Two stories from far away

There is something worth noticing in two cultural stories that do not seek each other out but end up side by side, and that together say something precise about the way the Anglo-Saxon world — and the Iberian one — tells certain myths: with the reverence of those who know these myths do not belong to them.

Peter Jackson has told El País that he is already writing the new Tintin film. The news is small in form and large in substance, because Tintin is not a character: he is a system of narrative values, a way of being in the world built from curiosity without cynicism, adventure without gratuitous violence, friendship as moral compass. Hergé constructed something that resembles a cosmology more than a comic strip, and everyone who touches it — Jackson knows this well, having already produced the 2011 film with Spielberg — measures themselves against an inheritance that does not forgive approximations. That Jackson is writing — not developing, not evaluating: writing — is already a signal of seriousness. Whether seriousness will be enough remains to be seen.

The story of Cesária Évora as told by the Guardian is of an entirely different nature, and an entirely different urgency. The title the British newspaper chose — we must keep her name alive — carries within it a melancholy that the Cape Verdean singer would have recognised immediately, because all her music was built around saudade, that untranslatable Portuguese word that is nostalgia but also the presence of the past in the body, a pain that does not want to heal because healing would mean forgetting. Évora was a bar singer — literally, from the local tavern — who became a global star without changing anything about herself: not her rough voice, not the shoes she removed on stage, not the cigarette, not the language. The world came to her, not the other way around. It is one of the most beautiful and rarest stories in twentieth-century music, and the fact that the Guardian feels the need to remember her — to keep her alive — tells us that popular culture still has a memory when it chooses to use it.

Two distant stories, one thin thread: both speak of fidelity. Jackson faithful to Hergé, the Guardian faithful to Évora. That is no small thing, in a moment when cultural fidelity has become a rare commodity.