2024-03-25 03:01:00
From Lisbon
The ashes of Jerónimo’s grandson – that illiterate shepherd who said goodbye to each of the trees he had in his orchard by hugging them – are under a centenary olive tree brought from his homeland, Azinhaga do Ribatejo, in the Campo das Cebolas square, with views of the Tagus River, and in front of the charming Casa dos Bicos buildingthe headquarters of the José Saramago Foundation. Next to the tombstone with the writer’s name you can read the epitaph, the last sentence of his novel, convent memorial: “He did not ascend towards the stars, if he belonged to the earth.” The midday sun sheds its light on Alfama“enclosed between four walls of water”, as Amália Rodrigues sang, in the song titled with the name of the oldest neighborhood in Lisbon, birthplace of fado and the place where Pereira, the character of Pereira maintains, by Antonio Tabucchi. A tourist approaches the olive tree with the intention of hugging it, as if the thick memory of the trunk bifurcated into two knots invited her to imprint her hands on the community of living things.
The façade of Casa dos Bicos is covered with stones carved in the shape of a diamond tip, the so-called “bicos” that are the spearhead of the architectural influence of the Italian Renaissance. The José Saramago Foundation, which has operated in this building since 2012, was created by the writer himself in a declaration of principles that he signed in Lisbon on June 29, 2007.. The objective is to defend and disseminate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the promotion of literature and the defense of the environment, with special attention to the problems of global warming of the planet. This private institution, whose sources of financing are the copyright of the work of Saramago (1922-2010), the contributions of members, tickets and what is sold in the bookstore, will bring to Argentina Let us ordinary citizens take the floor and take the initiative, a exhibition that will open on May 3 at the Library of Congress as part of the activities of Lisbon as a guest city at the 48th Buenos Aires International Book Fair.
Worker of letters
Climbing the stairs is an invitation to rise between brief quotes from the books that are read step after step, as if the Foundation called to put yourself in “Saramago mode” before entering. Impossible not to see the stamped letters; some phrases are more recognizable or easier to translate for the average visitor with dubious knowledge of the Portuguese language “Apart from the conversation of women, it is dreams that hold the world in its orbit.” We women smile with the intimate satisfaction of finding a “feminist” interlocutor in that fragment of convent memorial. “I will look at your shadow if you don’t want me to look at you,” she reads The Gospel according to Jesus Christ. On the first floor, the director of the Saramago Foundation, Sérgio Machado Letria, and the director of Communication, the Brazilian journalist and writer Ricardo Viel, tour The seed and the fruits, the permanent exhibition dedicated to the life and work of the author of Essay on blindness, which brings together numerous manuscripts, documents, first editions and hundreds of translations into more than 40 languages.
A reflection by this literary worker, author of more than forty titles, is terrifying because of its relevance. “If man is not capable of organizing the world economy in order to satisfy the needs of a humanity that is dying of hunger and everything, what humanity is this? We, who fill our mouths with the word humanity, I think we have not reached that yet, we are not human beings. Maybe one day we will be, but we are not, we have a lot left. We have the spectacle of the world there, and it is something chilling. We live next to everything that is negative as if it had no importance, the trivialization of horror, the trivialization of death, especially if it is the death of others, of course (…) And as long as people’s conscience is not awakened this will remain the same. Because much of what is done is done to keep us all in apathy, in a lack of will, to reduce our capacity for civic intervention.”
The display cases display Saramago’s student card from the Afonso Domingues Industrial School, for the 1939-1940 school year; the school notebook from 1933, which contains academic notes taken daily by his teacher, Mr. Vairinho, of whom he speaks in The little memories; To Toutinegra do Moinho, by Émile de Richebourg, the first book he ever read and which his mother kept on the kitchen cupboard; “Morte de Homem”, typewritten story with handwritten corrections, published in the Lisbon Diary December 28, 1950; “O Mr. Christ”, story published in the magazine Seara Nova he March 25, 1950. There is also the first novel that he published at the age of 26 in 1947, initially titled The Widowwhich Editorial Minerva changed to the title of Land of Sin; and the manuscript of Skylightdated January 5, 1953, which would only be published in 2011, a year after his death.
After finishing school, Saramago worked as a locksmith in an automobile repair shop. He married in 1944 Ilda Reis, who would soon become one of Portugal’s most important visual artists. In 1947, the same year he published his first novel, his only daughter, Violante, was born. For nineteen years, until 1966, when he published The Possible Poems, was absent from the Portuguese literary scene. He worked at the Estúdios Cor publishing house and dedicated himself to translating from French Colette, Pär Lagerkvist, Jean Cassou, Maupassant, André Bonnard, Tolstói, Baudelaire, Étienne Balibar, Nikos Poulantzas, Henri Focillon and Jacques Roumain, among others.
