The Choices of Ricardo Reis

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.

 

Adamastor's Howl*

 

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.

Comments

[TC]

Absolutely marvelous. And very you, Beth. Thanks for this. I look forward to Wah-Ming's response.

I've only read Ricardo Reis in parts--I almost said "I haven't read the whole thing since I wrote it," but perhaps that's too flexible with the... truth.

I wonder about what you said about age. My question isn't whether 48 is different from 58: for each individual it must be, of course. But I wonder if it is essentially different.

"[Saramago] ascribes feelings to [Ricardo Reis, at 48] that I find more credible in a person ten years older - the age I am now."

I'm neither 48 nor 58, so I don't know. But I doubt it. I can extrapolate from 25 vs 35--a personal difference, yes, certainly, but is there a massive essential difference? Culture, gender, marriage, children, mode of employment and, above all, life expectancy: these seem to be stronger factors than the actual number of the age itself. Some 48-year-olds are very old indeed, very weary indeed. And some 60-year-olds were just born yesterday. Or at least not so weary as their age-mates.

Does a 70-year-old in Japan have more in common with a 70-year-old in Libya or with an 80-year-old in Japan?

I bought my copy of "Ricardo Reis" in 1996 in Boston. And then the years began to happen, and I learned some things about shifting identities, about melancholia and quiet rage, about desire, about heteronyms.

Now I'm ready to enter the world the book long ago prepared for me. Your thoughts will serve me well as I return to those marvelous and impossible sentences...

[Beth]

Thanks, TC. Yes, your point about relative ages is well taken. I was speaking mainly about myself and friends. A major factor, actually, seems to be whether people have worked for institutions or for themselves, since some are dealing with job loss, mandatory retirement, or incentives, in this economic climate, that try to encourage early retirement. For artists and writers both the challenges and insecurities are different; Saramago is an encouraging example, producing most of his best works after the age of 60 and continuing to feel a moral responsibility to engage in questions facing society.

Pessoa, of course, died at 47 of cirrhosis - so we can draw our own conclusions about how that age felt to him.

[john]

Well I am intrigued so today i went to the little bookstore in my town and ordered the Saramago book.I look forward to checking it out

[Siona]

God, Beth. Why are there not more writers and more women like you? And why are paeans like this so rare? I read this letter--though letter seems not the right word for something that to me seems so catholic, and so achingly necessary--and wanted nearly to weep with gratitude, both for the beauty and courage of the expression, and, even more, for what you described, and the particularity of the perspective. Voices from the vantage of an encroaching 60 years are, to my mind, so much more needed--and so much more muffled--than so many of those with a briefer chronology.

In your comments you called Saramago an encouraging example. In my (starry-and-perhaps-still-too-youthful) eyes, to write, and to be an artist, at such an age is a strength. In my eyes, the answer (or at least a part of it) to your earlier comment about shaping the future lies in the power of your present voice, and the embodied realization and experiencing of an inevitable human exhaustion. Your voice vibrates with that tensioning wire, strung between birth and the end, and is all the more poignant and unforgettable for it. And if so much of the world seems deaf to such explorations, well, all the more reason to speak.

I don't know what the future may bring, no more than I know whether you or I will outlive the other, and no more than I know the reason for believing that what may come matters. I do know that letters such as this are important, though, and all the more so for their rarity. I want to know what it's like to experience an encroaching sixth decade, and I hope that my own expression of it will be so true.

[Beth]

Siona, I came home from a long day of singing to find your response to this post, and it made me happy. Thank you for what you've said here, and for reading carefully and being willing to engage with what I was trying to express.

Another commenter told me offline that he had read this post and liked it very much, but just felt he had nothing to add or say. That felt to me like a failure on my part (somewhat redeemed by what you wrote!) because I should always leave enough room, or offer an explicit invitation, for the reader, since my goal is never to lecture but to open a conversation. That's why blogging has been an almost perfect medium for me, as opposed to, say, being a professor, or writing books which are, by their nature, a sort of self-contained argument, which readers are free to discuss but only after the author has left the room. That sort of thing doesn't interest me at all.

