February, 1955
“THE HAPPIEST MONTH OF my life—an idyll,” said a German-refugee publisher in New York, kissing his fingertips to Portugal, when he heard that my husband and I were coming here last winter. “You probably think we have a dictatorship. Ho, ho, ho!” roared Portugal’s vice-chieftain of propaganda, when I went to see him in his office on our third day in Lisbon. I had to confess that this was what we Americans had been given to understand—“a benevolent dictatorship,” I hurriedly qualified, this being the formula that had been current among the passengers on the Vulcania as the ship glided up the Tagus. We were expecting an idyll and apprehending a dictatorship. These two notions had fused, for the time being, in a resolve not to be insular: democracy was not necessarily suited to all countries, we assured each other, gripping our travel books. “Salazar is a very good man, very wise for his people,” said an old Portuguese-American, brown-skinned as an Arab, who was identifying the approaching sights of pink-and-white Lisbon for us from the deck. “He must be wonderful,” sighed a lady in a tricorne, who came from Manchester, Vermont. The old man went on to relate eagerly, in broken English, how terrible conditions had been in Portugal in 1928, when António de Oliveira Salazar, born a poor peasant, left his post in Economics at the University of Coimbra to serve his country, first as Minister of Finance and then as Premier, saving, always saving, till the national debt was paid; and how he had sacrificed his personal life to the Estado Novo—never married, lived very simply and austerely, stayed up late at night, working, always working. “What’s that?” I kept asking, pointing to orange-roofed white buildings, gleaming new, that were spread out on the green hills of Lisbon’s suburbs. “Housing project,” the old man invariably answered, simply and proudly. This was the first thing I found out about the Estado Novo; whenever you point to anything, the answer is “Housing project.” After a few days, I learned to frame the question the other way around. “Housing project?” I would cautiously inquire. “Sim, Senhora.”
Most visitors to Portugal have come here to see something old, but the Portuguese are full of zeal to show you something new—Economic Homes, syndicate apartments, the auto-estrada, the airport, the stadium, the modernistic shrine of Our Lady of Fátima, that twentieth-century vision who came to warn against Communism. And in Lisbon signs of progress are not far to seek. Walking through the streets the first evening, I felt as though I had made an appointment in Samarra. The shop-windows glittered with radios, pressure cookers, electric mixers, automobile hubcaps, washing machines, gas ranges, soda-water siphons, mechanical iceboxes, grills, electric razors, soap flakes, plastics, hot-water bottles. In the delicacy shops, Tootsie Rolls and Ritz crackers rested on beds of red velvet, like holy images. There was a din of horns honking. Everybody, at first glance, appeared to have a new car; it was several days before I realized that what I had been noticing, actually, was that every car was new. In the Rossio, the yellow principal square, the coffee-houses, which look like New York cafeterias, were dense with men in overcoats, reading the newspaper and having their shoes shined. Outside, electric signs were advertising TWA and Philips electrical products. Movie palaces, playing French and American films, disgorged crowds into the teashops of the Avenida da Liberdade. From the open doors of taverns near the waterfront you could hear the radio playing the fado. The liquor-store windows were full of Haig & Haig. In the center of the pale-green Praça de Comércio—the famous Black Horse Square, on the harbor—there was a parking lot. And everywhere, in every quarter, there were windows and windows of shoes for sale. Lisbon, as every tourist knows, has a law forbidding the people to go barefoot; the shoe, I perceived, was a talisman of Portuguese progress, the fulfillment of a prophecy, a miracle, like the wonder-working relics in the churches, meant to be venerated through glass. I had never seen so many shoes displayed anywhere: oxfords, brogues, sandals, loafers, slippers, mules, pumps, play shoes, beach shoes, baby shoes—all in the latest American-style models, perforated, fringed, crêpe- or wedge-soled.
This “little America” aspect of Lisbon contrasts rather naïvely with the rest of Portugal, like a figure out of drawing in a primitive painting. Yet just this naïveté comes to seem, after a time, typically Portuguese. This small country, with its variety of climates and mixture of racial strains, is an assiduous copyist, mimic, and borrower. Any sizable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride’s finery—something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. Portugal has its “little Versailles,” in the pink palace of Queluz (with a miniature Dutch canal added); its Balmoral, in the Scottish-baronial Pena Palace. It has its “little Switzerland,” in the merry northern province of the Minho; its bit of Africa, in the southern Algarve. The Miguelite wars were a small-scale version of the Carlist wars in Spain; the present government’s politics were borrowed from Charles Maurras, the originator of “integral nationalism.” Portugal got its characteristic azulejos (painted tiles) from the Arabs and then subjected them to a Dutch influence. Its painters copied the Flemish, and its furniture makers the English and the French. “Style renaissance française, travail portugais ... Style anglais, travail portugais,” drone the guides as they conduct you through the palaces. “They can copy anything,” say the resident foreigners, speaking of the “little” dressmakers and the shoemakers. “But you must be sure to give them a model.” This appears to have been true of nearly all the crafts throughout Portuguese history. Even the Manueline architecture, done in the Age of Discoveries and uniquely Portuguese, with its stone ropes and knots and anchors, seems not so much a true architectural style as an innocent imitation of real life, too literally conceived. It is only in the far north, in the Minho and the “lost” province of Trás-os-Montes (Beyond the Mountains), that you find a pure architecture—the Portuguese baroque, done in granite and severe white plaster, and decorated with gold—that is not like anything else in the world.
