The last book he completed, The Size of the World, It’s full of furniture that creaks at night. Not because the writer had embarked, on his thirtieth novel, on the gothic novel, but because, in the intimate worlds he created, or summoned, nothing could be more frightening than everyday life, expressed in gestures repeated thousands of times: “Loneliness is measured by the creaks of furniture at night, when the armchair in which I sit suddenly becomes uncomfortable, enormous, and the objects increase in size. placematsleaning towards me, listening (…)”
Lobo Antunes thus returned to a theme that had haunted him for a long time: Loneliness, especially that which accompanies old age, when losses become too painful. “[…] Old age is not about stealing our future, it’s about having our past stolen from us, they even took away my parents’ voice, but what you say continues to happen […]”, he wrote in Of the Nature of the Godspublished in 2015.
For him, writing, or the desire for it, has always been there, since he was a boy, as he confessed in an interview with João Céu e Silva (DN, 2017): “What interested me since I can remember was writing. When I started at six years old I hadn’t experienced anything and when I saw a corpse for the first time it was a surprise.” Born in Lisbon (in the neighborhood of Benfica, where the municipal library that bears his name is now located), on September 1, 1942, Antonio was the eldest son of João Alfredo Lobo Antunes, neurologist and assistant to the only Portuguese Nobel laureate in Medicine, Egas Moniz, and Margarida de Almeida Lima.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper The Countrydated 2019, the writer said: “In my parents’ house there were a lot of books; when I was five or six years old, I got up at night to pee, everything was dark, but I saw on the walls that the bad books slept and the good ones, like The Brothers Karamazovby Dostoevsky, had their eyes open: it was the insomnia of good books; and I said to myself ‘I’m going to make books with insomnia.” Alongside the fascination with books, there was a taste for the stories of his neighborhood, at the time far from the center of Lisbon. Like those that were born from observing the comings and goings of the workers at the nearby Fábrica Simões or from his love for Sport Lisboa e Benfica, to the point of having publicly declared that “his dream was to be the José Águas of Literature.”
The brothers were born, all boys: João, Manuel, Nuno, Miguel, Pedro and in this small world, which the writer would evoke in so many writings, novels or chronicles, the figure of the paternal grandfather shone as a reference of affection and affection: “St. Anthony’s Day was the birthday of the most important person in my childhood, and therefore in my life. Even today, when I’m distressed or worried, it’s him I talk toeven today not a week goes by without me remembering him, without seeing him clearly, his hands, his smile, his eyes, his voice. He was a monarchist, Catholic, conservative, Salazarist. He thought the fact that I wrote was silly.” (In Second book of Chronicles). It was this same grandfather, who, in promise, devoted him to the protection of Saint Anthony, when still a baby, the boy was stricken with meningitis. His childhood would, in fact, be marked by illness, since, at the age of three, he had a tuberculosis infection that would send him to bed for many months.
This boys’ home would not, in fact, be the best school for affection, as Antônio himself would recognize several times: “We never had time, did we, for each other, and now it’s late, stupidly late, we’re left looking at each other like this, absent, foreign, full of superfluous hands with no pockets to anchor them.searching, in an empty head, for the words of tenderness that we did not know how to learn, for the gestures of love that we are ashamed of, for the intimacy that terrifies us.” (in Explanation of Birds).
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