Life Embitters (43 page)

Beyond its borderlands, shaped by the beauty of fighting-bull territory, Extremadura is convulsed and scored by deep ravines, and is much darker than Castile with its lofty and proud, acerbic and remote terrain, its sky higher than any other sky, and a somber, overwhelming, tragically pristine blue. The colors are solemn and stern: burnt cinnamon, deep reds, dark greens, white granite, and purple basalt. The scent is august, full of rural innocence.

We pass through Marvao and across the frontier. The Portuguese province on the other side has the same tone as the land we have just left behind. It too is called Extremadura. The same grandiose contours, under an identical sky open to the four points of the compass. The same human life: holm
oaks, acorns, herds of pink or blackish pigs roaming free on thin patches of grass under cork-oaks. The people: small, tough men, stocky, like miniature giants; young girls, like little saints, enraptured and ecstatic. And the solitude … Sometimes a vulture glides high in the sky …

But the train starts on a gradual descent and we enter farmed cork-oak territory with yellow stubble or reddish fallow beneath the light gray trees. The countryside becomes more populated. We have entered land shaped by the hand of man. From the care and skill that has gone into these trees, it is immediately obvious that the cork-oak is the national tree of Portugal. As we proceed, the air becomes sweeter, the atmosphere gentler and the sky’s steely blue fades to a warmer, opaque, fine gray. The first hint of the Tagus is like a freshly opened flower. It is the onset of the Atlantic climate. The atmosphere becomes pink and fuller, the land spreads and flattens out, and the vegetation thickens and softens. The air carries something stronger than the scent and savor of wet earth and smells of ocean winds. It is my first real contact with Portugal.

The lower reaches of the Tagus are astonishing. It is a broad, fatherly river with a gentle flow. The land is moist and flat. River barges glide by on the horizon hoisting square sails tinged with nicotine or orange juice hues. The appearance of these vessels amid the fields makes you wonder: “Where are we? Are we in Holland? Are we in the Po valley, with Venice as its grand finale?” No. It’s not Holland. Holland is even greener, softer, and spongier. It’s a watery, feathery pillow. There is a similarity with Venice. I think the European landscape most resembling what we know generically as Venetian is the lower stretch of the Tagus.

Surprised? I must confess I was extremely surprised. I was quite mistaken about Portugal. People tend to think there is a single differentiating factor on the Iberian Peninsula: the sea. However, the moment you reach Portugal,
you are forced to acknowledge there is another. Portugal is sea-conscious, it lives immersed in the Atlantic climate. But here one encounters the river dimension. Peninsular rivers on this side, when you enter Portugal, increase in volume, and are extremely important. Oporto is a river city. Lisbon is a river city. It is impossible to ignore Portugal’s rivers. The impact of the nearby sea is, of course, striking. “Portugal,” said Camoës, “is the country where the earth ends and the sea begins …” The gravitational pull of the sea that the rest of the Peninsula feels – if at all! – along a narrow strip of coast is present everywhere in Portugal. Thanks to the rivers that cross the country, Portugal has broad and amenable gateways to the sea. And, thanks to these rivers, the sea takes its warm embrace inland. It is by and large a land kneaded by ocean winds that climb upstream and by the mud the currents drag with them. Northern Portugal is all this plus the heavy downpours of Galicia. The south is dry, African, white.

Consequently, I arrived in Lisbon and almost automatically thought of Venice. At first glance I thought the city
was
a Venice that was milder in color, more washed out, an almost dying fall. The soft, swooning, slightly bloodless nature of the colors must be caused by the damp, misty, supremely benign qualities of the Atlantic climate. Some countries tend to present things in their pure outline, separating them out from the atmosphere where they exist, while others display them immersed in their own haze.

