Lisbon, 1917
"For many, too many, Portuguese, Lisbon is Portugal. They will put up with much misery in the provinces so long as Lisbon has fine shops and streets and squares."
From: 1915 C.E. To: 1917 C.E.
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Portugal of the Portuguese by Aubrey Bell, 1917.
For many, too many, Portuguese, Lisbon is Portugal. They will put up with much misery in the provinces so long as Lisbon has fine shops and streets and squares. The ambition of the peasant is to see Lisbon, and many prefer to live, however wretchedly, as citizens of that great city than quietly at their ease in the country. The rich inhabitants inhabit Paris, or else, as in the days of Garrett, "spend their lives between the Chiado and the Rua do Oiro," although the motor-car now lures many from the clubs of the Rua Garrett and the cafes of the Rocio at least as far afield as Cintra or the Estoris. Rua Garrett is now the official name (after the poet Almeida-Garrett, 1799-1854), but it remains the Chiado in common speech.
Its name derived probably from the name, or rather from the nickname, of another poet, Antonio Ribeiro, o Chiado. He was a popular sixteenth-century Lisbon poet, and lived in a house just off this street: it is thought that the frequent phrase “Vamos ao Chiado " ("Let us go and see Chiado") led to the name being given to the street, hitherto called Rua direita das Portas de Santa Catharina. The quaint lift which suspends people like the mediaeval Virgil in a basket over the city, and, like some of the other eight ascensores, gives a splendid view, still has the words written up at its Largo de Sao Juliao entrance: "Ao Chiado."
Lisbon, on its seven hills, has so few level spaces that people naturally congregate, as water runs down from a mountain-side, in the district between the Rocio and the river, appropriately called the Baixa, the Low Quarter, and meeting between acquaintances is more frequent than in any other capital city. The splendid Avenida da Liberdade has never become popular, and is apt to be deserted except on special occasions, a great review or some Republican anniversary. It seems to be too far from the centres of gossip: before you had walked from the Praça dos Restauradores (i.e., the liberators of Portugal from Spain in 1640) to the Praça do Marquez de Pombal and back a ministry might have fallen.
Best keep on the safe side and miss nothing of the human comedy which in Lisbon has centred in the Rocio throughout the centuries. Here there is continual movement by day and night. Lisbon sits up late and is an extremely late riser. Three o'clock on a June morning sees the last revellers in the streets, and, later, at an hour when other cities have put on their best clothes, dust-bins still line the pavements, and the rag-pickers are at their work.
Lisbon's streets, spick and span, at least all those that the passing tourist will see, give no idea of the accounts of all writers a century ago, who in prose and verse agreed about the dirt and nastiness of the town. Indeed, so late as 1835 the suggestions of a Portuguese writer for the improvement of the city give some idea of its condition. It will be forbidden, said he, to break in horses in the streets. It will be forbidden to kill or singe pigs in the streets, or keep them alive in the streets, or tied to the doors, "for all these things annoy the inhabitants." Dead animals were not to be left lying in the streets. He noted, too, the number of stray dogs, the beggars at every step, the filthiness of the outer staircases of the houses.
Some of the staircases had deep wells beneath them—there was one at No. 17 rua da Prata, 19 palmos deep. The great houses had several, as also the convents; indeed, there is a doleful history of how the Prioress fell into one of these on a moonless night; however, she was fished out next morning, and it was regarded as a miracle that her clothes were perfectly dry, not even the sabots which she was wearing showing any sign of water.
But the wisest inhabitants of Lisbon sent and send their servants and negro slaves to the public fountains or buy the water brought thence by the aguadeiros who may be seen barrel on shoulder in all the narrow streets of the high-lying districts. The water of many of these fountains is reputed to have special virtues, as formerly the "fountain of the horses of New Street," taken before sunrise, miraculously healed diseases of the eyes, and the same water "has the secret property of speedily fattening the horses that drink of it, and it would do the same to men if they went to drink of it at the fountain."
Carrying heavy bilhas of water up Lisbon's steep and narrow streets is so arduous a business that the poorest inhabitants prefer to pay a tiny sum to the aguadeiro, and in a country where wine is often almost as common as water the qualities of the various waters are discussed with perhaps greater keenness than those of wines. In the sixteenth century the number of water-sellers is given as twenty-six.
