I felt embarrassed, but I warmly welcomed him. And yet I dimly understood that his vague self-presentation as a literary character was symbolic, metaphoric: somehow he was the ghostly transposition of the old journalist to whom I bid my last farewell. I didn't know what to say to him then and there. Perhaps they were old colleagues, people who lived through the same battles, retired journalists.Ī month later Pereira paid his visit to me. A few names had been written there, but none I recognised. Old age, perhaps a hard life, had turned him into a fat, flabby old man.Īt the foot of the coffin, on a small lectern, lay a register open to receive the signatures of visitors. When I knew him in Paris, he was about 50, svelte and agile. I stood beside him for nearly 10 minutes. The gentleman was Catholic, and they had placed a wooden crucifix on his chest. I went to view the remains at two in the afternoon. No one remembered an old journalist who had resolutely opposed Salazar's dictatorship in the late 40s. It was a young country, led by young people. In that period Portugal lived the restless, convulsive life of a country that had rediscovered democracy after 50 years of dictatorship. He wasn't writing any more, he had retired, and I didn't know what he was doing for a living. I knew that after 1974, when Portugal returned to democracy, he went back to his country, but I didn't meet him again. He naturally encountered serious problems with the police and was subsequently forced to choose exile. And he had managed to ridicule the regime by publishing a savage article in a Portuguese newspaper.

He was a man who had plied his journalistic trade in Portugal during the 1940s and 50s under Salazar's dictatorship. I shall say only that he was someone with whom I had a passing acquaintance in Paris, in the late 1960s, when he, a Portuguese exile, was writing for a Parisian newspaper. I shall discreetly avoid any mention of the deceased's name. In the morning I bought the city's daily newspaper and read an article about an old journalist who had died at the Santa Maria Hospital and whose remains lay in state at the hospital chapel. One possible hypothesis is that the month before, on a torrid August day in Lisbon, I too had made a visit. I don't know why he chose me to tell his story. He was only a character in search of an author. He still didn't have distinct traits, he was rather vague, elusive, hazy, but he already nurtured the wish to be a protagonist in a book. In those days his name wasn't yet Pereira. D r Pereira visited me for the first time one September evening in 1992.

Tabucchi pereira