Remembrance of Things Past

The frail winter sun that caresses this windswept park in a quiet northern country town is of little solace, its pale warmth adding no more than a superficial joy to my being here. The sun will soon fade, leaving in its place the inconstant trace of undreamt of stars; very soon the wind shall be all that remains for the senses to delight in, the last tangible sign of life left in this quiet, time-forgotten and world-forsaken country town. I always loved the wind here, its sudden coldness on long summer sunsets being a symbol of life’s inexorabilities, the seductive uncertainty of its source breeding in me an imprecise urge to leave, its dreamy wintry iciness printing in my skin the longing for faraway places.

I left this place, but the wind didn’t. It keeps on sweeping the park, feeding extant tree leaves with a little life, keeping the town warm in forgetful chill. I’m like the wintry sun, only occasionally touching the streets of this quiet country town, a passer-by in the landscape of my early youth. I’m not very original in that: everywhere I see dimly familiar faces of people like me, who have left and returned, each one treading the clew of his own memories.

Getting entangled in the treacherous web of the past is an often overlooked part of Christmas. In fact, it is certainly also that: a yearly return to the past, a revisiting of dormant memories, a sometimes unwilling disturbing of the waters. And yet, there’s a river in my hometown, my whole childhood was indeed a flowing river of happy forgetfulness, as childhood always is, still untainted by the mark of remembrance…

Sitting here, in this café overlooking the sunlit townscape, I vaguely remember the ancient Lethe while I quietly contemplate the impossibility of complete oblivion. I’m not very original in that, either: with a deft extension of the meaning of the words I’m writing, I’m not even individual anymore. Each generation destroys the past, only to be destroyed amidst it in the end. Like everybody else before me, I had to destroy the past, only to find myself entangled in its reflection. There’s no Lethe except in the underworld: there’s no forgetfulness but in death. Each return is a rebirth, as every winter turns into spring. The wind, in the meanwhile, shall keep sweeping the landscape of our lives, as inescapable as the swift passing of time.

Merry Christmas.

Portugal: the Beauty of Simplicity

The Return of a Friend

There’s an interesting paradox in Portugal’s gastronomy: our national dish is made with an ingredient that doesn’t exist in our country. In fact our fishing boats have to go far into the North Atlantic to bring us this much loved fish we call Bacalhau (codfish, in English). However calling it fish sounds somewhat reductive to us. Firstly, we consider it neither fish nor meat: it’s just Bacalhau, a self-sufficient entity which creates its own category in the pantheon of good food. But treating it as mere food is something that in our view doesn’t dignify it properly. In fact we make our relationship with Bacalhau something much more personal than just that, something made evident by the fact that we quite often lovingly refer to him as our faithful friend. Perhaps because, in spite of the distance that separates us, he pays regular (even if somewhat forced) visits to our table.

In Saramago’s book The Stone Raft the Iberian Peninsula gets cut off the rest of Europe by some unexplained geological cataclysm and starts sailing adrift in the Atlantic. After a near-collision with the Azores islands the Peninsula, now itself an island, swerves to the north. As the characters anticipate the freezing landscapes of the Artic, someone points out, in a solacing way, that thus Portugal would at least be closer to its beloved Bacalhau.

Apparently the Vikings brought it here even before the existence of the country, so we ate it before we were Portuguese. It is thus as ancestral as its presence is familiar here, its triangular shape being one of the most intriguing things I can remember form my early childhood: such a strange fish, I thought, headless and all, how on earth does it manage to swim like this? I didn’t know anything about the drying and salting process then…

According to a common saying, there are 300 different ways of cooking it. I suppose that is slightly exaggerated, but the actual diversity bears testimony to the endless creativity of the Portuguese people. Bacalhau is traditionally poor people’s food, and so it remains in our national conscience even if its rising price makes it an extravagant delicacy nowadays. And, despite regional variations in preference, it is the main ingredient on our Christmas table, simply boiled with potatoes, cabbage and golden olive oil: a happy marriage of northern and Mediterranean Europe, proving the composite and cosmopolite nature of the Portuguese people.    

  

Wonderful Little Creatures

         Now it is over: the sardine season has undeniably come to the end. From June to November these beautiful little fish are a regular visitor to our tables. Grilled (as shown on the image) or fried (as I’m going to eat them in about half an hour) they’re always delightful.

            To eat them by late November also adds a nostalgic feeling to it. It’s cold outside now (well, 10 degrees Celsius is fairly cold already), but sardines always bring with them nice images of good summer sardinhadas. There’s no way of translating this: a sardinhada is the act of getting the family or some friends together, to grill some sardines and finally eating them, preferably with some tooth-painting red wine from Minho. Really, no other fish, expensive and refined as it may be, can beat the simple pleasure afforded by these wonderful little creatures.

May the Atlantic Ocean keep on pouring these silvery wonders onto our coast!… 

A Tiny History of Contemporary Portugal

Portugal has to get poorer if it is to survive the crisis, prime-minister Passos Coelho said yesterday (http://aeiou.expresso.pt/passos-coelho-so-vamos-sair-da-crise-empobrecendo-video=f683176 in Portuguese). This is an eloquent example of what we are being subjected to. In the meanwhile, people are slumbering in a mixed state of panic and depression.

