The Story of a Square

On the way here I saw an antique photograph of the Toural Square, occupying the centre of an apparently abandoned shop display. The place where I am now, the destination of my half-leisurely stroll, is the Milenário Café. I’m now sitting at a table by one of its large windows overlooking the Toural, the main square of the town of Guimarães, in northern Portugal. Guimarães is known as the cradle of the country and is also, by the way, the current European Capital of Culture. Much has been changed in the previous look of the town in order to prepare it for that event. The Toural, as one of the most iconic sights of the town, was naturally at the centre of a whirlwind of construction works for quite a long time. It opened a couple of months ago amid the usual mixed feelings of the locals, with positive impressions only slightly beating the negative ones. Personally I liked it, but then I’m not a local, so my opinion doesn’t really matter much for the point I’m trying to make here.

People from Guimarães (the vimaranenses) like to think of their town and themselves as a peculiar case of identity, almost as if they were the representatives of a different people inhabiting a country within the country: quintessentially Portuguese, but not mainstream Portuguese. They combine in an attitude that resembles a sort of local nationalism an extreme pride in their town and an obstinate sense of uniqueness. While the former is amply justified by the sheer beauty of the town, the latter is largely an exaggeration. In fact, most cultural traits of Guimarães have, in one form or another, equivalents in most comparable Portuguese towns, at least the northerly ones.

The history of the Toural is a good example of that. Originally, and judging from its name, it must have been the place of cattle fairs. However, old photographs already show the typical Portuguese square of the nineteenth century: neat, with a love of detail and closed. The entrance to the inner part of it was paid, thus making the place an exclusive of the better-off classes. The majority of the people would just stay outside staring at the Sunday stroll of the bourgeoisie. Public space was then a perfect symbol of society, its carefully marked social divisions echoing the God-given order of things.

Then the iron fence disappeared, and with it the social prestige of the centre of the square. The benches were now available to everyone, as well as the shade thrown by the trees, but only retired elderly people sat there. The square was consciously becoming a place of memory, a symbol of what the town no longer was. Those were the days of democratisation, of economic growth, of high buildings, big roads and shopping centres. A modern monument then occupied the place where previously there had been a fifteenth-century water fountain, its electrically powered jets of water mocking its predecessor. The advent of the era of memory, culminating in the classification of the historic centre of Guimarães by the UNESCO, can hardly disguise that everywhere memory was being wilfully shunned. Real memory, and not the cheap imitation sold to tourists, was now abandoned on the fringes of society, the exclusive property of a new kind of socially excluded people, the elderly.

Now things seem to be changing again, and the Toural along with them. The fifteenth-century water fountain has returned, the electrically powered water jets have vanished along with most trees. The benches have been relegated to a discrete an uninviting corner of the square, as there wasn’t enough courage to get rid of them altogether. The black and white patterns of the traditional Portuguese cobblestone walkways were replaced by some inconsequent lines casually drawn on the floor. The square has lost many of the features that made it a cosy place where to stay, in fact, that made it a place at all. Now people pass through it, more or less hurriedly depending on whether they are locals or tourists. The new Toural gives the town a cosmopolitan outlook, the uneven façades of the buildings adding the necessary local taste to an urban landscape that is essentially and intentionally tasteless. A church, some nineteenth-century buildings, a granite building that vaguely resembles a rural manor-house, a remarkably homogenous series of white buildings that bring to memory the downtown of Lisbon, a fascist style building housing Portugal’s public bank and a trace of a medieval wall claiming that Portugal was born here: an historical and architectural composite framing an experience of vague out-of-placeness. I can’t think of a better metaphor for the times we’re living... 

Long Live the King!

               

              Anyone who has been fortunate to have strolled from Trafalgar Square to the Mall past the Admiralty Arch on a fine winter’s day, with the sun shining through the velvety colours of the countless Union Jacks that cheer up the naked trees of St. James’s Park to see the changing of the guard in Buckingham Palace with the royal standard flying over it knows that a monarchy is better than a republic. Period!

                This discussion, always latent here, has hit the agenda following the publication of a manifesto under the title “implement democracy, restore monarchy” by a monarchic pressure group. Besides being a timely initiative (see previous post), they make a few valid points, namely the fact that Portugal had a democratic regime while under the rule of the king, something the republicans couldn’t keep for long. The republic, implemented by way of a coup, was itself later dismissed by a mutinous army, paving the way for half a century of reactionary dictatorship. Actually, the story is quite similar to Spain’s: a very progressive government replaces a relatively moderate one, only to find that its support basis is too feeble to resist, thus inviting a yet more radical (reactionary) faction to power. The Portuguese are simply too much ahead of the Spaniards in that respect: we went through the same things nearly two decades before them and without a civil war.

   Another interesting point they make derives from the striking parallel between the Portugal of today and that of the final nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time the country had had a period of relatively stable growth, mostly fueled by some big investments in the network of infra-structures. Fontismo (from the name of the minister who had put the plan into practice, Fontes Pereira de Melo) may have looked like some sort of avant-la-lèttre Keynesianism, but it somehow failed to put the country on the path of sustainable development. Then, as Portugal collapsed under the burden of debt, a British ship aimed its guns at Lisbon following some clashing territorial claims with our inconstant ally Britannia during the scramble for Africa; the ship (they could at least have dignified us with the sight of a fleet…) didn’t shoot (it didn’t have to) and Portugal was utterly humiliated, its sovereignty badly hurt. The king was a collateral victim of all this (he was shot a few years later), and the monarchy eventually fell amid some mild and merry skirmishes, mostly in the socially conservative, deeply catholic (at the time) northern Portugal. Now, as we try to deal with the consequences of Cavaquismo (a modern sort of Fontismo, from Cavaco Silva’s name, current president of Portugal and prime-minister by the time when Europe was drowning us in money) and other –isms (such as Guterrismo and Socratismo) we don’t have any sovereignty at all and it is Africa that’s scrambling for us. So, given the similarities, why not getting rid of the president (in a civilized manner, of course)?

