There I was, sitting in the middle of the square, book in hand, watching the world go by. They had made me slightly larger than life, I suppose so as to make me stand out all the more visibly. I have no idea how many years I’ll be spending there. I have always said that a statue’s ultimate fate is to be taken down, even though I’d like to think they’d leave me in peace as someone who had to come to earth twice over, first in person and then in bronze. This was something that sent my mind into the most ludicrous delirium, for I had never previously dared to entertain the prospect that a statue would be erected to me one day, on the very land where I was born. What had I ever done for this to happen? I wrote a few books; transported the name of Azinhaga1 around the world with me; above all, I made sure that I never overlooked those who bore and raised me: my parents and grandparents. I spoke of them in Stockholm2 during an illustrated public lecture, and was understood. What we see of a tree is a mere part of the thing: its most important aspect is undoubtedly its roots. My biological roots bear the names Joséfa and Jeronimo, José and Piedade, but I have others, bearing the names of cities and places—Casalinho and Divisoes, Cabo das Casas and Almonda, Tejo and Rabo dos Cagados, and others named for olive groves, willow trees, poplars, and ash; of hunting parties navigating the rivers, fig trees laden with fruit, pigs taken to pasture and piglets, sleeping in the same bed with my grandparents, to stop them freezing to death. I am composed of all these parts, and every part was included in the composition of the bronze in which they cast me. Yet you need to be aware that this was not a spontaneous gestation. Without the determination, the effort and the tenacity of Vitor Guia and José Miguel Correia Noras, the statue would not be there. Out of the deepest depths of my gratitude I here bestow on them my embrace, extended to include all the people of Azinhaga, together with this other son of theirs, whom I leave in their care and who is none other than I.
There are some people who seem not to belong to either the world or the period into which they were born. Like so many of his generation dragged into the prisons of Fascist Spain, Marcos Ana suffered indescribably in both body and spirit, escaping in extremis two death sentences and becoming, in every sense of the word, a survivor. Prison could not defeat him though he spent twentythree years of his life there, deprived of his liberty. The book that he has just launched in Portugal is his account, at once objective and impassioned, of this dark period. The title of these memoirs, Tell Me What a Tree Is Like, could hardly be of greater significance. Over time, the harsh reality of his imprisonment ended by superimposing itself upon external reality, shrouding it in a vague mist that every passing day he had to make fresh efforts to dispel in order not to lose faith in his increasingly fragile inner self. Marcos Ana saved not only himself but many of his imprisoned comrades, raising their spirits, solving their problems and arguments, acting as a new kind of justice of the peace. Steadfast in his political convictions, yet without allowing his critical faculties to be affected, Marcos Ana gave everyone with whom he came into contact an irrepressible sense of hope, as if they all ended by concluding, “If he’s like that, then so, too, might I be.” On regaining his liberty, he did not simply go home to rest. He returned to the political struggle, risking further imprisonment, and launched an impressive project to help and support those still remaining in jail. In Spain, friends and admirers of this exceptional character (among them, the Nobel Prize–winner Wole Soyinka) have put him forward as a candidate for the Prince of Asturias Concord Prize. Nothing could be more appropriate, and it is all the more necessary to demonstrate to the Spanish people that this historical memory persists, alive and among us.
We left Lanzarote last Saturday, flying out to Seville and then continuing by car to Lisbon. On Sunday, as I have explained, we went to Azinhaga on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue. The plane tree standing in front of our house had a splendor all its own, a range of rich greens drawing me into lengthy contemplation and making me think, “Don’t ever move, just let yourself stay put as it does.” A useless desire, when we observe the heat of summer, the first chills of autumn, the leaves falling and the tree’s splendor extinguished, and then its falling asleep until a fresh spring comes to take the place of the one now ending.
These entirely unoriginal thoughts caused me to recall the last brief chapter of Journey to Portugal, which, I used to think, had some trace of originality about it. And I deemed it no bad idea to record it here, when we are on the point of another return to the country, this time entering through Coruña. So here we go:
The journey is never over. Only travelers come to an end. But even then they can prolong their voyage in their memories, in recollections, in stories. When the traveler sat in the sand and declared: “There’s nothing more to see,” he knew it wasn’t true. The end of one journey is simply the start of another. You have to see what you missed the first time, see again what you already saw, see in springtime what you saw in summer, in daylight what you saw by night, see the sun shining where you saw the rain falling, see the crops greening, the fruit ripening, the stone moved from one place to another, the shadow that was not there before. You have to retrace your footsteps, either to tread them again, or to plant fresh ones alongside them. You have to start the journey over. Always. The traveler sets out once more.3
That’s how it is. And so let it be.
I’ll now approach the question of secularism, in my opinion never very clearly expressed, because the fundamental question that should dominate the debate is usually overlooked: whether or not to believe in the existence of a god who not only created the universe and with it the human species, who will endure until the end of time, but who is also the judge of all our actions upon earth, rewarding those who have performed good ones with admission into a paradise where the elect may gaze upon the face of the Lord for all eternity while, also for all eternity, those guilty of certain other deeds burn forever in the fires of hell. This final judgment will not be easy, either for the god or for those arriving to give an account of themselves, since I don’t know of anyone who has performed either exclusively good or exclusively bad deeds in the course of a lifetime. It is our human condition to be uncertain in our purposes and to contradict ourselves from one hour to the next. In the midst of all this, secularism seems to me to be more a defined political position based on prudence, than it is the articulation of a profound conviction regarding the nonexistence of god and the impertinence of believing the logic of institutions and their instruments that purport to impose on us ideas contrary to human understanding. We discuss the issue of secularism because we are afraid of discussing atheism. The interesting aspect of the case, however, is that the Catholic Church, conforming to its ancient tradition of doing ill and making moan, continues to bewail its lot as the victim of “aggressive secularism,” a new category of the position that allows the Church to attack the whole while pretending to attack only a part. Duplicity was ever a feature inseparable from the diplomatic tactics and doctrinal strategies of the Roman Curia.
It would be a welcome change if the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church would cease meddling in what doesn’t concern it, meaning in people’s civic and private lives. We should not, however, be surprised by its behavior. The Catholic Church cares little or nothing for the destiny of souls, and has always had the control of bodies as its primary aim, while secularism has always been the first door through which the body seeks its escape along with the soul, given that one of them cannot set out on a path in any direction without the other. The issue of secularism is no more than a preliminary skirmish. The real confrontation comes when belief and unbelief finally go head to head, when one opponent in the struggle assumes its true name: atheism. All the rest is but a game of words.
Carlos Casares, the Galician writer who has brought me to Coruña and will accompany me over the coming days, died in March 2002. A few months after his death, in September of that year, a foundation was established in his name, and in the years that followed that foundation has established an extraordinary program of cultural activities across the region. I have participated in more than one of its Dialogues of Mariñan, and this one, the sixth, was on the theme of the mechanisms of memory and its application to literary creation. My partner in this dialogue was Manuel Rivas, one of the most outstanding heirs to the great tradition of Galician literature, continuing in the steps of Torrente Ballester and Cunqueiro. The auditorium in the Caixa Galicia Foundation, where our session took place, was packed with an audience who displayed the most alert interest throughout, and I consider that Manuel Rivas and I worked well together, not least in offering some straightforward reflections on one another’s literary output. The proof is that we do not retreat when confronted with such thorny matters as the unconscious workings of memory . . .
There are around a half dozen foundations in Coruña and they are—as everyone there recognizes—the most active and effective cultural dynamos of the city and the surrounding villages. Every month they organize dozens of cultural activities, as many in the field of literature as in music and the fine arts—not to mention their social dimension, at least as important overall. The population of Coruña lives its foundations, which are indispensable to their civil and cultural education. In Portugal, we also have foundations that, happily for them and for the rest of us, enjoy public favor. But there’s no shortage, either, of critical outsiders or of the obsessively envious, like a certain opinionated journalist who, when asked what seemed to him the likely reasons for the creation of a José Saramago Foundation (if you’ll forgive me for mentioning myself) replied that the sole purpose of any foundation was to launder money and evade taxes. May God forgive him, for we cannot bring ourselves to. . .
This article appeared in yesterday’s edition of the Spanish newspaper El País, and was specifically commissioned by them. Given that this blog has already hosted a number of remarks regarding the exploits of the Italian prime minister, it would have been odd not to post this article here. No doubt there will be more in the future, until such time as Berlusconi renounces who he is and what he does. Until that day arrives, neither shall I.
I can’t see what other name I could give him. A thing perilously close to a human being, a thing that holds parties, organizes orgies, and rules a country called Italy. This thing, this disease, this virus that threatens moral death to the land of Verdi is a deep sickness that needs to be wrested from the Italian consciousness before its venom ends up running through the veins and destroying the heart of one of the richest of European cultures. The fundamental values of communal life are daily trampled into the ground under the sticky feet of the Berlusconi-thing, which, among its numerous other talents, has a theatrical capacity for abusing words, perverting both their sense and intent, as in Partida della Libertà (Freedom Party), the name of the coalition he heads, which has seized power in Italy. I chose to call this thing a criminal, and see no need to repent of the word. For reasons to do with normal or social semantics, which I leave to others who can elucidate them better than I, in Italian, the term for criminal has a negative weight far stronger than that in any other language spoken in Europe. It was to translate what I thought of the Berlusconi-thing in a clear and incisive manner that I employed the term, accepting the meaning that the language of Dante had habitually granted it, even though it is now more than dubious that Dante ever employed the term delinquenza himself. Criminality, according to my Portuguese mother tongue, signifies—and here I make reference to dictionaries as well as to common parlance—“the act of committing crimes, disobeying laws or moral imperatives.” This definition fits the Berlusconithing without a solitary wrinkle or a single crease, to the point where it seems more like its skin than the clothes that cover it. For many years now, the Berlusconi-thing has been seen to commit a variety of crimes, always of demonstrable seriousness. That said, it not only disobeys the law but, worse still, manufactures new laws to protect its public and private interests, which are those of a politician, a businessman and an escort of minors; and as for moral standards, there’s little point in mentioning those, since there’s no one left in Italy or the rest of the world who is unaware that the Berlusconi-thing has long since sunk into the most abject and utter depravity. This is the Italian Prime Minister, this is the thing that the Italian people have now twice elected to serve as their model, this is the road to ruin they have taken, dragging through the dirt the values of liberty and dignity imprinted in the music of Verdi and informing the political actions of Garibaldi and of all those who created the country of Italy in the nineteenth century during the struggle for unification, values that helped make Italy a spiritual guide to Europe and the Europeans. And this is what the Berlusconi-thing wants to cast onto the rubbish-heap of history. Are the Italians really going to permit this to happen?
