by W. S. Merwin
Maria Antonia poured out aguardente in liqueur glasses for Johannes and herself and me. The decanter of it, she told me, had been left for her as a present by the Comte, and she was giving me a bottle to take down to the farmhouse. It was nearly white alcohol, stronger than brandy, aged for a while in wood but still firewater, with a woody taste. She explained to me that it was made there on the farm, from the fruit of the arbutus, the strawberry bush, which grew wild all over the mountains. The fruit was a round, dark red berry with a slightly sweet, musky taste. The berries were edible, but I was told later that its Latin name, Arbutus unédo, suggested that one should eat no more than one of them. They were reputed to have all sorts of effects, medicinal, cathartic (especially), and even toxic. Maria Antonia loved the taste of the aguardente—in small quantities, she said—and we all sipped it as a kind of initiatory draft.
Maria Antonia began to talk about the Sa da Estrela, the towns and monasteries, Viseu, the Mondego valley, Coimbra. One day soon we must go to Coimbra. I could see that she was allowing herself, cautiously, to be happy to be back in Portugal.
She had one of the women from the kitchen light the lanterns for us and show us how to do it ourselves, and we said good night outside on the terrace and started down the drive to the bridge, surrounded by the rushing note of the river and the night scent of the mimosas. In the yellow light of the lanterns even the raw cement bridge seemed to have life and a story. From the middle of it we stood listening to the turning complaint of the water wheel, and the Ceira flowing beneath us, under stars brighter than we could remember. Then we walked on, accompanied by the sound of our own footsteps on the empty road, to the smell of old wood as we opened the front door of the farmhouse.
Quitas brought us our breakfast early, everything under napkins on a round tray. The local bread, broa, baked at the house, was a heavy, gray loaf, the flour part corn meal. It had a flat potatoey taste that I liked—but then, I was disposed to like every new thing that appeared before me, if I could. The gritty coffee came in a pot of black crockery. Quitas had a fire going in the woodstove downstairs to keep it hot. Hot milk from the cows outside. Orange marmalade, and quince mermelada cut from a dense brick the color of dark amber, oranges from the trees below, eggs from the hens scratching under them, butter with a strong, rank taste and smell, from the same cows. Quitas bustled around the house putting things to rights, eventually coming to one of us to ask, “What more?” and then nodding, with a gesture that was part assent, part curtsey, and disappearing down the stairs. To me it seemed that she was a forest creature. I realized that I could not begin to imagine her life, when she was out of sight, or what was in her mind when she was there.
Antonio and Robertinho turned up at the door after breakfast to begin their studies. We had few books, to begin with, which would be another reason for a trip to Coimbra. We sat and made plans for organizing our mornings. Roberto was still so young that Dorothy said it made more sense for her to take care of his studies separately. For the moment, Anthony and I tried out a few of the books I had with me—some Scottish ballads, a Shakespeare, a Swift, translations of Homer—to see whether we could use any of them. He was wonderfully open and eager to listen, and to my amazement and delight, when I read him Shakespeare and the ballads slowly, he was caught up at once by them both. I gave him Gulliver’s Travels to read on his own, and he read it in a few days, and re-read it, and we talked about it as part of our lives. The same thing happened with Rieu’s prose translations of The Odyssey and then The Iliad, and they supplied his reading for a while—though not for as long as I expected at first, for if I assigned him a chapter to read, or a book of one of the Homeric poems, he was likely to read two or three before he saw me next. I read Shakespeare to him every day, at the end of the morning studies—unless he had neglected to do his arithmetic assignment, or read his chapter of history (after we got books). If that happened he caught up on what he had missed in the time when I would otherwise have been reading him Shakespeare. He regarded his days without Shakespeare as punishment. He particularly loved Sir Toby Belch, Malvolio, the clowns in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Falstaff, and wanted to hear their scenes over and over. He was a bright, excited, wide-eyed, quick child, and I felt that I was not teaching him so much as opening doors for him, leading him to subjects and writings that he then discovered for himself, and began to savor and possess. He knew more about some parts and some figures of Portuguese history than I did, of course, and I encouraged him to tell me about them, and then to learn more (when we had more books) so that he could tell me still more. (Peter had had some of the same love of reading, but he had liked to keep some of his treasured worlds, such as those of the sagas, somewhat to himself. Antonio seemed to talk without restraint about whatever excited him. His new enthusiasms were radiant, and it was a joy to watch him come to them.)
