. . . almost all the soldiers came back with mementos, a mask, a wooden doll, an ear in a bottle of alcohol, a boy, one arm less, silences in the middle of conversations where they wandered far away remaining over there . . .
These soldiers have returned home after the fifteen-year-long Guerra de Libertação, which pitted the nationalist movements of Portugal’s African colonies against António de Oliveira Salazar’s authoritarian regime, the Estado Novo. In this list of their mementos, a subject is hidden amongst the objects, and in the space between them, we are given the plot of the novel: Is the boy a living trophy? Might he have a life in Lisbon, amid the silences of the soldiers, surrounded by masks and ears?
*
The unsettled memory of Portugal’s war in Angola is the wound that scars all of Antunes’s novels. In the early 1970s, he spent fifteen indelible months working as a military doctor in a psychiatric hospital in the southeast of Angola. His second novel, Os Cus de Judas (admirably retranslated by Margaret Jull Costa in 2011 as The Land at the End of the World), draws directly on this experience. It was published in 1979, five years after Angolan independence, and received widespread critical acclaim. Since then, Antunes has produced a novel every couple of years, earning him a string of European prizes and the unofficial title, certainly after José Saramago’s death in 2010 (and, Antunes’s fans whisper, even before), of the greatest living Portuguese novelist.
Os Cus de Judas achieved immediate commercial success because it was one of the first books to reflect directly on the Portuguese experience of the conflict. In an interview with The Paris Review in 2011, Antunes said it “sold incredibly well because people wanted to know what was going on. Newspapers, books, and movies had all been controlled up until then, if not completely forbidden.” Os Cus de Judas is the long hallucinatory confession of a medic haunted by the war. It’s a lush, baroque text, in which everything is excessive, the prose no less than the violence of the war. In it, all bras are black bats, hanging from chairs, waiting for night, while knitting needles are “secreting sweaters as they clash like domesticated fencing foils.” Sometimes, the similes work, but just as often they are imprecise, and their overall effect is dampened by their plenitude. It’s a young man’s book, and Antunes seems overwhelmed by his material—how else to describe an excessively horrible war, except excessively?
The twenty-five novels Antunes wrote after Os Cus de Judas do not speak directly to the war, but instead are haunted by the Portuguese experience in Angola, and what they lose in directness, they gain in subtlety and power. Several novels treat the collapse of grand, rotten families after the Carnation Revolution of 1974 ended the Estado Novo and the colonial conflicts. In The Splendour of Portugal and The Inquisitor’s Manual, memories of the war function like a mirror in which society’s decay is revealed, while in Fado Alexadrino and Knowledge of Hell, the ruined participants of the war stagger through a Portugal they no longer recognize, the wreckage they wreaked in Angola paralleling the wreckage of their lives at home. All of these novels analyse the scars left by the war; the way its aftermath slipped into Portuguese life, disrupted its rhythms, and revealed aspects of its existence that society would have preferred stay hidden.
*
The Portuguese experience during the Angolan war is at the centre of all of Antunes’s work, but Angola itself feels like a stage, rather than a real country. His work is resolutely aloof from many of the postcolonial convictions of contemporary literature. His novels are not dialogic. Angola does not speak. In Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, which is structured as a series of overlapping monologues, we do hear the voice of the boy taken back to Portugal, now older and unhappily married, but his voice is not distinctively Angolan. His monologues are the negative echoes of Portuguese violence, and his only memories of home parallel those of his adopted father, the soldier who slaughtered his parents and brought him back to Lisbon. His only memories, then, are of burning villages and corpses without ears. The Angolan man, never named, is a too-perfect colonized subject taken from the pages of Fanon, deracinée and objectified. His adopted father, he says, could have taken an ear, but instead took me. The chapters that he narrates are the weakest in the novel, for his consciousness is only ever the event of his capture, and he is less a character than a foil for Portuguese nightmares about the violence they perpetrated in Angola.
It’s unfair to ask Antunes to write books he never intended to write; his subject was never Angola, but rather the aftermath of violence, and its compulsive, repetitive quality. Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water is not a dialogue, but a solipsistic nightmare. “I may be wrong,” the Angolan character says, his sentences composed of fragments of pain and impossible memories, stilted and confused, “but the impression that between us a dialogue whose phrases we would lose in pronouncing them because the ears that they cut off from us were swallowing . . .” There is no dialogue, Antunes suggests, when violence has rendered us incomprehensible to each other.
