PART I
Justice
1
The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor
SILVIANO SANTIAGO
Translated by Magdalena Edwards and Paulo Lemos Horta
I.
As Manoel de Oliveiraâs 1997 film Voyage to the Beginning of the World unfolds, the cameraâs focus gets confused with the carâs rearview mirror.1 The camera, or the rearview mirror, determines the point of view that will guide the viewerâs perception of the voyage from Lisbon to a distant town embedded in the mountains of northern Portugal. For the characters in transit, distance from the past and the future holds the same dramatic weight. The arrival at their destination will take even longer due to the rhetorical effectâand the experience that awaits the characters in the future is an unknown that will unfurl without warning, as opposed to what happens in David Lynchâs films where the cameraâs gaze follows the road taken and a climate of suspense dominates. Here, as the car gains ground, the camera shows us the signage that has already been obeyed, the asphalt path already traveled, and the landscape unveiled. The viewer enters into a time machine. By filling up the heart of the past twice consecutively, the present becomes a throughway to the future.
Four people travel along the modern Portuguese highway, not counting the fifth, the unknown figure of the driver. Two by two. The old film director, Manoel, and the starlet in love with him. And two more actorsâone is Portuguese and the other French, the son of a Portuguese father who at the age of fourteen crossed the poor mountains of northern Portugal, fleeing by foot to Spain and from there emigrating to France. He abandoned his native village to earn a living and start a family. The famous French actor Afonso, who arrives in Lisbon to star in a big film production, plans a voyage to the beginning of the world. He wants to meet his rural relatives who still live in northern Portugal. The group is transnational in its ease with national languages. Everyone is of Portuguese origin and, with the exception of the actor Afonso who speaks only French, bilingual.
Two films unfold and are contrasted in Voyage to the Beginning of the World. The first is in the hands of Manoel, the film director. The French Portuguese actor Afonso, who is the son of another Manoel, drives the second. In the first, the director, played by Marcello Mastroianni, commandeers the voyageâs original impetus, namely, the curiosity and anxiety of the exile, from the French actor. The old director steals the desire to walk his familyâs past from the son of the alien (meteco or mĂ©tĂšque). Unlike the actor, who eagerly anticipates his first meeting with the Portuguese family he lost due to his fatherâs emigration in the 1930s, the director only intends to revisit the aristocratic past of the Portuguese nation, which includes his ancestorsâ achievements, and more recently, his own. In a predictable and tiring monologue, he seeks the attention of his three fellow travelers so he can recall his own memories. His courtly youth, Portugalâs history, and the nation-state become muddled in memoryâs landscape. In an attempt to free his memory from the anguish of saudade, he makes the driver take a detour three times, thus imposing his particular pastâs images on that routeâs place and putting them ahead of the images of the second film.
The car first stops in front of the renowned aristocratic Jesuit school where the director began his early studies. The camera abandons the position dictated by the rearview mirror in order to capture the car and the characters in profile, as if to say that it is now narrating a story at the margins of the voyageâs trajectory. The car stops a second time. While the director weaves additional reminiscences, the group wanders through the abandoned gardens of a former luxury hotel. Still catering to the director, the car stops for a third and final time, now in front of a house with a statue of Pedro Macau, a paternal image for the director. Pedro Macau represents the Portuguese who, having enriched themselves in the colonies, returned wealthy to their country of origin and brought to its shores âthe white manâs burden,â to use a classic expression from Rudyard Kipling. Notice the log Pedro carries on his back, immobilizing him; read the metaphor of Pedroâs adventures: the Portuguese present moment is torment, and the future arrives gnawed by remorse. A country of sailors, the Portuguese ended up exiling themselves in their own land, in maturity or in old age.
The film directorâs story is no different from so many others depicted in modern national literatures since the beginning of the twentieth century. Marcel Proustâs branding iron both laid bare and universally marked the individual literary memory of the past century. All the great artists and intellectuals of Western modernity, including the Marxists, went through the madeleine experience. There is a shared pastâin most cases cosmopolitan, aristocratic, statelyâthat can be drawn from each one of the subsequent autobiographies of various authors. In the preface of SĂ©rgio Buarque de Holandaâs RaĂzes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil), Antonio Candido was sensitive to the disappearance of the individual from the socio-literary texts of the decade in question. The memoryâs text transforms what seemed to be different and multiple into one and the same. He observes: â[O]ur particular witness accounts become a register for the experience of the many, all of whom, belonging to what dominates a generation, deem themselves different from one another in the beginning and become, little by little, so similar they end up disappearing as individuals.â
The passengersâ attention, and the spectatorsâ, is diverted three times from the second filmâs images and dialogue, which hold more interest than the first. The French actor, as much as he tries to counterattack the usurper, only manages to confiscate the narrative thread from him late in the film. The film director does not have the right to impose the memories that fill the void of the aristocracyâs saudade on the other two Portuguese travelers and on the son of the meteco (alien), now a rastaqĂŒera or rastaquouĂšre (good-for-nothing). The Portuguese language in Brazil appropriated the words meteco and rastaqĂŒera, which have pejorative meanings in modern France, which we use here to characterize the French actor, the son of Portuguese emigrants.2 Consider this passage from Mocidade no Rio e Primeira viagem Ă Europa (Youth in Rio and First Voyage to Europe) (1956), the memoirs of the author, lawyer, and diplomat Gilberto Amado (1887â1969): âI began, naturally, to be delighted by the masterworks of French cuisine. I raised my already reasonable aptitude for opining knowingly, and not approximately like a rastaqĂŒera or meteco, on these matters of sauces and condiments.â In French lands, the diplomat, a member of the Brazilian elite, did not want to be confused with the immigrants, from whom he also distances himself back home.
