A LETTER TO WAH-MING CHANG
Marcenda placed her right hand over her left. Both were cold, yet between the two was the difference between the quick and the dead, between what can still be salvaged and what is forever lost.
Dear Wah-Ming --
This letter, full of still-incomplete thoughts, comes to you because it was you who suggested Saramago's "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" to me, and you I've thought of often as I read the book. Perhaps that seems strange, because we've never met and hardly know each other, although I read your excellent essay on Saramago just after his own death at 87 earlier this year; perhaps he feels now like our mutual friend.
The real reason is clear to me, though. If every reading of every book is unique, as I believe, then as I read this remarkable novel I kept wondering about your reading of it, because mine felt so particular, and so dependent on reading it at the age that I am, preoccupied with certain thoughts because of that age. You are, I think, in your thirties, while I am hurtling toward sixty. And while we both, as writers and readers, read this book -- I am quite sure -- breathless through Saramago's astounding sentences, wide-eyed at his minute but razor-sharp observations of place and personality, slack-jawed at his masterful construction of plot and narrative, and awed, in the aftermath, by the multiple layers of meaning that emerge -- I felt Ricardo Reis' cold hand on my shoulder as if I were a third party in the room, along with his visitor, the ghost of poet Fernando Pessoa, and I cannot imagine that you would have felt this; not yet.
My one quibble with the plot, actually, is that Saramago has his protagonist, the doctor and poet Ricardo Reis, come back to Portugal from Brazil at the age of 48, and ascribes feelings to him that I find more credible in a person ten years older - the age I am now. Of course, he had no choice: Reis' age had to be 48 because the book follows him for a year after the death of Pessoa, at 47; Pessoa, the inventor of 70-some heteronymns with distinct voices and personalities, of which one of the three main ones -- a melancholy flaneur and believer in fate rather than the possibility of happiness or choice -- was "Ricardo Reis." And so, because this is a magic realist novel, we have the living "Ricardo" returning to his native country after many years of self-imposed exile precisely because his author, Pessoa, has died, and Pessoa himself appearing, out of the graveyard with his pale face and impeccable black suit, to speak with Reis in the streets of Lisbon that Reis wanders, and in the hotel room where Reis conducts his affair with a chambermaid and longs, without real hope or decisive action, for the unreachable Marcenda, with her paralyzed hand.
As I said, there are many ways this novel could be read, but for me, it is a book about the fatigue that comes at late middle age. I'm not talking about being jaded, because unless one has really been spoiled or profligate, one learns that there is always beauty to be seen and something new to be experienced. It's a fatigue that happens when one is old enough to look back and see that much of life is past, that death has become a companion, and that what looms ahead is a choice requiring, on the one hand, great force of will: to continue to engage, to create, to live as fully as possible, or to slow down or even give up, resigning oneself to waiting passively for the inevitable. I see this now in friends facing retirement, whose children are gone and on their own, weary in both body and spirit, convinced their best work and best years are behind them. And though I never anticipated finding it in myself -- because as an artist, writer, and thinker I have no intention of "retiring, " ever -- there are times when I am so exhausted by the world, by a worn body and mind that have seen and felt too much, and by reminders of death, an increasingly frequent visitor, that this choice becomes much more obvious and imperative.
Saramago himself didn't achieve literary recognition until he was sixty, and wrote "Ricardo Reis" when he was 64; these ideas must have been very real to him or he couldn't have embodied them so convincingly in his characters: Reis, the doctor who refuses to heal; Marcenda whose hand "like a lifeless bird that she stroked in her lap" ceased to function after the death of her mother; the sleazy informer Victor, always announced by his leitmotif of onion breath; Lydia the chambermaid and her anarchist brother - the most vibrant characters in the book - who choose very different ways of seizing life with both hands. Saramago asks: what motivates action and what creates paralysis? What constitutes a miracle? What is a valuable life? What is the role of hope and how far are we willing to go to find it?
So there is this possibility: a very personal reading. The story, like many other 20th century novels with a political setting, can also be read as a commentary on detached intellectualism. Or it can be read both as an account and an allegory about the choices faced by nations - by Portugal and Spain, sliding into Facism - or, by extension, perhaps even by nations in our own time. It would seem that this was at least part of the author's intention: in his Nobel lecture, Saramago remembered himself as an "apprentice" of 17, discovering the poems of "Ricardo Reis", and not realizing for a long while that this poet was actually Fernando Pessoa. He memorized many of Reis' "Odes," including the unforgettable and - is it deliberately provocative? - line "Wise is he who is satisfied with the spectacle of the world".
Later, much later, the apprentice, already with grey hairs and a little wiser in his own wisdom, dared to write a novel to show this poet of the Odes something about the spectacle of the world of 1936, where he had placed him to live out his last few days: the occupation of the Rhineland by the Nazi army, Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, the creation by Salazar of the Portuguese Fascist militias. It was his way of telling him: "Here is the spectacle of the world, my poet of serene bitterness and elegant scepticism. Enjoy, behold, since to be sitting is your wisdom..."
So here he was, well over sixty in 1988, turning his clear sad eyes at a world that had learned nothing since 1936. And what does he choose to do? In the very next paragraph of his Nobel lecture he tells us,
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ended with the melancholy words: "Here, where the sea has ended and land awaits." So there would be no more discoveries by Portugal, fated to one infinite wait for futures not even imaginable; only the usual fado, the same old saudade and little more... Then the apprentice imagined that there still might be a way of sending the ships back to the water, for instance, by moving the land and setting that out to sea.
And that became his next book, The Stone Raft.
Wah-Ming, I hope you will tell me what the novel meant to you. I'm grateful to you and to Saramago that this book came along - as books sometimes do - at this precise point in my life, when I'm deliberately looking both backward and forward, considering the future and how much I may have a role in shaping it. One needs to see the alternative before, perhaps, believing that stone rafts can float.
*Adamastor is a mythological character invented by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões. In an epic poem, he appeared in a threatening thundercloud to the explorer Vasco de Gama, who dared to pass the Cape and enter the Indian Ocean, which was Adamastor's realm. A statue of Adamastor stands over Lisbon's harbor, and is frequently mentioned as if he were a real person in the book.
