Vitorino Nemésio

Excerpts from Corsair of the Islands

translated by Scott Edward Anderson

I

“Grab him: It’s an Islander!"

September 15, 1948

The Islands, for me, are that ribbon of road between Angra and Praia, in Terceira, where at the age of ten, as a weaver putting a new shuttle on the loom, life taught me about longing and isolation. Because you can even be exiled twenty kilometers from home without leaving a square foot of island—which (the chorographer said to me) is “a piece of land surrounded by sea on all sides”...

It’s true that, following this melancholy itinerary of my ten-year-old self, almost always done under a blur of clouds and with the damp ears of a boy from the Azorean outskirts, I realized that: land, if I had it, could not end up far away. We used to cross a kind of gravelly platform a kilometer or two from the sea. Climbing up the Presa do Ferrão to the Fonte do Bastardo, we would go along the high line of the island’s southern slope where the main settlements are located. One might say that the man had grown tired of the sea, seeking silence and sitting inside. From there, too, in the hills of the Alentejo, he kept better watch over the crops.

To our left was a line of poorer but older villages: Porto Martim, with its Canto da Câmara, where the first municipal council of that cliff of Christ seems to have started; Ribeira Seca de Baixo and Cima, where the Annals of the island reported the birth of its first son; and, finally, with the permission of a few whims and turns of what is called the rock of the sea—the Porto Judeu de Baixo (by which name it can’t miss!) and whose Jewish Quarter was a nest of white houses with wide open doors facing the Atlantic.

This first line of fires on Terceira Island seemed to be the root of that kind of messy swell that was this land of ours, mysterious and old as the geologists would like, but new to the animal man, who settled there late and at a tough time. Earth remade, in recent history: land that the bowels themselves, in the form of earthquakes and eruptions, were given the luxury of revolving and remodeling, at least every century. There we were born, there we lived—there we were. And “to be” is much more of an islander’s verb than “to live.”

Whenever, as we grew up, we came to a hilltop, like the one at Pico do Capitão (Peak of the Captain) or the Fonte das Amoreiras (Fountain of Mulberry Trees), and discovered, not the island’s rim, which can only be seen from the Santa Barbara mountain range, but an entire side of it, a flank, we felt what is vulnerable and fragile about being an island, and, with much stronger reasoning, about being an islander. The Continentals, always a little malicious toward us, gave us the image of our narrowness in this world, saying: “When you wake up, do not extend your legs, for fear that the sea will wet your toes” ... 

Now, if this is not physically true—not even in Corvo where the Chactas of Chateaubriand could stretch that freely—it nevertheless has a certain inner reasoning: it caricatures our insular sense of solitude and limitation. We are not afraid that the sea will flood us or that the land will not provide for us:—we always have in mind, as a salutary warning, the feeling that the world is short, and time even shorter.

But against what one could draw from the cramped area of our cradle, as to our equation with the world and our way of breathing, the truth is that no one more than the islander, except perhaps the man of the plains, possesses the instinct of vastness. It is with our own eyes that we take from the sea the land we have lacked. Islanders of what, from São Miguel to the west, we call the Lower Islands, the arrangement in which the Central group of islands favors this impression of mobility, of dreamlands, that the islands give each other. The climate, humid and dull, becomes complicit in the illusion.

The natives of the southwest coast of Terceira, those of Graciosa, those of the two slopes of the single and longitudinal mountain range of São Jorge, the Picaroto of the north and west, the Faialense, are all accustomed to speculating on and scanning the horizon: they are naturally lookouts or sentinels. The islander’s radical attitude is to go to the house door and interrogate the sea. The relative frequency of the name “Fanal” (lantern) in Azorean toponymy not only attests to the need for night signals, but also the network of watchtowers that naturally form around each island and which, from one to the other, is woven into fixed or accidental posts of waiting and observation. The name of the village of Velas, which belongs to the head of the settlement of São Jorge, puts on the rocky island this kind of motto of the islander’s destiny—which is to watch over, to keep watch.

