The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  Xalapa, July 1994

  28Translated by William and Charles Archer

  PEREIRA DECLARES

  Writing about Antonio Tabucchi has always placed me on the threshold of the impossible. Dazzled by his writing, my greatest temptation is to reproduce it abundantly, to fill pages with his quotations, find a common thread, and deploy them in an order best for sharing with the reader the pleasure of reading him. His prose is hard to imitate; it possesses its own melody, an emotional tension moderated by intelligence. His writing is conjectural and at the same time precise. In his novel Requiem: A Hallucination, a ghostly Pessoa pleads with the narrator: “Please, don’t abandon me to all these people who are so certain about everything, they’re dreadful.”29

  Misunderstandings, ambiguities, grey areas, false evidence, imagined realities, and dreams mottled by a terrible reality, the search for what we already know is lost, backward games, voices from the gates of hell—these are elements that we often find in Antonio Tabucchi’s world. Another one: a perfect elegance born of simplicity. Tabucchi’s elegance is like melancholy, always clinging to the shadow of the story, or buried in the subsoil of language.

  Tabucchi declares that he aspires to write for a reader who expects neither solutions nor words of consolation but rather questions. The presumed reader should be willing to be visited, to host the imponderable, to modify mental categories, lifestyles, to introduce new ways of approaching the human condition: to force destiny rather than be condemned to an early requiem.

  In a lecture delivered in Tenerife in 1991, entitled “The Twentieth Century, Balance and Perspectives,” Tabucchi asserts: “A writer who knows everything, who is already familiar with everything should not publish a book. The only certainty that I have is that everything is relative, that there is another side to everything. It is, above all, this area where I like to investigate, where nothing is immediately visible.” And later: “The man given to us by the literature of our time is a solitary and broken man, a man who is alone but no longer knows himself and has become unrecognizable […] One must reclaim the right to dream. This may seem, at first, like an insignificant right. But, upon further reflection, it will seem like a great prerogative. The man who is still able to nourish illusions is a free man.”

  And that brings us to Pereira and what he declares in the novel that bears his name. Tabucchi takes risks that few authors are willing to take. Pereira Declares is, among other things, a political novel, which in itself will cause some to furrow their brow. It narrates events that occurred in Lisbon during the span of a month, between late July to late August 1938, a period during which the Salazar regime strengthens its totalitarianism and locks Portugal away in a seamless dictatorship that will last thirty-five cruel years. It is, indeed, a political novel, but different in every way from the ideological narrative of socialist realism. The only thing that Tabucchi’s novel shares with stories of an ideological character is its parabolic nature. And this is perhaps the source of its greatest challenge. Every character that participates in an apologue exemplifies a virtue or a vice that will ultimately be unmasked and punished or rewarded; all of their words and actions are predetermined in general terms to achieve this purpose. However, in order to be novelistically valid, it must have its own breath, assume those virtues or defects as an individual expression, otherwise the language will always give off a whiff of pamphleteering.

  Pereira, the protagonist of Tabucchi’s novel, like Ariel from The Tempest, is built of “such stuff as dreams are made on.” However, as he fulfills his destiny he becomes imbued with reality, a tragic reality. In the end, we find him transformed into an extraordinarily animated character, one of the most lovable of contemporary narrative. He enjoys the double privilege of maintaining his individuality and of becoming a symbol.

