Philip Graham
Spends a Year
in Lisbon.
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Philip Graham, a writer who teaches at the University of Illinois, will be spending a year in Lisbon, Portugal. He will be reporting to us from there.
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D I S P A T C H 9
Those Tricky
Subgestures.
By Philip Graham
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I step out of the cab and pay the driver, adding a modest tip that's still larger than anything anyone else in Lisbon would ever give. Usually I wouldn't dream of bucking local custom, but in this case I don't care—as a college student, I spent one summer driving a cab in New York City, and I haven't forgotten how tough the job can be.
I stand at the corner, glancing left and right. My friend Rui Zink is late—or should I, as an American living in Portugal, say that I'm early? Lately I've been hanging out with Rui, a fine writer who can work in any genre imaginable. He's a gregarious, opinionated, generous fellow, and because Rui seems to get invited to everything, sometimes he'll give me a call if he thinks I might be interested. Tonight I'm very interested: the Nobel laureate José Saramago, in town for the week, is attending the launching of a book of essays about his work.
I'm psyched. In Saramago's novels, the Iberian Peninsula can break off from Europe and float free in the Atlantic Ocean, or a plague of blindness will unravel the inner and outer worlds of its victims. In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Reis, one of the poet Fernando Pessoa's invented alter egos, survives his creator's death and wanders through the streets of Lisbon. I read that book with a map by my side, a year before my first trip to Lisbon; it's how I first began to learn my way around the city. And Saramago's prose! It's surprisingly, entertainingly readable, considering that it inhabits a time all its own: either some pre-punctuation Paleolithic of the sentence, or a post-apocalyptic grammatical future where a literary neutron bomb has wiped most periods and quotation marks from the face of the earth. It's a kind of magic, to be able to write fiction that looks so difficult and yet isn't.
The cultural foundation sponsoring tonight's do is somewhere on this block, so I continue down the street, approaching four guards who stand before an official-looking building, two of them sporting machine guns. They certainly have down pat that air of casual menace so popular among the machine-gun-toting masses, and because I'm walking with a bag big enough to contain any number of suspicious items (one of Saramago's novels, my notebook, a camera), I look straight ahead, trying to exude an air of I'm going about my own peaceful business, no need to worry about me.
A couple of motorcycles rush by, leading the way for a few very official-looking cars, their lights flashing. I'm guessing it's not considered polite to stare, so I feign disinterest and concentrate on my search for that foundation. After wandering up and down the street a couple times, I notice a tiny brass plaque beside a heavy wooden door. This must be the place, but Rui is the one with the invitation, so I walk across the street and wait.
Folks are starting to arrive now, entering through the door. Still no sign of Rui. I think of calling him, but hesitate. The guards down the street aren't that far away, and if they saw me punching numbers into a phone ... Haven't cell phones been used by terrorists to set off explosions? I hope those guards don't have trigger fingers. Then I laugh, because I can't believe I'm still giving in to this War on Terror paranoia—especially since the Republicans' asses were so soundly and justly handed to them in the recent elections, and on a silver platter—
There's Rui, marching up the street. He's in the shadows, but I know him by his walk. Rui is a bear of a guy, almost anti-Portuguese in body size, and he has a bit of a limp. He's embarrassed to admit it (and also eager to admit it, Rui is like that), but he forgot where the street was and got lost. Well, não faz mal—no harm done—because, hey, just look at me: my body's completely unriddled with bullets! We enter the building, have our names ticked off a list, then march down a surprisingly large number of stairways to the lecture hall.
At once I locate a short line of people waiting for Saramago to sign books. His face is an odd mixture of severity and calm, with the occasional wan smile softening it all. He looks approachable, and part of me would really like to have him sign my copy of Ricardo Reis. But when it comes right down to it, I know I'm not going to snag a signature, or snap a photo. Either souvenir, I realize, is irrelevant to the impact his books have had on me. That brain encased in his skull is what I'm here for, the one that has already generated some of my favorite novels. I hope at least a few more are fermenting in there.
