A wolf does not use collar

Rui de Azevedo Teixeira, who was commanded in the War of Africa and a university professor, always aligned the axis of war and literature, as shown in The Praise of Hardnessmasterpiece in which reality goes beyond fiction. We have known each other for over a decade when he published his biography of Jaime Neves, which I enjoyed a lot. Unsurprisingly, we were friends and, by his hand and with great honor, I was invited to his « Comandite ». War and literature are not limited to the theoretical plan, such as Rui, who lived them, knows better than anyone. These are men’s things that following tradition gathers to exchange lived stories. After all, that’s how the story was born. In these lunches there are seemingly unlikely encounters, but they make perfect sense. There are men on the left and right, from different generations, there are old combatants and journalists, there are teachers, editors and translators, there are even some in which such labels accumulate.

It was in one of these meetings that Rui introduced me to Carlos Matos Gomes and the approach was cautious, but always respectful. Until one day, I left the late Trindade Livraria, and saw that Matos Gomes, as I treated him, climbed Rosemary Street, with his long, long step. We greeted ourselves and told him where he came from, he answered in the same coin, went to the publisher to review the tests of his last novel. We then started a conversation about authors and readings, in which a complicity was born. It was the books, whether they were old or born, that united us.

It was not their forays into military history or their political rehearsals that interested me, but fiction, which published as Carlos Vale Ferraz. First, yours Blind knotthat Rui de Azevedo Teixeira as well classified as a « modern classic », but also Wolves do not use collarwhose title was based as a glove to the author and would be taken with mastery to the cinema by António-Pedro Vasconcelos, as The immortals.

Never our political positions, diametrically opposite, prevented the so many good conversations we had, about books and not only. This statement seems unnecessary and even absurd, but the dark times we live in force me to make it very clear.

For those who insist on seeing in Matos Gomes only a « April captain » or « left man », I remember the courageous positions he took twenty years ago, when the riots in France.

In late 2005, signing with his literary pseudonym, he did not align with social reasons for these conflicts and wrote in DIARY OF NEWS That “the problem is not the lack, in France and many of the richest European countries, from job subsidies and training courses, it is not the lack of social housing, gyms and cultural centers, it is not the lack of proximity police and animators looking to integrate young people from the second generations of skinny, designated by Beurand Africans to drift, not even resolved, thus throwing money and good advice. The problem is much more complex and profound than the conversion of young delinquents into respected citizens and their resolution far goes beyond the scope of order replacement operations, because the problem is identity and references. About the eager integration, it was categorical: “The belief that integration is possible, that it is possible for a community to forget or abdicate its historical, genetic and cultural identity to assume another, emerges as a permanent lie, a rough hypocrisy exposed and felt by both foreigners and indigenous. Thinking about the future, he concluded that “it is not possible to constitute new national and European realities with those who reject their cultural matrices, their legal system, their values, their worldview. With those who are foreign to the historical process that made Europe what it is. With those who seek, even unconsciously, historical revenge against what Europeans have done to them in the last thousand years, from the crusades to slavery and colonialism. For coexistence to be possible and peaceful we must know that to have the doors open we have to keep the walls that support them. »

Reading these lines in the era of so -called Wokism is the demonstration that Matos Gomes was, in fact, a free spirit.

The last time the VI was in October last year, in a beautiful lunch, where we were side by side, in a heterodox group of friends who, despite so many differences, defend Portugal.

As I wrote to you in the dedication I made you when I offered my first book to Matos Gomes, here I leave him a hug from who is « on the other side of the barricade, but sometimes the same. »