This country is now awakening from two decades of daydreaming. I can, from my personal experience, illustrate that very well. When I was a child, I remember that the country lived in the anticipation of its first major international event, the Expo98. A universal exhibition centered on the theme of the oceans, it was meant to be a culminating national celebration. The narrative was indeed uplifting: a small country on the edge of Europe had, in the past, been able to turn its peripheral position into a new world centrality (if you take a look at a world map you’ll notice that Portugal, despite being on a corner of Europe, is right at the center of the world); some five centuries later, the country had finally been able to shake off its burden of obscurantism left by half a century of dictatorship and was then re-emerging as a modern, fully European nation, bound to be (it was just a matter of time, it was believed) as rich and developed as any northern state like, say, Switzerland or Denmark.

It is interesting that we spoke of these places without really knowing them: for our purpose of would-be nouveau-riche our only idea of developed Europe was precisely that: they were rich, and we wanted to be like that also. Of course, we weren’t totally ignorant: we were selectively so. As the typical guy with an inferiority complex, we only saw what we wanted to see. Besides, there were lots of Portuguese emigrants abroad, but far from throwing some light on real differences and similarities, they just played the same game: Portugal was for them just a fading memory of poverty and absurdities, a country where nothing works properly. Even the seventh-hand BMW, which had always worked perfectly in Düsseldorf (as it had spent the whole year in the garage) had capriciously decided to break down as soon as it crossed the border (damn Portuguese roads!).

The result was a general sense of animosity towards emigrants returning on summer holidays which could be fairly summed up as the usual suspicion of the nouveau-riche seeing in each other a reflection of their ill-disguised lack of pedigree.

But back to history. The Expo was great (and quite expensive), but we were suddenly without the prospect of a future party. Then came the Euro 2004. Ten stadia were built, some of them costing tenfold the initial predictions: who cares? But the European championship itself left an ominous taste behind it. The day we lost the final against Greece the country was ungoverned, as our prime-minister had left office to go somewhere to Europe. Since then, we and the Greeks were doomed, and our government was never again to leave that place somewhere in Europe. Eventually we would find that the actual places where our government had made its abode were Berlin (on weekdays) and Paris (on weekends).

And now, after two decades believing ourselves almost rich, we are told that we have to get poorer. In fact, we never were anything else but poor: we just bought our way out of poverty, with the ensuing burden of indebtedness. Well, recognizing that we’re poor has at least some solace in it: we can always get poorer… Or die trying. 

Weather

An acquaintance of mine was asking a few days ago on Facebook whether our climate had somehow decided to follow the path of our economy by becoming more and more similar to that of a third-world country. In fact, things have been wild here, as far as St. Peter’s decisions are concerned (to those not familiar with the catholic cultural framework: St. Peter is supposed to be responsible for the weather). Summer holidays (we still have those, so far…) started with funny temperatures: people here are not used to having to wear warm clothes at night from May to September, but all of a sudden we were discovering the concept of wind-chill in early-August. This added to an atmosphere of general depression: with the prospect of a meager Christmas ahead, people were also being deprived of the summer, with fortnights in the Algarve being ruined in the face of rainy beaches that vaguely remembered those of the British Isles.

Then, I left: I went abroad on a European road-trip. Quite shocked, I realized that northern Italy was getting better climate than Portugal, and that alongside with higher wages. That’s tremendously unfair, I thought. In fact, we have this long-held assumption that good weather and economic success are mutually exclusive. When I returned to Portugal, my sense of misery was confirmed: September started with three rainy days. Through the windows I stared, hopelessly disgruntled, at the green slopes of Minho, then coated in a cold mist. Such a startling and unexpected sense of irishness (except for the economic recovery)!... The impression was everywhere the same: the summer is over, people thought; if we’re lucky we may get a nice Indian summer (we call it St. Martins summer) around November, but that’s rather unlikely: Frau Merkel, as part of her punishment of the lazy southerners, won’t certainly allow it.

And suddenly, there comes the heat. Uninterruptedly. From then until now temperatures have risen, and with them wild fires proliferating and the beaches showing themselves in their full glory again, filled with people and journalists. Yes, journalists: every single piece of news on TV starts with a journalist interviewing somebody on the beach, these days. I guess that’s a habit we got from our historical friends, the British: the weather is certainly a widespread topic of verbal intercourse, here (I wouldn’t call it conversation, really…). We just take it a little further, by making it breaking news. Quite unlike the Brits, however, with their monotonous rain, we do have plenty of reasons to talk about the weather. We’re very concerned, indeed. The most pessimistic look worriedly at the Sahara, fearing it will engulf us; in a fortnight, and with the first chills of winter, they will probably do the same with the Arctic. The most optimistic wonder if we will ride camels, or if codfish will decide to make its abode along our coast. In the meanwhile, and whatever comes, I shall enjoy the 35 degrees Celsius forecast for today.

Welcome

            This is a blog about life in Portugal. I decided to create it for two main reasons. The first one is quite obvious: I’m writing it merely for the sake of writing in English. The second one is rather more complex: I can say that the last definitive impulse to start with this blog came from this unusual spotlight under which my little country, otherwise nearly forgotten, has lately been. It is truly ironic that this small stretch of land that once pioneered the globalization is now, and only now, suffering the full consequences of it...

          To speak of Portugal nowadays is to speak of debt, crisis, disillusionment and European distress. Alongside with Greece, we are everywhere a byword for economic failure. Truly, things are different, in reality. Life is always more complex than a simple label might convey. I hope to show some of that complexity; I want to show how it is to live in Portugal, from an insider’s perspective. That is the starting point... Then (let me apply a common Portuguese truism here) we’ll see.