Pereira Maintains: A Testimony by Antonio Tabucchi, translated by Patrick Creagh (New Directions Ebook)
[T]he fact is that I’ve been stricken with misgiving, what I mean is what if those two youngsters are right? In that case they’re right, said Dr. Cardoso gently, but that’s for History to say, not you, Dr. Pereira.
What does it mean to be right in the eyes of History? What does it mean to be on the right side of History? Reading online news or watching television in the past few weeks and months, one was bombarded with coverage of the Senate impeachment trial. One saw some senators preening with their twisted ideas, wearing the robes of honorable jurors. One could only wonder if this troupe of senators defending a morally bankrupt public official had any regard for how they would be remembered. Legacy in the wastebasket. One already felt sorry for how harshly history would judge and remember our senators who were luxuriating in the banality of evil.
Since history (or History) would be the judge and historian of events still unfolding, perhaps the question was wrong in the first place. The question should be, What does it mean to be on the side of the victims of history?
It was the twenty-fifth of July Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-Eight, and Lisbon was glittering in the azure purity of an Atlantic breeze. Pereira maintains.
"Pereira maintains ... Pereira maintains ... Pereira maintains." It was a predictable repetition across blocks of prose, the pauses in between functioning like the oxygen giving life to the routine details, domestic and work-related, surrounding the later life of cultural editor and ex-journalist Dr. Pereira. The repetition was almost Bernhardian in its shaking insistence, but Antonio Tabucchi used the refrain to remind us of the unified voice behind his narrative and to constantly pull us back into the orbit of "a testimony," the novel's subtitle. It was a recurring phrase that added not only predictability but also ominousness to the entire proceedings.
The inconsistency of having the translation published under different titles and subtitles—Declares Pereira: A True Account (1995), Pereira Declares: A Testimony (1997), Pereira Maintains (2010), and Pereira Maintains: A Testimony (2021)—is a testament to the enduring "afterlife" (after Walter Benjamin) of the English translation. Translator Patrick Creagh—who died in 2012, two years before "Declares" became "Maintains"—must have had a hand in replacing every instance of the word and, in doing so, reinterpreting the entire novel's voice and meaning.
It was 1938, and Pereira maintained that the whole of Lisbon "reeks of death," in fact "the whole of Europe reeks of death." The waiter at the restaurant he frequented would only openly describe what was happening as "barbarous goings-on."
While neighboring Spain was in the hot seat of simmering political and ideological conflicts, Pereira observed that "even here [in Portugal] things aren’t too rosy, the police have things all their own way, they’re killing people, they ransack people’s houses, there’s censorship, I tell you this is an authoritarian state, the people count for nothing, public opinion counts for nothing."
And so throughout the novella, Pereira was called to witness and declare his observations of the stifling atmosphere of authoritarianism. He was called to testify and to maintain (if not declare) time and again that his life was lived for a purpose perhaps greater than himself, that he had actively and consciously participated in the course of history too big to contain him. His deposition early in the book—as an initially reluctant observer of "barbarous goings-on"—was hurtling inevitably toward his final act of resistance.
The voice of Dr. Pereira was genial, urbane, a touch too civil and polite and yet nonetheless opinionated. It was a sure voice that could frame contemporary threats with delicate caution at times and indelicate frankness at other times. "I’m not Thomas Mann," he humbly described himself, "I’m only the obscure editor of the culture page of a second-rate evening paper." He was an inconsistent, imperfect, complex human being, which made his final act all the more heroic.
Pereira did not only maintain what he said. He also preserved documentary materials as evidence. He was finally making a written account of an event that could shape public opinion. But to whom is Dr. Pereira giving his account? To himself? To posterity? To future generations? Whoever it was, as transcribed by Tabucchi and as translated by Creagh, Pereira was giving a written record in style, detectable in the translation as quaint civility and conversational ease.
Listen Miss Marta, he protested, I am neither one of you nor one of them, I prefer to keep myself to myself, and in any case I don’t know who you and yours are and don’t wish to know, I am a journalist and my job is culture, I have just finished translating a story of Balzac’s and as far as your business is concerned I prefer not to be in the know, I’m not a reporter.
From a Bartleby who "prefers not to" be in the know, Pereira's life was transformed—we could not say overnight, everything was novelistically calculated in this story. Dr. Pereira did not do things totally contrary to his nature. His objective journalistic truth-telling did not come from a vacuum. We learned that before his current retirement job, he had been a reporter on the crime beat of a major newspaper. Characters and scenes that made him question the status quo early on foreshadowed his unconscious yet gradual reawakening, if not yearning, for a life of principles, ideals, and convictions.
At the outset, we found Dr. Pereira recruiting an obituary writer for the culture section of the newspaper. That's when he became entangled with Monteiro Rossi, a shady young man whose education credentials were suspect (he admitted to having plagiarized his university thesis). The unusual relationship (friendship? acquaintance? father-son figure?) that developed between Pereira and Rossi somehow turned the former from a complacent observer to a half-hearted sympathizer of a revolutionary cause, from a current culture writer back to the journalist he had once been, whose mandate was to bear witness to the facts and describe why an atrocity is an atrocity. From an individualist to a comrade. From a cog in the wheel of history to its direct participant.
If he couldn’t publish it [a translation of a book by Georges Bernanos] in the Lisboa well never mind, he thought, maybe he could publish it in book form, at least the Portuguese would then have one good book to read, a serious, moral book, one that dealt with fundamental problems, a book that would do a power of good to the consciences of its readers, thought Pereira.
We have the theme of conscience: how to awaken one in difficult times, in times of crisis. Tabucchi's novella reminded me—mainly in its tone, and also in its theme, though in an inverted sense—of Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, particularly in its treatment of the ethical dilemmas surrounding the press and its function to tell the objective truth and to stand up against the forces of evil.
At the end of the novel, when Dr. Pereira summarized what happened in a news report, everything clicked into place. What went on up to that point, every harmless detail that went before, seemed like a lengthy digression leading up to his concise report. The entire thing, the entire novella, after all, was an obituary, apart from being a testimony.
He also said tell Dr. Pereira to write an article about the soul, because that’s something we all need, that’s exactly what he said, Dr. Pereira. Just his little joke, said Pereira, however tomorrow I’ll be talking to him myself.
Albeit irrevocably late, irrecoverably too late, a posthumous article about the soul was sorely needed in these times of moral and political reckoning, when you read the news, you see arrogant senators, world leaders, and authoritarians spouting and commanding, with impunity, unspeakable evil in their words and deeds.
Pereira Maintains was dedicated to the soulless. It was what was needed by everyone still able to distinguish right from wrong and hence able to act. To grow a little soul, grow a little conscience. To recognize and confer dignity on the fallen—that's probably what it means to be on the side of history, to be squarely on the side of the victims of history.
