“Festas, muitas festas.”
I cannot stand cordial people. If it depended on them, literature would have disappeared from the face of the earth. However, “normal” people are highly regarded wherever you go. All murderers, as shown on television, in the eyes of their neighbors are always normal, cordial people. Normal people are accomplices in literature’s Montano’s malady. This is what I thought today at midday inside a Pico taxi, while recalling what Zelda said to her husband, Scott Fitzgerald, how no one but they had the right to live, and those other bastards were destroying their world.
I hate the vast majority of “normal” human beings who day by day are destroying my world. I hate people who are very good-natured because no one has given them the opportunity to know what evil is and so to choose good freely; I have always thought that such good-natured people have an extraordinary malice in the making. I detest them, I often think like Zelda and regard them all as bastards.
I could not stop myself and I gave the taxi driver a mental blow to the head. I waited for one of those brief pauses in his pseudo-tour-guide monologue which ended with the inevitable “festas, muitas festas” to ask him point-blank, as I stood at the ready against Montano’s malady, if he had ever heard of a writer living in Pico.
It was horrible and ludicrous at the same time, because the man thought that I wanted to know if there were typewriters on the island, typewriters for offices, and proceeded to talk about the lack both of offices and of suitable office equipment on the island. This was the last straw. I interrupted him and asked him if he had ever read Proust, who also talked about parties, lots of parties, but didn’t talk much about offices. Silence. Then I told him that his cordial and anti-literary discourse simply disgusted me. Clearly he didn’t understand a word of what I was saying and Tongoy intervened very angrily. “I think,” he said to me, “we’ve had enough of your obsession, illness, call it what you like. Try to calm down. And treat the taxi driver with some respect.” I wasn’t expecting such an outburst from Tongoy, I thought he was my accomplice or squire, but it was also true that I had taken my game too far.
In a show of repentance, I softened my manners, leaned forward and whispered directly in the taxi driver’s ear; I repeated my question in a slow and careful voice, I explained to him — using both Spanish and Portuguese — that I wanted only to know if there were writers — people with an interest in literature — on the island. Finally I got the message through. “Ah,” he said, “you mean book people, people with books, there’s one on the island, he’s not a book person, but he was.” The wretch let out a mysterious laugh. “He lives on the other side of Lajes, at the end of a dirt track, here we all call him Teixeira, we can go and see him if you like.”
The mysterious laugh aroused my curiosity. “He’s not a book person, but he was.” I thought of Montano, of whom something similar could be said when in Nantes he was suffering from writer’s block. At this point we passed through the deserted town of Sao Roque, with nobody in the streets. We hoped that there might be somebody in Lajes. I asked the taxi driver if there would be somebody in Lajes. “Teixeira,” he answered, and the wretch laughed. I asked if there was no one else living there. He shrugged his shoulders and said there might be, might not be, he was from Madalena. “Where there is nobody,” remarked Tongoy, whom anything this lunchtime seemed to put in a bad mood. “That’s right,” said the taxi driver a little uneasily, observing Tongoy’s Draculean face in the rearview mirror with a certain amount of mistrust. “And why is there nobody?” asked Tongoy in an almost frightening tone of voice, as if his life depended on that question. “Carnival,” answered the frightened taxi driver.
As was to be expected, the whaling museum in Lajes was firmly closed. What wasn’t closed in Pico? In Lajes only the monumental church was open, and a small bar modeled on an Irish pub. While the taxi driver stayed in his car, waiting for us to have a look at the two places that were open, we entered the church, where there was absolutely nobody and where what was on view can be seen in so many of the world’s churches; we continued to look at it for some time, we didn’t have much else to do: carpets, chalices, pews, missals, candles, hassocks, dried flowers, an unobtrusive organ, rancid silence. “What will happen on the day churches cease to make sense?” Tongoy asked me. Had we already visited Teixeira by then, I could have answered him: “Well, the new man, the Teixeiras of the new world will visit them in the same way we are visiting the one on this island, without understanding a thing.”
