CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by José Saramago

Praise

List of Illustrations

Dedication

Title Page

Author’s Preface to the English Edition

I

FROM NORTHEAST TO NORTHWEST: THE DOURO AND THE DUERO

Map

1. The Sermon of the Fishes

2. The Wicked Ways of Dossel

3. The Fiery Waters of the River de Onor

4. The Story of the Soldier José Jorge

5. The Devil’s Temptations

6. The Stately Home

7. The Tame Wolf’s Cave

8. Passionate Animals

9. Where Camilo is Not

10. Sleeping Beauty’s Castle

11. Of Headaches and Other Miracles

12. An Even Bigger House

13. The Girls of Castro Laboreiro

14. St George Sets Forth on Horseback

15. Food for the Body

16. Mount Everest of Lanhoso

17. “Beside the River They Call the Douro … ”

II

LOWLANDS BESIDE THE OCEAN

Map

1. Endless Waters

2. At Home with the Marquess of Marialva

3. Not Every Ruin is a Roman Ruin

4. Coimbra Climbs, Coimbra Falls

5. A Castle Fit for Hamlet

6. At the Mountain’s Gateway

III

SOFT-STONE BEIRAS, BE PATIENT

Map

1. The Man Who Could Not Forget

2. Bread, Cheese and Wine in Cidadelhe

3. How Malva Got its Name

4. A Grain of Corn Away from Being Lisbon

5. New Temptations of the Devil

6. King of Cards

7. Highs and Lows

8. The Town of Stone

9. The Ghost of José Júnior

10. “Hic Est Chorus”

IV

FROM MONDEGO TO SADO, STOPPING ALL THE WHILE

Map

1. One Islands, Two Islands

2. Arts of Water and Fire

3. Friars, Warriors and Fishermen

4. The Oldest House

5. So Near and Yet so Far

6. Captain Bonina

7. The Name in the Map

8. There Was Once a Slave

9. Paradise Encountered

10. At the Gates of Lisbon

11. They Say It’s a Good Thing

12. Chimneys and Orange Groves

V

THE VAST AND BURNING LANDS OF ALENTEJO

Map

1. Where the Eagles Rest

2. A Rose Flower

3. One Ancient Stone, One Man

4. The Destruction of Nests is Prohibited

5. The Night the World Began

6. Looking and Leaping

7. The Italians in Mértola

VI

OF THE ALGARVE, SUN, DRY BREAD AND SOFT BREAD

Map

1. The Director and his Museum

2. Portuguese as She is Not Spoken

3. The Traveller Sets Out Again

Picture Section

Index

Copyright

About the Author

JOSÉ SARAMAGO was born in Portugal in 1922. His oeuvre embraces plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and novels that have been translated into more than 20 languages and which have established him as Portugal’s most influential living writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

NICK CAISTOR, a producer of BBC programmes and a journalist, has translated the work of Eduardo Mendoza, Osvaldo Soriano and Juan Carlos Onetti.

AMANDA HOPKINSON translates contemporary literature, mainly from Latin America. She is the author of a biography of Julia Margaret Cameron.

About the Book

From the misty moutains of the north to the southern seascape of the Algarve, the travels of Nobel laureate José Saramago are a passionate rediscovery of his own land.

Setting off in his veteran motor car, Saramago wants to travel to Portugal, as well as through it: by making it his destination the acclaimed writer hopes to take stock of his native land as it hovers on the edge of the modern world. He is no typical guide – he avoids the “sights” in favour of a remote Romanesque church, a cobweb-ridden chapel, the local and the domestic – but, with his deep fount of memory and erudite knowledge, each encounter evoking the span of Portugal’s history, he is anyone’s idea of a delightful travelling companion.

Also by José Saramago in English translation

MANUAL OF PAINTING AND CALLIGRAPHY

BALTASAR AND BLIMUNDA

THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST

THE STONE RAFT

THE HISTORY OF THE SIEGE OF LISBON

BLINDNESS

ALL THE NAMES

THE TALE OF AN UNKNOWN ISLAND

A novella

“His superbly written narrative gives the reader not only an appreciation for the current lay of the Portuguese land but also a very edifying course in the history of a proud nation. All of which adds up to what Saramago intended: a book on Portugal ‘that could not in any respect be confused with any other’”

BRAD HOOPER, Booklist

“It is a myth that good travel writing involves leaving home, as José Saramago’s Journey to Portugal proves . . . There is the joy of reading this consummate novelist’s account of his travels across his native land in a veteran motor car discovering so much he did not know about his own people”

LOUISE NICHOLSON, The Times

“It is difficult to resist being enchanted by the witty, at times sarcastic reveries of a man in search of his land, its history and himself”

