Antonio Tabucchi's "The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa" - with bonus lobster recipe

How could I resist the Tabucchi book with Fernando Pessoa right there in the title?  The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa (1994) is really a short story, only about thirty little pages in the City Lights volume, where it accompanies Dreams of Dreams.  The Pessoa story is a good companion since it is really just another fictional dream (“A Delirium” is the story’s subtitle), another way for the author to play with his most beloved literary toys.

This delirium is the sanest, least delirious delirium I have encountered.  Pessoa is in the hospital and receives a series of visitors, poets, mostly, all great admirers of Pessoa.  The visitors are all imaginary, Pessoa’s heteronyms, the characters he created in a wild burst of creative activity circa 1914 that resulted in the ingenious and perplexing body of writing I have been reading and messing around with off and on over the past year:  the pastoral poet Alberto Caeiro, the energetic Álvaro de Campos, the skeptical neo-pagan Ricardo Reis, the prosaic Bernardo Soares, and the mad philosopher António Mora, who I have not really read.  I am not sure that he got much down on paper.

Each heteronym makes his farewell to his creator, poignantly, sometimes, as when Caeiro gives Pessoa a final poem, or more comically, as when Soares brings Pessoa a bowl of his favorite tripe soup, likely knowing that Pessoa had no appetite and he would be able to eat the soup himself.  Reis is given permission to write more poems:

But they will be apocryphal poems, Ricardo Reis replied.

It doesn’t matter, said Pessoa, the apocryphal does no harm to poetry, and my work is so vast that it accommodates even apocryphal poems.

Is this a nod to José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis?

Tabucchi, in each episode, is interpreting Pessoa.  The story is a covert form of literary criticism.  Caeiro, for example, the poet who inspired all of the others, is revealed to be Pessoa’s father who died when Pessoa was five.  Or, really, a self-generated psychological substitute for his absent father:

The fact is that I needed a guide and coagulant – I don’t know if I’m making myself clear – otherwise my life would have shattered into pieces.  Thanks to you I found cohesion, it’s really I who chose you to be my father and master.

Not that any of this is necessary to enjoy Pessoa’s work.  It is all play.

Soares brings not just soup but a recipe for lagosta suada, sweaty lobster.  How this does not by itself bring a dying man back to life is a mystery of existence:

You need butter, three onions, tomatoes, and a bit of garlic, oil, white wine, a little aged aguardente, which I know you like [a little joke about Pessoa’s alcoholism], two wine glasses of dry port, a dash of hot pepper, black pepper, and nutmeg.   First, you steam the lobster, just a little.  Then you add the ingredients I gave you and put it in the oven.  I don’t know why it’s called “sweaty,” probably because it produces a very tasty broth.

What any of this will mean to a reader unfamiliar with Pessoa and his creations is beyond me.

Many thanks to Caroline for declaring Antonio Tabucchi week!  Many more Tabucchi books should be appearing at her site and scattered around book blogdom.

Antonio Tabucchi Week! with a bonus roast goose recipe

Book bloggers just go ahead and declare their own celebrations, and why not?  If the National Jelly Doughnut Council can do it, why can’t we?  So:  it’s international Antonio Tabucchi Week! as proclaimed by Caroline.

I read a couple of tiny, pleasing Tabucchi booklets to celebrate, Dreams of Dreams (1992) and The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa (1994), packaged together by City Lights Books and translator Nancy Peters.  Translated from the Italian this time – the other Tabucchi novel I have read, Requiem: A Hallucination (1991), was originally written in Portuguese, a good trick reflecting the author’s most unusual side, his profound interest in and knowledge of Portuguese literature.   Reading Dreams of Dreams, though, I can see that his love of literature as such is similar.  A kindred spirit.

The book contains twenty dreams of two or three pages each.  The dreamers are mostly writers, but three painters, one composer, and one mythological figure slip in.  I am over-simplifying, since every figure is given two roles:  Chekhov is a “writer and doctor,” Caravaggio “a painter and irascible man.”  Many are visionaries of some sort, dream-artists like Coleridge and Goya and Rimbaud, or near cousins, advocates of their own version of Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, writers like Rabelais and Villon and Pessoa.  Freud rounds out the list, giving himself something to interpret.