Many houses, chiefly in the newer parts of the city, are entirely covered outside with azulejos, mostly green or blue, which give them a cool and cleanly appearance. The rooms inside, too, often have a pattern of azulejos several feet high round the walls, and their use should be more common in all hot countries. The low-lying part of Lisbon between the Rocio (sometimes called Rolling Motion Square or Turkey Square) and the Terreiro do Paço or Praça do Commercio (Black Horse Square) was rebuilt in parallel straight streets after the earthquake of 1755. These streets seem narrow enough now, and the united breadth of them would fit into the Avenida da Liberdade, but for the days of the Marquez de Pombal their plan had a certain grandeur.
They still keep in some measure their distinctive characters, the Rua da Prata abounding in the shops of silversmiths, the Rua Augusta in tailors and linen-drapers. From the Rocio, besides these links with Black Horse Square, goes the steep Rua do Carmo, with more fashionable shops, leading to the Chiado, and on the opposite side is the great market-place of the Praça da Figueira.
Thither through the night carts drawn by single oxen rumble slowly in, laden with vegetables from the country, the white hanging street-lamps lighting up the lordly pyramids of cabbages or turnips or tomatoes while regateiras (market women, also called collarejas, from Collares) carry in great baskets on their heads, and may be seen resting at dawn on the pavement outside the market. Indeed, it is one of the charms of Lisbon that beneath all its cosmopolitanism it has succeeded in retaining a certain rustic air. The servant-girl in one of M. Anatole France's books, who came back well pleased with her first day in Paris: elle avail vu de beaux navels, would be enchanted with Lisbon. There the flat open baskets of vegetables balanced by men on their shoulders at either end of a thick pole—a truly tremendous burden, but perhaps they are gallegos, the porters of Lisbon, who stand cord over shoulder at the street corners—and the brimming panniers of donkeys give a freshness to the streets.
Morning and evening the milkman drives his cows through the streets with the most melodious and delightful of chants. Or the seller of maize bread cries his broinhas de milho quentinhas. In May come the strawberries: morangos de Cintra, followed through the summer months by a legion of melon-sellers, criers of grapes and all manner of fruit as the heat increases. Some kind of fruit is ever to be had in plenty: in winter handcarts of oranges and pineapples; or a man carries a rosary of great pineapples hanging from a pole.
And year in, year out, go the varinas, the women of Ovar, bare-footed, with their gold ornaments and stiffly falling skirts, crying their fish; the sellers of newspapers; and the lotteryman (cauteleiro) with his perpetual litany of figures and his warning that "to-morrow the wheel goes round: Amanha anda a roda." The cries are nearly always soft and musical, very different from the piercing street-cries of Madrid or Barcelona.
There comes a time, about the end of July, when Lisbon is like Oxford in vacation. The glory is departed, and here there is no secondary reflected splendour of Lisbon besundayed scouts to take its place. The smart carriages and motor-cars are few and far between, the steady flow of the well-dressed and fashionable passing up and down the Rua do Carmo, the Chiado, the Rua Nova de Almada, the Rua de S. Nicolau, and the Rua do Oiro, dries up like the summer streams.
Then lemons and dark red bilhas of water are carried about the streets, here a woman bears on her head over a kerchief of deepest blue flowing to her waist a flat basket of long light green water-melons, or a great mound of white and purple grapes. Or perhaps in the sultry evening from some doorway sounds the sluggish and persistent Quem da mais, mais, mais, of the auctioneer at a long drawn-out leilao, as if the whole world were ending in a slow desolate agony. It is a cry so different from, yet as melancholy as, the Ho vitrier of the itinerant glazier in some village of the French Alps in autumn before the first heavy snows cut off its communications with the plain.
But with the autumn in Lisbon cheerfulness returns. From Bussaco and Cascaes and Cintra, the Estoris and Buarcos and Caldas da Rainha, from Paris and foreign and Portuguese watering-places, come the sun-browned veraneantes. There is a fresh vigour in the streets, the first autumn violets are sold, the chestnut-seller with his smoking baskets chants his Castanhas quentes e boas. Donkeys are driven through the streets with panniers of olives fresh from the country, and a little later droves of turkeys stalk through the Rocio undeterred from their leisured dignity by all the embarrassing trams and taxis….
If stress is here laid on these rustic traits as one of Lisbon's great attractions to the foreigner, it must not of course be thought that it is not endowed with all the luxuries and refinements of a great modern city. There they all are, the good hotels, streets neatly paved and scrupulously clean, the comfortable motor-cars and carriages, the tempting shop-windows, and a good service of electric tramcars, in an endless rosary of white and yellow.