Now... Whenever I think of the mysteries of isolation it reminds me of the history of Esteves do Correio and the cagarros of Ponta da Má Merenda...

Esteves was from Trás-os-Montes. Esteves was the head of the third-class telegraph-postal station. But Esteves was also somber and grumpy. So, I consider (a little freely) the arrival of Esteves to the Lower Islands, as a functionary of normal and expedited communications, the result of a public indisposition between him and his strained postal customers of Trás-os-Montes.

The sufficiency, despotism, and telegraph-postal tyranny of Esteves do Correio is one of the deepest admirations of my childhood and my islander adolescence. Oh! whole mornings spent waiting for a stamp, at the post office counter, staring at the stamps on the cushion, withered like Esteves’s physiognomy, while he, in the Station’s front room, shouting “Wait!” like a lion-tamer to my daring act of slapping a coin on the counter, was concerned with I don’t know what mysterious writings or checking of funds.

On the other side of the railing, and beyond the perched stamps, the cogwheels of the Hughes telegraph device, trembling with that linear excitement coming from Angra, were waiting too. What Esteves really cared about was the electric telegraph, the Morse system and its dashes and dots, dots and dashes of calls! I couldn’t care less! The important thing was the writing, and his mood as an underpaid family man.

Anyway: when Esteves thought it was time, he would go to the tape, mumble to me a crooked answer, make me wait until he deciphered, glued, and had the telegram distributed, only then tearing off for me, from the perforated sheet, the beautiful stamp with the effigy of D. Manuel II, with the mark REPUBLIC.

Oh, Esteves do Correio! His bad temper, his cane, his grim face, the restlessness, and disquiet that this telegraph-postal head sowed in the village, without anyone daring (not even the doctor!) to give the slightest hint of a general discontent! Poor man! Good man, who burned your character and your exile into my childhood, so that there would be in it the benign shadow of a homely tyrant, or the living example of I do not know what feudal entity, whose castle paid rent to my father in his capacity as proxy for an absentee landowner, and had at the entrance, instead of a drawbridge, that gate provided with a slot and a metal hatch where I shoved my first original work intended for print!

In the afternoon, Manuel Machado, the postman, arrived; the man stopped at the entrance to Rossio Street. Mailbag in sight! And, in the light of oil lamps and foyers of the houses, Joaquim Giesta would distribute the handful of correspondence that Esteves had unloaded, like someone shooting the legs of henhouse thieves, the desperate strokes of the stamp. It was Esteves almost at Largo da Luz, in irritation, and my Uncle Mateus, attentive and peaceful, two or three houses below....Between the two,—the statue of José Silvestre and the two eternal araucaria trees. They are both there, in the hand of the Lord and in the dark of the caves of the Vale Farto!

But I’ve left the story of the cagarros untold. Such was the case that Esteves, newly arrived on the island, decided to take a walk in the Serra do Facho, to unwind. He was, of course, still sore from the exile; and his expeditious way of dispatching the customers had not yet been established. Be that as it may, he climbed the Ladeira Devassa and braved the cliffs of Ponta da Má Merenda. He had chosen well, there is no doubt...There, the island sky is a pure frown, and the little bit of land that the sea allows rises and blackens. On one side, the valley of Ramo Grande with the village of Praia in the background; on the other, the sea of the Espartel islet, which, dark and cramped on the rocks, looks like a spilled inkwell or a lost soul that, bursting, can no longer burst. Esteves, with a cane behind his back, measures the shortcut practiced almost on the edge of the rock, where Almeida’s oxen pass in the background, and now, with the Creed in his mouth, António Esteves, head of the third-class telegraph-postal station, born in the province of Trás-os-Montes, was borne away to Terceira Island.

Then, as if by magic, they began to gather, coming from here and there, from the direction of the underworld of the earth and the direction of the underworld of the sea, some scornful animals, of swift feather and fast wing began to gather, hovering and closing in on Esteves. From the top of the cliff, they looked like an infernal legion. Their maritime cry, to our islander’s ears, is not inelegant; it’s something like—garr... garr… Oh, let me! Garr... Him!

