Perhaps There is a Light Inside People

When I lived in Lisbon I exchanged a few e-mails with the writer José Luís Peixoto, but somehow we never managed to meet; my loss, particularly since it has taken me a couple of years to read his marvelous novel The Implacable Order of Things, which won the José Saramago Prize in 2001.

The novel is set in the farmland of Portugal’s Alentejo region, a world of low sloping hills, cork and olive trees, golden wheat fields, and a relentless heat that Peixoto captures here nicely: “The earth was its own silence on fire. The sun was a blazing heat lighting up the flame-colored air: the aura of a fire that was the aura of the earth, that was the light and the sun.”

Alentejo landscape

It’s a world where “swallows fly close to the ground, like harmless volleys from a slingshot,” and where characters can live well past 100 years, as if baked into a sort of semi-immortal beef jerky by the Alentejo’s ever-present sun. Peixoto further peoples his novel with Siamese twins who are joined at the pinky, a brutal giant, a scheming sheepdog, a man with no right arm or leg who somehow manages as the town’s premier carpenter, a cook who sculpts her meals into elaborate landscapes, and an oracular voice locked in a hallway chest that seems to hypnotize some of the characters with pronouncements like “Perhaps there’s a light inside people, perhaps a clarity; perhaps people aren’t made of darkness, perhaps certainties are a breeze inside people, and perhaps people are the certainties they possess.”

These individual certainties, though, are almost never shared by the characters, who are unable to breach their invisible interior walls, and this lack of connection sets in place turns of fate that continue in the novel through not one but two generations.

Translated by Richard Zenith into a beautiful English that often rises to the rhythms of a desperate prayer, this novel’s accumulation of wisdoms lingers in my mind, particularly this hard truth: “We are granted our heart’s desire only for it to be definitively taken away, since our dream of it perishes.”

While I was reading Peixoto’s novel, I discovered by chance a Portuguese band that I have to confess to my shame I’d never noticed when living in Lisbon, A Naifa. Now I can’t stop listening to their music. They combine the traditions of fado with a contemporary, at times almost ambient rock sound, a strange brooding mixture of past and present. In many ways, the songs of their album “3 minutos antes de a maré encher” became the soundtrack for me of The Implacable Order of Things.

One of my favorite A Naifa songs is their heartbreaking “Todo o amor do mundo não foi suficiente” (“All the Love in the World Wasn’t Enough”). This video of the song is especially moving since it records one of the band’s last performances with their bassist, João Aguardela, who died too young of cancer in January 2009. Rest in peace, João.

And here’s a strange note: when I finally met up with José Peixoto, at the Disquiet International Literary Conference in Lisbon, he told me that he had written the lyrics for A Naifa’s song “Todo o amor do undo não suficiente.”

Interested in more of Peixoto’s work? Read about his travel experiences in North Korea, in the post “The Kinship of Secrets.”

2 Comments

tsiwari says:

November 29, 2010 at 6:05 pm

It’s very good to see/ find by hazard a portuguese music’s lover… a Portugal’s fan…

Hugs from Portugal! 🙂
admin says:

November 30, 2010 at 11:07 am

Obrigado!
You might also enjoy this article I wrote on the subject, “The Pleasures of Saudade,” which includes videos and MP3s of recent Portuguese music:
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/the_pleasures_of_saudade.php
Com amizade, Philip

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