At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Just as the Lisbon fado differs in spirit from cante flamenco as it is sung in Seville, so the Portuguese bullfight differs from the Spanish. In Spain, the bullfight is tragedy: in Portugal, comedy. In Spain, ritual; in Portugal, chivalry, a real survival from the original bullfights of the sixteenth century, when the bull was fought on fine horses by the aristocracy. If Spain is the country of the bull, Portugal is the country of the horse; in their bullfights the Portuguese desire most to bring out the superiority of the graceful horse and the stupid violence of the bull. And, unlike the Spanish, these gentle people do not allow the bull to be killed. The reasons for this are historical but they are also in the Portuguese character, which is noted for its care of animals and its dislike of violence—in passing it may be noted that capital punishment has long ago been abolished in the country.

  There are not many bullrings in Portugal, and there is no hierarchy of famous bullfighters. The most important ring is the strange, Russian-looking place in Lisbon with its onion-turrets. When the opening parade marches into the ring, the chief figures are not the toureiros but the horsemen, who come in on perfectly trained animals with the step of the haute école. The horsemen wear the traditional costume of the old court, the horses are often plumed and beribboned.

  The opening move in the fight is a pursuit, so that the bull may show his fury; at the barrier, the pursued horseman skillfully turns and plants a small dart from his lance in the bull’s neck; he then rides back to the middle of the ring and makes the dramatic “call to the bull,” shouting to him to come on. From that moment the fight becomes a series of exciting skirmishes, sudden turns and evasions, thrilling in its grace. The bull’s horns have been shortened and are capped by leather knobs so that the horse cannot be injured; but an expert rider will ride close to the bull and avoid even a graze from the bull. The whole art lies in taking the charge and yet, by a flick of the reins, cheating the bull of his collision. There are no wild careers or clumsy scuffles. After a number of darts have been planted, a toureiro may work on foot with the bull, making the Spanish passes and simulating the death stroke.

  After this comes the most curious act of the spectacle. A file of men, wearing the dress of the peasants on the bull-raising farms and called moços de forcado, advances upon the bull. The bull charges at the leader, who flings himself between the horns and weighs down on the bull’s head, while the rest of the team scramble on his back or hug him by the tail until he rolls over. If the first man is tossed, the next takes the charge, but once the bull is down he is officially dead; there is the pleasant deep clang of cowbells, twenty or thirty bulls are driven in and the defeated bull goes out with them.

  The evening is milky over the Tagus, the red sun goes down in a fume of lilac haze over the sea. The waves roar under the most westerly cape in Europe, and from the little fishing town of Cascais one hears the evening bugle call at the fort and sees the barefoot fishermen on the shore and the bright blue floats among their nets. The estuary is rimmed by lights for mile after mile. At Estoril, the little Monte Carlo, the flower gardens are drawn up like a military review for the consolation of the exiled kings, heirs and pretenders to European thrones who preserve here their waning protocols, their large cars, their tennis, their stamp collections and their surviving scandals. It is a little Ruritania in Riviera dress, with beach guards to supervise the propriety of the bathing costumes.

  Estoril’s last high moment was the war; for Lisbon was the gateway in and out of occupied Europe. Inland at Cintra, the moon—indispensable to the romantic scene—sails up over the Moorish castle on the “horrid crag” and the grotesque Germanic castle which was the home of Manoel II, the last Portuguese king, who left the country in 1910. The view from the castle is stupendous and the gardens of the park that hangs down the hill are enchanting at the time of the camellias. Cintra is cool after the heat of Lisbon. The fountains tinkle in its still and wooded gardens; cascades and cisterns make their birdlike water music among the trees. Cintra is a cool and shaded Capri; there are villas like fantastic wedding cakes, and a gazebo to every wall. The horse carriages trot, the donkeys come clipping in from the outlying farms, the barking of dogs echoes back over the lemon groves in the ravine. Time has stopped since the decorous days of the Romantic poets; Byron or Southey might be walking there.

  From its terrace high over the plain Cintra looks to the site of Mafra, sticking up like a wisdom tooth miles away on the horizon, a royal palace and monastery built to surpass the Escorial in Spain. The marble of Mafra chills one to the bone. This is the last and most despotic monument to the royal wealth that Portugal lost in Brazil, and it declaims, on its bleak site, that it was one of the most costly buildings in the world. Once more the bugle call. From some side door the slack sentries come shuffling up grinning to a change of guard: the monastery is part barracks.