  Who, then, is Pereira, what does he do, what problems does he face? Well, he is an old journalist, an infernally fat widower, plagued with ailments, whom doctors have given only a few years to live. Not long ago, he began to edit the weekly literary page of a second-rate evening paper. He becomes obsessed, almost maniacally, with obituaries. Several things could explain this phenomenon, perhaps because his father was the owner of a funeral home called La Dolorosa, or that his wife suffered from tuberculosis during their entire marriage, to which she eventually succumbed, or the conviction that his heart problems would lead him to an early grave. But, too, because during the radiant summer of 1938, he began to sense that Lisbon reeked of death, that all of Europe reeked of death. Pereira is Catholic. The immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the flesh are topics on which he meditates incessantly. The first illuminates him; the second terrifies him. Imagining that the vast quantity of fat that smothers him will be resurrected makes him dizzy. Pereira, plain and simple, is a good man, immersed in a world that he finds increasingly more disgusting. His cult of death leads him to create an obituary column for the literary page he edits, to prepare in advance the obituaries of writers whom he admires; but, for some reason, he refuses to be the one to write them. To this end, he contacts a young man, who has recently graduated university, from the Faculty of Philosophy, Francisco Monteiro Rossi, whose essay precisely on the subject of death he has just read.

  Pereira Declares at times sends me to one of the author’s earlier novels, which I revere: The Edge of the Horizon. At first glance they might seem like opposites. An old Pereira moves under Lisbon’s radiant blue sky. Spino, the protagonist of The Edge of the Horizon, on the other hand, carries out his investigations under a hazy sky in a city steeped in humidity and darkness. Pereira’s search ends with the discovery of personal freedom, the performance of an act of protest, which at the time disguises a heroic quality: by revealing himself he discovers the society that surrounds him. Spino, however, isolates himself little by little from society as if trying to suppress a metaphysical sign. How, then, are these stories alike? On the one hand, the theme of death is always present in both. Pereira imagines a collection of obituaries at the service of his cultural page. Death and eventual resurrection are his obsessions. Spino works in a hospital morgue, he is in constant contact with corpses. In both novels, personal identity is the underlying theme. In both, the result is the same: each of the characters marches toward the revelation of a destiny that is incubating inside him.

  Upon meeting with the young Monteiro Rossi and his girlfriend, Pereira’s via crucis and final resurrection begin. “He asked himself: Am I living in another world? And he was struck by the odd notion that perhaps he was not alive at all, it was as if he were dead.”30 The journalist, however, is predestined to remain alive, even if each of his meetings with the young couple leads him to difficult situations, to truly atrocious moments. And perhaps therein lies the most difficult challenge that Tabucchi has assumed: to not introduce a young communist in the thirties as a cruel and callous sectarian, which today is usually considered mandatory. The young Monteiro Rossi and his friends are communists, yes, and are aware of the need to strengthen the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War, among other things, because Franco’s victory would mean the continuation of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. He knows nothing about the purges in Moscow and, if anyone had spoken to him about them, he would think it was a lie invented by fascist propaganda, or the punishment of a group of traitors who committed crimes before being executed. The same thing Kio would have thought, the character from Malraux’s The Human Condition, one of the most beloved heroes during my youth, whose death moved me as if it he had been one of my closest friends. In this way, Tabucchi shatters a rigid form of contemporary “politically correct thought,” that of turning any communist militants living during the years of the Soviet purges into monsters of abjection, into active accomplices in the crimes of Stalin, and into builders of the extermination camps. That would be like condemning Walter Benjamin, Picasso, Tibor Déry, and hundreds of intellectuals who believed in the possibility of changing the world. The young hero of Pereira Declares could be
one of them. Not long ago, Jérôme Garcin reported that during a conversation with Julien Gracq this remarkable writer above suspicion had addressed the situation in the thirties: “The Revolution was a job and an article of faith. He was a communist then and was active in the Confédération générale du travail (the CGT). He didn’t miss a single meeting […] He remembers with amusement almost being discharged in 1938 for being the only teacher at the Lycée de Quimper to participate in a banned strike. He continues to evoke that period of collection drives, of meetings and illusions during which he headed a section and delivered the Party word to the trawlers of Douarnenez, to the tuna boats of Concarneau, and to the lobster boats of Guilvinec, in cafés where the chouchen inflamed the minds of the seaman. Gracq surrendered his card in 1939, when the German-Soviet pact was announced. Did he get out in time? No, he retorts, it was already too late. From the first trials in Moscow, he says in retrospect, I should have made a clean break. But he adds he would have been deprived of the beautiful moments of fraternity in the secret and harsh Finistère, where he learned about a universe at once pure and Manichean.”