At various times I have asked myself where the left was going, and today I have the answer: it is out there somewhere, still counting the miserable and humiliating number of votes cast for its candidates and seeking an explanation as to why that number should be so small. A movement that in the past succeeded in representing one of the greatest hopes for humanity, capable of spurring us to action by the simple resort of an appeal to what is best in human nature, I saw, over the passage of time, undergoing a change in its social composition, displaying a growing tendency to stray and make mistakes, creating its own internal perversions, daily moving further away from its early promises, becoming more and more like its old adversaries and enemies, as if this were the only possible means of achieving acceptance, and so ending up becoming a faint replica of what it once was, employing concepts to justify certain actions, when it formerly used to argue against precisely the same actions. With its increasing slide toward centrism, a shift once proclaimed by its protagonists to be a demonstration of brilliant tactics and peerless modernization, the left does not appear to have noticed that it has become very much like the right. If, at the end of all this, the left is still able to learn a new lesson, that has to be that in creating a pan-European front it has sold out to the right, and once it realizes this, it can ask itself what has created the entrenched distance between it and its natural supporters—the poor, the needy, but also the dreamers—in relation to what still remains of its principles. For it is no longer possible to vote for the left if the left has ceased to exist.
Curiously enough, and this is the real paradox, the politics that the title of this article describes are precisely those that at the moment are determining the destiny of the country that for so very long has been busy devising a form of politics both imperial and conservative in every significant aspect: Barack Obama’s. This provides food for thought. A political act that, as I have said, does little beyond attempting to rearrange the furniture in the White House, where a rapacious capitalism on the point of devouring itself resides, now increasingly appears to us almost as the realization of a left-wing dream. All the more so, given that so many people, including progressives, socialists, communists, and the rest, are currently going around asking themselves: “And if Obama were the leader of my party . . . ?” Perhaps it is situations such as these that give rise to discussions of the term the irony of history. . . Or perhaps it may also be simply due to his personal charisma.
Perhaps it was nothing more than a drop of fresh water falling into the bitter ocean of skepticism and indifference, but I think we still need to rejoice over the good idea currently on the march across Spain. To be precise, the idea, which originated in the province of Granada, is to hold an annual celebration of the lowering of the age of majority—not only officially but also in terms of civic recognition—to the age of eighteen. Each newly enfranchised young person will be handed copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Spanish Constitution, and the Statute of Andalusian Autonomy. Obviously, there will be other, perhaps more jocular—or at least somewhat less solemn—celebrations, but since serious matters should only be treated seriously, you could consider that seeing the eleven thousand young people who are expected to attend supplied with such guidance, as one by one they step forward into the future, will teach all of us something about their civic responsibilities. “Equip them,” I say, “with these three essential texts, and you won’t have failed to provide them with a more solid and substantial education, well fitting them to be citizens of the present and future.” The idea is a good one, and let us hope it will spread further. To turn it into a collective and civic holiday will require considerable creativity and effort, but these, we can be sure, will not be in short supply.
The drop of freshwater referred to at the start of this post did not fall into saltwater, but onto my hand. I sipped it like one dying of thirst on one of those days when frustration descends upon us all, as we observe how the forces of the right—including the ultraright—are rejoicing in their political victories across the length and breadth of Europe. Democracy is as yet not in danger, but it relies on us to prevent it from becoming so. Granada is on the right track.
What do we know about you, if all we have are your verses,
What memory remains in the world that you knew?
Between birth and death did you conquer each day,
Or did you lose your life in the verses you left us?
These questions are taken from my book Os Poemas Possíveis [Possible Poems], published in 1966. Today, more than forty years later, I am still seeking the answer. Perhaps I will never find it. I write this on June 10, the anniversary of the death of the author of The Lusiads, arguably the most fundamental book in Portuguese literature. Although Camões died poor and forgotten, today those writing in Portuguese can still obtain the unique and exclusive honor of receiving the prize that bears his name.