In the sitting room Dorothy initiated Roberto into the rudiments of addition and subtraction, quite painlessly, she said, and she read him Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which we found when we went to Coimbra. He had just begun learning to read, and after she read the stories to him she let him read them slowly back to her.
I had the room off the sitting room inside the front door to work in, with a small table at the window where, when I looked up, I saw above the courtyard the porches with their white-washed beams and railings, and their strings of beans and peppers and onions drying in the morning sunlight, and the courtyard below, with its well, and the hens and ducks and geese coming and going. The house had taken us in without noticing that we were there.
32
We had been at the quinta only a day or two and were scarcely oriented to the surroundings, when Maria Antonia sent a message saying that she was going to Coimbra the next morning and inviting us along. Martin, her chauffeur, in his green livery jacket and peaked cap, was driving the big Buick when it pulled up outside the front door, next day after breakfast, and off we went, on a side road over the mountain. On the far side we followed the winding valley of the Mondego down to Coimbra. Martin parked in the open square facing the train station, near the river, and we all set out on foot from there, with shopping baskets.
The small inland city was another revelation. I had glimpsed a few bits of the industrial port of Genoa, and the narrow streets and back squares of old Nice, but Coimbra, with its small university founded in the thirteenth century, and its ancient church, the Se Velha, built like a fortress, was set firmly in medieval Lusitania, a palimpsest in which the Middle Ages and the nineteenth-century showed through each other. The twentieth century, up until then, seemed to have brushed over it lightly. There were almost no cars, and a very few dilapidated trucks. A streetcar line led along the principal avenue, from the train station beside the river, up past the main cafés and the dimly lit stores, and snaked around up the hill to the upper squares, the Se Velha and the university. The sides of the street cars were open when the weather favored it, and the students (all of them men) in their black gowns rode standing on the running boards, holding onto the brass poles between the seats and leaning out over the street, their robes flying like tiers of wings along the sides of the trolleys. The students never seemed to pay for their rides at all. The rest of the street traffic consisted of pedestrians, donkeys with packsaddles—sometimes a string of them, one behind the other—donkey carts, horse carts, a few bicycles. Everyone seemed to be in the habit of spitting, everywhere, all the time.
A succession of market squares ran parallel to the main street, down a flight of steps from it, and the cobbled spaces were filled with stalls and piled tables, and lined with artisans’ shops. There were woodworkers of many kinds, makers of wooden bowls, toys, kitchen tools, pieces of furniture. There were weavers, behind hanging displays of blue and white bedspreads and tablecloths and curtains, made of crossed strands of flax and wool. There were coarse, shaggy blankets, undyed, and in stripes of the natural sheep shades of gray and tan and brown, or crossed with bands dyed bright red and green. Baskets of osie
r and bamboo in all sizes from dolls’ handbags to donkey panniers, and huge hampers the size and shape of bass drums. Shoe- and boot-makers and repairers, cobblers at work sitting outdoors astride their three-legged benches. Toolmakers. Seed stores entrenched behind sacks. Vendors of fried cakes dusted with powdered sugar. Hatmakers. Rain cloaks. Musical instruments. Lanterns. Agricultural and gardening implements. Sharpeners, with grinding wheels the size of barrel hoops singing under blades. Barrels, kegs, and wooden buckets.
The bookstores had been installed in an earlier century, in which they were still rooted. Old ladders, worn shiny, rose into the upper shadows. My miserable, makeshift Portuguese, patched together, for the most part, from Spanish words, hopefully, hopelessly, was not a reliable help, but I found booksellers who knew some English, or Spanish, or French, and before long we had a real, two-volume Portuguese-English dictionary with a boiled-down Portuguese grammar in one of the volumes, and then I fell upon the Sa da Costa series of Portuguese classics, and the works of Gil Vicente, the Cancionero da Ajuda, a medieval Crestomatia, volumes of the nineteenth-century Portuguese novelists, and such oddities as Portuguese translations of Rilke and Pirandello. One store had schoolbooks for students of English, including graduated mathematics textbooks, and history books that would do for our morning lessons.
