Wolf Antunes, standing

António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese writer, has died at the age of eighty-three. I think he was no longer in vogue (I don't know if he ever was), but we have a number of his novels translated into Catalan: The Inquisitors' Manual (Ediciones 62, translation by Xavier Pàmies), The Splendor of Portugal, Exhortation to the Crocodiles and Don't rush into this dark night (Proa Editions, translated by Joan Casas) and I didn't see you in Babylon yesterday (El Gall Editor, also translated by Joan Casas). It is highly recommended reading.

Lobo Antunes is a fitting writer for our violent, dark, and fearful times because he himself experienced violence, darkness, and fear firsthand and addressed them in his books. He practiced as a psychiatrist and served for two years in the army during Angola's long and bloody colonial war, an experience that shaped and defined his writing and his worldview. The Inquisitors' Manual It proposes a look at the Salazar dictatorship, on the periphery of the Cold War, as seen by a minister of the regime; Exhortation to the crocodiles It interweaves the monologues of four women involved in armed activism in favor of General Spínola, who was the first president of the Portuguese Republic after the fall of the Salazar regime with the Carnation Revolt (Spínola had also exercised military command in Angola).

"Spanish fishing boats signaling with lights in front of Peniche, Cascais, Tavira, in an engraving above the ambassador the dead were resurrected half-naked in a landscape of ruins, in a second engraving Jesus walked on water blessing olive trees while some wasted, enraged, bearded disciples, money, drugs, explosives, what Saint Stephen hid from the Romans, the hem of the tunic, it was not the communion of the prisoners but revolvers, mines, grenades, the shopping baskets of the neighbors motionless on the stairs, waiting for the mercy of rheumatism that the tips of the joints would have pity, from the store mom made me ask for eggs and sugar on credit, the doorbells seemed to ring in uninhabited caverns and awaken the beehives, the hinges turned like cardboard that tears and showed a basement gloom, closets without doors populated by dirty jackets, eyes that looked over.

This bewildered stupor, this slightly hallucinatory melody, is a fragment ofExhortation to the crocodiles In Joan Casas's translation, which I marked when I read it, perhaps twenty-five years ago. It sounds imposing, like all of Lobo Antunes's literature, and it sounds as terrifying as it does today. Now we see that Lobo Antunes's books were a handbook of fear, perhaps a spell to combat it, but also a warning of what was coming and has now arrived, while he departed with his dignity intact.