Death and the Journalist

Those of us who belong to a book group do so, no doubt, for a variety of reasons. For some it’s enlightenment, for others it’s the prompting to read something outside one’s comfort zone, the companionship or the quality of the cake. These need not be mutually exclusive. My own book group consists of seven friends who enjoy one another’s company, and each of us brings something different. One likes books about paths. Another maintains we should only choose books that provoke a debate. While a third, who has stronger connections to continental Europe than the rest of us – her mother escaped Berlin on the Kindertransport and she still has close relatives in Germany – has introduced us to writers we insular British might not otherwise have discovered. Joseph Roth is one, and Antonio Tabucchi is another.

Tabucchi, an Italian who spent half his life in Lisbon and the other half in Siena lecturing on Portuguese literature, won prizes all over Europe for his novels and short stories. Pereira Maintains (1994) is possibly his best-known novel (Wikipedia tells me there is a film of it starring Marcello Mastroianni and Daniel Auteuil). The story takes place in Portugal over a few days in 1938 and is written as a testimonial – someone else is telling us what happened based on Pereira’s recollections. The words ‘Pereira maintains’ open and close the book and are repeated throughout. (The book’s Italian title is Sostiene Pereira; interestingly, sostenere can translate either as ‘maintain, uphold’ or ‘withstand, stand up to’. Resistance is hinted at.) This gives the book a sinister and somehow urgent air as we have no idea whether Pereira is relating his story to a friend or, more worryingly, to an interrogator. Salazar is only briefly mentioned but we all know about totalitarian states in Europe in 1938 and this book is definitely a thriller. The closing pages are reminiscent of Graham Greene at his most horrifying. Pereira himself, however, is not your average hero. He is a slightly mournful middle-aged man who talks to his dead wife’s photograph, is sad that he is childless and whose journalistic career appears to have stalled: his current job is producing the culture section of a minor evening newspaper. He is very overweight, he has a heart condition which makes climbing stairs and hills difficult and when he eats he ties his napkin round his neck (I am having trouble picturing Marcello Mastroianni here). He is nostalgic for his youth when he was good-looking, fit and popular. We feel sympathy for this gentle person who feels something is missing from his life – in fact when the book opens he is ‘meditating on death’:

He was struck by the odd notion that perhaps he was not alive at all, it was as if he were dead. Ever since his wife’s death he had been living as if he were dead. Or rather, he did nothing but think of death . . . perhaps his life was merely a remnant and a pretence. And he felt done in, he maintains.

However, we are soon thrust into an alarming, very alive world where the police are everywhere, his office caretaker is almost certainly a spy, rumours proliferate and the most reliable news comes from a friendly waiter who listens to the BBC in London. The Vatican has aligned itself with Franco, and the Minister for Culture is also the Minister for Propaganda. The local kosher butcher’s shop has been attacked, a carter has been shot in a market for being a socialist, and Pereira’s own paper, the Lisboa, prints only gossip and society news. ‘Pereira broke out in sweat, he was thinking of death again. And he thought: this city reeks of death, the whole of Europe reeks of death.’ Pereira contacts a young man called Monteiro Rossi, hoping he might contribute to his newspaper’s culture page, only to discover that Rossi has absolutely no talents in that direction. But despite himself he lends the young man money, promises him work and warns him about the office caretaker. He later tells his wife’s photograph:

He’d be about the age of our son if we’d had a son, there’s even a slight resemblance to me, he has that lock of hair flopping into his eyes, do you remember when I had a lock of hair flopping into mine? . . . he has a beautiful girlfriend with copper-coloured hair, called Marta, she’s just a bit too cocksure and talks politics but never mind, we’ll see how it goes . . .

Pereira’s kindness to the young man draws him into a dangerous world, although for a time he guards his stance as a bewildered, impartial onlooker on events he claims to know nothing about. It turns out that Rossi and his girlfriend are republican sympathizers caught up in the cause currently tearing Spain apart. Rossi finds it impossible to write the sort of articles of which the Lisboa would approve, and Pereira – against his better judgement – finds it impossible to reprimand him, buying him lunch instead. Feeling he has no one to talk to (his wife’s photograph simply maintains her faraway smile), Pereira takes himself to a spa for a rest and in the hope of unburdening himself to an old friend. Sadly this turns into a full-scale argument, written in one long paragraph at breakneck speed. Pereira protests that ‘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’. His friend calmly responds, ‘We’re a southern people, Pereira, and we obey whoever shouts the loudest and gives the orders.’ Pereira gives up and leaves the next day. On the train he is cheered by meeting a charming Jewish woman who is reading Thomas Mann; they discuss the political situation in both Germany and Portugal, and she urges him to take a stand.

I’ll do my best, Senhora Delgado, but it isn’t easy to do one’s best in a country like this for a person like me, you know, I’m not Thomas Mann, I’m only the obscure editor of the culture page of a second-rate evening paper, I write up the anniversaries of famous authors and translate nineteenth-century French stories, and more than that I cannot do. I understand, replied Senhora Delgado, but surely there’s nothing one can’t do if one cares enough.

The sinister atmosphere intensifies: Pereira distrusts his office telephone, notices a soldier apparently sleeping on a bench outside his flat, hears about ‘barbarous goings-on’ from his friend the waiter and exchanges surreptitious notes with Marta. And we worry for him every time he climbs the stairs, eats yet another omelette, drinks his sugary lemonade. But although he insists to Marta, ‘I am neither one of you nor one of them,’ gradually the heroic inner man emerges. There is a wonderful scene on the beach where Pereira – balding, fat and in too small a bathing costume – manages to swim a long way out before having the last word with the condescending young lifeguard. He is crisp with the spying caretaker and he approaches two writers whom he overhears talking of emigrating and tells them, ‘the whole of Portugal is proud to have two such artists as you; we have sore need of you’. He is becoming heroic despite himself. On his cardiologist’s recommendation Pereira spends a week at a clinic; he meets a young Dr Cardoso whose advice is, ‘stop haunting the past and try to drop in on the future’. He starts to eat more healthily and lose some weight. He begins to realize that his translations of nineteenth-century French stories have more influence than he’d thought; one by Balzac about repentance brings him fan mail. ‘That message was really and truly a coded message, and only people who had ears to hear could receive it . . . he chortled to himself.’ Pereira begins to understand his power. Throughout the novel, peppered as it is with characters despairing of Portugal (Dr Cardoso and Senhora Delgado are both leaving), there are lyrical descriptions of the country, which only adds to its tragedy. ‘How beautiful it was, this little land of Portugal, blest by the sea and its gentle seaborne climate, but it was all so difficult, thought Pereira . . .’ There is also some splendid comedy, both in the affectionate portrayal of the portly Pereira and in some of his conversations with, for example, his editor, who lectures him on patriotism and is deaf to Pereira’s ironic retorts. This short novel, racing to its shocking conclusion, is written in a breathless style (echoing Pereira’s own efforts when climbing the stairs), as if someone is in a hurry to impart its message. This makes it all the more frightening and, I suggest, gives it an urgency entirely relevant to present-day Europe. We need more Pereiras. Sosteniamo!

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Posy Fallowfield 2025