At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  There are only two cities in Portugal: Lisbon with nearly a million inhabitants and growing every year, like all southern European cities; and Oporto, the wine and textile city in the north, where the revolutions have traditionally started, with 300,000 people. Lisbon is the most splendidly situated capital in Europe. Something of the sparkle of Venice and the pleasure of Naples is in its character. The great river Tagus, cutting its way through Castile, widens in the softer Portuguese landscape and opens into sealike lagoons as it comes toward the estuary where Lisbon glitters, so that far inland one can see the tall russet sails of the luggers moving, as if they were some magical landcraft, between the prairies and the vines. At Lisbon itself the estuary is widening fast and is marked all along by the chalky flush of pretty villages and little towns. A nation seems to be gathering itself jubilantly to look at the sea.

  At first sight Lisbon looks like a sedate Oriental arrangement of clean-colored plaster boxes, cut sharply into the sky. It is built on a great many short hills, nobly crowned here by a castle, there by a palace or by the dome or tower of a church; but the center of the city has the dignity and order of all creations of the eighteenth century. It was rebuilt after the great catastrophe which shook the Age of Reason everywhere in Europe and was indeed used in Voltaire’s Candide—the earthquake of the 1750s. To this Lisbon owes its eighteenth-century squares, above all the elegant Black Horse Square, on the waterfront, which is often compared to Saint Mark’s in Venice. The crowds who cross by ferry from the opposite bank of the Tagus, a mile or more away, step off the boat to stand at once before this palatial entrance. From here the city rises into breakneck hills paved in skiddy black-and-white marble mosaic. (One might exaggerate and say half of Portugal is paved in marble and walled in tiles.) Up these steep streets the yellow trams are always groaning, the cars changing gear, the crowds climbing or mounting by short funicular or by the astonishing street lift in the center of the city. One looks down over red roofs and gardens upon the Rossio, where the crowds stand about on the pavement and sit in the cafés. Descending to the middle of the square, one can see a small section of that waved puzzle-paving of marble which once covered the whole space and got the name of Rolling Stone Square from every British sailor who tried to cross it in his cups; it has never puzzled the abstemious, coffee-drinking Portuguese.

  Above the Rossio is the Avenida—a wide imitation Champs-Élysées with flowering trees—and beyond are the fine modern quarters of a city beautifully planned to please the eye with its colored walls. Always the tactful adapters of foreign things, the Portuguese have taken the violence and megalomania out of modern architecture. They have colored it, calmed it and set it in trees and flowers, for Portugal is a subtropical garden. The flowers hang from the balconies, the long parades of scarlet and yellow canna from the West Indies civilize the avenues; bougainvillea and the blue-trumpeted convolvulus hang like colored foam from the iron-gated villas, creepers flower on the walls and, in the wide walks under the trees, acacia and mimosa sweeten the air. Capital cities tend to public display and monumental magnificence, but the public things in Lisbon have a familiarity and grace, as though public splendor were tempered by private fantasy.

  And that is what one finds all over Portugal. It is above all a country of family life closely connected with the farms and the land. Victorian in its domestic living but, as in Spain, with some passive, torpid inheritance from the Orient in it. Lisbon is masculine, not feminine like Paris; nor do the sexes seem to challenge each other, as they do in Spain, in formal battles of eye-warfare and display. There are more homely women than there are alarming beauties. Men and women pursue their lives separately and, in the middle classes, women rule their lives by the strictest appearance of propriety: “I could not be seen at such and such an hour in such and such a street.” They rarely go out alone; or if they do, they provide their families, their aunts and cousins with proper explanations. They delight demurely in an elaborate web of conventional intrigue.

  In the working classes and among the peasantry, there is a marked difference of custom, for here the women work in the fields, wash clothes in the rivers, spin wool, mend the nets. Women are the great carriers of the country. They walk like queens, with a basket of wash, a pumpkin, a water jar, a load of sticks on their heads. I have seen a pair of them loaded up by men with a heavy glass door or a spring mattress—talking and gesticulating as they go without concern. And, since everything in Portugal is sooner or later turned into a fiesta, the women carriers of the country can be said to have their formal celebration in the procession of the Tabuleiros by the river and gardens of Tomar. The girls, each accompanied by a young man, carry on their heads new loaves of bread skewered by canes into a high pyramid and decorated with flowers. It is the stateliest of all the Portuguese processions.