In the novels after Os Cus de Judas, violence emerges at the edges of conversations, in stutters and silences. Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, in contrast, is full of burned bodies without ears and the smell of death, as when the soldier, also unnamed, is returned to the war while remembering his wife:
. . . taking me to a hideout in the jungle where a commissioner would sink a pistol into my belly button if by chance she was going shopping pulling a cart with two cross-eyed wheels that jumped on the carpet, the poor things, under a volley from a Kalashnikov, the boss at the same time absent and everywhere, in the living room, in the corridor, in the sunroom, staring at me with sewing glasses at the tip of her nose that called me . . .
Here we have the basic formula of Antunes’s prose: a first-person narration that features the uneven coincidence of two times and that takes the form of long, serpentine sentences slipping from one world to another, as shopping carts recall semiautomatic weapons and wives become commissioners. If they remember Angola, Antunes’s characters remember dreaming of Portugal. On their return to Lisbon, the soldiers find themselves living out the war. Time is out of joint. When he is finally reunited with his wife, the soldier in Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water tells her that he managed to get married when away, and that “Angola won’t leave me.” The war is faithful to him.
When these scenes tarry too long in Angola they begin to jar. Of that country of writers and poets—one whose first president, Agostinho Neto, himself a poet, stated that the struggle for national liberation was a struggle for national culture—nothing remains in Antunes’s novels. While Neto expected Angolan writers to write the country into existence, Antunes writes it out of his narratives. In his novels, the war in Angola is a curse that happens to befall his narrators—an event that none of them can bear that occurs in a place none of them understands. This limit is not simply a limit of Antunes’s fiction: it’s the limit of the world of the Portuguese characters about whom he writes. Their Angola is confusing cries and shadows, violence and weakness, welded together by clichés and banalities. They entered the country without understanding, and that is how they left it, haunted by their own violence. That’s the limit of their world.
*
In Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, Antunes tells the story of that haunting in scene after scene of violence that explodes from within the everyday. At the beginning of the book, a soldier, back from the war, randomly cuts off a dog’s head with a hoe and sits down to smoke in silence. Such explosions of unprecedented violence could almost belong in an American movie about the war in Vietnam—another long, unwinnable conflict that critics often grope for as an analogy to the Portuguese war in Angola when trying to explain Antunes’s books to an English-speaking audience. (In such a movie, the scene would be a barbecue, and the weapon a gun, not a hoe, but the weight of the resulting silence would seem the same). The similarity is superficial. The emphasis of these films—and much of the American cultural production about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is not on the violent acts of the imperialist, but on the perpetrator as victim, punished by internalized psychic violence. The silence of these men occupies the centre of so many films and books, all with the same narrative structure: a silent man, returned home, bearing the weight of unpronounceable experience. As it turns out, there are a lot of words to be written and films to be made about men who don’t have much to say.
In the American context there is subjective silence and objective noise—silent men and an endless series of films and books. Antunes’s novels, in contrast, occur amidst a relative paucity of Portuguese works about the war in Angola. However, if there is silence at the societal level, in Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water the soldiers are not noble heroes struggling with the inexpressible. They all have rather a lot to say. Like in many of Antunes’s novels, the interweaving first-person monologues of Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water feature characters trying to make sense of the violence of war, without any of their efforts giving a final cast to experience. At no point does the experience of war settle into a narrative form, as it does in the American context. Rather, his novels interrogate how attempts to narrativize experience fail. Antunes’s characters tell endless stories about themselves—no contemporary writer is more attuned to the impact of the self-serving lie—but none of these stories allow his characters to navigate a way out of the darkness. Their stories founder on the rock of their experiences.