  There are three Portugals for the traveler: Portugal of the garden and the peasant’s plot; the historic and living Portugal of the sea; and sometimes oddly allied to it, the Portugal of architecture. In painting there is little to see. On the crag at Cintra the Moorish castle stands like a falling crown; the Portuguese drove the Moors out of Portugal. The Portuguese stared at the sea and went to Madeira and the Azores and the African coast. They traded in ivory and slaves. Under their half-English king, Henry the Navigator, their energies came to a head in the great age of discovery. Spain and Portugal shared the world. There were great captains like Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque; Magellan was Portuguese. To Spain went the Americas, but not Brazil; to Portugal the African coast, India and the East Indies. There was a tremendous and, as it turned out, mortal uprush of energy and the reward of enormous and sudden wealth. The Portuguese genius was dominant, like the Spanish, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it declined as rapidly. The great discoveries in India and Malacca and Africa meant setting up trading stations; stations meant forts; the drain of life in shipwreck, fighting and, above all, sickness was enormous. There was a heavy loss by intermarriage and desertion. Slaves, Negro and Indian, were brought back to Portugal to replace the declining population. The Portuguese of today is of a very different racial strain from his forebears in the sixteenth century. One historian writes that the Spanish discoveries were dramatic but that the Portuguese were tragic. The Spanish ended in the bitter smile of Cervantes; the Portuguese, less emphatic and better balanced than the Spaniard, ended in the stoical sadness of measured people.

  Not only slaves came back—to be freed in the eighteenth century—but gold, silver and precious stones. The palaces and altars of Portugal are dark with gold leaf. This wealth went mainly to the court and the Church, and the great captains who went out from Belém quay, committing themselves to God, were to awaken an appetite for fantastic luxury, for ornament and the grandiose, which is one of the paradoxes of the frugal Iberian temperament. In Lisbon, in all the small towns, in the great convents and palaces, the traveler finds himself moving from one golden room to another. None reveled in the baroque or elaborated the rococo like the Portuguese, none enjoyed so much—for love of fine work and detail is in their nature—the inlaying of fine woods; ebony and walnut, mahogany and cedar.

  Portugal has always been the country of the tile maker and the potter and so, in the churches, the walls are glazed by profuse murals in blue and white ceramic telling the story of the Fall of Man or the Crucifixion. And in this bold, blue setting are placed the painted sculptures of the time. The saints and the angels stare rosily and with ardor, and there is all the grace of living expectancy and movement in the carved robes of the beckoning and turning bodies. At churches like São Roque in Lisbon, the luxury may surfeit the northern eye, which wonders, too, at the scores of relics encased in glass boxes held in some painted arm or metaled hand; but presently, as one abandons oneself to it, one feels the sensuous spirit of the makers of the country itself. The barley-sugar columns of rococo art are golden; all that is not rare marble, or rare wood, is gold; for golden vine leaves wind round the colu
mns bearing their golden grapes and (as if this were not enough in an orgy which suggests the gaieties of the wine harvest), cherubs appear like pink rosebuds among the vines.

  In Lisbon, in Oporto, in Braga and the little textile town of Guimarães, there are silver altars. The dream of precious metals has never died, though the mines of India and Brazil are gone. At Oporto is the most bizarre of all the golden-leaf churches of Portugal, for here not only the altars but the pillars and the vaulting are covered with fantastic golden leafage, and one seems to be walking in a hanging subtropical forest, where vines climb the columns and the pampas waves among golden angels and cherubs. Even hosts of golden birds are flying among the chaotic foliage.