  The fishwives of Lisbon are the most famous community of head carriers. It is sometimes believed that they are descendants of the Phoenicians, as are also the curiously costumed, silent fishermen at Nazaré up the coast, where the wives sit mending the nets on the shingle, side by side with the teams of oxen who drag the moonlike fishing boats up the beach. Whether they are Phoenicians or not, the Lisbon fishwives are a strong-hipped, strong-armed race, with iron calves and iron voices. In their bunched cotton petticoats and colored scarves they come shouting out of the market by the Tagus, carrying heavy trays of fish on their heads, swinging both arms free as they stride or half trot along, the trays turning without tipping as they glance at the traffic. The feet of these women are large and broad and scarred, sometimes bandaged, and the law has lately obliged them to wear slippers. They race in pairs up the narrow side streets and there start bawling, take their slippers off and put them on the fish until they catch sight of a policeman. Then on they go again. The fishwives of Lisbon are the powerful matriarchy of the port.

  You sit in the early evening in a café under the trees of the Avenida, where the cars are racing in the rush hour. The bootblack, the youth with his tray of ties, the pencil sketcher who draws your portrait and leaves it lying about if you don’t want it, come to the table. They do not pester. Almost shyly they go away. There are no Portuguese apéritifs; one or two men drink iced beer, but most are drinking the small cups of strong black Brazilian or Angolan coffee. The especially sober add a little water to it. In the bar a man here or there drinks vinho verde, the young heady acid wine from the north, out of a china mug.

  The restaurants fill up with solemn family parties—father and mother, son-in-law and daughter—who eat heavily. There is a habit of serving a spoonful of rice, a piece of lettuce or raw tomato with nearly everything, even fish and sucking pig. The most powerful dish is bacalhau, the stew of dried cod served in a bed of sliced potatoes, and the ways of cooking it are noted by connoisseurs in every town. It is the national dish and an acquired taste, for it is preferred strong. The oil on the salad will be strong, too, for the Portuguese like it on the rancid side and let their olives rot a little before the oil is made. The portions are huge and the light wines are good, though often thick to the palate. No one drinks port; that is an English or a French aberration.

  Toward eleven o’clock one goes to the Bairro Alto or to the Alfama, the warren on the hill where first the Jews and then the Negro slaves lived and listened to the street songs of the city.

  What cante flamenco is to Spain, the fado is to Portugal, though the only thing they have in common is the popular, even vulgar nature of their origin. In some tavern of the Alfama or in a simple nightclub of the Bairro Alto one can hear these popular songs, sometimes (it is true) in a debased jingling song-hit form, but quite often in their true melodious, insidious manner.

  The genuine fado is melancholy and melting. Three guitarists come; two playing small, round Portuguese guitars, a tinkling and sweet instrument which runs on like a woman’s voice, the third touching the rhythm with the deeper-toned Spanish instrument. Presently the singer gets up—either a woman in black, wearing the long black woollen shawl of
the people, or a man in his most sober suit. The singer’s face becomes trancelike; he clasps his hands before him, leans his head back so that he is all throat, closes his eyes in an expression of surrender and pain. And then out comes the little song, some ballad of parted lovers, of loss, despair, longing or resignation, perhaps of prostitutes and criminals or of popular religion. The tune runs and falls to an undulating rhythm—some have suggested the fado was the song of the fishermen as they came home on the Atlantic swell—it has lilting pauses on suspended notes which break suddenly like sobs and create a new mood, and then it either fades away to a hesitating murmur or skirls out in a melodramatic climax. The diphthongs, the nasals, the narrow and manipulated vowels of Portuguese, in themselves give a delicacy to the simple words.

  The fado catches something of the Portuguese proneness to mood rather than to passion. Two key words occur over and over again: sentimental and the famous, untranslatable saudade, to which these untrained voices bring a melting power. Saudade is sometimes called nostalgia, but it is not quite that. It is a longing for something that can never be defined; or, perhaps, a mixture of the vague longings of the Celt (for the Celtic strain is strong in Portugal) corrected by Latin realism: but the longings are unattainable. The result is a mood of stoicism in despair which, from the days of the early terrible sea voyages to India, has been fundamental in Portuguese character.

