Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reasons of the Heart

Giving unto Caesar is considered by most Christians to be a strict requirement of citizenship. From the payment of taxes to the offering of one’s life in patriotic war, one is expected to conform as a Christian duty. Established government appears to be divinely sanctioned by the biblical command. After all, Christianity stands for orderliness in the universe. Social chaos is by definition evil. And isn’t salvation a purely personal matter?

Martin Luther, for example, divided the world cleanly in two. In his interpretation the spiritual had nothing at all to do with the political. Modern Evangelicals still view existing law as God-given, unless of course they take offence at it. But mostly, middle-class Christians simply accept the inevitability of government and its policies and they adopt an attitude of impotent indifference to the resulting suffering - usually by the less well-off and non-Christians. Commonly they claim to do so in the name of Christianity itself.

So it was in Salazar’s Portugal during the 1930’s, as it was in most of contemporary Europe. Fear and hypocrisy combined to create political acceptance, even among those who found its oppressive fascism most distasteful. And so is it now in Trumpist America. Christianity seems to have a natural affinity with monarchs, dictators, and anyone else who can consolidate power in its, Christianity’s, interest. Occasionally however someone, usually a non-Christian, provokes the dormant conscience of the Christian psyche. Pereira Maintains is the story of such a provocation, and its consequences.

Christian conscience can be a strange thing. The eponymous Pereira feels uncomfortable with the political condition of his country and “... he wanted to repent but didn’t know what he had to repent of, he only felt a yearning for repentance as such, surely that’s what he meant, or perhaps (who knows?) he simply liked the idea of repentance.” Repentance, like salvation, is a personal thing without social implications. The resolution of Pereira’s discomfort, he thinks, is confession and counsel. Political involvement is unthinkable.

Pereira is drawn to memory, mainly the reminiscence of his deceased wife. But more generally he is motivated by the memory of how things used to be, the familiar orderliness of past life. Unable to live in the past, he ignores the reality of the present except within the limited sphere of his own ego - his digestion (poor), the weather (hot), his job as a journalist (satisfying), the maintenance of his social isolation from potential threats (mainly the government and its network of informers).

Pereira fervently believes in and desires the resurrection of his soul but not his body. The later, of course, is inherently social and dependent upon other human beings. This is hardly an orthodox opinion but it is necessary in order to maintain his detachment from the world. What he finds, however, is that the slightest human contact is political. It can’t be helped. His soul is part of a “confederation” over which he has no real control and whose connections are matters of the collective heart not the individual will. Even mere translation of long dead authors establishes such a bond that is politically dangerous.

The entire story is told in the form of a judicial deposition or police interrogation report as suggested by the title. It is a narrative prepared by an intermediary, ready perhaps for confirmation by the person who has been questioned. The central point of this narrative is stated early on: “Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.” What’s wanting then is only a signature admitting this crime of recognition.

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