Publishers’ Weekly

“He is never indifferent, nor ignorant, nor detached. Instead a profound, almost anguished engagement with his country holds him during the six months he takes to make this journey . . . This reviewer for one will be taking Journey to Portugal with him as, in his turn, he makes his way into every last nook and cranny of his mother’s country”

C. A. R. HILLS, Literary Review

“This is a book written by someone besotted with his subject. José Saramago, the Portuguese author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is deeply in love with his country . . . It is much more than a guide book. It is an intimate account of a series of meetings between the author and his beloved, a series of passionate encounters . . . And one feels privileged to be in his company . . . This book is a joy to pick up and a delight to read”

HUGH O’SHAUGHNESSY, Tablet

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1 From Northeast to Northwest

2 Lowlands Beside the Ocean: Northwest Portugal

3 Soft-stone Beiras: Eastern Central Portugal

4 From Mondego to Sado: Lisbon and Western Central Portugal

5 The Alentejo

6 The Algarve

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

Fig 1, 13, 16, 18, 26, 30, 31, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 63 Alvão & Co/Centro Português de Fotografía

Fig 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 33, 34, Pedro Baptista

Fig 6, 28, 38, 39, 42, 48, 61, 69, 70, 71, 72, José Afonso Furtado

Fig 32, 37, 59, 62 Luisa Ferreira

Fig 35, 40, 52, 54, 58, 65, 66, 68, Centro Doc. Informação/Diário de Notícias

Fig 36, 60, 64 Juno

Fig 44, 53, 67, 73, 74 Dorothy Bohm

Fig 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 57 Câmara Municipal de Lisboa/Arquivo Histórico

To the one who opened doors for me and showed me the way –
and also in memory of Almeida Garrett, master-traveller

José Saramago

JOURNEY TO PORTUGAL

Translated from the Portuguese and with notes by
Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor

Author’s Preface to the English Edition

EXACTLY TWENTY YEARS have gone by. It was in the autumn of 1979 that I left Portugal, crossing the border at Valença do Minho into the Galician countryside. I wanted the title I had already chosen for my book – Journey to Portugal – to obtain its fullest meaning from my very first step and word onwards, for it has to be said that a journey to a country must always involve starting from beyond its frontiers. Once undertaken, the journey obviously has to take place in and through Portugal, and so what was clear to me from the outset should be equally apparent to readers from the moment they set eyes on the book, from its title. For four days I amused myself travelling through the provinces of Galicia and León, staying in towns and villages as though they and nowhere else were the true objects of my journey. It was only on the fifth day that I decided to cross into Portugal, entering from Zamora and the Rio Douro. There I preached a sermon to the fishes, in imitation of St Anthony and of Father Antonio Vieira, as the first chapter comprehensively explains, and so at last came into Portugal.

Where journeys are concerned, insisting on the difference between an in and a through and a to is something much more profound than a play on words or a simple vocabulary exercise. In determining to journey to Portugal, the task I was setting myself would require me to leave out any number of things seen and people met; to discount assumptions derived from superficial encounters; forfeit the routine of tourist guides and everyday maps as the one way in to the history and culture of my country. Twenty years on, I am not so sure I was successful, or at least to the extent I thought I was. Even so, perhaps the perceptive reader can observe, here and there, in the odd felicitous moment of my account, an occasional indication that, at best, it constituted the most ambitious project to which I could have aspired: to write a book on Portugal that could not in any respect be confused with any other, a book capable of offering a fresh way of looking, a new way of feeling. (Let us be tolerant and pardon the author this imprudent spirit, this delirium of will and imagination . . . )

During the lengthy voyage that took nearly six months, the conviction was born in me that in every place I passed through there was a piece of old Portugal bidding farewell to the traveller I was, an ancient Portugal which was beginning, finally, while still doubting whether it wanted to or not, to move towards the twentieth entury. It was like those long, distant Lusitanian ages where, in comparison to any other calendar in Europe (an eighteenth century that ran until the middle of the nineteenth, a twentieth century that only now seemed on the brink of noticing that there weren’t another hundred years left to it . . .) there was a sensation of so much that was being tugged onwards by a Time tired of waiting. Sometimes afterwards, as I tried to set down, word by word, the memory of what I’d seen, heard and felt during the journey, I began to think that in some sense I must be writing a sort of last will and testament, an inventory, a list of what had been salvaged, a long farewell.

A mere tourist guide was what I least wanted the Journey to Portugal to become, any more than I wished the intervening years to have passed by. Some things described here have either ceased to exist or are no longer immediately recognisable. Landscapes have been transformed, as have towns and their architecture; tastes and ways of life have changed. But this book should not be read as a melancholy journey into the past. Instead the reader should bear in mind the principle which guided the traveller at every step and on every page: a pursuit of Portugal’s history and culture. Guided by this principle, there’s no chance of losing the way.