  Some writers say the fado was taken to Brazil by Negro slaves and given back to Lisbon when the Negroes were brought here, and there is indeed a blurred, plaintive, African softness in the song. A classical fado of a more polished and lyrical kind is sung in Coimbra, the university city. It is composed and sung by parties of students in their black cloaks as they walk under the poplars and cypresses and acacias of the romantic Mondego River. In Coimbra, the fado is aristocratic; it is a street song no longer.

  Portugal is a small country, but it has those intense differences of regional life that astonish the traveler in both countries of the Iberian Peninsula. The Tagus cuts the country in two. In Estremadura one is in country of high rolling hills, with pine and eucalyptus that break into rice fields, maize plots and olive groves in the steep yellow places. There are small colored villages each with its white church, framed in gray stone and embossed with the seignorial flourishes of baroque ornament, its beds of brilliant flowers. Hills of vines break the woodlands. There is the strong smell of pine; the yellow irises grow near the watercourses, there are cyclamen and jonquils; bougainvillea and convolvulus hang in purple and blue cascades on the walls of the houses; hydrangeas bush by the roadside, with the cactus and the aloe. A land of kind climate, without frost, for a simple, dreaming, yet hardworking, people.

  At Coimbra, the elegant university crowns the steep hills of the old town (which, alas, the Portuguese with their mania for modernity and restoration are beginning to pull down) looking over the long gracious valley of its river. There are superb libraries in Portugal, and Coimbra’s library, with its lacquered stepladders and its profuse, painted ceilings, surpasses the elegant library of Mafra. In Coimbra no first-year student is allowed out in the street after six in the evening, and if he is caught by the “bulldogs” they have the right to shave his hair off then and there. They do. (I notice in the last twenty years the students are giving up their fine black cloaks.)

  In all that is decorative the Portuguese have delighted and excelled. This happy region is fertile, but it is never far to the mountains, to a tougher mountain people, to the rock villages of Beira, and to the wild places of Trasos-Montes, the forgotten province on the Spanish frontier. At Oporto, in the north, we enter the most Celtic part of Portugal, the gayest and (as they quickly tell you) the hardest working. This region is the Minho, with its wool towns, its textile towns, its small felt factories, its timber, its wine. In the vineyards the grape gatherers and treaders wander from quinta to quinta to the music of accordion and guitar, and tread the grapes to their sparkling tunes until the treading is itself a dance. For miles and miles in the Minho the vines grow on trellises and are trained to the poplars so that the whole country is garlanded, festooned and boxed in vine. The wide-horned oxen draw the carts on the road and the plows in the fields between the silvery veiling of birch trees and solid chestnuts and pines. As the infinitely slow train bumps along there is the twang of a guitar at the stations of small towns, the cries of the bread sellers and water sellers; the black-suited, wooden-faced peasant walks with his umbrella against the sun or the rain, or with his long crooklike stick; a girl will walk with a pumpkin or a washing bundle on her head. Under the shade of her vines, where an ox is turning the waterwheel, an old lady will be working her spinning wheel, passing the pink wool through her hands. Wool hangs bleaching in the gardens and barefooted women tread the maize or scutch the flax.

  Small charcoal fires are lit everywhere for the cooking; mechanics, plowmen, farmers buy their tools for the year; and in the autumn the chestnuts are stacked. The chestnut roaster sits up in the alleys of the fair, and placid ladies sit before their little tables with clean white cloths spread on them, two or three glasses, cakes and a bottle of syrup, almost like a doll’s tea party, for those who want a drink. Rarely does one see a drunken man at these celebrations. The Portuguese wines are light, and drunkenness and violence are frowned on. Even to raise the voice is not liked; the imperative is never used; orders are framed as questions.