This persistent copying of foreign models, this literal translation from one medium to another, produces an effect of monkey humor—a slight absurdity that at its best is charming, like a child’s recitation, and at its worst grotesque. The Portuguese genius, in fact, ranges between the charming and the grotesque: on the one hand, a miniature barnyard exquisitely worked in marzipan, a statue of Saint Anthony wearing a British officer’s sash, pink-faced baroque angels in buskins and powdered periwigs, Saint Anne sitting in a Queen Anne chair; on the other, the horrors of late Manueline realism, the gross “cute” ceramics of lifelike cabbages and wrinkled spinach leaves, the votive offerings in the shrines and chapels, where one sees arms, legs, and ears painstakingly executed in mortuary greenish-white wax.
Lisbon itself is almost wholly charming—a model city of nearly a million people and an incalculable number of dogs. These multitudinous dogs—in muzzles, as prescribed by law—are forever underfoot, like stray bits of torn fur scattered on the streets; they are and must always have been one of the charms and absurdities of Lisbon. (The rational French, under Junot, during Napoleon’s occupation, killed ten thousand of them.) The Portuguese love animals. In the country, the donkeys and oxen look better nourished, often, than their owners. In Lisbon, pet shops abound, full of lovebirds, parrots, parakeets, hens, and puppies, and along the narrow slum streets, hung with clean, bright washing, bird cages swing in the sun. Every day is washday in Lisbon. The Portuguese are famous for their cleanliness; no matter where you go, in city or suburb or country, you see laundry festooning the scene—spread out on cactus plants, flapping in back yards, hanging from windows. The smallest, muddiest rivulet has its band of women pounding clothes on flat rocks. “You can eat off their floors,” the foreigners say, and this is very nearly true. But I have been in Portuguese restaurants where I would rather eat off the floor than off the plate before me. The Portuguese are very erratic and confound generalization.
But the cleanness of Lisbon is dazzling. In January, the steep stone streets are washed several times daily by sudden tropical showers, and Nature is assisted by street-cleaners with brooms made of twigs. The Portuguese have a green thumb. Lisbon, in winter, is brilliant with orange calendulas, blooming everywhere, together with geraniums and succulents; oranges and lemons dangle from trees in the walled gardens like bright Christmas balls, the oranges matching the orange sails of the little fishing boats on the blue Tagus. The seasons at this time of year are all awry. Autumn is present in the calendulas and oranges; spring in the first wicker baskets of camellias that come down from the nearby mountains to the florist shops; summer lingers in a few exhausted petunias; winter—last January, at least—came for a day in a fall of snow, which brought the population, marveling, out into the streets to touch it. As the new year gets under way, everything is growing, all at once; even the old tile roofs have windfall crops of grass and yellow mustard, which, if you look down from a window, over the rooftops to the Tagus, make the whole city seem fertile—a sort of semitropical paradise that combines the exuberance of the south, with the huge palms in the public squares, the oranges and the monumental statuary, and the neatness and precision of the north, seen in the absence of dirt and litter, the perfectly kept public gardens and belvederes, the black-and-white mosaic patterns (ships and ropes and anchors) of the sidewalks, and the bright tiles of so many house fronts, painted in green-and-white diamonds or pink roses or solid Dutch blues and yellows. Lisbon is a city built on hills, like San Francisco, and it is full of beautiful prospects, of which every advantage has been taken. It is designed, so to speak, for a strolling tourist, at sunset, to ensconce himself in a belvedere and gaze out over the Tagus, down to the pink-and-white dome of the Basilica of Estrela, or across a ravine of buff and pink and gold buildings to the old fortress of São Jorge.
Lisbon is a planned city. It sprang from the despotic imagination of the Marquis of Pombal, who rebuilt it in the eighteenth century, after the great earthquake. It was planned, I should think, for pleasure and efficient administration, and this is what makes it seem like a toy city. It is full of ingenious contrivances—underpasses and cable cars and a tall outdoor elevator tower that has a view and a restaurant on top of it. The ferryboats chugging back and forth across the harbor, the little blue train that sets forth, on time, for Estoril, half an hour away, and the yellow open streetcars all seem part of the toy mechanism; the very fragrance of fresh coffee that drifts like a golden haze over the city seems to have come from a doll’s electric stove. The eighteenth-century taste for curios and for a ruin, rightly placed, still animates the twentieth-century administrators. Lisbon has recently created one of the wonders of the world—the Estufa Fria, which is a sort of reverse hothouse, a large, shady terrarium for trees and plants that like coolness and moisture. Full of grottoes, streams, and bridges in a green, subaqueous light, it is in the height of early romantic feeling, a cultivated jungle popular with lovers and with French governesses on holiday. Lisbon also has a romantic ruin—an old Carmelite convent, just off the Chiado, the fashionable shopping street.
