Authors: Norman Lewis
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘The fact is that this book is the
vade mecum
of suicides. They’re all hoping for an easy way out. We have to remember that on the whole these people are a soft-hearted lot. There’s even a recipe for a dose to be given to felons to quieten them down before execution.’ He paused to give further thought to the possibilities. ‘She may have been blind drunk when it came to the crunch,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope that’s the way it was.’
‘Is it true,’ I asked, ‘that there’s been talk of a memorial plaque to mark the spot?’
The doctor barked a scornful laugh. ‘That wouldn’t go down well even with tourists. No, this has to be forgotten. Nobody’s going to make the pilgrimage to this dull little place just for the kick of seeing where they burned that poor, silly girl. Memorial plaques are out,’ he said.
Marco de Canavezes, we decided, was not to be missed. The doctor put us in touch with a car hire firm which supplied the aged Fiat that carried us through flowering valleys and eagle-encircled peaks down to Canavezes. We stopped to gaze down on the pink roofs gleaming among the trees over the Sousa River. A hill road curved down and through to the small square where the tragedy had been staged. The village was poor with tiny houses built on its outskirts, sometimes appearing to consist of a single room. Women in black squeezed past us along the narrow street. Leaving the car as soon as we could, we continued on foot down to the centre, to which, said the notice, only horse-drawn traffic was admitted.
We had been recommended by our friend to announce our presence to the police, but a notice tacked to the station door informed us that the officer in charge was away for that day. We were later to learn that he was shared with other villages.
Fortunately the doctor had arranged for us to meet an ex-patient of his, a tall pink-faced young man in his early twenties who blinked nervously when informed of the purpose of our visit. He put aside whatever he was doing to talk to us, having first pulled down the blind over his window. There was some difficulty because the man spoke only Portuguese, but a friend was fetched who translated what he had to say into Spanish.
‘Did you know her?’ I asked.
‘In the village,’ he said, ‘we all know each other.’
‘Do you believe she was possessed by an evil spirit?’
He winced, and drew his fingers across his mouth as if to wipe away something clinging to his lips. A moment of silence followed before he said, ‘I cannot reply to this.’
‘Why do you think they burned this poor woman?’
‘They blamed her for the plague that killed many people two years ago.’
‘Plagues are not caused by evil spirits,’ I told him, ‘but the dirt in the big cities, and the sickness that spreads from it.’
He nodded, as if in agreement, although I believed that his opinion remained the same.
‘When they took this woman from her house,’ he said, ‘she was laughing, so they put a gag in her mouth. After that they carried her to the place where the stake was set up and tied her to it. They covered her face with a mask. The priest was there to pronounce the forgiveness of the Church and to frustrate the devil by renaming her Gabriel, after the angel. All the people who went with her were religious persons who were concerned with her acceptance into the world of those who are saved. The church bell was tolled three times, the people covered their eyes, and the fire was lit. Those who attended the ceremony shook hands with each other. A few women wept.’
‘Did you stay?’
‘No one was allowed to leave, but many turned their heads away. You see, we Portuguese are compassionate by nature. Many covered their faces to hide their tears.’
The next day we took a slow train to Coimbra which proved to be a city of tea shops and beggars, but above all it was known for eccentric happenings in which it was conceivable that its citizens took some pride. The latest story, related by the waitress in our first tea shop, was of a man who had put on wings, leapt into the air from a low cliff and broken both legs. There was a disputed claim as to whether or not a priest displayed the stigmata and that day’s paper reported that a house consisting of nine rooms built one on top of the other had just collapsed.
Coimbra had been put on the tourist map at the beginning of the century by the visit of the celebrated Prince of Lichnovsky who was there in the first instance for treatment of ‘a complaint of the loins’, for which it was said that the town’s physicians were still renowned. Sufferers from this ailment must have flocked to its hospitals and clinics and Lichnovsky’s relief at their efficiency may have been reflected in his description of the town. Of it, the most distinguished traveller of his day said, ‘Nothing similar to its beauty and magnificence have I gazed upon in all Europe.’ Of the neighbouring forest of Bussaco, he said, ‘I feel myself wafted away in the marvellous and very ancient wooded regions of the Orient.’ This ecstatic description was reproduced in a booklet published by the Portuguese Touring Club, which, however, ignored Lichnovsky’s recommendation of the forest as ‘exceptionally suitable for romantic exploits of an intimate character’.
