Luiz Pacheco

Luiz Pacheco (May 7, 1925 in Lisbon – January 5, 2008 in Montijo) was a writer, publisher, polemicist and literary critic (mainly Portuguese literature). He was most proud of his work as a publisher. In fact, Contraponto released works by many Portuguese writers (Herberto Helder, Natália Correia, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, Vergílio Ferreira, António Maria Lisboa), at the time unknown, and was the first to publish Sade in Portugal.

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.

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