A title containing these phrases evokes, more or less directly, two works by José Dias de Melo: Pedras Negras [Dark Stones] (1964) and A Montanha Cobria-se de Negro [The Mountain Was Shrouded in Darkness] (2008; hereafter A Montanha). And in this choice obviously lies the degree of subjectivity and arbitrariness that always accompanies each reader, too. Viewing the decision from another perspective, I would say that I have limited myself to following the paths on which each work always points its readers.
Clearly there would be insufficient reason to make Pedras Negras the starting point of a journey like the one outlined here. In fact, if A Montanha was the last book published in Dias de Melo’s lifetime, then Pedras Negras was not the inaugural volume in the author’s career, not even in his prose, nor even about Pico or its whalers. For that, we would have to reach back to the poems in Toadas do Mar e da Terra (1954) and also peruse the chronicles of Mar Rubro (1958).
But I can adduce as a reason for including Pedras Negras in my title the centrality of that narrative to the author’s body of work, the locus of synthesis it effectively constitutes. That is because in it exists essentially everything, or almost everything, Dias de Melo had written up to that point and would later write reformulating topics, revisiting situations and recontextualizing them. In Pedras Negras is the literary transfiguration of an entire insular world at a specific time, [1] a world threatened by the contingencies of the present and the memory of the past. The voice of Francisco Marroco’s grandfather brings knowledge of the experience of the Ano da Fome [Year of Famine] to the younger generation, while Padre Velho’s readings reclaim the (written) history of the volcanic cataclysms at the beginning of the settlement, all of which nourish a pervasive fear that infiltrates each person’s deepest recesses.
In Pedras Negras is humankind’s dream for other worlds and the anger of those who feel expelled from their own island, and also that fundamental experience of discovery and knowledge of otherness that the journey provides. There is in the multicultural microcosm of the whaling ship Queen of the Seas the gesture of solidarity, but also the Azorean version of Hobbes’s “man is a wolf to man” in the person of emigrant Albano Passarinho, a prime example of how yesterday’s victim can become today’s victimizer. And in a particularly relevant trait, it (also) relates a narrative of return, a thing so infrequent in Azorean literature: in this case, the return allows for the final reckoning between the island and rebel Francisco Marroco, who dared to defy the fatalness of the island’s destiny. And, as we know, every revolt will be punished.
Time will resume its destructive cycle of droughts. Famines and disease will return. Envy (that Portuguese expression of hatred, as Marcello Duarte Mathias writes), and scheming and shady business deals will take care of completing the natural destruction. The protagonist will be annihilated. Punishment will strike the guilty and innocent alike, in the authentic manner of Greek tragedy. And all this is served up in a linear and clear narrative by a transparent language that combines the lyrical with the tragic, the cultured with familiar expression, the popular.
Finally, I could justify my title by citing the fact that Pedras Negras constitutes Dias de Melo’s first narrative fiction, thus opening the arc that closes with A Montanha. Moreover, both works highlight in their respective titles the presence and force, both physical and symbolic, of space. Furthermore, separated by a writing interval of about forty-four years, the two works are linked by much more than the closeness of their titles or the whaling universe they present.
With varying degrees of importance and consequences, each story evokes the historical context of World War II. Pedras Negras coincides with the end of the action, while A Montanha it provides the temporal framework for events. In both works the sinister character of Chico Gaudêncio plus his henchmen serve nefarious interests against the whalers’ well-being and the exercise of social justice; both narratives culminate in the village, the center of civil power.
It is true that in A Montanha the whalers encounter in the person of Maritime Commissioner Romero da Silva a power enbodying a sense of fairness and justice that contrasts with the image presented in Pedras Negras. From the empirical reference point, incidentally, Lieutenant Romero da Silva precedes in office the Maritime Commissioner who will arrest the whalers in Pedras Negras, as Dias de Melo mentions in a footnote.
Even so, the ending of A Montanha still expresses a pessimism (the author speaks of a despair that is perceptible within the ideological context) that seems to attest to disbelief in the triumph of justice, given the evidence that the social machinery always winds up triumphing and destroying those at the bottom. And it is worthwhile to compare the ending of each of work, to see how the use of symbolic representation of space accentuates the reader’s impression of pessimism in the face of the failure of individual or collective projects:
a) Francisco Marroco dragged himself to town to see the whalers and his son — his own son — behind bars. In tears, his daughter-in-law, still-unmarried daughter, and frightened grandchildren accompanied him.
