On the night of October 27, 1949, an Air France Constellation F-BAZN slammed into Monte Redondo on São Miguel’s Pico da Vara massif while preparing to land on neighboring Santa Maria, in what was to be a technical stop before the second leg of its Paris-New York flight.
From mainland Europe’s perspective, the accident took on the drama and mystique of things that occur in remote locations (like an island somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic), adding further confusion as to the possible causes of this disaster. And if public and media emotions were connected to the fact that its forty-eight occupants had died, celebrity was conversely not alien to two passengers: renowned French violinist Ginette Neveu, and famed boxer Marcel Cerdan, who was going to New York to try to regain his middleweight championship title and enjoy singer Edith Piaf’s company.
João de Melo, in his novel O meu mundo não é deste reino (My World Is Not of This Kingdom), has already left us with an account of the Constellation disaster from the perspective of a populace startled by the thunderous boom and fire falling from the sky that shattered the peace and quiet of a night consigned to the routine of time immemorial. His pages narrate an apocalyptic tale of the people of Rosário, who faced signs of end times and ventured onto Pico da Vara’s roads and trails to witness the extent of the death and its face throughout the shock and awe — which did not, however, impede their pillaging and looting of the victims.
In December 2014, Adrien Bosc’s novel Constellation, which meticulously recounts the Air France flight, was published in France. The journey is in fact the narrative’s organizational thread, from preparations for departure until the plane crash, and subsequent events — recovery of the bodies and their return, and even some errors in identifying victims (Ginette Neveu, for example). But these are elements of quasi-direct reference, “transcribed” by a stripped-down dry discourse; the most novelistic parts surely consist of the reconstruction of the travels of the plane’s occupants (crew and passengers), the paths that led them to the fateful flight: chance, the combination of fortuitous life events, random episodes that wrought upon them the invisible finger of fate that caused them all to meet on the wrong plane on the wrong day (just as, conversely, others who were to have been on the flight but wound up not taking it, thus escaping death).
Alternating these biographical elements with descriptions of the flight, Adrien Bosc reconstructs the human and personal dimensions of victims’ lives beyond a plane ticket. And if “the airplane of the stars” in fact carried other celebrities besides Ginette Neveu and Marcel Cerdan — for example, painter Bernard Boutet de Monvel and entrepreneur Kay Kamen (head of the marketing licensee for Disney Studios) — it also welcomed into its cabin humble people who saw New York as a mere transfer point to other destinations where the American dream awaited them: five Basque sheep herders who had planned one day on returning home from the United States with their savings; and Amélie Ringler, whom a letter had summoned to America as sole heir to a godmother who had fled France in the 1930s and grown wealthy in Detroit.
“Hear the dead, write their small legend, and offer to these forty-eight men and women, like so many constellations, a life and a story”1 — this aptly summarizes Bosc’s project and the results of his novel, which wraps the life of each person in an aura of doom and awakens the sense of injustice always inevitable before the tragic spectacle of happiness within arm’s reach that is abruptly snatched away.
It is not by chance that Adrien Bosc’s book opens with the epigraph “Sometimes the direction we take in our lives can be decided by the combination of a few words”2 by Antonio Tabucchi, drawn appropriately from (what else?) his The Woman of Porto Pim. This slight Italian volume, whose success surprised the author himself, truly became a type of guide for the Azores’ literary discovery and reinvention (as seen by Romana Petri and Enrique Vila-Matas).
In Adrien Bosc’s case, his literary voyage to the Azores likewise follows in Tabucchi’s footsteps, via not only that general epigraph but also topics or Tabucchian motifs cited in Constellation, like Peter Café Sport, or those little shrines that in this French novel are perfectly suited to the placement of the small monument on Pico da Vara marking the 1949 accident site and bidding passersby to offer an “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” for the victims — all this, as well as his balance between fiction and fact, his author’s voice in the space outside pure fiction, with island references inserted into the text as a result of his own experience, and here too (as in Tabucchi’s work, incidentally) not avoiding some factual inaccuracies.
Constellation’s strong literary dimension is not spent, however, in Tabucchi’s text before it is implemented and deepened in each chapter’s epigraph, drawn from a wide variety of sources — and in quotes convened within the narrative discourse like small beams of light that illuminate the direction of their lives, as they soar over their night in a brief flash that ultimately still projects into the author’s text and makes it the receptacle of memories of reading, of survivors from earlier texts.
Notes:
In April 12, 1950’s Diário dos Açores, Fernando de Lima published an article describing his pilgrimage to Monte Redondo to accompany Mme Salvatori (widow of the Constellation’s navigator Jean Salvatori), who came to São Miguel to view with her own eyes the spot where her husband had lost his life (this piece was included in de Lima’s book Dez Contos e Outras Histórias, ed. Filomena Medeiros. Ponta Delgada: 2004).
In his article revisiting a J.P. Lacroix essay in the newspaper Franc Tireur, Fernando de Lima objected to the fact that the disaster’s media coverage concentrated on the figure of Cerdan while ignoring the rest. Adrien Bosc’s novel finds a way to rescue the memory and lives of the others who also lost their lives on São Miguel.
Writer Daniel de Sá wrote a brief “musical” note (in multiple senses) titled “Um Stradivarius no Pico da Vara” centering on Ginette Neveu’s violin, which Adrien Bosc relates that legend claims was snatched in the 1950s by a crazy man on São Miguel, before winding up in the United States and being purchased for the price of gold.
But Ginette Neveu had two violins, as Adrien Bosc further points out. More than thirty years after the accident, a Guadagnini violin scroll3 found on the slopes of Monte Redondo was presented live on television to Étienne Vatelot, son of luthier Marcel Vatelot, from whom the artist had purchased it not long before her trip to the United States. Having traveled from the Azores to Brazil, the scroll finally reached the hands of Étienne, who in 1949 had been scheduled to accompany the violinist’s performances, but instead booked a transatlantic sailing for October 30.
Translated into English by Katharine F. Baker in “The Role of the Crash of Air France Flight #009 in Adelaide Freitas’s Novel Smiling in the Darkness.” Providence, RI.: Gávea-Brown — A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies, vol. 46, Fall 2022, pp. 20-21:
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:fzhxtt7