In 1961, Pacheco travels to Vieira do Minho to a cheap typography to order the printing of the “baker” postcards, which were sent by the dozens “to the Portuguese World”. Upon his return, Pacheco spends a day in Braga. There, on 16 or 18 October, in the Oliveira Guest House, “while waiting for his lunch”, he comes up with the story of O Libertino passeia por Braga, a idolátrica, o seu esplendor. This Libertino… story’s anti-hero is Luiz Pacheco himself who, at that time, used to ride around in the itinerant library-vans of the Gulbenkian Foundation, vans full of books that travelled around the real country, feeding minds hungry for literature, especially the younger generations. In the shadow of one of these vans, parked in Braga, the Libertine attempts to seduce Lolitas and young recruits. In a timid country, made of people battered in body and soul, there is no room for Don Juan, Sade or Casanova, only for a Libertine in the scale of the country we were (are?). Pacheco never cared about being respectable and, above all, he did not wish to respect conventions. In a world where morality is a straightjacket forced by the dominant group on the dominated in order to safeguard its predominance, Good and Evil are entirely distinct and independent from it – Evil can walk hand in hand with morality, and Good can be against it. Morality changes depending on the dominant group and its needs; it is ethics that remains immutable. In this visit to Braga, the Libertine does not breach any ethical rule; on the contrary, his discussions and reflections describe us and provide us with a much sharper picture of Portuguese reality, of the timid life during times of oppression in a grey country with contained violences, than an entire body of literature that claimed to be disruptive. At the same time, the entire story is permeated by humour, satire, irony and self-irony, and by the pleasure of life.
In 2025, we commemorate the centenary of the birth of Luiz Pacheco, writer, editor, polemicist, letter-writer and critic of Portuguese literature. He was born in Lisbon, in 1925, and died in Montijo in 2008.
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