Tag: João Ricardo Lopes

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A Photograph

Photograph by Thorsten von Overgaard

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On the night of June 23rd that year, the only lamp still lit in the university residence was mine. From the third floor, I could take in the sky ablaze above the city and the festivities. In Porto, it’s mandatory to enjoy oneself on the eve of St. John’s Day. Patios, stairways, alleys, passageways, squares, and avenues fill with noise, colored paper streamers, and the glint of sardine scales. It is compulsory to go out, to mingle, to raise a racket, to drink with abandon, to brandish leeks and press them against the insincerely naïve noses of young women. Tradition has it that this is the solstice night. Even if it’s not the shortest night of the year, it is certainly the longest. Every reveler knows that.

As for me, I stubbornly shut myself in to study Linguistics. From outside, the world burst in—loud, full of life—like a stab to the heart. Through the windowpane I could see the rooftops and church towers where the trailing fire of paper lanterns climbed skyward, the scattered light from crowded balconies, from grills and barbecues burning bright, and the lagging groups running about with their plastic hammers. I could swear the dozens of students’ rooms were empty. Since mid-afternoon, I hadn’t seen a soul in the hallways, nor heard a single voice inside the building.

Martinet’s notes struck me as monstrously tedious. I underlined them with a fluorescent marker and recited the glosses aloud from my notebook. I was alone.

It was in that solitude that I noticed the sky sinking into ever darker shades of green-black, eerily like chromium oxide, suffocating the horizon. The first lightning bolt and thunderclap I mistook for part of the celebration. But then came more. The storm wasted no time shaking the windows and unleashing the most vengeful rain I had ever witnessed.

In an instant, cries of confusion multiplied—hysterical, terrified. Sheets of rain hammered mercilessly against the long tables on the terraces. The grills were dragged under awnings however best they could. Old and young alike huddled together in kiosks and under doorways. The scene of the commotion struck me as so amusing, so full of warmth, that I opened a drawer and took out my Leica.

Despite the fogged glass and saturated air, the landscape had changed. It seemed beautiful now—human, sheltering, inviting.

Far away, the floodlights of the churches lit the storm. Closer, the streetlights revealed the damage. I went down to see it better. As soon as I opened the door, I came face to face with one of those poor souls so common in our cities.

— Didn’t mean to scare you, son. Forgive me!

— You didn’t. Don’t worry!

I hesitated for a moment, unsure whether to step out or invite him in. There was a mix of smoke and vapor rising from the asphalt. My camera was ready.

— This rain. Who could have guessed!

The man said nothing. He only shrugged. In one hand he held an apple, in the other a nylon sack. That downpour, it seemed, was nothing unusual to him.

— You’ll be soaked through… Come in, take shelter!

Without a word, the man obeyed.

I looked at the street: a box of peppers on the ground, abandoned beers, cats under cars, smoke. St. John, it seemed, had proven himself indecent. I couldn’t bring myself to fire the flash. Then the man said:

— In any case, what you’re feeling now is déjà vu.

And it was true: the whole scene felt familiar, as if some link in my memory had sparked the impression I had lived that moment before. The man—though I’d never seen him—was, I could swear, oddly familiar.

— You’re not going to take a single shot with that camera. The objects don’t interest you. Only the subject in front of you is worth noting. Isn’t that right?

His tone, nearly arrogant, sounded like a reproach. He went on:

— Right now, you’re thinking about how to get out of this mess. The street no longer seems the strangest place in the world—this little space here does, doesn’t it? You’re thinking how that box of peppers, those abandoned beers, those screams, those cats hiding under the cars, that smoke—none of it compares to the chaos reigning in your head.

— And how can you possibly know all this?

— Martinet’s Elements of General Linguistics upstairs is proof enough that we’ve both sunk into the same wretched solitude.

— Who are you?

— You always choose the side door, never the corridor straight ahead… You’re still thinking in mazes. And yet, since the moment we saw each other just now, you’ve known—we are the same person!

— We’re the same person?

— The same character, yes!

— The same character?

— Don’t look so surprised. Borges—whom you’ve yet to meet—does the same in the first story of The Book of Sand. Dickens—whom you’ve already forgotten—does it with Ebenezer Scrooge. Dante—whom you’re about to discover—dreams of his own soul transmigrating through the circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

— And you’ve come to show me the future, is that it? To prove something? That I—we—are wretched? That I need to change so we can both be redeemed?

— I haven’t come to prove anything at all…

My other self bit into the apple, slung his bundle over his shoulder, and stepped back out into the night, unafraid of the deluge, swallowed by the dirty reflection of a thousand shattered lights.