J. S.

I

FROM NORTHEAST TO NORTHWEST: THE DOURO AND THE DUERO

1

The Sermon of the Fishes

NOTHING OF THE kind had occurred within the living memory of any border guard. This was the first traveller ever to pull up in his car, with the engine already in Portugal but the petrol tank still in Spain, and lean over the parapet at the precise point crossed by the invisible line of the frontier. Then, from across the deep dark waters, echoing between the tall rocky slopes on either side, the traveller’s voice could be heard preaching to the fish in the river:¹

“Gather round, fishes, those of you to the right still in the River Douro and those of you to the left in the River Duero, come closer all of you and advise me which language you speak when you cross the watery frontiers beneath, and whether down there you also produce passports and visas as you enter and depart. Here am I, gazing down on you from this high barrier, as you gaze back up at me, fishes residing in these mingling waters, and who can as easily find yourselves on one shoreline as on another, a grand fraternity of fishes who only devour one another for reasons of hunger and never on a patriotic impulse. Grant me, O fishes, clear instruction, lest I forget this lesson on the second stage of my journey into Portugal: may I learn in passing from one land to the next to pay the closest attention to the similarities and differences, whilst not forgetting something common to both humans and fish alike, namely that a traveller has preferences and sympathies unconstrained by the obligations of universal love, never hitherto required of him. To you, then, I at length bid farewell, O fishes, until a future day: may you follow your own course out of the sight of fishermen. Swim joyfully on, and wish me a safe journey. Farewell, farewell.”

This was a fine miracle with which to start the journey. A sudden breeze ruffled the waters, or perhaps it was simply the disturbance caused by the submerging fish, for no sooner had the traveller fallen silent than there was nothing to be seen apart from the river and its shores, and nothing to be heard above the dozy hum of the car engine. That’s the problem with miracles: they last such a short time. But the traveller is not a professional miracle-worker, he works them only by accident, so by the time he returns to his car he is already resigned to the fact. He knows he is about to enter a country rich in supernatural pageantry, as immediately witnessed by the first town he comes to in Portugal, one called Miranda do Douro,² which he enters in the precise manner of the fastidious traveller. Here he is forced to recognise his own shortcomings, and admit he has everything to learn. About miracles, as all else.

It’s an October afternoon. The traveller opens a window in the room where he is to spend the night and, at first glance, discovers or recovers the certainty that he is fortunate indeed. He could have faced onto a wall, a miserable piece of stonemasonry, or an area strung with washing, and have had to content himself with the sense of utility, of decay, or simply the hygiene of a washing line. But what he encountered was the stony cliffside of the Spanish Duero, so hard in its composition that even brushwood could scarcely find a hold and, since strokes of luck never occur singly, the sun was positioned in such a way as to create an enormous abstract painting in varying shades of yellow, tempting him to remain there staring for as long as there was still light. At this point in time the traveller doesn’t yet know that a few days hence he’ll be in Braganza, in the Abade de Baçal Museum, staring again at the same stone, maybe even at the same shade of yellow, only here in a painting by Dórdio Gomes. No doubt he will be shaking his head and muttering: “It’s a small world . . . .”

In Miranda do Douro, for example, it is impossible to get lost. Descend the Rua da Costanilha, with its fifteenth-century houses, and we’re hardly aware of the city gates but are already out beyond the town, overlooking the vast valleys stretching to the west. We are shrouded in a heavy mediaeval silence: what a strange period to find ourselves in, and what a strange people to be among. To one side of the gateway huddles a group of women, all dressed in black, speaking in low voices; not one of them is still young – few of them, in all probability, can remember ever having been so. The traveller, as you would expect, has a camera slung over his shoulder, but feels embarrassed, still unaccustomed to the boldness normally adopted by tourists, which is why there’s no pictorial record of those shadowy women who have been talking there since the world began. The traveller has a melancholic sense of foreboding that a journey which commences thus will come to a bad end. He falls into a brown study, happily only for a few moments then, near at hand, just beyond the walls, he hears the roar of a bulldozer engine, levelling a new highroad: progress at the gates of the Middle Ages.

He climbs back up the Costanilha, turning off into other roads and side streets. There’s no-one at any of the windows, only traces of ancient anti-Spanish rancour in the form of obscene graffiti scored into good fifteenth-century stone. This therapeutic scatology, which runs no risk of offending either the eyes of a child or the most turgid of our defenders of morality, made him want to laugh.

In five hundred years nobody had bothered to get the offending slogans effaced or excised, inescapable proof that the Portuguese don’t lack a sense of humour, merely that they exercise it only in the service of their patriotic interests. This was not the place to learn the lesson of the fishes of the Duero, yet perhaps it had its own logic. If at the end of the day heavenly powers favoured the Portuguese over the Spanish, it would look bad if the humans on this side were to override the interventions from on high and defy their authority. The story can be briefly told.