What was Esteves hearing?:

— “Grab him: it’s an islander!” “Grab him: it’s an islander!”

Then, shivering on his way and raising his cane toward the cagarros, he cried out: 

—“I am not an islander! I’m from the Continent!”

II

A CORSAIR OF THE AIR

7 June 1955

A fourteen-year-old boy, a neighbor of the Lajes airfield on this island of Terceira, from where I write, taking advantage of the excitement and atmosphere of confidence of a festive parade of Allied air forces, approached a C-124, a three-story military machine, pretended to be interested in the details of the aircraft, and slipped as slyly as he could into the tail compartment of the plane. And, without anyone on board noticing the supernumerary, within a few hours of transatlantic flight landed at Dover Delaware, an American airport.

Once landed, he let the crew climb down the ladder and onto the runway, to leave in their turn. Only a sergeant from Dover air police asked him where he was going.

—To meet my father... —replied the boy, in the nasalized English of a regular neighbor of the American Air Transport Station near the Lajes Base.

—The son of some returned operator or meteorologist…—thought the runway guard. And he let him continue his way.

But the facilities of the Dover base are long; the surveillance service is certainly complicated there. Our young man, the son of a poor farmer from the Juncal area, above Lajes airfield, wore his Azorean peasant’s clothes, or else denim pants and a printed shirt or blouse, according to the model imported from the workers in the airfield. In any case, he was detained by a Dover captain, who blocked his path:

—Where are you going? What’s your name?

To the second question our adventurer answered without hesitation:

—Milke. (translator’s note: “Mike”)

He had certainly foreseen the inevitable inquiry, and he did not lack water at the helm to be confirmed himself as an American. What! Since he was a boy, he had been living next to our friendly guests at Lajes Air Base, Armando Ormonde Machado (that’s the name of our little subject) was familiar enough with the North American saints—Joe, Frank, Ronald, Milke—to put one of these masks on his face in a tight spot...

But neither the strategy nor possibly the good pronunciation acquired in an Anglo-Saxon contact of a few years served our Armando this time...The captain, discovering his identity and designs, handed him over to the American police. He was then given hospitable lodgings, clothes, and comfort. And, on the first plane from Dover to Lajes—the C-124/3030—the formerly supposed American subject Milke, brave little Portuguese Armando Ormonde Machado, and legitimate rabo-torto (which is the ethnic nickname given in the Azores to the natives of Terceira Island) was heavenly restored to the homeland and airport, where our police took charge of the clandestine episode and will certainly give him appropriate and benign punishment.

What did Armando intend with the Atlantic crossing? When questioned by an island journalist shortly after landing, as if he were a movie star or some champion pilot, he told him that he planned to go meet an uncle in California—for which he was already prepared with a handwritten letter, to be mailed in America, advising of his whereabouts. His uncle would come for him: “Dover Delaware, New England.” [sic] Simply, the indiscreet captain of the U.S. Air Force, intercepting him, ruined everything. The letter remained in the small pocket of the adventurous traveler’s overalls and he fell into the nets of international law—no longer “watching ships,” like his ancestors from the top of the Serra da Praia, peering over the islet of Espartel, with no other aerial horizon than that of kites and wild pigeons, but seeing airplanes that will never again take him where his dreams lay...

