Pereira Maintains

ONE

Pereira maintains he met him one summer’s day. A fine fresh sunny summer’s day and Lisbon was sparkling. It would seem that Pereira was in his office biting his pen, the editor-in-chief was away on holiday while he himself was saddled with getting together the culture page, because the Lisboa was now to have a culture page and he had been given the job. But he, Pereira, was meditating on death. On that beauteous summer day, with the sun beaming away and the sea-breeze off the Atlantic kissing the treetops, and a city glittering, literally glittering beneath his window, and a sky of such a blue as never was seen, Pereira maintains, and of a clarity almost painful to the eyes, he started to think about death. Why so? Pereira cannot presume to say. Maybe because when he was little his father owned an undertaker’s establishment with the gloomy name of Pereira La Dolorosa, maybe because his wife had died of consumption some years before, maybe because he was fat and suffered from heart trouble and high blood pressure and the doctor had told him that if he went on like this he wouldn’t last long. But the fact is that Pereira began dwelling on death, he maintains. And by chance, purely by chance, he started leafing through a magazine. It was a literary review, though with a section devoted to philosophy. Possibly an avant-garde review, Pereira is not definite on this point, but with a fair share of Catholic contributors. And Pereira was a Catholic, or at least at that moment he felt himself a Catholic, a good Roman Catholic, though there was one thing he could not bring himself to believe in, and that was the resurrection of the body. Of the soul yes, of course, for he was certain he had a soul; but all that flesh of his, the fat enveloping his soul, no, that would not rise again and why should it? Pereira asked himself. All the blubber he carted around with him day in day out, and the sweat, and the struggle of climbing the stairs, why should all that rise again? No, Pereira didn’t fancy it at all, in another life, for all eternity, so he had no wish to believe in the resurrection of the body. And he began to leaf through the magazine, idly, just because he was bored, he maintains, and came across an article headed: ‘From a thesis delivered last month at the University of Lisbon we publish this reflection on death. The author is Francesco Monteiro Rossi, who graduated last month from the University of Lisbon with a First in Philosophy. We here give only an excerpt from his essay, since he may well make further contributions to this publication.’

Pereira maintains that to begin with he read without paying much attention to the article, which was untitled, but then mechanically turned back and copied out a passage. What came over him? Pereira cannot presume to say. Maybe that Catholic-cum-avant-garde magazine got on his nerves, maybe that day he was fed up with Catholicism and the avant-garde in every shape and form, devout Catholic though he was, or maybe again at that particular moment of the particular summer then glittering over Lisbon, with all that bulk of his flesh weighing him down, he detested the idea of the resurrection of the body. But the fact is he set about copying out the article, possibly so as to chuck the magazine away as soon as possible.

He didn’t copy all of it, he maintains, only a few lines, which he can document and which read as follows: ‘The relationship that most profoundly and universally characterizes our sense of being is that of life with death, because the limits imposed on our existence by death are crucial to the understanding and evaluation of life.’ He then picked up the telephone directory and said to himself: Rossi, Rossi, what an unusual name, there can’t be more than one Rossi in the telephone book. He dialled a number, he remembers the number well, he maintains, and heard a voice at the other end say hullo. Hullo, said Pereira, this is the Lisboa speaking. And the voice said: yes? Well, said Pereira, he maintains, the Lisboa is a Lisbon newspaper founded a few months ago, I don’t know whether you have seen it, we are non-political and independent but we believe in the soul, that is to say we have Roman Catholic tendencies, and I would like to speak to Mr Monteiro Rossi. At the other end, Pereira maintains, there was a moment’s silence, and then the voice said that it was Monteiro Rossi speaking and that he didn’t give a great deal of thought to the soul. Pereira in turn was silent for a moment or two, for to him it seemed strange, he maintains, that a person who had penned such profound reflections on death should not give much thought to the soul. He therefore assumed there must be some misunderstanding, and at once his mind flew to that resurrection of the body which was a fixation of his, and he said he had read an article on death by Monteiro Rossi, adding that he too, Pereira, did not believe in the resurrection of the body, if that was what Monteiro Rossi had in mind. In a word, Pereira got flustered, and he was angry, mainly with himself, he maintains, at having gone to all this trouble of ringing up a stranger and speaking of delicate and indeed intimate matters such as the soul and the resurrection of the body. Pereira could have cursed himself, he maintains, and at first even thought of hanging up, but then for some reason he summoned the strength to continue and said his name was Pereira, Dr Pereira, that he edited the culture page of the Lisboa, and that admittedly for the time being the Lisboa was an evening paper, and therefore not in the same league as other newspapers of the capital, but he was sure it would sooner or later make its mark, and it was true that just now the Lisboa devoted most of its space to society news, but in a word they had now decided to publish a culture page to come out on Saturdays, and the editorial staff was not yet complete so he needed an outside contributor to do a regular feature.

Pereira maintains that Monteiro Rossi muttered he would come to the office that very day, adding that the work interested him, that any work interested him, because yes, the fact was he badly needed work, now that he’d finished at university and had to earn his own living, but Pereira had the foresight to say no, not in the office for the moment, perhaps it was best to make an appointment to meet somewhere in town. He said this, he maintains, because he had no wish to invite a stranger to that dismal little room in Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca, with the wheeze of its asthmatic fan and the eternal smell of frying spread abroad by the caretaker, a harridan who cast everyone suspicious looks and did nothing but fry fry fry. Nor did he want a stranger to know that the culture staff of the Lisboa consisted solely of himself, Pereira, one man sweating with heat and discomfort in that squalid cubbyhole, and in a word, Pereira maintains, he asked if they could meet in town and he, Monteiro Rossi, said: This evening, in Praça da Alegria, there’s an open-air dance with guitars and singing, I’ve been invited to sing a Neapolitan song, I’m half Italian you know, though I don’t speak Neapolitan, but anyway the owner of the café has reserved an outside table for me, there’ll be a card on it marked Monteiro Rossi, so what about meeting there? Pereira said yes, then hung up and wiped his brow, he maintains, and just then he had the brilliant idea of publishing a short feature entitled ‘Anniversaries’. He thought he’d start it the very next Saturday, so almost unthinkingly, perhaps because he had Italy in mind, he wrote the title ‘Two Years Ago Died Luigi Pirandello’. Then underneath he wrote the subtitle: ‘In Lisbon the great dramatist first staged his Sogno (ma forse no)’.

It was the twenty-fifth of July Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-Eight, and Lisbon was glittering in the azure purity of an Atlantic breeze, Pereira maintains.