Above the cathedral there is an old quarter, called the Alfama, that escaped the earthquake and preserves the sights and smells of the Middle Ages. The Lisbonese are proud of the Alfama, which resembles the worst pages of Victor Hugo. Rags, smells, and emaciation teem here; the narrow, cobbled streets, where the leaning houses almost meet overhead, are dirty and full of verminous-looking dogs; every orange in the stalls has been felt a hundred times by skinny hands; there are cripples, and one-eyed men, and every species of deformity. Yet the Portuguese are eager to show the Alfama, as a bit of local color. The tourist is directed to visit it at night to hear the fado sung in the taverns, and is assured that it is perfectly safe; you will never get a knife in your back nowadays in the Alfama, they say, though before Salazar you risked your life in broad daylight every day, right on the Avenida. Before Salazar, they say, a rich man never went out without wondering whether he would come home.
I wondered myself, I must confess, the Sunday morning we picked our way through the Alfama after Mass at the cathedral. I was afraid, and at the same time repelled by the vivid poverty. But everybody assured me that the people in the Alfama were a special breed, that they liked their way of life and would not live respectably if you made them. In fact, the government had considered cleaning up the district in the course of a slum-clearance program and had been compelled to desist, hastily, by the outcry of the populace. In the Estado Novo there is a whole repertory of such tales—of slum dwellers who refuse to be moved from their hovels, of men who refuse to work. “Is there unemployment?” I asked the propaganda man. There was seasonal unemployment in agriculture, he said, but no real unemployment—any man who wanted to could get work. “But what about the people in the Alfama?” I inquired. He shrugged and replied, “They don’t want. A few work; others don’t want.” And to illustrate the government’s plight he told me a “personal experience”—of a well-dressed man who asked him for money one day in a café, saying that he could not get work, and how he, the government official, promised the man a job but the man failed to turn up for the appointment, and how again he saw the man begging and beckoned him over to his table and again got a hard-luck story and again promised him work, and again discovered him begging. The plot of the story was familiar; I had heard it on occasion in my own country. No doubt these experiences really do befall people who, as it were, act as lightning rods for them; it is a case of serendipity.
“Still,” I murmured, when the propaganda man had finished, “many of the people look very poor.” “Oh, Alfama!” he said genially, and started to explain again that the Alfama was an institution. “Not the Alfama,” I interrupted. “Other places.” I had not intended to bedevil the propaganda chieftain, a big, dark, rubicund, jolly fat man, pronounced by foreigners to be more civilized and indulgent than his predecessors. But without my wishing it, it began to happen. The Portuguese, as I have since learned, are very sensitive, and certain words offend them; one of these words is “poor.” “Portugal is a poor country,” they will begin by telling you, with an air of self-deprecation. But they do not like you to say it. “Poor?” they will reply, as the propaganda man did now, contemplating the word with a kind of majestic wonder, as if it were susceptible of many different meanings. “Where did you see poor people?” The answer was, nearly everywhere, but I simply named the Rua de São Bento, a main street in a working-class quarter. There I had seen half-naked children, and women, like shapeless rummage bundles, buttoned into two or three torn sweaters, their feet tied up in rags and stuffed into men’s shoes of odd pairs, or into gaping old felt bedroom slippers; some of the younger women wore once-fancy mules on raw, chapped, bare feet. I tried to describe this. When I had finished, he leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and gave a long, tolerant laugh. “You don’t understand,” he said. “These women are very saving. They have good clothes, but they don’t wear them. They keep them for Sunday or a special occasion. If you meet them on Sunday or a holiday, you will see they have a nice dress, nice shoes, pocket-book, stockings. You would not know them for the same person. Our women are not like yours; they save, save, save. You cannot get them out of it.”
I smiled dubiously. The strange thing was that I had not been especially conscious of poverty in Lisbon until I spoke of it in the propaganda man’s office. In this bureaucratic setting, all the sorry sights I had beheld, almost without seeing them, came out as if they had been recorded on a photographic plate that was only now immersed in a solution. Not to see, in fact, is a part of the Portuguese idyll, a sort of trick of the dazzling light and brilliant weather. It is easy for the foreigner in Lisbon, bewitched by the fruit and flowers and the myriad cakes and cheeses and sausages in the glittering shopwindows, to miss the signs of poverty or to assimilate them to the picturesque. Oporto is different. There, gray misery is very evident; the Oporto equivalent of the Alfama is a scene of such purulent horror that the tourist flees, with his handkerchief to his nose, under the gaze of the mustached Mmes. Defarges along the riverbank. But Oporto, a dirty, foggy industrial city and the classic hotbed of Portuguese radicalism and rebellion, is under a cloud, both literally and figuratively, and nothing has been done to make it charming or colorful—while Lisbon has been beautified by government fiat. Visitors see the pink and pistachio and buff and yellow washes of the houses gleaming in the Lisbon sun and take this as evidence of individual prosperity and initiative, whereas the fact is that Lisbon houseowners are compelled by law to repaint every five years, and in the government-subsidized housing projects the range of colors is prescribed by the authorities.
