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Menina e Moça:
A neglected masterpiece
“I shall
soon be quite dead in spite of all. Perhaps next month.”
(Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies)
“Die
Welt der Glücklichen ist eine andere als die der Unglücklichen.”
(Wittgenstein, Tractatus
6:43)
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It’s a scandal that, after 500
years, the astonishing Portuguese fiction Menina e Moça has still not been
translated into English.
In the unhappy world of this dark,
beautifully-written book, the characters'
lives are driven by blind compulsion and unknown forces: fate, curses,
haunts, and omens. The story takes place in an unknown land, and all of
the characters are exiles with mysterious pasts. The narrator has been
doubly exiled -- first from her childhood home, for unknown reasons, and
later from her new home because of abandonment by her lover, whose
whereabouts is also unknown.
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A girl and a child, I was
taken from my mother's house to distant lands; as for why I was
taken away .... I was little, I didn't understand.....
For my peace of mind (if
such a thing there might be, together with such sadness and regret)
I chose to live near this mountain, where both the place and the
lack of human company are right for my feelings -- for it would
have been a great mistake, after witnessing so many troubles with
these eyes of mine, still to venture to hope for that peace from the
world, which it never gives to anyone.
long sought, and sought
forever.
It was a great
misfortune which had made me sad -- and perhaps what had made me
happy, as well. But after I had seen so many things
changed into others, and happiness turned into intense pain, such
emotions came over me that the good that I had had pained me more
than the evils that still were with me. |
The narrator has come to a
deserted place to live as an recluse and wait for death. The world she
knows is one of constant change, always for the worse -- only sorrow, it
seems, is eternal. Doomed by dark forces and an evil fate, she is at the
limit of her strength. (At the same time, though we should not
psychologize prematurely, she might be thought to show symptoms of
clinical depression and delusion).
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Thus it came to seem to
me that I had already been looking for these transformation in which
I saw myself here, when I had been more pleased by this land where
it took place than by any other, and chose it to finish the few
days of life that I thought remained to me….
And being here alone, so
far from all others, and farther still from myself -- where I never
see anything but the hills on one side, which never change, and on
the other the waters of the sea, which are never still -- I thought
that finally I would escape from ill fortune, since first my ill
fortune and then I myself, with all the power that either of us had,
had made sure to leave left no place in me where new griefs might
lodge….
For up until now I have
gone about amazed at myself at how long sorrow can last after the
cause of it is gone, and at how time does not destroy it the way it
does all the other things that exist….
But it seems that
misfortune can transform itself into new misfortune, whereas
something good does not become a new good….
The more so since in the
unfinished parts there will be nothing new for me; for when have I
ever seen happiness fulfilled, or trouble that came to an end?....
But there is nothing
secure; for change rules everything…. |
The ill-fated narrator’s life has never been
under her own control. Even the choices she makes for herself seem
doomed to self-destructiveness and failure. Finally she decides to write
down her story -- she knows not why.
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Now I can only believe
that I was already meant to be, then, what I later came to be…..
I then came to understand
that the pity I felt for others, I should have felt just as much for
myself, if I had not been much more in love with my misery than the
one who was the cause of it seems to have been with me; but so great
was the logic of my sadness, that no trouble ever came to me but
that I would have gone myself to search for it.
But in this, as in many
other things, I deceived myself. Now it has already been two years
that I have been here, and I still do not know when my last hour
awaits me -- it cannot be far. This made me doubt whether to write
down the things I had seen and heard. But afterwards, thinking to
myself, I said to myself that the fear of not finishing the writing
what I had seen was no reason not to do it, since I had no one to
write for, except for myself alone….
I well knew that I was
not ready for this task which I now wanted to begin, for to write
anything requires tranquility -- and me, my troubles draw me now to
one side, and now to the other; they compel me so, that I am forced
to take the words that they give me. I am not driven to serve art,
so much as my own sorrow. Many flaws will be found in my
little book, but they came from my fate. But who is it that asks me
to look for flaws, or for excuses? The book will be what is
comes to be written in it. Of unhappy things it is not possible to
write in an orderly way, since their occurrence is so disorderly.
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The narrator tells us few details
about her life, nor does she tell us of things which she has seen with her
own eyes.
Instead she retells stories told to her by the Lady of Ancient Time, who
mysteriously appears
on the scene from places unknown. The Lady, who talks little about her
own past, is also living as a recluse in mourning for her son. The
stories she tells were told to her by her father, who in turn
had heard them from others: we are drawn into a world of embedded
storytelling reminiscent of Cervantes or Jan Potocki.
It seems possible that the Lady
herself and many of the things she tells about are hallucinatory
projections of the first narrator, and equally possible that the Lady and many of
the things she tells about are ghosts and haunts, the visible expressions
of the dark forces.
