By Urbano Bettencourt
Translated by Katharine F. Baker
Marta de Jesus (a verdadeira) is a novel built on a literary pretext, in this case the narrative arising from a core element that the title lays bare to the reader’s eyes and mind. The epigraph extracted from the Gospel of Luke signals the antithetical behaviors and profiles of Lázaro’s sisters Maria and Marta de Jesus [in English: Jesus’s disciples Lazarus, Mary and Martha of Bethany], centering on a capacity for action and concern unknown to the original ones. This Marta’s dynamism and leadership relegate her sister to a zone of shadows and alienation within the narrative, and represent from the outset a valuing of action to the detriment of contemplation, at odds with the Bible’s original message.
Transposing it to this Marta’s universe, namely the nucleus of followers of the biblical Emanuel — his mother Maria Nazaré, Maria Madalena, and his group of disciples, though temporally recontextualizing them into the mid-20th century (extending into the ‘90s) and situating them on Europe’s westernmost locale, the Azorean island of Flores — Álamo Oliveira has constructed a novel whose reading obliges a repeated shuttling back and forth between its explicit contemporary foreground and the implicit remote background. It is an evangelical subtext challenging readers and playing with expectations arising from their greater or lesser biblical knowledge. This duality is attested to from the outset by each chapter’s opening phrase drawn directly from the Gospels, “In those days,” and by the obvious contrast juxtaposing it with the signs of contemporaneity present from the novel’s opening: “In those days, Marta de Jesus sensed approaching death in perhaps the same way the scheduled delivery of an express mail order arrives on its appointed day and is brought to the door.”
The reader will naturally have occasion to compare allusions in this novel to Bible episodes, in order to determine the extent to which they appear as repetitions or differences; how apt the genre’s narrative and textual procedures are; and finally, how these differences may constitute a level of frustration for reader expectations. Indeed, by transposing certain biblical episodes to the second half of the Azores and Portugal’s twentieth century, including the messianic projection of the country’s political salvation, the author condemns them to failure from the outset. That is because this is not a narrative touched by the sight and perception of miracles1 (although the religious dimension may pervade the characters’ universe and their experiences), or because historical truth precludes a liberation set within that time frame. It would take another twenty years for the latter to occur, and even then not through any salvation “mission” but by armed force.
The world depicted in Marta de Jesus (a verdadeira) is fundamentally that of Flores, a rural microcosm in social and economic free-fall with no sign of redemption in sight. As for the utopia of the country’s transformation of this remote space, and thanks to the actions of a small band like Emanuel Salvador and his followers… I would say that this utopia is nothing more than that, so it will eventually stumble over the contingencies of time, with no practical effect on the role of ideological mentor played from Lisbon by Pedro (the intellectual who had left Flores somewhat earlier).
The planned journey of liberation to the capital is thwarted by the brutal intervention of an ad hoc court panel hastily convened in the city of Horta, Faial, to judge the rebels. And even if they had managed to land in Lisbon, the group would still have been decapitated of its leader Peter, who disappears under mysterious circumstances during the trial, and Judas who slits his wrists in Horta within sight of the island of Pico (which, thanks to the landscape, is always a way of assuaging his remorse for having sold out the Master for thirty contos).
“In those days, there were no epilogues,” the author writes. And if it is true that after the attempted intervention in Portuguese politics (a blow struck on March 16, 1974, at Caldas da Rainha, with its origin on the American tectonic plate), and “the island of Flores had never been the same” and had gained media visibility, as we would say today, then it is also true that the emigration tidal wave continued. Marta saw her island conspicuously bleeding westward, as always. “From then on, they began coping with his sadness,” and not even transformations resulting from the April 25, 1974, coup and consequent establishment of a regional government were able to raise the island’s hopes to the same level as their expectations.
Gradually “the ‘60s group” was being dismantled in good part by the Americas of Pedro da Silveira’s greater (or lesser) abundance. Among others, the character of Pedro — freed in 1974 from Portugal’s Tarrafal prison on Cape Verde, where he had ultimately been cast away — dies disenchanted with politics. Marta’s death unleashes a series of cosmic phenomena that herald the end of things. Emanuel dies peacefully from slavishly obeying an order by his beloved disciple João, who had ordered him just to sleep.2 João himself eventually winds up being admitted to the Casa de Saúde de São Rafael health center in Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira,, right after the regional government changes political parties.
In the other reading this novel prompts, namely that of a second plane of meaning beyond the readily decodable, Marta de Jesus (a verdadeira) can be considered a general parable about a Portuguese time, and more specifically an Azorean one, whose initial limits were duly noted. The period depicted in Álamo Oliveira’s book is effectively marked by collective and social dynamics that owe much to those who dared to dream of something else for the island’s destiny, in a gesture of civic and cultural intervention aimed at overcoming doldrums and conformity. In a deferred way, Marta de Jesus (a verdadeira) fictionalizes these attempts at transformation and also their failures, the institutional stumbling blocks placed in their way based on a suspicion that, being set in a specific moment, it is by extension and norm the timbre of those who look at this island space from the banks of the Tagus River in Lisbon and who, through local leaders, tend to keep a tight rein on their populace.
On the other hand, if Marta de Jesus (a verdadeira) constitutes a type of assessment of both the group and the Azores during the ‘60s as read in today’s light, then it is one whose deceptive and disenchanted tone is enveloped by irony in a discreet cloak of melancholy. Eschewing cynicism, it nonetheless signals the novelistic awareness that not everything was lost and that the future was somehow, despite disappointments, the fruit of those seeds sown over island soil in a time still unready to receive them.
Beyond all the game-playing of (apparent) social and political advances and retreats, books and authors endure, and Álamo Oliveira’s novel is also a tribute to Florentine writers in particular, because even when not fully understood (think of Madalena’s reaction to her son reading Florentino poet Roberto de Mesquita’s Almas Cativas), books are survival manuals that teach how to live with solitude and to overcome the insular confinement and its watery shores. Wherever we are, literature teaches us how to die, Marta could say, quoting Umberto Eco. And this is still a way of organizing humankind’s relationship with time and space, and with each other. And of living.
This text, in the original Portuguese, is posted at:
https://urbanobettencourt.wordpress.com/2018/11/14/alamo-oliveira-narrador
1. Read, for example, the episode of the marriage of the Mayor’s daughter and its outcome, in a clearly ironic reversal of the biblical miracle of the wedding at Cana. And even Lázaro’s death, contrary to what happened in the canonical narrative, will not provide this Florentine Emanuel with any miracle; at the tomb he limits himself to exclaiming, “Lázaro, you are the hero of our lack of medical care,” inscribing contemporary referentiality in the discourse. And Marta, so pragmatic, recognizes this non-transcendent side of events when addressing Emanuel: “Let’s go home,” she told Emanuel. “This is enough of a spectacle without magic.”
2. Also note the ironic charge of the dialogue between the two, disarticulating the biblical discourse: “One day Emanuel murmured in João’s ear, ‘Sometimes I am hungry and thirsty for justice. Other times, I’m just thirsty.’ / ‘Then sleep,’ João answered.”