Eventually, everyone starts to settle in the seats, and I can see that we're in for an evening of speeches, because an international mix of four scholars—two Portuguese, a Brazilian, an Englishman—have lined up in a row on the small stage.
They look terrified.
Why shouldn't they be? Saramago is right there before them, sitting in the front row! Imagine presenting some cobbled-together lit crit in front of, say, a reincarnated James Joyce or Leo Tolstoy, come back from the dead to be entertained for an evening.
The Portuguese start with the first two presentations. These days, I'm good for understanding about 10 percent, sometimes up to 40 percent, of spoken Portuguese. The stone of the language skips across the surface of my understanding, the curve of its trajectory giving me at least the gist of what's being said. Catching visual cues helps, too, and what I'm noticing is that the Portuguese scholars sit a little too stiffly, their body language a picture-perfect model of the advanced stages of calcification. When it's finally the Brazilian scholar's turn to speak, however, she quickly sheds her nervousness and teases Saramago, looks directly at him and thanks him for everything he's written, and she even calls her fellow panelists nossa equipa—our team—as if they're a bunch of literary midfielders, kicking a Saramago soccer ball back and forth. She can't suppress a little samba sway as she speaks.
So far, everyone seems to be conforming to cultural stereotypes, yet this has to be too easy an observation, one that ignores a whole range of subtleties beyond my ken. I can't help thinking of one of my favorite passages in all of Saramago's work, a sentence from his novel The Double that I've often quoted and discussed with my students: "People say, for example, that Tom, Dick or Harry, in a particular situation, made this, that or the other gesture, that's what we say, quite simply, as if the this, that or the other, a gesture expressing doubt, solidarity or warning were all of a piece, doubt always prudent, support always unconditional, warning always disinterested, when the whole truth, if we're really interested, if we're not to content ourselves with only the banner headlines of communication, demands that we pay attention to the multiple scintillations of the subgestures that follow behind a gesture like the cosmic dust in the tail of a comet, because, to use a comparison that can be grasped by all ages and intelligences, these subgestures are like the small print in a contract, difficult to decipher, but nonetheless there." Now this is a sentence whose winding ways are worth mulling over, but the English scholar has started speaking.
And he is one of my worst nightmares.
Clearly more nervous than the others, he lurches from sentence to sentence, his Portuguese accent sometimes on, sometimes off. Worse, he doesn't know when to quit. Maybe he's trying to prove he can redeem his initial faltering, but then he pauses, struggling to remember a word (oh, how many times have I done that!), and a few people in the audience offer, in a murmur, what they think he's looking for.
Rui can barely contain himself, but, as for me, I feel this scholar's embarrassment as my own, having stumbled countless times in conversation. There's so much to remember in building a Portuguese sentence. Just this morning, while reading the newspaper, something about the use of the word andar—to walk—made me think it's not always used literally, so I opened up my sometimes too comprehensive Portuguese dictionary and almost cried at the sight of a long column of useful phrases designed to squeeze every last drop of metaphoric juice out of the word. One lousy verb, so many subgestures.
By this time, I'm staring at the floor. No way do I want to make eye contact, because, in truth, I can only aspire to this scholar's level of linguistic grief. I am a mere mote, a subatomic particle, an infinitesimal muon or quark, to the gas-giant planet of his shaky Portuguese. I can imagine him throwing up his hands in defeat, pointing at me, and saying, "Hey, you think I'm bad—why don't you try listening to that guy speak?"
After the poor fellow finally sputters out, he sits there, pinned to his chair, sporting a blush that's going for the world's record for blushing, and in two categories—depth of shade, and duration. He may even sport traces of it when he has grandchildren, a tiny pink hint about his cheekbones that his family whispers about.
