José Luís Peixoto should be on his way to the Lima Book Fair, but he is at his house in Oeiras, 15 minutes from Lisbon, on the Atlantic coast. There he has spent confinement, a "claustrophobic" time that so disconcerted him that he parked the novel he was working on and pushed him to write poetry. After the worst, he remains restless: "Here the beaches are full, but it is worrying that in a country with the size of Portugal, eight or nine people die in one day." According to the writer (Galveias, 45 years old), his narrative blockage was due to "the impossibility of imagining the future." But isn't that precisely the work of a narrator? "Yes, but this pandemic will still have unforeseeable developments," he replies by videoconference. “The last one, that Bolsonaro has been infected, a turn that seems like a bad novelist. Literature takes time to get an overview of things. In that it is distinguished from journalism, which always has enough data because it works with the present. "
He has waited 10 years to turn a decisive person in his life into a fictional character: José Saramago, who died in June 2010. The 1998 Nobel laureate is one of the two protagonists of Autobiography , recently published in Spain in translation by Antonio Sáez Thin. The other is a young writer who is commissioned to write a biography of the author of Essay on Blindness . Peixoto was 26 years old and was nothing more than the author of a self-published book - Te me moriste (Minúscula) - when he won the prestigious José Saramago award with his first novel - No one looks at us (El Aleph). His illustrious colleague pointed it out as one of the great revelations of Portuguese letters and he was able to stop teaching at an institute to live on literature.
"Nineteen years later, they still talk about him when they introduce me," adds Peixoto. She says it without complaint, without underlining, just to demonstrate what the award meant in her career. Also without underlining, he says that Autobiography is "a tribute" to his mentor. A tribute, not a hagiography: “Saramago is just a great writer, not a superhero. To present it as such would be to remove a human dimension that involves imperfections and a certain complexity ”. That is why the novel does not avoid aspects that are still controversial in Portugal such as Saramago's close connection with the Communist Party - "who called for a more radical revolution than that of the Carnations and even the creation of a socialist state" - or the role that his second wife, the writer and journalist Isabel de Nóbrega, played in the dissemination of his literature - "my opinion is that he has oversized himself: his work defends itself" -.
"It would be nice if they gave the Nobel to an author or author of the Portuguese language who was not Portuguese. There are literatures of great value in Brazil and in Africa. It would be important to recognize them ”
José Luís Peixoto knew before sitting down to write that the protagonist of his book is a symbol in his country, someone with unconditional defenders and staunch enemies. He also knew that he was not going to please anyone. "That danger attracted me," he admits. The solution was to think about "the truth of the novel and nothing else." Not even what Pilar del Río, widow of Saramago, could think of? "Not even!" She replies with a laugh. “When I started writing I had it in mind all the time. Writers always have an implicit reader in mind, but my reader was very explicit: her. I broke free when I stopped caring what I thought. The important thing was to be fair with the story. Of course, she was the first person to read the original. " And what did he say? "She understood that this is a literary game."
In fact, Pilar del Río has written commendably about Autobiography , which he relates to the novel in which Saramago matches Fernando Pessoa with one of his heteronyms: The year of Ricardo Reis' death . "She's right," concedes Peixoto. “I made many nods to that novel, starting with the portrait of Lisbon. It was the only one I reread before writing mine. " Also someone reads it in Autobiography . In Spanish. "I did that to provoke," he explains. “Saramago's relationship with Spain is something that many have not just assumed in Portugal. We have a historical trauma with you. "
The parallelism ends there, Peixoto insists. His career and that of his "character" are not alike. He is not short of editors, Saramago found none for his second novel, Claraboya , written in 1953 but published only after his death. The future Nobel laureate spent almost three decades in the dry dock of the narrative, to which he returned in 1977 with Manual of painting and calligraphy . Then came Alzado del piso (1980), his first success. Of all the Saramago books, this is the one that Peixoto prefers: “He gave a different vision, not folkloric, of my region, the Alentejo. And it is wonderfully well written. It contains some of the best Saramago-style pages. " The rural world crosses Peixoto's work but he does not claim the exclusive. "Before me there were writers who spoke about the towns -Miguel Torga among others- and today there are still: in the Azores, in the north of Portugal, in the same Alentejo", he clarifies. “I know the book The Empty Spain and I would say that here we are even worse. The rural world in Portugal is abandoned, it is deserting, the population is aging. There are people who have only left Lisbon to go to Porto and say that rural Portugal no longer exists. But it exists. With the coronavirus, the Portuguese themselves are being encouraged to get to know the country and present it as an exotic place! ”
José Luís Peixoto's first books opened paths to the fantasy that he refuses to close in Autobiography . "Why do I have to choose? Some people read a book that talks about the rich and the poor and says: neorealism. No, it is reality. I'm interested in neorealism and nouveau roman . I am eclectic. ” So much so that he declares himself a devotee of Saramago and Lobo Antunes, something that in his country has some anathema. “There is a conflict between them that continues even after Saramago's death. I have my opinion regarding what each one said about the other, but I also have it regarding their novels, and I find it difficult to find authors who exclude themselves. The literature is not characterized by exclusion. The story includes everything. And when it excludes it is because someone is manipulating it. ” Some labels also seem exclusive to you. Autofiction, for example. "Irritates me. It seems to me a useless and misfit concept. Many times autobiography and fiction overlap like paradoxes. But our way of understanding the world and the rational logic of western thought forces us to disregard these paradoxes. But they are given a lot. And not only in literature. Memory, which is the narrative that we all carry, is made of autobiography and fiction. And no one denies that memory is essential for us to structure ourselves as people ”.
Saramago was the first Nobel laureate in the Portuguese language and Peixoto does not have a replacement candidate: “Now it would be nice if they gave it to an author or author of the Portuguese language who was not Portuguese. There are literatures of great value in Brazil or in Africa. It would be important to recognize them. " He lived in Cape Verde but until now he has been able "the modesty" to write about a reality in which he felt "a foreigner". However, he acknowledges that “to be Portuguese is to have an identity with issues to resolve. The old colonies, for example. It should not be forgotten that for 13 years Portugal had a three-point war [Angola, Guinea and Mozambique]. It is not negligible because people were killing themselves. And then there is the whole colonial relationship, a relationship of inequality that leaves scars. Maybe literature helps process that past. "
Autobiography . José Luís Peixoto. Translation by Antonio Sáez Delgado. Literature Random House. 288 pages. 20.90 euros (paper). 8.99 (digital).