I find myself wondering, then, how best to initiate this sort of conversation while still trying to express ideas in an essay-like manner. Sometimes I've found that when I've really worked hard on a post, there are fewer comments. One reason can be because, OK, it was fairly well thought-out or carefully written and people think they don't have much to add. Maybe the post has provided food for thought, and that's good. But there's always room for different viewpoints.

It reminds me a little, unfortunately, of being a smart kid in the class who, after a while, didn't get called on. Do we continue to have that kind of stigma follow us around all our lives, just because we're articulate? And when there's also a patina of age that falls between us and younger readers, god help us! So I'm asking you and other readers for your opinions about how online dialogue can best be opened between younger and older readers and writers, between experienced writers and those who feel somewhat intimidated, perhaps. Because that is certainly not the intent here (as I hope most readers know.)

From my own experience, all I can say is that the way to grow as a writer and thinker is to plunge in, and not worry about seeming foolish, less-well-read, or inexperienced -- there's always someone more erudite, more learned -- so what? The way to hone one's skill and one's thinking and self-expression is to engage not only with our peers but with people we like and admire, and this just continues throughout life, it never ends. And one of the disappointments I've heard in people of advanced age - like my father-in-law, who lived to 99, is the difficulty of finding people to talk to on a deep level, because one's friends thin out, and once you're out of the intellectual mainstream, younger people don't come around so much; he used to talk about his "conversations" with the authors of favorite books -- some of whom had lived centuries before!

The internet has changed this, but we need to learn, I think, to use it in a more free-for-all way, like one of those wonderful and memorable dinnertable conversations where normal daily hierarchies of rank and age and position cease to matter, and everyone (inhibitions loosened by good wine and good food, maybe) surprises themselves by entering in, and finding their ideas and contributions welcomed.

[Siona]

Goodness. I feel flattered at having evoked such a luxuriously long response! I hope you do turn it into a post at some point; it seems to me a conversation well-worth having.

I wish I had an easy answer for the question around how to open such intergenerational dialogue. (Or perhaps I don't; easy answers don't lend themselves to much insight or discovery.) I think it takes a certain undoing of assumption--I know I've often assumed not only that more well-organized posts such as the one above are whole and of a piece, and that adding on might somehow unbalance the structure, but that writers such as yourself (or human beings in general) might not need or want my affirmation--but I'm not sure how to encourage this outside personal efforts to undo them.

(An aside, but I find blogging an ideal medium for precisely the same reasons. Thank you for that perfect articulation.)

In any case, it's not hard to append the occasional italicized set of questions to a post, asking for feedback or expressing any other not-explicit-in-the-post-thoughts. I imagine this too takes a certain courage and vulnerability on behalf of the poster, and does run the risk of seeming to pander for comments, but it does seem the simplest way to start.

There's more I could muse on, but I'd love for others to weigh in, and would love, too, for this to be expanded into a post unto its own. I'm sure there are plenty more who'd have something to say but who might this this buried-in-the-comments beginning.

[maria]

Ever since you posted this, I have been haunted by the achingly clear vision you have on that "fatigue that comes at late middle age." As one who suffers from it, with god days and bad ones, the latter in increasing number, part of me did not want to engage with this dialog, nor consider the call you put out there for us to make the choice for action, in spite of the weariness, in spite of that knowledge of what lies ahead.

I haven't read The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, so I can't engage in a dialog over his work, but your response to it, that call to resist giving in to the fatigue is not lost on me, even if I happen to be at a loss for words. That you wrote it as a letter, a personal address, makes it that much more intimate and urgent. I hear you!

Siona's response is a spark to light that fire that makes it possible to believe that we are not talking just among ourselves, we of a certain generation. Her affirmation and desire for an inter-generational dialog is an inspiring "tonic" for overcoming some of that fatigue.