The day Lobo Antunes said he did not know Luis Sepúlveda

It was Sunday and it was raining in Porto. Luis Sepúlveda had just added a year at the age of 50 that he carried in that big black beard, very Chilean, that framed his melancholy look.

The rain that Carmen Yáñez insulted in poetry to take revenge on her, inspired him only discouragement. Carmen had been his first wife, his middle wife and his last wife, a love story in curves and circles that could, in another context, very well be told by the good old José Bolívar Proaño.

Sepúlveda, who had adopted Spain for a living, loved Portugal, visited Lisbon regularly, had Fernando Assis Pacheco as his best Portuguese friend, his guide and, for many years, he also missed him.

But on that day the storyteller was not in Lisbon, he was in Porto at the invitation of Porto 2001. Paulo Cunha e Silva (who else?), Commissioner in the area of ​​Thought, had invented a cycle of conferences called “Under Influence”, which he had delivered to Richard Zimler and Alexandre Quintanilha. The curators of the international reading program were asked to cross authors who influenced other authors.

The Almeida Garrett Library was more crowded than a full balloon, lots of people standing, with balconies flattened. On the stage, the crossing was made between the Chilean writer and the Portuguese António Lobo Antunes. It was the year of “What will I do when everything is art?”, Fifteenth novel of the future past Nobel, fresh on the market. The crossing, however, was nothing more than a clumsy waltz, each dancing to the tone of his tone, Lobo Antunes abandoning his colleague as a bride at the altar.

In private, with the elegance that is known to him, Lobo Antunes justified his behavior with ignorance. “I don’t know who Sepúlveda is. There is a big difference between writers and people who write books.”

(Silence) Away from the amazement and embarrassment that chilled those who heard the phrase, Sepúlveda followed free and light. “It doesn’t matter. I know him and I like his books. I don’t care that the opposite doesn’t happen.” Later, the man who, in addition to being a novelist, was a short story writer, a journalist and a political activist, would say what, being obvious, will not be so for everyone. “Literature is not a competition.”

Sepúlveda also knew Eugénio de Andrade, poet from Porto with whom Lobo Antunes had spent the afternoon, talking about “writing as salvation” and drinking a “fatal port wine”. In fact, nothing gave him more pleasure than reading poetry. And even write it, even though I didn’t publish it. It was a kind of pact of honor with the woman, or just the most sublime gesture of love. He would stay with prose, she with poetry. It was like that all my life.

And in view of this, which is not available to everyone, even Lobo Antunes knew how to surrender. “One of the good things in life,” he said that day, “is to find people with human capacities that we don’t have, especially the capacity to love. Love is a matter of delicacy in attention, in the slow dawn of little children. it’s the details that people get lost in. “

“At some point we have to learn to fly”

Moments earlier, Luis Sepúlveda was giving “Notícias Magazine” the interview that António Lobo Antunes had refused. “Have you read my 15 books? No? So, no way.” From Sepúlveda he had read only two, but the question was not even asked. Other things moved the man who had been the personal guard of President Salvador Allende. He liked to be moved, like Proaño; to fly above the shallow, like the Zorbas cat.

“I love people who read passionately and who are moved to tears. I am very moved to read, but also to write. And I like the reader to feel reading the same as I feel writing.”

What he didn’t like was that he was cataloged. Much less as a travel writer, even if travel has made him what he was. “I have a way of looking at things very openly, very generously, precisely because travel has taught me. But travel is never the central theme. The travels I make in my books and the characters that star them always want to prove something. They want to always demonstrate the values ​​that I consider fundamental. Like friendship. “

It was precisely because of these fundamental values ​​that he wrote “The story of a seagull and the cat that taught her to fly”. It is a book-promise-legacy-lesson for your six children.

“I wanted to teach them that, at some point, we have to learn to fly. But I also wanted them to learn the value of friendship. I wanted to teach them how loyalty is fundamental. Because life is a dialectic function, everything is related. No there can be ecological concern without first human concern. Our fundamental concerns have to do with people, because everything that happens to them will definitely affect them. “

As definitive as the literature. “The book is an open reflection. It is something that is not finished the moment it has just been read. It is something that continues, that continues to make us want to consult a certain page and that contains a series of elements that are incorporated into us. That is the essence of literature. The rest does not matter. “

It is interesting to hear the cat Zorbas, which today also meows in the rain. Zorbas tells us that Sepúlveda, who complained to himself, long before Marcelo, was “one of the founders of affection”, will never be the writer who died in the middle of a pandemic, he will always be the writer who on each page of each book in the life taught us that “there is no other way to live coherently than through affection and affection”.

Mia Zorbas. “You’re going to fly, Ditosa. Breathe. Feel the rain. It’s water. In your life you’ll have many reasons to be happy, one of them is called water, another is called wind, another is called sun and it always comes as a reward after the rain. Feel the rain. Spread your wings. “

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