, we may still be alive. In reality, if in a year as remote as 999, in one or another part of Europe, the few sages and many theologians around then had set themselves to divining what the world would be like a thousand years later, I am sure they would have been wrong about everything. Yet there is one matter on which I think they might have been more or less correct: that there would be little fundamental difference between the confused human being of today, who neither knows nor cares to inquire where he is going, and the terrified people of past centuries, who believed that the end of the world was at hand. By comparison, I think we could well foresee a far greater number of all sorts of differences between the kind of people we are today and those to come, perhaps not even in a thousand but in only a hundred years. In other words: it may be that we have more in common with those who lived on our planet a millennium ago than with those who will live on it a hundred years hence . . . And now the world is really about to end, whereas a thousand years ago it was still flourishing.
On the subject of whether the world is or is not ending, of whether the sun will rise tomorrow or not, why not put ourselves to considering tomorrow, the one day on which we know we will be lucky to be alive? Instead of however many gratuitously ambitious proposals for and about the third millennium, which itself will more than likely reduce all such recommendations to dust, why should we not decide to put forward a few simple ideas, along with a number of projects comprehensible to most reasonably intelligent people? If there are no better proposals, I would like to start by suggesting we do the following: a) allow development not from the front but from the rear, meaning those growing masses of the population left behind by current models of development, who should now become the front line; b) create a new sense of human duty, making it entirely interdependent with the exercise of human rights; c) live simply, like foragers, given that the patrimony and products, the goods and fruits of the planet are not inexhaustible; d) resolve the contradiction between the assertion that we are all increasingly close to one another and the evidence that we are daily feeling more and more isolated; e) reduce the difference between those who know much and those who know little, which is presently increasing from one day to the next.
I think that our tomorrows will depend on the answers we give to these questions, and most of all our days after tomorrow. For the whole century to come. Not to mention the next millennium.
Therefore, let us return to philosophy.
The text of a dialogue in a TV car ad. A six- or possibly seven-year-old girl sitting in the front passenger seat of a car asks her father, who is driving, “Daddy, did you know that Irene, my school classmate, is black?” Her father answers, “Yes, of course. . .” and the girl replies to him, “I didn’t. . .” If these few words are not exactly a blow to the solar plexus, they could certainly be called something else: a fillip to the mind. The rumor goes that this little piece of dialogue was no more than the creative outpouring of a marketing man of genius, but here at my side is my niece Julia, no more than five years old, who when asked whether black people live in Tías—the region where I reside—replied that she didn’t know. And Julia is Chinese.
It is a commonplace to say that truth comes from the mouths of babes and sucklings. However, according to the above examples, this appears not to be the case, since Irene really is black and there are plenty of black women in Tías. The problem is that, contrary to what is generally supposed, and however hard they try to convince us of the opposite, absolute truths do not exist: truths are plural, and only a lie is global. The two children did not see black women: they saw human beings, other people just the same as themselves, so the truth that emerged from their mouths was simply another.
But Mr. Sarkozy happens not to think just like them. Now he’s come up with the idea of demanding that an ethnic census be conducted, designed to provide an “X-ray” (his expression) of French society to show where each and every immigrant is living, supposedly in order to bring them out of their invisibility and prove how well the anti-discrimination policies are working. According to a widely held opinion, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is where I believe France will go if this initiative wins out. It is not hard to imagine (the past provides a wealth of examples) how the census could be used to demonstrate a perverse need for new and more refined forms of discrimination. I am seriously thinking of asking Julia’s parents to take her to Paris as an adviser to Mr. Sarkozy . . .
There will be no lack of advice: beware, the European Union could turn into a sack of cats, at risk as much of turning dangerous as turning ridiculous. It is impossible for the same old national egotisms, for the politicians’ eternal personal ambitions, for mental corruption (this at least) that from the very start always contaminates every attempt at collective organization unless it is governed by principles of intellectual honesty and mutual respect—I repeat, it is impossible for such a combination of extremely negative features not to end up by turning the European Union into the most grotesque caricature. This is what has now happened with the intervention of the Czech minister Mirek Topolanek, elected rotating president of the European Union for a six-month period and—a disconcerting paradox, this—resigning his office as prime minister of his country, which he used to inveigh against the president of the United States in the most vulgar terms, accusing him of setting the economy on ‘the road to Hell’ (or, in a toned-down version, ‘to disaster’), thereby revealing clearly the nature of his hopes and allegiances: a return to old-school radical liberalism and the rejection of any measures in favor of accepting, however superficially, the attempts of the social democrats to become involved. As we see, Mr. Topolanek is a sound hope for humanity.
