August, 1955
ONE RARELY SEES NOWADAYS a completely happy person, but that was how Mr. Rodriguez struck me, like a sunburst. He believed tremendously in his work; this was evident from the outset. He leaped up from his desk to meet me—a stoutish, ruddy-cheeked man, about thirty-five years old, with black, wavy hair, a round potato nose, very clean hands, and linen snowy as an alb. Outside, on the tessellated pavement, a car was waiting, with a driver, furnished through the Ministry of Information, to take us on a tour of housing projects in the Lisbon area. Mr. Rodriguez searched in his desk and found me a speech he had delivered to an international conference of housing experts, describing the achievements his department had made. He was the director of “Economic Homes,” one of the “new men” of the Salazar régime, a former schoolteacher who had married a social worker.
Yes, he said proudly: Portugal had social workers as well as super-highways, social security, adult education, housing projects, rent controls, price controls, modern psychiatry, football, workers’ vacation plans, and a reformed school curriculum based on citizenship and vocational training, rather than on book learning. “Just like America.” I nodded, wanly. It was not the first time the resemblance had been called to my attention. Portugal, though a small, poor country, as her officials assured me, had nearly everything America had, plus social discipline.
The Portuguese were children, so their leaders said. Mr. Rodriguez did not express this thought in words, but his whole being radiated a chaste paternal glow. He was, as he told me immediately, the father of a growing family, the head of an office family of engineers and social workers and secretaries, and the patriarch of 10,084 “Economic Homes,” occupied, according to his estimate, by 40,336 persons. Health and philoprogenitiveness burst from him, together with vital statistics, as he sped me about his offices, joyously introducing me to his staff and citing their qualifications. Three bashful young women social workers, wearing little merit stars in their dark suit-lapels, lined up before him, like convent pupils, to hear their names pronounced and tell, in Portuguese, what they did. The secretaries and “typewriters” sat demurely at their desks or hurried to open the files at Mr. Rodriguez’ bidding. At the head of the office class, in Mr. Rodriguez’ doorway, stood a beaming engineer who had propagated thirteen children.
Thanks to the charts and figures which had been showered on me by the Ministry of Information, I understood the principle of “Economic Homes,” and I had observed, for myself, the blocks of new housing scattered throughout Portugal. There were housing projects everywhere, for the fishermen, the sardine workers, the miners; in the slums, bulldozers were at work; in the remotest mountains, developments were springing up, complete with electrification, new streets, church, school, and recreation center. The wise philosophy of Salazar, as the official texts explained, embodied itself characteristically in the medium of housing, the casa being the symbol of family life and political stability. “For every family a home, for each arm, a hoe, for every mouth, its bread.” There were Prefabs, “Limited Rent Housing,” “Free Housing”—all subsidized or controlled by the government.
But “Economic Homes,” I learned, were the backbone of the building program. They differed from the other types of housing in that the rent, scaled to the occupants’ wages, was paid as amortization over a twenty-five year period, so that at the end of this period, the tenant owned his casa. The houses were divided into four classes, according to occupation: unskilled; skilled; white-collar; and professional (college graduate or equivalent). The four classes, in turn, were divided into types, according to the size of the family and the sex of the children: no children; one child; two children of the same sex; two children of opposite sex; three children, and so on, the requirement being that no more than two children should share a room, and that these two must be of the same sex.
This scholastic precision, as of dogmatic theology, dazzled my mind, and I found it hard to distinguish “Economic Homes” from “Economic Rent”—a branch of “Limited Rent,” which was also divided and subdivided into multiple categories. Mr. Rodriguez explained the vast difference as he bustled me into the car. “Economic Rent” consisted of large apartment houses, built by workers’ syndicates or by other corporative organizations or by private enterprise. Such housing projects, he understood, existed everywhere, while the Casas Economicas, combining individual ownership with state control and giving to each worker his separate house and garden, were typically Portuguese.