With the Leica off in my hands, I watched him go, unable to add a single word.

Truth be told, there was nothing left to say.

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From the book O Moscardo e Outras Histórias (The Horsefly and Other Stories, 2018, pp. 255–259)

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A Quest

Photograph by Colin Watts

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Weary of the errors of his age, of the injustices of his people, and of the brazen lies by which one fed the other— weary of the vileness with which both had cast aside the primacy of kindness among men— Kazuya turned his back on the city and walked toward nothingness for as many days as his sandals would carry him.

In a certain misty place, he came upon a curious tree, which seemed as lost as he was. There, beside it, he began to draw from within himself the words he had long kept buried—words that rattled in his mind like water boiling in a pot.He said many things: first in whispers, then in cries, and at last in deep regret.

Then he felt a great cold. An immense, devastating solitude. An uncontrollable urge to weep. And weep he did, as much as his eyes could bear. Afterward, he embraced the tree, thanked it, and continued his journey into the green-gray horizon. Nothing more was known of him than this.

The last person to see him was an old spinner of thread.

She marveled that such a ragged vagabond could seem happier than a lit lamp— and that he had asked her for nothing, not even a good day.

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The Blessed One

Photo by Leroy Skalstad

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They brought him ivory, and he carved it with the most refined patience of which the human kind is capable. The objects that came from his hands were among those most ravenously coveted by foreigners in Brazzaville, in Djambala, in Sibiti, in Mandigou, and throughout the Congo. They called him “The Blessed One,” though his real name was Isidor Nkobanjira. As he grew old, he boasted of having no fewer than seventy children.

Near the end, he began to cut and pierce and carve deep grooves into an elephant tusk. First, he etched the winding course of a river, then the rise of a mountain, then a flurry of perfectly hemispheric stars. With care, he added water and fish, earth and impalas, sky and vultures. He filled the ivory with every creature he could remember, omitting neither silence, nor death, nor fear.

“The whole universe fits here,” Nkobanjira thought.

But in truth — he noticed with a look of dissatisfaction — after all was done, a bit of space still remained.

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Children’s Day

Photo by Kant Smith

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The world exasperates. A latent brutality thrums within it, undoing the stubborn innocence of things, and making ever murkier the divination of times that shall outlive us. We know History swings, endlessly, between seasons of peace and seasons of war, between ages of brilliance and ages of barbarity, between hours of human grandeur and hours of atrocious pillage. If we return to the 1980s, we recall the searing images of Biafra, of Ethiopia—the solidarity campaigns that gathered the world against hunger. We recall the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dawn of democracy in countries once shackled by Soviet rule. We recall Mandela’s release, the silencing of guns in Northern Ireland. A time, perhaps, when free thought was loosening its chains, when democracy and the rights of the unheard began, however briefly, to hold.

But the world is once again turned inside out by the same old forces—those who forever gnaw after wealth, after power, after dominion. One wave of hope gives way to another of grim despair. I think of the children in Gaza, in Ukraine, in that half of the world left wrinkled and worn, enslaved by the relentless sprawl of multinationals. It is hard to believe that a handful of words could matter—and that, too, exasperates.

And still, in these places seemingly abandoned by God—long since forsaken by humanity—there remains a force, faint but unyielding, that drives us to persist. A kind of breath of truth threads its way through the sulphur and phosphorus of falling bombs, compelling us to resist. Resistance itself exasperates. As though some hidden covenant between the last flickers of moral conscience and justice, poetry and the sheer passion for life, shame and a whisper of prayer were urging us to rise—to face the impious cries of tyrants, and the colluding silence of nations that call themselves free. I think of the children of Gaza, starving. The children stolen from Ukraine. The children of Yemen, Sudan, Venezuela. The ones who drown off Lampedusa and Tenerife. The ones who toil from dawn till dark in Bangladesh, in India, in countless places lost to maps. The ones ruled by the Taliban, by mafias, by the degenerate hands of men who harm them. I know that words do not console. Nor do donations (for ten years now I’ve given one to UNICEF on this day). Both are drops in the sea. But I must not forget. I need, as Pedro-Daniel Névio once wrote, to “place a blue thistle in the space left by the stolen heart.”

Perhaps that is the invisible, stubborn force—the one that, beneath the fingernails of the few (and of many more), moves mountains.