He suddenly felt old, very old, very old.
He returned home forever defeated.
It was nighttime.
And that night, like on so many others, there were no stars in the sky. (Pedras Negras)
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b) The Lima had been sailing for a while. It had just disappeared beyond Castelete with its load of passengers, on board among them Second Lieutenant Romero da Silva and his family…
The Mountain was shrouded in darkness… (A Montanha).
From Pedras Negras to A Montanha Cobria-se de Negro, it is as if Dias de Melo’s fiction returns to its starting point after some thematic digressions in order to reassess old questions and revive the presence of companions from yesteryear, now not even transformed within the text, for example the case of João Flores.
In 1979, on the occasion of Dias de Melo’s twenty five years of literary and publishing life, Pico native Tibério Silva, then a young law student, published in issue 5 of the journal A Memória da Água-Viva (hereafter MAV) a long essay on Dias de Melo’s “whale cycle.” The designation was not original: it had appeared in July of that year in Diário de Lisboa, in an article with the byline of writer J. H. Santos Barros, who applied it to Dias de Melo’s books Mar Rubro, Pedras Negras and Mar pela Proa; To clarify the meaning accorded to this cycle, it is worth considering that by this time Dias de Melo had already published Cidade Cinzenta (1971), a collection of columns and short stories about São Miguel and its citizenry, whose realm does not, however, belong to the whaling world.
Tibério Silva’s text pointed out aspects that the critic recognized in Dias de Melo’s writing: a worldview marked by the radical dichotomy between the users and the used, and on the other hand the commitment embraced by the author and the text’s narrator to the weakest, the victims of the social system. Silva wrote:
Dias de Melo recreates in a unique and authentic way the atmosphere, language and imagery of a small Azorean village closed in on itself, in which the tavern, boathouse and church constitute microcosms where people go about building their daily lives. (…)
For Dias de Melo there are fundamentally two classes of people: the exploiters and the exploited. And in the realm of Azorean literature, his work is one of the first to address this problem and confront it on every page. Furthermore, the narrator identifies with the struggle of the exploited — the whaler (an allegorical figure) — and applies his hand to the task that this whale cycle embodies: to recount in vibrant pages the odyssey of men who find their survival on the handle of the oar and the shaft of the harpoon. (MAV 5, December 1979, p. 9).
Besides providing another chance to publish the writer on the occasion of his anniversary (which did not go unnoticed in Lisbon), Tibério Silva’s text afforded the added benefit of prompting an extended letter from Dias de Melo that we would publish in the journal’s next issue. In it, the writer began by stating that he thought it unfair to exclude the poems in his Toadas do Mar e da Terra from the so-called cycle, then he went on to other considerations constituting the explicit formulation of one project already developed and another yet to be developed. Dias de Melo wrote:
This [whale cycle] designation seems to designate a moment, a certain number of writings that in my very modest life as a writer has already ended. Yet there are many stories of whales and Pico whalers yet to be written. If possible, I would like to collect them all and, working on them literarily, go a bit further…do a little more than what has already been done. (…) Moreover, had I time enough, I would not limit myself to collecting only this material. I would collect everything: stories of yachts, of my land’s great sailors, delving into the past as far back as possible to the time of sailing Pico’s boats with their wide open mouths. (…) Stories of our people’s hard, harsh lives; (…) Festivals (despite everything), revelry, dancing, songs sung to Azorean guitar accompaniment, and the good years. Epiphany…; legends, fantastical stories of witches, sorceresses, disgusting gluttons… In short, everything that is part of Pico people’s past. Certainly all this would help younger generations understand our way of life, respect their elders’ memory, and learn our own history. It seems important to me.
(…) But it is important to talk with elders, to investigate, to note what is heard — and to do so one would have to record it. I remember that for this I bought a tape recorder. But I have done very little. Little — or nothing. The time I lack… the health that is fading… and now living away from there again. (MAV, 6, May, 1980, pp. 37-38).
Dias de Melo would ptove correct about Toadas do Mar e da Terra, if we think in thematic terms and particularly of the Canção do Baleeiro [Whaler’s Song], a kind of epic poem that recounts a whaling episode, already with strong referential elements and use of colloquial language. But critical readers focused their attention on his chronicles and narratives, bypassing a poetic experience reusing the technical models of popular poetry, of which there are other examples among us.