I then confessed that I found it hard not to confuse “Free Housing” (for the totally indigent) with “Free Rent Housing” (luxury apartments outside government control). And I mixed them both up with the Casas do Povo (“Houses of the People”), which had nothing to do with housing but were centers for agricultural workers. Mr. Rodriguez laughed. For a foreigner, he said, I had mastered the distinction well. He was relieved, he acknowledged, to find I had done my homework; this would leave us time to talk.
Time oppressed Mr. Rodriguez; the shortage of it was his only vexation. As he sat beside me in the back seat of the car, in his dark suit, with his black hair leaping into a vibrant pompadour, he gave the impression of a solid package of restless energy, like a quantum. He sat with arms folded and rump perched on the edge of the seat; one eye rested on the driver, to make sure he was taking the shortest route; the other, so to speak, roamed out the window; noting points of touristic interest that we were going too fast to see.
He began to tell me about himself, conscientiously, as we sped along, like a man dictating a memo while having his shoes shined. He came from Miranda-do-Douro, in Tras-os-Montes, far off in the north, near the Spanish border; his wife—a nice contrast—came from Silves, in the southern Algarve. He had been to America, as a representative of his teachers’ syndicate; he showed me a photograph of himself in a group of teachers at the summer school of a Midwestern American college. He was still active in his teachers’ syndicate, though housing kept him very busy and he had other obligations, as husband, citizen, father, and faithful son of the Church. Meetings, always meetings, he said happily. “Just like America.” He had felt very much at home in America, he confided, and in his office he used American methods, treating his subordinates democratically and working harder than any of them, to show what he expected. He tried to keep up his English; at home, on his bookshelves, I would see, there were volumes he had brought back: St. Augustine, in the Modern Library, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book.
As he spoke, he kept interrupting himself, looking at his watch, leaning forward and abruptly directing the driver this way and that, whenever a new idea crossed his active mind. “Em frente,” “Direito,” “Esquerda”—Mr. Rodriguez’ interests far transcended the boundaries of his field, and the car shot about like a ball in a pinball machine, forward, left, right, under his dynamic impetus. During the course of our tour, we saw not only “Economic Homes,” Mr. Rodriguez’ own domain, but Prefabs, Free Housing, Limited Rent Housing, and Free Rent Housing (“You cannot tell the difference?” he inquired proudly). Crisscrossing Lisbon at a wild pace several times during the afternoon, we also saw the auto-estrada, the airdrome, outside and in, the new science laboratories, the new belvedere of Santa Clara, and the new church, metallically modern, of Our Lady of Fatima, where Mr. Rodriguez knelt down and rapidly said a prayer.
Thinking of the chauffeur, waiting outside, I too sent up a prayer—of thanks, for once, that we were not in a democratic country. As a democratic person, I was already feeling apologetic toward the chauffeur, who was not Mr. Rodriguez’ employee but had been assigned to me through the Bureau of Tourism. But what could I do? Mr. Rodriguez had assumed command, and the driver, I told myself, was probably used to obeying. Under a dictatorship, Mr. Rodriguez would not be expected to give his reasons.
For my own part, I was a little sorry that Mr. Rodriguez’ interests pertained so strictly to the new. When I glimpsed a pink palace, once, and turned my eyes hopefully toward him, he took no notice of my curiosity.
“Pretty,” I murmured, hinting.
“Em frente,” said Mr. Rodriguez sternly (“Straight ahead”), as the driver started to slow down. For a moment, looking at his profile, with its stubby, turned-up nose and glowing round cheek, I thought of a Soviet official. And like so many revolutionaries, he was a puritan; he had turned over a “new” leaf. At one point, hearing that I too had been educated in the classics, he proposed that we should speak Latin together, but set aside the idea, stalwartly, as belonging to the “former” Mr. Rodriguez.
