Andalus

by Jason Webster

  ‘PORCO!’ she screamed as she found him hiding in the kitchen, and landed a punch on his ear. The bar owner, clearly a friend of the poor man, made low-pitched groans of complaint, but the strangely cube-shaped jilted wife was in full flow.

  ‘PUTA! PORCO!’

  I thought some efforts would be made to shut her up, or at least move the marital dispute to a more private location. But no. Such displays of emotion appeared to be quite acceptable – the flip side of the coin from the usual haunting silence I’d encountered since entering the country. Portugal struck me as a fundamentally odd country: as though everyone here had had their testosterone levels artificially set to zero at birth. How else could you explain their languidness, moodiness, their melancholy and the nightly showing of the Women’s Roller Hockey World Championship on primetime TV?

  Some twenty minutes passed before the husband managed to escape the beating and fled to the toilet, where he locked himself in. The woman beat on the door a few times for good measure, called him a porco several times more, and then left, whispering an apologetic disculpe to me as she passed on the way out.

  The Moors appeared to have left little evidence of their time in Portugal, and Serpa was no exception – a shard of an amphora was about as good as it got. But just as I was turning to leave the museum, a photograph in one of the display cabinets caught my eye. It showed a small dirty-white building, square and with a round dome on top – an unmistakable Moorish design. Underneath, a strip of paper pinned to the photo simply said ‘Santa Margarida Mosque’. I looked back in my guidebook: there was no mention of such a place. And the man at the tourist information hadn’t brought it to my attention either. There was no clue to the whereabouts of the mosque.

  I leant over to the window to peer into the courtyard, where the mad curator had been when I’d arrived: he was no longer there. I felt certain that somewhere inside that jumbled mind was the location of the Santa Margarida Mosque, so I set off to find him.

  He crept up on me from behind as I went searching for him in the prehistoric section. With a start I turned round. His face was kind, skin like sandpaper, and, like most Portuguese men I’d seen, he wore a flat cap on his bony head.

  ‘Olá,’ he said. Just as in Spain, the greeting came from Allah, but with deeper Portuguese vowels it sounded even more like the original word. Zine would have had fun here, I thought.

  ‘Olá. Santa Margarida,’ I explained. ‘A mesquita.’

  And then it began: the most bizarre set of instructions I’d ever heard, spoken in a garbled version of a language I already had difficulty understanding, and accompanied by huge sweeping arm movements and wild vibrating eyes. At times I thought I could pick out odd words of German or French. Just what language was the man speaking? Then he made the sounds of a river, birds twittering, a crunching noise as he jumped up and down. It was pure nonsense, but at the same time, and to my surprise, I started to understand what he meant: take the road to Beja, then turn off and cross a river bed, up a dirt track (the jumping up and down was the movement of a car driving on a bumpy road) and the mosque was in the middle of an orchard.

  The effect of the man’s wild gesticulations and gibberish-talk was to give me a crystal-clear image of my route, as though he’d shown it to me on film.

  And so fifteen minutes later I found myself outside the hidden Mosque of Santa Margarida, surrounded, as he’d told me, by olive trees filled with twittering birds, at the top of a slope on the other side of the muddy river bed from the Beja road. The mosque looked like a Second World War pillbox: a small greying structure with cracking walls covered in mildew, and a tiny green door. It was the spitting image of zawiyas you came across all over Morocco, and which could still be found in Spain: a quiet spot, perhaps marking the tomb of a holy man, or a solitary place of prayer; perhaps the meeting point for annual religious processions, when everyone marked a certain saint’s day by walking out of town in a column to a sacred place in the country – romerías, they called them in Spain; romarias in Portugual, moussems in Morocco. Christian, Muslim: it didn’t matter. Today they still called it a mosque, only it was dedicated to a Christian saint.