Nearest in time to Dias de Melo’s era would be Festa Redonda (1950) by Vitorino Nemésio, which, while utilizing the structures of Terceira’s traditional songs, surpassed the ethnographic record thanks to strong verbal and visual creativity. Due to its unpretentiousness, simplicity of tone, and appeal to a certain rural idealization of fraternal life, Toadas do Mar e da Terra was much closer to Em Louvor da Humildade, published thirty years earlier in 1924, authored by Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, who wrote the Palavras Finais for Dias de Melo’s book, stating that he was, “without concerns for literary schools, captivated by the charm of his island [tunes], the rhythms of his feelings to the folk guitar. This is the greatest value of his island poems.”
Dias de Melo’s letter also sheds light on how his writing style, even in fiction, hews to a projection of fidelity and draws from the hard Pico land, from the land and its people, culture, history and imagination, and how all this nourishes an expressive diversity that ranges from chronicles to novels, short stories to historical research, to travelogues. It also explains how evocation and fiction intersect in Dias de Melo’s writing, at times becoming even inextricably linked.
The letter’s final cited paragraph leads us directly to a work like Na Memória das Gentes (1985 and 1991), a remarkable oral history in which, as the author confessed, “the seafarers [told him] a lot about the land and people of the land, even women, [told him] much about the sea.”
The result is an immense collective tapestry in which the specific autobiographical accounts intertwine and penetrate one another, weaving a complex social and historical fabric: the scarcity of material resources and difficulties in obtaining those few that were available; the absence of medical care, and use of remedies from… America, the destination of so many escapes and dreams, and stage for no fewer disappointments and dramas. Even the oral texts collected in Book III (tales, short vignettes) attest to the survival instinct of those who had to invent tools and implements to conquer the land and seas, and at the same time developed their own system of storytelling, of symbolic and imaginary worlds with which they could confront the ghosts of loneliness.
From that same year, 1979, comes his book of short stories and chronicles, Vinde e Vede [Come and See]. A title capable of surprising, as Santos Barros wrote in the Diário de Lisboa? Perhaps. Even more so if we add to that the sequence of initial epigraphs (five) taken from biblical text. The columnist wrote:
“The author could not omit a faithful portrait of Azorean society, its religious factor, the enormous weight of the Catholic church on the islands. Hence the biblical expression, which in other cases could be understood as a convenient way to manipulate titles — which are not only those of the ‘stock market’ — appears here as a demand for the transformation of that reality, perhaps a proposal for a different reading of the Gospel text.” (Barros, 1981: 145)
But all this must still be understood in light of the introductory text written by Dias de Melo, which functions as a kind of personal programmatic manifesto on the conception of art (literature in particular), and of the writer in concrete terms. That is to say: there is no art without commitment to humanity, to society, a “commitment that is also imperative to the collective consciousness of humankind.” (Vinde e Vede, p.13)
In this context the writer becomes a secular civil prophet who denounces the present, its inhumanity and injustices, and at the same time announces a radiant future in which the stars will shine in the social sky, in contrast to what happened at the end of Pedras Negras. The discourse and narrated events gain in some texts of Vinde e Vede an appealing force, a denunciatory tone, and the attestation of a social violence that was previously found only in some moments of Dias de Melo. If there may be a spirit of the era here, there is also the consequence of another aspect: Vinde e Vede is a book whose social universe has shifted eastward to São Miguel, the latifundiary island, as the author writes.
While Dias de Melo already affirmed that in Cidade Cinzenta he altered his writing because the reality he was dealing with was different, he also writes in the introduction to Vinde e Vede that upon observing São Miguel’s society again after time away in Lisbon, he had to reformulate some texts that are part of the book profoundly, rewrite others, and definitively discard still more. Peasants, wage earners, fishermen and laborers comprise the core of this human universe on São Miguel, grappling with a daily life of injustice and oppression, and misery too, in the guise of charity that is very un-Christian and un-evangelical, where not even a “good priest” can impose the light of the Gospel on the good conscience of the rich. But he does not overlook struggles waged for social transformation in hopes of a day of final victory, “that of the emancipation and definitive liberation of the humiliated workers of the entire day.”
