The Anti-Fascist Fiction of Antonio Lobo Antunes

Antonio Lobo Antunes’s fiction challenged colonialism and fascist dictatorship.

It is a necessary sentence that mainstream publications are incapable of producing this week, as Portugal lost one of its greatest novelists on March 5.

Maybe this sentence doesn’t sell.

Authors I know who hide from politics say we have enough politics on our phones. Besides, authors want to be known for writing about “time” or “memory” and the travails of “the human heart.” These themes are human and enduring, they say, while politics is for newspapers that line the bottom of the parrot cage. Sometimes they even quote Antunes’s favorite, William Faulkner, about the “problems of the spirit.”

But what I notice is that these authors rarely mention Faulkner’s plots set in curdled, Jim Crow police states. For me, no one wrote about time, memory, or the human heart better than Antunes. But no one could explore the human potential trapped by a moldy tyranny either, its “confused ideals of oppression.”

His characters witness pain and war, returning to cities ignorant of the distant horrors of the frontier:

“In 1973, I had come back from the war and knew about injuries…about explosions, about gunshots, about mines, about bellies blown apart by the explosions of booby traps, knew about prisoners and murdered babies, knew about spilled blood and longing, but I had been spared the knowledge of hell.”

What we are learning in the 21st century is that environmental catastrophe and imperial warfare are human and enduring literary themes, too. Antunes, a writer who served as a soldier from 1971-73 in Portugal’s doomed colonial war in Angola, explores a society cut from its connection to the natural world and struggling in the aftermath of dictatorship and colonialism.

The recent obituaries of Dick Cheney often did not use the words “empire,” “corruption,” or “war criminal.” The New York Times obituary of Antunes does mention the author’s “war experience” in an “Angolan War” as well as “the sizzling vigor” of Antunes’s prose. True enough. In an interview at the New York Public Library he said a great page of prose can make you “hear the sound of rain.”

Yet, many of his more than 30 books grapple with life in the filthy ashes of wasteful colonial wars. His wounded characters survive but are haunted, divided from one another by trauma and class, searching the darkness of city streets filled with informers and fear. One character in Knowledge of Hell becomes a psychiatrist, like Antunes, in order to “understand their lunar speeches and the rancorous aquariums of their brains, in which swim the moribund fishes of fear.”

Antunes, more than anyone since Jacobo Timerman, excellently renders the setting of captivity by state thugs and the deliciousness of freedom from a torture chamber. In The Natural Order of Things, one character recounts, “They gave me shots, they removed my cast, I stopped feeling crushed glass in my bladder, I could chew again and walk without a cane, it became easier to guess time, it was always midday and warm, my love, always the same blue, always the seagulls, always the river, ah, and the sirens of boats…”

Antunes did not write mere political screeds. Who could outperform the radical chic of Jose Saramago? To me, many of that author’s allegories seem almost quaint now. I offer my shelves to Antunes. After all, what is more human than the sight of a torture cell, the concentration camp and the paid stooge screaming lies into a state microphone? Many of Antunes’s sharpest characters flourish in spite of politics, eschewing the romanticism every step of the way, even in interrogation:

And the inspector, hanging up the phone and pressing a buzzer,’ “So you want democratic due process, so you want socialism,” and I said “I was never a Socialist, sir, I was never a Socialist…forgive me, but I don’t even like poor people, they age so quickly, dress so badly, look so ugly.

A psychiatrist and son of one of President Salazar’s doctors, Antunes was born in 1942, a decade after the Estado Novo dictatorship had lodged itself like a tick inside Lisbon. Like Faulkner, Antunes could provide the sensory experience of a foggy street but also vividly render the black hole in the heart of a vicious reactionary patrolling it. In fact, there’s an eerie parallel between Paula Rego and Leon Golub’s under-appreciated portraits of Portuguese thugs and colonial torturers with villains from Antunes’s works in the same years.

In one scene in The Explanation of the Birds, a boss sniffs: “You see, we’ve got the situation back under control, and the Communists in check–for fifty years we kept the weeds from getting a foothold, so we know how to deal with them.” Later, a character laments: “If the Communists win the elections, they’ll make us all put a wagon wheel inside our front doors and fill up our houses with the foul smell of books.”

In Antunes’s charming autobiographical sketches, The Fat Man and Infinity, he avoided discussing war. In his cronicas, little columns, he wrote about his family and considered his own childhood and mortality. He was an inveterate watcher, a man who could sit in silent observation in malls or on city streets.

In one sketch, he watches three funerals a day from his ground floor apartment. He sits in a parlor talking to a thirty year old portrait of his dead wife sitting on the crochet doily. “It’ll only be a matter of months: sooner or later, I’ll watch my own death from here,” he writes. “I know how it will be…a cortege of random ghosts staggering along on crutches, unseen by anyone. Then someone will place a second photograph on the crocheted doily and two yellow smiles will light up the gloom like the tremulous flames of oil lamps while the dogs bark at the dark as if they were anxious orphans.”
In his own life, Antunes was skeptical of the paternal charity of his bourgeois family. Their shabby gentility held with it a condescension for the weak, a love of poverty if not the grateful poor.

Meanwhile, he wrote in The Fat Man, “all those poor people, all those Little Saints, and all those smells irritated me.” He would climb up to the attic with “increased affection” for a dusty engraving “which showed a jubilant multitude of poor people standing around the guillotine where the king and queen were having their heads chopped off.”

Antunes, like Faulkner and Sebald, is a writer of attics and dust, an artist of “the oblique spotlight of memory.” But we should not merely relish this melancholic imagery and turn it into some dead motif or literary cliche to lull us into watchful passivity at “History.” Don’t forget that these authors also wrote in the aftermath of authoritarianism and war. Like them, Antunes is a writer of bitter aftermaths. His astonished characters ride the shockwaves of war, arriving shaken by the blast.

Yet, Antunes is also a writer of our time, too. His rich pages are filled with birds and “the unmoving raging Algavre sun tacked onto the blue plank of sky,” or the ghostly whisper of wind in the trees. In one passage a character reflects on modern man’s obsession with ecocide: “We are trees but explain to me where our roots can survive when the earth has all been asphalted, carpeted, and parqueted, when even the cemetery ground has been paved by stones, when not a square foot of grass is left for my now frail body, reduced to a shadow that stubbornly protests, and when this condo shrinks to the exact size of my dread.”

Antunes’s radical legacy is surely in his irreducible artistic vision. But as the ogre of our out-of-control empire lurches from genocide and illegal bombing abroad to ethnic cleansing and authoritarianism at home, we should remember clearly the fierce authors who vividly portrayed our struggles.

Antunes wrote elegantly, what he believed was the highest form of courage, against the ogre’s gibberish. His Portugal was a place where “everything is make-believe…Only the fear and wretchedness are authentic.”

Our landscape is a setting Antunes knew well.

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