The ways of the life
“He spent a long time without publishing. Was she preparing because she had nothing to say? Life took him on other paths,” says Ricardo Viel.author of A country raised in joy, the reconstruction of what the days were like in the life of the Nobel Prize awarded for the first time to a Portuguese writer. In the early 1950s, the young Saramago attempted to write several novels that he never finished or that he only outlined as You Sandwiched. “Maybe I can’t write this novel. I would have to put too much of myself into it to make it believable. I’ve been wallowing in myself for fifteen years. Why continue? It is an unanswered question. I think I have no choice but to continue wallowing. I don’t know how to do anything else,” he confesses in some unpublished notes.
The paths of life continue; He divorced in 1970 and began a relationship with the writer Isabel da Nóbrega; In April 1975, with the Carnation Revolution, he became the director of the newspaper News Diary, a position he held until November of that same year, when he was fired due to the turnaround caused by the military coup. What could a man unemployed for political reasons, a man who never hid his communist militancy, do? Then he decided to dedicate himself entirely to literature and find out what he was worth as a writer. In 1980 he published Raised from the ground, the story of a saga of landless peasants from the Portuguese Alentejo from 1910 to the Carnation Revolution, a novel that gave rise to the form of narration that characterizes Saramago’s fiction: without the standard normative punctuation, without semicolons, periods suspensive, and with an integration of the dialogues as a flow of voices that are distinguished because after a comma the capital letter will mark the change of the voice that intervenes. In one of the display cases are the transcriptions of the interviews done by Saramago with peasants from Lavre in 1977 for the novel Raised from the ground. During the 80’s he published convent memorial, The year of Ricardo Rei’s deaths, The stone raft, History of the siege of Lisbon.
Affective diplomacy
In Saramago’s life, in 1986, there appeared Pilar del Río, a Spanish journalist and translator, who read The death of Ricardo Reis and traveled to Portugal to take the literary route of the novel and meet the author. Viel says that Pilar called him for the first time on June 11 and they saw each other three days later. In the writer’s personal agenda is the handwritten record of the first time they met, on Saturday, June 14, 1986. He wrote down the surname “De los Ríos” incorrectly, which appears crossed out and then written correctly. There is a poem he wrote, “June Fourteenth,” dedicated to that woman, twenty-eight years his junior. Then they began to exchange letters between Seville, where she lived, and Lisbon. “There is a letter that is a model of emotional diplomacy in which Saramago asks her if the circumstances of her life will allow him to pass through Seville,” Viel recalls and adds that a year later Pilar settled in Lisbon and was the the writer’s partner until June 18, 2010, when he died at his home on the island of Lanzarote.
Saramago did not live or die here; There is no sign, trace or mark of his spirit on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling, as is usually expected when visiting a writer’s house. What are we looking for by contemplating the space inhabited in another time, recycled with the aspiration of recovering the child or young person who finds a literary destiny in the thaumaturgic power of the word? Fernando Gómez Aguilera’s exhibition project manages to weave the threads of life and work by integrating existential inquiry with intellectual commitment through the incorporation of numerous manuscripts, notebooks, notebooks, diaries, book editions, photographs and videos to display the complex Saramaguian world. On one of the walls you can see Saramago with Susan Sontag, with Gabriel García Márquez, with Mario Vargas Llosa, with Chico Buarque, with Mario Benedetti, with Ernesto Sabato and Kenzaburo Oé, among other writers and artists.
A small country, a big language
In the space dedicated to the moment he became the first Portuguese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, Viel remembers that at the time when the winner was announced, the writer was waiting for a flight to return to Spain. Teresa Cruz, then responsible for the press at the Frankfurt Book Fair, called the airport to notify that she had won the prize and prevent the writer from traveling. A stewardess communicated the news to Saramago, who after winning the Nobel Prize published The cavern, The duplicate man, Essay on lucidity, the death intermitence, The elephant’s journey y Cain. As happened with Fernando Pessoa, unpublished texts by Saramago and unfinished sketches of novels have appeared after his death. Is it valid to publish everything a writer wrote? asks Page 12. Sérgio Machado Letria, the director of the foundation, assures that “not everything will be publishable” and that the materials that are decided to be published will be made with critical studies and texts from specialists.
Saramago’s studio reproduces the space in which he wrote with original objects such as his work table, the Hermès machine, which he bought second-hand and which he used until writing History of the siege of Lisbonin 1989; his glasses; Fountain pens; some stones collected in symbolic places, such as East Timor or Chiapas; the pipe from his smoking days; his first personal library; three volumes of Montaigne, in French, of great sentimental value for the author; frequently referenced books (history, geography, literature) and an engraving by Júlio Pomar. On the table, next to the typewriter and his glasses, is the Portuguese language dictionary that he usually used, accompanied by the phrase “A small country, a big language.”