When the actor overtakes the filmâs narrative threadâan opportunity the up-to-that-point costar seizes in order to take the spotlight from the director and to command, as the star, the continuity of the narrative until the endâhis action does not operate as a mere cut within the film. The seizure signals more: it has to do with a true epistemological cut. The words and the images of memory, in Manoel the film directorâs hands, follow the experience of one day in the life of the French actor, son of another Manoel, the Portuguese Ă©migrĂ© we have already discussed. The first name of the director and of any and all Portuguese Ă©migrĂ©s is the sameâManoel. What differentiates and distances the two is the family name and the place each occupies in Portuguese society. On this day, which is to be experienced by the four fellow travelers, the Portuguese past of all those other ManoeĂs (plural of Manoel in Portuguese) will be unveiled, in every way different from the past of the ManoeĂs who were being represented by the film directorâs autobiographical and elitist speech. The actor says to his fellow traveler:
âI liked listening to him, but what he said does not pertain to me.â
The actorâs interest in the voyage is another, his anxiety is another, and his memories are otherâdictated by the life experience of that other Manoel, his father. He was a âvery willfulâ boy, the son of poor farmers from northern Portugal. Without documentation or money, he climbed the mountains of Felpera with only the clothes on his back. He made it to Spain during the Civil War. He was imprisoned. In jail, he learned the rudiments of mechanics. He went cold and hungry and often did not have a roof over his head. He crossed the Pyrenees, who knows how, made it to France, and settled in Toulouse, where he became an employee at an auto shop and later the owner. He married a French woman, had two children with her, and bedded many other women. In that other Manoelâs past, his son wants to discover the misery of life in the countryside as much as the taste of adventure in distant lands. From his father, the son inherited nostalgia, translated by the guitar he carried and the fado he sang. In the fatherâs future, in a most unexpected way, a son appeared whoâthrough who knows how much effort and tenacityâbelongs to the elite of French cinema.
Achievements are not the only things in the life of ManoĂ©is good-for-nothings (rastaqĂŒeras). The cosmopolitanism of the poor Portuguese man brought losses for the son that only the voyage at handâthe opposite of the emigrant fatherâs voyage by footâcan reveal and recompense. The main loss is that of the maternal language. In the win-or-lose of cosmopolitan life, the actor ended up without control over the indispensable tool for communicating directly with his forefathers. Having a father who abandoned his original nationality, the son ended up suffering the violent process of becoming a citizen of France. In the film directorâs speech, during the first film within the film, Portuguese is a language as exotic for the French actor as the autobiographical material it carries. The other two travelers take on the role of interpreters. The Portuguese spoken in the car has nothing to do with him, the son of the meteco (alien) in France.
In the second film, when everyone sits around the table in the dining room of the house where Afonsoâs father was born, the actor realizes that he has lost his relatives less in memory than in the linguistic hiatus that isolates them in the present. The lack of a shared language brings about a lack of communication and creates distrust in the home, dominated by the black color of the clothing. The actor feels exiled in his fatherâs land for a different reason than the one raised by the film directorâs narrative. As he gets closer to those who are distant, the inverse voyage undertaken by the son distances him, in another way, from the relatives who should be close. The inverse transforms the anxious and happy reunion scene among relatives into an afflicted game dominated by misalignment and distrust. In the process of hybridization, typical in the lives of metecos who donât reset their family values to a blank slate, the actor commits an irreparable omission: the failure of continuity with the mother tongue, having forgotten it.
We can bring some originality to the debate in vogue today by introducing the idea of the stable and anachronistic Portuguese village into the discussion about the unstable and postmodern global village constituted in transit by the economic circuits of the globalized world. Voyage to the Beginning of the World dramatizes two types of poverty that are minimized in analyses about the processes of the transnational economy.
The first type of poverty dramatized in the second film predates the Industrial Revolution and presents man in his condition as a worker of the land and herder of animals, a romantic and autochthonous representation. Faced with the powerful machines that till, plant, harvest, and satisfy the needs of the transnational economy of grains, faced with the extremely modern processes of breeding and raising domestic birds and animals, faced with the mysteries of cloning animals, the emblematic figure of the Portuguese peasant is anachronisticâan individual lost in time and space in the twentieth century, without ties to the present and, for this reason, destitute of any idea of the future. He canât even relate to modern electronic gadgets like television, which are within reach thanks to the perverse tricks of consumer society.
The days that follow are confused with the return voyage to the âbeginning of the world.â The image of the actorâs aunt is as mineral in quality as the stony landscape where survival unfolds for those who remain to till the land and raise the livestock. Her husband has the snout of an animal, which the director character points out crudely by making faces to imitate him. Both are timely through the revanchist metaphors they carry: the aunt, a stone in the middle of economic globalizationâs road; the uncle, a wolf on the lookout for failures in the computerized sheepfolds so he can pounce.
In the case of Brazil, the two revanchist metaphors find their political redemption in the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (the Brazilian Landless Workers MovementâMST).3 They fight for agrarian reform on the legislative level and for the ownership of unproductive lands on the judicial level. They fight for the permanence of peasants in a motorized and technocratic world that excludes them, reducing them to the condition of global societyâs pariahs. These days, due to police persecution that is compounded by interminable judicial processes, many activists survive as the accused.
The other type of poverty dramatized by the second film occurred after the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the democratizatio...