Lanzarote was not in its origins and, however, it was where Saramago decided to go into exile. There he would write Essay on blindness (1995), he would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and spend his last eighteen years until he died with his wife, Pilar del Río, who continues his legacy today.
“Lanzarote, not being my land, is my land”
Perhaps Napoleon is to blame for making an island seem like the best place to go into exile. A piece of volcanic land surrounded by kilometers of Atlantic, a warm but incessant wind, and a story that already belonged to Saramago’s emotional imagination before he even visited Lanzarote.
And the island did not emerge from the sea as we know it. It is believed that the Los Ajaches volcano emerged first, which would make up what is today the south of the island. Then, that of Famara, north of Lanzarote and finally, between these two, a much smaller one: the volcanic edifice of Tías, which would end up uniting them into a single island.
It would be the town of Tías that became Saramago’s new home, as if his own life were an auction of The stone raft. A book in which the writer had imagined years ago an Iberian Peninsula detached from the rest of Europe, floating towards America to unite in a great Ibero-American continent.
It was love at first sight: the same day he and Pilar landed to visit relatives, they began to talk about building what is today the José Saramago House Museum.
“We always end up arriving where they expect us”
When entering, more than a museum, the feeling that prevails is that of having knocked on the door of an acquaintance. First, because of the small group with which we began the visit. Of the more than three million tourists who land in Lanzarote every year, just over a dozen people cross these doors every day. It is not a sun and beach tourism, but one related to culture and a figure that moves hundreds of travelers from the other side of the pond. “Many come to Lanzarote just to visit the house,” the director, María del Río, tells us about those who come from Mexico, Brazil and other Latin American countries.
The lack of signage does not contribute, he explains, although part of its charm also lies in that ‘secretiveness’, being an accomplice to the intimacy it gives off. The personal items give the impression that Saramago was going to walk in at any moment, put in a record and sit down to write in front of the old computer screen where he started. Essay on blindness.
Among the exotic aspects of the visit is finding ourselves in an inhabited house. In the next house, with a shared garden, his brothers-in-law still live, and his wife continues to stay here when he passes through the island. “Is it also open when she is there?” we asked. They confirm to us that this is the case. Pilar insists that the house never ceases to be visited.
“A house made of books”
If for Saramago “everything is autobiography”, this house manages to be the quintessence of that mixture of life and literature. Theirs emerges from its own intra-history to the structure.
A casa opened as a museum nine months after Saramago died as a nod to The year of the death of Ricardo Reis, the book where he recounted the nine months after Pessoa’s death. Upon entering, an open space takes us through the gallery, the living room or the studio without doors or brakes to stop us, a journey without pauses that flows as frequently as he himself wrote.
In the studio where it began Essay on blindness, The pine table shows the paws bitten by his dogs, so present in his works. One of them appeared there one day and stayed forever, just like that of the potter Cipriano Algor, protagonist of The cavern, who also reminds us of the collection of ceramic vessels from Lanzarote that presides over what he called “the best work”: the living room windows overlooking the Atlantic.
Around, each of the paintings in the room pays homage to one of his most famous books. Pens, inkwells, rocks from his travels, photographs stuck with a magnet to the refrigerator. Portraits of Pessoa, Tolstoy, Joyce, Kafka, Proust and Lorca, his great references. Private winks on all the clocks stopped at four in the afternoon, the time he met his wife. An engraving by Millares. Red carnations in each room evoke a revolution in which he participated. A painting, the first one they painted and bought, in installments, based on their book Raised from the ground, shows a group of Portuguese day laborers on their way to a clandestine meeting that would lead to the Carnation Revolution.
Because talking about Saramago is talking about his social commitment, the defense of human rights and his desire to be those open eyes when the world is blind that he tried to convey to us in Essay on blindness. Another metaphor where his life transcends his literature.
“It’s not that I’m a pessimist, it’s that the world is terrible”
His revolutionary position against the powers, economic and ecclesiastical, was also what led him to self-exile after the work The Gospel according to Jesus Christ was censored, eliminated by the then president of Portugal, Cavaco Silva, from among those chosen to represent his country in the European Literary Prize.
There were many personalities from culture, journalism or politics who decided to come here to visit him in support of his exile. In the kitchen, we find photographs in the house with Bernardo Bertolucci, Eduardo Galeano, Marisa Paredes, Juan Goytisolo, José Luis Sampedro, Ángeles Mastretta, Sebastião Salgado, Susan Sontag, Almodóvar, Zapatero or Carrillo, among others.
“Before building the first boat, the man sat on the beach and looked at the sea.”
He said of Lisbon that it was “the place where the sea ends and the land begins.” The feeling, when he sat down for the first time in what was then a vacant lot, should not have been very different. Little by little, with love, water and sand, they created this place integrated into the landscape.
In the middle of this Lanzarote garden, next to a stone that he wanted to keep there, visitors can sit in their privileged place. A chair to contemplate the sea, to think, to feel.
The wind of Lanzarote sneaks between the olive trees, the landscape of his childhood, the palm trees of the islands, a pomegranate tree from Granada and, in his day, between two quince trees that, although they did not survive, the writer tried to convert into Víctor’s sun catchers. Erice.
“Is not true. The journey never ends. Only travelers end”
The visit ends in the library, a place they began to build after realizing that every time they wanted to read a new book they needed to order it from the peninsula.
Behind the sofa, the table on which Saramago wrote the last four books of his life. On the walls, the fiction is arranged according to the origin of the author; philosophy, politics and essay, by theme. All of this is mixed between paintings by José Santa-Bárbara, the Cuban artist Kcho and an engraving by Tàpies along with a text about peace and hope that seems to have been written for a moment like the one we are going through today.
“When reading these lines about the suffering flesh, we cannot help but think about what is happening in Palestine,” the director, María del Río, tells us. It was one of the causes that the writer defended throughout his life. For María, A casa is, above all, a focus of culture and commitment, the scene of cultural activities such as presentations, reading clubs, visits from schools and associations, with which they intend to make it a cultural reference also within the island.
Saramago said: “The end of one journey is only the beginning of another.” We will listen to you. We will begin the return trip but, first, we will take some of his words to throw into the sea in a bottle. Aware, at the end of the day, that they are still necessary even though today fourteen years have passed since his death.