It was a town possessing not only the traces of past splendours, but one that had even managed to preserve echoes of a class system inherited from Victorian times. Its many beggars were fed publicly by splendidly attired persons of social standing who remained scrupulously aloof from physical contact with the poor they were helping. These beggars were even given tiny sums of money by servants, who managed to maintain a certain aloofness from the process too, some covering their nostrils with their hands. An up-to-date cinema had just opened and its patrons were besieged by supplicants who, while managing to ignore servants offering scraps of bread, knelt down in the street to thank their distant benefactors at the back of the crowd.
The news reaching us here was depressing indeed. We were now committed—with all arrangements made—to travelling the full length of what remained of Portugal down to Villa Real de Santo Antonio on its south coast, and at this point crossing the River Guadiana to reach Ayamonte on the Spanish frontier. Now, without the slightest warning, came the crushing news that the Spanish State of Alarm was back—if anything in a more threatening form. The town of Ayamonte—across the river from Villa Real—was on the frontier of the Rio Tinto mining area with the largest coal and iron mines in Spain. Here heavy fighting between revolutionary miners and the Spanish Army had once again broken out. Thus the ferry to Spain had been suspended indefinitely and a special permit was required from the Spanish Governor of Huelva to cross the river. Was there any hope, we asked our travel agent, after this appalling news, of crossing over to Seville? His reply was, ‘In our country all such crises are fluid. Today promises no solution, but that does not mean that tomorrow you cannot travel. Then again, do not let us be over-optimistic. At the last time of such a disruption the frontier was shut for a month.’
The next time we saw our friend at the travel agency we armed ourselves with sweets to curry favour with the irresistible children who had cordoned off the approach to the entrance. He listened with sympathy to what we had to tell him before waving a hand in protest.
‘All this,’ he said, ‘boils down to one simple and inescapable fact, namely that you have to persuade a person of influence in Villa Real to take you under his wing.’
‘And how do we set about doing that?’
He sighed, ‘In the usual way, I’m afraid.’
‘You mean we make it worth their while?’
‘Exactly that,’ he said. ‘And remember that whoever you talk to about this will assume that you expect him to work for you, and that the work will be tricky—furthermore that this man will have a necessitous family to feed.’
‘Now I understand. And what will it cost?’
‘Well, say fifty dollars, or the equivalent in pounds. Each of you, I mean. Escudos aren’t accepted.’
‘And you think that’s likely to do the trick?’
‘If anything can,’ he said. ‘When do you want to go?’
‘As soon as it can possibly be arranged.’
‘If you can afford it I strongly recommend first class. Otherwise it’s like being in a war. I can get you forty per cent off the advertised rates.’
‘Don’t bother about that,’ I told him. ‘We’ll be writing about the experience.’
‘As you please. It’ll certainly be just that.
‘A word of advice,’ he added. ‘Take American cigarettes with you. You can use them when you can’t use money. The story is that they put shavings from the leather factory into the local brand. I’ll give the fellow at Villa Real a buzz and tell him to expect you. By the way, the guy has a sister you might find interesting, so take a bottle of Coty along. Better to have two friends in court than one, and every little helps.’
T
HE JOURNEY FROM COIMBRA
to Lisbon, our first stop on the way, took eight hours. The engine of our train bore the mark ‘Manchester 1890’, and the carriages had probably been considered luxurious at about that time. The trip gave us some idea of how our grandfathers had travelled. There was no corridor, but this deficiency by no means impeded free circulation between compartments. The ticket collector and the passengers, including women in voluminous skirts, just scaled the low barriers dividing up the carriages.
The attractions of the towns through which we passed were advertised in splendidly
azulejo
-tiled tableaux on the station walls. We recognised the names of several health resorts we had spotted in the press, and not only minor complaints of the loins came in for mention, but in one case a lightning cure for syphilis had been frankly included.
