One day they asked the writer Lídia Jorge what she would have wanted to be and she answered sincerely: “A sea port.” The response was so good that the journalist felt cheated and did not publish it. Today the question is different: when will the Nobel Prize be awarded? In the middle of the street, walking through Guadalajara (Mexico), the Portuguese woman spreads her skirt like a crow’s wing with one hand and this time, she jokes in hissing Spanish: “I already have my long dress ready.” She laughs and continues on her way.
It is not an extravagant question. Lídia Jorge has been accumulating recognitions throughout her life, which has now reached 77 years, among many others the Grand Prize of the Portuguese Writers Association, the FIL Grand Prize for Literature in Romance Languages or this same year the Médicis Extranjero for her latest novel, Mercy. The Médicis was created in 1958 to honor those authors whose notoriety was not at the level of their talent and has been received by great minds such as Doris Lessing, Julio Cortázar, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk or David Grossman, among non-French . However, there is not a cloud of followers around her when she moves through the Guadalajara International Book Fair, nor when she gives a lecture in the Auditorium of the Guadalajara university. Lídia Jorge is read by thousands of people around the world, but it is the small and careful independent publishers, always attentive to ingenuity, that strive to show the world the treasure route. In Mexico it is done by Elefanta and in Spain by La Umbría y la Solana. Only if Stockholm announces one day that this author has reached the highest goal of letters, as happened with the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux last year, will the great book industry get its share of the pie.
In Guadalajara, the author will tell that she was born in a town in the south of Portugal where people lived in the Middle Ages, captives of the land, looking up at the planes flying over the sky of the Algarve. “Human life was a prisoner of its destiny, the farmers followed the rhythm of the sun and the moon, waiting for the seasons to harvest the harvest. Submissive.” The injustices between rich and poor and the human being himself, she summarizes in another anecdote. When they went to the produce market, the merchant used two scales, one for buying and one for selling. Why don’t we go to the one that only has one? she asked her mother. “Everyone has two scales,” she responded.
Among the farms he inherited from his grandparents, he has just sold one for 5,000 euros, a piece of land where the weeds have already devoured the old bridle paths. Her children were not amused by such a gift, but she approved the exchange because the buyer has a project that will be beneficial for the abandoned land, she says at a restaurant table. Maybe this way she can find peace on the beach without being tortured by those summers of her childhood, terrible for her fellow farmers. The same ones in which that extravagant girl that she was would look out the window and recite Emily Dickinson. She slowly eats a charred beef fillet, as she requested, and some vegetables, interrupting her own memories with her fork: that of her grandmother, “behind the plow, releasing a small handful of seeds and a larger one. Then, on the way back, she would throw a smaller handful of fertilizer and another larger one. She thus embroidered the eras.
“I wrote so as not to forget.”
“He writes by dipping his very fine pen in the dust of history,” confirms Mexican Javier Guerrero, professor in the Spanish and Portuguese department at Prince, to present Jorge’s lecture on this cloudy day at the FIL. Indeed, much of the Portuguese literature sinks into the colonial past through African lands and wars, between missionaries and dead children, men who never returned home, dusty roads and plagues of cicadas. The author cultivated her experiences as a secondary school teacher in Angola and Mozambique. Then came the Portuguese Los Claveles revolution that ended the disjointed Salazar dictatorship and the colonies, also material for Jorge’s books, collected in The Memorables.
In his latest novel, however, the seaport receives a completely different ship: Mercy He recounts the last year in his mother’s life, admitted to a nursing home, trapped in a disability that does not stop her thoughts, which were put to an end by the coronavirus pandemic. The night is the great protagonist of the book, the one that besieges the sleepless head of a woman who cannot reach the emergency button, the one that places her claws on the pillow and holds her in the darkness. The night as illness, as death and as conscience that it interrogates. “During the night, there are nights when the night comes.” The story is not just the anecdote of a person in a nursing home. Lídia Jorge also escapes from those walls through the outside experiences of the center’s caregivers and family members, thus drawing an enormous human frieze typical of round works. In that center called Hotel Paraíso, old age is only the exaggeration of youth: “He who was charitable has his eyes permanently moistened by the decadence of others. He who was selfish’s eyes moisten at his own decadence. He who was peaceful becomes motionless. He who was restless becomes skeptical. He who was ironic becomes disdainful. “He who was funny can become mean or even cruel.” old age
The author is also easily visited by tears. Her face is framed by an impeccable blonde half-length hair that hides the ends towards her neck, her green eyes liquefy when she thinks about her mother, her father, the mistakes of her adolescence or the presentation of this latest novel, which gave her a big surprise in Portugal. Each anecdote is a story in her mouth. Her former friend and also her writer, the current Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, appointed by Pope Francis prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, went to Portugal to present Mercy. There she read a speech, that was her response to the last letter that the author wrote to her and that she never answered. Lídia Jorge’s eyes fill with water again. And she jokes without finishing the steak yet: “Those who are atheists got angry because a cardinal came to present my book.” He was her youth friend.
Before getting up, with the steak still medium and without dessert, she asks the waitress for a man. He is not at the restaurant today. “He told me that he collected banknotes from all over the world. Would you be so kind as to give him this 10 euro one?” Detail-oriented, calm, silent, attentive woman.
And again to the Guadalajara Fair to continue signing books with delicacy and calm: a dedication designed for each one, date and city. Sitting with her legs perfectly aligned, she concentrates on that task like a disciplined, almost fearful student. Everything in its place, everything organized, not a hair out of its place. This last book could well have been titled Hotel Paraíso, which gives its name to the nursing home, but her mother asked her to name it Misericordia, and so she obediently did. Her mother was everything to her, in the distance of her father.
“Mija, I know that a writer is a person who publishes famous books, his house is like a museum for teaching the entire society, his photography is everywhere, a writer is an illustrious person. And a writer?” the mother character challenges from her wheelchair. “It’s very simple, a writer is a woman who makes love to the universe, and that’s all,” the daughter responds. “I understand, he doesn’t need to publish important books, he doesn’t make a lot of money from them, his photography doesn’t go everywhere and his house doesn’t become a museum.”
If you had been a man, would things have been different? “I know that he would have attended many literary residencies, he would have written a lot more, for sure, but I don’t know if he would have been of better quality.”
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