In the pub, which was completely empty — there was only a young waiter dozing behind the bar — Tongoy ordered a beer and asked me if I had realized that the two black clouds had disappeared. I replied that I wasn’t surprised the weather had changed, every day here it seemed to change more quickly. Tongoy then declared himself happy that I was talking about the weather in the Azores and not seeing Pessoa whichever way I turned. I ordered a Cardhu whiskey with water. “Sacrilege,” Tongoy said. “I’m sorry,” I was forced to reply, “it wasn’t my intention to offend you.” “But you don’t order a Cardhu with water,” he said with indignation. We drank in silence. The beer must have gone straight to his head, because he suddenly asked me what I was drawing the map of Montano’s malady for and why I kept hiding it and didn’t show it to Rosa and why I pretended in front of her by making her believe I was enjoying a peaceful, curative rest when in fact I spent the day believing I was the Don Quixote of the Azores, I was more literature-sick than ever and, though I did not realize it, I was unbearable and that was why Rosa had not wanted to accompany us to Pico, because deep down, though she did not wish to accept it, she sensed that I was worse than ever.
I didn’t even feel like making a joke of it and telling him, for example, that I thought he was a better squire than that, a better accomplice in a game we had started for fun in Barcelona, fun stupidly wasted in this pub, and it would be better if we left. “No way,” he said, ordering another beer and another whiskey. It came straight from the heart, very spontaneously, and I said to him, “Listen, if you’re in love with Rosa, all you have to do is wait for the film to end and you can run off with her.” He looked at me as if he could not believe his ears. For my part, this brief scene of unfounded jealousy suggested to me an idea for a role I wish to incorporate into a lecture I must give in Budapest, I think at the end of June. I took out a pencil and a notebook and jotted down the idea. “I know what you’re writing there, you’re mourning the fact I didn’t go along with your game, but you should remember that a squire is obliged to keep his master’s feet on the ground, especially if his master has ideas above his station,” Tongoy said. With the third beer, he asked me if I had heard of Flutterbudget Center. “Nope,” I said, responding like a boxer who raises his guard as a precaution. “Well, it’s on a hill, in the south of Oz.” “I don’t know where Oz is.” “The inhabitants of Oz who show signs of becoming a Flutterbudget are sent there to live.” “I don’t know why this is relevant,” I protested. “It is relevant because Flutterbudgets, like you, are harassed by imaginary dangers and obsessed by the disasters that might overcome them if the things they imagine were to happen.” I told him that he simply couldn’t hold his drink, at which point he ordered his fourth beer and my fourth whiskey, and this landed us in certain chaos, until eventually we began to consider the possibility of visiting Teixeira and finding out what kind of writer this man hiding in a house on the outskirts of Lajes had been. We considered the possibility, thought so hard that by mutual agreement — we had never been so much in agreement — we eventually asked the taxi driver to take us to Teixeira’s home. Halfway there, as we were driving along the dirt track, Tongoy leaned on my shoulder and said to me, “I was talking to you as a friend. It hurts me to see you take so seriously the fight against Montano’s malady, an imaginary disease, my darling Flutterbudget.” Instead of being grateful for his vampiric tenderness, I asked him if he had not noticed that for the extremely complex things he had to say he used a language that was very simple, very plebeian and far removed from my brilliant literary style. He looked at me again in disbelief at what I had said, his eyes shone, his pointed Draculean ears had suddenly gone red. He said to me that perhaps complexity was a weakness and that I had not realized, despite being so wise and such a wonderful critic, that the strength of Kafka, for example, resided precisely in his lack of complexity. He said this and laughed, convinced that he had won the round. “You don’t know,” I replied, “how glad I am to hear you talking about literature and also how glad I am of your strength, friend Sancho, dear squire of this poor Flutterbudget, you don’t know how much I admire an ugly man like you.” In case he hadn’t heard properly, I repeated the last bit: “An ugly man like you.” He stared at me with amusement. “I like it,” he said, “when you’re simple.”