Armando will probably get his ear boxed by his father. He is still young enough for that. He already has his share of scares, and disappointments to punish him for his recklessness. He will never again think of hiding in any tail, even if it is in the tail of some harpooned sperm whale, who smells bad, and has no one to watch him, and forbid him access. He will learn that, if you insist on emigrating or visiting distant uncles, you must do so by normal channels, respecting quotas, military service, passports... But, having learned all this and the other things that adult morality and the laws of the people command, Armando will have paid his dues and redeemed his guilt. And therefore, I don’t believe it’s iniquity or incitement to disobedience to say that Armando Ormonde Machado, boiling in little water, proved to be a usable boy, an ardent, brave, and trustworthy soul. It can’t be said that, in the event, he behaved like a gentleman, with a loyal heart, for we have already seen that he violated a lot of respectable precepts: he ran away from his parents and his country, he went to the wedding without being invited—that is: he got into the C-124 of a foreign country, albeit a friendly one, without saying a word about it (and, what’s more, in the plane’s tail cubicle, like someone skimming the tail of a nearby fish!). He frightened his family at home, alarmed his uncle in California, made life difficult for the police in two airports, and created complications for the flag of his country...  In short, a real corsair—as they say on Terceira Island of mischievous boys like Armando. Yes! And because a corsair, in the early days of the islands, was just that: he was the one who arrived on foreign land aboard a ship, by surprise, and jumped ashore without anyone expecting him.

It is certain that Armando Ormonde Machado, disembarking in America, from an airplane, did not intend to plunder, to take possession of goods or people, to kill and injure, to tear down and set fire—but quite simply to go to an uncle who was in California, offering to milk his cows on the ranch, dressing up in big man’s clothes—in short: to say O. K. (okay!) about everything and nothing, as he learned as a boy from the Americans at the Base. This will serve as a mitigating factor. This, and even one of his own surnames—the surname of ORMONDE, which, with its face disguised as a legitimate Portuguese word, was an old Anglo-Saxon surname, DRUMMOND, which, pronounced DRUMONDE and DORMONDE, in the Portuguese way, ended up losing the initial D supposed to be a preposition: DE ORMONDE.

So, just as the Drumondes came, I believe from Scotland, first to Madeira and then from there to Terceira, so Amadeu Ormonde decided to set sail for America. He had other examples: those of the Portuguese navigators who, in the 15th century, sailed from Terceira to the Northeast, reaching the coasts or, at least, the sargassos of America, when no one there yet thought of air transport, except some flying fish...

III

THE TURTLE

23 February 1949

The turtle always pulls toward the sea...

Ugly and stubborn animal! But a firm animal, with only one face and one faith—the robust and salty faith from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. A face, moreover, made to be almost always disguised, hidden—as a matter of structure, and because, unfortunately, the edge of the sea was not made only for turtles, crabs, and rays stretched out on the sand by the ebb tide: it also belongs to the children of the animal-man, like Mateus Queimado and others of his ilk, who, at the age of twelve, were amused by flogging a poor turtle in the sand with canes and sticks.

José Plácito, who shoveled sand to fertilize the land without limestone, spied them from afar, buried the tool in the pile of clean sand that he had managed to clear with effort from the bosom of Anfitrite... He snuck up on the group, with his hood down—and then he shouted, throwing a shovelful of sand at them:

—Bunch of boys! Harassing the animal!...Get the hell out of here!

And, with their backs down low, fleeing the volleys of sand and Plácito’s wrath (a weak and symbolic aggression...), Mateus and his companions took shelter behind the cane reeds, which Rosalgar had planted in a small, sandy dune piled by the winds, in the hope of keeping back the brave and white tide that, thank God, renews and affirms the Azorean Atlantic for centuries and centuries.

But... (poor Rosalgar!) at that time the Atlantic asserted itself too much at his expense and at the expense of his corn and horse mackerel seed... That’s why he felt so sorry for himself! Rosalgar didn’t have, like Mateus Queimado, a typewriter to write longingly about waters gone by without any major damage (at least, material damage), nor friends who could get him into a newspaper or book to spread it around this world, in print. That to have longed for the high tide and the rough sea is very nice and very beautiful, as long as you don’t have fields on the water’s edge covered by blankets from the flood. As another said: —“Those who have them should enjoy them!” 

Remember the sea and the old things! As if this weren’t our family’s operation! As if a man was not born to miss what he was and where he has been, with adventures that can hardly be reconstituted, dear faces that time and death have erased, but whose voices come up in the heart like a layer of leaves that an autumn wind stirs and then sets quietly down.