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And it so happened that,
in a strange way, I was transported to a place where my own pain was
reenacted before my eyes in others' lives; and my ears did not
escape their own share of woe. |
The Lady's stories are feminist
versions of the stories of chivalry she remembers from
her childhood:
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When I was young in my father's house, during
the long evenings of the fearful winter nights with the other women
of the house, some spinning and the others weaving, we decided that in
order to distract ourselves from the work one of us should tell stories,
so that the evening would not seem so long. A woman of the house, who was
already old and had seen and heard many things, would claim that as the
oldest, that office was hers, and she would tell us stories of
knights-errant. And truly the outrages and great adventures that she
described them undergoing in the service of their ladies made me
feel sorry for them. |
The Lady's stories are set in the
same haunted valley in which the two women find themselves:
| To you, tears should not be unfamiliar,
since it pleased you to find solitary places like this one where we
find ourselves, which once in a different time, it is said, were
peopled with noble knights and lovely ladies. And yet to day in
places around here, shepherdesses find pieces of armor and jewels of
great price, which makes the shades of this valley seem sadder than
others. No one knows where the disorder of this world will stop: at
one time, these valleys were well-populated which are now desert;
gentlefolk used to go, where there are now only wild beasts; the
former abandoned what the latter then took. Why were there such
transformations in this single land? But it seems that the very land
was transformed, like the things on it; and this is because the time
for happiness had passed, and the time had come for being sad. |
The feminism of the book is
explicit, and involves the complete rejection not only of the conventions
of courtly romance, but also of the whole male culture of valor. It is
women who have no control over their lives, not men.
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This is enough for the
sadness of women, who do not have the remedies for trouble that men
do; for in the little time that I have lived, I have learned that
there is no sadness among men; only women are sad; for when troubles
see that men are always moving this way and that and, as is often
true, with the continual changes things sometimes are scattered and
sometimes lost, and that these various activities obstruct them most
of the time, they turn toward the poor women, either because they
are wearied by the changes, or because the women have nowhere to
hide….
For I believed that a
knight, stoutly armed on his splendid steed and passing through the
laughing countryside by a riverbank, could live as sadly as a frail
damsel in a lofty apartment, reclining on her bench, walled-in,
alone, surrounded by high walls, and guarded with such force for
such a weak creature -- great precautions being made to take away
her freedom, but to keep distress from reaching her, very few. But
knights have ways to make themselves seem sadder than they really
are; and damsels, few to show that they are really sadder than they
seem…. |
The narrator speaks of the sadness
of her book:
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Anyone who is sad can
read it; but there will be no men among them, since mercy is to be
found in women; women, because men are all heartless. But it was not
for those women that I made this, for since their own trouble is so
great, and they cannot respond to that of others except by becoming
even sadder, it would be wrong for me to want them to read it; but
instead I beg them to flee from it and from all sad things, since
even so the days are few in which they will able to be joyful; for
thus was it ordained by the misfortune of their birth. |
The unhappy world of
Menina e Moça
is not medieval or even Renaissance, despite the style. This is the
paranoid early-modern world of Descartes' lying God (or Don Quixote's
enchanters), and in it there are many hints of the neo-Platonist or Manichaean
belief that human souls are trapped in the evil world of matter, which is ruled by
Heraclitean struggle and continuous malign change. In this world, even inanimate objects
seem to to be fighting one another. Sitting by the river watching a rock
in the current, the narrator reflects:
| I had raised my eyes to look there, and
began to think about the way that even things without consciousness
cause trouble for one another, and thus I learned to take some
comfort in the midst of my own distress. The boulder was troubling
the current which wanted to go its way, just as earlier my own ill
fortune had been doing with everything I most desired -- though now
I no longer desired anything. |
In the world of the lying God, we
cannot even trust our own minds:
| Our fates fit us with some kind of
blinders, so that we cannot see the things right before our eyes.
Everything is switched around, so that we cannot understand it; and
so we are overcome by our troubles when we are least aware, so that
we mourn at once both the good that we lost, and the harm that we
afterwards received. |
In one passage, a shepherd
expresses ideas about good and evil reminiscent of those of the Manichaean
Cathars, who had still survived (especially among itinerants such as
shepherds) at least as late as 1318 (about two centuries before the book
was written):
| "The earth is well supplied with pasture,
and just as good springs up, so does evil. And once I heard speak a
great man who attended to things of the other world, who said of the
peopling of this land (which, though you see it in many places gone
to brush, is in many places populated with herdsmen) that this is
one of the marvels of nature, that from a single land could be born
two things so opposed to one another. And this is true not only of
animals, but of men also: for there is no evil except where there is
good, and there are no thieves except where there is something to
steal. |
Ribeiro’s book was first published by Portuguese
Jewish publishing houses in exile in Italy and Germany, and some think
that Ribeiro (or an anonymous authoress who might have used his name as a
cover) may have been from a converso
family of dubious orthodoxy which had been forced
by the Inquisition to leave Portugal.
Helder Macedo’s book argues this in detail,
showing us that the cultural world of Ribeiro’s time was exceptionally
rich and also exceptionally confused. If an
exiled and distressed Jewish / Christian poet, male or female, had written
a book, and if he or she had
received neo-Platonist, humanist, evangelical,
Kabbalist, and Manichaean influences, the book may well have read
like Menina e moça.
Without committing to any specific theory either about
the author's identity and beliefs or about the disaster which I think that we can
assume that he or she had suffered, I think that we can see in
Menina e Moça
the response by a man (or woman) from the rich pre-modern
Peninsular tradition responding to the destructive cruelties brought to
him or her by the
Inquisition and by the the advent of modernity.
My hope is that someone seeing this
page, after coming to appreciate the power and interest of this book, will
commission and publish a translation so that readers of English can experience its
strangeness.
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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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