Also known as Corpus Christi, this is a “holy day of obligation” for Roman Catholics, as well as a public holiday. All the faithful are expected to attend Mass in order to bear witness to the real and substantive presence of Christ in the Host. Woe betide you if you have any doubts concerning the Divine Presence within the wheaten wafer, as did a priest called Peter of Prague back in the thirteenth century: the last thing you want is any repetition of the ghastly miracle of actually seeing the host transformed into flesh and blood, not symbolic but real. Nor do you want to have to carry the bloody evidence around in a solemn procession to the Cathedral at Oviedo, as Wikipedia so kindly explained that Peter was obliged to, as I learnt when I had recourse to consult the site on such a complicated topic. The world was an extraordinarily fascinating place in that period. Today the miracle of economic recovery and resurrection of the banks is effected by printing millions of dollars and putting them into circulation at vertiginous speed, thereby filling one vacuum with another, or, to use less risky terminology, substituting for a lack of value a merely assumed value that will last only as long as the consensus obtained on its so-called value in the first place.
Yet it was not this crisis I wanted to write about. In any case, as you will now see, my mention of the Body of God is not a gratuitous or easy pretext to preach heresy, as is my custom when I follow my own canonically expert opinions. A few days ago, on May 28 to be precise, a Bolivian aged thirty-three called Fraans Rilles, an immigrant “without papers” and with no work permit, who nevertheless worked in a bakery in Gandia, Spain, was the victim of a serious accident: a kneading machine severed his left arm. It is true that the bakery owners had the charity to take him to the hospital, but they left him some 200 yards from the door with the injunction, “Should you be asked, don’t mention our bakery.” Quite properly, the doctors requested the arm so that they could try to reattach it, but were forced to abandon this project because of the arm’s poor condition when they found it. It had been thrown onto the rubbish heap.
In conclusion, I realize that I did not really want to write about the Body of God. As is my wont, I have let one thing lead to another, and it was the Body of Man of which I truly wanted to write, this body that since the first dawning of time has been maltreated, tortured, despised, humiliated, and violated in its most basic physical condition; a body from which now an arm has been torn, and the man who lost it ordered to keep silent in order not to damage a business. I only hope that today the faithful who hurry to Mass will read their newspapers and spare a thought for this man’s suffering flesh and spilled blood. I am not thinking of what is set out on the altar. I only think that those churchgoers should consider this man and so many others like him. They say that we are all God’s children. It’s not true, but this falsehood affords consolation to many. God did not help Fraans Rilles, the victim of the kneading machine and of the cruelty of the unscrupulous people who grossly exploited his labor. That is the way of the world: there is no other.
I got to know José Rodrigues Miguéis some time after I began working at Estúdios Cor publishers in 1959. The company was co-owned by Correia and Canhão, and the literary director was Nataniel Costa. A year earlier, Miguéis had published a collection of short stories and novels called Léah, which was extremely well received by both the public and the critics of the time. This was the first work of his I read, and I don’t need to tell you how much it filled me with enthusiasm. I’m not exactly sure when I first came to know Miguéis in person, for he would have been living in the United States at the time. What I do know is that, from the appearance of the novel Um homem sorri à morte com meia cara (A Man Smiles at Death With Half a Face), published in 1959, right up to that of the novel Nikalai! Nikalai!, which appeared in 1971, and through A Escola do Paraíso and O passageiro do Expresso, both in 1960, Gente da terceira classe in 1962, and É proibido apontar in 1964, I was in more or less continual contact with José Rodrigues Miguéis: in daily contact whenever he was in Portugal, and in frequent contact by letter whenever he returned to the United States. This correspondence, judged worthy of selection by José Albino Pereira for his doctoral thesis (and on the same level as I would put my literary exchanges with Jorge de Sena) gives me the right to say that I have not cut a bad figure in this world. My epistolary relationship with Miguéis was only broken when I left the publishing house, toward the end of 1971. Thereafter I saw him only occasionally; there were no more letters that I remember, but he always remained in my memory as an extraordinary person, endowed with exceptional oratorical skills, and with a mind capable of describing the most complex situations in the fewest words. An everyday conversation with him was a real gift, and entering into dialogue with such a brilliant mind made his fellow conversationalist appear all the more intelligent. Speaking personally, and without wishing to boast about it, I made the most I could of those occasions. He died almost thirty years ago, yet I remember it all as if it were yesterday.