The service of motor-cars can scarcely be called good. Most of the cars are comfortable, and some of the drivers efficient, but the drivers of others sprawl lazily in the Rocio, only waking up to charge an excessive fare, which frightens away most people. Even if they have a taximeter, it starts at a shilling (250 reis) and reaches 1,000 reis with a strange rapidity. And if they have inveigled some unwary person into becoming their fare and prey—they, of course, consider all foreigners fair prey—he will find himself being conveyed at breakneck pace in a totally wrong direction.
Indeed, the foreigner driven furiously in a Lisbon taxi may think that the lisboeta sets more value on time than on life, but in fact their attitude to time is rather that of the madrileño driver who, if asked to drive faster, will gradually slow down, stop, get down, open the door, take off his hat, and ask if you wished for anything. He will keep his politeness, even if you miss your train. All the sadder is it that in Lisbon the inroad of foreign customs tends to interfere with the pleasant dilatory habits of the native. Few shops, for instance—one or two chemists or booksellers at the most—have a little circle of chairs for their clients (freguezes) to pass the time in leisurely cavaco.
But centuries of progress have failed to make Lisbon uninteresting, so various are the ingredients of its motley population, men of all nations, classes and religions. Saloios, i.e., peasants from the neighbourhood of Lisbon, are noticeable in the streets for their short "Eton jackets" and close-fitting trousers spreading out over the foot, and peasants from further afield, beyond the Tagus for their immensely wide (desabado) hats and their sackcloth coloured cloaks reaching in a succession of capes to the feet. And emigrants with their many-coloured patchwork alforges and their coffin-shaped trunks haunt the quays.
Along the Tagus are more markets of fruits and vegetables and fish, and vessels of every description, from the fishing-boat to the great Atlantic liner, are continually loading and unloading. Above and between the masts of the boats show the many-coloured dresses of fishwives and peasants, while a multitude of snow-white sea-gulls rise and fall, rise and fall against the turquoise blue of the river. Beyond lies Barreiro, with its cork factories, the banks of the Tagus rise abruptly, and on a clear day lordly Palmella (from which the palmelldo wind blows across the Tagus), perched on its lofty crag, gleams from the dark serra.
The passing traveller has, even without landing, a magnificent view of city and harbour. But Lisbon has many more intimate beauties which demand a longer study, and would provide an artist with work for months and years. Especially in winter the colouring is often very exquisite, with tints subdued and delicate, as, for instance, on a stormy day the grey irregular roofs with their crops of fresh green grass seen in some steep travessa against the dark indigo of the river or hills beyond; or some glimpse of ruined Carmo or crumbling Alfama set in relief by a sky of limitless clear blue.
The old tiled roofs, warped and curving, are a perpetual delight. Sometimes they have grass in straight furrows between the rows of tiles like springing corn, or they are covered by a more continuous carpet of mosses, or even are gay with the flower of hawksweed. It depends largely on the rain. Two or three months of continuous rain in winter brings them to a high perfection. Summer is the great weeder in Portugal: it robs both roofs and cobbled squares of their pleasant green. Alfama from a distance has the look of a tumble-down fishing-village above the Tagus. At close quarters it is found to be an intricate maze of streets so narrow that they never let in the sun, and a man's stretched-out arms touch either wall, and so steep that they are built often in the form of stairs.
Equally picturesque is the district of Santa Catharina, on the other side of the city. The marvellously steep streets and stairways going down from the Calçada do Combro to the river are full of quaint surprises worthy of the wynds of Edinburgh. Narrow stone staircases lead round and down and down, apparently nowhither, small yards and terraces struggle manfully to keep their balance as level spaces, here and there a palm or a vine or an orange-tree gives a touch of green. The principal descending streets are several yards in width. Rows of bright-coloured clothes perpetually a-drying are projected on poles from either side, and beneath these motley banners is a succession of tiny stifling black shops. The steps are strewn with rubbish and with cats and children innumerable.
Sometimes from a doorway comes a smell of burnt rosemary or other scented brushwood used to light the kitchen fire, and bringing with it saudade of the life in Portuguese villages. The names of the streets are often as quaint as the streets themselves, or were, for they disappear and change with a dreadful frequency. One may tremble for the Travessa da Larangeira (of the Orange Tree) or for the Travessa dos Fieis de Deus (of the Faithful of God). How soon will these be called the Passage of Progress and the Street of Civilisation? But perhaps those in authority are beginning to realise that these changes often rob the city of what is more precious than much fine gold and can never be replaced.
Bell, Aubrey. Portugal of the Portuguese. Scribner. 1917.
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