The struggles of the Restoration³ were underway in the mid-seventeenth century and Miranda do Douro, here on the banks of the Duero was, so to speak, no more than a stone’s throw away from enemy assaults. The city was besieged, hunger was widespread, those laid siege to weakened, and, for a time, Miranda seemed lost. It was at this point, so the story goes, that a child appeared, rallying the flagging populace to arms, infusing them with spirit and courage where courage and spirit were drooping, so that in no time they cast off their faintheartedness and low spirits, seized genuine or improvised weapons, and followed the boy against the Spanish like a herd trampling the new-grown corn. Seeing their enemy thrown into confusion, Miranda do Douro triumphed, and another famous page was inscribed in the annals of those wars. Only – where was the commander of the victorious army to be found? Where that gentle combatant who had exchanged a spinning top for a field marshal’s baton? Nowhere to be seen, he couldn’t be traced, indeed he was never seen again. Therefore, according to the populace of Miranda, it was a miracle. And therefore, it was additionally deduced, he must have been the Child Jesus.

So the traveller can confirm. If he could preach to the fishes, as they could listen to his sermon, he had no reason to disbelieve the ancient strategies of war. Still less so when actually confronted by the Child Jesus of Cartolinha, two handspans high, a silver sword at his waist, a red sash falling from his shoulder, a white bow at his neck and a cap perched on top of his rounded infantile head. This is hardly the uniform of victory, just one taken from an ordinary wardrobe, a regular and everyday outfit, as the Cathedral verger explained to the traveller. Well aware of his duties as a guide, the verger, on observing the scrupulous attention being paid by the traveller, brought him into a side-building housing a collection of various pieces of statuary, protected from the temptations of professional and amateur thieves alike.

Matters were now resolved. A small tableau, sculpted in high-relief, was the traveller’s final proof of how much he has yet to learn where miracles are concerned. Here St Anthony is receiving the genuflexion of a sheep, offering an exemplary lesson in faith to the shepherd who had dared mock the saint, and there, in the sculpture, you can see the latter flushed with shame and therefore, by this very fact, capable of redemption. According to the verger, many still make mention of the picture but few actually visit it. You must forgive the traveller’s utter inability to contain his vanity. He came from so far away, without the least introduction, and was admitted to these mysteries simply on account of his honest face.

The journey is but beginning and, meticulous as he is, the traveller immediately falls to questioning his motives. What kind of a journey is this after all? Simply a question of taking a turn about the town of Miranda do Douro, visiting the Cathedral with its verger, its little capped child and the sheep, something that, once accomplished, he ticks off on his map, then hits the road again and says, like the barber shaking off his towel: “So, on to the next!” A journey is supposed to be cast in a different mould, a matter more of being than of moving on. Perhaps recognition should be given to professional travellers, but only for those with a genuine vocation, for the rest who believe in taking their responsibilities lightly are deceiving themselves: each kilometre is worth no less than a year of life. Wrestling with contemplations like these, the traveller ends up by falling asleep. When he awakes next morning there before him is the yellow stone of the cliff, forever in the same place as it is in the destiny of a stone to be, except an artist should come to carry it away in his heart.

On the way out of Miranda do Douro, the traveller continues sharpening his powers of observation so that nothing may get lost and everything prove to be of benefit, and to this end he turns his attention to a little river running close by. As we’ve established rivers have names, and this one – so near to the abundant Douro – what name might it have? He who doesn’t know, asks, and he who asks sometimes receives a reply: “Excuse me please, but what is this river called?” “This river is called Fresno.” “Fresno?” “Yes, sir, Fresno.” “But fresno is a Spanish word that in Portuguese would be freixo [after the ash groves]. Why don’t you call the river Freixo?” “Ah, that I can’t tell you. That’s what it has always been called, as far as I know.” So, at length, in spite of all the repeated struggles against the Spanish, despite even the divine interventions of the Child Jesus, we still we have this Fresno ensconced between its pleasant banks, laughing at the traveller’s patriotism. He remembers his fishes, the homily he delivered to them, amusing himself with the memories, until he reaches the village of Malhadas where his spirits begin to lift: “Who knows if this fresno matter doesn’t arise straight out of a Mirandese dialect?” It occurred to him to ask as much, but then he forgot, and when much later his doubts revived, he decided it was of no importance. In usage at least, fresno could now pass as Portuguese.

Malhadas is situated a little way off the main road that continues on to Braganza. Close at hand are the remains of a Roman road the traveller has no intention of following. But when he asks after it to a peasant and his wife whom he encounters on his way into the village, they tell him: “Aha! what you mean is the Moorish high road.” So be it: the Moorish high road. All that presently interests the traveller is the why and wherefore of the tractor from which the worker dismounts with the familiarity of someone in charge of his own property. “I own just a small plot of land. The tractor’s too much for me alone. Sometimes I hire it out to my neighbours, and that’s how I manage to stay ahead.” The three of them pause to chat, discussing the problems that beset parents with children to maintain, and it soon becomes apparent that there’s another one on the way.

