Lobo Antunes' Land at the End of the World
The earliest of his books to be translated (so far)...
A seeming paradox that emerges when reading through Lobo Antunes’s work systematically is that the later works are more stylistically pronounced yet more accessible, while the early books, on the other hand, are more rudimentary on the surface, but are in fact forbiddingly difficult in their content.
The Land at the End of the World, or Os Cus de Judas (Judas’s Asshole) in Portuguese, is Lobo Antunes’s second novel, published in 1979, with the wonderful translation by Jull Costa coming out in 2011. The story is anchored to a single speaker, with a basic situation (picking up a woman at a bar), divided into chapters for each letter of the alphabet–but K, W, and Y are missing.
It’s not obvious when this washed up ex-soldier who narrates the book is monologuing out loud, or addressing himself, or reporting events like a traditional narrator. We can’t definitively place this voice anymore than he can place himself in either Angola where he was a medic in the colonial war, or the democratized Portugal that has forgotten him. “My friends’ lives, which have grown used to going on without me in my absence, will find it hard to accommodate this newly resuscitated, disoriented Lazarus, who finds it painfully difficult to relearn sounds and the use of certain objects.”
Now he guzzles whiskey and spills out his life’s story to an apparently receptive woman, and vignettes of returning to his pitiful home—the underwhelming sexual act, another dawn over Lisbon—mix with hellish memories of brothels and strategic hamlets in Angola, treating victims of mine explosions (human flesh embedded into materials and vice versa), guerilla attacks from the Soviet-aligned MPLA’s liberation movement, the sadism of PIDE agents and their lackeys.
It’s a raw, dark, extremely inebriated portrait of a sad man; certainly Lobo Antunes at his Malcolm Lowriest.
The book’s opening salvo, about the narrator’s childhood visits to the zoo, goes all out with similes:
The zoo had a whiff about it like the open-air passageways in the Coliseu concert hall, a place full of strange invented birds in cages, ostriches that looked like spinster gym teachers, wedding penguins like messenger boys with bunions, and cockatoos with their heads on one side like connoisseurs of paintings; the hippopotamus pool exuded the languid sloth of the obese, cobras lay coiled in soft dungy spirals, and the crocodiles seemed reconciled to their Tertiary-age fate as mere lizards on death row.
If that weren’t enough, the food they serve at the zoo undergoes obscene transformations:
The zoo’s restaurant--where the smell of animals wafted in dilute scraps into the steaming stew, adding to the potatoes an unpleasant hint of bristle and to the meat the fibrous texture of carpet--was usually full, in equal quantities, of parties of daytrippers and impatient mothers, who shooed away with their forks balloons that drifted about like absentminded smiles trailing bits of twine behind them, like a Chagall bride trailing the hem of her dress.
You quickly get used to these massive pile-ups of clauses filling the setting with overwhelming detail, a fixture of Lobo Antunes’s technique. Another thematic trademark that I tried to hit on in my review piece for Full Stop is his aggressive deflation of all things appealing to Portugal’s historical glory or Catholic legacy. Here it comes in the image of Maria de Conceição Ferrão de Pimentel, a 20th century saint (Costa’s footnote tells us she gave up her life for her father’s conversion) who gets turned into a Hollywood sex symbol:
In my mind, that guardian-angel-in-a-tie [his childhood religious instructor] replaced forever the virtuous postcard of Sãozinha with her suspiciously plump cheeks that made her look like some Mae West of the sacristy deep in mystical love with a Christ sporting a thin Douglas Fairbanks mustache in the silent cinema of my aunts’ chapel…
And as if that weren’t enough, later he recollects seeing the “ladies from the National Women’s Movement,” a pious contingent for the fascist Estado Novo. “I always imagined the ladies’ pubic hair to be like a fox-fur stole and thought that, when aroused, drops of Ma Griffe and poodle drool would dribble from their vaginas, leaving shiny snail trails on their wrinkled thighs.”
His Angolan tour begins in the capital city of Luanda, then east to the border with Zambia, where he administers medicine to the villagers of a strategic hamlet in a parody of the eucharist. Then the border city Ninda, like a “barbed-wire island,” where there is little to do but wait for the next MPLA attack. “I discovered myself to be a Beckett character waiting for the mortar grenade of a redemptive Godot.” We get details of the military’s internal resistance to the Estado Novo, including the narrator’s captain. A montage of brothels and death.
Why the hell doesn’t anyone talk about this? I’m beginning to think that one million five hundred thousand men who went to Africa never existed and that I’m just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart--one-third bullshit, one-third booze, one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing--just so that we can cut to the chase more quickly and end up watching the dawn together in the pale blue light that seeps in through the shutters and rises up from the sheets, revealing the sleeping curve of a buttock, the profile of someone facedown on the mattress, our bodies fused in an entirely enigmatic torpor.
By chapter heading J, the narrator is offering to pay for the drinks, and his speech slips into topics of debasement and human folly, tumbling into a flow of situations that eventually lead back to a tiny source for hope and feeling in art, like the pictures of Matisse (violent in their own way as they blow out the color wealth of the world beyond their contours) and the sight of a young woman. The second sentence in this passage brings off a weighty and complex bundle of images and analogies, and of differing tenors, from tunnels and moss to the “inertial of the moribund.”
We should all use our suspenders to keep our souls from slipping down to our heels, Vidalie advised his friends in a bar that May 1968 had left intact, just as, for some reason, the tides leave certain rocks on the beach untouched, and perhaps that way we would stop tripping over the trouser bottoms of our most carefully painted and powdered plans, which always have the most appalling halitosis when viewed from close up. There are few things I still believe in, and, from three o’clock in the morning on, the future shrinks to the terrifying proportions of a tunnel through which I walk, bellowing out the ancient pain I haven’t yet managed to cure, as ancient as the death that has been growing its sticky, febrile moss inside us since infancy, inviting us to embrace the inertia of the moribund, but there’s also the diffuse, volatile, omnipresent, passionate clarity that you find in Matisse’s paintings and in Lisbon afternoons, which, like the African dust, gets in through every crack and crevice, through closed windows and the soft spaces between the buttons on a shirt, through the porous wall of eyelids and through silences the texture of murdered glass, and it’s not impossible that the unexpected beauty of a young woman, who, oblivious to your presence, walks past you in a restaurant, where the head of the fish on your plate is gazing at you with imploring, orgasmic eyes, will suddenly awaken in you the fragile mirage of a pang of desire and happiness.
“We never are where we are.” The speaker is stuck in East Angola, while Lisbon in its suburban sprawl is unrecognizable, and the difficulties of settling back at home begin at the airport. “And I felt that everyone was looking at me the way they look at the cripples hauling themselves along on crutches near the Military Hospital.” That remark could be the slogan for the entire cast within Lobo Antunes’s fiction, never equipped to take in the present moment, distracted as they are by their hurts from the past.
For more background on the Salazar period in Portugal, the ‘74 coup, and end of colonialism (and shameless plugging), see my review piece for Full Stop on the recently translated Warning to the Crocodiles.
Lobo Antunes is probably my favorite living author, and his books claim a lot of shelf space in the silent friends zone. Stay tuned for more letters on him (in a while).