Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
António Lobo Antunes (1942–) is a Portuguese novelist and medical doctor. He was forced to serve with the Portuguese Army in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974). He published his first two novels in 1979 and, since then, there have been twenty-one others, earning him a succession of European prizes. He has been named as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. After a long rivalry with José Saramago, when the New York Times called for a comment on Saramago’s Nobel Prize victory, he grumbled that the phone was out of order and abruptly hung up. In 2007, he underwent surgery for intestinal cancer, and, knowing how his body would look cut open, recorded the experience in a series of articles.
For reasons I won’t go into right now, the last few difficult weeks have forced me to think about the past and the present and to forget about the future. Especially the past: I have rediscovered the smell and the echo of hospitals, the atmosphere like soft white felt through which the nurses glide like swans and that so thrilled me when I was an intern, the silence of rubber, the gleam of metal, people speaking in hushed tones as if in church, the sad solidarity of waiting rooms, the interminable corridors, the terrifyingly solemn ritual that I watch wearing a tremulous smile that serves as my walking stick, a fake courage barely disguising my fear. Especially the past because the future is getting narrower and narrower and I say especially the past because the present has become the past too, memories that I thought were lost and that return without my realizing they were lost, the Sunday markets at Nelas, the squeals of the suckling pigs
(I remember the squeals of the suckling pigs so vividly now)
a ring bearing the emblem of Benfica that when I was five I thought was beautiful and that my parents thought hideous, and that at fifty I still think is beautiful even though I also think it’s hideous and feel that now is the right moment to start wearing it again given that I don’t have that much time left for large pleasures. I want the ring with the Benfica emblem, I want my grandmother alive, I want the house in Beira, I want everything that I allowed to slip away and that I need, I want Gija to scratch my back before I go to bed, I want Zé Rebelo’s pine woods, I want to play Ping-Pong with my brother João, I want to read Jules Verne, I want to go to the fair and ride on the figure-eight roller coaster, I want to see Costa Pereira save a penalty from Didi, I want to eat sweet eggy desserts. I want codfish cakes with tomato rice, I want to go to the school library and get a thrill from reading Fialho de Almeida’s racy The Redhead in secret, I want to fall in love all over again with the wife of the Pharaoh in The Ten Commandments as I did when I was twelve and to whom I remained staunchly faithful for one whole summer, I want my mother, I want my little brother Pedro, I want to buy ruled paper with thirty-five lines a page from the grocery store so that I can write poetry counting out the stresses on my fingers, I want to play ice hockey again, I want to be the tallest in the class, I want to blow on my marbles for luck
ox-blood cat’s eye rainbow and coral
I want Frias at Senhor André’s school to tell us about the films he’s seen, to talk about the Boy, the Girl and the Boy’s Friend, in films I only ever saw through Frias’s descriptions of them
(Manuel Maria Camarate Frias, where are you now?)
and his descriptions were much better than the films, Frias imitated the sound track, the noise of the horses, the gunfire, the brawl in the saloon, he imitated this so well it was as if we could see it all, and Norberto Noroeste Cavaleiro, the man who thought I was trying to break into his car and who boomed at me
—Dr. Cavaleiro to you, you young devil
the first time a grown-up had called me names and I felt like telling him that my father was a doctor too, and that when I first went into the locker room at Futebol Benfica, Ferra-O-Bico explained to the others
—Blondie’s dad is a doctor
and a circle of respectful silence formed around me, Blondie’s dad is a doctor, I want to get a cab at the door of my house and hear the driver ask
—Is this where a guy called João lives, the hockey player?
and I want to feel the same amazement that he should talk about my dad like that, I want to break one of my arms and have a plaster cast on it, or, better still, my leg, and have to use crutches and amaze the girls the same age as me, a small boy on crutches
I thought then and I think now
there isn’t a girl who doesn’t want to fall in love with him, what’s more the cars stop to let you cross the road, I want my grandfather to draw me a horse, then get on that horse and ride away, I want to bounce up and down on the bed, I want to eat goose barnacles, I want to smoke a furtive cigarette, I want to read the World of Adventures, I want to be the Cisco Kid and Mozart at the same time, I want to eat Santini’s ice cream, I want a flashlight with batteries for Christmas, I want chocolate umbrellas, I want my Aunt Gogó to give me my lunch
—Open your mouth now, Toino
I want a plate of lupine seeds, I want to be Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia, I want to wear long pants, I want to jump off trams while they’re still moving, I want to be a ticket collector, I want to play all the plastic trumpets in the world, I want a shoebox full of silkworms, I want my soccer cigarette cards, I want there to be no hospitals, no patients, no operations, I want to have time to get up the courage to tell my parents that I love them very much
(I don’t know if I can)
to tell my parents that I love them very much before darkness falls, ladies and gentlemen, before the final darkness falls.