Requiem: A Hallucination

NOTE

THIS STORY, which takes place on a Sunday in July in a hot, deserted Lisbon, is the Requiem that the character I refer to as “I” was called on to perform in this book. Were someone to ask me why I wrote this story in Portuguese, I would answer simply that a story like this could only be written in Portuguese; it’s as simple as that. But there is something else that needs explaining. Strictly speaking, a Requiem should be written in Latin, at least that’s what tradition prescribes. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’d be up to it in Latin. I realised though that I couldn’t write a Requiem in my own language and that I required a different language, one that was for me a place of affection and reflection.

Besides being a “sonata”, this Requiem is also a dream, during which my character will meet both the living and the dead on equal terms: people, things and places that were, perhaps, in need of a prayer, a prayer that my character can only express in his own way, through a novel. But this book is, above all, a homage to a country I adopted and which, in turn, adopted me, to a people who liked me as much as I liked them.

Should anyone remark that this Requiem was not performed with due solemnity, I cannot but agree. But the fact is that I chose to play my music not on an organ, which is an instrument proper to cathedrals, but on a mouth-organ that you can carry about in your pocket, or on a barrel-organ that you can wheel through the streets. Like Carlos Drummond de Andrade, I’ve always had a fondness for street music and I agree with him when he says: “I have no desire to be friends with Handel, I’ve never heard the dawn chorus of the archangels. I’m happy with the noises that drift up from the street, which bear no message and are lost, just as we are lost.”

A.T.

THE CHARACTERS

ENCOUNTERED IN THIS BOOK

The Young Junky

The Lame Lottery-Ticket Seller

The Taxi Driver

The Waiter at the Brasileira

The Old Gypsy Woman

The Cemetery Keeper

Tadeus

Senhor Casimiro

Senhor Casimiro’s Wife

The Porter at the Pensão Isadora

Isadora

Viriata

My Father as a Young Man

The Barman at the Museum of Ancient Art

The Copyist

The Ticket Collector

The Lighthousekeeper’s Wife

The Manager of the Casa do Alentejo

Isabel

The Seller of Stories

Mariazinha

My Guest

The Accordionist