Letter to Salman Rushdie (Part 3)

My Mother: Margarida Lieblich Losa,
Was born in 1943 into a very liberal family in a very conservative country. She was five years younger to her sister Alexandra and developed an early interest in literature. In between high-school and University, she travelled to (West) Germany and Italy. She studied Germanics in Coimbra and Lisbon, where she took a very active stand in student protests against the regime.
Around 1964, a student friend of hers tried to persuade my mother to join the Communist Party but she was very hesitant. So he took an unusual step and invited her to “observe” an underground meeting of a student cell in Coimbra. Unfortunately, one of the persons attending this meeting was soon arrested and a list of names duly materialised with the notorious secret police (PIDE).
A couple of agents came to get her, and she was four months in the prison-fort of Caxias. There, she faked insanity when she was interrogated, screaming madly, climbing the walls and trying to overall exaggerate the effects of the sleep torture to which she was briefly submitted. When they stopped the interrogations, she conducted English lessons for her five cell inmates, who naturally became her unwavering friends for life (she never became affiliated with any political party).
After imprisonment, she tried hard to win the lost time in the university schedule and also to win the heart of a young and attractive man. On the verge of the last exam for the term, her hesitant boyfriend dumped her never caring to say why and my mother had a serious nervous breakdown. Sometime during this phase, she also had a clash with her mother and the two never healed completely.
Around 1965 or 66, she travelled West to the new world on a scholarship. She worked on her masters and in a Pizza restaurant. By now, her field of interest (the Neo realist novel and comparative literature) was already established and she started to work on her own novel about student politics in Portugal and the U.S.

One or two days after marrying my father (in a small office near Poughkipsie, NY), she wrote a letter to her parents, telling them of the fait accomplis. The reactions varied from suspicion and coldness on the part of my grandfather and, I suspect, some racism and disgust on the part of my grandmother.

Her doctorate thesis “From the Working Class Romance to the Realist Novel” was written on a grant in midst of travels back to the U.S. and was concluded in 1988. However, it took time for her career to become established in the University at Porto. By the early nineties it did and my mother was travelling constantly over the world, especially to international comparative literature conferences. Her responsibilities and achievements in her field soared and in 1996 she prepared to take another sabbatical and travel to the U.S.

By now, the visa requirements included a full medical check-up.

She fought hard but cancer is unforgiving. She would not waste time, she tried to finish some things, start others. She tried to finish her novel. I don’t know if she did – it’s all in box alongside with notebooks about the characters and the method and so on. I’ve just found and opened that box yesterday.

(End of Part 3)