  I tried the door, but it was locked. There was no-one around. This part of Portugal, the Alentejo, was supposedly the poorest region in Europe: people were a rare commodity. I tried again, but still it refused to open; I might have tried harder but I didn’t want to have break-in and entry into a mosque/church on my conscience. After circling round it a couple of times I realized that there was no way in, and nobody was on hand with the key. Probably empty, I thought in an attempt to console myself. Finding it in the first place was the important thing.

  It started raining again and I headed back to the car. Although deep inland and almost on the Spanish border, you felt the presence of the Atlantic in the rapid shifts of weather blowing in off the ocean: rain, then searing humid heat, strong winds, then more rain.

  It was time to go. The inside of the mosque would have to remain a mystery.

  MÉRTOLA

  ‘Biologists say we’re genetically very close to North Africans. They want to set up an organ donation programme between Portugal and Morocco.’

  Santiago Macias could barely have looked less Moorish, with his fair hair and distractingly blue eyes. His family, he told me, was originally from northern Spain, exiles from Franco. But the Lusophone Santiago now chatting to me over a bottle of mineral water and a cigarette had become one of the leading lights of the nascent field of Islamic studies in Portugal – a far more politically charged affair than anything I’d come across in Spain.

  You had to look back to the dictatorship of Salazar to understand the importance of what Santiago and his main collaborator Claudio Torres, the godfather of Arab studies in Portugal, were doing.

  António de Oliveira Salazar had been the most low-key of Europe’s fascist leaders. A celibate former economics professor, he had neither the theatricality of Mussolini, the evil of Hitler or the enigmatic guile of Franco, yet he ruled Portugal virtually single-handedly from 1932 to 1968. Catholic and austere, he drew on a romanticized view of the Portuguese Reconquest and the Age of Exploration to create a pageant-like imagery to legitimize his regime. The result was that for decades Arab studies were almost non-existent in the country – in what appeared to have been a more extreme version of what had happened in Spain, the Moorish period of Portugal’s history was simply rubbed out in favour of a picture of Christian purity, and no archaeological digs which might show to the contrary were allowed.

  Things only began to change after Salazar died. The man who spearheaded events was Claudio Torres, a former Communist activist who had concentrated his efforts in the ancient Alentejo hilltop village of Mértola. Apart from his more academic work, he had also revived and promoted traditional crafts that dated back to Moorish times, such as the weaving of brown and white woollen blankets with intricate geometric patterns. The idea had caught on: other Arabists, including Santiago, had come to join the Mértola project, and the place had become Portugal’s main centre of investigation into the Moorish past.

  Set at the joining of two rivers, the tiny, bustling village had the feeling of another era to it – mounted policemen with big moustaches in grey, military-style uniforms looking like something from a hundred years ago, children shuddering down cobbled streets on push-bikes and foot-scooters. Buildings were painted in bright clean colours – a sky-blue star framing a white window, heavy fire-engine-red doors at the entrance to a nineteenth-century public building. Old women covered their hair with black scarves tied underneath their chins and straw hats balanced on top of their heads, as in many parts of Morocco. Zine would have looked more like a local than he did in Spain, I thought. Complexions were generally dark, but in addition, many men had tight-knotted, almost Afro hair, the kind so common among North Africans. On four or five occasions I’d mistaken Portuguese walking in the street for Moroccan immigrants, only realizing they were local when I heard them speak.

&nb
sp; The surrounding landscape was like something from a Chinese watercolour, with steep valleys, tall delicate trees and waterfalls – the whole scene painted in shades of green and grey. The church was a former mosque – easily identified by its rectangular shape and rows of columns. And below the walls of the old castle that crowned the village was a small chapel – again a former Islamic building with its tell-tale cubic structure topped with a dome like an orange sliced in half. Inside was kept a very hairy-looking statue of Jesus, with demonic black eyes.

  ‘Mértola was an economic disaster in the Middle Ages. That’s why we’re based here, because the place has effectively been preserved,’ Santiago told me, speaking in almost flawless English. ‘Lisbon and Beja were more important for the Moors, but very little remains.’

