What the Traveller Saw (10 page)

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All Saints’ Day, Saturday, 1 November 1755, the great Lisbon earthquake began. Within ten minutes there were three major shocks accompanied by awful, apocalyptical rumblings. The towers and spires of the churches, which were filled with worshippers, swayed and toppled and the buildings collapsed on the congregations.

Dust turned day into night; fires broke out; and the Tagus rose over its banks in three huge waves, inundating the lower part of the city. The palaces of the rich, the hovels of the poor, convents, libraries, art collections, the immense treasure looted from Africa, India and Brazil; even, to the delight of the majority, the headquarters of the Inquisition which had sentenced the indigenous inhabitants of Goa and other overseas dominions to be burned alive at the auto-da-fé wearing yellow dunces’ caps with the same enthusiasm as they had committed their fellow countrymen to the flames, collapsed. The entire centre of the city and an estimated ten thousand buildings of what one Spanish writer described as ‘this eighth wonder, the greatest in Christendom, this outstanding city, famous and noble’, were largely consumed. Out of a population of about 275,000, more than 30,000 lost their lives.

The earthquake marked the end of an era. The British and Hamburg merchants never again enjoyed the same influence in the city. After it the belief in divine and benevolent providence was rudely attacked by Voltaire and
Candide
became a bestseller. The optimism of Pope and Rousseau and the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz no longer sounded so good in Lisbon anymore, or anywhere else.

But the city recovered. In twenty years it rose splendidly from its ashes under the able direction of the Marquês de Pombal, Minister of José I, an absolute dictator of a sort which the Portuguese seem to stand in need of and positively relish at times.

Lisbon was a very soberly dressed city. Bourgeois ambition was a beaded dress for dinner with your husband and his boss and his wife and a Persian lamb coat with a mink collar for winter. The reason why so many ladies in Lisbon smelt of mothballs, even if they never owned a fur coat, was because mothballs were supposed to ward off bad luck. They certainly warded off me. Their menfolk appeared to wear subfusc suits and white shirts at all times, except when on a beach or in bed.

Even though the Baixa (pronounced Baïcha, if that is any help) or Lower Town is an elegant shopping area you soon began to realize that this was, for all the outward show, the desperately poor capital of a desperately poor country. Many people lived on the outskirts in what were nothing more than brick huts with no water supply. You could see such townships of hovels in the Alcântara Valley where the great aqueduct, the Aqueducto das Águas Livres, crossed it.

You realized it, too, because in this city there were almost more sellers of lottery tickets than potential buyers. Not only men and women without arms, legs and eyes, but others, unmutilated, some of whom looked as if they might once have been bank managers who had had their banks fold under them.

And there were lots of beggars whom the Lisboans, a kindly lot on the whole, had the pleasant habit of rewarding rather than ignoring.

As evening fell, you could see whole families of what were known as
Ferro Velho
, otherwise the
Homens do Papétar
, the Men of the Paper, women and children included, scavenging
the cardboard and paper from outside shops and offices and lugging it away to sell it to middle men in the scrap paper business. Nothing was wasted by the poor of this city. Anything that was broken here could and would be repaired. They did not understand the meaning of ‘replace the unit’, which was why, added to the strange cries uttered by the
varinhas
, the fishwives and those of the innumerable sellers of roast chestnuts whose smoking stoves each winter plunged the streets into a species of fog, you could hear the equally weird sound of the Pan pipes played by the Galician repairers of umbrellas who wheeled their bikes around the streets loaded with old ones which they cannibalized for the ribs. Galician knife-grinders also played the same instruments to attract customers.

But if you think that because of all this scarcely concealed poverty the shopkeepers and the assistants in any of the more expensive shopping streets were going to encourage you to acquire anything on their premises, you have another think coming. While down in the fish and fruit and veg. markets women were positively pressing one to pick up 20 metres or so of conger eel, a sack or two of potatoes or half a dozen pineapples, wherever the shops had plate glass windows you were going to encounter something peculiarly Portuguese, which is the sales person’s resistance to selling anything. To attempt to buy in a department store one of the hideous pottery roosters that come from Barcelos in northwest Portugal was like trying to shop in a family vault.

