The biggest problem with hate is that once someone starts it, it never ends.
In 2016 I met the writer Salman Rushdie. We were together for three days, just 72 hours, but it was so intense that we became friends and have been texting regularly ever since.
Our subject was always freedom and the dangers it faces. This freedom that made him hide from hatred because of the “Satanic Verses” and also because of them, made him feel free and a citizen of the world, in his beloved New York.
It was in October, in the literary village of Óbidos, in Portugal, during the literary festival Folio, which takes place every year in one of the most picturesque locations in Portugal, that I met him for the first time. The “damned” writer was, after all, a simple and amusing man.
Incredulous, I was dumbfounded when I read the news that hatred had finally found Josep Anton precisely in New York, the city of which he considered himself a citizen, in the most classic and purest form.
Josep Anton was the forced pseudonym in which Salman Rushdie hid from the fatwa that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued in 1989, when he was the supreme leader of Iran, and which later resulted in the book “Josep Anton, A Memory”, published in 2012 when the shadow of the hatred decreed by the Ayatollah was already thought to be extinct.
I learned this from the writer himself when, in 2016, after much insistence from the Portuguese Secret Services to closely monitor his visit to Portugal and “provide the necessary security”, Salman confided in me almost in jest (so convincingly that I believed): “We don’t need these people—tell them. [a sentença de morte] It’s been settled between Iran and the UK for ten years, now it’s just show-off”.
And so it was. On our visit to Pilar del Río at the Saramago Foundation in Lisbon, he “forced” me to abandon my car in the garden of São Pedro de Alcântara and lie to the police, who were chasing us everywhere in an indiscreet red car, saying we were somewhere else.
Without paying the slightest attention to any security detail or showing any concern, Salman asked me to be photographed next to the immortal Portuguese writers, whose work he knew well.
On the esplanade of A Brasileira do Chiado, he sat on the mega-famous statue in which the bronze Fernando Pessoa of Lagoa Henriques shares the garden bench with millions of tourists. Then, at Café Martinho da Arcada, a century-old bar in Praça do Comércio, he crossed his legs as in Almada’s painting, sitting at the same table that is reserved for Fernando Pessoa until the end of eternity.
But 33 years after the death sentence handed down to him by Iran’s religious leader at the time — even without ever having read the satanic verses, as his son later confessed to The New York Times — and when he was no longer predictable, an anachronistic fanatic, without any practical sense, reminded the world that hatred, once begun, never ends.
