The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

Note

The characters, locations and situations here described are purely the fruit of the author’s imagination. From actual fact he has drawn one very tangible episode which set that imagination in motion: on the night of May 7, 1966, Carlos Rosa, twenty-five years old, a Portuguese citizen, was killed in a police station of the Republican National Guard at Sacavém on the outskirts of Lisbon, and his body was found in a public park, decapitated and showing evidence of torture.

For certain themes of a legal nature to be found in this book I owe much to friendly conversations with Judge Antonio Cassese, president of the International Penal Court of Justice at the Hague, as well as reflections arising from his book Umano-Disumano. Commissariati e prigioni nell’Europa di oggi (Inhuman States. Imprisonment, Detention and Torture in Europe Today, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995).

This novel is also indebted to the person whom I here call Manolo the Gypsy, a fictional character, if you like, though it would be better to say a whole community concentrated in one individual in a story to which, on the plane of what is called reality, he is extraneous. Far from extraneous to the story, however, are certain unforgettable tales heard told by old gypsies one far-off afternoon at Janas, during the blessing of the animals, in the days when the nomad people still had horses.

I wish to thank Danilo Zolo for all the information regarding the philosophy of law which he was kind enough to provide me with, and Paola Spinesi and Massimo Marianetti for the care and patience with which they transformed the original manuscript into a typewritten text.

It only remains to add that Damasceno Monteiro is the name of a street in a working-class district of Lisbon where I once happened to live, and that the opening sentences of Loton’s speech for the prosecution are taken from the philosopher Mario Rossi. The rest of that speech relies solely on the culture and convictions of the character himself

A.T.