Here, on this bank of the Tagus River, Lisbon is drawn beyond a line of rusty bell-shaped packet boats of neutral colors. The river doesn’t move. A piece of lead becomes the sky; and, blurred, almost without a tree, the ridges of the right bank, from Monsanto to Sintra, await. They await what? They await all who one day, like Mateus Quemaido, entered this European estuary and found here these things that are late or never ready, and which are therefore called hopes.

They are the builders of audacious buildings, with noticeably light materials, the men of the invisible city, those of the Praça da Saudade, unhappy passengers of imaginary packet boats, which no one has ever seen, not even at the bottom of the sea or on the epic Tagus River, except by some illusory and ephemeral light effect on the waters of dead tides.

Recall for what? It is nice, for example, to know that “to recall” means something like “to make someone or something pass through your heart a second time,” that “recalling” is not too far from “waking up,” and “to agree,” neither is “longing” far from “peaceful” and “harmony”… In concord died Don Quixote—Alonso Quijano El Bueno. For God, since He did not make them Quixotes, may He preserve the judgment of humans until the hour of death. And may He, in the meantime, out of charity, let them recall a little, do a bit of intimate etymology, choreograph the tired and compassionate heart.

The turtle always pulls toward the sea...It’s quite true! The one that Mateus Quemaido, in collusion with other boys, whipped on its head and fins when he was little, confidently made and remade her short course towards the sea—even after they overturned her hull in the sand and maliciously let her kick a little. Some may call the turtle’s gesture—stupidity. They have flipped the poor animal over; they made it a symbol of a kind of unnerving stubbornness: that of those who calmly stand on their own, and do not give a damn.

What was the poor turtle to do in front of that bunch of half-naked devils with stubby reeds, on the deserted sand of a warm island? Give the fin a twist?... But she had her inviolable shell: it was natural for her to hide her poor fin in what God gave her for her own safety. Then, after a minute or two, the turtle sticks out her head and fins, and paddles quietly and faithfully, right to the sea that created her.

If we had anything to do with this psychological heraldry, we would not make the turtle the symbol of the obstinate, but the mirror of the candid and faithful. It’s true that, at that time, on the island, neither one nor the other was made of the turtle: they made a stew... Mateus Queimado finds José Joaquim Nazaré, with a pipe in his teeth, with a turtle in his arm. The fishermen, who are puckish and lordly, already make fun of him:

—Huh, José Joaquim? That’ll give you a rump...

And Nazaré, who catches a little of the speech, with his small, shallow pipe teeth, comes back:

—Tell him no... Tell him no!... A turtle’s blood is worth twice as much as a pig’s!

So, the past is worth twice the present...  One—because it is worth what it was, exactly when it was; the other—because it is worth this value again when we pull it from memory, now that it is not precisely what it was...

Let the turtle (writes Mateus Queimado) forever correct its wrong course on earth; let us... Holy time, that of the footprints in the sand, of the family’s stolen swims, with the clothes stripped-off in less than an instant and hidden in the depths of the reed grass ... There, the quarter wind stood watch over the rags, lightly ruffling the leaves of the green cane, which could be used as both a nasally bagpipe and as a scepter of scorn in the wooden hands of Lord-Amarrado-à-Coluna. Then, high and dry, the cane reeds would shore up the tomatoes in the backyards of the prudent old ladies. The dear and sacred cane of yore, a stick for every spoon... A stick, even, that the parents so often used themselves, cutting it there with a knife, close to the crooked stump, to drive us home, after a furtive and disobedient swim in the sea. Mateus Queimado, Tiàzé, Francisco da Segunda, and others in equal portion... The parents (in general, only those of the boys who earned the treatment of “boys” from their mothers); the fathers came down from the land, along the wall, looking for the renegades. With their heads out of the water, there they spotted Mr. Zozimo’s grave bowler hat, who had come in search of his son:

—Get dressed, Venâncio, your father’s coming, and you’ll get a beating!