The visitor’s first impression is that the people of Lisbon are extraordinarily well dressed, on the whole; outside the Alfama and some of the poorer working-class sections, practically every man you see, not counting the lottery-ticket sellers and the street-cleaners and the policemen and the laborers repairing the streets, is wearing a business suit, a clean shirt, and a necktie. It is a little time before you get to realize that the suit on the man next to you in the streetcar is terribly frayed and patched and mended, the surface of the shoes worn and cracked, the briefcase ragged and made of simulated leather, and the hand holding it seamed and cracked, too, like red leatherette. The laundry garlanding the streets is so fetching at first glance that you do not notice that many of the articles hung out are, literally, shreds and tatters of garments—scarecrow shirts and underwear. And there is something about Lisbon, not only the government’s enterprise but the pride and politeness of the people, that makes you, politely, not want to notice.
Portugal has a misleading reputation for being an inexpensive country to live in. From our point of view, food and wine and rent and laundry and tobacco are cheap. There are a number of hotels and pensãos where you can get a room and three meals, with wine, for two dollars and forty-five cents a day, plus a ten-percent service charge, plus, in most places, a three-percent tax if you are a tourist. At a restaurant, you can have an excellent meal—a shrimp omelet to start, then a golden bacalhau (dried cod, done with egg yolks, black olives, sauté potatoes, and onions), a tender beefsteak, a salad, white-mountain or Azeitão cheese, a superb peeled and sugared orange, and black coffee—for a dollar and seventy-five cents, which includes a bottle of good wine. (This is the ideal meal; you can eat less and pay less, or you can eat a worse meal and pay more in a luxury restaurant.) Taxis and trolleys are cheap by our standards, and buses and trains very reasonable. In general, any product or service that has human labor as its chief component is not at all costly. But if you want to buy something imported (a pressure cooker, an electric stove, a radio) or something made in a modern factory, it is often quite expensive by any standards. Cars are very expensive, and gasoline costs around seventy cents a gallon. Kleenex is about seventy-five cents a small box. I had to buy a one-piece bathing suit with a skirt, as decreed by the authorities, to take to the Algarve coast; this, quite ugly and made of inferior wool in a Portuguese factory, cost twelve dollars. If, however, I had had the suit made up by a seamstress, in cotton, it would have cost five dollars, or even less. My husband had a pair of shoes made for him by a shoemaker in Potimão; they squeak, like all Portuguese shoes, but they cost only eight dollars and fifty cents. A factory-made shoe of comparable quality but ugly design costs ten dollars.
Thus even the most slow-witted foreigner begins to wonder, as I did, who buys the things in the Chiado—the refrigerators and electric mixers and washing machines. A maid’s monthly salary, one learns, is from two hundred to four hundred escudos, or from seven to fourteen dollars, plus room and board. Construction workers get about twenty escudos (seventy cents) a day take-home pay, with no pay for days when rain halts work; workers in the sardine canneries get about the same, and are frequently laid off for a day or more, depending upon the catch of fish. “How do they live on it?” foreigners ask one another. The answer is that nobody seems to know. Most economic questions dissolve into mystery in Portugal. The Portuguese themselves, except those in the poorer classes, have no curiosity about such matters. “Who buys the things in the Chiado?” In the early days of my stay in Portugal, this question harried me. In a country where labor was the cheapest of all commodities, who was buying the labor-saving devices? And who was munching the Tootsie Rolls? Not the marquesas, surely, gliding by, with eyes like black diamonds, in their Rolls-Royces. After a while, I gave up asking these questions, as most Americans do who stay on here, because I never got a satisfactory answer. “Foreigners,” some Portuguese say, vaguely, and some think it may be the parvenus—the people who made money on Portuguese wolfram during the war. (“Wolfram” is one of those ready answers, along with “Housing project,” that come like responses in a litany. “Wolfram?” you learn to ask, pointing to a fur piece or a stream of traffic on the auto-estrada, and your companion nods.) After my curiosity had shrunk, from constant thwarting, I finally met an actual consumer—a high government official, who had given his wife a pressure cooker, which she had used, or had her cook use, once or twice, to see how it worked; it was evidently a toy.
Certainly there is new money in Portugal. They did well on wolfram, and on refugees, during the war. The Oppositionists say that many of these gains found their way into the pockets of the government bureaucrats, and that these bureaucrats continue to profit, through bribery, on every business transaction. A surprising thing about Portugal, which is admired as a model state by laissez-faire conservatives abroad, is that it does not have a free economy. Prices, wages, and the profit margin are mostly fixed by law. “Why, it’s Communism!” lamented an American who is in the chemical business here. He also had a low opinion of the Caixa de Previdência, the Portuguese social-security system, which exacts from the employer an amount equal to fifteen per cent of the worker’s wages, adds to it two per cent from the worker, and invests the whole in a fund for sickness, disability, old age, widows’ pensions, and burial allowances; there is no unemployment insurance. The chemicals man was objecting not so much to the tax itself as to what he called the “Socialist” use the government was making of the Caixa de Previdência fund—investing it in public housing, which competes with private industry. “It’s the economic principle behind it that’s all wrong!” he said excitedly, adding that there had been scandals in the administration of the funds.
