The Woman of Porto Pim

Prologue

I am very fond of honest travel books and have always read plenty of them. They have the virtue of bringing an elsewhere, at once theoretical and plausible, to our inescapable, unyielding here. Yet an elementary sense of loyalty obliges me to put any reader who imagines that this little book contains a travel diary on his or her guard. The travel diary requires either a flair for on-the-spot writing or a memory untainted by the imagination that memory itself generates — qualities which, out of a paradoxical sense of realism, I have given up any hope of acquiring. Having reached an age at which it seems more dignified to cultivate illusions than foolish aspirations, I have resigned myself to the destiny of writing after my own fashion.

Having said this, it would nevertheless be dishonest to pass these pages off as pure fiction: the friendly, I might almost say pocket-size muse that dictated them could not even remotely be compared with the majestic muse of Raymond Roussel, who managed to write his Impressions d’Afrique without ever stepping off his yacht. I did step off and put my feet on the ground, so that as well as being the product of my readiness to tell untruths, this little book partly has its origins in the time I spent in the Azores. Basically, its subject matter is the whale, an animal which more than any other would seem to be a metaphor; and shipwrecks, which insofar as they are understood as failures and inconclusive adventures, would likewise appear to be metaphorical. My respect for the imaginations which conjured up Jonah and Captain Ahab has luckily saved me from any attempt to sneak myself, via literature, in amongst the ghosts and myths that inhabit our imaginations. If I talk about whales and shipwrecks, it is merely because in the Azores such phenomena can boast an unequivocal reality. There are however two stories in this small volume which it would not be entirely inappropriate to define as fiction. The first, in its basic outline, is the life of Antero de Quental, that great and unhappy poet who measured the depths of the universe and the human spirit within the brief compass of the sonnet. I owe to Octavio Paz’s suggestion that poets have no biography and that their work is their biography, the idea of writing this story as if its subject were a fictional character. And then lives lost by the wayside, like Antero’s, perhaps hold up better than others to being told along the lines of the hypothetical. The story which closes the book, on the other hand, I owe to the confidences of a man whom I may be supposed to have met in a tavern in Porto Pim. I won’t rule out my having altered it with the kind of additions and motives typical of one who believes that he can draw out the sense of a life just by telling its story. Perhaps it will be considered an extenuating circumstance if I confess that alcoholic beverages were consumed in abundance in this tavern and that I felt it would have been impolite of me not to participate in the locally recognised custom.

The fragment of a story entitled “Small Blue Whales Strolling about the Azores” can be thought of as guided fiction, in the sense that it was prompted by a snatch of conversation overheard by chance. I don’t even know myself what had happened before and what afterwards. I presume it is about a kind of shipwreck, which is why I put it in the chapter where it is.

The piece entitled “A Dream in Letter Form” I owe partly to reading Plato and partly to the rolling motion of a slow bus from Horta to Almoxarife. It may be that in the transition from dream to text the content has suffered some distortions, but each of us has the right to treat his dreams as he thinks fit. On the other hand the pages entitled “High Seas” aspire to no more than a factual account, the only merit they can claim being their trustworthiness. Similarly many other pages, and I feel it would be superfluous to say which, are mere transcripts of the real or of what others have written before me. Finally, the piece entitled “A Whale’s View of Man,” in addition to my old vice of looking at things from another’s point of view, unashamedly takes its inspiration from a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who, before myself, and better than myself, chose to see mankind through the sorrowful eyes of a slow animal. And it is to Drummond that this piece is humbly dedicated, partly in memory of an afternoon in Plinio Doyle’s house in Ipanema when he told me about his childhood and about Halley’s comet.

Vecchiano, 23 September 1982