  Working men wearing flat caps came into the bar where we were sitting, their skin rough and dry, their bodies heavy and burdensome. One of them had a lump the size of an apple on the back of his neck. Poverty appeared to be afflicting the region even now.

  There seemed a genuine love of his subject behind what Santiago said, and I quickly warmed to his enthusiasm and friendliness: I’d only called him up to arrange the meeting fifteen minutes beforehand and he’d agreed to come round without any hesitation.

  ‘You’re lucky to have found me,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be at a conference in Lisbon today. I have to leave in an hour.’

  I explained the reason I was there, and my search.

  ‘The legacy of the Moors in Portugal is more subtle in some ways than in Spain,’ Santiago told me. ‘Here there is no Alhambra or Cordoba Mosque, yet the link is strong. Lisbon, for example, is closer to Rabat than Madrid.’

  I was struck by this idea, which had never occurred to me before, and I made a mental note to check it when I got back to the car. Although, as it turned out, Madrid had it by a few miles, the point was clear – North Africa was closer than it seemed.

  ‘The Mértola project has been ongoing for over fifteen years now. The mosque is obviously an important site, but we’ve also found graves with Islamic inscriptions next to Christian ones – people were buried together. The whole village is dotted with them – nothing spectacular in themselves, but the significance of finding something like this after years of denying the Moors were ever a serious presence in the country is enormous.’

  Santiago went on to explain why.

  The Moorish conquest had been more like an assimilation than the rapid invasion described in the history books. No Islamic tombs had yet been found from before the eleventh century. Essentially the same people were here before and after the Arabs arrived – they just became Muslims.

  On the TV news the night before there’d been footage of mass arrests of Al-Qa’ida suspects in Lisbon. The police chief in charge of the operation was interviewed afterwards and looked as Arabic as the people he’d just detained: olive skin, thick mouth, strong round chin and black curly hair.

  ‘We Portuguese pride ourselves on not being racist,’ Santiago said when I mentioned this to him. ‘But it’s not entirely true: northerners call the people of the south mouros. And they’re not being polite.’

  Just as in Italy, where northerners often called the toe of the peninsula Calabria Saudita – Saudi Calabria.

  Yet there were about six hundred words from Arabic in Portuguese, even though some of them were being lost as society and the language evolved. Falua, for example, came from the Arabic for ‘little horse’ and was used in Portugal to describe a certain kind of small boat. But those boats were no longer used, so the word was dying out. The same went with old measurements – the Arabic terms were lost with the switch to litres and grams. The Portuguese had oxalá, like ojalá in Spanish. And then there was the expression Deus é grande!, taken from Allahu akbar – God is great – in Arabic. You had to look for the influence in subtle things like this, Santiago said, the language of food, for example – all the escabeche sauces in the Algarve made from vinegar. There were similar dishes in Spain, where anything from rabbit to sardines could be prepared in thick onion and vinegar gravy.

  ‘Then there’s the Alfama district of Lisbon,’ he continued. ‘The name comes from the Arabic al-hammam – bath house.’

  According to Claudio, his colleague, you could hear Moorish influences in the mournful sounds of the local Alentejo choirs, or see it in the designs woven into the blankets the women made, or the fact that in Portuguese they gave the days of the week numbers rather than names, just as in Arabic: Day One, Day Two.

  ‘We’re surrounded by this kind of thing. Have you seen the Marrakesh-style battlements on top of the church? It’s everywhere. And then there are the stories of the Moorish Maiden.’

  I sat up. ‘What stories?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a kind of national legend. Some say a Moorish maiden helped the knights of Santiago reconquer the southern town of Aljezur – the last to be taken by the Christians – by secretly opening the city gates in the middle of the night. Then others say she’s a ghost collecting water, crying because the Moors are no longer in Portugal.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘And then there’s the story about a shepherd who saw some amazing light while he was out with his sheep.’