Saramago is invited to join the panel onstage, and he accepts. He sits among them, calm, urbane, amused by it all, clearly satisfied with his portion of praise for the evening. He plays the part of a much-honored writer, gracious at the minor honor of this short stop on his long career, and begins a little impromptu speech. Hoping to catch some of what he's saying (why didn't I bring a tape recorder?), I silently will my ears to stretch out to Dumbo size, and I manage to suss out one tidbit: "All one needs to know in life," Saramago says, "is that others exist"; then he adds, "Life is not just 'me.'"
After a brief question-and-answer period, everyone is all talked out, and Rui insists on introducing me. He and Saramago have met before, and after a short chat Rui nods in my direction and describes me as an American writer living in Lisbon for the year.
Saramago's face stiffens. He says to Rui, in icy Portuguese, "It's good that he came here, because I won't travel to his country, in protest."
I'm pretty sure I've heard correctly. Certainly, it's clear that our little colloquy is over, so Rui and I make our way to the table where wine and rissóis—creamy shrimp turnovers—are being offered. Meanwhile, my mind starts up a great interior ruckus. What does Saramago think my citizenship makes me, anyway—a six-year smorgasbord of headlines featuring global warming, fundamentalist Christianity, illegal wiretapping, a war built on lies, legalized torture, that damn dog Barney? Hey, I voted against Bush twice, and I went through quite a rigamarole to send my absentee ballot in time for the midterm elections, and then there's all the dough I sent to a whole gaggle of netroots Democratic candidates, and I used my Skype account on Election Day to make calls from Portugal for a get-out-the-vote effort, and—
I'm all revved up, but I keep it to myself. One of the lessons I've learned in life is that self-righteousness is best served as a private midnight snack. Still, wine glass in hand, I can't help asking Rui if I really did hear Saramago correctly. He'd rather not answer, but Rui is honest to a fault, and his quick, embarrassed grimace says it all. "Sometimes," he murmurs, "he's not the easiest person to get along with ..."
Strangely enough, I feel an odd moment of affection for Saramago, who, after all, is just a fallible human being. It hasn't been all that rare in my life to encounter fellow writers who can crank up more compassion for their created characters than they can for the living, breathing souls around them. It's almost touching that tonight Saramago opted for headline rattling. It's so easy to miss the fine print.
After chatting with the writer Hélia Correia at the reception, congratulating her on the literary prize she recently won for her latest novel, Rui and I head off for a late dinner at one of his favorite tascas. Our path takes us right past those machine-gun guys, and I'm feeling a bit uneasy again, or, as the Portuguese say, "Eu ando com a pedra no sapato," which literally means "I'm walking with a stone in my shoe." "Who do you think they're protecting?" I wonder aloud, and Rui, ever curious and forthright, turns to ask the guards. They tell him it's the American ambassador's residence.
Yup, on closer look there's a small plaque by the front door, spelling it all out. There's an American flag flying from the third floor—how could I have first missed this, even if it's way up there? As for the ambassador, I've read a little about the guy—he's a longtime fundraiser for Bush, and a businessman from Florida, of all states. I can't help thinking that he could have helped out in the stealing of the 2000 election (and for a moment I have this crazy image of him in a dimly lit room, gluing tiny chads back onto an election ballot). He's just the sort of right-winger I've fantasized standing in front of, red-faced, demonstrating the long list of all the curses I've ever learned, followed by a longer list of all their variations.
As Rui and I continue past the residence, I peer in at the impressively fenced-in grounds, and I notice something else I'd missed earlier in the evening. (I'm a writer, damn it—aren't I supposed to be alert to small details?) In the attached garden, there's a play structure—swings, slide, little wooden tower—much like one I once built in my own backyard. Suddenly, I'm ashamed of the broad brush with which I've been painting. The ambassador must have small children, or at least grandchildren. His politics may set my teeth grinding, but now I can imagine him standing at a window, watching the kids outside swinging back and forth, or squealing down the slide, while a few feet away armed guards behind an iron fence protect them from the headlines of the world, headlines that as of yet they know nothing about.
Oh, those tricky subgestures.
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Click here for Philip Graham's video report from the International Short Story Conference.
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