crusaders and their enemies were driven by religious motivations, that to defend paganism the Romans fed Christians to the lions, that many immolations have taken place for religious reasons, that many suicide bombers—among them the attackers of the Twin Towers—have been extremely religious, as are Bin Laden and the Taliban, who bombed the Buddhas, that India and Pakistan are opposed to one another for religious reasons, and that in the end it was with a cry of God bless America that Bush invaded Iraq. Which made me think that perhaps (if religion sometimes is or has been the opium of the people) it has more often been its cocaine. I also think that is Saramago’s opinion, and I give him that definition—and the responsibility that comes with it.
Saramago the blogger is a furious man. But is there really such a gap between this practice of daily indignation about the ephemeral and the activity of writing “little moral works” that are valid for both past and future times? I am writing this preface because I feel I have an experience in common with our friend Saramago, and that is of writing books on the one hand, and on the other of writing moral critiques in a weekly magazine. Since the second type of writing is clearer and more popular than the former, lots of people have asked me if I haven’t decanted into the little articles wider reflections from the bigger books. But no, I reply, experience teaches me (and I think it teaches anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation) that it is the impulse of irritation, the satirical sting, the ruthless criticism written on the spur of the moment that will go on to supply material for an essayistic reflection or a more extended narrative. It is everyday writing that inspires the most committed works, not the other way round.
And there it is. I would say that in these short writings Saramago continues to experience the world as it wretchedly is, before going on to see it again from the more serene perspective of poetic morality (and sometimes to see it as worse than it is—even if going further seems impossible).
But then, is this master of the philippic and the Catiline Oration really always so furious? It seems to me that apart from the people he hates he also has some that he loves, and so we have affectionate pieces dedicated to Fernando Pessoa (Saramago isn’t Portuguese for nothing), or to Jorge Amado, to Carlos Fuentes, to Federico Mayor Zaragoza, to Chico Buarque de Holanda, which show us how little this writer envies his colleagues, and how he is able to weave polite and tender miniatures around them.
Not to mention (and here we return to the great themes of his narrative) those moments when the analysis of everyday life throws up its great metaphysical problems, about reality and appearance, about the nature of hope, about what things are like when we aren’t looking at them.
Then Saramago the philosopher-narrator returns, no longer furious but meditative, and uncertain. But we don’t dislike him even when he loses his temper. He’s congenial company.
1 This is the preface to the Italian edition of The Notebook (Bollati Boringhieri, 2009), translated by Shaun Whiteside and reprinted with permission from Umberto Eco.
Preface
When Pilar and I settled in Lanzarote in February 1993, while still keeping our Lisbon house, my sister- and brother-in-law, María and Javier, who had already lived there for some years, along with Luis and Juanjo, who had recently arrived, offered me a notebook, which I was to use to record our days in the Canary Isles. They imposed just one condition: that I should give them a mention every once in a while.
I never wrote anything in that notebook, but it was thanks to this gift, and for no other reason, that the Lanzarote Notebooks1
were born and lived for five years. Today I find myself in an unexpectedly similar situation. This time, however, the motivating forces are Pilar, Sérgio and Javier, who take care of the blog. They told me they had reserved me a blog space and that I ought to write for it—commentary, reflections, simple opinions about this and that, in short whatever happened to occur to me. Being much more disciplined than I often seem, I replied yes, indeed, I would do it, on the condition that this notebook would not demand the same diligence that I had obliged myself to show with the others. For what that is worth, you can count on me.
1 Published in the 1990s, the Lanzarote Notebooks are an account of Saramago’s life as a writer on the island. They have not yet been translated into English.
September 2008
September 15: Words for a City
While shuffling around a few bits of paper that have lost that fresh quality of newness, I came across an article about Lisbon I wrote a few years ago, and I’m not ashamed to admit that it moved me. Perhaps because it isn’t really an article, but a love letter—expressing my love for Lisbon. So I decided to share it with my friends and readers, making it public once again, this time on the infinite page of the Internet, and with it inaugurate my personal space on this blog.
WORDS FOR A CITY
There was a time when Lisbon didn’t go by the name Lisboa. They called it Olisipo when the Romans arrived there, Olissibona when it was taken by the Moors, who immediately began saying Aschbouna, perhaps because they couldn’t pronounce that barbaric (Latin) word. But in 1147, when the Moors were defeated after a three-month siege, the name of the city wasn’t changed right away; if the man who would become our first king had written to his family to announce the news, he would most likely have headed his letter Aschbouna, October 24, or Olissibona, but never Lisboa. When did Lisboa start being Lisboa in law and in effect? At least a few years would have to pass before the birth of the new name, as they would for the Galician conquerors to begin to become Portuguese . . .
One might think these historical minutiae uninteresting, but they interest me a great deal: not just knowing but actually seeing—in the precise meaning of the word—how Lisbon has been changing since those days. If cinema had existed at the time, if the old chroniclers had been cameramen, if the thousand and one changes through which Lisbon has passed over the centuries had been recorded, we would have been able to see Lisbon growing and moving like a living thing across eight centuries, like those flowers that we see on television opening up in just a few seconds, from a still, closed bud to a final splendor of shapes and colors. I think I’d love that Lisbon above all else.
In physical terms we inhabit space, but in emotional terms we are inhabited, by memory. A memory composed of a space and a time, a memory inside which we live, like an island between two oceans—one the past, the other the future. We can navigate the ocean of the recent past thanks to personal memory, which retains the recollection of the routes it has traveled, but to navigate the distant past we have to use memories that time has accumulated, memories of a space that is continually changing, as fleeting as time itself. This film of Lisbon, compressing time and expanding space, would be the perfect memory of the city.
What we know of places is how we coincide with them over a certain period of time in the spaces they occupy. The place was there, the person appeared, then the person left, the place continued, the place having made the person, the person having transformed the place. When I had to recreate the space and time of the Lisbon where Ricardo Reis lived his final year, I knew in advance that our two concepts of time and place would not coincide—that of the shy adolescent I used to be, enclosed within his own social class, and that of the lucid and brilliant poet who frequented the highest planes of the spirit. My Lisbon was always that of the poor neighborhoods, and when, many years later, circumstances brought me to live in other environments, the memory I always preferred to retain was that of the Lisbon of my early years, the Lisbon of people who possess little and feel much, still rural in their customs and in their understanding of the world.
Perhaps it isn’t possible to speak of a city without citing a few notable dates in its history. Here, speaking of Lisbon, I have mentioned only one, that of its Portuguese beginnings, the day it was first called Lisboa: the sin of glorifying its name is not such a dreadful one. What would be a grave matter would be to succumb