When the traveller announces his intention of heading for Vimioso before returning by the same route, the peasant woman, without pausing to seek her husband’s permission, invites him in, saying: “We live in that house over there. Come and eat with us.” It was obviously a genuine invitation, meaning that however much (or little) there were in the pot, it would be unequally divided, since it’s more than certain that the traveller would find the bigger and better part of it on his plate. The traveller thanked them, postponing the occasion. The tractor sets off, the woman retires to the house. “They’re real merrymakers in that village,” she’d added, so the traveller took a turn around it which had hardly begun before it was brought to a halt by the spectacle of the giant black tortoise of the parish church with massive walls and hefty flying buttresses forming the creature’s feet.

In the thirteenth century and in these the lands of Trás-os-Montes, locals could have known little of the resistance of the materials they employed, or perhaps the builders had renounced all trust in the certainties of this world and determined to construct for all eternity. The traveller entered and surveyed the belfry and the roof, letting his eyes run over them and into the distance, more than a little intrigued by a trans-mountainous land that fails to collapse into the abrupt precipices and valleys his imagination was fabricating. Ultimately it has to be each to its own: this was undeniably a plateau, and the traveller was not going to gainsay his imagination, particularly given how useful it had proved in transforming the church into a tortoise: only a fellow-visitor can judge just how fair and correct such a comparison really is. Two leagues further on lies Caçarelhos. Here, Camilo Castelo Branco⁴ tells us, Calisto Elói de Silos was born and Benevides de Barbuda, Agra de Freimas’ eldest son, the rustic hero and the glutton in Queda dum Anjo, a novel of considerable humour and a certain melancholia. The traveller estimated the aforementioned Camilo could not escape the censure acidly proffered by Francisco Manuel do Nascimento, in accusing him of making fun of Samardã, as others had before, at the expense of Maçãs de D. María, Ranhados or Cucujães. In linking Eloi with Caçarelhos the place had been subjected to ridicule, or maybe this only serves to demonstrate our own spiritual defects in preferring to apportion blame to the land and not to those the land produces. The apple rots according to the ailment of the apple tree, and not from the sickness of the earth. It goes without saying that the worst ailment of this village was its remoteness, here at the back-end of the world, and it’s unlikely that its reputation has much to do with what those in Minho mutter amongst themselves: for the people of Caçarelhos are gossips, incapable of keeping a secret.

Caçarelhos must have its secrets but nobody revealed any to the traveller when he arrived on a local market day to encounter herds of beautiful honey-coloured cattle, eyes like lifebuoys of tenderness, lips white as snow ruminating in peace and serenity while a thread of saliva slowly dribbles down, all this beneath a forest of lyres, their carapace of horns, natural sound-boxes for the lowing which, from time to time, rises from the candelabra’ed company. Clearly there are secrets in all this, but not the kind to be related in words. It’s easier to keep counting the bank-notes, so many for this ox, take the beast with you, you won’t regret your choice.

The chestnut trees are coated in prickly bobbles, so many that they look like flocks of greenfinches pausing to collect their strength, gathering in the branches ready for great migrations. The traveller is a sentimentalist. He stops his car and picks a spiky sweet chestnut as a simple reminder for many months to come. Now it has dried out, it must be time for him to return and visit the great chestnut tree beside the main road, relishing again the bright morning air culminating in a definite rural promise of chestnuts.

The main road twists and turns towards Vimioso and the contented traveller murmurs: “What a beautiful day.” There are clouds in the sky, white fluffy ones which cast scattered shadows over the countryside; a light wind blows; the world looks newborn. Vimioso is built on a gentle slope, a placid little town, or so it seems to the passing traveller who has no intention of staying there, only of requesting some information from a woman he sees. But here he encounters his first disappointment. His informant is very friendly, to the extent of showing willing to take a turn around the back streets and show him the local specialities, but what she really wants is to sell him her hand-stitched linen. Please don’t take this amiss, but the traveller holds to his principles and persists in his conviction that the world is obliged to provide him with nothing beyond the information he is requesting. He descended a steep street down to the bottom, where he met his reward. To his eyes, unfamiliar with the sacred architecture of the countryside, there was no small pleasure to be found in the contrast between the robust seventeenth-century façades and the incipient signs of Baroque frigidity. The nave’s interior was low and broad, Romanesque in a character not borne out by other architectural features. But the best was yet to come. Outside, under the trees’ shade and seated on the steep stairway giving onto the courtyard, the traveller heard the story of the church’s construction. In return for a private chapel, a certain family offered a pair of oxen to haul the stone intended for the church. The oxen devoted two years to the effort, pacing out the steps from the quarry to the outhouse used by the builders, whose part in the labour ultimately amounted to no more than shouting “giddy-up!” as the beasts came and went without either herdsman or keeper, deafening the surrounding wasteland with the groans of badly greased blocks of stone, while profound discussions regarding the presumptions of men and their families raged. The traveller wished to know of the chapel and whether the original benefactors had descendants who continued to make use of it. Nobody could tell him. He found no particular marks of distinction within, although they might still exist. What does persist is the tale of a family who donated nothing of their own beyond the oxen who paid the price with their exhaustion, and in so doing opened up the way to guide their owners to paradise.