It was mid-afternoon when we drove into the first block of Casas Economicas in the Madre de Deus district. I had asked to see Class A and Class B, unskilled and skilled—the lowest categories. As we drove along the new streets, laid out on a rectangular plan, Mr. Rodriguez emphasized that these were not houses but homes. The owner-tenants were screened by the young social workers I had met in his office, to make sure they were the right kind of people. The rents were fixed in each category not to exceed one-sixth of the family’s total earnings, and fifteen per cent of this rent went to cover insurance premiums for death, disability, and sickness, also for fire insurance.
What if a worker loses his job? I asked. The social workers would find him one, Mr. Rodriguez replied. And if he died, even if he had just moved in, the house would belong to his widow, without further payments. Still, I said, there must be some occasions when the worker-tenant could not keep up the installments and the house would revert to the state. Very seldom, said Mr. Rodriguez. The screening was very thorough. “If we suspect a man is unstable, we do not give him the house.” Once in a while, of course, human nature being what it was, a tenant might begin to drink or go crazy, but again the social worker would step in and have him treated by psychiatry.
It sounded very good, I observed. But what if the owner-tenant’s wife was a slatternly housekeeper and they let the place run down? The government, he answered, had thought of that too. Each block of houses was supervised by a Fiscal officer, who lived in the end house, where he could keep an eye on things. But generally there were no problems. The Portuguese were naturally neat, and since the casa belonged to the worker, he had a special interest in keeping it in good condition. Many improved their houses, working after hours. There, for example—his eye traveled down a street commendingly—was a garage an owner-tenant had built himself.
A feeling of surprise came over me as I turned to look at the garage, draped in bougainvillea. I knew what a car cost and I knew what workers were paid. A building worker, in a good month, might get $23.40, minus taxes and social security deductions. The cook (skilled) in my pensão got $7 a month. What, I murmured, was the rent in these Class A houses? He was not sure; each case was different—about a hundred and thirty escudos, $4.55. (He was wrong; as I later learned, the Class A rents in this district were about two hundred escudos—$7.)
This was not too bad, I reflected; some workers could afford to live here, especially with the gardens yielding fruit and vegetables; according to Mr. Rodriguez, many of the tenants kept chickens and rabbits also. And if all your insurance were paid and there were no heating bills to think of, in this temperate climate, and the state sent the doctor when you were sick? The houses, in pale pastels with orange-tile roofs, looked pleasant from the outside; the streets were clean and sunny and the children were riding tricycles up and down the pavement. If the interiors lived up to the outside, the worker’s lot here would compare quite favorably to America, with its dreary television aerials and canned spaghetti dinners. I still wondered about the garage, but it occurred to me that the owner might be a taxi-driver.
Our own car had stopped, in front of the Fiscal’s house. Mr. Rodriguez jumped out and knocked at the door. There was no answer. An expression of annoyance crossed Mr. Rodriguez’ face. He jotted down a note in his notebook, and we drove along slowly, trying to choose a house.
A uniformed maid, with a child hiding behind her skirts, answered the door of the house we finally selected.
“Class A?” I queried, feeling that there must be a mistake.
“Class A,” said Mr. Rodriguez, firmly, piloting me forward. I glanced at the young chauffeur for confirmation.
“Class A,” he nodded, grinning, and folding his arms proudly, in imitation of Mr. Rodriguez, before the picture of (unskilled) working-class prosperity that presented itself framed in the doorway. The mistress of the house was out, but the maid consented to show the house to us when Mr. Rodriguez revealed his identity. She was eager, indeed, to show it, hurrying ahead of us to plump a cushion here or straighten a hanging there. I tried to conceal my astonishment. The house was furnished in the height of Portuguese bourgeois taste. There was a huge crystal chandelier in the small boxlike living room; there were carved cabinets, heavy embossed draperies, a wall-to-wall armoire in the Chinese style, Oriental-type rugs, floppy velvet dolls, lace antimacassars on dark, overstuffed chairs. The dining room and the upstairs were furnished with the same abandon; the only room that could be called economic was the maid’s room, which had nothing in it but a bed, a cheap chest of drawers, and the toys of the son of the house.
“Bonita,” I echoed the maid’s soft comment, as we moved from room to room, Mr. Rodriguez stopping to demonstrate that the house had everything the charts distributed by the Information Ministry promised: modern bath, modern kitchen, room for the child, room, as he put it, “where the couple sleeps,” flower garden in front, vegetable garden in back. There was, however—in the chart—no maid’s room in Class A, Type 2 (one child). The house we were in, from its layout, was in fact Class A, Type 3 (two children of opposite sexes). I did not call this to Mr. Rodriguez’ attention, and if he noticed it, he gave no sign.
“They have fixed it up, I think,” he said instead to me, uncomfortably, passing his hand through his pompadour, as we came out into the street.
I could have told Mr. Rodriguez not to worry, that this too was “just like America.” We too had housing projects designed for the poor and pre-empted by grafters who got in through pull. But instead, rather meanly, I said nothing, and we went on to a house across the street—another Class A, which belonged, said Mr. Rodriguez, to a railway worker. This one was more modest. The crystal chandelier (“muinte caro”) was smaller, and there were fewer rugs and carved cabinets. There was no maid, and the housewife kept apologizing for the state of the rooms, though in fact they were very clean and redolent of furniture wax. Here again (poor Mr. Rodriguez!), we were invited to inspect the quality of all the appointments: the mirrors and the china and the chiffon-covered boudoir lamps.
“Bonita,” I said, “Muinte bonita.” I knew what this house reminded me of—the Massachusetts home of an Italian liquor-store dealer who was reputed to be a millionaire by his humble Portuguese-American neighbors. There was the same smell of wax and there were the same iridescent taffetas and holy pictures in gilt frames and sets of matched colored glasses. The chief difference was that the Massachusetts wine merchant had a radio that lit up with a colored sign, “Four Roses,” when you turned it on. In his backyard, the liquor-store Croesus had a fig tree. Here there was a goat in the backyard, and a pair of rabbits in a hutch. We lingered on the back steps, talking to the flustered housewife, who apologized, laughingly, for the goat.
Out on the street again, Mr. Rodriguez mopped his brow and looked up and down the rows of houses in perplexity. “Let’s try to find one that isn’t fixed up,” I suggested, feeling sorry for him, since he was a nice man, a sincere progressive, too, according to his lights. I liked Mr. Rodriguez, and I could not make out whether he was surprised by what we were finding or merely taken aback at seeing it suddenly from a foreigner’s point of view. The driver was grinning, and I could not make out what he was thinking, either. When I caught sight of a shoemaker’s sign hanging from a door, Mr. Rodriguez gladdened.
“Class B,” he said—the skilled working class—and on his behalf I was honestly hoping to find a poor shoemaker inside, at his last, with a parrot and potted herbs. But the shoemaker was not at home, and there were no signs of his trade. The housewife let us in and told us that her husband worked at one of the big hospitals, making shoes. This house, curiously enough, was inferior to the others structurally, though it was in a higher category on paper. It had less light; the kitchen was smaller and the bath not so up-to-date. (I cannot explain this; neither could Mr. Rodriguez, though he admitted the difference when pressed.) The rooms still had the original cheap lighting fixtures. The divans were older; the decoration had homemade touches—in the couple’s room, besides the usual Madonnas, there was a framed colored photo of Queen Elizabeth, in her Coronation dress, cut out of a magazine. But in the dining room, luxury reappeared, in the form of an enormous dark polished sideboard, covered with a lace cloth, like an altar, and laden with a display of bottles—wines, brandies, ports.
“These people drink, I am afraid,” murmured Mr. Rodriguez, discreetly closing the door.
As we left, the woman next door, who had been watching us and gossiping with the driver, invited us to see her casa, which was much the same as the shoemaker’s—another Class B.
“You want to look at more?” inquired the driver, when we came out onto the sidewalk again. I glanced at Mr. Rodriguez and hesitated. A sort of tact prevented me from asking the indelicate question pulsing through my mind: “Are there any poor people in these houses?”
