About how the character was the master and the author his apprentice.

The wisest man I ever knew couldn't read or write. At four in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered in the lands of France, he would rise from his cot and go out to the fields, taking half a dozen sows to pasture, whose fertility provided for him and his wife. My maternal grandparents lived off this meager means, from the small pig farm that, after weaning, was sold to neighbors in the village of Azinhaga, in the Ribatejo province. These grandparents were called Jerónimo Melrinho and Josefa Caixinha, and both were illiterate. In winter, when the night's cold was so intense that the water in the jugs froze inside the house, they would fetch the weakest piglets from the pigsties and take them to their bed. Under the coarse blankets, the warmth of the humans kept the little animals from freezing and saved them from certain death. Although they were people of good character, it wasn't out of any compassionate spirit that the two old men acted this way: what concerned them, without sentimentality or rhetoric, was protecting their livelihood, with the naturalness of those who, to maintain their lives, hadn't learned to think beyond what was necessary. I often helped my grandfather Jerónimo in his shepherding, I often dug the earth in the yard next to the house and chopped firewood for the fire, often turning the large iron wheel that powered the pump, I drew water from the communal well and carried it on my shoulder, often, secretly from the guards of the fields, I went with my grandmother, also at dawn, armed with a rake, basket and rope, to gather the loose straw from the stubble that would later serve as bedding for the cattle. And sometimes, on hot summer nights, after supper, my grandfather would say to me: “José, tonight we're both going to sleep under the fig tree.” There were two other fig trees, but that one, certainly because it was the largest, the oldest, the one that had always been there, was, for everyone in the house, *the* fig tree. More or less by antonomasia, an erudite word that I would only come to know and understand the meaning of many years later… In the midst of the nocturnal peace, between the high branches of the tree, a star would appear to me, and then, slowly, it would hide behind a leaf, and, looking in another direction, like a river flowing silently through the concave sky, the opalescent brightness of the Milky Way would emerge, the Way of St. James, as we still called it in the village. While sleep eluded me, the night was filled with the stories and tales my grandfather would tell: legends, apparitions, hauntings, singular episodes, ancient deaths, brawls with sticks and stones, words of ancestors, a tireless murmur of memories that kept me awake while gently soothing me. I could never tell if he fell silent when he realized I had fallen asleep, or if he continued speaking so as not to leave unanswered the question I invariably asked him during the longer pauses he deliberately inserted into his story: "And then?" Perhaps he repeated the stories to himself, either to avoid forgetting them or to enrich them with new adventures. At my age, and in that time for all of us, it goes without saying that I imagined my grandfather Jerónimo to be the master of all the world's knowledge. When, at the first light of dawn, the birdsong woke me, he was no longer there; he had gone out to the fields with his animals, leaving me asleep. Then I would get up, fold my blanket, and, barefoot (in the village I always went barefoot until I was 14), still with straw clinging to my hair, I would walk from the cultivated part of the yard to the other side where the pigsties were, next to the house. My grandmother, already up before my grandfather, would put a large bowl of coffee with pieces of bread in front of me and ask if I had slept well. If I told her about a bad dream born from my grandfather's stories, she would always reassure me: "Don't worry about it, there's no certainty in dreams." I thought then that my grandmother, although she was also a very wise woman, did not reach the heights of my grandfather, he who, lying under the fig tree, with his grandson José beside him, was capable of setting the universe in motion with just two words. It was only many years later, after my grandfather had passed away and I was a grown man, that I came to understand that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. It could only mean that, one night, as she sat at the door of her humble house, where she then lived alone, gazing at the larger and smaller stars above her head, she uttered these words: “The world is so beautiful, and I am so sorry to die.” She didn't say fear of dying, she said sorrow of dying, as if the life of hard and continuous work that had been hers was, at that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and ultimate farewell, the consolation of revealed beauty. I was sitting at the door of a house unlike any other in the world, because it was inhabited by people capable of sleeping with pigs as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave this life simply because the world was beautiful, people, and this was my grandfather Jerónimo, a shepherd and storyteller, who, sensing that death was coming to take him, went to say goodbye to the trees in his yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he would never see them again.

Many years later, writing for the first time about my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa (I failed to mention that, according to those who knew her as a girl, she was unusually beautiful), I became aware that I was transforming the ordinary people they had been into literary characters, and that this was probably the way not to forget them, drawing and redrawing their faces with the ever-changing pencil of memory, coloring and illuminating the monotony of a dull and horizonless daily life, like someone recreating, over the unstable map of memory, the supernatural unreality of the country in which they decided to live. The same attitude of mind that, after having evoked the fascinating and enigmatic figure of a certain Berber great-grandfather, would lead me to describe, more or less in these terms, an old portrait (now almost eighty years old) in which my parents appear: “They are both standing, beautiful and young, facing the photographer, showing on their faces an expression of solemn gravity that is perhaps fear before the camera, at the moment when the lens is about to capture, of one and the other, the image that they will never have again, because the next day will be relentlessly another day… My mother rests her right elbow on a tall column and holds a flower in her left hand, which hangs by her side. My father puts his arm behind my mother's back, and his calloused hand appears on her shoulder like a wing. They both tread timidly on a carpet of branches. The canvas that serves as a false background to the portrait shows some diffuse and incongruous neoclassical architecture.” And he concluded: “A day had to come when I would tell these things. None of this matters, except to me. A Berber grandfather, from North Africa, another grandfather who was a pig herder, a wonderfully beautiful grandmother, serious and handsome parents, a flower in a portrait – what other genealogy could matter to me? What better tree could I lean against?”

I wrote these words almost thirty years ago, with no other intention than to reconstruct and record moments in the lives of the people who gave birth to me and who were closest to me, thinking that I needed to explain nothing more for people to know where I come from and what materials made up the person I began as and the person I have gradually become. In the end, I was wrong; biology doesn't determine everything, and as for genetics, its paths must have been very mysterious to have taken such a wide turn… My family tree (forgive me the presumption of calling it that, given how meager its sap is) lacked not only some of those branches that time and life's successive encounters cause to break off from the central trunk, but also those who would help its roots penetrate to the deepest underground layers, those who would refine the consistency and flavor of its fruits, those who would broaden and strengthen its crown to make it a shelter for migrating birds and a refuge for nests. By painting my parents and grandparents with the colors of literature, transforming them from simple people of flesh and blood into characters who would once again, and in a different way, construct my life, I was, without realizing it, tracing the path by which the characters I would later invent—the others, the truly literary ones—would create and bring me the materials and tools that, ultimately, in the good and the bad, in the enough and the insufficient, in the gain and the loss, in what is defect but also in what is excess, would end up making me the person I recognize myself as today: creator of those characters, but, at the same time, their creature. In a certain sense, one could even say that, letter by letter, word by word, page by page, book by book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that, without them, I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them, perhaps my life wouldn't have managed to be more than a vague sketch, a promise like so many others that never managed to become more than a promise, the existence of someone who perhaps could have been and ultimately never became.

Now I can clearly see who my life mentors were, those who most intensely taught me the hard craft of living, those dozens of characters from novels and plays that I now see parading before my eyes, those men and women made of paper and ink, those people whom I believed I was guiding according to my convenience as a narrator and obeying my will as an author, like articulated puppets whose actions could have no more effect on me than the weight they bore and the tension of the strings with which I moved them. Of these masters, the first was undoubtedly a mediocre portrait painter whom I designated simply by the letter H., the protagonist of a story that I believe it is reasonable to call a double initiation (his, but also, in some way, that of the book's author), entitled *Manual of Painting and Calligraphy*, which taught me the elementary honesty of recognizing and accepting, without resentment or frustration, my own limits: unable and unwilling to venture beyond my small plot of land, I was left with the possibility of digging deep, downwards, towards the roots. My own, but also those of the world, if I could allow myself such an immoderate ambition. It is not for me, of course, to evaluate the merit of the result of the efforts made, but I believe it is now evident that all my work, from then on, obeyed this purpose and this principle.

Then came the men and women of the Alentejo, that same brotherhood of the condemned of the earth to which my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa belonged, rough peasants forced to rent out their labor in exchange for a wage and working conditions that only deserve the name of infamous, charging for little more than nothing the life that we, the cultured and civilized beings we pride ourselves on being, appreciate calling, depending on the occasion, precious, sacred, or sublime. Common people I knew, deceived by a Church as complicit as it was a beneficiary of the power of the State and the large landowners, people permanently watched by the police, people, how many times, innocent victims of the arbitrariness of a false justice system. Three generations of a peasant family, the Mau-Tempo family, from the beginning of the century until the April Revolution of 1974 that overthrew the dictatorship, pass through this novel, which I titled *Raised from the Ground*. It was with these men and women, raised from the ground—real people first, fictional figures later—that I learned to be patient, to trust, and to surrender to time, to that time which simultaneously builds and destroys us, only to build us again and destroy us once more. I am only not certain that I have satisfactorily assimilated what the harshness of experience turned into virtue in these women and men: a naturally stoic attitude towards life. However, considering that the lesson received, more than twenty years later, remains intact in my memory, that I feel it present in my spirit every day like an insistent summons, I have not yet lost hope of becoming a little more worthy of the greatness of the examples of dignity that were presented to me in the vast plains of the Alentejo. Time will tell.

What other lessons could I receive from a Portuguese man who lived in the 16th century, who composed the Rhymes and glories, the shipwrecks and national disenchantments of Os Lusíadas, who was an absolute poetic genius, the greatest in our Literature, however much that may weigh on Fernando Pessoa, who proclaimed himself the Super-Camões of it? No lesson that was within my reach, no lesson that I was capable of learning, except the simplest one that could be offered to me by the man Luís Vaz de Camões in his pure humanity, for example, the proud humility of an author who goes knocking on every door looking for someone willing to publish the book he wrote, suffering for it the contempt of the ignorant of blood and caste, the disdainful indifference of a king and his company of powerful people, the scorn with which the world has always received the visit of poets, visionaries and madmen. At least once in their lives, all authors have had or will have to be Luís de Camões, even if they didn't write the verses of "Sôbolos rios..." Between court nobles and censors of the Holy Office, between past loves and the disillusionments of premature old age, between the pain of writing and the joy of having written, it was this sick man who returns poor from India, where many only went to get rich, it was this soldier blind in one eye and wounded in his soul, it was this fortune-less seducer who will never again disturb the senses of the ladies of the court, that I brought to life on the stage of the play called What Will I Do With This Book?, at the end of which echoes another question, the one that truly matters, the one that we will never know if it will ever have a sufficient answer: "What will you do with this book?" Proud humility, that of carrying a masterpiece under his arm and seeing himself unjustly rejected by the world. Proud and stubborn humility also exists in wanting to know what purpose the books we are writing today will serve tomorrow, and immediately doubting whether the reassuring reasons we are being given, or that we are giving ourselves, will last for long (for how long?). No one is more deceived than when they allow others to deceive them…

Approaching now are a man who lost his left hand in the war and a woman who came into the world with the mysterious power to see what lies beneath people's skin. His name is Baltasar Mateus, nicknamed Seven-Suns; she is known as Blimunda, and also by the nickname Seven-Moons, which was added later, because it is written that where there is a sun there must be a moon, and that only the joint and harmonious presence of both will make the earth habitable, through love. Approaching also is a Jesuit priest named Bartolomeu who invented a machine capable of ascending to the sky and flying without any fuel other than human will—that which, it is said, can do anything, but which has not been able, or has not known how, or has not wanted, until today, to be the sun and moon of simple kindness or even simpler respect. They are three mad Portuguese men from the 18th century, in a time and country where superstitions and the bonfires of the Inquisition flourished, where the vanity and megalomania of a king led to the construction of a convent, a palace, and a basilica that would astound the outside world—in the unlikely event that this world had enough eyes to see Portugal, just as we know Blimunda had to see what was hidden… And also approaching is a multitude of thousands upon thousands of men with dirty, calloused hands, their bodies exhausted from having raised, for years on end, stone by stone, the implacable walls of the convent, the enormous rooms of the palace, the columns and pillars, the airy bell towers, the dome of the basilica suspended over the void. The sounds we are hearing are from Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord, who doesn't know whether to laugh or cry… This is the story of Memorial do Convento, a book in which the aspiring author, thanks to what he had been taught since the old days of his grandparents Jerónimo and Josefa, has already managed to write words like these, where some poetry is not absent: “Besides women's conversation, it is dreams that hold the world in its orbit. But it is also dreams that make it a crown of moons, therefore the sky is the splendor that is inside the heads of men, if the heads of men are not the very and only sky.” So be it.