I only spoke because it was impossible to remain silent any longer. Brought to the wall by the president of the United States, the Israeli prime minister agreed (or rather condescended), finally, to the creation of a Palestinian state. It was no more explicit than that. Or rather, yes, he additionally demanded that this future state (should there really be one at some point) should not be permitted an army, and that its air space should be controlled by Israel—in other words, that Israel would have the means to oppress and maintain the Palestinians in the state of forced political marginalization. However, the other essential aspects of Barack Obama’s position, regarding both settlements and settlers, did not merit a single word from Netanyahu. Everyone knows that on the West Bank the “national” land theoretically belonging to the Palestinian people is covered with settlements, some “legal” (meaning sanctioned and constructed by the government in Jerusalem), others “illegal” (not sanctioned, but to which the same government turns a blind eye). Altogether they amount to more than 200 settlements, inhabited by around a half-million settlers, who according to everyone involved present the most serious obstacle to peace, even greater than obtaining recognition of the Palestinians’ right to an independent and viable state. Bush Senior himself had suggested as much in his time, when he obliged the Israeli government to realize that to talk of peace and condone the settlements at one and the same time was an insane contradiction. Ex–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also appeared to be aware of this when, in quotes supplied to the Haaretz newspaper in November 2007, he said that if a two-state solution were not rapidly reached, “the State of Israel would be finished.” Yet he did nothing at all to resolve the problem, while his words stayed hanging in the air. They help us to understand how the settlers have always served as a Sword of Damocles suspended over the Israeli government, and now—with somewhat more pressing reasons—over the head of Netanyahu. I think that many Jews in Israel are obsessed by a fear of returning to the Diaspora, that worldwide dispersal that has seemed to be their destiny. This prospect brings me no pleasure whatsoever, yet it remains to be seen whether Israel’s rulers will prove capable of forging peace. Ask them as often as you like, the answer remains negative.
My readers will recall that the names of the two villages encountered on the expedition to Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo were never mentioned by the narrator of that story. These villages, as described, were mere inventions necessary to the narrative and did not bear then, any more than now, any relationship to actual reality. It would therefore be an insult to devotees of historical rigor to learn that today Solomon was being prepared for a journey that, although not an actual documented historical fact, could well have happened, even though not a trace of it remains. Life is filled with chance events, and one cannot exclude the possibility that, in this or another instance, the history just happens to tally with the story. It is true that history does not record Solomon trampling over the earth at Castelo Novo, Sortelha or Cidadelhe, but it is equally impossible to swear that it could never have happened. We at the José Saramago Foundation availed ourselves of this obvious truth in order to plan and organize the journey that sets out today from the Hieronymite monastery at Belém and takes us all the way up to the frontier, where the incident of the Austrian cuirassiers who attempted to bring the elephant to the archduke took place. What an arbitrary itinerary, the reader may protest, while we, for our part, will have none of it, preferring to describe it as simply one of innumerable possibilities. Let us go away for a couple of days, and let us weave a story out of our travels. Who is to go? Let the whole Foundation set out, along with a few of Solomon’s best friends and some Portuguese and Spanish journalists, good people all. Let us go in peace. Until we return, farewell, farewell.
Over thirty years ago I wrote:
Castelo Novo is one of the most moving of the traveler’s many memories. Perhaps he will go back there one day, perhaps he won’t, or perhaps he’ll deliberately avoid it, just because some experiences cannot be repeated. Castelo Novo, like Alpedrinha, is built on a mountainside. If you continued on up, you would soon arrive at the summit of Gardunha. The traveler has no need to reprise his account of the time of day, the light, the damp air. He simply asks that all this be not forgotten while he is busy climbing the steep streets, past the simple houses and the palaces like this one from the seventeenth century, with its portico, its balcony, the deep archway leading to the yard. It would be hard to find a more harmonious construction. So there is the light and the hour, as if held suspended in time and in the sky: the traveler will be able to see Castelo Novo.
I also wrote about specific people thirty years ago:
The traveler asks an old woman who emerges onto her doorstep where the wine trough is. The old woman is deaf, but understands if she is spoken to loudly and she can watch your lips. When she grasps the question, she smiles and the traveler is amazed, for although her teeth are false, the smile is so genuine, and she is obviously so pleased to be smiling that he feels like hugging her and asking her to do it again.
Of José Pereira Duarte, one of the most generous people I have ever met in my life, I wrote that he looked on the traveler as one would on a friend who turns up after many years’ absence. His one regret, he said, was that his wife was ill in bed: “Were she not so ill, I would really enjoy entertaining the traveler for a while in my house.”
Today we’re with José Pereira Duarte’s daughter and grandson. The old lady is no longer there, but other friendly faces are to appear in Castelo Novo, and I will depart again in the same high spirits as when I left thirty years earlier. If Solomon the Elephant happens to pass this way, those who make up his retinue will feel the same thing. You cannot invent the warmth of a welcome like this.
