The islands of Faial and Pico are the first destinations chosen for an unusual experience in Portugal: making the Azores known by those who (d)written them. There is of course the magic eye of Vitorino Nemesio [un poète et romancier açorien, 1901-1978]the boastful story of Mark Twain [dans Le Voyage des innocents, 1869] and the epic of the whalers by José Dias de Melo [un autre écrivain açorien, 1925-2008]but also the stories of several other authors who were impressed by the beauty of these islands located in the middle of the Atlantic, as virgin as the most inaccessible sites in the world, with landscapes still very little altered by the human presence.
The idea of this organized tour “The Azores of writers”* comes from Luís Daniel, who designed the itinerary for this literary and touristic adventure. On this Friday in February, around twenty people are expected at Horta airport [la plus grande ville surf Faial]. For three days, they will travel Faial and Pico, its neighbor, by bus. They will cross the channel that separates them by ferry to discover the latter, where stands the highest point in Portugal, which has constantly appeared on the horizon of travelers since their arrival.
Disturbing hoods
It is first Faial who constitutes the literary attraction. By crisscrossing the rural area, we will come across surprises, all taken from the books that serve as guides for this trip. The first of these will be The Unknown Islands by Raul Brandão [“Les îles inconnues”, inédit en français, dans lequel le natif de Porto (1867-1930] recounts a trip to the Azores and Madeira]. The author describes the town of Horta [en 1924] and we see that “the convents, the massive churches, the old and pleasant provincial houses with wooden and wrought iron balconies” have not disappeared. It is clear, it is impossible not to notice Pico, which stands on the other side of the channel. “The formidable Pico… its rounded bay and [la plage de] Port Pim.”
Brandão did not stay in the lower part of the city and the voice of Luís Daniel, who accompanies the trip with passages ofThe Unknown Islands, stops at Espalamaca, where the wind persists in being as strong as the beauty of the place. Then she utters a sentence: “What gives this land its powerful character is the hood. Every now and then a black, misshapen ghost with a large hood on his head bursts in.” The traveler wonders what the meaning of this statement is when, after only two steps in the vicinity of a mill, he notices a covered woman whose face we do not even see. “So is that the hood?” he asks himself as he approaches this black body which has troubled Brandão so much and which troubles him almost a century later.
The astonishment of Mark Twain
This is the first surprise of an itinerary from which will emerge many sights that have astonished so many travelers over the centuries. From this moment, the current reality of the islands and the evocations of other times will not stop overlapping. Moreover, all you have to do is wait a few minutes for these reconstructions to add knowledge that you did not know you had or that you had forgotten, for example, that Faial was populated equally by the Portuguese and the Flemings and that if the mills present similar structures, they have different wings according to the nationality of whoever built them.
At that moment, we hear the pages that Mark Twain devotes to them in The Voyage of the Innocents [le récit d’un voyage effectué en 1867, disponible en français à la Petite Bibliothèque Payot]. “When the wind changes they tie up a few donkeys and spin the whole top half of the mill until the wings are in the right position, instead of adapting the system so that you can move the wings rather than the mill”, he writes, surprised.
Mark Twa