Rabelais, a friar, is fasting.  He dreams of food, of a feast with “His Majesty Sir Pantagruel”:

They served François Rabelais two geese, and nineteen to Sir Pantagruel.  Innkeeper, said his majesty the guest, you must teach me how these geese are cooked.  I want to tell my cook.  The innkeeper smoothed his imposing moustache, cleared his throat and said: first you take a fine choucroute and put it to the boil for four or five minutes.  Then you melt the goose fat and sauté the cabbage, lard, juniper berries, cloves, salt and pepper, sliced onion, and then cook it for three hours.  Then you add prosciutto, finely chopped goose liver, and you bind the mixture with bread crumbs.  The geese are filled with stuffing and put into the oven for about forty minutes.  You have to remember, when it’s half-cooked, to collect the sizzling fat and pour it over the stuffing, and the dish is ready.

This description only leads, obviously, to renewed appetite for Rabelais and Pantagruel until the latter belches so loudly he wakes the former, who gnaws on the “piece of dry bread” he allows himself during his fast.

I feature this long, delicious passage for two reasons: first, recipes are enormously popular and lead to all of the likes and thumbs and +1s and “you go, girl”s that are so important these days – I have no idea what any of that means – and anyway I need to have some material in place for my inevitable transition into a cooking blog, and second it suggests a limit to the delights of Tabucchi’s book. 

The reader unfamiliar with the life and work of Rabelais, or who does not know why it is amusing that Freud dreams he is his patient Dora, or why Debussy dreams of nymphs and priapic fauns, may be baffled, irritated, and bored, like he is reading the walkthrough of a video game he have never played.  Tabucchi and I, though, we had a lot of fun playing with our literary toys.

No room today to watch Fernando Pessoa expire.  Tomorrow.

That’s precisely what literature should do, be disquieting I mean - Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem

Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem: A Hallucination (1991) is a love letter to Portuguese culture.  Tabucchi is an Italian writer who became, through diligence and enthusiasm, a Portuguese adoptee.  Fitting its subject, Requiem is written in Portuguese.  The subtitle, the hallucination, is an addition to the English version,* but a useful one.

A Tabucchi-like narrator spends a hot July day – noon to midnight, actually – wandering in a dream Lisbon, revisiting its cultural treasures and sites from his past, encountering ordinary Portuguese and dead friends.  The climax of the novel is a dinner with Fernando Pessoa:

I know, he said, with me it always finishes that way, but don’t you think that’s precisely what literature should do, be disquieting I mean?, personally I don’t trust literature that soothes people’s consciences.  Neither do I, I agreed, but you see, I’m already full of disquiet, your disquiet just adds to mine and becomes anxiety.  I prefer anxiety to utter peace, he said, given the choice.  (99)

Requiem is honestly not an anxious or even disquieted novel.

Portuguese cuisine is one of the featured cultural treasures.  Oh yes yes:

I’ll tell you the ingredients for a real sarrabulho, I never measure anything, I do everything by eye, anyway, you need loin of pork, fat, lard, pig’s liver, tripe, a bowl of cooked blood, a whole bulb of garlic, a glass of white wine, an onion, salt, pepper and cumin.  (37-8)

No need to give the whole recipe here, I guess.  The result “looked revolting,” “drenched in a brown sauce that was probably made from wine or cooked blood [the latter!],” but has “the subtlest of flavors” (36).

Perhaps I overemphasize close attention to food in fiction.  I am only reflecting the attention I give it.

Close attention is also paid to a painting in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony.  Who says your culture’s treasures have to be from your own culture?  We study the details, the skate in the lower center, the  - well what is that in the upper right?

I know this painting like the back of my hand, he said, for example, you see what I’m painting now?. Well, all the critics have always said that this fish is a sea bass, but it isn’t at all, its’ a tench.  A tench, I said, that’s a freshwater fish, isn’t it?  It is indeed, he said, it lives in swamps and ditches, it loves mud, it’s the greasiest fish I’ve eaten in my life, where I come from they cook a rice dish made with tench which is just swimming in grease, it’s a bit like eels and rice only greasier, it takes a whole day to digest.  The Copyist paused briefly.  (65)

You see, it is not just me who gets distracted by the food.

A sort of story is carried along in Requiem, a plot about an old, tragic love affair, but that as the novel progresses that story recedes to the background, its incidents taking place not in but between chapters.  The Portuguese background moves to the front.  What a fine novel to round off my little Portuguese project.

I read the translation of my hero Margaret Jull Costa.  The seraillon blog is suffused with Antonio Tabucchi.

* No it's not! Please see Miguel's comment.