Re-Writing the Estado Novo: Antonio Tabucchi's Sostiene [Afirma] Pereira

Abstract

Portugal, 25 July 1938; self-isolated from but ideologically the neighbour of Fascist Spain. An ageing, literary editor, for long a crime reporter now charged with a supposedly harmless culture page for the weekly Lisboa, Pereira is a Catholic “a modo mio” and a widower preoccupied with resurrection; shy and bookish, given to eating and drinking alone. Into his sheltered life comes the half-Italian, half-Portuguese, Monteiro Rossi, an idealist activist prone to leftist thinking and to penning articles on living writers rather than anodyne obituaries commissioned on safely departed authors. ‘Onore a Francesco Franco Onore ai militari portoghesi in Spagna’ (‘Viva Francisco Franco Vivam os militares portugueses em Espanha’) proclaims the banner slung from tree to tree in the Praça da Alegria in Lisbon, where Pereira is snatched back to reality amidst the singing and dancing of ‘uma festa salazarista’ … , now alerted to the danger of fellow-travelling with Franco's Spain. Can there ever be a terra firma? Has there ever been a terra firma Nation? A sovereign State controlled, tight, constructed within borders … alone? In António Salazar's Estado Novo, which was to perdure/perjure from 1933 to 1974, were the Portuguese ever to be sustained, affirmed, (re)claimed, maintained—or detained, ‘even violently’—merely by being deemed (and as late as 1965, defiantly declared, by Salazar himself) as … ‘orgulhosamente sós’? How can/may any such position/posture have been anything but pretence, the later dictum ‘proudly alone’ anything but a lingering (paranoiac? still colonizing?) pretention? That is the aporetic question confronting the eponymous Pereira in Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira.