THE TRAVELLER HAS already remarked how Guimarães is truly the cradle of our nation. He had learnt as much in school, heard it repeated in commemorative lectures, so had no lack of reasons for taking his first steps to the sacred site where the Cathedral stands. At one time the slopes on the way up were stripped of heavy vegetation, so the owners might find no impediment on their way out, nor their enemies any hiding place on their approach. Today it’s a garden filled with neat alleys and luxuriant woods, the perfect place for new lovers to haunt. The traveller, always subject to exaggeration where historical detail is concerned, would have preferred the entire hillside to be cleared, and left as rough terrain, with only its eight-hundred-year-old stones still flourishing. Thus preoccupied, he lost the venerable shade of Afonso Henriques, lost his way to the front door, before becoming impatient and deciding to go straight ahead, confident of being hailed by some municipal guard who would accost him with: “Gentle knight, where are you headed?” To which our first king replies: “To the castle. My horse is exhausted with going round in circles.” The gardener hasn’t noticed a horse thereabouts but replies charitably: “Take him to the water, and then follow this track and you won’t get lost.” And when Afonso Henriques departs, dragging his wounded leg to Badajoz, the gardener comments to his assistant: “You get all sorts around here . . .”
Thus constructing this and further episodes of a revised history of his country, the traveller enters the castle. From outside it had looked considerably larger. Inside there is a tiny enclosure, made even smaller by the thickness of the walls along the main tower of tribute and the remains of the citadel. Within is a typical little Portuguese house, as can be found in any part of the world at any moment in time. The traveller examines his emotions for signs of affection and despairs at finding himself less moved than he would have wished. Among so many stones, which are the most charged with feeling? Many were laid here little more than forty years ago, others date back to the time of Dom Fernando, when the earth and wood was sent to arm the Countess Mumadona, leaving behind only this sodden dust which sticks to the traveller’s fingers when he shakes out his trouser turn-ups. The traveller would prefer the river of history to rashly invade his breast, instead of which a thin trickle of water continually secretes itself there, vanishing into the sands of oblivion.
He is thus unsheltered between the false walls, almost sighing with frustration as, defeated, he looks at the floor and takes comfort in finding the explanation of it all so close at hand, although hitherto unseen by himself. He is standing on the same great stones that Afonso Henriques and his labourers walked upon – who knows whether if here someone was imprisoned or even died, perhaps a Martim or an Álvaro? – but the stone, the floor, the ceiling above, the squally wind, all carry every word ever spoken there in Portuguese, and with the first and final sighs arising from the depths of the profound river that is our people. The traveller has no need to mount the sentry’s walkway to view a bit more of the countryside, nor clamber to the top of the tower to see still more. Sitting on this stone, unworn by feet either shod or unshod, he understood everything, or assumed he did, at least for today.
The traveller departed, bidding farewell to Afonso Henriques, who was wiping down the sweat of the day’s hard labours from his horse, went down to the church of St Miguel do Castelo, which he found closed, then on to the heavily over-restored Palace of the Dukes of Braganza. The impression it offered the traveller was to have committed to architecture the same taste for mediaevalisation that our official and officious sculptors adopted from the forties through to the sixties. The artistic wealth of the palace is not in question, still less the Gallic aspect of its construction, there in the original, but it had had a fresh coat of paint, equally distributed across the ancient and merely archaic additions, despite its Gobelins and Pastrana tapestries, the armoury hall, or the collection of furniture and sacred paintings. Perhaps the traveller still bore the castle’s boulder upon his shoulders. Something rendered him unable to take in the palace. He made a pledge to return there one day, to repair the present injustices which, through his own fault, he was committing.
It was high time to visit the museums. The traveller started with the oldest, Martins Sarmento, with its collection of the finds from Briteiros, a pre-Roman fortified town, and Sabroso, an Ibero-Roman settlement. Stone for stone, there can be no limit to the examination and appreciation they evoke, even within the bounds of the traveller’s scientific knowledge. The statues of Lusitanian warriors are delicious, not to mention the unsurpassed colossus of Pedralva, the granite boar, a brother to the swine of Murça and the rest of the transmontine piggery, and finally the crematorium door at Briteiros, the felicitously-named Pedra Formosa [Beautiful Stone], with its ornately interlocking geometrical loops. The rest of the museum, with other less antique specimens, some hardly dating from earlier than yesterday, do not merit less attention. So the traveller departed well restored and continued on a high to the Alberto Sampaio Museum.
Let the traveller put on record that this is one of the most beautiful museums he knows. Others may have greater riches, more famous collections, ornaments of finer provenance: the Alberto Sampaio Museum has a perfect balance between what it contains and its architectural surroundings. Then there’s the cloister at the College of Our Lady of the Olive Tree whose sequestered air and irregular design leaves the traveller with no desire to depart, but rather to linger over examining its arches and capitals, its abundance of rustic and learned statues, all of them beautiful and all putting the traveller at grave risk of falling into temptation and not moving on from there. His salvation lies in the guide’s announcement of further beauties within its halls, which he discovered, in such numbers it would take a book to describe them all: Dom João’s silver altar and the coat of chain mail he wore in Aljubarrota; the “Santas Mães” [Holy Mothers], the eighteenth-century “Fuga para o Egypto” [Flight into Egypt], the “Santa María a Formosa” [St Mary the Beautiful] by Master Pero, “Nossa Senhora e o Menino” [Our Lady and the Little Boy] by António Vaz, with their open book, the apple and the two birds, and the picture by Brother Carlos of “SS Martin, Sebastian and Vincent” – and a thousand other wonders in painting, sculpture, ceramics and silverware. The traveller’s final conviction is that the Alberto Sampaio Museum contains among the loveliest of collections of sacred objects on display in Portugal, less for the quantity than for the exceptional aesthetic quality of the vast majority of the pieces, many of them truly first-class. This museum merits any number of visits, and this particular visitor swears to return every time he passes through Guimarães. He might not revisit the castle or the dukes’ palace although he promised to do so: this, however, is a museum he won’t miss out on. The guide and the traveller bid their farewells, each of them brimming with sadness, since the latter was the only visitor. Despite this, the summer supposedly brings many more.
