Thither through the night carts drawn by single oxen rumble slowly in, laden with vegetables from the country, the white hanging street-lamps lighting up the lordly pyramids of cabbages or turnips or tomatoes while regateiras (market women, also called collarejas, from Collares) carry in great baskets on their heads, and may be seen resting at dawn on the pavement outside the market. Indeed, it is one of the charms of Lisbon that beneath all its cosmopolitanism it has succeeded in retaining a certain rustic air. The servant-girl in one of M. Anatole France’s books, who came back well pleased with her first day in Paris: elle avait vu de beaux navets, would be enchanted with Lisbon. There the flat open baskets of vegetables balanced by men on their shoulders at either end of a thick pole—a truly tremendous burden, but perhaps they are gallegos, the porters of Lisbon, who stand cord over shoulder at the street corners—and the brimming panniers of donkeys give a freshness to the streets.
Pregões.
Morning and evening the milkman drives his cows through the streets with the most melodious and delightful of chants. Or the seller of maize bread cries his broinhas de milho quentinhas. In May come the strawberries: morangos de Cintra, followed through the summer months by a legion of melon-sellers, criers of grapes and all manner of fruit as the heat increases. Some kind of fruit is ever to be had in plenty: in winter handcarts of oranges and pineapples; or a man carries a rosary of great pineapples hanging from a pole. And year in, year out, go the varinas, the women of Ovar, bare-footed, with their gold ornaments and stiffly falling skirts, crying their fish; the sellers of newspapers; and the lotteryman (cauteleiro) with his perpetual litany of figures and his warning that “to-morrow the wheel goes round: Amanhã anda a roda.” The cries are nearly always soft and musical, very different from the piercing street-cries of Madrid or Barcelona.
Lisbon in the Dead Season.
There comes a time, about the end of July, when Lisbon is like Oxford in vacation. The glory is departed, and here there is no secondary reflected splendour of besundayed scouts to take its place. The smart carriages and motor-cars are few and far between, the steady flow of the well-dressed and fashionable passing up and down the Rua do Carmo, the Chiado, the Rua Nova de Almada, the Rua de S. Nicolau, and the Rua do Oiro, dries up like the summer streams. Then lemons and dark red bilhas of water are carried about the streets, here a woman bears on her head over a kerchief of deepest blue flowing to her waist a flat basket of long light green water-melons, or a great mound of white and purple grapes. Or perhaps in the sultry evening from some doorway sounds the sluggish and persistent Quem da mais, mais, mais, of the auctioneer at a long drawn-out leilão, as if the whole world were ending in a slow desolate agony. It is a cry so different from, yet as melancholy as, the Ho vitrier of the itinerant glazier in some village of the French Alps in autumn before the first heavy snows cut off its communications with the plain.
Chestnuts.
But with the autumn in Lisbon cheerfulness returns. From Bussaco and Cascaes and Cintra, the Estoris and Buarcos and Caldas da Rainha, from Paris and foreign and Portuguese watering-places, come the sun-browned veraneantes. There is a fresh vigour in the streets, the first autumn violets are sold, the chestnut-seller with his smoking baskets chants his Castanhas quentes e boas. Donkeys are driven through the streets with panniers of olives fresh from the country, and a little later droves of turkeys stalk through the Rocio undeterred from their leisured dignity by all the embarrassing trams and taxis. The inner meaning of castanha in Portuguese is “restoration”; violets were the emblems of Napoleon’s return from Elba: so that everything points to the coming of King Sebastian on one of those quiet autumn mornings when the hot sun does not pierce till midday through the thick mists enveloping the Tagus, and the fishing boats pass down-stream silent and invisible. The author of Costume of Portugal[27] refers to Lisbon’s chestnut-roasters: “women who are seen at the corner of almost every street in Lisbon. While the chestnuts are roasting a few grains of salt are thrown over them, which gives them a down similar to the bloom on a plumb fresh gathered.” We may take the bloom of the plumb with a grain of their salt, but still in the winter months women are to be seen sitting in nearly every doorway of the humbler streets fanning their glowing earthenware pots of shape exactly the same as that used in illustration of the letter F (Fogareiro) in João de Barros’ alphabet (1539).
Modern Lisbon.
If stress is here laid on these rustic traits as one of Lisbon’s great attractions to the foreigner, it must not of course be thought that it is not endowed with all the luxuries and refinements of a great modern city. There they all are, the good hôtels, streets neatly paved and scrupulously clean, the comfortable motor-cars and carriages, the tempting shop-windows, and a good service of electric tramcars, in an endless rosary of white and yellow. The service of motor-cars can scarcely be called good. Most of the cars are comfortable, and some of the drivers efficient, but the drivers of others sprawl lazily in the Rocio, only waking up to charge an excessive fare, which frightens away most people. Even if they have a taximeter, it starts at a shilling (250 réis) and reaches 1,000 réis with a strange rapidity. And if they have inveigled some unwary person into becoming their fare and prey—they, of course, consider all foreigners fair prey—he will find himself being conveyed at breakneck pace in a totally wrong direction. Indeed, the foreigner driven furiously in a Lisbon taxi may think that the lisboeta sets more value on time than on life, but in fact their attitude to time is rather that of the madrileño driver who, if asked to drive faster, will gradually slow down, stop, get down, open the door, take off his hat, and ask if you wished for anything. He will keep his politeness, even if you miss your train. All the sadder is it that in Lisbon the inroad of foreign customs tends to interfere with the pleasant dilatory habits of the native. Few shops, for instance—one or two chemists or booksellers at the most—have a little circle of chairs for their clients (freguezes) to pass the time in leisurely cavaco. But centuries of progress have failed to make Lisbon uninteresting, so various are the ingredients of its motley population, men of all nations, classes and religions. Saloios, i.e., peasants from the neighbourhood of Lisbon, are noticeable in the streets for their short “Eton jackets” and close-fitting trousers spreading out over the foot, and peasants from further afield, beyond the Tagus for their immensely wide (desabado) hats and their sackcloth coloured cloaks reaching in a succession of capes to the feet. And emigrants with their many-coloured patchwork alforges and their coffin-shaped trunks haunt the quays.
Glimpses of Lisbon.