Out to the west, above the Tagus, in Mandragoa, was where the
varinhas
lived, together with their families. They came originally from Ovar, a fishing town on the lagoons south of Oporto, and most of them lived in a labyrinth of dwellings that was once a convent. It was they who bought the freshly landed catches down on the waterfront and then trotted off through the streets with the fish on their heads in wicker baskets, crying in their impossible dialect the equivalent of
‘Fresh mackerel’, ‘Fresh sardines’, or whatever fish they had to offer.

Dark-skinned, some of them young and saucy, others more severe, some pear-shaped with legs like boles of trees, they looked as if they would be capable of supporting the whole world on their heads in addition to a hundred pounds or so weight of fish. They wore black shawls, short, bunchy black skirts, aprons, gold hoops in their ears and round their necks gold necklaces with hearts and crosses hanging from them.

Now, in the 1980s, their numbers have been reinforced by a whole host of brightly dressed negresses who, together with their husbands, have migrated here from the Cape Verde Islands, and when they are seen as an ensemble with the black-clad
varinhas
, down on the waterfront, they look like the chorus line of some fishy musical about to burst into dance and song.

On either side of the valley in which Pombal’s city stands were the old quarters: the Alfama, built in the sixteenth century, and to the west the Bairro Alto, which had been seriously affected by tourists, reached by way of the Elevador, a fantastic lift designed by Eiffel of the Tower. The Alfama was also much frequented by tourists but strangely unaffected by them; the Bairro Alto, a criss-cross of narrow streets as deep as canyons, some with exciting, unexpected views of the Tagus, was by day full of artisans in little workshops turning out objects that were only a memory in most other Western countries. Here, some of the restaurants were so small that six customers made a quorum and even then the fish had to be grilled outside on the pavement.

In the afternoon the tarts began to appear on the street corners. Some looked more like maiden aunts than tarts. At night the Bairro Alto finally woke up, and the
fado
could be heard. But to hear the
fado
sung properly it was necessary to cross the valley to Alfama.
Fado
is sung by ladies of a certain
age; ripe would not be an uncomplimentary description. And they are always dressed in black. It is tremulous, and infinitely melancholic, and its origins are disreputable.

In Lisbon, as indeed almost anywhere else, it is to the Alfama and similar quarters that one returns. Those in which the manifest happiness of the furless, tieless inhabitants appears to be in inverse proportion to their wealth. In the narrow streets into which cars seldom penetrated, in which the washing billowed out like well-drawing spinnakers; streets in which there were odd smells, not all of them unpleasant, not all of them agreeable, but streets, something becoming increasingly rare in the modern world, in which you were not made to feel unwelcome.

The country around Lisbon and to the immediate north of it is very different to that of the Alentejo, and the Algarve in the south, which in the late 1960s was only just beginning to be developed. Much of it was lush and green, and further north of Lisbon, in the Beira Litoral, there were enormous pine forests, first planted in the thirteenth century.

But it was the number of large, old buildings which made this country different from the south. Down in the Alentejo, beyond the endless main road, there seemed to be no other roads at all, no other villages among the red earth. There I felt that a properly mounted expedition would be needed to penetrate those fastnesses among the eerie cork trees, in which only an occasional white farmhouse loomed on a hill. Down there it was comparatively rare to see a monastery or even a large secular building, apart from the farmhouses.

The north, on the other hand, was full of palaces, convents, monasteries and churches, many of them built in splendid isolation and on such a heroic scale it seemed impossible that they could ever have had their full complement of the courtiers, nuns, monks or congregations they were designed to house. Now for the most part they were uninhabited, except
by hordes of custodians. Visiting them it was necessary to be equipped with plenty of small change – they both needed and appreciated it.

