Crossing the Tagus

On one of those warm, hazy October mornings I crossed the River Tagus to Lisbon by ferry from the south side of the estuary, as thousands of commuters do every day. The river is wide here, close to the sea. The frontispiece of the Baixa, seen from the river, is an open square on the waterfront, the Terreiro do Paço, visual climax of the Pombaline reconstruction.

“It looks like San Marco in Venice,” I said to one of my fellow passengers. Then added, in a fit of enthusiasm,“É uma maravilha.”

My interlocutor, whose name, he told me, was Heitor, was a regular traveller on the ferry. He shrugged and pointed out, as we drew closer, that the square was used as a giant carpark. Thus reducing, as he put it a grandiosidade da arquitetura da cidade.

Still, as Heitor also pointed out, the rest of Pombal’s toytown Manhattan is intact: seven blocks by seven, six or seven storeys high, running back on the level space behind the Terreiro do Paço to Rossio, Lisbon’s main square. Once Rossio was the scene of public executions, bullfights and autos-da-fé. Today it is still the social and cultural centre of the city. On its northern side is the National Theatre; round a corner is the main railway station, an excessively ornate four-storey edifice built in imitation of the fairy-tale architecture of early sixteenth-century Portugal. The station is half-buried in the hillside. The lines that vanish into a tunnel and run several miles underground before emerging on the far outskirts of the city.

Rossio and the two smaller squares that flank it swarm with taxis and buses; the café chairs and tables spill onto the tessellated sidewalks. Behind seductive displays of port and pastry in immaculate pastelarias, ladies of leisure scoff almond tarts and sip black coffee; working men in bars drink wine from tumblers, with dishes of squid-in-ink or bacalhau. There is less and less of the latter, though. Bacalhau—sun-dried salt cod, rehydrated and sprinkled with hot olive oil—is the Portuguese national dish, but there is no cod to be caught in the seas off Portugal these days; it is imported from northern European waters, themselves in danger of overfishing.

The crowds in the city centre include immigrants from the Cape Verde islands, from Guinea-Bissau, from Macau and East Timor—and, more recently and less visibly, large numbers of retornados, the pieds noirs of Portugal, displaced from Portugal’s former possessions in Africa, and now reduced, many of them, to shining shoes in the heart of Europe’s first and last empire. In every church porch, there are mute, hungry beggars. Once, I suppose, all southern European cities were like this; today the ubiquity of indigent people singles Lisbon out, giving it an oriental air.

Plan of Pombaline Lisbon

Beyond the Baixa

On either side of the Baixa rise steep hills where aspects of an older Lisbon are preserved. To the east the shady steps and alleyways of Alfama lead up to a rocky summit crowned with a Moorish castle. Here in Alfama, where the streets are too narrow for buses, and only trams can pass, a more communal form of life persists. The front parlours of the narrow tenement houses give on to the street; pot plants and caged birds cascade from their upper windows; there’s a bar on every corner, sometimes scarcely bigger than a phone booth. An inner city neighbourhood like this might seem ripe for gentrification, but we are not in one of the prosperous capital cities of northern Europe. Since the revolution the Portuguese gentry have largely gone to ground—or to Brazil. And, so far, earthquake-proof Alfama—it survived the cataclysm of 1755—has resisted social upheaval too.

West of the Baixa, up an even steeper slope, an elevator and a funicular railway carry shoppers and others to the Bairro Alto, where Lisbon’s fanciest shops and most celebrated bars are to be found. The elevator, a cast-iron edifice designed by Gustave Eiffel, towers above the lower town—an outsize gothic crane—like a giraffe in a sheepfold—that causes visitors to stop and gasp and laugh.

