by Norman Lewis
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.’
CHAPTER 12
THE 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 agr
eed 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.
CHAPTER 13
SUDDENLY, AT THE END of a long day, we had come to the end of Portugal. Its colour, its mystery and its splendid wilderness were no more. Forests had become managed woodlands, rivers were bridged, villages were encircled by cabbage patches and advertisements for coffee were stencilled on walls. What was to be expected of Villa Real de Santo Antonio, we had enquired of our fellow travellers. They had shrugged their shoulders, preferring evidently not to be the bearers of ill-tidings.
Despite the grandiose name it appeared more as an untidy village with dogs disputing the rubbish in its streets, and most of the inhabitants looked like criminal suspects temporarily free while awaiting imprisonment in chains or deportation. The problem facing normal inhabitants at this moment was the closure of the frontier, provoking, as we were to discover, a species of claustrophobia. We had been met by a member of the council who led the way to a Portuguese version of a Nissen hut that was to be placed at our disposal.
Following our inspection of this, I put the question, ‘Do foreign tourists come here?’
His reply was, ‘Sometimes earlier in the year, yes—but at this time the weather is not good.’
‘How do they occupy themselves?’
‘The café is open two nights out of three,’ he said. ‘On Saturday evenings there is a cinema show. Those wishing to stay on for a repeat of the programme must book a day in advance.’
‘And are there other attractions?’ I asked.
‘When it is possible to visit Spain, day trips are available, but now with the State of Alarm these are no longer possible and it has become a little more dull.’
At least we discovered Villa Real possessed a public telephone and we got through to Gordon Street for the first time in a week. Ernesto came on the line. ‘How was it then? You go to Seville?’
‘No. This is Portugal. We’re still on the way.’
‘How much longer this take?’
‘Not long, Ernesto. Didn’t you hear? The Spanish closed the frontier. Some more fighting started up. As soon as they let us through we’ll be there in a day.’
‘You call me then, huh? You tell me how things are. I am waiting.’
A notice left on the hut door informed us that we must present ourselves at the office of the Chief of the International Police who we found in his cabin down on the waterfront, thumbing through a collection of mug shots of wanted criminals before pasting them in an album.
He was most affable as well as consolatory over our situation. The enemy in Villa Real, he told us, and as we had already supposed, was boredom. There was very little to occupy body or mind. Undesirable persons attempted to take refuge here, he said, and two prisons had been made ready to deal with them. A prisoner could choose to pay twenty-five escudos a day for a higher category of incarceration. For the ordinary lock-up you paid nothing, but, said the Police Chief, it had to be admitted that conditions were not good.
In a speech punctuated by hearty laughs and recommendations to a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable, the Chief saw nothing for it in our case but a return to Lisbon, where he had no doubt that we could get a boat back to England. It was a point of view underlined at that moment by the sound of distant gunfire.
He described the case of two other stranded foreigners who at that moment were to be seen approaching us across the otherwise deserted waterfront. The short one, he told us, was a recently released Polish criminal who had been given three days to leave the country, the other a somewhat mysterious German whose visa was about to expire and who was faced with the possible alternative of joining the Pole or waiting in the rat-infested non-paying prison. This by no means affected the Police Chief’s social attitude towards them, and while we were discussing the immediate future of all involved they dropped in for a chat and a smoke. There were introductions, cigarettes were passed round, and there was a general conversation about the quality of the film shown the evening before.
After this the Pole and the German went off while the Chief indicated by a gesture that he wished us to stay. I began to suspect that he was a lonely man. He had no objection to talking about himself, and he told us that he had studied criminology at Coimbra, mistakenly as he now believed, as it had provided little of the excitement he had expected. The motives of safe breakers could not possibly have less to do with the skills called for in keeping an eye on a national frontier, and he readily admitted that so far as he was concerned life’s battle was one against boredom. Take the case of the German, he said. He was travelling on a forged passport, yet proved upon examination to be a statistician who was visiting the area in search of rare medicinal plants. The Pole had actually murdered somebody and, having admitted that he found real criminals more interesting than normal members of the community, it was clear that the Chief was attracted like a moth to the flame by the drama of this man’s life.
‘The Spanish situation,’ the Chief said, ‘has provided a little excitement in our dull existences, but even the Spanish cannot go on fighting each other for ever. Any day now the frontier will open up again and we’ll be checking shopkeepers from Huelva down here on three-day all-in holiday trips. So what do we do to liven things up?’ asked the Chief, appealing like a beggar with outstretched hands to his audience. ‘Students from Faro Conventual Academy are coming over to sing Songs of Praise to us next week. There must be some way we can return to real life.’
Later in the day Security HQ Coimbra came through on the phone to the Chief with the news that in future foreigners arriving without visas would be deported. ‘They made up their minds at last,’ the Chief said.
‘So that’s the end of our two friends,’ I suggested.
‘Inevitably,’ he said. ‘And not too soon.’
‘So when’s this likely to happen?’
‘As soon as anything does in this country. Remember the frontier’s still closed and there’s no sign of the Spanish changing their minds.’
‘What does the frontier consist of?’ Eugene asked. ‘Some sort of wall, or fence?’
‘No, it’s the further bank of the Guadiana River,’ the Chief explained. ‘The Spanish have frontier posts, and patrol it with searchlights at night.’
‘But do they really manage to keep the foreigners out?’ Eugene wondered aloud, and the Chief shook his head.
‘They do their best,’ he said, ‘but the fact is there’s a constant stream crossing over.’
‘Why should that be, with all the trouble in Spain?’
‘Foreigners come here because it’s cheap. They stay in the best hotels and pay what they would in village inns in their own country. In Portugal they can afford champagne with every meal. This is the cheapest country in Europe.�
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‘You’re probably right,’ I told him.
‘But the trouble is nothing exciting ever happens. In Spain, as we all know, the reverse is the case. Cross the frontier to Huelva and you have about a one in ten chance of getting your brains blown out. Remarkably enough, some people seem ready to take the risk.’
‘But all the same the river frontier idea doesn’t work,’ I said.
‘It works down here at the river’s mouth with a Spanish sentry every two hundred metres, but all you have to do is to get someone to drive you upstream, say forty-odd kilometres as far as San Lucar, where there are no posts at all, and get a boatman to row you across.’
CHAPTER 14
THE MOOD IN THE café that evening was subdued. The lady in charge of the business (generally regarded as the only pretty woman in Villa Real) had been tempted away to join the staff of what was suspected of being a brothel. With this loss, all the services offered by the café fell into decline, and, worst of all, the food had become inedible.
Surprisingly, in view of the disappointing news, the Chief calling in for his evening brandy and snack seemed more than usually optimistic, despite having decided to surrender a plate of eggs, Albufeira-style, to the dogs waiting at the door. ‘The deportations are going ahead after all,’ he said. ‘No problem. It looks like being easier than expected, and quite a break so far as I’m concerned. Why don’t you come along too? Assuming you haven’t changed your minds about Spain, there’s no easier way.’
‘Sounds like wonderful news,’ I said. ‘One way or another, as I told you, we have to get to Seville.’
‘We lead dull lives,’ the Chief said. ‘For once here’s a chance of a little excitement, with no risk to anyone.’
‘Is this your original idea?’ I asked. ‘The one about driving up the N122 to Sanlucar and then crossing the river.’