    As it is implied in the starting lines of this post I’m rather sympathetic towards the monarchic cause, but for different reasons. As a consequence of academic inclinations I have a certain degree of intimacy with British culture. On the other hand, my literary frame of mind renders me quite sensitive to the symbolic aspects of social life. The point is that the Portuguese republican institutions have failed to function as a solid symbolic reference, one strong enough to guide people in times of trouble. We really don’t look up at anything for comfort; we just look at each other, usually in jealousy, suspicion and resentment. The manifesto hints at those reasons, but leaves them largely unexplored, diluting them in the idea that a king is good because he’s not entangled in party politics. Actually it goes much deeper than that: a king is not a political entity at all. Historically and culturally speaking there were kings before there were cities (polis, in the classical Greek sense). When the task was simply to keep a group together people looked up to the authority of a king, and not to the discussions of a parliament. In a slowly fragmenting society, with dissolving social ties and waning points of reference a king could perhaps be the living symbol of the unity of the tribe. With the advantage that since the invention of constitutional monarchy one can have both: unity and diversity, a king and a parliament.  

   Objections to monarchy usually stem from the idea that a king is not democratically chosen by the people: but neither is the country itself. You don’t choose your parents and you love them nonetheless. You can’t choose certain things; they choose you instead. And that’s exactly why they’re so important, precisely because they've made you the object of their preference, thus rendering you important. If everything was a matter of choice nothing would matter much: one could always choose something else. The vague postmodern illusion that identity is a matter of choice entails an uncomfortable moral void which, in politics, is discernible in the general sense of a lack of common purpose. In extremis choosing an identity means having none or, according to the best available option, a second or third-hand identity.

   So, yes, I dream of coming along the Rua Augusta down to the Terreiro do Paço, gazing at a white and blue flag flying over the Arch of Triumph there, mirroring fair Lisbon, the azure sea and the gentle sky.   

On Power and its Trivialization

              

             Some days ago, in another one of his inspired moments of high rhetoric, the President of Portugal Cavaco Silva said that he was partaking in the terrible sacrifices the Portuguese are enduring in these times of economic hardships. To prove it he added that his pensions (note the plural) “won’t almost certainly be enough to pay for his expenses”. Our president is known (among other things, of course) for his lack of verbal skills and during his long public life has already got us used to these amazing utterances. In spite of all that there’s a general feeling here that this time he has crossed the limits, not the least because he earns more than € 10.000 a month. I know it’s not that much if one compares him to his peers (the only possible comparison in this situation): but it was him who decided to compare himself with the average Portuguese pensioner, who earns some € 300. Given the current touchy disposition of our impoverished country the event immediately caused a wave of outrage: mostly facebook-based (as outrage almost always is these days), with one or another more or less humorous initiative of the “a coin to help the President” sort. I won’t join the chorus, really. I won’t even speculate about why he may have said such a thing, even conceding that it is all the more surprising given the fact that he is usually discrete and habitually measures very well what he says. My point here is that this sort of pseudo-events illustrates quite well some of the basic malfunctions of our contemporary political systems as far as the symbolic construction of the notion of power is concerned.

               It is now commonplace to complain about the feebleness of today’s European political leaderships and to contrast them with the authority and vision of a Churchill, a de Gaulle or a Jack Delors. In Portugal the most prominent spokesmen of this point of view is Mário Soares (who obviously includes himself in the lot of great, charismatic past leaders). But the point is that no one will let anybody be a charismatic leader nowadays. Charisma has a remarkably low life-expectancy these days: usually it dies after facing the press and the public opinion for a few weeks. The democratic demand for transparency as a necessary pre-requisite for consent has in contemporary society degenerated into the idea that politicians have to be permanently justifying everything they do. Finally, television turned it all into a masquerade. Politics is today little more than a half-serious reality show, in which everybody tries to play his part with the sole aim of gaining more popularity. Cavaco, for example, has always played the part of the poor, humble and honest average rural Portuguese, a common man, even if he is one of the richest men in the country. What’s the problem, one could ask: after all, there’s an obvious difference between actuality and representation and the Portuguese media has always been obedient to the established power in favouring the latter over the former. The problem is when the masquerade falters, either because of the music that stops playing, or because the mask itself becomes grotesque (or both, as is the case with Cavaco).

              I want to make something clear: I obviously believe that politicians have to justify what they do to the citizens: they just don’t have to do it constantly and not in such subservient terms. Political power has degenerated into political marketing; charisma has wrongly been assumed to be something one can buy from some image consultancy agency. Trust, the essential constituent of democracy, has vanished and left in its place an all-too-ready disposition to run after public opinion, to try to please the common people who always criticize without bothering trying to understand, who talk about everything without an overall vocabulary of about... 500 words. Really, democracy is something suitable for enlightened societies, but where are they now? The Enlightenment has been so long ago... This paradoxical dark age of ready-made communication and superficial commentaries doesn’t look like a particularly fertile soil for democracy to flourish. When we measure a man’s political worth not by what he says, thinks or does but solely by the number of times he appears on TV, something must be terribly wrong. When power succumbs to mundane trivialization and authority is sought on the basis of emotional iterations such as Cavaco’s, then there’s no possibility of leadership. It should moreover be noted that the Portuguese word for leadership, liderança, is a neologism, a rather recent one, hastily borrowed from English. We’re playing with new toys, here: it’s a pity we haven’t read the instructions manual.