But this man is a foreigner. Portuguese businessmen do not worry about principle; they look at the facts. Except for the two-per-cent levy on wages, there is no income tax in Portugal. The rich do not forget that they were saved, as they say, from anarchy; it is Salazar or worse, they declare. “You never had it better,” the government tells them, in effect, and doubtless this is true. If the margin of profit is fixed (as it is even for the small retailer; the customer can send in a complaint if he is overcharged in a shop), most wages are fixed, also. Strikes are forbidden; agitators are run out of the syndicates, which might be described as government company unions; Communists are outlawed. It is true that there is a heavy duty on imports, which is tantamount to a tax on the rich—the only people who can afford cars and French neckties and foreign gadgets, Chesterfields and Yardley’s—but to some this has marked social advantages, for it preserves class distinctions. A Chesterfield cigarette is a badge of class; the Portuguese make a queer, characteristic little grimace—the lower lip thrust out in pouting dismay—when they see a foreigner smoking one of the domestic Dianas or Suaves. The same with gin; the English in residence drink Portuguese gin, but the Portuguese middle class serves Gordon’s. Coca-Cola is not permitted to enter the country—for moral aesthetic reasons, I was given to understand by the propaganda man, although I have since heard that the Coca-Cola case was “mishandled”; pressure was applied too heavily and at the wrong spot. At any rate, other foreign companies that compete with Portuguese manufacturers have been able to come to terms with the government; Lux, for instance, made in Portugal and not very sudsy, can be bought, at considerable cost, by ladies with nylons to wash.
A number of taxes assume the form of licenses. Cigarette lighters are licensed. Cars, naturally, are licensed, and so are bicycles and dogs; every parrot, croaking in its cage, is licensed; every donkey toiling up a mountain road. There is the three-per-cent tourism tax, which is taken from the tourist in most hotels and pensãos and in luxury restaurants. And there are hosts of regulations, conducive to a disciplined atmosphere. You have to have a permit to buy a typewriter ribbon. Hotel rates are regulated, and the hotel and boardinghouse keepers are required to serve a third of a litre of wine (the vinho da casa) with every lunch or dinner. Road menders—poor men who work from sunrise to sundown for a tiny wage as part of the Portuguese P.W.A.—salute every passing car; it is a rule, one is told. Every newspaper must be approved, daily, by the censor. Political parties are proscribed, except Salazar’s National Union, which calls itself not a party but an “organ” of the people. Workers’ syndicates are bound “to abstain from all ideological discussions and to concentrate on the defense of the material and moral interests of their members, on the technical improvement of their trade, and on the creation of the frame of mind necessary for social peace.” Factories with more than twenty employees must conduct adult-education courses for the illiterate. Every landowner is assessed for the number of hands his property can theoretically employ, and in periods of agricultural crisis or general unemployment he is required to take on workers up to that capacity. The assessments, I have heard, are often unjust, and fall hardest on the small landowner, who cannot afford to bribe the proper officials. For such a landowner, they put mechanization out of the question; there is no point in buying a tractor if you are obliged to employ extra field hands, whose labor you must contrive a use for.
This is corporativism; everybody, except the housewives, is organized, or “integrated,” in some fashion, even the priests. To be expelled from a syndicate means literal outlawry for a worker; if anybody is to hire him, he must change his name or get his record expunged. Agricultural workers are incorporated into Houses of the People, which are syndicates of a sort; employers are incorporated into gremios, or guilds; lawyers, doctors, engineers, and other professional people are incorporated into ordens, or societies. Youth is mobilized into the Mocidade Portuguesa—a semi-military youth movement—but membership in it is not compulsory. There are five kinds of police—municipal and national—plus a National Guard, a Fiscal Guard, and the volunteer Portuguese Legion. “Two persons, one policeman” is the sardonic comment of the lower-class Portuguese on the omnipresent police, who are also referred to as “Salazar’s friends.” The size of the Regular Army is under a security blanket at present, although there can be no real secrecy, since the figures are known to NATO, and it is typical of Portugal that nobody can explain why this regulation was imposed. “Perhaps the Army is afraid the Russians will find out,” one Portuguese suggested to me hopefully. In any case, there are sour-looking soldiers and their barracks everywhere, most noticeably in the provincial towns. Many of the big convents, from which Christ’s volunteers were driven out half a century ago, now house Army conscripts.
But all such hardships and annoyances do not worry government officials or the well-to-do Portuguese and foreigners living in villas in the resort towns of Sintra, Estoril, and Paria da Rocha. “I adore Salazar” is the cry of the English lady-in-exile, with a blue chiffon scarf at her throat. “Dictature? Pas du tout. C’est ridicule,” the chief male dancer of the Portuguese ballet said to me. This young man adored Salazar, too, while holding les choses portugaises in a certain wry contempt. He read only French books, and disliked port and the fado and cooking with oil. This is typical of the sophisticated Portuguese. “Manueline—it’s simply futurism, the parvenu art of commerce,” I was told by a Portuguese art historian who was also in the cotton business. People of standing complain about the servants, about the food, about the Portuguese character, but not about the corporate state. The more vexed such critics are with the Portuguese people, the more they applaud the strong hand the government takes with them. Most of the few kind words I have heard about the Portuguese character have come from Oppositionists—people who have been in prison or are living on the edge of disaster. There are many exiles in Portugal, including some famous kings and pretenders, and the Portuguese of the upper classes have developed an air of living in exile themselves; there is a tendency among them to look upon the people of the lower classes as natives, in the colonial sense of the term—to berate them, bewail them, smile over their idiosyncrasies, boast of their devotion.