There was no shortage of poor people, certainly, in Portugal; their absence, in fact, from this district was its most remarkable feature. I missed the familiar signs of poverty, both ugly and picturesque: the tattered laundry on the clotheslines, the birds in their cages, the orange horse meat in the stalls, the beggars and ragged children, the women in shawls and shapeless sweaters, the men in thin suits, like paper, the flower sellers, the reek of wine from the taverns, the mongrel dogs, the smell of codfish, the baskets of eels and fresh bread. But I dared not intimate this to Mr. Rodriguez, whose round face wore a troubled, anxious expression, as if he were conscious suddenly of a lack in his Creation, like God, when he made Eden, and forgot to put in woman.
Instead, I told the driver no, thank you. If they were all like this, I said, I had seen enough to get the idea. We got into the car and drove off. The houses were very nice, I said repeatedly, to comfort Mr. Rodriguez—very clean, very clean. And I did not bother to speculate, even inwardly, as to how these owner-tenants had qualified for their homes: had they concealed their assets or were they devoted members of Salazar’s National Union or did they have a cousin or a godfather in Mr. Rodriguez’ office? Looking sidewise at Mr. Rodriguez, I could not believe that he was corrupt, in any of the ordinary ways. For one thing, he looked much too uncomfortable, like a person who feels criticized and does not know where to begin his defense.
The problem, evidently, was turning over in his mind, for he came, all at once, out of a fit of abstraction and directed the driver to turn back and take us along the edge of this Madre de Deus section, where, on the outskirts of the Casas Economicas, on razed ground, a few leaning hovels were still standing.
“It was all like that—a slum—before we built the houses,” he said excitedly.
“Terrible,” I agreed. And he made the driver take us around the circuit a second time, to compare before and after. I inquired what had happened to the inhabitants whose houses had been torn down, to create the Economic Homes. On this point, Mr. Rodriguez was vague, but he was certain they had been taken care of. Some might be in Free Housing, for the indigent, and some in the Prefabs in the Tin District, some in Limited Rent, and some, maybe, in Casas Economicas. Again, I held my peace, mindful of the New York slum dwellers who had been dispossessed to create Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. What Mr. Rodriguez didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, I decided patriotically.
After this, we saw Prefabs (temporary housing). These were authentic working-class houses, very charmingly done, with strings of bright laundry, bird cages, potted geraniums, and large families in the doorways, watching us as we drove by and shading their eyes against the late afternoon sun. I liked these much better than the Casas Economicas, but I did not want to hurt Mr. Rodriguez’ feelings by saying so. On his side, he assured me that these Prefabs were only a makeshift; the tenants who made good here would be moved into Casas Economicas, the others into Limited Rent. In time, the whole district would be torn down, but progress was a question of stages. We paused here only briefly; he was in a hurry to be on. From the car, we looked at two more districts of Economic Homes.
“They are all alike,” said Mr. Rodriguez, “but some are more fixed up. You do not wish to go in?” I shook my head. I was satisfied, I said, that they were all very nice. We were hastening on, I realized, to the climax of our tour: Mr. Rodriguez’ own home, Class D, Type 3—college graduate, two or more children of different sexes.
His wife, his young sister-in-law, who was a “typewriter” in his office, his children, and a maid were all waiting to receive us and show us in shy trepidation their casa and family life. Their house was large and sunny, more restrained in its decorative appointments than any we had yet seen. It had a splendid modern kitchen, two baths, bedrooms for the children and the parents, a comfortable book-lined study for Mr. Rodriguez, and a small bare room for the maid. I had to inspect everything—the ribboned baby in its bassinet, the toilets and the laundry facilities, whose workings the father of the home energetically demonstrated; the whole family gathered round while Mr. Rodriguez turned on the shower in the main bath to show that the water was hot. “Feel,” urged Mrs. Rodriguez, a pretty, gentle little girl with big dark eyes, and we all put in our hands and felt.
