ABSTRACT
The castle of Guimaraes, also newly restored for 1940, is paradigmatic of these ideological articulations. Perhaps no image better renders this than that conjured by Salazar himself when, in the speech which officially launched the 1940 commemorations, he evoked the «milhoes de portugueses» communing in a triple act of patriotic «devogao, exalta^ao e fe», humbly cast [6] «de alma ajoelhada diante deste castelo».7 When, in the imaginary dialogue didactically narrated in a volume of the National Campaign for Adult Education, the high school student Ze Manel explains to the young apprentice Antonio the reason for his tears of emotion as they sang the national anthem and heard the castle’s history within its walls, it is still the echo of Salazar’s speech that can be heard. For it is only now, upon that «sitio sagrado, onde ha mais de oito seculos os primeiros portugueses decidiram fazer Portugal» that for the first time Antonio realizes «profundamente o que significa Portugal» and «a honra extraordinaria que para cada um de nos representa sermos portugueses».8 When, in turn, Saramago has the irreverent «viajante» of his Viagem a Portugal stand on the same ground, «examina[ndo]-se para descobrir tragos de emo?ao», bemusedly unable to tell apart the stones newly added in the restorations of forty years earlier from those of six centuries before, or, finally, repudiating the monument altogether to commune instead in the invisible traces, last breaths and lost words of the anonymous common people, their memories carried by the «pedras brutas do chao, o ceu que todos cobre, o vento que passa», it is the fictive Ze Maneis and Antonios, the Salazars and their identitarian nationalist ideologies of patrimony that he is rejecting.9 Saramago himself was to enunciate a more explicitly political critique of identitarian and exclusivist nationalist ideologies in a discussion of Lisbon lived and remembered. Refusing the «patriotismo de exalta^ao balofa» and the «napoleonica vaidade» that «do alto deste Castelo oitocentos anos nos contemplam», it is in the hybrid heritage of its people, the part of the defeated minorities alive in each of us no less than their part in the memories of Lisbon that he finds the object of celebration.10 But it is in the Historia do Cerco de Lisboa, in the voice of Saramago the novelist, that his critique is at its most subtle and engaging. Fifteen years after the Revolution that overthrew the New State regime, and fifty years upon the apotheotic celebration of Salazarist values, there is perhaps no better measure of the distance covered in the attitude to the past, to history and to heritage than Saramago’s imaginative rewriting of the History of the Siege, and no better point of entry into the subject of this paper.
