June 2020 marked the 10th anniversary of the death of José Saramago, Portugal’s only recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In March 1997, the renowned author found Macau as his gateway to an East he had never visited before, and whose strangeness and incomprehension he confessed in his book of chronicles, Lanzarote Notebooks. Upon his arrival in the city, someone called him a “dangerous writer” from afar. It was his first impression of a land whose future was uncertain at the time, just two years before the Handover.
“Macau did not receive me with words of welcome,” wrote José Saramago on March 4, 1997, upon arriving in the territory for the first time. He had been invited by the Cultural Affairs Bureau to attend the launch of the Chinese translation of
Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda in English), one of the most popularized works of the author. The journey also took him to Beijing and Hong Kong.
A controversial personality, he was received in Macau as a “dangerous writer” – a name that was thrown at him by a stranger before he had even unpacked his luggage. It was his first impression of the territory, recorded in his book (Lanzarote Notebooks), published a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“After thirteen or fourteen hours of exhausting air travel, after a night practically without sleeping, when, still half-asleep, I was pushing my luggage cart, I heard a voice behind me say: ‘There goes the dangerous writer Saramago’”, wrote the author of his early impressions of Macau.
“‘Even here, in the City of the Name of God!’, I murmured succinctly, without recognizing the source of those ‘distinctly pronounced Portuguese words, in the faces behind me’”, he wrote.
Upon arrival, the then-head of the Cultural Affairs Bureau, Gabriela Cabelo, welcomed him, together with Ana Paula Laborinho, former president of Camões Institute. The reception was warm enough to make Saramago sigh “in relief ”. “There’s still hope,” he wrote.
The writer confessed that during the days of his first encounter with the East, he experienced an absence of emotion and a strange feeling of awkwardness. He even reproached himself for this somewhat apathetic reaction to the visit program that led him through the city to Guia Lighthouse, the Ruins of St Paul’s and A-Ma Temple.
“‘You are in the East for the first time in your life, how is it possible that you are not moved?’” he scolded himself on a walk through the city center, where he was accompanied by his wife, Pilar del Rio.
Saramago was waiting for “a strong emotion that never came”, and felt numb in the face of an unknown culture. “I knew, in advance, that I would not be able to easily open doors in this Chinese world. Quite atypical in this sense, I am a Westerner who not only instinctively rejects any kind of cultural impositions, but accepts, out of respect, to stay outside of what he will never come to understand satisfactorily. I am aware that I would make a bad anthropologist. And certainly, an even worse missionary”, he wrote.
Making plain use of ironic and satirical criticisms of the Catholic Church that were characteristic of his work, he reported in his memoir an anecdote of a painful fall he had in front of the facade of the Ruins of St. Paul’s.
“When jumping over a fence in order to shorten the path, believing I was still in the agile early days of my 70 years of life, I did not raise my left knee as high as I should have, which resulted in me hooking my toe on one of the iron chains that surrounded the enclosure, and there the author of ‘The Gospel’ (his infamous novel ‘The Gospel According to Jesus Christ’) was plunged, so to speak, at the door of the church, to finally pay with his bones for the unbearable sacrilege and heresy instilled into that divisive book ”, he described in his diary. (In 1992, the rightwing Portuguese Government removed Saramago's Gospel from the shortlist of candidates for the European Literary Prize, saying it was offensive to the country’s Catholics. In protest, Saramago, a communist and atheist, went into exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, in the Canary Archipelago, where he died in 2010).
About A-MA and other miracles
Saramago also describes in his memoir what must have been a walk through the Lou Lim Ieoc Gardens, though he did not remember its name. The author speaks of “a beautiful garden, with a small bridge that goes round and round (seven times? eleven?) before deciding to reach the other side”, and of a pavilion, “like a bandstand”, where “some Chinese, men and women, played and sang their music”.
He also visited A-Ma Temple, and the story of the zealous goddess who looks after Macau inspired him to compare it with a list of Christian miracles and the apparitions of saints: “The story that men have been telling since the beginning of time and in all different places in the world, it is a single story, the story of the ‘miracle’ of survival”.
During his stay, Saramago gave lectures to students of a local high school and the University of Macau, where he felt that the auditorium was unable to follow his thoughts, despite finding “faces so serious, so concentrated, eyes so fixed” that he had rarely seen in other audiences on previous occasions.
He also strolled around the islands, with mild and sunny March weather. “A beautiful day, with the sun uncovered and the temperature mild,” he points out on March 8, while noting that “on the Chinese side they are busy in cyclopean efforts to erase mountains” that will serve “for construction, or perhaps to do land reclamation from the sea, so common in these areas”.
José Saramago’s trip to Macau also included visits to the Historical Archive, Central Library and Portuguese Institute of the Orient, where he recalls an interior architecture “truly traumatizing”, “capable of creating daytime hallucinations and nightmares in those who work there”.
What would the writer have said if he had had the opportunity to reconnect with the territory a few years later, in view of the new “Vegas” constructions of the MSAR? And what would he have said about the present moment, some 20 years after Macau SAR, about which in 1997 he prophesied with little optimism?
“We built a good airport, we opened roads, we reclaimed land from the sea, we have erected huge sculptural pieces in the squares and avenues in remembrance (of what exactly?), but to find a Chinese person on the streets of Macau, speaking something that even remotely sounds like the Portuguese language, is miraculous. The Cultural Revolution is over, but I wonder how many years Camões can continue to exchange views on the fate of the country with João de Deus, his companion in the garden of Leal Senado”, the writer questioned on March 15, the last entry that mentions Macau in his Lanzarote Notebooks.