The water element, the aquatic touch – that is often felt more than seen – perhaps explains why Portugal is closer to our idea of a continental climate than to our idea of the Peninsula. The vertical contours of the interior, that confront Castile, Extremadura, and Andalusia, are, one might say with a degree of license, a continuation of central Spain. The wide coastal belt – irrigated by broad rivers, touched by the Atlantic – is very different. This is the great surprise the country holds in store: the gentle waters and silt of its
rivers, the salt water and Atlantic winds. Portugal pulled seawards. Portugal, gateway to the Atlantic: the sensation of land ending and sea beginning with infinite horizons …

Open to the sea, the Praça do Comércio is a perfect, unified ensemble of buildings. It is one of the most pleasant places in Lisbon. In periods of culture, creators of distinct forms, – in this case, the eighteenth century – grasped with remarkable vision that the most inhospitable, relentless natural formations and the magma of water called out for rational, symmetrical, perfect structures. A statement made by a culture that openly opposes nature. Following identical intuitions, Italian architects in the age of neo-classicism built Stockholm and Saint Petersburg, that experience the harshest, most inhuman nature on the continent.

An extension of the square’s architectural order – the streets from the Praça do Comércio lead to the Rossio. Straighter and more refined, with immaculate linked gradients and cornices, they constitute the center of the city, the atmosphere of cosmopolitan Lisbon. I wander and idle here. I listen to Portuguese being spoken.

Years ago a Portuguese theater troupe came to Barcelona. Our adorable bourgeoisie packed out the theatre and prepared expectantly to see and hear the work. Everyone was shocked by the first scene. It was
impossible
to understand a word of what was being said on stage. People strained their ears, snarled, and looked glumly at fellow spectators

“What an earth are these actors speaking?” they asked rather indignantly.

The actors perhaps spoke very correct Portuguese or perhaps a Portuguese that wasn’t so correct: the fact is nobody understood them.

This led to a surprise development. When it seemed that everything would give way to total indifference – not to say hostility – nerves gradually
calmed, and the strangeness always produced by the sound of an unintelligible language vanished. The audience became almost drowsy, blithely rocked by the soft, soft lilt of the Portuguese language. The melodious vowels slowly suffused the auditorium and the performance ended wonderfully.

Don Joan Margall would say that Portuguese is an obscure language – he meant darkly hued. Rather than obscure, I would say it is a velvety, shadowy language with damp mossy vowels. Portuguese vowels are dark green, deep, and gentle on the ear, with sensuous, unctuous, sinuous inflections. Delicious.

Strolling along the streets squeezed between the Praça do Comércio and Rossio hoping to capture the subtlest shades and features of the language, I didn’t perhaps follow the advice linguists usually give. Perhaps it isn’t the place to hear the purest Portuguese. In these matters there are always people who know where the language is best spoken – which is usually two or three hundred kilometers from where you happen to be. No matter, despite the slack grammar ruling those streets, I thought the phonetics of Portuguese carried the scent and color of violets. I understood how you can do so much with raw material that is so dense, so silky and modulated. Perhaps even too much. The year of my trip to Portugal was 1921. All the harshness left by the First World War had spread across Europe. That harshness hadn’t yet succeeded in destroying the softness of Portuguese vowels. Thanks to these phonetics, the young ladies here seem the most feminine on the continent and the young men look as if they have a gently resigned propensity to commit suicide. Suicide, driven by love, naturally. However straight their hair, they bring to mind Antero de Quental, who eliminated himself in a moment of sweet melancholy, who practically melted into the phonetics. At that level, you see very clearly that these phonetics preceded
saudade
.
Not that
saudade
is its most suitable means of expression. On the contrary,
saudade
is one of the last – often dramatic – effects of their phonetics.

The beauty of Lisboa – that the Portuguese pronounce
Lisboua
– is astonishing. According to Humboldt the geographer – the greatest traveler of his time – it stands, with Constantinople and Naples, as one of the best located, best positioned cities in the universe.

From the Praça do Comércio one can see the landscape that extends beyond the southern bank of the river. It is quite unattractive – a flat, monotonous, featureless landscape. Lisbon, on the other hand, should be seen from this bank, from the opposite bank of the river. You pay a small toll, and one of the small boats that ply between one bank and the other will take you there. Then you can observe over the broad waters of the Tagus how the tide swells or shrinks, raises or sinks, according to the moment, the wondrous amphitheater of the city astride the undulations, humps, and depressions of its famous seven hills. There is little in Europe that can rival this magnificent spectacle. Once seen, it’s never forgotten. It is a vista devoid of ugliness that contains not a single item that human love of measure rejects. In that sense it is gracefulness by the grace of God.