By coincidence, a couple of days ago, Rodríguez Zapatero, president of the Spanish government, found himself under close fire from the whole lineup of his parliamentary opponents, not for the imminent withdrawal of Spanish troops, since this had been already planned more than a year ago, but for his failure to conform to the most elementary requirements in notifying the NATO alliance or the United States administration in advance. But the question that presents itself to me now is the following: What does the European Parliament plan on doing to make it clear to Mr. Topolanek that, along with being a reactionary, he is also an ill-bred and rude man?
Over there and far from here, the sun rises differently. The Indians on the indigenous reserve at Raposa do Sol, in the state of Roraima up in northern Brazil, say as much. They are those whom their country’s federal high court has only just recognized, definitively approving their full ownership and unrestricted use of the thousand square kilometers that make up the reserve. The ruling allowed for no margin of doubt: all non-Indians were obliged to leave Raposa do Sol immediately, along with the rice companies that for years had invaded the territory, installing themselves there in defiance of indigenous rights. Back in 2005, President Lula had determined to grant the land to the indigenous peoples and to oblige the rice companies to leave, but the Roraima state authorities favored the rice companies, and went to the high court in order to have the presidential decree declared unconstitutional. Four years later, the high court has reached a decision and drawn a line under the proceedings. Not everything in the garden is coming up roses. In the end, the class struggle, so extensively discussed in the relatively recent past and which seemed to be consigned to the dustbin of history, still exists. With the tunnel vision we Europeans have of Latin American problems, we tend to overlook differences there and reduce their affairs to a state of simplicity that is not and never was. In Raposa do Sol, there are rich members of the indigenous community who have made common cause with the non-indigenous and the rice companies. Today’s celebrations were for the others, the poor ones.
Down here in the Marvelous City8 there is samba and carnival, but the local situation is no better. The latest idea is to fence in the shantytowns, the favelas, with a concrete wall three meters high. We have already had the Berlin Wall, we have all the walls imposed on Palestine, and now it seems to be Rio’s turn. Meanwhile, organized crime stalks every street, its tentacles reaching vertically and horizontally to penetrate the state apparatus and society in general. Corruption appears to be invincible. So what is to be done?
Just as Molière’s M. Jourdain wrote in prose without realizing it, there was a moment in my life when, without my actually noting the phenomenon, I found myself deeply involved in something as mysterious as fractal geometry, of which, with apologies for my ignorance, I had absolutely no prior knowledge. It happened sometime in 1999, when a Spanish geometrician, Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, wrote to direct my attention to an example of fractal geometry presented in my book Todos os Nomes (All the Names). The passage in question reads as follows:
“Seen from the air, the General Cemetery looks like an enormous felled tree, with a short, fat trunk, made up of the nucleus of the original graves, from which four stout branches reach out, all from the same growing point, but which, later, in successive bifurcations, extend as far as you can see, forming, in the words of an inspired poet, a leafy crown in which life and death are mingled, just as in real trees birds and foliage mingle.9
I have not been thinking of changing my job, but all my friends observed a new sense of conviction in my spirits, a kind of conversion on the road to Damascus.
For those few days I was rubbing shoulders with no lesser a company than the best geometricians of the world. The point they had attained after so much hard effort, I realized I had reached through a sudden flash of scientific intuition, a realization from which, to tell you the truth, I still haven’t recovered, despite the amount of time that has gone by. Now, ten years later, I felt the same emotion when I saw the cover of a book titled Armonía Fractal [Fractal Harmony], of which Juan Manuel is the author, together with his colleague, Hector Garrido. The illustrations are in many instances quite extraordinary, the text of a scientific precision in no way incompatible with the beauty of its form and concepts. Buy it and give yourself a treat. It comes highly recommended from an authoritative source . . .
1 In Portuguese the infinitive reparar means to repair/restore/compensate/admit/notice/observe/criticize. [Translator’s note—and a translator’s nightmare.]
2 In the opening epigraph.
3 The Motorcycle Diaries of Che Guevara, subject of a film directed by Meirelles. The cinema bookshop and publisher is called Ocho y Medio (8½) after the title of Fellini’s seminal film.
4 Small Memories, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill Secker, 2009).
5 Op cit. Section 1, p. 5ff.
6 Young Argentine poet, who went into exile when General Videla seized power in 1976.
7 Señor Presidente is the title of a famous book by the Guatemalan Nobel Prize–winner Miguel Angel Asturias, and tells of the rise, fall, and intervening evil practices of just such a politician.
8 A Cidade Maravilhosa = Rio do Janeiro.
9 Translation of All the Names by Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill, 1999, p. 186).