But Venâncio is not like Mateus, who is left without a drop of blood because one of the ten hermetically sealed windows of that old balcony is opened by chance, and a pair of theatre binoculars, mounted on the shrewd eyebrow of his aunt, looks for his face and his skin and swears by it underwater. Venâncio is from the race of the strong, from the pirates sworn to betting on buttons being ripped off (if necessary) from the garments that are most needed for people to keep, I won’t say standing, but decent... Venâncio is a Malaysian pirate, son of a gun, and outlaw!

Given the warning signal to that gang of childish rascals, the boys run ashore, shivering with cold, straight to the bundles of clothes. Sometimes, so that the scandal, publicized, would serve as a lesson, certain parents, justice-seekers, would barely let them get dressed! They had time to stick themselves into their shorts, if only, and if they were lucky... Then, marching in front of the cane of the paternal authority, like a relentless sheep having strayed, the poor boy would serve as a little dish at the window grilles shuttered in the warm peace of noon ...

Biography of Vitorino Nemésio and background on Corsair of the Islands 

In the cultural history of the Azores—the nine-island Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—there are arguably few twentieth-century literary figures more important than Vitorino Nemésio (1901-1978). A poet, essayist, critic, and for many years the host of an influential cultural television program, Nemésio was perhaps best known for his novel Mau Tempo No Canal (translated as Stormy Isles, in English), as well as being a professor in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon and member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. 

Nemésio was born on Terceira Island, educated there and at the University of Coimbra, where he later also taught. He made several return trips to the Azores, two of which, in 1946 and 1955, would form the basis of his influential book, Corsário das Ilhas, published by Bertrand in 1956, and still in print in a revised, third edition published by Imprensa Nacional—Casa da Moeda in 1988. A new edition, further revised and corrected by the scholar Leonor Sampaio da Silva, will be published in Portugal later this year. 

The book chronicles Nemésio’s travels as a returning islander, a unique perspective that offers a view of the islands—simultaneously—of that from both an insider and an outsider. Corsário also captures, as Azorean critic and scholar Onésimo Teotónio Almeida wrote, “his profound spirit of observation and his disposition to empirical attention that seemed always to find Nemésio’s gaze cast to the ground, combing the Azorean earth with his fingers in search of the smallest discoveries, the better to illuminate the soul of that land where his feet trod.”

Nemésio, Almeida recounts, “describes the archipelago, and its inhabitants in colorful swaths of writing—today seen as classic works on Azorean cultural identity.” 

As influential as this book is in the Azores (a recent popular RTP Açores television program, “Mal-Amanhados: Os Novos Corsários das Ilhas,” paid tribute to and followed in the footsteps of Nemésio’s volume) and as important as it is to Portuguese literature, Corsário has never been translated into English, despite a large potential audience in the Azorean North American diasporic population in the U.S. and Canada, many of whom do not read Portuguese. 

Now, on the heal of the publication of the first English-language edition of another important 20th century Azorean travelogue, Raul Brandão’s The Unknown Islands (Ilhas Desconhecidas), Tagus Press, with the partial support of the Brown University Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, has enlisted award-winning poet, essayist, and third-generation Azorean American Scott Edward Anderson to translate Corsário into English for the first time. Nemésio’s surviving family and executors have approved of this translation project, and it will be published in 2023.

Scott Edward Anderson is an award-winning poet, memoirist, essayist, and translator. He is the author of Wine-Dark Sea: New & Selected Poems & Translations (2022), Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana (2020), the Nautilus Award-winning Dwelling: an ecopoem (2018), and two books of non-fiction, including Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances (2019) and Walks in Nature’s Empire (1995). He has been a Concordia Fellow at Millay Arts and received the Letras Levadas/PEN Açores Award, the Nebraska Review Award, and the Larry Aldrich Emerging Poets Award, selected by Thomas Lux. He is currently the “Non-resident Poet” at Ryan Observatory at Muddy Run and divides his time between the Berkshires and São Miguel Island in the Azores. His translation of Vitorino Nemésio's Corsair of the Islands will be published by Tagus Press in 2023. Find him on various social media platforms @greenskeptic