As we came down the polished stairs, Mr. Rodriguez hurried ahead and flung open the door to the dining room, which I had not yet been shown. He revealed a table spread with a lace tablecloth and cups and plates and saucers and heaped with fruits and cakes. This, it seemed, was in my honor; I was expected to stay for tea. There were olives and ham and sausages; salted almonds from the Algarve; five kinds of cakes from Silves, Mrs. Rodriquez’ home; frilly little sponge cakes, like daffodils, from Lisbon; a special cake from Evora, in the Alentejo; sweets made of figs and almonds, four kinds, from the Algarve; and finally a decorated birthday cake that had been made the day before to honor one of the family. Mr. Rodriguez took an appraising look at this banquet and at once ordered the maid to make sandwiches. The sandwiches came in; Mr. Rodriguez examined them critically; he feared the bread was cut too thick. Tea was poured, and Mr. Rodriguez sent out to the kitchen for a fresh round white mountain cheese.
Everything was homemade, Mr. Rodriguez attested—in the kitchens of cousins or aunts or friends. And I had to partake of it all, especially the candies and cakes from Silves, because I had been there and walked in the grass-carpeted old Moorish fortress and dropped stones into the great cistern that was used in the famous siege when the Portuguese were fighting the Arabs.
“She has been there!” Mr. Rodriguez assured the two shy sisters, and we talked happily of Silves in English, French, and Portuguese. Mr. Rodriguez proudly demonstrated that Mrs. Rodriguez spoke French. When I had sampled everything on the table, paper napkins were brought to make up a package of cakes and sweets for my husband, because he too had been in Silves and climbed on the red parapets of the castle, looking out over almond and mimosa and figs and kumquats to the blue mountains of Monchique. “Tell him they are from Silves,” said Mrs. Rodriguez softly.
Mr. Rodriguez went to the sideboard and poured port, two kinds, into liqueur glasses. They all—the sisters, the maid, and the older children—watched while I drank under Mr. Rodriguez’ supervision, as they had watched when he demonstrated the miracle of the hot shower bath.
“Drink,” said Mr. Rodriguez, fetching another bottle from the sideboard. Rather troubled, I tasted the liqueur—something regional, from the Upper Douro, with a flavor like Drambuie—that he poured into a fresh glass. It was nearly eight o’clock, and I was worried about the driver, waiting all this time outside. Even if it was a dictatorship, there were, I felt, limits.
At last, they let me leave the table to go into the study and telephone my husband, who had been expecting me at our pensão for the past two hours. While I was waiting for the boardinghouse to answer, I saw Mr. Rodriguez open the front door and curtly beckon the chauffeur in.
“Eat,” commanded Mr. Rodriguez, in Portuguese, directing the young man to the now-empty dining room, where the table lay strewn with crumpled napkins and the debris and crumbs of our feast. The driver, cap in hand, declined, and I secretly applauded his spunk, even though I feared he was hungry. Mr. Rodriguez shrugged, the picture of offended beneficence. Nevertheless, we all said goodbye very warmly. Mr. Rodriguez presented me with the marital calling card of himself and Lucinda Maria Duarte Estrelo. “You will not forget us?” he said, glancing at his watch, for he was off to a teachers’ syndicate meeting. I promised that I would not.
The chauffeur did not forget him either. The next week he took us—my husband and me—on a ten-day trip through the north, to see baroque churches with painted ceilings and eighteenth-century palaces and Roman remains. All along the way, outside once-Phoenician fishing villages or walled medieval towns, in the savage recesses of dark mountains where the inhabitants lived in granite huts without windows or chimneys and where wolves were said to roam, we kept seeing or, rather, spotting blocks of bright new orange-roofed white houses deposited on the countryside, like Mr. Rodriguez’ calling-card.
“Casas Economicas,” the driver would sigh. “Mr. Rodriguez. ‘Direito,’ ‘Esquerda,’ ‘Em frente.’” And his laugh, like a wild dog’s bark, would echo sardonically across the emerald ravines.