The history of Lisbon is severed by the earthquake of 1755 that destroyed most of the city. Very few traces remain of what existed before that horrendous eruption. Tirso de Molina’s
Don Juan
has a description of the city as it was before the earthquake: a small, narrow, Gothic walled city with a suspicious, unfriendly demeanor. The Marquês de Pombal, a friend of Rousseau and Voltaire, rebuilt it with French, Italian and Portuguese architects. Given the dominant ideas when it was reconstructed, it is only natural that Lisbon – the Marquês de Pombal’s, I mean – should be similar to neo-classical cities in the era of enlightened, absolutist monarchies.
Neo-classicism was the taste defining the century of Louis XIV and the court of Versailles. The palace of Versailles was in fact the starting point for this taste that shaped every expression of European culture and left remarkable architectural landmarks.

The Lisbon earthquakes stirred deep emotions throughout the world. The scenes of chaos and pain they threw up, the astonishing number of dead and injured they caused, were an obligatory topic of conversation for years to come and were deployed in the intellectual polemics that raged at the time. Voltaire used them to fight Leibnitz’s philosophy of sufficient cause, pre-established harmonies and all that amusing nonsense: that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Candide and Dr Pangloss are in Lisbon during the earthquake: “Streams of flames and ashes covered streets and public places; houses turned to sand, roofs collapsed, foundations were obliterated; thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.” Candide was injured. A thoughtful Pangloss asked himself: what could be the sufficient cause of this phenomenon? A deep, grotesque, erratic disciple of Leibnitz, a complete nonentity, Dr Pangloss witnessed the Lisbon earthquakes and posed the problem of what might be its sufficient cause. He couldn’t find one. However, this lack of explanation didn’t lead to a change of criterion. He continued to affirm that this is the best of all possible worlds – “
car tout est bien.
”

An urban amphitheatre rolls over the hills of the Marquês de Pombal’s Lisbon. This constant up and down of the city’s streets gives it huge character and the liveliest sense of movement. Strolling along its labyrinthine streets, you find yourself at roof level as easily as you feel you are going underground. To look at a terrace roof, you must sometimes look down; at others, you must raise your eyes to the heavens to find a front door. The upshot is that you enter houses through the attic or the cellar. It all makes
for a most entertaining urban agglomeration: a fascinating, animated place. Perhaps in the long term, life apparently lived on scales constantly going up and down may become rather irksome. One thing, however, is undeniable in my opinion: this part of Lisbon is unique, a sight that can never leave you cold; it’s what Lisbon has that thousands of other cities will never have.

I think the color of this district is particularly beautiful. The frantic urban bustle brings out its best. Towards dusk, when a pink or even crimson bank of clouds comes between city and sun, and diverts and dissects the sun’s rays, as the fan of cloud opens and closes, the city seems to refresh one’s face and chest …

Lisbon’s light and color is so malleable, has such a quivering, fleeting movement it is hard to pin down adjectivally. Sometimes the light – for an instant – is a youthful, fleshy pink, as if the city were blushing like the skin of an adolescent cheek; a second later the pink vanishes and the light turns an ivory pale. The atmosphere over Lisbon becomes a crucible of glinting carnation tints that airily finger the red roofs, the warm whites of the walls, the fresh or watery green of the shutters, the pumpkin hue of the façades, the crumbling toast of the old walls, where parasitic creepers hang down or a lofty palm tree soars in the sun, shamelessly lethargic, suffused by a reek of perfume. Sometimes the air has a crystalline purity that never hardens – a warm, amicable purity; sometimes watery damp creates atmospheres that seem to give weight and density to the color, imbuing it with an intense life. This fleeting passage of carnal tints across the Atlantic light – the light in the wind – sweeps over the undulating hills relishing their flight, giving each moment a distinct mark, determined to be born, to live for a moment, and then die …

The earthquakes in the eighteenth century didn’t destroy every trace of the past. It is very likely, for example, that seismic movements didn’t
demolish all the Gothic. However, the Marquês de Pombal was a man of the Enlightenment and the Enlightened thought that the Gothic represented pure barbarism. The rebuilding of Lisbon was probably lethal for medieval architecture. It hardly needs to be said, on the other hand, that Pombal conserved and restored buildings in the so-called Manuelline style, even though they were probably less valuable than the older style.