  The discoverers of India and Malacca awakened this appetite for wealth and excess, and though it gluts the eye, its heaviness is relieved by the artlessness of the things used. The Portuguese architects and sculptors did not think it incongruous to use motifs from the tackle of ships or the grotesque sights of the sea. Textures and shapes suggested by cork—for Portugal is an important supplier of cork to the world from the woods of the Alentejo—frame the windows. In the magnificent convent of the Templars at Tomar is the well-known chapter window, a window that Vasco da Gama or some fisherman might have dragged up in his net from the bottom of the tropical sea. The framing pillars are fashioned to look like coral, and the buttresses appear to grow out of sea anemones; rope and sails appear, and below is the figure of a sailor drowning or riding with the gale. This is not one of the aberrations of art nouveau but something cut daringly out of the riotous confidence of Portuguese life in its time. The articles of the mariner’s life, his fears and fantasies, have been subdued into an astonishing work of art.

  It is one of the strange contrasts of this peasant country, where the people are seen always in their gardens, that it is also the country of the ocean and all that it makes men imagine. The traveler who spends a few days at the little fashionable resort of Praia da Rocha, where the Atlantic comes in warm, its spray smoking in the sunlight, can drive out across empty country, marked here and there by little villages which look purely Moroccan, to Cape St. Vincent and catch something of the drama of Portuguese discovery in its beginnings. On this lonely cape one of the most powerful lighthouses in Europe now swings a light that is seen far out into the Atlantic. The time to go is in the evening and to imagine the hiss, which (the Arabs said) the setting sun made when its fireball met the ocean; but what really moves one is the sight of the ruined royal hermitage where Henry the Navigator worked at his nautical sciences, and the rudimentary compass drawn out in small cobblestones on the grass. It stares up like a skeleton on the loneliest, most westerly outcrop of Europe, at what was once the very edge end of the land known to European man. It is a sight as moving as Stonehenge or Avebury, and as one stands there one can hear the ocean crack against the cliffs and suck in the tunnels it has cut under them. It howls up the holes in the scrub of the clifftop where you walk, like the voices of the thousands of Portuguese sailors who left their country for new worlds.

  [1956]

  3

  Down the Seine

  The Seine is the life stream of Paris; it is part of the life stream of all of us. So much of us has been left behind with it. There have been very few years of my adult life when I have not walked for days, weeks or even months beside the river, daydreaming with that effervescence of the senses and that leaping and dragging of the heart that the perfect river evokes. It is conducted through the city with great and simple art. The roadways run above it and the trees—the plane, the acacia, the poplar and the linden are continuous. More tall trees grow from the quays below, their long trunks sloping a little toward the river at an angle that breaks the monotony of upright line. The walls in the main are of white stone, not glaring white, but those varying whites shading toward saffron, like the cheese of Brie, and when they are gray, as they are in the Île de la Cité, it is not an implacable prison gray. The stains are not foul. Although Maupassant and others have insulted the water, the Seine is far cleaner in Paris than is the Thames in the middle of London. Fish can live in it. It is far beyond the reach of the tides, it has a calm close rippling movement and never swirls except in the time of winter floods, and it has not that leathery look of rivers near the sea. It is a quivering and marbled water. Its surface is made of millions of light brush strokes of tarnished silver and green-grays, and under the faintly ochered arches of the bridges there are jade pools where the light sometimes catches the waltzing fishes. From the river the eye never winces. It is not mysterious even when the white winter fogs lie on it, and there is always enough mist in the Paris air to soften any hard, urban formality the architects have imposed. At night, because trees parade the banks through the city, the lime-colored and golden lights that pierce the water are not the riotous lights of buildings but come from the lamps which proceed with that measured gaiety found in the movement of the water itself.

  In the center of Paris the Seine is a bookish, cultivated and learned river. Religion, politics, the law, the sciences, the arts are close to it—the law even parks its cars on the lower quays—and engrave a sort of reflected Latinity on the water. Except at Passy, wealth and fashion avoid it. There are two huge popular shops—the fabulous Samaritaine and La Belle Jardinière, by the Pont Neuf—but apart from these, the Seine’s banks are not for shoppers who are interested in other things than fishing rods, antiques, pictures and books. There are bars and restaurants for a short distance on the Left Bank; but for the rest, the Seine is a river to stroll by or drive by in that screaming wolf pack of fast traffic that is more terrifying, more concentratedly breathless, more egotistical, more ravening after human prey than any other traffic in Europe. Studying the fixed ecstatic expressions of Seineside drivers as they howl by, a crude Anglo-Saxon can think only that this traffic is a direct product of the Latin capacity for abstract thought. He makes for the relative peace of the bridges.

