Like a Portuguese version of As I Lay Dying, but more ambitious,
Antonio Lobo Antunes's eleventh novel chronicles the decadence not
just of a family but of an entire society - a society morally and
spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule. In this
his masterful novel, Antonio Lobo Antunes, one of the most skillful
psychological portraitists writing anywhere, renders the turpitude
of an entire society through an impasto of intensely individual
voices. (The New Yorker) The protagonist and anti-hero Senhor
Francisco, a powerful state minister and personal friend of
Salazar, expects to be named prime minister when Salazar is
incapacitated by a stroke in 1968. Outraged that the President
(Admiral Americo Tomas) appoints not him but Marcelo Caetano to the
post, Senhor Francisco retreats to his farm in Setubal, where he
vaguely plots a coup with other ex-ministers and aged army officers
who feel they've been snubbed or forgotten. But it's younger army
officers who in 1974 pull off a coup, the Revolution of the Flowers
(so called since no shots were fired, carnations sticking out of
the butts of the insurgents' rifles), ending 42 years of
dictatorship. Senhor Francisco, more paranoid than ever, accuses
all the workers at his farm of being communists and sends them away
with a brandished shotgun, remaining all alone - a large but empty
shadow of his once seeming omnipotence - to defend a decrepit farm
from the figments of his imagination. When the novel opens, Senhor
Francisco is no longer at the farm but in a nursing home in Lisbon
with a bedpan between his legs, having suffered a stroke that left
him largely paralyzed. No longer able to speak, he mentally reviews
his life and loves. His loves? In fact the only woman he really
loved was his wife Isabel, who left him early on, when their son
Joao was just a tiny boy. Francisco takes up with assorted women
and takes sexual advantage of the young maids on the farm, the
steward's teenage daughter, and his secretaries at the Ministry,
but he can never get over the humiliation of Isabel having jilted
him for another man. Many years later he spots a commonplace shop
girl, named Mila, who resembles his ex-wife. He sets the girl and
her mother up in a fancy apartment, makes her wear Isabel's old
clothes, and introduces her to Salazar and other government
officials as his wife, and everyone goes along with the ludicrous
sham, because everything about Salazar's Estado Novo (New State)
was sham - from the rickety colonial empire in Africa to the
emasculate political leaders in the home country, themselves
monitored and controlled by the secret police. Once the system of
shams tumbles like a castle of cards, Francisco's cuckoldry glares
at him with even greater scorn than before, and all around him lie
casualties. Mila and her mother return to their grubby notions shop
more hopeless than ever, because the mother is dying and Mila is
suddenly a spinster without prospects. The steward, with no more
farm to manage, moves his family into a squalid apartment and gets
a job at a squalid factory. The minister's son, raised by the
housekeeper, grows up to be good-hearted but totally inept, so that
his ruthless in-laws easily defraud him of his father's farm, which
they turn into a tourist resort. The minister's daughter, Paula,
whom he had by the cook and who was raised by a childless widow in
another town, is ostracized after the Revolution because of who her
father was, even though she hardly ever knew him. Isabel, the
ex-wife, also ends up all alone, in a crummy kitchenette in Lisbon,
but she isn't a casualty of Senhor Francisco or of society or of a
political regime but of love, of its near impossibility.
Disillusioned by all the relationships she had with men, she
stoutly resists Francisco's ardent attempts to win her back,
preferring solitude instead. We have to go to the housekeeper,
Titina, this novel's most compelling character, to find hope of
salvation, however unlikely a source she seems. Unattractive and
uneducated, Titina never had a romantic love relationship, though
she secretly loved her boss, who never suspected. She ends up, like
him, in an old folks' home, and like him she spends her days
looking back and dreaming of returning to the farm in its heyday.
Old age is a great equalizer. And yet the two characters are not
equal. Titina retains her innocence. But it's not the innocence of
helpless inability - the case of Joao, Francisco's son - nor is it
the pathetic innocence of Romeu, the emotionally and mentally
undeveloped co-worker by whom Paula has a son. Titina isn't
helpless or ingenuous, and she isn't immune to the less than
flattering human feelings of jealousy, impatience and anger. But
she never succumbs to baser instincts. She knows her worth and
cultivates it. She is a proud woman, but proud only of what she
really is and what she has really accomplished in life. At one
level (and it operates at many), The Inquisitorssssss' Manual is an
inquiry into the difficult coexistence of self-affirmation and
tenderness toward others. Their correct balance, which equals human
dignity, occurs in the housekeeper.
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