Many of these stories are not about Angola at all, but about Portugal. In his characters’ monologues, memories of the Portuguese colonial empire slip into thoughts about Henry the Navigator and the age of explorers and maritime “discovery.” These nostalgias only illuminate the wreckage of the country to which they return after the war in Angola. While Until Stones Becomes Lighter Than Water is narrated by multiple characters, there is only one tone, provided by the soldier who has returned with the Angolan boy, and in the sadness and languor of his voice, we can recognize an Antunes’s type. The soldier drinks too much; the war broke whatever relationship he had with his wife. On his return to Lisbon, all he can think about is how small everything is. In his bitterness and resentment, he recalls Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and a long line of alienated modernist narrators. The dislocations of the war and the memory of violence are what allows the soldier to see through the lie of the story that Portugal tells about itself—a broken empire trading on past glories. Antunes is particularly good at tracing the way histories of toxic masculinity are inherited through family stories, and the violence of male initiation is repeatedly juxtaposed to the war in Angola. In Until Stones Becomes Lighter Than Water, the violence of the war is used to expose the violence of the soldier’s family, the emptiness of his marriage, and the hollow promises of the politicians who sent so many young men into a pointless war.
*
That’s the novel as polemic, as cultural critique—it’s not what drives Antunes, or what is most central to his oeuvre. In a short text published in Visão in 2002, “Prescription to Read Me,” Antunes writes that “the male-female relationship, the problem of identity and the search for it, Africa and the brutality of colonial exploitation, etc.” are only the shallowest and least important aspects of his books. He asserts that in his work “there are no exclusive meanings or definitive conclusions: there are only material symbols of fantastic illusions, the truncated rationality that is ours.” If Angola is the stage for his characters, perhaps Portugal is merely the stage for Antunes’s central subject, which is the failure of language to adhere to experience. His novels are not only not dialogic; they haven’t even worked out how to talk to themselves yet.
What interests Antunes is not a critique of violent patriarchs and broken soldiers, but the time that persists after everything has broken down. In his novels, his characters frequently find themselves inhabiting ruins (ruined houses, ruined marriages, ruined stories), and learning how to live with stories that no longer ring true, struggling with what Antunes will call the “monstrous skeleton of our own grief.” Often, this struggle manifests itself in loud silences, such as that which marked the list that began this review: “silences in the middle of conversations where they wandered far away remaining over there.” The materiality of these silences is beautifully treated by Until Stones Becomes Lighter Than Water. For the soldiers’ interlocutor, such gaps are moments of absence in everyday conversation that mark the persistence of the soldier’s war in the present. What persists isn’t a given content—there isn’t a particular set of memories of acts that needs to be repressed (and which could thus also be unveiled). Rather, what persists in that silence is the soldier’s inability to make the experience of war a cohesive part of life in Portugal. Antunes’s prose renders this incoherence by allowing two temporal frames to coexist next to each other, without ever really touching: the soldier sees the shopping trolley jump and hears a Kalashnikov, but the two experiences don’t form a unified whole.
Nothing is ever resolved in Antunes’s world. Every attempt to create a synthesis of experience and language founders. Reading his novels, we hear the hollowness of the stories his characters tell about themselves. Rather than ducking the clichés and banalities that so often characterize writing about war and its aftermath, Antunes places them next to experiences that show how such stories transform life, without ever being identical to it. In Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, the narrative is constituted by the soldier bringing his adopted son back to his ancestral village to participate in the annual pig killing, a central rite of passage in his youth. The annual slaughter was when his own father taught him about nationalist pride and masculine power, and also made him feel emasculated and feminine, horrified by his own weakness. Where else to teach his adopted son about violence? What happens at the annual celebration is revealed on the second page of the book:
. . . no one remembers anymore what happened ten years ago at the time of the pig killing, when the black son murdered his white father with a knife still covered with the animal’s blood, not another knife, the same knife, and the same knife seemed to me for him, another, very old knife, I was going to swear there was a very old knife at his head, the black son screaming at the white father . . .That’s the novel. Son kills father, and then the police kill the son. If that sounds too stuffed full of symbols, too much like a plot that could have walked out of a volume of Freud, Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water is saved by its disinterest in its own symbolism. Nothing of the actual texture of the book and the shape of the characters’ monologues is really tied to the world of symbols in which they exist. Like the stories they tell about themselves—indeed, like the book’s narrative as a whole—these symbols affect Antunes’s characters only obliquely.