Gregory McNab rightly draws attention to the difference in perspective that shapes the way Pico’s whalers and São Miguel’s fishermen and farmers act: the heroic dimension in the activity of the former, versus the tragic drama of the latters’ experience annihilated by a social system they cannot escape, subjected to an order or disorder whose greatest effect of human degradation is attested to by the sale of labor power and, ultimately, the sale of the body in a trade where sex is exchanged for bread.
Having thus traversed a social universe only very summarily touched upon here, it would be time for an inner re-encounter of the author with himself and the literary universe. His 1999 novel O Autógrafo textualizes this writing experience in its creative and institutional dimension, articulating on two distinct temporal planes writer Rodrigo Pinho’s present and past. On December 15, 1996, Pinho publicly presents his latest book, Farrapos de Espuma [Scraps of Foam]; the unexpected appearance of a young man seeking an autographed copy for Ana Rosa causes an internal earthquake in the writer and exposes the remains of an experience that occurred exactly fifty years prior: his first book, Sou Pescador e Cavador [I Am a Fisherman and a Digger], and above all the great passion Pinho and Ana Rosa shared, which a misunderstanding and suspicions on his part abruptly ruined.
Now, while encoutering Ana Rosa’s son, longing and remorse drop the writer on his knees, but everything is beyond repair. A story of a passion rekindled when the writer is already experiencing solitude and old age, O Autógrafo is also to a certain extent a coming-of-age novel, an account of the process of growth and learning about the social and literary world, the friendships that sustain and encourage this growth, the discovery of one’s body and sexuality. And it is achieved without denying the writer’s social origins that the title of his first book [Sou Pescador e Cavador] ostentatiously highlights, but arising from there to form an awareness of the duty of solidarity with all the humiliated people in the world.
Even using a narrator who does not participate in the story, it is not hard to see Dias de Melo’s strong autobiographical element projected as the writer in O Autógrafo, regardless of the disguises and masks that writing always interposes between reality and fiction: again the recovery of the 1940s, fundamental years of formation in Horta, the echo of World War II, the atmosphere of intellectual solidarity that made possible the creation of the Associação Cultural Académica in November 1944, of which Dias de Melo was one of the founders and participants, [2] the discovery of the press, etc., aspects that a more detailed comparison would help confirm.
In this way everything ultimately coalesces: the strong social and historical dimension of Dias de Melo’s fiction finds its ultimate explanation in the psychological and intellectual portrait of himself that he leaves recorded in O Autógrafo.
The old saying goes that the greatest tribute to writers is to read them. True. But if we do not usher them to the forefront, if we do not bring up their names, they will continue to die eternally on bookshelves, as José Pedro Guerreiro wrote in a moving text some years after the death of Santos Barros. Keeping Dias de Melo’s work in circulation, bringing it to the public space, placing it under the gaze of (potential) readers will always be the most effective way to honor the author and prevent his trail from being lost in the avalanche of days.
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[1] The author preferred to speak of reproduction instead of transfiguration, as he made clear in a long and enlightening interview granted to Vamberto Freitas (1992: 172).
[2] In the above interview Dias de Melo provided information about the Associação Cultural Académica that he and Mário Frayão founded in Horta, “based at the Bombeiros Voluntários’ headquarters and supported by its commander and our great friend, Lieutenant Horácio Saloio, dismissed from the army along with Lieutenant Vilhena and others for having rebelled against the dictatorship.” The Academic Cultural Association, whose activities extended until the end of the 1945-46 school year, is also mentioned by Mário Frayão in his Crónicas e Outras Estóerias (2016: 354), as well as by Lieutenant Horácio Saloio, one of the many Portuguese deported to the Azores for political reasons (2016: 107).
Cover art of the Japanese translation of Pedras Negras by Kiwamu Hamaoka (Tokyo, Sairyusha, 2005). Support from the Regional Directorate of Culture, Azores. Cover based on a photo by Maurício Abreu.
This text is included in my book Sala de Espelhos (Companhia das Ilhas, 2nd ed., 2020). It constitutes an expanded version of the lecture I gave at the Dias de Melo Municipal Library at the invitation of the Lajes do Pico Câmara Municipal [City Council] on April 8, 2009.
It was also published in Portuguese as “Dias de Melo — Das pedras negras ao negro da Montanha” at: