Bucket List

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

– Lao Tzu

The last reading assigned to us in Lisbon was The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago. With two months of studying Portuguese literature I still don’t believe that I caught all of the references in this book. Lisbon is built upon layers of its history, with Roman ruins sleeping under modern banks. Saramago tells this tale with countless layers of literary references. This book applied ALL the allusion. 

The story opens with the line, “Here the sea ends, and the earth begins.” I mean, it probably starts, “Aqui onde o mar se acaba e a terra principia” but, for obvious reasons, I read an English translation. This sentence deliberately mirrors, “Where the land ends and the sea begins” from Os Lusíadas, a 16th century epic poem by Luís de Camões.

It is a strange story in that the protagonist, Ricardo Reis, is fated to death. You know this before you even read past the cover. Reis arrives in Lisbon, after years exiled in Rio de Janeiro, shortly after the death of Fernando Pessoa. Which places the story in 1936, with a shadow of fascism darkening over much of Europe. Death is no impediment to Pessoa visiting Reis often throughout the story. 

According to the book, just as a baby exists unseen for nine months, before it is ready to be born into the world, so too does a spirit exist for nine months after death before it is ready. This is an interesting enough premise for a story. So it is that Pessoa has this precisely measured time to wander Lisbon and call on old friends. I often found myself caught up in the logistics of trying to have a social life knowing that Fernando Pessoa’s ghost may or may not let himself into your hotel room during your most intimate rendezvous. 

There are deep philosophical discussions of life and death. The reader is invited to consider if, and how, one would live their life differently if they knew exactly when they would die. It goes beyond life and death, too. What does it mean to exist? Even our protagonist’s thoughts are somehow separate from the man. Saramago at one point posits that a particularly casual thought may have in fact thought itself. 

This deep solipsism isn’t so much a sidebar as just another level of a theme already in progress. Far stranger than the existence of the ghost in this story is the existence of the protagonist. Ricardo Reis is one of the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa seemed to narrowly straddle that fine line between genius and madness. These heteronyms seem less like Stephen King’s pen name/fictional character Richard Bachman and more like Andy Kaufman’s Tony Clifton.

King used the pseudonym to publish without the benefits or baggage of his own name. Once outed, he never denied it. Bachman was just an attempt to anonymize some of his work. Kaufman was adamantly separate from Clifton, and I don’t believe that he ever officially admitted otherwise. Pessoa’s heteronyms had their own birth dates and places (and mapped out astrological charts). They had separate religions and political views, fully fleshed out biographies and their own writing styles. 

So it stands to reason that they would have their own deaths, too. With these taking place at different dates, of different causes, than their creator’s. From that perspective it seems easy to speculate about what became of these people after Pessoa’s death. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is what happens when a really good writer does the speculating for us. 

I think every writer wants to create a legacy that will outlive them. I mean, maybe not in such a way that our creations move into a Lisbon hotel, embroil themselves in a love triangle, and play passive spectator to the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, but in some less tangible way, sure. Our art says that we were here, we existed, we had feelings about it. I wonder if raccoons rearranging the landscaping ever think about their legacy. Is it only humans who want so badly to ascribe meaning to our existences? 

Sometimes, if I’m struggling to figure out what I want, I buy a lottery ticket. A dollar’s not a bad price for a day or two of daydreams. I find it illuminating, the things I fantasize about changing and the things that I want to keep the same. If I had won the lottery that summer, I still would have gone to Portugal to study abroad. I still would have completed my degree at Berkeley. My original motivator of education as a ticket out of poverty would be moot. Still, I had worked so hard and I was just too close not to go all the way. 

For ages, I had a whole plan for a nonprofit I would create if I won the lottery. I’m getting lazier with age, though. I think I’d rather just give a lot of money to nonprofits that already exist. And of course there’s the obvious generosity to friends and family. I only want to make smaller changes to my life.

I tend to create the details of my Bucket List after the fact. Being introduced to Ray Bradbury by Larry Niven is worth a lot of geek points. It’s totally a bucket list item, but it wasn’t on my list until it had just happened. The list I actually operate from before the fact is a little more vague.

Bucket List

• Love
• Be Loved
• Be of Service
• Travel
• Live an Interesting Life
• Write
• Write Well
• Write Prolifically

The summer of 2022 is when I realized that I was remarkably close to having it all. I mean I’m grateful to have friends and family who I love deeply. And there’s my general love for humanity. But also, I was passionately in love with a great guy, and by some unfathomable miracle he loved me too. Check and check.

Forever scared me, not because I didn’t want it, but because I wanted it so much. I mean, it’s kinda the point- you start out talking to someone, and then seeing someone, and then dating someone, etc. At each step of the way you gather information and when enough of it is good you level up. When enough of it is bad you break up, and good and bad are very subjective, very personal. Good for me might be bad for someone else and vice versa. 

If a relationship isn’t growing it’s dying. I just wasn’t expecting such a sudden growth spurt. In one year I’d gone from I think we need to break up to trying to figure out the logistics of a marriage while he would remind me that Mexicans (our shared heritage) are very fertile people. He was acting as if I couldn’t age out of fertility like mortal (or I guess non-Mexican) women.

He showed up in my life at a time when I really wasn’t looking for anything. I was working, volunteering, raising kids, trying to get a degree. I mean, never say never, but I couldn’t imagine how there would be room for a relationship in all of that.

Besides, when we started seeing each other I didn’t even know where I’d be going for my bachelors. Berkeley was my first choice school, but they say no to a lot of people every year. I felt like I should know where in the state I was going to be living before I got booed up with anybody.

Then this guy showed up, and he kept showing up, and he kept getting flirtier, and we were both single, and both into each other. I knew we would probably break up when I went away to college but as they say, it’s better to have loved and lost and all that. So when he actually started something that was more than flirting, I went for it. 

I’d made such a point of wanting him to sow his wild oats before we started anything. It turns out, I hadn’t put any thought into my own. Not that I wanted to fool around with anybody. I definitely did not. It’s just… I had other things on my list besides love and be loved.

I’d tried to talk the Work Bestie into joining the Peace Corps with me (a traveling while being of service twofer). Apparently, he’s over the whole traveling thousands of miles to stay in primitive conditions while working himself to the bone. He’d rather stay in a nice hotel and have free time to see whatever he wants. Some people are just weird that way.

My studying abroad was a good compromise. It allowed me to have a sense of purpose and community and to feel like I was living where I’d traveled to, not just showing up waiting to be entertained. I ran perfectly ordinary, everyday errands and felt like part of my neighborhoods while I was in Portugal. I just had to scratch that whole live abroad itch in two months instead of two years. 

I’ve spent a lifetime working and volunteering in the nonprofit sector and there’s no reason that a relationship would stop that. One of the women who ran the grief camp I used to volunteer at was even based out of San Diego. I’m sure the hospice she works at now has a volunteer program I could join. So I already had an in for contributing to the greater good there. It was a crazy thought, but maybe, just maybe, I might actually be able to have it all, and sooner rather than later.

One of our last field trips in Portugal was to the José Saramago Foundation at Casa dos Bicos. There’s a small museum dedicated to his legacy, with copies of his works in their various translations, and displays of his personal possessions. There I stood, far closer than I ever thought I’d be to a Nobel Medal. To the best of my knowledge José Saramago is still the only Portuguese writer to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Portugal has been producing literature for as long as any other country in the running, but it’s just not widely translated and that limits the size of its audience. I guess there’s a lack of people who read in Portuguese on the selection committee. This isn’t unreasonable for a Swedish prize. It’s just that it makes simply writing in Portuguese enough to make Saramago an unlikely winner. 

And yet, there it was, right in front of me, a very large, very formal, gold medal. Unlikely things do happen. I reckon if I do all the other things on my bucket list that will be an interesting enough life. Everything on my bucket list was actually in progress. Well, except for those last two, about the quality and quantity of writing. With the Work Bestie in my corner there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, though. We got this. 

Somebody

Has got to say it all

Yeah, adjectives on the typewriter

He moves his words like a prize fighter

– Cake
Shadow Stabbing