The traveller retraced his steps, distracted from the path now familiar to him. In Malhadas there was the temptation to claim the meal offered him earlier, but he held to his sense of timidity even though he suspected he would later repent of it. Instead, he went to where the pauliteiros dancers live in the village of Duas Igrejas. Since it was not the season for them to appear, the traveller never learnt any more about them than how the dancers took hours to process slowly through the streets. However the traveller retains a right to his imagination, and as regards the matter of pauliteiros, it would then as now have been both more seemly and proper to alter the dance so that instead of crossing sticks the dancers use sabres or daggers. Then the Child Jesus of Cartolinha would have had sound military reasons for inspecting the army trooping in their embroidered ruffs and cravats. It’s a defect of the traveller’s: he wishes to improve on perfection. May the pauliteiros forgive him.

By the time he reaches Sendim, it’s suppertime. What and where should he eat? Someone recommends the traveller to: “Follow this street onto the square, and in the square there’s the Restaurant Gabriela. Ask there for Senhora Alicia.” Such informality is to the traveller’s liking. The waitress informs him that Senhora Alicia is in the kitchen. The traveller looks through the doorway and a great smell of cooking fills the air as he inhales; a pot of greens is bubbling on the hob, while from across a heavy table in the centre of the room, Senhora Alicia asks the traveller what he would like to eat. The traveller is more accustomed to being brought a menu, to choosing as it were in the dark, and now he’s obliged to order directly and Senhora Alicia suggests a fillet of veal, Mirandese-style. The traveller agrees and goes to sit at a table, where to make his mouth water he is brought a tasty vegetable soup, accompanied by bread and wine. What is the fillet of veal going to be like? and why is it described as a fillet? a fillet has, to him, always meant a fillet of fish. “Which country am I in?” the traveller asks his glass of wine, which fails to reply but genially permits him to continue drinking. “There’s not too much time for questions.” The gigantic chunk of veal comes swimming in vinegary gravy, cut down to the size of the plate so that it doesn’t drip on the tablecloth. The traveller thinks he is dreaming. Soft flesh into which the knife cuts effortlessly, cooked to perfection, and that vinegary sauce which brings a sweat to the cheeks, the clearest proof that bodily contentment exists. The traveller is eating a meal in Portugal, his mind’s eye filled with past and future landscapes, while the Senhora Alicia can be heard shouting in her kitchen and the waitress giggles and shakes her plaits.

2

The Wicked Ways of Dossel

THE TRAVELLER IS a native of the lowlands from far down south and, knowing little of these uplands, had hoped for something on a grander scale. He’s already said as much, and now he’s repeating himself. There’s no dearth of exceptions, but all tend to prove the rule of relativity: height ranged only in relation to sea level, each peak shoulder-to-shoulder with the next in perfect profile. If ever one pokes out of line, sprouting up unexpectedly, then yes, the traveller is permitted a clear sense of their grandeur, less by approaching close to than from taking a longer perspective. Once the foothills are reached, he notes no great variation in size, but is satisfied with their distant and fleeting promise.

The railway line running beside the road looks like a toy track, perhaps something left over from the ancient of days. The traveller, whose childhood dream was to be an engine driver, fears that the locomotive and its carriages will turn out to be in period, museum objects the enveloping mountain wind still hasn’t succeeded in blowing the cobwebs off. The line is called the Sabor, after the river which twists and turns, wending its way to the Duero, but where the savour of those covered carriages has gone is something the traveller fails to discover.

Without noting that he has left the highlands behind him, the traveller touches down in Mogadouro. The afternoon is waning though it’s still luminescent, and from the top of the castle it’s possible to visualise the labours of the men and women of the region. Every neighbouring slope is cultivated; a jigsaw of terraces and plantations, some gigantic, others smaller, as though existing simply to fill out the shadows of the larger ones. His eyes thus refreshed, the traveller would be utterly at peace if it were not for the remorse at having inadvertently obliged a pair of lovers to flee the shelter of the ramparts where he’d happened on them walking and canoodling together. Here in Mogadouro that had to be yet another demonstration of the age-old conflict between intention and consummation.

