Memoirs of His Widow

Abstract

Hermínio and I had only one chance to meet—the mutual friend who introduced us was about to leave the LSE—and we seized it. Ten days after our initial meeting, at the end of June 1957, we met in the early afternoon at the then Academy Cinema in Oxford Street and saw Robert Bresson’s film Un condamné à mort s’est echappé, set in occupied France during World War II. Hermínio then took me to one of the then existing cartoon cinemas at Leicester Square, and then I took him to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where Verdi’s Il trovatore, with its suitably Iberian setting, was being performed. The next day we went to see the film of Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet, also set in World War II. And so we have continued—more or less—ever since.

A slightly different version of the following memoir first appeared, in Portuguese, in a previous festschrift (Margaret Martins (2015), Uma Única Chance de Encontro, in Domínio das Tecnologias: Ensaios em Homenagem a Hermínio Martins, ed. Maria Ângela D’Incao, São Paulo: Letras à Margem, 295–301). Margaret Martins wishes to retain the use of the present tense for this new volume, since the original text was written when Hermínio was still with us.