The teenager already knew something about poetry, learned from his textbooks when, at a vocational school in Lisbon, he was preparing for the trade he practiced at the beginning of his working life: that of a mechanical locksmith. He also had good teachers of the poetic art during the long nights he spent in public libraries, reading at random from encounters and catalogs, without guidance, without anyone to advise him, with the same creative wonder of the navigator who invents each place he discovers. But it was in the library of the industrial school that The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis began to be written… There, one day, the young apprentice locksmith (he would have been 17 years old then) found a magazine – “Atena” was the title – in which there were poems signed with that name and, naturally, being so poorly acquainted with the literary cartography of his country, he thought that there was a poet in Portugal who was called that: Ricardo Reis. It didn't take long, however, to learn that the poet himself was a certain Fernando Nogueira Pessoa who signed poems with the names of non-existent poets born in his head, whom he called heteronyms—a word not found in the dictionaries of the time, which is why it took the apprentice of letters so much trouble to learn its meaning. He learned many poems by Ricardo Reis by heart (“To be great, be whole/Put all that you are into the smallest thing you do”), but he could not resign himself, despite being so young and ignorant, that a superior mind could have conceived, without remorse, this cruel verse: “Wise is he who is content with the spectacle of the world.” Much, much later, the apprentice, now with white hair and a little wiser in his own wisdom, dared to write a novel to show the poet of the Odes something of what the spectacle of the world was like in that year of 1936, in which he had placed him to live his last days: the occupation of the Rhineland by the Nazi army, Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, Salazar's creation of the Portuguese fascist militias. It was as if he were saying to him: “Behold the spectacle of the world, my poet of serene bitterness and elegant skepticism. Enjoy it, savor it, contemplate it, since being seated is your wisdom…”.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ended with some melancholy words: “Here, where the sea ended and the land waits.” Therefore, there would be no more discoveries for Portugal, only an endless wait for unimaginable futures: just the usual fate, the ever-present longing, and little more… It was then that the apprentice imagined that perhaps there was still a way to launch the ships back into the water, for example, to move the earth itself and set it sailing out to sea. A direct result of the collective Portuguese resentment towards Europe's historical disdain (it would be more accurate to say a result of my personal resentment…), the novel I wrote at the time – The Stone Raft – separated the entire Iberian Peninsula from the European continent, transforming it into a large floating island, moving without oars, sails, or propellers towards the South of the world, “a mass of stone and earth, covered with cities, villages, rivers, forests, factories, wild scrubland, cultivated fields, with its people and animals,” on its way to a new utopia: the cultural encounter of the peninsular peoples with the peoples from the other side of the Atlantic, thus challenging, as my strategy dared, the suffocating dominion that the United States of America has been exercising in those parts… A doubly utopian vision would understand this political fiction as a much more generous and human metaphor: that Europe, as a whole, should move south in order to, in redress for its past colonial abuses and Moderns, helping to balance the world. That is, Europe finally as an ethic. The characters in The Stone Raft – two women, three men, and a dog – travel tirelessly across the peninsula as it sails the ocean. The world is changing, and they know they must look within themselves for the new people they will become (not forgetting the dog, who is not a dog like any other…). That is enough for them.

The apprentice then remembered that at some point in his life he had proofread books and that if in The Stone Raft he had, so to speak, revised the future, it wouldn't be wrong to revise the past now, inventing a novel called The History of the Siege of Lisbon, in which a proofreader, reviewing a book of the same title but about History, and tired of seeing how said History is becoming less and less capable of surprising, decides to replace a "yes" with a "no," subverting the authority of "historical truths." Raimundo Silva, as the proofreader is called, is a simple, ordinary man who only distinguishes himself from most by believing that all things have their visible and invisible sides and that we will know nothing about them until we have fully explored them. This is precisely what a conversation he has with the historian is about. Thus: “I remind you that the reviewers have already seen much of literature and life. My book, I remind you, is history. Not being my intention to point out other contradictions, sir, in my opinion, everything that is not life is literature. History too. History above all, without meaning to offend. And painting, and music. Music has been resisting since its birth, now it goes, now it comes, it wants to free itself from the word, I suppose out of envy, but it always returns to obedience. And painting, well, painting is nothing more than literature made with brushes. I hope you haven't forgotten that humanity began to paint long before it knew how to write. You know the saying, if you don't have a dog, hunt with a cat, or, in other words, those who cannot write, paint, or draw, that's what children do. What you mean, in other words, is that literature already existed before I was born. Yes sir, like man, in other words, before he was, he already was. It seems to me that you are mistaken.” "Your vocation should be to be a historian. I lack the preparation, sir. What can a simple man do without preparation? It was already a great stroke of luck to have come into the world with good genetics, but, so to speak, in a raw state, and then no more polishing than the first letters that remained unique. You could present yourself as self-taught, a product of your own worthy effort. There's no shame in that. In the past, society took pride in its self-taught people. That's over. Development came and it ended. Self-taught people are looked down upon. Only those who write verses and stories for entertainment are allowed to be self-taught, but I never had a knack for literary creation. So, become a philosopher. You, sir, are a humorist, you cultivate irony. I even wonder how you dedicated yourself to history, being such a serious and profound science. I'm only ironic in real life. I would like to believe that history is not real life, literature, yes, and nothing more. But history was real life in the time before..." "I could call it history. So, sir, you think that history is real life. I think so, yes, that history was real life. I mean, I have no doubt whatsoever. What would become of us if the deleatur that erases everything did not exist?" sighed the proofreader. Needless to say, the apprentice learned the lesson of doubt from Raimundo Silva. It was about time.

