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Fiction, politics, memory and testimony: “Os salteadores”, from Jorge de Sena

Abstract

The marks left by the Spanish Civil War in the work and life of Jorge de Sena, who was nineteen years old when the conflict ended, by Franco, on April 1, 1939, the day of the lies, are extensive and profound. Some aspects of the 1936-39 war and its Portuguese consequences, experienced or witnessed by the young poet, were transmuted by him into fiction, with emphasis on the novel Sinais de Fogo, published posthumously, in 1979, and for Os Grão- Captains, a sequence of short stories published in 1976 and written in 1961-62, in the heart of his Brazilian exile, in these “black years when it seemed that Salazarism would never end” (Sena, 2016: 235).
In Os Grão-Capitães, one of the short stories, “A Grã-Canária”, even seems to continue, in fictional terms, the suspended end of Sinais de Fogo, as it plunges into the epicenter of the Franco revolt, from which, prodigiously, emerges a love, an impossible one, iberian, but redeeming in the instant of its duration, between a cadet from the Portuguese navy and a Spanish girl that political persecution and poverty force into the misery of prostitution.
Another key story for the construction of the literary memory of this Iberian and European war is “Os salteadores”, also from Os Grão-Capitães. This tale, based on the case of republican combatants who, trapped by the advance of Francoist troops, took refuge in the border of Portugal, constitutes a reaffirmation of the importance of Jorge de Sena and Portuguese literature for the Spanish war memorial, that shows that the time of a war exceeds its duration and its geography extends beyond its borders.