confirmed in the ability of each image to stimulate other discourses, more or less guided by a discipline, but which can always be framed within the author’s work. Nothing is ever read from the perspective of an empty mind, as if what one reads were not destined to complete, question or disturb what has already been read. The look at Cabral’s work proposed here, therefore, naturally invites other interpretations, not randomly or through mere accumulation, but rather due to the fact that the methodology, the gaze and the disciplines tie in with the direction his work has taken above all since his second book. From reportage to diary-writing, letter-writing, sketching and travel literature, these are the possible points of a constellation in which Cabral’s work encounters a (or many) possible meaning(s). In the journalistic field, mention should be made of Susana Moreira Marques’s reportage in Trás-os-Montes, with photos by André Cepeda (Agora e na Hora da Nossa Morte, Tinta da China), and the work of Alexandra Lucas Coelho in Oriente Próximo (Relógio d’Água), two possible approaches to the work of a reporter, in which fulfilling the rules of observation and journalistic report coexist with a narrative approach with literary overtones. The travel diary is represented here by Somerset Maugham and The Gentleman in the Parlour (Vintage Classics), the author’s account of his travels in old Burma, Siam and Indochina where his lack of interest in the exotic and his indifference towards a certain idea of heroism common to travel accounts of the time are the mark of a style, but above all of a way of seeing the other. To the work of Maugham can be added The Russian Journal by Lewis Carroll (Dover Publications), Galiza 1905 by Fialho de Almeida (O Independente), Crossing Antarctica by Will Steger and Jon Bowermaster (Menasha Ridge Press) and Paul Theroux’s classic, The Great Railway Bazaar (Quetzal). In the field of graphic diaries, two pieces of work which have an affinity with that of Cabral’s in terms of methodology and the overlapping of text and image areViagem ao Curdistám para apanhar estrelas by Séchu Sende (self-published) and Traços de Viagem by Manuel João Ramos (Bertrand). Besides these, which are easily classifiable in a taxonomy of approaches to travel and an account of what is seen, three books are included whose structure does not fit into any established genre: by Bruce Chatwin, one of the most recognised names in the so-called field of travel literature, there is Debaixo do Sol, a volume of letters sent by the author to his family and friends from various destinations (a successful example of letter-writing as a travel record); John Banville, in Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, interlaces diary-writing, political reflection and fictional discourse to create a portrait of the city which owes more to his searching gaze than to the well-known tourist and heritage spots; and Macau, by Antoine Volodine, with photos by Olivier Aubert (Seuil), is a fictional account in which there is a desire to narrate the spatial – and a specific temporal – aspect of Macau in light of a certain aura of invisibility which surrounds gestures, conspiracies and attitudes that most visitors to the Chinese city fail to notice. Finally, we include a work by Ryszard Kapuscinski, a recognised master of the journalistic field, who in The Other (Verso) presents six lectures which reflect on alterity, a facet essential to travel and the travel report, both for its confirmation and the many possible ways of deconstructing it.
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To these books proposed here as a form of completing, questioning and dialoguing with the work of Ricardo Cabral we add a collection of tools with distinct functions, but with a possible nexus: they help to reveal the world. Seeing is not an exclusively visual action, but rather a way of seeking to understand, a basis on which senses and narratives are constructed. This is what the authors of these books do in very different ways and it is what Cabral does, both when he records what he sees and when he fictionalises what he might have seen.
The gaze constructs the world Discussing whether a falling tree makes any noise if there is no one in the forest to hear it is a matter for philosophy. It is not that it has no relevance (on the contrary), but the essence of what it discusses has less to do with the journalistic notion of reporting and other representations which seek to show a certain reality. What is certain is that what is depicted and shown, regardless of the disciplines or the tools used, is always a mediation between an author and a reality. The value of the discourse resulting from this mediation lies not in its capacity to ‘tell the truth’ – an ontologically impossible aspiration in its absolute form – but rather in the way it constructs what it wants to show from what it sees, what it can see. The examples of journalistic and literary discourse, distant frontiers with common azimuths, are an example of this. In Cabral’s work, this construction gets stronger with each book but its roots can be glimpsed in his earliest work. In a gesture which interlaces the desire to report with the need to understand or at least to ponder, what the author does is to construct a space, to people it and to assume it as a source of various meanings – that is, to construct the world. It is pointless, therefore, to try to see in books like Israel Sketchbook and New Born. Dez dias no Kosovo, and in some stories in Pontas Soltas or the most recent Comic Transfer, a representation of the reality of each of the places which motivated them. The realism imprinted on the images, via the use of colour from photos taken at the scene, and the possibility of recognising the spaces through the drawing are not signs of an absolutely accurate depiction of reality and the truth, elements which contribute little to the seriousness of a representation such as these and which are aimed more at rewarding a lazy reading than challenging a studied one (observe, by way of example, pages 124 and 125 of Israel Sketchbook in which the author represents a segment of the city of Jerusalem including the Dome of the Rock, which the narrator warns “is not really there, but which I forced into the drawing”). Another author could have been in the same places and opted to focus his attention on the people he may have met or seen, on the narrative of the conflicts – the geopolitical ones and the daily ones experienced everywhere – or on stories based on reports. By the same token, this hypothetical other author would not give us a representation of reality to read for the simple reason that it is unattainable. What Cabral depicts in these two books, as well as in Pontas Soltas (even when the fiction is used as the main vehicle, such as in “Lágrimas de Elefante”), is his gaze at the reality he is able to experience. With this gaze, Cabral constructs the world which he shows us, and that is no small gesture within the scope of creation.