The failure of language in Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water occurs at two levels. It is the failure of character’s stories to give a definitive shape to experience, but it is also the failure of language to adhere to character as such. The monologues of the novel are less the product of characters than they are fragments of a single fragmented consciousness, as if Portuguese society had come to life, and was wrestling with its wounds in prose. Of all Antunes’s novels, Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water is the most extreme expression of this failure. It is a crystalline distillation of many of Antunes’s formal innovations. Jeff Love, the translator, has not shied away from rendering the strangeness of Antunes's Portuguese in English. We shift from subject to subject, often in the same sentence. Subjects and objects frequently lack connective terms, and simply jostle next to each other. It is, Love says in his introduction to the novel, often a paratactical form of writing. One effect of these innovations is that the distinctions between characters slip away: phrases and forms of consciousness are shared across consciousnesses, as many minds wrestle with the emptiness of war slogans and the morning vows of veterans hoping to renew their marriages. This polyvocality, however, does not reveal the truth of Portuguese society: instead, it is its very fragmentation, its impossibility, that might be the only thing shared by the novel’s narrators.
*
The constant shifts of Antunes’s prose render the dislocations of history and bring them into the present. One of the opportunities afforded by these shifts is the distinctive way he can render speech, which interrupts the narrative flow of the characters’ consciousness, while being embedded within it. In Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, phrases can be strung out over several pages. A mother says “boy” to her son, and this “boy” is rhythmically repeated, punctuating the narrator’s consciousness, interrupting reflections on the narrator’s alienation from his wife, his conversation with a prostitute, the brutal relationship he has with his adopted son, and a description of the sadness of vultures circling destroyed villages. This could be trite—too obviously symbolic and meaningful—but Antunes makes it work; his work registers the temporal density of experience; the way that causal phrases and expressions can haunt a life, accruing meaning across contexts and experiences.
The repetitions of the prose mirror the repetitions of memory. There isn’t any resolution to the fact that the soldier thinks about shooting people when buying tinned tomatoes, or sees his son’s earless father when he looks at his son. Throughout the book, memories compulsively return, as if the characters were broken records. Maybe war makes broken records of us all. Some of the most powerful scenes are when phrases in Kimbundu are uttered by Portuguese characters. I was immediately reminded of William Kentridge’s recent opera, The Head and the Load, in which the power of colonialism is partly traced through the repetition of sentences that are increasingly distorted in meaning as they shift through historical registers: colonial conversations repeated in the present, as if the phrases themselves had become sundered from subjects, haunting something like a collective consciousness.
In Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, one could even say that it is these phrases that are the real characters of the novel, and the subjects just live in their echoes. In one scene, the narrator mourns the overly frenetic sex life of his downstairs neighbour, the evidence of which is the constant cry “Oh Carlo, Carlo,” which the narrator starts to repeat, again and again, while thinking of other cries (violence, the burning of napalm, pleas for help), measuring that cry of pleasure against all the other cries, but without finding any depth or resolution.
The great achievement of Antunes’s body of work is the way that it has taken the psychic wound of the war, and the uneven coincidence of the everyday and the violent, and used it to create a distinctive literary world, in which each scene is permeated by what it was, what it can no longer be, and what it holds to itself as dream and consolation. I know of no finer opening to a contemporary novel than that of The Inquisitor’s Manual, which envisages a farm through a series of negations of its present (not the farm of my youth, with its . . .), all held within a dream that the narrator acknowledges is already lost. It is at once a scene of nostalgia, and more interestingly, a depiction of a present characterised by lack and want that can only be expressed by an appeal to an already inaccessible past that nonetheless provides the language of the present.
One looks in vain in Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water for something like resolution. Despite the constant juxtaposition of Lisbon and Luanda, Portugal and Angola, nothing is solved by the simultaneity of the time of war and the space of home. Antunes spent much of his life working as a psychiatrist, and his books are clinical in the sense that they provide a cutting diagnosis of a world out of joint, full of fragmented characters clinging onto empty shards of language, which resound through consciousness. One of the most powerful phrases to haunt the book is the stuttering, nervous request that the soldier makes to his wife when they first meet, “Would you permit me to accompany you?” It’s that moment, and the tenderness that follows, which haunts the soldier as his adopted son stabs him, as the military helicopters swarm overhead in his consciousness, as the March light comes through the frame of the open window, and he bleeds out over the floor. In Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, Antunes has created his most radical study of what happens when all that is left to us is language, and that language fails us, leaving silences in the middle of our conversations.