  In Paris there are thirty-three of them; a few are beautiful, a few neither here nor there, a few odd and one or two are disasters. It is the variety that strikes the stranger; James Fenimore Cooper, once a considerable name to Parisians, noted it. There is one unlucky little footbridge, the Pont Saint-Louis, a structure that looks like a flytrap, or a bird cage or something the Army engineers have thrown across the river in a hurry. It connects the Île de la Cité and Île St. Louis. Something bad always happens to any bridge on this site. Its predecessor was knocked down by a tanker barge a few years ago. I am no friend of the vainglorious Pont Alexandre III, splendidly placed to receive the Tsar of Russia at the turn of the century in celebrating the Glories of War and Peace and the Fame of France at different epochs of her history. It is a piece of exhibition rhetoric; couples point and giggle at its comic pomposities—those golden Pegasuses flying off into the sky from the four pedestals, those metal lions coaxed along by fat bronze infants trailing sea plants and flowers, those lamp standards that might have come out of some old Ritz.

  A revered Parisian curiosity is the statuary on the Pont de l’Alma. The central arch is guarded by four enormous stone soldiers. One of these, a Zouave, is consulted like an oracle at periods of flood—“The water’s up to his gaiters. It’s over his belt. It’s approaching his chin”—and passengers on the bateaux-mouches always give it one of those derisive salutes that Parisians affectionately save for municipal objects.

  Of all the Seine bridges the Pont des Arts is the pleasantest to sit or walk on; it is reserved for pedestrians and is really a promenade pitched between sky and water for students, nursemaids, children, old gentlemen and for painters having another go at the classical view of the Pont Neuf and the Île de la Cité, picking out the light on the Tour St. Jacques, struggling to get that flaking-gray shade of the river buildings. Nothing sacred or secular, joyous or macabre escapes the inflection of French irony. I was chatting with a plump and rosy young man who is in charge of the small lifesaving station that is cozily shaded by the trees close to the
bridge. Every couple of days, he said, people jump off the Pont des Arts or the quays close by the river. It is the bridge, he said, most esteemed by those wishing to make a show of ending their lives. “But never at night,” he added. “No Frenchman ever commits suicide at night. He wants to be seen doing it. Il veut se faire un drame.” The stagelike elevation of the bridge, he said, with its fine view of the Louvre on one side and the dome of the Institut on the other, contributing their romantic suggestions of art and poetry, makes the spot appropriate. But between his little boat moored below and the skiffs of the river fire station on the other side of the bridge, he said that the chances of a fatal success were small. The morgue, by the way, so conscientiously visited by the French Naturalist school and the painters of the nineteenth century, has been moved from the Île de la Cité. A garden is there now.

  This nest of bridges on the two islands and the upper quays beside them contain much of the dense early history of Paris. Many had houses on them until the late eighteenth century. The Pont Neuf—not, as is often thought, the oldest bridge across the Seine—never had houses, but was notorious for its market stalls, thieves, money changers, prostitutes, goldsmiths—and its famous open-air dentist. Trade long ago moved off the bridges, but the tradition survives in the stalls of the bouquinistes along the river walls. Secondhand paperbacks are spoiling the stalls and someone has flooded the market with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, but the bouquinistes are still amusing. And very convenient, I remember from younger days, for selling your books when you had run out of money. All my Molières went that way. One can still have a squint at the Gravures Libertines and the girl dreaming that the bolster is her lover; but a cynical commercialism has come into the trade in books on aphrodisiacs, the lash, Oriental perversion and the erotic manuals. They are packaged in impenetrable cellophane and Peeping Tom can peep no more, while the old lady in charge sits on her stool under the plane trees, slicing her potatoes for the midday meal. The high moment of the bouquinistes was at the time of Anatole France, whose father had a bookshop on the quays. One of the bouquinistes wrote a book on the trade. I used to call on this old gentleman and his wife in their attic in the Rue Jacob. Their couple of rooms were as musty as their bookstall. Though the market trades have gone from the bridges, they have stuck to the neighborhood. The Quai des Orfèvres still has goldsmiths, the Quai de la Mégisserie has its bird and flower market, and you still buy your fishing rods on the Quai du Louvre.