Wanderlust Library: Portugal

Welcome to the 5th edition of the Wanderlust Library, the series where I read, watch, and listen to the books, movies, and music recommended for every country in the Lonely Planet’s 2011 edition of The Travel Book.

In this entry, I’m going to Europe for the first time to explore the proverbial door to the continent — Portugal! As it stands, my main connections with this country are through my consumption of their tinned fish and Vinho Verde wines. Thus, my goal for this entry is to break free of the limitations of import-consumerism and learn more about the country’s history, culture, and spirit. So, without further ado . . .

Read: Baltasar and Blimunda

The book recommended by the Lonely Planet editors is the novel Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago. As his breakout work, this book helped launch Saramago to international literary acclaim, eventually securing him the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. The story follows the love of two social outcasts, Baltasar, a soldier who lost his arm in a recent war, and Blimunda, a mystic and daughter of an Inquisition victim. Their romance is set among several historic events, including the construction of the Convent of Mafra and Bartolomeu de Gusmão’s experiments with human flight.

Since I’m not a literary critic, and this is not a book review, I’ll quote Wikipedia to give an idea of the book’s style and themes, as I could never do it justice.

“The novel mixes historicity with fantasy, romance and critique of social inequities. Saramago’s narrative style blends dialogue, description and commentary in a dense and multifaceted text. The novel has been described as a mix of magical realism and neorealism. It deals with themes found in all societies and cultures: the dynamics of power, wealth and politics, and is also a love story. Saramago has said that with his fictional portrayal of the peasant workers who built Convent of Mafra and other characters in the novel he wanted to depict people who are never mentioned in history. The construction of an aviation machine is an integral part of the novel, and when finished it allegorically lifts the lovers out of reach of the injusticies and the Inquisition.”

The novel’s setting at the beginning of the nation’s twilight years provides rich opportunities to learn about life and politics living in the core of a dying empire.

A major arc in the novel is Father Bartolomeu de Gusmão’s attempts at building a flying machine — the Passarola. Gusmão stands as an early pioneer in European attempts at flight, alongside numerous glider, balloon, and even helicopter designs. Many of these attempts tried to replicate the flapping action birds use in their designs, with Gusmão being a particularly ambitious example. While the popular history tends to highlight the work of Da Vinci or the Montgolfier brothers, inventors like Gusmão were constantly tinkering with novel flying machine designs.

In Baltasar and Blimunda (spoiler alert), his design proved successful, and the three characters took off in flight over the Portuguese countryside. In real life, the Passarola never saw action, and probably for good reason, as it would have undoubtedly led to the death of the pilot. The story does conclude with a historically accurate resolution, however, with Gusmão being persecuted and banned from pursuing his avian ambitions by officers of the Inquisition, who found the enterprise to be a testament, not to human ingenuity, but to human hubris.

Moving away from the active plot, I want to now explore the picture Saramago paints of the national condition of Portugal in this era. A detail repeated throughout the book is the continual ridiculing of the quality of Portuguese goods or workers. Characters instead praise the outputs of foreign masters or the riches of Portugal’s colonial possessions. The following passages illustrate this:

“From Portugal all that is required are the stone, tiles, and wood for burning, and men of brute force and empty hands. If the architect is German, the master-carpenters, master-builders, and master-masons are all Italian, and if the traders and other rogues from whom we buy everything are English, French, and Dutch, then you can be quite certain that they import from Rome, Venice, Milan, Genoa, Liège, France, and Holland the bells and carillons, the oil lamps and chandeliers, the candlesticks, the bronze torch-holders, the chalices and the silver-gilt monstrances, the tabernacles and statues of saints to whom the King is particularly devoted. . . . From Brazil, innumerable planks of angelin wood for the doors and windows of the convent, for the flooring of the cells, dormitories, refectory, and other outbuildings, including the steps of the delousing booths, because it is a wood that does not perish, unlike this splintering Portuguese pine, which is only good for heating saucepans and for people to sit on who do not weigh much and have nothing in their pockets.”

