Baltasar and Blimunda

Baltasar and Blimunda (first published in Portuguese as Memorial do Convento) is a 1982 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago. Set in the eighteenth century, it takes place during the construction of the famous Baroque and Neoclassical monastic palace, the Convent of Mafra, in Portugal—a place that is now one of the country’s most famous sites. A young man and woman, Baltasar and Blimunda, meet in Lisbon and fall in love in the midst of an international war. While they undergo their own existential struggles, they encounter important figures in Portugal’s history, such as Padre Bartolomeu de Gusmão, a priest who invented a precursor to the airplane, and Domenico Scarlatti, a famous composer. The novel is highly experimental in its use of diction and syntax, moving, often abruptly, between verbose description and stream-of-consciousness. The book was adapted into an opera, Blimunda in 1990.

The novel opens as Baltasar sete-Sois is discharged from the Portuguese army, having just lost one of his hands in combat. A fallen soldier without work or a clear path ahead, he goes to Lisbon. There, he hopes to find a program that will give him a pension for his service in the army. He gains the financial support of the Padre Bartolomeu de Gusmão, working as his protégé. There, the young woman Blimunda joins him. The Padre enlists Baltasar and Blimunda to work on his model of the Passarola, which he imagines to be the first airship.

Blimunda is the well-known daughter of a notorious heretic gifted with the power to peer beyond surfaces and preconceptions, seeing the objects that lie underneath ordinary scenes and the complex forces that lurk beneath the appearances of life. Blimunda’s father uses his power to report the locations of lost possessions, as well as the causes of sick people’s symptoms. Baltasar learns that Blimunda is also endowed with a supernatural power: she is able to see the future.



While Baltasar and Blimunda work on the Padre’s physical model for the aircraft, he embarks on a separate quest to find the “ether,” a buoyant substance which he believes holds the key to flight. He tells Blimunda that the ether is contained in the wills of humans and compels her to travel Portugal extracting the wills from dying men and women. He justifies the task, assuring all involved that the people’s souls are separate things and will remain intact. Blimunda successfully collects enough wills to fill the orb-like tanks that power the Passarola. Their first flight succeeds, shocking even the Padre, who nearly goes into a psychotic state. The Padre begins to fear that the rest of society, upon learning of his invention and the steps he took to accomplish it, will have him burned. He immediately stops the project and cuts off all ties from Baltasar, Blimunda, and society, as he knows it. Before parting ways, he declares his goodwill for the couple and his desire that they live meaningful lives.

Balthasar goes on to work on the construction of the convent at Mafra. An obsession with the flying machine continues to occupy him, and, to a lesser extent, Blimunda. The convent takes more than two decades to build. In the end, it fails to become an unadulterated spiritual refuge, since it represents so much toil fueled by the ego of mankind. After it is completed, Baltasar is trapped aboard the airship, which again goes airborne. Blimunda looks for him for nearly a decade. When she finds him, he is nearly dead. She accepts her lover’s will into her arms, just as she did when they first sourced fuel for the Passarola. The lovers realize that their invention was never the source of their triumph; rather, it was their love and sacrifice for each other.