The poetic denunciation of José Cardoso Pires in O Hóspede de Job

Abstract

José Cardoso Pires builds a neo-realist metaphor of an impoverished country, silenced, exploited and devastated by the interest and indifference of foreign neocolonialism, in the Estado Novo. The author focuses his narrative on the rural Alentejo, shaken by hunger and oppression, postponed and without hope, in which the path that brings two characters together, leaving
their village — an old man and a young man without health — , moved by a vain hope of work and sustenance that results in the path of a closed cycle, stands out. This cycle closes with the mutilation of the young man, caught in shooting exercises commanded by foreign officer (Job’s guests), insensitive to the surrounding reality. This trajectory, in a wild landscape, crosses with the
barracks of Cercal, a village in Alentejo, stopped in time, drowned in space, where the miserable life of the soldiers ‘says’ the misery of the national order. Floripes, the young villager, and her grandmother represent the unbroken strength of women, like a ray of hope, contemporary with the death of Catarina Eufémia.