No one looked at Saramago like her

A universal declaration of human rights was proposed to us and with that we believed that we had everything, without realizing that no right can subsist without the symmetry of the duties that correspond to it. The first duty will be to demand that these rights be not only recognized but also respected and satisfied. Do not expect governments to do in the next fifty years what they have not done in those we commemorate. Let us therefore, ordinary citizens, take the floor and take the initiative. With the same vehemence and force with which we claim our rights, let us also claim the duty of our duties. Maybe this way the world will start to get a little better.

Jose Saramago1998, acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A writer whose obsessions have given him no peace (Jose Saramago), an Atlantic and volcanic island (Lanzarote) and a house (At home) with a garden, three dogs (Camoens, Pepe and the unpleasant Greta) and library. But also, next to the writer, on the island and in the house, there is a woman who, out of love and love, evokes the days and works of the writer in the corner of the world that gave her space to create and love.

Who knows this woman? river pillarWe knew she was not just any woman. Not because she was and is a journalist, translator, soul of the Foundation with a citizen and universalist vocation which bears the name of Nobel Prize Portuguese, but because she is an unleashed force of nature, a generous and sensitive being and, now, also the author of a book as unclassifiable as endearingbut above all necessary and revealing, entitled Island intuition. The days of José Saramago in Lanzarote.

“It’s a book for friends”, warns Pilar del Río and insists throughout the volume. And it’s true and it’s a lie. Or it’s a lie and it’s also true if we consider the reader as one more friend, accomplice of whom hundreds of times – thousands of times the lucky writers, millions of times the very lucky ones, like Saramago-, without ever leaning on their eyes, we have made to infinity, almost all possible confidences, if we accept that writing is an act of premeditated and irrepressible exhibitionism.

But, with this book, these millions of Saramago friends will have access to other revelations that the modesty of the author did not dare to ventilatebut now Pilar del Río enlightens us by giving us a the most complete human and literary portrait of the author of the stone raft while living in the place where he seems to have been happiest and, arguably, most productive.

Saramago’s days in Lanzarote, the Canary Island where he made his home, At homethey ran from 1992 until his death in 2010. Were two decades full of creation and joy (several novels and visits from dozens of friends) and whose most important public moment was the news he received there that he had been the first Portuguese-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (when the prize was still received by great writers).

The most gratifying thing is to know that his island life was born out of a still offensive act of censorshipwhen the prime minister at the time and later president of democratic Portugal, Aníbal Cavaco Silva -and I quote the author- eliminated the novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) which had been chosen by three cultural institutions to represent the new Portuguese literature in Europe.

“The Cavaco Silva government justified its decision on three grounds: first, the book offends the Portuguese, who are Catholic and do not tolerate dogma; secondly, the author is a militant communist and we already know that communists do not represent their country; Third, the book is poorly written. If the first reason could have any (fundamentalist) basis, the second is as offensive as the ostracisms to which Communist governments subjected Pasternak or Akhmatova, among others, and the third, a lamentable exercise in literary criticism by obtuse politicians. AND The writer decided to move away from a country with a government like that.

In brief chapters, like vignettes centered on a subject, the author then reviews the most diverse personal and affective, creative and political or civil situations of this extremely fruitful stage of Saramago’s life, to enable us to complete the readers a fuller picture of his personality and his vital obsessions.

It’s like that in the book the Saramago who was the open and cordial man who enjoyed the gifts of lifefrom the invariable breakfast of toast with olive oil to the visit and the company (almost always with dinner included, better with cod and washed down with wine) of a host of writers, politicians , journalists and friends who have been there at some point At home and made the house a place of intellectual reference in the contemporary cultural world.

But, above all, is portrayed the writer who, with the discipline necessary for his work, he locked himself in his workshop to fulfill the greatest of his obsessions and needs, writing. Thus, each of the novels written at that time has its own commentary in the book, in an exercise in creative and temporal contextualization which completes the knowledge of the work in question.

With particular interest, I have found in these spaces dedicated to artistic work several answers that personally have always haunted me because the questions that precede them contain what I consider to be one of the great mysteries of creation: d do ideas come from? a novel?; Why is one idea “novel” and another not?; How and where did the idea come from, destined to become one novel among many others?

And illuminations like this appear:The idea of ​​writing blindness trial he was introduced to José Saramago at a restaurant in the Madragoa in Lisbon, as he was waiting for a plate of roast cod with sweet potatoes a murro. “What if we were all blind? asks the writer. And immediately he answered himself: “But we are blind, blind that seeing we do not see”. At that moment (…) he knew that he would have to write blindness trial…”, this novel of which he came to say: “… I don’t know if I will be able to survive this book. I finished it in a state of convulsion”.

And another revelation like this: “Con The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, José Saramago had not ended his relationship with God. The sentence “Men, forgive him, he does not know what he has done”, with which the book ends, resounded constantly in his head. You don’t know what you did? He does not know? But if it is God… And then (…) he began to write (…) what was left to say about this founding story of Judeo-Christian civilization, this permanent disagreement between men and “idea of ​​God that has caused so much pain and death through the centuries”.

And of course it is present in the book, since it is consubstantial with the man and the writer, the Saramago aware of its civil liabilitywith whom he committed himself until the end of his days and led him to participate by his pen and even by his physical presence in various social and political processes that moved his sensitivity and demanded his solidarity.

For this reason, as an unbeatable highlight of the proposed itinerary, river pillar includes the results of the writer’s invincible concerns about our human rights, the rights to freedom and life, to the way of thinking and writing, and the duties that these rights entail, for which José Saramago has often spoken for many pulpits and who encouraged the drafting of the “Universal Charter of the Duties and Obligations of Persons”, finally drawn up in 2017, and directed, as Saramago thought, by the statement that “All people have a duty to fulfill and demand the fulfillment of rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the rest of the national and international instruments and the obligations necessary to guarantee them effectively”.

Thus, with all his body, intimate and public, José Saramago leaves Island intuitionmaybe the closest and most beautiful tribute to his memory and his workthought, lived and written by the one who was his life companion, and continues to be the repository of his thought, the ineffable river pillarthat we, admirers of the work of Saramaguiana, must thank for having opened the doors of At home and he will let us live with José Saramago and even with his dogs Camoens, Pepe and the not so hostile Greta.

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