We all make mistakes. On leaving the museum, the traveller followed one old street after another; he admired the ancient Paços do Concelho [Council Chambers], the Salado monument and, having emerged into the Praça do Toural, he involuntarily committed a sin against beauty. There stands a church, whose name the traveller prefers to remain unremembered, for its assault on good taste is fundamental and extends to insulting what a religion has the right to expect: meaning an atmosphere blessed with excellence, an oratory dedicated to aunt Patrocínio or mother Paula, a transgression of the confessional. The traveller enters contented and emerges in anguish. He had viewed the “Santas Mães” in the museum, and the Virgin garlanded with roses who’s also there – but neither she nor the pair of them deserve such an offence and such a let-down. There remained much still to be seen in Guimarães, but the traveller preferred to depart.
The next morning it’s raining. The weather’s like that here, disposed equally to sun as to showers. It’ll rain with occasional breaks all the way to Santo Tirso, but the skies will already have opened when the traveller comes to stop in Antas, close by the Vila Nova de Famalicão. To the traveller, the whole region resembles a suburban landscape sown with houses, the focus of the industrial penetration radiating outwards from Oporto. For this reason the Romanesque fourteenth-century parish church of Antas appears somewhat unexpected, incongruous even, in a region whose rural character is disintegrating, the less suited to an ambience in which the most delirious product of the imagination is a “house maison with a fenêtre window” for returning emigrants. Ever since he left Trás-os-Montes, the traveller’s eyes have attempted to remain averted from the horrors now strewn around the countryside, roofs tiled in four or eight colours, bathroom tiling transferred to the façade, Swiss roofing, French attics, Loire castles fortified alongside the main road in the form of a cross, the unthinkable addition of reinforced concrete, the boiling vats, the “parrot’s perch”,1 the great crime against culture which is being committed and whose commission is permitted. Now, having simultaneously before his pained eyes the pure and sober beauty of the Antas church and the architecturally cretinous outskirts, the traveller could no longer maintain the pretence of not seeing, nor discuss things only in terms of pleasure and praises but must register his protest against those responsible for the general degradation.
Where is São Miguel de Seide? Lavish signposts point in the general direction but from there on, street past street, their scale is reduced, their arrows magicked away, and the traveller is in the ludicrous situation of passing the house that was Castelo Branco’s without actually noticing it. Three kilometres further on, at an enigmatic crossroads, he’ll ask a man standing there, possibly for the purpose of charitably assisting lost travellers, only to be informed: “It’s some way back behind you. On the square where the church and cemetery are.” The traveller retraces his steps blushing with embarrassment, and finally hits upon the house. It’s lunch-time, the guide is taking a rest, and the traveller is obliged to wait. While he waits, he walks up and down and takes a look at the gatehouse where Camilo Castelo Branco lived and died. The traveller knows that the real house burnt down in 1915 and that this one is as recent as the battlements of Guimarães castle, yet he still hopes that there will be something inside to move him as much as the wild and stony ground surrounding the castle walls. The traveller remains a man deeply attached to hope.
The guard materialises. “Good afternoon,” says the one. “Good afternoon,” replies the other. “I would like to see the house if I may.” “Yes, indeed sir.” The gateway is opened and the traveller goes inside. Camilo had been here. The trees weren’t the same, nor the plants, nor probably even the stone floor. But there is Jorge’s acacia, beside the stairwell, there’s no doubting its authenticity. The traveller goes upstairs, the guard repeats to him things he already knows, and opens the apartment door. The traveller realises there’s to be no miracle. The lighting is dim, the furniture and ornaments, however genuine, bear the imprint of having passed through other places and feel strange about returning here, neither recognising the walls around them nor feeling recognised by those walls. When the house burnt down, it only contained a portrait of Camilo and the sofa where he died. Both were saved. The traveller could therefore see the sofa and, in so doing, see Camilo Castelo Branco seated upon it. It remains true that the possessions inside these little rooms, the ornaments and autographs, the pictures hanging on the walls, every last bit of it all, either definitively or presumably belonged to Camilo. This being so, where does the deep melancholy which invades the traveller come from? Maybe from the heavy atmosphere, maybe it was the fine mould which seemed to cover everything. It had to derive from the tragedy of the life lived within these walls. It had to be down to the distress of those failed lives, however glorious their works. Might it be this, or that, or something else again? This was the house where Camilo slept and wrote. So, where does Camilo reside? In São João de Gatão, or in his lair at Texeira de Pascoaes, also about as dark as he deserved? Seide could be a bourgeois interior of the 1800s either on the Rua de Santa Caterina in Oporto, or on Lisbon’s Rua dos Franquieros. Seide is far more really the home of Ana Plácido, and belongs very little to Camilo. Seide fails to move you, it saddens you instead. Perhaps this is why the traveller is starting to feel that it’s time to take a look at the sea.
1. A mediaeval torture reputedly used under the military dictatorship, the victim being strung upside down from a pole (“perch”) by the wrists and ankles.