  Legend had it the shepherd walked towards the light and saw a beautiful Moorish woman surrounded by jewels and treasure, and she called out to him: ‘Come. Take all the gold you want, but whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about this, and more importantly, don’t look back when you walk away.’ And so this is what the shepherd did. He picked up all the gold that he could and ran off back down the mountainside. But halfway down he looked back to see this light just one more time, even though the woman had told him not to. And when he got home he told everyone about what had happened. When he returned to the place where he’d found the gold, all he saw was rusty scrap metal. And so today – according to the story – you can still find many pieces of this old metal left behind by the shepherd, scattered over the hilltop.

  Santiago lit another cigarette as I finished copying the story down.

  ‘They’re stories grandmothers tell,’ he said, as though it was of little importance. I nodded and remained silent as I felt another piece of the puzzle slot into place. This was the same legend as Musa the Moor and his hidden treasure, the tale that had made me start on all of this in the first place. Portugal’s Moorish Maiden was the same person as Zoraida, the daughter of the legendary ruler of Al-Andalus, guarding her father’s treasure from the unworthy by making it appear less valuable than it actually was. In Spain it was stones: here it was pieces of rusty metal.

  ‘There’s another thing you must have seen too,’ Santiago said when I looked up. ‘The Hand of Fatima.’

  I had noticed that dozens of door-knockers were in the shape of a woman’s hand holding a ball, a ring on her second or third finger.

  ‘That’s another Moorish legacy. It’s to ward off the evil eye.’

  ‘Isn’t the Virgin of Fatima the patron of Portugal?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s because of the three children who saw visions of Mary in the village of Fatima during the First World War. Salazar turned her into an icon.’ He lowered his voice for a comic pompous effect. ‘The saviour of Portugal.’

  ‘It seems Fatima’s a common name here, just like in the Middle East,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ he laughed as he got up from the table. ‘But it’s just coincidence.’ He shook my hand. ‘I have to leave now. I’m so sorry. But I have to get to Lisbon. Good luck with your journey.’

  Coincidence. But as I watched him step out of the bar back into the humid sun of the village square, I found the treasure-seeker in me liked the idea that the very man who’d denied the country’s Arab past had venerated a holy woman with the same name as Muhammad’s daughter.

  In the past they had buried Muslims and Christians together; now Salazar’s efforts to bury the mixed Muslim-Christian culture of his own country for good were coming to nought.
r />   It was a slippery thing, this Moorish legacy.

  BELMONTE

  ‘This is my spiritual home. Cleveland Ohio’s where I was born and where I live, but this is where I really belong.’

  Esther smelt of adrenaline, a piece of chewing gum relentlessly pummelled between her jaws. Her heavy thighs were pressed out flat against the low granite wall where we sat near the village square. She was taking a momentary break from her tour group as they took photos of the monument to Pedro Álvares Cabral, the discoverer of Brazil and the most famous son of the tiny village of Belmonte.

  ‘This is just tourist stuff,’ she said, pointing to the massive green-bronze statue of the famous explorer, who clutched his sword, astrolabe and a cross about twice the size of him. It reminded me of fascist sculpture of the thirties: simplistic and just slightly over-dramatic. There was a theory that Cabral hadn’t been the first to reach Brazil, but rather a group of Berbers from the Barazil tribe who had arrived there a few hundred years before, hence the name of the country. But she seemed uninterested in this side of Belmonte’s history, and focused solely on the reason for her visit.

  I pulled my jacket closer around my body: high in the mountains on the Portuguese–Spanish border autumn had come on rather suddenly, despite the pale, cloudless sky above. Church bells rang out in the silence of a largely deserted village, while my stomach protested at the sausage roll I’d picked up for lunch at a local pastry shop. The landscape reminded me of the north of England – all moss-covered dry-stone walls and sodden fields.

  ‘We had dinner with the rabbi last night. It was so special. I’ve been planning this trip for twenty years, ever since Mom told us about our Sephardic past. I mean, I knew I was Jewish, but I had no idea about what happened to us here, about the Inquisition and everything. They threw everyone out. Can you believe that?’