Now, it was probably this learning of doubt that led him, two years later, to write The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. It is true, and he has said so, that the words of the title came to him as a result of an optical illusion, but it is legitimate to wonder if it was not the serene example of the proofreader that, in the meantime, had been preparing the ground from which the new novel would spring. This time it was not a matter of looking behind the pages of the New Testament in search of contradictions, but rather of illuminating their surface with a grazing light, as one does with a painting, so as to highlight the reliefs, the signs of passage, the obscurity of the depressions. It was thus that the apprentice, now surrounded by evangelical characters, read, as if for the first time, the description of the massacre of the Innocents, and, having read, did not understand. He did not understand that there could already be martyrs in a religion that would still have to wait thirty years for its founder to pronounce its first word; he did not understand why the only person who could have saved the lives of the children of Bethlehem did not do so; he did not understand the absence, in Joseph, of even the slightest feeling of responsibility, remorse, guilt, or even curiosity, after returning from Egypt with his family. Nor can it be argued, in defense of the cause, that it was necessary for the children of Bethlehem to die in order for Jesus' life to be saved: simple common sense, which should preside over all things, both human and divine, is there to remind us that God would not send his Son to earth, moreover with the task of redeeming the sins of humanity, only for him to die at the age of two, beheaded by a soldier of Herod… In this Gospel, written by the apprentice with the respect that great dramas deserve, Joseph will be aware of his guilt, will accept remorse as punishment for the fault he committed, and will let himself be led to death almost without resistance, as if that were all that was needed to settle his accounts with the world. The apprentice's Gospel is therefore not just another edifying legend of blessed beings and gods, but the story of a few human beings subject to a power against which they fight, but which they cannot overcome. Jesus, who would inherit the sandals with which his father had trod the dust of the earth's paths, would also inherit from him the tragic feeling of responsibility and guilt that would never leave him, not even when he raised his voice from the cross: "Men, forgive him, for he does not know what he has done," certainly referring to the God who had led him there, but perhaps also remembering, in that final agony, his true father, the one who, in flesh and blood, had humanly begotten him. As can be seen, the apprentice had already made a long journey when, in his heretical Gospel, he wrote the last words of the dialogue in the temple between Jesus and the scribe: "Guilt is a wolf that eats the son after having devoured the father," said the scribe. "That wolf you speak of has already eaten my father," said Jesus. "Then it only remains for him to devour you." "And you, in your life, have been eaten, or devoured?" "Not only eaten and devoured, but vomited up," replied the scribe.

If Emperor Charlemagne had not established a monastery in Northern Germany, if that monastery had not given rise to the city of Münster, if Münster had not wanted to mark the twelve hundredth anniversary of its founding with an opera about the terrible war that took place in the sixteenth century between Anabaptist Protestants and Catholics, the apprentice would not have written the play he called In Nomine Dei. Once again, with no other aid than the small light of his reason, the apprentice had to penetrate the obscure labyrinth of religious beliefs, those that so easily lead human beings to kill and to be killed. And what he saw was again the horrendous mask of intolerance, an intolerance that in Münster reached a demented paroxysm, an intolerance that insulted the very cause that both sides proclaimed to defend. Because it was not a war in the name of two enemy gods, but a war in the name of the same god. Blinded by their own beliefs, the Anabaptists and Catholics of Münster were unable to grasp the clearest of all evidence: on Judgment Day, when both sides appear to receive the reward or punishment they deserved for their actions on earth, God, if his decisions are governed by anything resembling human logic, will have to receive both in paradise, for the simple reason that both believe in him. The terrible carnage of Münster taught the apprentice that, contrary to what they promised, religions have never served to bring men closer together, and that the most absurd of all wars is a religious war, considering that God cannot, even if he wanted to, declare war on himself…

Blind. The apprentice thought: “We are blind,” and sat down to write the Essay on Blindness to remind whoever might read it that we perversely use reason when we humiliate life, that the dignity of the human being is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that universal lies have taken the place of plural truths, that man has ceased to respect himself when he has lost the respect he owed to his fellow man. Then, apprentice, as if trying to exorcise the monsters engendered by the blindness of reason, he began to write the simplest of all stories: a person who goes in search of another person simply because he understood that life has nothing more important than asking something of a human being. The book is called All the Names. Unwritten, all our names are there. The names of the living and the names of the dead.

I'm finished. The voice that read these pages wanted to be the echo of the combined voices of my characters. To be honest, I have no more voice than they have. Forgive me if this seems like little to you, but for me it is everything.

• Speech delivered at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on December 7, 1998.