Luiz Pacheco - Life

Life

He was born in an old house at Rua da Estefânia in the São Sebastião da Pedreira district. His father was a civil servant and an amateur musician. Only child of a middle-class family with roots in Alentejo, soon Luiz Pacheco had read all the books of his family considerable-sized library. Since early age he was asthmatic and short-sighted, and later in his life it became impossible for him to read, something rather cruel to anyone, but in particular to a person who needed to read to feel sane. He was arrested twice while a minor for romantic involvements with young girls. He compulsively married one of these girls who became pregnant when he was 18-years old. She was 15-years old. After one year, he turned to her younger sister. The three of them lived together during a spell, with all his children. It was then that he wrote A Comunidade (The Community), his centrepiece; it portrays that period. His women were always his intellectual inferiors, the first two were peasants. He loved to teach them to read. He had eight children from three different wives.

He studied in Camões high school, being the best student of his year, and later he was enrolled at the Faculdade de Letras of the University of Lisbon, dropping out due to financial troubles. Mário Soares, Urbano Tavares Rodrigues and Artur Ramos were his classmates. He used to say his highschool grade was 18 (out of 20), while Urbano Tavares Rodrigues’ was 12. Urbano, a somewhat popular Portuguese writer, was one of Pacheco’s ‘favourite enemies’. After dropping out from the University of Lisbon, Pacheco decided to become an autodidact, and he did manage it. He was a compulsive reader and always had an analytic point of view, as one could see from some of his books, always underlined and with his own comments.

In 1946 he got a job at the state-run Inspecção Geral de Espectáculos as a fiscal for theatre plays, music shows and movies. Some people say he was a censor, but nothing could be farther away the truth. In fact, he saw this as an opportunity to watch plays and films for free. There was never a single play or movie prohibited or altered due to his action. This was perhaps a way of antagonize a dictatorship which he always condemned with all his strengths. But then he decided that he couldn’t take it and left. Since that time he never had a proper job. He wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, including O Globo, Bloco, Afinidades, O Volante, Diário Ilustrado, Diário Popular and Seara Nova, he made translations, and was an excellent proof reader. A libertine, always living through hardships, he depended on his friends' good will; he used to classify them according the amount of money he could borrow from them each time. He sold books and pamphlets edited by Contraponto for survival. When there was money to spend he was extremely generous toward his friends and people in need.

Along the years of financial instability, he lived in many houses, rented rooms, pensions, all over the country, and many important documents have been lost in these constant moves. Charismatic places for Pacheco, where he wrote many of his works were Caldas da Raínha and Setúbal, but, as he once said, being away from Lisbon blurred his view and critical sense. He never had an affiliation to any political party, although in his late years he publicly asked the Portuguese Communist Party to accept him, because he wanted to be warm when he died, and what better than the Party’s flag! This irreverent posture, always laughing at stupidity, made his life a living hell. But he couldn’t live it any other way. A dedicated literary and cultural critic, he became famous (and feared) for his sarcastic and irreverent critical writings. He denounced intellectual dishonesty and the censorship imposed by Salazar's Estado Novo regime.

Tall, thin and skinny, bald, wearing eyeglasses with thick lenses, dressing second-hand clothes (sometimes ragged and undersized ones), hypersensitive to alcohol (he enjoyed red wine and beer), hypochondriac, always foreseeing his own death (due to asthma and a poor heart condition), cynical but honest, paradoxical, he is a worthy heir of Luís de Camões, Bocage, Gomes Leal or Fernando Pessoa.