Portugal of the Portuguese

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

The outlook on life in the North and in the South of Portugal seems often, indeed, poles asunder, the North conservative, reserved, slow; the South more expansive, liberal, and socialist, and the inhabitants of Minho will look upon the inhabitant of Algarve as little less of a stranger than the Frenchman or the Spaniard, indeed more of a stranger than his northern neighbour of Galicia. The inhabitants of the North are certainly more independent: in the South, and especially in all the district round Lisbon, political intrigue and office-hunting, and invasion of foreigners, have had a bad influence on character.

Begging.

Perhaps in no region on earth is begging more general. It is not only the lamuria, the woeful ladainhas of the beggars in the streets and on the roads, with their strange tales or worn pieces of paper telling of “disastrous chances” and “moving accidents,” in spelling still more disastrous. You may say that you have no money to give or that you will not give it, but that will not move them. The shibboleth to get rid of them is Tenha paciencia (Have patience: the very last thing they require), which corresponds in effectiveness to the Perdone Vd. por Dios, the pardon asked in the name of God of Spanish beggars for giving them nothing. It means presumably that you have a hardened and obdurate heart, that you have heard it all before, and are up to all their tricks and devices: at least they immediately depart with gently muttered imprecations. These unfortunate persons are from time to time swept up promiscuously, the knaves and the deserving, by the police, and shut up in the worst cells of the Lisbon prisons till they can be shipped overseas with far less care or concern than a cargo of frozen meat. Meanwhile their confrères in higher grades of society continue in their no less degrading mendicity: for an official post, a trade concession, a favourable verdict in the law-courts, a this, a that, sinecures and trifles, in an endless intrigue to arranjar whatever necessity or ambition demands at the hands of friends, Government officials, deputies, politicians.

Officials.

And the number of Government officials is enormous and increases. It is the object of all to attain this dignity. For the higher posts a University degree is a help, and many go to Coimbra solely with this object in view. (In the seventeenth century, according to the Arte de Furtar (1652), over a hundred “students” yearly succeeded in taking their degree at Coimbra in order to obtain government employment without ever having been in Coimbra.) But even the cantoneiro, who receives something under a shilling from the State to mend or omit to mend the roads of Portugal, thereby rises a step in the social scale and, if he starves, starves with authority. It is the duty of a political leader to provide places high and low for as large a number of followers as possible: herein will be gauged the measure of his success. There is thus continually a great moral (or immoral) force persistently at work to overthrow the existing Government, which is like a solitary batsman with not only the bowler—the legitimate Opposition—against him, but the whole field and all the spectators (hostile or indifferent). For the Portuguese are like the frogs, never content until King Log has been replaced by King Stork, and not very content then. For them the bird in the hand is never half so fine as the two in the bush, and they go on intriguing, insinuating, imagining novidades and betterment, both in private and public life, forgetful of their own proverb, Do mal o menos (Let sleeping dogs lie). Politics sometimes causes disturbances at Coimbra. The University, formerly Liberal, has now become Conservative, “reactionary” in its dislike of the methods of the “White Ants.”

Coimbra University.

This, the only Portuguese University, answering to Oxford and Cambridge, and old as they, is built on a hill in a delightful position above the Mondego, perhaps the most beautiful of Portugal’s many beautiful rivers, flowing through a country lovely in itself and endeared to all Portuguese by its traditions of history and legend, of which a great book might be filled. The teaching at Coimbra is apt to be too theoretical and to embrace too many fields, to the loss of exact scholarship. Many attend the lectures and rarely open a book. Literary discussions are frequent unless momentarily submerged by politics, and of course much ingenuity is always expended on skit and troça and epigram. Actual book-learning and accurate study of texts are less in favour (especially among the cabulas or calaceiros, i.e., students whose mission in life is to take the key of the fields). Rows between town (futricas) and gown are not unknown. The undergraduates are divided into caloiros (becjaune, fledgling, fresher), novatos and veteranos, and live in considerable freedom, in lodgings or hôtels, or clubbing together in republicas composed of a few students often from the same province, algarvios, minhotos, beirões.

Regional Variety.

Thus even here are maintained those distinctions between region and region, which form no little part of the attraction of Portugal for the traveller. Scarcely for the traveller in trains: if anyone wishes to write a valuable and delightful book on Spain and Portugal, let his travels be with a donkey, or on foot, selling, say, saffron or images of saints, and he will be amply rewarded for whatever little discomforts he may have to endure. The dress and gold ornaments of the peasant women of the North have been often described, and if Minho deserved visiting for nothing else it would be worth while to go there in order to see some out-of-the-way village praça (consisting often of the high road) on a market day gleaming with gold, if not purple, more than all the cohorts of Sennacherib. Some of the women are entirely covered with necklaces from neck almost to the waist, and wear one or more pairs of earrings often several inches in length. But even the boeirinha, the little ox-girl who goes dressed in scarlet and gold with her huge goad in front of the oxen, will have her gold ornament. It is in the North that the oxen wear on their heads those strange erections, often beautifully carved, called cangas. In Minho, too, chiefly survives the use of the cloak of reeds—coroça—which, according to the author of Costume of Portugal, was adopted by certain English officers who had seen it in Portugal nearly a century ago, and admired its convenience and capacity for keeping out the rain, which runs off it as water from a duck’s back: a useful property in a country like Portugal, where the autumn, winter, and spring rains are often heavy and sometimes continuous. For the Portuguese, except for some districts of Traz os Montes and Beira, winter consists of rain, not cold, and the rain at most develops a suspicion of sleet (chuva branca). But as a rule that good sun of Portugal, which has the property of warming without burning, is ever lurking round the corner, ready to appear on the first pretext.