The farmers’ market, on a series of tiers that descended to a magnificent fountain, was a cornucopia of piled fruits and vegetables and displays of the white cheeses and hard, Dutch-type cheeses of the region. I stood for a long time spellbound, watching one large, regal woman in a flowing head scarf and shawl, seated on the paving stones with the fountain behind her brilliant pyramids of oranges and tangerines. If a prospective customer paused in front of one of them and asked her about them, she would reach over to a pile, pick up an orange, cup it in both hands, and with a twist like a magician’s gesture strip the skin from the upper half and hold out the opened fruit, lying in its skin as in a saucer, to be tasted. She was a figure of such grace and authority, sitting there with the fountain behind her, that I thought there must be legends about her.
The Mondego is wide in the valley there, with narrow islands in the middle, and the long bridge crossing to the south passed another great church, down in the river plain, a Gothic building, ancient but not as old as the Se Velha. It had been almost finished when the unprecedented weight of it had caused the water table below it to begin to give way, and slowly the whole elaborate edifice had sunk into the river, with the water filling it part way up the walls. There were places along the Coimbra side from which one could look across and see into the church, with the light from the unglazed Gothic window frames glinting on the water surface inside. Houses had been built against the outer walls like cliff dwellings, and a man with a boat could be hired to row one into the nave, and along the windows to the apse, where one could look back and see the reflection of the city, upside-down on the dark water. His services were not sanctioned by the authorities, ecclesiastical or municipal. It was said that the roof was not safe, which probably was true. The government was in the process of expropriating and removing the buildings encrusted against the original walls, with a view to repairing the structure, but it was not going forward very fast.
We came back to Coimbra almost every week, and we all loved the town as it was then. Often we came with Maria Antonia in the Buick, and sometimes we took the small green train with the polished brass trim and the wood-burning locomotive that we had seen at the Serpins station. Again and again, as I walked on the cobbled, echoing back streets, it came over me with a rush that I was in Europe, in Europe—a fact as palpable as the donkeys and knife-sharpeners, as certain as my floundering dumbness in the language, but as hard to believe as though I had discovered that I was flying.
Once we came in to town when Maria Antonia’s elder brother, Don Duarte, the “pretender” to the Portuguese throne, was visiting her. He had his own car, a mid-sized old Citroen, which he drove himself, and Maria Antonia had come with the Buick, and her chauffeur, Martin. Maria Antonia had invited us to have dinner over at the main house when Don Duarte and his wife had arrived, and I had liked him at once. He was a modest, quiet, well-read, witty man, who refused to take his position as seriously as those around him did, or at least that was the impression he gave. We had conversed easily from the beginning, and on that day when he and Maria Antonia had come to Coimbra together, each with appointments in the morning, the two cars had been parked outside a café across the square from the train station and left under Martin’s eye, while we all went off into the town, agreeing to be back at a certain time. When Dorothy and I got back to the cars, Don Duarte was sitting at a café table having a late coffee and invited us to join him, and there we sat and waited for an hour, talking with him about his recent travels, and his rediscovery of Portugal, and how his sister had been late all her life, it was just one of those things. I listened to him, thinking of his own intricate, vexed, unresolved relation to everything around us, Coimbra, the people in the street, those who recognized him and those who did not, the entire country and its history. I tried to imagine what it might be like for him to explore the country at his age, seeing for the first time places and landscapes and houses that he had always heard about, but had come to see only when any claim to possession of them, which his family had believed in and some still did, no longer existed, and he had become, indeed, anyone, an outsider, hearing his own language with an outsider’s ears. I thought of how improbable it was that I was sitting there with him laughing about his sister being late.