It’s the nearby hamlet of Azinhoso that kindles the traveller’s passion for the rural Romanesque regions of the North. The risk taken by the tiny churches isn’t their boldness, since they are made to a pattern imported from far away, and only lightly adapted to enhance the architect’s prestige. Yet anyone imagining that having seen one he’d seen them all would be culpable of self-deception. It’s vital to look over each one in tranquillity, waiting silently for the stones to speak, with enough patience to ensure that every departure is an act of repentance, on the part of this or any other traveller. Repentance at not having stayed longer, for it’s hardly good behaviour to sojourn merely a brief quarter-hour in a church that’s seven hundred years’ old, as is Azinhoso’s. Worst of all is when people approach the traveller wishing to chat to him, people who would do better to listen, so becoming the beneficiaries of these past seven centuries. The tiny courtyard is overgrown with weeds and the traveller pauses and rests his heavy boots there and feels, without quite knowing why, restored. The more he ponders, the more he decides that’s the word for it, that and no other, without knowing how to explain it.

Shortly night will fall, early as it does in autumn, and the sky covers over with dark clouds; perhaps tomorrow it’ll rain. In Castelo Branco, fifteen kilometres further south, the air feels as if it has passed through a sieve so fine that, to judge from its clarity, it could catch even ashes; so pure that it shocks the lungs. At the roadside looms the façade of a stately home, rising to great pinnacles at the corners. If Portugal had ghosts, this would be the perfect place for them to scare travellers, with lights flickering from beyond shattered windows, possibly accompanied by clattering teeth and chains. But, who knows, by daylight its decay might appear arguably less depressing. When the traveller reaches Torre de Moncorvo, it has been pitch dark for some time. The traveller considers it discourteous to enter a village at such a late hour. Villages are like people, we approach them slowly, a step at a time, not like this, a sudden ambush, under cover of darkness, and as though by highwaymen. Still, the villages exact a thoroughgoing revenge. The inhabitants put their house-numbers and street-names at an exaggerated height, if they bother with them at all, and, when it suits, name a square the same as a crossroads, leaving the perplexed traveller stopping the traffic and stranded, when a politician with a politician’s grin and a band of faithful adherents decide to sally forth in the quest for votes. That’s what Torre de Moncorvo does to travellers.

The worst of it was that the traveller was en route to an estate which lay beyond it, in the Vilariça valley, and the night proves so dark he can’t even determine whether the banks shoring up the roadside verges are rising or falling. The traveller strives to find his way in an ink blot, without even stars for help, since the sky is a mass of unbroken cloud. Eventually, after considerable confusion, he reaches his destination. Unruly dogs bark loudly at his arrival, hailing his entry to the house where he is greeted with a smile and an extended hand. Portentously grand eucalyptus trees make the night outside even darker, but dinner isn’t long in reaching the table, and dinner is followed by a glass of Port wine. Thus he whiles away the hours until bedtime which, when reached, leads him to a room boasting a four-poster bed of such a height that only our tall traveller can do away with the ladder, and clamber up atop it. From this position, he is now inclined to consider the profundity of the Valley of Vilariça’s silence, the consolations of friendship, and his desire to fall sound asleep. Who knows, but in this four-poster may have slept His Majesty the King or, preferably perhaps, Her Highness the Princess.

He awakens early. The bed is not only high, it’s also enormous. Portraits of ancient forebears gaze sternly down on the intruder from the bedroom walls. The traveller hears a noise. He rises, opens the window, and sees a shepherd with his sheep passing by: times have moved on, and this shepherd no longer appears as if he’d stepped out of a bucolic romance. He doesn’t throw back his head and announce himself, he doesn’t bless me with a “May the Lord go with you, sir.” If he weren’t so busy doing what he’s doing, he’d merely say: “Good day,” and what more could a traveller ask for since that’s the most one can wish from a day, that it should turn out good?

The traveller bids farewell, thanking those who put him up for the night, and before setting forth again returns once more Torre de Moncorvo. He has no wish to leave unpleasant memories behind him, nor to abandon the village with a disgust it ill deserves. Now, in the full light of day, there’s no longer a need for signs on every street-corner. The church is before him, its Renaissance porch and high belfry giving it the air of a fortress, an impression accentuated by extensive surrounding walls. Inside it has three naves, punctuated by thick cylindrical pillars. With the door shut against military incursions, the enemy would need to push long and hard before gaining access to their next Mass. Yet the tranquillity in which the traveller was able to circulate gave him time to develop a taste for a sculpted and painted wooden triptych representing scenes from the life of SS Ana and Joaquim, not to mention other examples of equal value. In fact the entire Igreja da Misericordia has a Renaissance air, with its granite pulpit and its bas-relief figures, and is itself worth stopping for in Torre de Moncorvo.