And, indeed, there is something at once maddening and endearing about the Portuguese people—“le peuple portugais, le vrai peuple,” as the upper classes and the intelligentsia call them, to distinguish them from the middle classes, whom all the other classes unite in abominating. This maddening quality—a sort of bizarre inefficiency, lumpishness, and illogicality—is encountered chiefly in the men and overgrown boys, the rapazes of the hotels and shops and boarding houses. The women and children are angels, most people agree. But the word “rapaz,” meaning “boy,” comes for the foreigner to be a word of horror, combining, in the Anglo-Saxon mind, the worst features of “rascal” and “rapscallion” and evoking a picture of a tepid, scowling, scurfy, lazy, lying youth who cannot get anything right and who will soon grow into a man with the same characteristics—his sole source of drowsy interest his football club. (There are charming boys and men, too, of course—sensitive, courteous, but somewhat frail and pensive, as though their virtues had attenuated them.) The Spanish call the Portuguese “estúpido,” and the Portuguese men say it of one another, furiously, leaning out of their cars to bellow it at a pedestrian, at a policeman, at another driver: “Estúpido, estúpido, estúpido!”
“Fantástico!” our intelligent young Portuguese driver kept saying, with a grin, whenever we struck on some instance of illogicality during a ten-day trip through the north. “Fontaschtic,” he would sigh. It was his favorite word, in Portuguese and English, the sign that he had become an onlooker, like the foreigners he drove. “Fontaschtic,” we would agree, as the road menders stopped work to salute. This fantastically, or freakishness, as of a piebald horse or a flower curiously streaked, runs irrepressibly through the Portuguese character. Doubtless it is partly the result of the conjunction of an illiterate peasant people and modern machinery. (Critics, biologically minded, trace it to hereditary syphilis, brought back during the Age of Discoveries, and there are certainly many freaks of nature in Portugal—hunchbacks and mustached women, recalling the Middle Ages. In the course of our ten days in the north, we saw three women bearded like prophets.) What is strange about Portugal, on the whole, is the unevenness of its development. The terraced farms in the mountains, with their rock walls like rows of teeth, are masterpieces of masonry; a plowed field in Portugal is more beautiful than a garden elsewhere. Many of the mechanical contrivances one sees are extremely inventive. Yet there are eerie zigzags and contradictions. For instance, practically all of Portugal is electrified, including the most primitive villages, but the lights are always going out, even in the big hotels, often several times in an evening, and the boy who goes to fix them does not understand electricity. Though this happens with almost predictable regularity, nobody thinks to provide candles. Only once in my three months’ stay here have candles been on hand when the fuses blew, and that was in a hotel run by an Englishman. In Praia da Rocha, the lights went out every Sunday morning all over the town; it was explained that the authorities were “washing” the electricity. In the same town, at the principal hotel, which was filled with foreigners of all nationalities, there was nobody on the staff who spoke any language other than Portuguese, and there was no railway timetable; an adventurous old Swiss gentleman with a beard, who spoke eight languages and had once made an ascent in a balloon over Moscow, nearly lost his reason trying to discover how to get a train to nearby Loulé. An Englishman at the hotel was dying from a heart condition; the ambulance taking him to Lisbon ran out of gas on a hill, the hand brake did not work, and the two orderlies stood by as the vehicle, with the stretcher in it, slipped jerkily back down to level ground.
On the comical side, there is the turkey walk from Estoril. Once every fortnight or so, the turkeys for the Lisbon market are walked in from there by a turkeyherd; driving along the auto-estrada, you can sometimes see them—the turkeyherd sleeping under a tree with his flock beside him. It is a fifteen-mile walk, and the turkey is a tough, seasoned veteran by the time you look him in the eye, still alive and ready to be poked, in the Lisbon market.
Most Americans shun Lisbon and huddle together in a sort of stockade in Estoril, which is an ugly little beach resort, with a casino, and houses painted blue and cream, like so many filling stations. The American wives in Estoril hate Portugal and complain that there is nothing to do here. There is some justice in the charge. Lisbon has a delightful rococo opera house in which a German and an Italian company appeared last season, but the National Theatre did one play for dreary months on end—a Portuguese adaptation of a Spanish or Italian comedy laid in England in 1850. The movies are rather wearying, with many intermissions, and a great deal of cutting by the censor; when “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a French picture, opened in Lisbon, only four deadly sins were left in it. There is very little artistic life—though not for lack or “intellectuals,” as a man in the government wryly explained to me. Foreign books, chiefly, are read by the avant-garde—Sartre and Camus and Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Tolstoy. The most recent Portuguese literary renaissance was in the nineteenth century. Portuguese painting continues in its derivative course; last spring, in a tiny gallery, there was an abstract show for which all the local painters obligingly became abstractionists.
