The Notebook. José Saramago
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day came, the biggest room in the Altis Hotel was bursting at the seams, and no sign or word of Eduardo Lourenço. You could breathe the concern in the heavy air—something must have happened. On top of this, the great essayist has a reputation for haplessness, and he might have got the wrong hotel. So hapless, so hapless indeed, that when he finally did arrive he announced, in the calmest voice in the world, that he had lost his speech. There was a general “Ah” of consternation, in which I did not join. For a terrible suspicion had assailed my soul: that Eduardo Lourenço had decided to take advantage of the occasion to avenge himself for the episode of the photographs. I was wrong. With or without his notes, the man was as brilliant as ever. He started off on some ideas, weighed them up with the misleading air of someone who was thinking about something else, left a few of them to one side for a second examination, arranged others on an invisible tray, allowing them to develop the necessary connections between themselves and other minor ideas that in fact turned out to be more valuable than had first appeared. The final result, if I might be permitted the metaphor, was a nugget of solid gold.
My debt had increased, had expanded wider than the hole in the ozone layer. The years went by. Until—and there is always an “until” to set us straight at last, as though time, after a lot of waiting, has lost patience. In this case it was my recent reading of an essay by Eduardo Lourenço, ‘Do immemorial ou a dança do tempo’ [“On the Immemorial or the Dance of Time”], in the journal Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 7 from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It would be insulting to summarize this extraordinary piece. I will limit myself to assuring you that the famous copies are now finally in my possession and that Eduardo will receive them in a few days. With the greatest friendship and deepest admiration.
October 14: Jorge Amado
For many years Jorge Amado wanted to be, and knew how to be, the voice, meaning, and joy of Brazil. It is not often that a writer manages to become as much the mirror and portrait of an entire people as he was. A significant part of the reading world outside the country started learning about Brazil when they started reading Jorge Amado. And many people were surprised to discover in Jorge Amado’s books, on the clearest of evidence, the complex heterogeneity of Brazilian society, not only in racial but in cultural terms too. The generalized, stereotyped view that Brazil could be reduced to the mechanical sum of white, black, mulatto, and Indian populations—a view that in any case has been progressively corrected, albeit unequally, owing to the dynamics of development in the country’s multiple sectors of social interaction—received in Jorge Amado’s work the most serious and at the same time pleasing rebuttal. We were not unaware of early Portuguese immigration, nor (on a different scale and at different times) German and Italian immigration, but it was Jorge Amado who placed what little we knew about the subject right there before our eyes. The fresh breeze that fanned Brazilian culture came from an ethnic richness and diversity you would never believe if you looked through the eyes of Europeans, whose view was obscured by the insular habits of colonialism. In fact, from the nineteenth century through the twentieth and up to the present day, hordes of Turks, Syrians, Lebanese and tutti quanti left their countries of origin to transport themselves body and soul to the seductions, but also the perils, of the Brazilian El Dorado. And Jorge Amado opened wide the doors of his books to them.
I will give as an example of what I’m saying a small and delightful book whose title—The Discovery of America by the Turks—is capable of mobilizing the immediate attention of the most apathetic readers. It begins by telling the story of two Turks, who are not Turks, Jorge Amado says, but Arabs called Raduan Murad and Jamil Bichara, who have decided to emigrate to America in pursuit of money and women. It does not take long, however, for the story (which seemed to start out by promising unity) to divide up into other stories, in which dozens of other characters appear—violent men, whorers and drunkards, women as thirsty for sex as for domestic harmony, all peopling the district of Itabuna (Bahia), precisely where Jorge Amado had been born. (Is this a coincidence?) The picaresque land of Brazil is no less violent than the Iberian Peninsula. We are in the land of hired guns, cocoa plantations that once were gold mines, arguments resolved with machete cuts, lawless colonels who exert a power nobody can understand how they came to hold, brothels where prostitutes are fought over like the most chaste of wives. Here the people think only of fornicating and accumulating money, lovers and opportunities for drunkenness. They are flesh for the Final Judgment, for eternal damnation. And yet. . . and yet, throughout this stormy story of persons of ill repute there breathes (to the reader’s bewilderment) a kind of innocence, as natural as the wind that blows or the water that flows, as spontaneous as the weeds that spring up after the rains. A wonder of narrative skill, The Discovery of America by the Turks, notwithstanding its almost schematic brevity and apparent simplicity, deserves to occupy a place alongside the great Romanesque panoramas, such as Jubiabá, A Tenda dos milagres [The Tent of Miracles] or Terras do Sem-fim [The Violent Land]. They say that you can recognize a giant from his finger. Well then, here is the finger of the giant, the finger of Jorge Amado.
October 15: Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes, who created the expression “La Mancha territory,” a happy formula that came to express the diversity and complexity of the existential cultural experiences that connect the Iberian Peninsula with South America, has just received the Don Quixote Prize in Toledo. What follows is my tribute to the writer, to the man, and to the friend.
The first Carlos Fuentes book I read was Aura. Although I have not returned to it, I have retained to this day (and more than forty years have gone by) the impression of having penetrated a world unlike anything I had known before, with an atmosphere composed of realist objectivity and mysterious magic, and that these opposites—which after all are not as opposed as they seem—merged to captivate the reader’s spirit in a wholly unique way. Few of my encounters with books have left me with such an intense and lasting recollection.
That was not a time when American literatures (I am referring to South America) enjoyed the special favor of the learned public. Having been fascinated for generations by the French lumières, which today have faded, we watched with a certain carelessness (the feigned carelessness of ignorance that suffers from having to recognize itself as such) what was going on below the Rio Grande, a movement that, just to aggravate the situation, might have been traveling with relative freedom to Spain but barely paused in Portugal. There were lacunae, books that simply never appeared in the bookshops, and the distressing lack of competent criticism that could help us to find among the little that was being placed within our reach the excellent things at which those literatures, often fighting against similar odds, kept persistently working away. Deep down, there might have been another explanation: the books traveled little, but we traveled even less ourselves.
My first trip to Mexico was to Morelia, where I participated in a congress on the chronicle as a literary form. I didn’t then have time to visit bookshops, but I had already begun to peruse assiduously the work of Carlos Fuentes, reading key works such as La region más transparente [published in English as Where the Air Is Clear] and The Death of Artemio Cruz. It became clear to me that this was a writer of the highest artistic standard and of a rare conceptual richness. Later there was another extraordinary novel, Terra Nostra, which opened new perspectives for me, and I need not mention any further titles here (with the exception of The Buried Mirror, a key work indispensable to any sensitive and aware understanding of South America, as I have always preferred to call it) to affirm that from then on I saw myself definitively as an admiring devotee of the author of The Old Gringo. I knew the writer; I had yet to meet the man.
Now for a confession. Personally I am not easily intimidated, quite the contrary, but my first encounters with Carlos Fuentes, which of course were always polite, as one would have expected of two well-brought-up people, were not easy, not through any fault of his but because of a kind of resistance on my part to accepting naturally something which in Carlos Fuentes is extremely natural—that is, his style of dress. We all know that Fuentes dresses well, with