The elephant rejoiced in what he saw and let it be known to the assembled company, although there wasn’t a single point on our own chosen itinerary that might have coincided with those he guarded so zealously in his elephantine memory. An elephant who, we have been told, traveled north with the soldiers of the cavalry division almost as far as the frontier, at a time when the roads were in a truly dreadful state. Compared to the journey in those days, ours was a walk in the park: good roads, good lodgings, good restaurants. The archduke himself, however well accustomed to all the luxuries of Central Europe, would have been pleasantly surprised. The expedition was a working one, but it was as enjoyable as if it were a holiday. Even the long-suffering porters, obliged to carry over fifteen pounds of equipment on their shoulders, were enchanted. What was interesting was that none of our friends, and none of the accompanying journalists, were already familiar with the places we visited. All the better for them, then, since they could gather so much material to recount and record. We started from Constância, where it is believed that Camões lived and made his home, and where through his windows he must have seen the embrace of the Zêzere and the Tejo over a thousand times, whose gentle backwaters inspired his most sublime verses. From there we went on to Castelo Novo to see the Casa da Câmara,4 dating from the time of the thirteenth-century King Dinis, and the Joannine fountain that sits tranquilly beside it. We also saw the tub, a kind of open-air vat excavated from the bare rock, where grapes were trodden in times that are now reckoned to be prehistorical. We stayed overnight at the Foundation, which is set in an excellent region for cherries, and the next day went on to Belmonte, where Pedro Alvares Cabral was born, and where we went straight to the church of Santiago, to which I am particularly devoted. It contains one of the most moving Romanesque sculptures on the face of the earth, a roughly painted pietà made of granite, with the lifeless Christ spread across the knees of his mother. Set against this, Michelangelo’s famous pietà from the Vatican is barely more than a last gasp of Mannerism. It was not easy to drag our fellow travelers from the ecstatic trance into which they had fallen, but we succeeded in enticing them away to view the architectural enigma of Centum Cellas, the building whose unfinished state was and continues to be the subject of the most heated arguments. Could it have been a watchtower? Or a hostelry for passing travelers? Or perhaps a prison, despite the quantity of broken windows that remain, surely unusual for a jail? No one knows. Our hunger for images satisfied for the time being, we proceeded to Sortelha, with its gigantic city walls, where a thunderstorm unlike any other assailed us with striated rays of lightening, thunder to match, rain in buckets, and hail like machine-gunfire. We never managed to get our coffee, as the electricity was cut off. It took an hour before the skies began to clear. It was still pouring when we came out onto the motorway, heading for Cidadelhe, on which I will not now write. I simply refer the interested and well-disposed reader to the four or five pages dedicated to that place in Journey to Portugal. Our companions’ eyes were dazzled by the 1707 palio and afterward, on a tour of the village, by the bas-reliefs over the doorways to the houses and the tombs in the mother church, with its portraits of saints. They returned transfigured by happiness. Now all that yet remained for us to see was Castelo Rodrigo. The president of the council chamber of Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo was waiting for us on the bridge over the River Côa, not far from Cidadelhe. I retained an image of Castelo Rodrigo, from the first time I went there, thirty years ago, of an old town in decline, where the ruins were already ruins of ruins, as if it were all intended as some kind of a multiple disguise. Nowadays Castelo Rodrigo is home to 140 souls, the streets are clean and accessible, the façades and interiors have been restored, and—above all—its sadness has decidedly disappeared, and its new mood is now its best advertisement. One has to return to these historic places, for they can come to life again. That is the lesson of this journey.
I met the playwright Alfonso Sastre more than thirty years ago. It was our one and only meeting. I never wrote to him and I never received a letter from him. I was left with the impression of a dour and harsh character, with nothing kindly about it, which did nothing to make our conversation easier, although neither was it exactly difficult. I never heard more of him, other than through occasional and inexpressive press reviews, which always referred to his political militancy in the ranks of the Basque nationalists. In recent weeks the name of Alfonso Sastre reappeared at the head of the list of candidates for the European elections, as part of a recently formed International Initiative. The group failed to obtain representation in the Strasbourg parliament.
A few days ago, the ETA assassinated a policeman by the name of Eduardo Pelles, using that nearly foolproof device, a bomb placed under the chassis of his car. His death was hideous; the fire horribly burnt the body of the unfortunate man, whom no one was able to help. The crime provoked general indignation, right across Spain. Or rather, not so general. Alfonso Sastre has just published a threatening article in the Basque daily Gara, where he speaks of “times of great pain rather than peace” while seeking to justify the attacks as integral to the “political conflict,” adding that there would be further attacks should political negotiations not be reopened with ETA. I can hardly credit what I am reading. It was not Sastre who attached the bomb to the chassis of Eduardo Puelles’s car. All the same, I never expected to see him justifying murderers like these.
