A fast footnote on Luiz Pacheco

I was watching a documentary on Luiz Pacheco, a Portuguese writer.
He is of Saramago’s generation.
And a bissexual libertine.
Ever poor, he loved very young women.
Getting a fifteen year-old pregnant, he was forced to marry her; the only one who was close in age to his own.
After a year, he turned to her younger sister.
The three of them lived together during a spell, plus with other lovers and all their common children.
He then wrote A Comunidade (The Community), which I couldn’t find yet.
Seems to be his centrepiece; it portrays that period.
His women are always his intellectual inferiors, a son reports.
Those first two were peasants.
He loved to teach them to read, that son reports again.
He lived of his friends’ goodwill; he classified them by the amount of money he could borrow each time.

* * *

Once a friend asked Pacheco for help with a translation.
It was Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique.
Pacheco gets paid in advance.
Ever delaying the work, he kept on saying he was almost done with it.
The deadline arrived, yet no one got killed at least for two more months.
Being by then under constant pressure from his friend the employer, he finally gets it started.
He put his typewriter on the desk and the original on the side; no dictionary.
He read each sentence aloud and then typed out the translation.
For every word he didn’t know the meaning of he wrote a vulgarism: cunt, fuck, cock, the lot, all in red.
He handed the translation over to his friend, as a draft.
His friend was under stress due to the deadlines and raced to the editor.
The editor was under stress and raced to the printer.
The printer was obedient and italicised each word typed in red, as was the custom, without questioning anything. "You know... These literary people…"
Being told about what happened with the draft, Pacheco raced to the printer, halted the production on time.
"Some last clarifications must be added," he said.
He replaced every swearword by what it ought to be there.
Except for one footnote.
On page 273 of volume I, one can read:

Ezequiel (...); several critics were displeased with the order the Lord gave him, to eat, for three hundred and ninety days in a row, wheat, rye and corn bread covered in shit.

It was what we would call today a shitty sandwich.
The first edition was later corrected.
Pacheco’s name isn’t part of any edition.
His friend says it was the worst translation he ever saw printed under his own name.
I took the two volumes with me last year from what’s left of my father’s library.
Opening volume I on page 273, I found the footnote I translated above.