Jacinto Lucas Pires draws on a long and productive career as a writer.
Lucas Pires writes novels, short stories, theatre plays, screenplays, and music. His latest novel is “Oração a que faltam joelhos” (“A prayer with no knees”, Porto Editora, 2020). During the lockdown he published a book of short stories: “Doutor Doente” (“Patient Doctor”, Húmus, 2021).
The sound of the river, the water running and falling, has a mellow quality that envelops everything. And on the bank a blue-hatted scarecrow keeps watch: a representative of everything not shown, everything unsaid. Here everything seems secret.
This text takes flight. Words that ascend, turn, go, crossing the oldest blue of October skies, flying over streets and houses, fields and factories, towns and villages, passing close to the Douro’s fertile furrows, marvellously ignorant of all that winding beauty, thinking that there drawing and history are synonymous, until “Boom!” A wind invites them to rise and there they go, soaring refreshed on clean air, breathing forgetfully, until they start to mix with colours against the sun and become just light, silence, questioning, feeling—to reappear later with a bang in a completely different and lofty place known as the Castle of Bragança.
Without marking time, the words follow the streets, witnessing how stone becomes a village, looking at the little yellow flowers gracefully distracted along the roadside, following the smell of smoke to the last house, or the first.
Tell us about something you saw that you had never seen before.
I had never been to Rio de Onor. Now, it's as if I have always known the place.
If you had to tell a child about your trip, what would you say?
It was a crazy journey around the top of the country. Some were writing drawings, others were drawing words.
What was your favourite moment of this trip?
It's hard to pick a favourite moment. But perhaps it was the group laughing fit at dinner in Ponte de Lima.
If you had to recommend [the region] to friends, what would you say?
If I had to recommend Northern Portugal to friends, I would say, “Go with plenty of time because Northern Portugal goes on for ever…”