We were travelling in a compartment full of peasant girls who were going into service in Lisbon. Several of them, as they told us with no evidence of sorrow, had said goodbye to their families for the last time, and were being taken by their employer straight out to Brazil. Their parents had loaded them with eatables, and these were stacked in careful piles along the seats, while the girls remained standing throughout the journey, clustered round the windows. Some had never been on a train before. From the moment they got on board until we drew into the station at Lisbon, they held their tickets clutched in their hands. Every time a train going in the opposite direction rushed by, they flung up their arms to shield their faces and crouched down in terror.
Apart from watching the landscape fly by the girls sang
jotas
in shrill, powerful voices, with occasional outbursts of laughter at the introduction of a passage of salacious wit. After the first hour or so they became exceedingly friendly. One of them had decided to change the position of some heavy luggage, and on being complimented by Eugene on her impressive strength she rolled up her sleeve to display her forearm, saying, ‘Just take a grip of this.’
We changed trains at Lisbon and thereafter were to encounter poverty of the kind that neither of us had experienced before. This, as we saw it, was a result of unfairly distributed resources, illustrated by emphatic social divisions and the side-by-side display of desperate poverty and extreme wealth. The Portuguese south, outside the towns, illustrated a degree of misery that was limitless and unchanging. This advertised its presence, for example, in tiny village houses with the minutest of doors and no windows or chimney. In areas of the Algarve, in the far south, we were assured that about half the rural houses consisted of a single room. On several occasions we saw a man walking in the street wearing a single shoe. In answer to our questioning we were told, ‘That is his stock in trade,’ meaning that it was for sale and that in cases of desperate poverty shoes—although not necessarily in pairs—were offered for sale.
The simple experiences of Portugal could be adventurous. The train stopped wherever it was called upon to do so—often by little groups of girls on their way to shop in the nearest town, who would wave their thanks to the driver before climbing aboard. This, indeed, was a cheap and cheerful life, and by this time we had picked up enough of the language to be instantly included in these peasant groups. Each group came prepared with two-gallon stone jars of wine which were passed over the barriers from compartment to compartment. The grapes, they told us, were sold in a Lisbon shop at a penny per kilogram, and the wine—carried with them wherever they went—cost two pence per litre. Third-class travel by trains here was a splendid adventure, with our relationship immediately cemented for the continuation of the journey by the almost sacramental procedure of taking wine together.
Another party of servant girls formed part of the congenial group in the third-class carriage. No doubt put at their ease by the wine, the girls began to examine our clothing with frequent cries of admiration and wonder. We failed to correspond with their previous opinions of how members of the Anglo-Saxon race should appear and behave. One girl who had worked for an English family in Lisbon had, until this moment, understood that all Britishers—just as her employers had been—were ginger-headed. These cheerful, muscular, uninhibited ladies, it turned out, were bound for Praia da Rocha in the far south, an unfinished resort spoken of hopefully, but with eyes sometimes raised to the heavens, as the future Portuguese Riviera. At all events, the girls agreed the wages—equivalent of three shillings per week—were good, and if the worst came to the worst they could always walk home in a matter of two or three days. They laughed and clapped their hands.
From Lisbon down through Estremadura and Alentejo the peasantry kept out of sight when not slaving in the fields. Then down in the Algarve, drama returned like the reopening of a great play. A golden flush had spread through the landscape, and with the renewed beauty of the earth its people had recovered a little of the mobility destroyed by the masters of the great estates. The womenfolk appeared at the entrances to their houses like players on stage as the curtain is lifted, and there were times when we were reminded of the poses of classical statuary. We passed through the outskirts of a village where images were being carried in procession and the male celebrants raised their hats to the train. Now clear of the bleached pastures and turnip fields, the colour had flooded back into the scene, with the red earth turned by the ploughs, the black pine-forest and a sky full of white cranes. Deer browsing as calm as cows in these empty places sprinted away from the terror of the train. A falcon dropped like a stone from the sky and a fox was flushed from its cover within a half-dozen yards of the track. We rattled slowly southwards as the last of many deer vanished from sight and the first of the cowboys trotted into view.