Nearly a hundred years, ninety-eight to be precise, are what Ernesto Sabato is celebrating today. I first heard his name in the old Café Chiado in Lisbon, way back in the 1950s. It was uttered by a friend whose literary tastes tended toward the then little-known literatures of South America. The rest of our gathering—we met every day in the late afternoon—favored, almost unanimously, a sweet yet immortal France, except for the occasional eccentric who boasted of knowing by heart what was being written in the United States. To this friend, whom in the end I lost sight of, I owe the initial curious impulse that led me to Julio Cortázar, Borges, Bioy Casares, Miguel Angel Astúrias, Rómulo Gallegos, Carlos Fuentes, and so many others who slip from my memory when I attempt to recall them—Sabato among them. For some strange reason I associated those three rapid syllables with a staccato stab from a dagger. Considering what this familiar Italian word actually means, my association might seem all the more incongruous, but truths are there to be told, and this among them. El túnel [The Tunnel, also translated as The Outsider] had been published in 1948, but I had never read it. At that point in time, as an innocent and youthful twenty-six-year-old, I still had a great many roads to travel before I discovered the sea route that would bring me to Buenos Aires. . . Meanwhile, El túnel became my unforgettable companion at many a café table, where I sat musing and perusing, Sabato’s novel in hand. Its very first pages showed me exactly how far an audacious association of ideas had come to bring me from surname to dagger. Any subsequent readings of Sabato’s works, whether novels or essays, only served to confirm my initial impression of an encounter with a tragic and outstandingly lucid writer who was able to open up a path through the labyrinthine corridors of his readers’ souls and would never permit them, even for an instant, to turn their eyes away from the most obscure nook or cranny of their being. Did this make the works difficult to read? Perhaps, but it also made them all the more fascinating. The mixture of surrealism, existentialism and psychoanalysis that provided the theoretical underpinning to the prose composed by the author of Sobre héroes y tumbas5 should not allow us to forget that this self-proclaimed enemy of reason (called Ernesto Sabato) used his own fallible and humble human reason to describe what was right before his eyes during the apocalypse of bloody repression inflicted on the Argentine people.6 Works of fiction that recall definite historical periods in objectively named places, such as El túnel; Sobre héroes y tumbas;Abbadón el exterminador [Abbadón the Exterminator], not only force one to hear the cries of a conscience afflicted by its own impotence and see the prophetic vision of a sibyl terrified by the future foreseen, but also remind us, like Goya (better known as a painter than as a philosopher) in his famous engravings of the Caprichos of indelible memory: it is always the sleep of reason that bears, grows and makes prosperous an inhuman race of monsters.
Dear Ernesto, this is the tremor and the terror running through all of our lives, and yours is no exception. Perhaps nowadays we are not confronting a situation as dramatic as those you lived through, and for which, endowed with a sense of humanity as you are, you have refused to absolve your own species. You are someone for whom it has become impossible to forgive even his own human condition. No doubt some will not be pleased by this violence of feeling, but I beg you not to disarm yourself of that dagger. Nearly a hundred years old. I am certain that the century we have left behind will become known as the century of Sabato, at least as much as that of Kafka or Proust.
I am not unaware of the fact that the main duty of education in general, and especially education at the university, is what we call formation. The university prepares the student for life, transmitting the knowledge necessary for the effective exercise of a chosen profession within the range of the demands placed on it by a given society, a profession that might once have been a vocational calling, but which increasingly frequently now is based on scientific and technological advances, along with pressing business interests. In either case, the university will always have reason to think it has fulfilled its obligations by delivering up to society young people ready to receive and integrate into their body of knowledge the lessons that yet remain to be learned, meaning those that experience (the mother of all things human) will teach them. Nowadays a university, as is its duty, forms you, and if this so-called formation continues to do the rest, the inevitable question arises: “Where is the problem?” The problem is that I have limited myself to discussing the formation necessary to professional development, leaving aside that other formation, the formation of the individual, the person, the citizen—that earthly trinity, all three in a single body. It is now time to touch on this delicate subject. Any action that is performed presupposes, obviously, an object and an objective. The object—or perhaps we should here say subject—is the person who is the object of that formation, and the objective lies in the nature and aims of that formation. A literary formation, for example, gives rise to doubts only as to the teaching methods employed and the greater or lesser receptiveness of the student. The question, however, changes radically when we start discussing the formation of individuals, always given that we want to inspire that person whom we have designated as our “object,” and not restrict ourselves to merely supplying the materials appropriate to this particular discipline or that particular course. This then involves us in including the whole complex of ethical values and theoretical or practical relationships indispensible to any professional activity. However, forming individuals is not, of itself, a soporific. An education that propounded notions of racial or biological superiority would be the perversion of this intrinsic concept of value, replacing the positive with a negative, replacing ideas promoting respect for humanity with intolerance and xenophobia. Both ancient and recent human history is not short on examples of this. Let us continue.
Where might I be going with this discourse? To the university. And also toward democracy. The university, because it is quintessentially the home of excellence, responsible for dispensing the knowledge necessary to the formation of citizens and the education of individuals in the values of a shared humanity and respect for peace, preparing them for liberty and for the responsible and healthily critical discussion of ideas. You can argue that an important part of this task should devolve upon the family as the basic social nucleus, yet, as we know, the institution of the family is undergoing its own identity crisis, which makes it ineffectual in confronting any of the changes that characterize our times. The family, with rare exceptions, tends to lull our social consciences to sleep, until we reach the university, where, as we meet new people and discover diversity, the necessary conditions for a practical and effective apprenticeship in the fullest democratic values come together, starting with what appears to me to be the most fundamental value of all: the issue of democracy itself. We have to find a way to reinvent this concept, to drag it out from the paralysis into which routine and disbelief have sunk it, both amply assisted by the economic and political powers that find it convenient to maintain the decorative façade of the democratic edifice without allowing the rest of us to check whether there is actually anything still behind it. In my opinion, whatever remains is almost always more heavily employed in bolstering lies than in defending the truth. What we call democracy is beginning, sadly, to resemble the funeral cloth covering the urn in which rest the remains of a putrefying corpse. Let us then resurrect democracy, before it is too late. And may the university assist us in doing so. Will it want to? And will it be able to?