  Oporto stands on a steep ravine crossed by spectacular hooplike bridges. It is a city of granite and gray—severe, rather slummy, rimed by fogs and struck by rain in the autumn and winter. On the south bank of the river are the port-wine lodges. The wine is brought down the river on the strange sailing barges with their galleylike prows and their long, curved tillers, and the black casks in the lodges stand in rows like some solemn and full-bellied priesthood. There the blenders work, the coopers hammer at the casks and pairs of men seesaw the barrels as they wash them out. In a room like a dispensary the tasters sit, working out their formulas; they consider the rows of labeled glasses, take a mouthful on their valuable palates and then give the ritual spit of their profession. They must be born with the palate; no vocational training center or university course can give it to them. They are the high priests, and some have a look of rubicund sanctity and of exquisite martyrdom to the vine.

  South of the Tagus is a different Portugal, something at once more Spanish and, eventually, more African. The country of the cork forests has begun, the bare hilly lands of scrub and olive, where goats are herded and pigs fatten on acorns. The prairies of the horse breeders and the bull breeders are in the upper valley of the Tagus near Vila Franca de Xira, where the bunched-up country women kilt their skirts and tie them round their legs like trousers, and the men carry their day’s food to their work in pots made of cork, which act like vacuum flasks and keep the food hot.

  If one travels first of all toward the perfect little town of Évora, the country loses its garden aspect and opens into a rising and tawny plateau. As in the wildernesses of eastern Spain, the air here seems drier and more limpid, the sky takes on an extra height; at night the brilliant hard stars are close to the soil. Here are large estates, and mournful songs are sung by the brushwood fires in the evenings. The men walk into the arcaded square of the white town of Évora wearing jackets of sheepskin and the long, green stocking hats. They spread the colored saddlebags on their donkeys, or carry striped blankets over their shoulders. There is a thin garlic soup to eat, stewed tripe with bits of sausage to follow, boiled potatoes and sliced tomato and the rancid olive oil. On gray days, as in Spain, the sky is fixed like some thundery and motionless sculpture over the scrubby, silent, monotonous land. One passes chalk-white villages, each house framed in a border of blue wash, and they are as startlingly clean inside as they look outside. A town like Évora is a museum piece of the baroque. Every house has its seventeenth-century flourish, every church its extravagance. The barley-sugar columns of the altar may be in indigo or blue. Like all Portuguese towns Évo
ra seems to be populated only by men. Male voices echo in the tiled walls of the cafés, men in the billiard rooms above, in the market square, in the buses, in the shops. I counted only thirty women coming out of the cinema there in the evening, and at least three hundred men.

  On the south side of the Tagus one drives through cork forests, where the tree trunks, stripped every nine years, seem to be wearing dark ginger-colored nylons. Here the gypsies are camped; slender and smoky-skinned, beautiful in carriage, there is no gypsy like the Iberian, but, unlike the Spanish, the Portuguese gypsy is not a dancer. One moves on to the Arrabida, the southward-facing mountain range, where there is an almost Mediterranean stretch of coast to Setúbal, the delightful sardine town, one of the great packing places of the country. The wide, clean avenues of palms and flowering trees, the acacia and the jacaranda, the pretty, colored houses, the candid sky, give this place of fishing boats an air of well-being and gaiety. There is a graceful, odd church with columns which seem to be of three loosely twisted hanks of stone, like yarn or rope. This is the work of Boytac, often called the inventor of Manoeline architecture—that form of baroque which draws so many of its motifs from nautical themes.

  One is traveling now over open brown hills, with windmills set in threes or fours for corn grinding on their summits—the windmill is one of the common sights of Portugal and commoner than Don Quixote’s windmills in La Mancha. The country becomes lonelier, emptier, the villages farther apart, until after a day’s driving or a night in the slow-moving train one is in—Africa. The air is strongly scented, and hot with that soft and total heat that takes the strength out of the bones. The locust flutters on the canes, the flies bite, the cricket trills at night as people sit half asleep in the cafés. The houses are low and white and have religious pictures done in light tiles on their walls. Along the roadside geraniums grow like trees. Here in the huddled Moroccan villages one sees the small, pierced, nearly conical chimneys of Africa. The fig trees droop their long branches and, in October, when the leaves have fallen, look like the gray skeletons of huge crabs crawling across the ground in the moonlight.