  Censorship, distrust of his newspaper, and police surveillance barrel down on Pereira. It seems the meeting with the young couple who write delusional and unprintable obituaries was a curse for the old and infirm journalist, who becomes increasingly more engaged with the “pure and Manichean” world to which his protégés belong. In the end, he will become another man. His obstacles to survival will surely become greater, but he will have the certainty of having saved his soul. His victory will be immense. The only obituary he manages to write is that of the young Monteiro Rossi. It will also be the most beautiful page of the novel.

  We do not know to whom Pereira is speaking, to whom he declares what happened during that terrible summer of 1938. Perhaps he shares his testimony with fellow exiles, one of them the novel’s supposed author, who glosses, details, and shades everything the journalist declares in order to transmit it later to the reader, who in fact becomes the true recipient of the testimony. The method is perfect. It allows both proximity and distance. And those two words: “Pereira Declares”—repeated throughout the novel—work as a refrain that accentuates the melody of perfect prose.

  Xalapa, July 1995

  29Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  30Translated by Patrick Creagh

  ENDING

  JOURNEY TO CHIAPAS

  I. THE BEGINNINGS

  2 JANUARY 1994

  Ominous headlines appear in today’s newspapers: “Revolution breaks out in Chiapas. San Cristóbal de Las Casas and three cities fall into the hands of rebels.” A friend, who as a rule is very well informed, phoned me this morning to wish me a happy New Year. She answered my questions and told me that the situation had returned to normal, but that there had been wide-scale fighting and several deaths. Yesterday I went to my cousins’ for New Year’s dinner. Some of those in attendance expressed enthusiasm for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was coming into force. We would soon be like the United States and Canada. Well, not the country, it would still have to wait a while, they clarified; but everyone present agreed it would be a good thing for us. Someone claimed to have heard on a radio newscast something about the occupation of some cities in Chiapas. No one took it seriously. They tell him he must not have understood correctly. Some fanatical opposition groups have begun storming the city halls in some villages, only to abandon them after four or five days of anarchy…In fact, my friend in the know told me that the army had to intervene to liberate the occupied towns. She was sure that it was an act of revenge against the president. Someone had pledged to ruin the day that the Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Without a doubt we would find out who was responsible for the disturbance. Newspapers, for their part, are saying that someone incited the Chiapanec indigenous communities to revolt. But no one knows for sure who that someone is who is capable of ruining the President of the Republic’s day and making the Indians revolt. It seems to me that right now anyone who wanted to could organize uprisings in different parts of the country, because there is extreme poverty, and people in the countryside are desperate. As incredible as it may seem, the insurgents said they would advance on Mexico City and would not give up until they overthrew the government. They would not settle for being the protagonists of a regional insurrection.

  4 JANUARY

  What days! The rebellion in Chiapas has everyone on end. Contrary to what was said, it hasn’t been defeated. I watch television and everything seems unreal and quite terrifying…I’m exhausted, overwhelmed, in a foul mood…I’m almost certain this year will be horrible. The worst thing that could happen to Mexico would be the birth of a Shining Path. During a television newscast they said the leader of the guerrilla movement is twenty-four and speaks four languages. Surely some new information will come out soon. But how were these people militarily trained? That will also be made public soon, they say. I feel like going to live in Italy or Spain. Portugal. The Salinas era will wind down this year. But it will leave a lasting wound on the country.