Black Spain [España negra] is the title of a book by the artist José Gutierrez Solana (1886–1945). This book is sometimes difficult or discomforting to read, not because of an abstruse style or poor syntactic construction, but because of the brutality of its portrait of Spain, which it traces simply by the translation of his images to the written page, images previously described as gloomy and ugly, reflecting the degraded atmosphere of rural Spain at that time, revealing all in pictures without shirking the most atrocious, obscene or cruel examples of human behavior. Influenced by the darkest Baroque style, most especially that of Valdés Leal, and also informed by Goya’s “black pictures,” Gutiérrez Solana’s Spain is in the highest imaginable degree sordid and grotesque, for no other reason than that this was what he found in his observations of the so-called popular feast days and the costumes and customs of his homeland.
Today Spain is no longer the same; it has become a developed and cultivated country, able to teach the world a few lessons in civil society, as the reader of the above paragraph will protest. I do not deny that this view might hold water in Castelhana, in the halls of the Prado Museum, in the neighborhoods of Salamanca or on the avenues of Barcelona; yet there is no dearth of places where Gutiérrez Solana, were he still alive, could set up his easel and paint the same pictures in the same shades as before. I mean those towns and cities where, by public subscription or with the financial support of local town halls, bulls and bullrings are provided for the delight and delectation of the local population every time a local feast day comes around. The delight and delectation does not simply consist in killing the bull and distributing its steaks to the most needy. Despite high unemployment levels, the Spanish people enjoy an abundant diet. Delight and delectation also have another name. The bull charges blindly, streaming blood, pierced by lances in both flanks, perhaps scorched by the flaming banderillas that were used in eighteenth-century Portugal, and then is chased into the sea, there to drown: the bull has effectively been tortured to death. Small children cling to their mothers’ necks and clap their hands, excited husbands grab their excited wives, for it so happens that the people are made happy whenever a bull tries to flee its executioners, trailing rivulets of blood in its wake. It is atrocious, it’s cruel, and it’s obscene. But surely what really counts is whether Cristiano Ronaldo is going to play for Real Madrid? What does something like this matter when the whole world is crying over the death of Michael Jackson? Or what does it matter that a city subjects a defenseless animal to premeditated torture, on a popular holiday that will be relentlessly repeated the following year? Is this culture? Is this civilization? Or isn’t it more like barbarism?
Yesterday our Foundation was two years old. As it is customary to say, it really does only seem like yesterday that we got started. If we attempted to draw up a balance sheet of all we did and all we dreamed of doing, we’d have every justification for assuring you that we never had a moment’s rest. In the first place, there was the worry over deciding how best to nurture the newborn, in order for its next stages of development to be healthy and full of promise. Then came all the hard work of convincing those of little faith that we were not here to devote ourselves to contemplating the patron’s navel, but rather to work for the good of Portuguese culture and society as a whole. We are not so presumptuous as to assume we changed your minds then or are going to change them now, but the task of public clarification affords us the chance to offer our ideas and proposals to people of goodwill, who fortunately are not lacking in this country, however badly it gets spoken of at times. The Foundation is now in a position to present its portfolio of services to be rendered, which looks not only worthy but also promising. The work at the Casa dos Bicos, which we visited three days ago, is making steady progress, and it is highly likely that within six months or not much longer we’ll hold the key in our hands and will be able to freely come and go at the house that is already ours but will be all the more our own once its program is fully under way. We hope that the Campo das Cebolas, where it is situated, will become a regular part of people’s daily walks, including those for whom culture is more than a superficial spiritual ornament. We recently had occasion to remember the work and life and José Rodrigues Miguéis. Next, perhaps in January 2010, we will celebrate Vitorino Nemésio. And after him, Raul Brandão. Our country’s laws, however unjust at times, do provide opportunities and outlets in the literary marketplace, in an age when, all too often, great writers of the recent past are no longer spoken of in the literary world. We shall do all we can to stem, and even reverse, this harmful tendency. We have a great deal of work ahead of us. Two years are nothing, but the infant is in good health, and deserves praise.
1 Saramago’s birthplace.
2 Where Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
3 Journey to Portugal: A Pursuit of Portugal’s History and Culture by José Saramago, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor (Harvill, 2000), p. 443 (Afterword).
4 House of Chambers—the town hall, built in Saramago’s preferred Romanesque style.
5 Of Heroes and Tombs, now out of print in English, but a classic text of twentieth-century Argentine literature.
6 The three military dictatorships of Generals Videla, Viala, and Galtieri, which took place between 1976 and 1983, and the “dirty war” they waged on the civilian population, resulted in the “disappearance” of 10,000 to 30,000 people. In 1984 Ernesto Sabato published a book of the victims’ testimonies, called Nunca Más (published in Britain as Never Again [Faber & Faber 1986, trans. Nick Caistor]).