“While their wives and children looked on and pleaded with the magistrate, or tried to bribe the henchmen with some eggs or a chicken, pathetic expedients that proved to be useless, for the King of Portugal prefers to collect any tribute due to him in gold, emeralds, diamonds, pepper, cinnamon, ivory, tobacco, sugar, and precious wood, tears achieve nothing in the custom-house”

These scenes are interspersed with those of the average Portuguese citizen, who lives in relative squalor set among these riches. Chief among these are the residents of the town of Mafra, where the king was erecting an opulent “palace-monastery.” Funded by Brazilian gold and adorned with the finest of foreign goods, the workers lived in squalor during construction, sleeping in cramped quarters, eating spoiled food, and enduring frequent outbreaks of disease. Kidnapped citizens from the countryside were frequently brought in to pad the workforce.

This scene showcases the disconnect between the wealth the empire won by dispossession and the conditions experienced by Portugal’s nominal citizens is quite stark. While colonial trade helped spur growth, real wages during the period fell by as much as 50%. The flood of commodities into Portugal, namely Brazilian gold, devalued local assets and led to the importation of manufactured goods, like textiles. This de-industrialization, brought on by reliance on colonial wealth, had profound implications for the nation’s working class, which lacked meaningful employment opportunities. Portugal lagged behind peer nations, such as Britain, in building out manufacturing industries, consigning it to become a relatively poor nation by European standards. In short, colonies like the ones Portugal held created a sort of Dutch Disease, benefiting the nobility who could invest in colonial resource ventures at the expense of the economic health of their citizens (and colonial subjects, of course).

To close out this section, I wanted to list out some of my favorite quotes from the book. Saramago is an incredible wordsmith whose prose either builds and crashes like a thunderous wave or bites quickly like a serpent jumping out from the trees. He’s probably the only writer I’ve ever witnessed who can execute paragraph-long run-on sentences that enhance the reading experience.

[A description of Fat Tuesday celebrations in Lisbon] Outrages were committed on every street corner by those who never miss an opportunity to take liberties, derisive tails were pinned to fugitive backs, water was squirted on faces with syringes meant for other purposes, the unwary were spanked with strings of onions, and wine was imbibed, accompanied by the inevitable belching and vomiting, there was a clanging of pots and pans, bagpipes were played, and if more people did not end up rolling on the ground, in the side streets, squares, and alleyways, it is only because the city is filthy, its roads full of sewage and rubbish, crawling with mangy dogs and stray cats, and mud everywhere even when there is no rain. Now the time has come to pay for all these excesses, the time to mortify the soul so that the flesh may feign repentance, the depraved, rebellious flesh of this pathetic and obscene pigsty known as Lisbon.

[A priest telling Baltasar that having one hand is not a major impediment] I say that God’s left hand is missing, because it is on His right, at His right hand, that the chosen sit, nor do you find any reference to God’s left hand either in the Holy Scriptures or in the writings of the holy doctors of the Church, no one sits at God’s left hand, for it is a void, a nothingness, an absence, therefore God is one-handed.

The nuns of St Monica are about to rebel, in open defiance of the King’s edict that they consort in the convent parlour only with their parents, children, brothers, sisters, and relatives to the second degree, a measure with which the King is resolved to put an end to the scandals provoked by noble and not-so-noble philanderers who have a penchant for the brides of Christ and make them pregnant in less time than it takes to recite the Ave Maria.

My parents are in Brazil, my brothers in Portugal, so I have both parents and brothers, but for this enterprise I need neither parents nor brothers but friends, so listen carefully

God has a weakness for madmen, the disabled, and eccentrics

Saints tire easily and value their rest, for they alone know how difficult it is to control the forces of nature.

Watch: The Convent

This movie,1 featuring John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve, follows a professor’s trip to a mysterious convent in rural Portugal in search of a document critical to proving his thesis that William Shakespeare was a Spanish Jew who fled to England to escape the inquisition.

I am fairly well aware of the mountain of scholarship dedicated to investigating Shakspeares identity. Some 80 individuals have been proposed as possible Shakespeares by the so-called Anti-Stratfordians (referencing the Bard’s hometown along the river Avon). Francis Bacon is a name often thrown out, as is Emilia Lanier. Most arguments promoting these theories cite the fact that Shakespeare came from a decidedly non-aristocratic background, and his familiarity with court politics and geography strikes some as dubious. Additionally, the lack of school and baptismal records, along with his famous inconsistency in spelling his name, adds further fuel to the idea.

While these theories are considered fairly fringe in literary circles, the idea that Shakespeare was secretly Jewish is even more fringe. As far as I can tell, one book, Was Shakespeare a Jew? by Ghislain Muller, seems to be the only major piece of scholarship attempting to advance this theory. The story Muller tells2 is that Shakespeare’s family were Marranos, or Jews who pretended to be Christian to avoid persecution from authorities.

The evidence Muller draws from seems to hinge on the fact that Shakespeare was quite close to several Jewish families, that his absence from school for a portion of his childhood was so he could receive religious instruction at home, and details in The Merchant of Venice that, despite the plays anti-semetic tropes,3 point to a certain familiarity with Jewish lived experiences at the time. Personally, this all feels a bit pinboard-and-string. It strikes me that any subtleties of Jewish life that would normally go unnoticed by the average Elizabethan gentile likely came from Shakespeare simply talking with his Jewish friends about their lives. Regardless, it was interesting to learn about this wacky extension of the well-trodden Shakespeare conspiracies included in the movie.

The other element of the film that stood out to me was the use of human bones to decorate areas of the convent. Likely a nod to Capela dos Ossos (literally “the Chapel of Bones”) where a group of Franciscan monks built a church using 5,000 human bones. Bone churches, also called ossuaries, are a surprisingly common practice in old Europe. They often feature an inscription at the entrance providing the communicant with a memento mori, with this chapel’s welcome message reading “Here lie the bones that wait for your bones.”

The material impetus for the construction of Ossuaries is to deal with limited burial space in urban cemeteries or as a burial method to honor those who died in mass casualties, such as wars or natural disasters. From a spiritual perspective, having a place to confront one’s mortality and consider the fleeting nature of our lived experience is always valuable. However, I never really internalized the significance of this practice until I read a blog of someone exploring one of these churches in Czechia, who pointed out the theological resonance of these churches.

“When I really think about it, celebrating the Eucharist is as eerie and disorienting as walking through several rooms decorated with bones. We eat the broken body. We drink the shed blood. The significance of this act is not something to take lightly. The Eucharist may be a ritual of resurrection, but it first grapples with the reality of death. During communion, you’re not even just looking at death: you’re consuming it.”

Fundamentally, these churches are an artistic rendition of the resurrection of Christ. By using the bodies of the faithful in constructing these churches, they are being included in a celebration of the central narrative of the New Testament. For a faithful Christian, postmortem inclusion in these sculptures would be an incredibly sacred honor.

Listen: Mariza

The album Terra from singer-songwriter Mariza sits within a Portuguese genre called Fado. Originating in the 1800s, this genre consists of nostalgic and mournful laments for a beloved person, time, or place.

Terra integrates a lot of global sounds into its music, with a mix of Latin and African tunes having a strong presence in various songs. Given Mariza’s Mozambican lineage, this album strikes me as quite cosmopolitan, bringing together sounds from various Lusophone nations. Evidently, terra, the Portugese word for Earth or land, refers to her returning to her cultural roots in Africa and Brazil, hence the global scope of the album.

Overall, the vibe of this album says to me that Portugal was experiencing cultural trends similar to the anglosphere in the late 2000s and early 2010s, with society embracing a sense of cultural openness. This was an era when Lisbon was positioning itself as a global hub for multiculturalism and the vibrant creativity it generates. Mariza’s album seems to be a component of this broader push to include the perspectives and voices of migrants in everyday life. This process was particularly prescient during the nation’s post-colonial redefinition of Portuguese identity.

Some of my favorite songs from the album include Se Eu Mandasse nas Palavras, Beijo de Saudade, and Fronteira.

All-in-all, Portugal sounds like a lively nation bursting with culture, both new and old. In experiencing various artifacts from their culture, I have been continually impressed by the humor, heart, and soul of this nation. Hopefully, one day I can enjoy a glass of Vinho Verde while listening to Mariza in the aged Portuguese countryside.

What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to

Blue Zones: I’ve been recently bingeing old episodes of the wellness and nutrition fad podcast Maintenance Phase. I especially loved this breakdown of Blue Zones; regions that possess an abundance of long-lived residents. They both assess the flawed history behind health recommendations based on the cultures and diets of these places, as well as the flawed debunking’s of the concept itself!