  5 JANUARY

  Farewell dinner for John and Deborah, who will be spending a few months at Yale. The topic, like it or not, was the uprising in Chiapas. Later I went by Rodrigo’s house and the conversation was the same; then Braulio visited me at the hotel and went on about how complex the situation is. I went up to my room, turned on the television, and listened to the spokeswoman for the Secretariat of the Interior, Socorro Díaz, read a document on the insurgency’s structure: military training, weapons, recruiting, etc. It is incomprehensible that the authorities were not aware of these preparations. Either the guerrillas were protected by a powerful sector inside the government or had the full support of the indigenous communities who allowed them to create this army, or both. Everything seems to be in Chinese.

  8 JANUARY

  The fighting continues, and there were some terrorist acts in different parts of the country. No significant damage. Instead, they seemed intent on showing that danger lurks everywhere all the time. The television reports produced by the government, as usual, are very clumsy; they’re attempting to deny the main problem: the extreme poverty and contempt to which the indigenous population has been subjected. How did the government not know that something on this scale was going on? Army shelling continues near San Cristóbal in areas largely populated by Indians. There are constant marches for peace and for cessation of the shelling in Mexico City. I ask myself again: Did the army not notice anything during the year that, according to the Interior Secretariat, the preparations were underway? Or the secret service of the various police forces? Or the much-trumpeted military intelligence? Was the information intercepted, or was it received and then dismissed because of the leadership’s eagerness to reach the inflationary target? I stood in a long line at a newsstand today to buy La Jornada and El Financiero. I wasn’t able to work this weekend.

  11 JANUARY

  So far this month my life has been a bundle of nerves. A friend from Mexico City just called me. She was hysterical, bordering on delirious. There was something truly irrational about her excitement. The revolution was beginning to save the country from its sins and would deliver it from the many evils that afflict it! She spoke as if the guerrillas had already taken the National Palace. When I hung up the phone, I felt compelled to examine my conscience. I continue to be encouraged by the revolutionary uprising in Chiapas because it lays bare the official lie that had been nagging at me and many others. But that feeling of encouragement goes away as I think about the victims who will die: Indians and Indian children, whose constant presence on television has begun to haunt me, as well as the fear that the country is going to hell, terrorized by a group that could well prove to be (we know nothing about its leader or its members) a variation of the Shining Path. A unilateral ceasefire was declared yesterday. I was relieved to hear that Camacho Solís had agreed to attempt to broker a peace settlement. If he is successful, he will become a giant.
A giant in a world of midgets who govern our country. My hate, my contempt for the whole lot of arrogant scum who have constantly boasted of their so-called macroeconomic successes, has grown more intense and more radical. What an immense waste of money and effort on that solemn buffoonery that was Solidarity, for example! Today we saw a new image of Salinas on television. He no longer looks like the President of the Century but a tiny man with shifty eyes and a look of defeat: the man who for five years has misled the nation and deluded himself into believing that he was Caesar is forced—by grace of a group of Indians whose miserable existence he denied—to look into a mirror that reflects his true dimensions. I’m reminded of Tosca’s words as she stands over Scarpia’s corpse: “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!” All Rome trembled before him! The only thing we can hope for is that these ten ultra-enigmatic days we have lived not be forgotten, that they serve as a lesson, that they initiate a period of national reflection, that our leaders wake up to reality, that they realize how far we are, because of them, from the First World in which they believed they were already living.

  13 JANUARY

  Today in La Jornada there appeared an open letter explaining the Jesuits’ position on the Chiapas conflict. I find it surprising. Among other things, it says:

  Violence that causes loss of human life goes against the will of the God in whom we believe. However, violence in Chiapas did not begin with the armed uprising on the first day of last January. A secular history of plunder, abuses, marginalization, and murders has made victims of the poor inhabitants of that state, particularly the indigenous. This is, perhaps, the origin of the indigenous groups’ desperation that manifests itself now in armed counter-violence. So our rejection of violence, if it is to be just, must tend to its roots. The first and fundamental violence to be condemned is the structural-social-economic-political-cultural violence of which the ethnic groups and popular sectors of Chiapas and much of the national territory have been victims. Not to acknowledge this would be to avoid the state of things that have led to the current confrontation.