In time, most of the resident foreigners become disaffected and moody. Some take to drink, driven loco by the Portuguese peculiarities. As in the tropics, trifles begin to get on their nerves. I, for instance, cannot bear the way the Portuguese answer the telephone. “Não está,” they usually growl, and hang up. You can never tell whether the person you have asked for is out or whether you have the wrong number. One American girl, whose husband is here on business, has become obsessed by the Portuguese men’s habit of spitting. I told her one day that I had heard that some Oppositionists had been tortured. “What did they do to them?” she asked sharply. “Prevent them from spitting?” All winter, the Portuguese nose runs; most of the children one sees on the street have colds. The men seldom use handkerchiefs, except in the highest reaches of society. The American girl told me the other day that she nearly burst into tears of affection when she saw a very poor, ragged old man on the cable car get out a handkerchief and blow his nose. She gave him ten escudos.
It is the beggars who rasp the nerves of most foreigners—the shawled women with babies in their arms, and the old men, and the children whining, “Gimme an escudo, Mister.” The English tell you never to give to children; it gets them into bad habits. But it is hard to resist the children, either because they are so pretty or, on the contrary, because they are so wretched-looking, with cold, thin, raw legs, and running noses and sores. In the Algarve, the children have caught on to the English moral disapproval of begging, and offer to sell you things instead—necklaces of sea shells, and small shell dangles meant to be worn on the lapel. One little boy, on the beach, tried to sell my husband his homework.
Whether you give or not, the beggars will not leave you alone. As soon as a foreigner goes outdoors, he is surrounded, as if by a swarm of mosquitoes, and he begins to grow angry at the Portuguese. “There are plenty of rich people in Portugal!” cried an exacerbated old lady from Iowa in a hotel in the north. “Why don’t they take care of their own poor?” This indignant question echoes through the hotels and pensãos. The old American ladies and retired couples who arrive in Portugal—from upstate New York, largely, and the Middle West—are not especially well-to-do; they come because they have read in a magazine that Portugal is cheap. And the rich in Portugal are said to be the richest in Europe. As you watch them in the hotels—silent, like sharks, endlessly masticating, with their medicines before them—you form a new conception of what cold selfishness can be. Strangely, it is not the peasants on their donkeys, with their umbrellas, or the white-collar workers in the cafés, with their newspapers, or the working-class women, with their baskets on their heads, who look foreign to American eyes; it is the moneyed classes who appear to be of a different breed. The lowering, heavy darkness of the moneyed classes seems to be as much a state of mind or soul as a physical appearance. The thick skin, the somnolent, heavy-lidded gaze are perhaps a kind of protection against fellow-feeling. The difference between rich and poor is so extreme in Portugal that it seems to have formed a carapace over the rich, making them torpid and incurious. A gentle Portuguese lady, herself engaged in charity, explained to me, rather apologetically, that there is very little charity in Portugal. “It is not that they are bad,” she said of the wealthy. “They simply do not think. They have never been trained to think. In America and England, at Christmas, your children are taught to make packages and send toys to poor children. Here they are not taught things like that.”
The Caixa de Previdência is the fruit of official thought on the subject of the underprivileged; so are Economic Homes, and the various limited-rent housing projects, and the National Federation for Joy in Work, which is a workers’ vacation plan. Among the official class, there is a good deal of social consciousness. There are breezy young bureaucrats—half playboy, half hard-driving worker—who remind you of enlightened young businessmen in America. They are “selling” Portugal to the tourist trade and fighting for appropriations to build hotels and clean up slums. There are other officials of a different type—stodgy, sincere, devoted, of lower social origins, fathers of growing families, who make you think of the Soviet officials of the early thirties, before the great trials and the purges. This is a government of “new men.” Portugal is called a Fascist state by the Oppositionists, but the term seems a little out-of-date, for Fascism as we knew it expired with Hitler and Mussolini. General Franco’s regime already appears superannuated beside the Estado Novo. The quality of Portugal is modern. It is a semi-totalitarian state, with certain positive aspects. It is possible for an official here to believe in the value of his work, to think that he is furthering the cause of progress as it is generally understood in the world by combatting illiteracy, improving health and hygiene, building dams and roads, rehousing the underprivileged, reforming the school curriculum (less “book learning,” more training in citizenship; less “strictly intellectual culture,” more physical education).