Now the traveller is ready to move on from works of art. He’s taken to the byways, leading onto a bridge crossing over the River Vilariça, to climb and climb, as the main road unravels endlessly so that, given how bald the mountains increasingly appear on both sides, tumbling into the valley, the traveller starts to fear a puff of wind may carry him off in the breeze, thereby involving him in another means of locomotion with a far worse outcome. At all events, faced with such a landscape spread generously before him, the traveller feels he has taken wings. Within a few months, from here as far as the eye can see, all will be flowering almond trees. The traveller falls to imagining, and in his mind’s eye he has conjured up two images of trees in flower, selecting sugared almond pinks and whites, multiplying each by a thousand or ten thousand. Dazzling. The abundantly fertile valley is similarly resplendent, more fortunate for sure than the lowlands of Ribatejo, which derive no benefit from its fertile mud and suffer the afflictions of a sandy soil. Here the waters are carried to join the River Sabor where they become caught up in the abundant waters of the Duero, spreading into the valley, where they deposit the natural fertilisers they carry. The people around here describe it as their hedge against adversity, for come winter, and as long as it doesn’t overflow, it affords the valley a prosperous season.

The highway runs on to the village of Estevais, then to Cardanha and Adeganha. The traveller hasn’t the time to stop at each, he’s not exactly in a position to knock at every door and interrogate the inhabitants about their lives. But, since he doesn’t know how to rid himself of his little preferences and obsessions, nor does he desire to do so, and since he is intrigued by the work of men’s hands, he presses on to Adeganha, where they tell him of a delightful Romanesque church only so high. He arrives and enquires, only to pause amazed at the vast and unique granite flagstone which serves as a main square, threshing floor and bed for the moonlight in the village centre. It is surrounded by the type of houses generally found in the more obscure corners of Trás-os-Montes, built stone on stone, the door-lintels flush with the roof, the humans upstairs and the animals below. It’s the land of communal dreaming. If called to account, a man would assert: “My oxen and I sleep under one roof.” The traveller, whenever confronted with this sort of reality, feels deeply compromised. Tomorrow, on reaching the city, will he remember these matters? Will he feel happy? Or wretched? Or both in equal parts? Is it not a pretty thing, kind sirs, to preach concerning the fraternity of fishes? But what of that of men?

Found at last, the church is everything it should be. The person who described it was not guilty of exaggeration. At heights like these, buffeted by sweeping winds, beneath the iron cold and scorching sun, the church has heroically withstood the centuries. Its arrises are broken, its figurines and gargoyles are fractured on its surrounding corbels, but you would be hard put to uncover a greater purity or a more transcendent beauty. Adeganha church deserves to be carried away with you in your heart, like the golden stone of Miranda.

The traveller starts to make his descent down a road in even worse condition. His car suspension is creaking and protesting, and it comes as a relief when, in among the puddles and quagmires, Junqueira emerges. It’s a place of no special significance yet, since the traveller is given to inventing his own works of art, he finds himself before the façade of a roofless Baroque chapel, sprouting an exuberant fig tree in its centre, reaching beyond its rafters. You could get at the figs through an oeil de boeuf window, were the fig tree not out of season. His cries of admiration were cause for amazement in the village. Over the wall popped the head of a little girl, then another, followed by the mother of both. The traveller asks some unmemorable question, the answer comes back with restful Trasmontan inflection, all at once a conversation erupts, and in no time the traveller is party to the family’s stories, in one of which two princesses are put under a spell and immured in a high tower, and it’s true these little girls never leave here, not even to go as far as Torre de Moncorvo, a scant thirteen kilometres away. It is forbidden by their father to do so, for as you know, sir, it’s only safe to go out under the strictest supervision. The traveller has heard such tales before, so neither agrees nor disagrees. “What’s life like around here?” he enquires. “Wretched,” replies the woman.

Such conversations have a tendency to leave the traveller in a bad mood. That was the reason he hardly glanced at Vila Flor. He was obliged to open his umbrella, to go on an errand taking a present to an acquaintance, and in passing casts an eye over St Michael over the portico of the church door. The traveller has observed a considerable devotion to the archangel in these parts. He saw it first in Mogadouro, on an altar for Holy Souls, and again elsewhere, in places preoccupied with the imminence of purgatory. Here, once again disposed to continue on his way, the traveller changes direction. The portico of this seventeenth-century parish church is deserving of serious attention, and an adequate pause for attention: its sculpted columns, with their human and floral motifs, its geometric designs, fuse into a memorable whole. Less fortuitously, a panel of tiles inserted into a wall, showing a certain Trigo de Morais giving counsel to his sons, also sticks in the memory. Not that his counsels to his sons are bad, but the concept is worse than bad. And what self-importance on the part of the counsellor to thus come and moralise in a public place, in a fashion that should remain behind closed doors. In sum: this journey through Portugal is going to have a bit of everything about it.

It begins raining again. There’s nobody left in the main square when the traveller comes around the corner leading into it. But, as he starts to cross, he’s aware of eyes following him through the window panes, and there seem to be others looking back over shoulders in the shops, presumably with mistrust. Our traveller departs as if he had all the guilt of Vila Flor, or of the world, on his back. Maybe he had.