We grew fond of the green train that ran back and forth from Serpins to Coimbra, puffing calmly along the river valley, where the shallows appeared one by one around bends, and narrowed over rapids. On the way through the mountains the principal stop was at Louzá, a mountain town, its main street, at the foot of the hill, adorned with nineteenth-century facades and a small park enclosed by whitewashed balustrades. There were a few narrow streets leading up from there, and shops where dim naked bulbs glowed all day over piles of fabrics in the dark interiors. The stores sold bolts of woolen cloth, heavy shawls, blankets, a few rough, hand-knitted sweaters. There was a woodworker, and a cobbler with a window full of shoes waiting to walk out into 1900. A general store with fly-specked cans and jars on the shelves.
On the road above Louzá stood the ruins of a castle, built of a dark slatey stone laid horizontally, with no sign of mortar between the slabs. A great platform jutted out from the crag on which the walls clung above a deep gorge, with a stream splashing white, far below, and the remains of a watchtower and battlements rising around it. It became for me a distant but compelling image of Elsinore, the first scene of Hamlet, the sentries and the ghost; and the town, the train, arose in my mind, refracted, as models for scenes in The Magic Mountain, and Hans Castorp’s life-and-death journey.
Louzá, tucked away in its valley, was metropolitan, a Babylon compared to Serpins, farther up in the mountains, with its one-story houses lining both sides of the unpaved yellow road, the doorways standing open, for about the length of a single city block. It felt like the end of the line, and it was. The locomotive sighed, and when we got off we walked along the quiet road, among the voices in the houses with their doors standing open, the sounds of pigs, chickens, and the soft splashing of the Ceira beyond them.
Two roads led up the valley from the village, one on each side of the river. The smaller of the two, a pair of ruts impassable to cars and used mostly by oxcarts and peasants with animals, swung wide around the level part of the valley with its patchwork of fields behind their low walls. A tiny shrine and chapel and two or three small houses that could not have had more than a single room in each of them were huddled in the middle of them. The dwellings did not have chimneys. Smoke seeped out between the roof tiles and drifted upward. The buildings, and the thin smoke, reflected whatever sunlight there was in the valley. Chickens glinted, scratching in the cabbage rows. The axle of an oxcart squealed away along the track
.
The dirt road on the right, along the southeast side of the Ceira, was shorter and ran closer to the river. It was a mile or two to the quinta. Halfway along, a cluster of two or three buildings stood next to the road, stuccoed, with formal doorways. One of them was the schoolhouse for Serpins and the nearby mountain hamlets, and next to it was the house where the schoolmaster lived with his wife and their baby girl.
Maria Antonia had invited him to the main house to meet us, a few days after our arrival. I could see from his timidity that he and his wife had seldom, and probably never, been in the Comte’s house before. The teacher was a quiet young man, from a provincial background, a small town somewhere as remote as Louzá, where his parents had a shop, and his position as a village schoolteacher was proof of his education. He had risen in the world. The nail of his little finger extended a full inch to show that he did no manual labor. He was small and thin, with a long, fine face, a gentle, kind man, and he was proud of knowing a little English. He was eager to help me learn Portuguese, and offered his services, with touching generosity. His wife was even more hesitant to say anything. She knew no English at all, and never seemed to utter anything more pronounced than a smiling murmur. He called at our front door a day or so after our meeting to invite us to his own house, where we sat in the dining room and had yellow cake and sweet wine. Then we went out for a stroll along the road, where he walked slowly with his hands clasped behind his back, and his wife followed with the baby in a stroller. He talked and I tried to follow what he was saying, and I had almost as much difficulty with his English as with his Portuguese. It was clear that he loved the region, which he had known all his life, and that he must know certain aspects of its history very well. I had questions about things I had seen there from the moment of our arrival—about the quinta, and the village. Maria Antonia had told me that a member of the Comte’s family, perhaps his father, had kept his mistress in the house at the quinta, and I wondered whether the schoolmaster would ever talk about such scandalous matters, particularly when they involved people of title, members of a class above his own. Interested though I was in pursuing such possibilities, it took a burning effort for me to keep my attention on his mumbled, polite, hopeful syllables, his voice scarcely audible above the sound of our footsteps on the road, and as we strolled on at the deliberately meditative pace he preferred, I felt homesick for somewhere familiar, relatively native, thoughtless, and improbable in a way that I was used to.