Except for the question of dictatorship, on which they are stiff and sensitive, many of the officials I have met here (and this is a troubling fact) do not differ greatly in their views from many progressive American school superintendents. The functionaries of Salazar talk like practical idealists; they have no patience with “sentimentality.” Salazar’s own rhetoric belongs to an older school: “Although with delays, with possible wanderings from detail which the difficult times explain, we still stride along the same road, with our spirit faithful to the everlasting truth. ... For every arm a hoe, for every family a home, for every mouth its bread.” Yet even Salazar, in his most exalted vein, engages in the bureaucratic self-criticism that is characteristic of the modern totalitarian state. He complains that corporativism is slowing down, that the people are relaxing, and urges the pursuit of “our corporative crusade”; he bewails the “lack of indoctrination of the Portuguese people.” This self-criticism is prevalent in the ranks of the franker officials all along the line, among whom it wears the mask of tolerance. One thing they tolerate is the Opposition, which, as they point out, was allowed to run candidates during the most recent election, in 1953—the first “free” election since the military coup in 1926. This election had a little of the flavor of a Soviet election. The Oppositionists were permitted to run candidates, but they were not permitted to organize as political parties. Their newspaper, the Republica, was allowed more freedom than previously, but it was still under censorship; it could “criticize but not defame,” as my propaganda informant put it. The campaign was a rather improvised affair; without funds, without organization, the old parliamentarians and Socialists who had been in jail or exile off and on were restored to life in a state of slight confusion, somewhat like old Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. In many districts, they were not able to arrange a slate of candidates. Nevertheless, they did very well, considering; in the districts where they had candidates they polled up to twenty-five per cent of the vote. Indeed, in a country in which the government was in a position (to say the least) to take economic reprisals against every citizen through his syndicate or gremio or orden, in which mass arrests and long detentions on mere suspicion were a thing of the very recent past (1948 is the latest I have heard of), this was remarkable. But it was also sad for the veteran parliamentarians and Socialists, since it represented probably a better showing than they would ever again be able to make in their lifetimes. Since the election, the censorship has tightened again. The real standard of living, say the Oppositionists, is lower than it has ever been: the rich have been getting richer throughout Salazar’s regime and the poor steadily poorer, in real wages, despite housing projects and social benefits. Moreover, they point out, the intensification of the corporativist program makes the state steadily more powerful: two bureaucracies—the ordinary state servants and the functionaries of the corporative society—have the people in double harness. And the Oppositionist leaders themselves, a handful of persons—notably Dr. Francisco Cunha Leal, engineer and former professor at Coimbra; Dr. António Sérgio, humanist, critic, and educational theorist; and Dr. Egas Moniz, neurologist and Nobel Prize winner—are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. For Dr. Sérgio, a charming old man with an engraving of Kant in his study, it is a cross that the government does not trouble to arrest him anymore but confines itself to persecuting his associates in various petty ways.
“Ah, António Sérgio!” said the press chief of Salazar’s National Union, smiling broadly. “He is a little pink. We let these people talk unless they go too far.” This official was a live wire, in his early thirties, who had been to America and conferred with John L. Lewis. He was proud to tell me that he knew very well the difference between a Communist and an old-style socialist intellectual. The Communists were jailed, of course, whenever the government could catch them, but even in dealing with them, he declared, the state showed moderation; the most dangerous Communists got only five years. Were we in America any more tolerant? he demanded. I replied that in the Algarve I had heard of some people being arrested as Communists who were simply attending a funeral service for an old parliamentarian. Yes, that had happened, he acknowledged, but it had been a mistake, and such mistakes were rare. In the case I mentioned, the innocent bystanders had been released after two days’ interrogation, and the more suspicious ones had been held for only a month and a half. The press chief spoke with a cocky frankness of what he called the small mistakes and shortcomings of the government. If he could have his way, he said, he would push the social-security program much further and take the equivalent of twenty-five per cent of each worker’s wage from the employer for the Caixa de Previdência. And he would break up the big estates in the Alentejo—the great central dust bowl of Portugal. He aired these daring views coolly, rather like an insouciant young Marxist; he belonged, evidently, to the left, or “Bolshevik,” wing of Salazar’s National Union. For some reason—a kind of delicacy, I suppose—I never mentioned Salazar during our conversation. But as the press chief was guiding me out through a conference room hung with pictures of dignitaries, he suddenly whirled around and, with a violent jab of his short arm, pointed to a photograph of Salazar. “Do you know who that is?” he shouted, in a completely new voice, as though an angry public-address system had been switched on. “Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar!”
Here, apparently, was a case of political dual personality, a special mutation of our period. Another example was provided by a bilious-looking official of the Casa dos Pescadores who, with his colleague (officials here often come in pairs, like FBI men), was explaining to me matter-of-factly how corporativism works in fish. All at once, abruptly interrupting his colleague, he leaned over, fastened his yellowed eyeballs on me, and said, in a soft, menacing purr, “Have you ever heard of a man called Salazar?” In Portugal, Salazar’s name, like God’s, is usually spoken in a special manner—not exactly fearful, but dutiful, as if the voice were in a Sunday suit. There are dozens of stories about him, illustrating his economical habits, his modesty, his late and lonely vigils, his reluctance to wield power; they all sound apocryphal, like the stories that used to be told about Stalin. Some of them have a sort of gingerly humor—one, for instance, that I heard from a Portuguese chauffeur who drives for some English friends of mine. According to this story, Salazar, while driving in his Packard, encountered a Volkswagen on the road, got out, and asked its driver what it was. “It is the People’s Car,” said the driver, translating the German name into Portuguese. “And what is that?” he continued, pointing to Salazar’s Packard. “That,” said Salazar, “is my car,” and he got in and drove away.