“Literature is heading toward itself, toward its essence, which is its disappearance,” said Blanchot many evenings after having said he was fed up with the same two questions.
Out of a pure sense of the game, albeit also guided by a natural survival instinct, I tell myself that I should immediately turn into the essence of literature, embody it in my own modest person. But fortunately I realize that I am taking my responsibilities too far and in fact it is not a good idea, it really is not a good idea, for me to be the very essence of literature, for me to be Montano’s well-being or, which is more or less the same thing, to be the eternal rest of literature in its tomb. It is not a good idea, really it isn’t! The most prudent course of action would be to continue stealthily being the memory and not the disappearance of literature. It’s the least I could do.
Will literature never disappear?
I remember Scott Fitzgerald in Montano’s story paying an unexpected visit to Juan Rulfo’s memory and dictating to him in Coyoacán this sentence by Pedro Páramo: “Nothing can last so long.”
Whatever Tongoy may say, that man Teixeira we found hiding away on the island of Pico seems disturbingly to embody the new man, the man to come or perhaps the man who has already arrived; at least in Pico there is a specimen of what awaits us, his name is Teixeira and I would say that with his personality, he is constantly bidding farewell to a secular way of living the world, of living and conceiving it. I won’t easily forget Teixeira. Stunned by his dehumanized, barbarous laugh, I thought about something Bismarck said when he first saw the modern ships in the port of Hamburg: “Here begins a new era, which I cannot understand.”
I remove the map, my private geography of the illness, from its hiding place and look at it again, but without paying too much attention, when suddenly, absentmindedly, I discover that in the underground galleries inside the volcano, where the pencil has strayed most freely, an abyss has sprung up that I did not know and which has probably arisen — like the moles — from the corrupt and rough mental and moral subsoil I thought I observed in the cracks of the pathetic laughter of Teixeira, the man of the future, the man to come.
Will there not be another death in paradise?
— TONGOY
In Pico there is the volcano, which takes up virtually the whole island and is the highest mountain in Portugal. There is the volcano and three coastal enclaves: Madalena (where the ferries from Fayal dock), Sâo Roque, and Lajes, which is where supposedly — today we hardly saw a soul — most people live. Lajes has a whaling museum and an enormous church, disproportionate to the size of the island.
We hardly saw anybody this morning in the streets of Madalena when we arrived. Four or five passengers got off the ferry, no more; they got off with their bags and baskets, and in no time at all disappeared down the silent, deserted streets of this ghost town. I asked Tongoy if he knew what we were doing visiting Pico.
“One visits Pico for the experience,” he answered me.
There was nobody in the main square, only two taxi drivers with their vehicles parked opposite the small town hall (no doubt they had been warned from the pier in Fayal of the imminent arrival of two visitors, people from the film); the two taxi drivers did not address each other, one was young and looked like a criminal, the other was noticeably old. The young one, with a stupid smile, seemed confident that we would hire him.
We scoured every inch of Madalena in search of a bar or some incentive to stay there, but everything was shut, not even a bar open, not even someone other than the two taxi drivers, so we made our way back to the main square and again examined the two men; it felt as if we were in a brothel and had to choose between one prostitute and another.
The ferry did not return to Fayal for another three hours, and that was supposing it would, since a fairly spectacular black cloud was approaching. It became very clear that we had little option but to seek refuge in the old man’s taxi and to go to Lajes, to see if there were more people and more things there; perhaps the whaling museum was open — the old man told us he didn’t know. “One visits Lajes for the experience,” I remarked as the taxi pulled away. Tongoy gave me a very dirty look, and it struck me — I had already noticed it on the ferry — that he was in a foul mood.
“Have you seen the other cloud?” he asked me. “Because there are two black clouds, although you can’t see one of them. In a short while, this will be one of the darkest places on earth. I think one visits Pico for the experience, but I also think we made a mistake in coming here.”
There was only one black cloud, but I preferred to keep quiet. At that point the old taxi driver began to act as impromptu tour guide, he began to explain that there are only three towns in Pico and the rest is lava rock with the occasional vineyard and the odd wild pineapple. Then he said that he had only once left the island, to go to Fayal on honeymoon.
As the taxi driver was speaking, I paid closer attention to him and thought I observed that he looked a lot like Fernando Pessoa — Pessoa past the age of eighty. I had the happy idea of mentioning this to Tongoy, who reacted very badly and told me he would have had no problem laughing if I were joking, but he was sure I was being serious, and he found this awful, clearly I wasn’t just literature-sick, I was literature-rotten.
I preferred to keep quiet and watch the countryside gliding slowly past the taxi window. Pico’s road, the only one on the island, is terrifyingly sad in winter, but if you also happen to be traveling with an old taxi driver and Tongoy in a bad mood, you can fall into a depression lasting the rest of your days. The road runs along the breakwater, with many curves and deep potholes, overlooking a rebellious blue sea. The road, gloomy and narrow, crosses a stony and melancholic landscape, with occasional isolated houses on small hills, in winter normally swept by the wind.
“Here,” said the taxi driver, “there’s nothing left, but in the past, when I was a young man, this was full of vineyards that somehow grew from the difficult volcanic soil, and they made Pico wine. At the time of the grape harvest, there were parties, lots of parties.” On either side of the gloomy road could be seen the ruins of the old lordly mansions belonging to the families in Fayal who had made their fortunes producing wine in the lava soil. Of these once-great villas, where the grape harvest would have been celebrated, there remained only a few stones and the deep nostalgia of the taxi driver, who occasionally, with leaden and melancholic insistence, punctuating his cordial monologue, would say, in a Portuguese marked with a heavy Azorian accent:
“Festas, muitas festas.”
Leaden nostalgia for ancient days of splendor, in the most repellent cordial tone.
“Festas, muitas festas.”
The fifth time he said it, I fell into a trance and my brain began to whirl around. One of many things I remembered was that I had always to be on the alert against literature’s Montano’s malady. In short, I couldn’t help it, though I recognize that Tongoy was partially right when later he implied that I had overdone it and had gotten off track. In short, I couldn’t help it: the stupid poetic tone of the melancholic taxi driver reminded me that there is an activity we might call Proustian, which involves recalling facts from the past with sensibility and intelligence. The taxi driver seemed unaware of this, he seemed incapable of suspecting that there is a magnificent literary background in the art of telling melancholic stories; the taxi driver seemed entirely entrenched in the memory of some poor, unfortunate girlfriend he had once had at the time of the grape harvest; the taxi driver ended up getting on my nerves.