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To dear friends

Photo by Cristina Gottardy

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When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
John, 11:33

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One of the tenderest landscapes from which we should never stray is that of one shoulder offered to another — and both, together, upholding the dignity of being human. A few days ago, while crossing a lattice of narrow streets with Céu on our way to the São João National Theatre, I caught sight, on a steep stretch of pavement, of an old man supporting another. It was both curious and deeply moving to see how the first, steadying himself with a cane, guided the second — whose small, bewildered eyes seemed on the verge of being swallowed by the noise and the frenzied rhythm of passing legs. Hand in hand, as we always are, Céu and I paused for a moment, watching the first gently draw the second forward, trading slow, whispered words, the two walking on like actors offstage, or like shy survivors adrift in a time and place that no longer seems to (re)cognise them.

There is little point in listing — or even hinting at — the many vile examples of selfishness, meanness or cruelty offered by society. The world is a cradle of serpents, and society the swamp where they slither round the simple and the meek.

Yet it is worth remembering José Mattoso, in a magnificent passage from Levantar o Céu – Os Labirintos da Sabedoria: “We are, without doubt, living through a dramatic moment in human history. But as long as there is life on this planet, and the sun returns in the east each morning, as long as men and women love one another, and children are born and play, there remains a trace of hope.” Watching — with the woman I love beside me — those two elders nurturing each other in that sliver of encouragement and light, I could not help but feel a deep stirring, and recall the strength of that line by Herberto Helder: “I slowly love the friends who are sad, with five fingers on each side.” So long as there is a friend who cares for us, we are not lost in darkness. Nor has the meaning of life vanished. Friendship is, by far, the finest tonic for these cursed times — and, perhaps, the only path toward their resurrection.

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Poetry

Photo by Toa Eftiba

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I have long read, written, collected, and loved poetry. My bookshelves cradle a considerable number of volumes dedicated to this art the ancient Greeks believed was consecrated to Euterpe—an art whose hold on me deepens with time, as I come to grasp the astonishing power of freedom contained in this ποιείν (poiein): the freedom to think, to feel, to speak.

These days, in my classes, it is rare to find a student who chooses a book of poems for their own quiet, autonomous reading. Rarer still the one who brings to their peers a collection by Sophia, José Régio, Miguel Torga, Antero, Pessanha—or even by Florbela Espanca or Eugénio de Andrade (who, despite these “hard times for lyricism,” as Bertolt Brecht once wrote, still manage to glean some measure of admiration). Rarest of all is the one who admits to loving, or even intuitively grasping, this literary form.

Perhaps this is why—saddened by yet another crisis, this slow dwindling of love—I find myself thinking, more and more obsessively, about how to preserve Homer and Hesiod, Virgil and François Villon, Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Federico García Lorca and Anna Akhmatova. How to help them survive the great catastrophe of forgetting, and above all, the cataclysm of indifference. For time has taught me that the noblest battles for the life of the spirit are almost fated to fail in a society brutalised and brutal, prosaic and stained in its sentiments by the cement blocks we trample in the streets.

Poetry must be cared for—urgently. As with the great seed vault of Svalbard, we must shelter the most extraordinary force ever forged by the human mind, heart, and courage, working in concert. Only, in place of seeds, we must seal verses within.

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Bucolic

Photo by Milad Fakurian

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At the top of the hill lies the center of the world. From there, you can see everything: the village nestled on the slopes, the medieval church, the river below with its little Roman bridge, the hay carts and the flocks passing slowly, just like the hay carts and flocks from a thousand years ago.

There, sheltered beneath the branches of an old ash tree thick with saplings and roots, we hear the following dialogue:

– My life was cowardly, weak, miserably lived…

– Why do you say such things?

– Because I’ve always been a coward, a weak man, a miserable one…

– Don’t say such ugly things…

– But you, my child, you can have a different fate!

– What do you mean, Grandpa?

– You can look into my eyes and see what you don’t want for yourself, glimpse yourself now in a future time…

– But Grandpa, how can you believe what you just said? You’ve always been kind to everyone.

– I killed all my dreams, turned away from every woman for fear they would turn away from me, ignored the warnings, dismissed good advice, believed myself old at every stage of my life…

In the end, I wasn’t even able to put an end to the terrible remorse that eats me alive!

– What do you mean by that?

– You know… Ending everything…

– Grandpa!

– But you are different, my child! I’m telling you, a different fate awaits you. I’m telling you to go! Go while the shadow of your own feet is not yet heavy enough to drag you down, nor strong enough to turn your head back… Go, and never look behind you!

The clouds drift up above. The hill is gentle, like the curve of a fruit. All who love a good story know how vain words can be—and how fond they are of a fine pastoral setting.

“Never look behind you!”

Indeed, when walking forward, one must never turn back. It is a universal truth.