Among the most extraordinary of these large buildings was the Ajuda Palace above Belém, from which da Gama’s little fleet set sail for India in 1497, returning in 1499. Begun in 1816, but never finished (its last occupant was the Queen Dowager Maria Pia, who died in 1911), it was permeated with that unique form of Portuguese melancholy known as the
saudade
and housed one of the world’s great collections of uncomfortable furniture – a whole set of porcelain furniture was a gift from the King of Saxony. There was also a collection of awful paintings, some of them very funny. Long corridors, in which a perpetual twilight reigned, were lined with glass cases stuffed with unwanted wedding presents, some of really hideous ingenuity.

Somewhat different was the Queluz Palace, which was pink and very pretty, built in 1758 for Prince Pedro, who married his niece. Even nicer were the gardens with their box hedges, mazes, cages for wild beasts (now empty), statues – some very strange (sphinx heads with ruffs round their necks) – and the Dutch Canal, its walls lined with blue and white glazed tiles with marine scenes painted on them. And beyond that there was Sintra, in the Serra de Sintra, only 17 miles from Lisbon. It is difficult to exaggerate the romantic beauty of Sintra and the mountains in which it lay concealed, with great trees growing out of an almost endless chaos of rocks, which, wreathed in mist as they so often were, seemed like the work of an artist of the Sung dynasty. In the environs of the little town itself, the dark lanes with their moss-grown walls, and the sudden, surprising views of palaces and huge houses raising their extraordinary spires, towers and grotesque chimneys among the trees, created a powerful impression but not one that was altogether agreeable.

One of these great follies was the Pena Palace, built in the
mid-nineteenth century as a summer residence for Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a cousin of Prince Albert and consort of Maria II. It, too, was permeated with the
saudade
, and also an overwhelming smell of furniture polish which the state apparently dispensed to the custodians by the ton. The official policy with regard to an ancient building in Portugal at that time was, ‘If you can’t get permission to knock it down, make it like new and polish it.’ The Portuguese were great knockers-down of old buildings at that time, often doing so in the pursuit of what they called
urbanizaçāo
, urbanization.

Seven miles from the town, hidden away among even bigger, mossier rocks than one had so far seen, was the Convento de Capuchos, abandoned by the monks in the last century, its gloomy cells entirely walled and furnished with cork. William Beckford, who visited the convent in 1797, described it with the Capuchin monks at table, eating great mounds of greasy food, and presided over by their drunken Father Guardian, exactly as it might have been in a painting by Magnasco.

At Sāo Pedro de Sintra, highest of the three Sintras (the other two were Sintra and Santa Maria), on the second and fourth Sundays of each month a remarkable market was held in its triangular square, one of the last such markets to be held close to the capital.

At that time there were still, in spite of the preponderance of plastic objects, a lot of genuine country artefacts on sale, as well as some interesting, semi-antique junk. Here, too, in the upper part of this square, in the Cantinho de S. Pedro, you could drink a delicious white wine from barrels, in the company of shepherds and farmers.

North of Sintra the road to Mafra ran through open, rather lonely country, now much changed, at that time full of windmills which were still functioning. The sails of these windmills were of canvas and could be furled in the same way as a sail, and attached to them on ropes there were clay whistles
which when they rotated and the wind blew through them produced eerie sounds.

It is doubtful if even the Portuguese in the interest of
urbanizaçāo
will ever summon up the resolution to demolish the Convent of Mafra which is bigger than the Escorial. Designed by a German architect to the order of King John V in 1717, it took thirteen years to build. By 1730, 45,000 were employed in its construction. The cost of it helped Portugal on her way to financial ruin. Although it contained little that was memorable apart from a beautiful rococo library – there was a particularly lugubrious room entirely furnished with furniture constructed from the skins and antlers of stags – it did have an undeniably nightmarish quality about it, principally because of its ability to reduce everyone within its walls to the stature of pygmies.