The Bairro Alto is the centre of Lisbon’s nightlife, also of the book trade. Here is Lisbon’s Left Bank, its Greenwich Village, the kind of neighbourhood every city ought to have but which most have lost, with little squares and fountains and tiny restaurants in steep streets. Here also is Lisbon’s answer to Bond Street or the rue de Rivoli, the square and surrounding streets called Chiado. Named after a sixteenth-century poet António Ribeiro whose nickname was “chiado” (“squeak”), Chiado is lined with glass-fronted emporia so exquisite they are like museums. In these gilded grocery stores, the display cabinets—mirrored eighteenth-century armoires—are likely more precious than the objects displayed in them. Self-effacing sales staff carefully tie packages with coloured string and ring up purchases on old art-nouveau tills. It is almost a pleasure to pay.

An antic statue of António Ribeiro presides over Chiado. It is not the only one. Lisbon, even more than other European capitals, is littered with statues. In the lower town are the monuments to the empire builders; in the Bairro Alto a scattering of effigies of other celebrated writers. Here is Portugal’s greatest novelist, Eça de Queiroz, commemorated with an extravagant monument near the main fire station, which shows the nude figure of Truth flinging herself backwards into his arms. But Truth’s hands have been broken off. And in Rossio the great bronze statue of Pedro IV, King of Portugal and Emperor of Brazil, turns out to be a hand-me-down. It was originally a statue of Maximilian of Mexico: the statue was about to be shipped out via Lisbon when Maximilian was assassinated. The city fathers thought fast, bought it cheap and affixed a new head.

Chiado is as precipitous as every where else in Lisbon apart from the Baixa. You hardly find yourself on the level at all. The whole city slopes down to the water, to the wide estuary, busy with ferries like the one I arrived on. Beyond the looming new suspension bridge that connects Lisbon to southern Portugal—to the Alentejo and the Algarve, the estuary joins the sea, linking Portugal to its former seaborne empire, to the territories in Africa and Asia and South America that it conquered in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the old parts of the city all streets lead to the waterfront: the fish markets and the big ships at anchor are reminders of Lisbon’s raison d’être, its intimate relation to the ocean. Down at the far end of the long, straight streets of the Baixa, the sunlight bounces hot off the water. When the wind blows from the south and smell of the sea wafts up as far as Rossio

North, beyond Rossio, old Lisbon ends. The grid-pattern streets and squares and winding mediaeval alleys give way to a new-built city, growing faster since the revolution of 1974. From the landward end of the square a wide avenue in the Parisian manner leads up to a twentieth-century statue of the ubiquitous Marquis. Twentieth-century architecture takes over here: huge hotels loom over Lisbon’s biggest park, named after the British King Edward VII. (The name is one of many reminders, along with red post boxes and telephone boxes, of Britain’s historic relationship with Portugal, which dates back to eighteenth-century alliances against Napoleon.) Early in the morning, track-suited executives staying at the big hotels circle the park hesitantly, in search of somewhere flat enough to run.

I had an appointment there the following day to speak to Tomas Taveiras, Portugal’s most celebrated living architect, responsible for the most egregious of these new buildings. For the time being, though, I headed back down the valley once more to the three old areas of the city: to the ancient curvaceous passageways of Alfama, the geometric streets of Baixa, and the unpredictable twists and turns of the Bairro Alto, where streets may broaden into tree-lined squares or end abruptly in soaring flights of steps.

Satellite view of Tagus estuary

A run-down city

There is something endlessly alluring about this graceful eclecticism. It’s a model display of contrasting, but complementary townscapes, organic and planned. The city seems modest, humbly following the landforms on which it is situated, taking on the colour of the land it is built from, with the occasional white limestone church jutting up, a pale mushroom among the city’s earthen roots. Still, Lisbon is marked by poverty. This is the capital of what is, by European standards, a poor country. And it shows, not just in the shanty towns on the outskirts, and the shoeshine boys and the silent beggars but also in the upkeep of the buildings, most of which could do with a lick of paint. Much of the city is run-down and unkempt, shell-shocked, like a city in wartime. In fact Portugal maintained neutrality during the 1939-1945 war in Europe and the fabric of the city was unaffected by the conflict. By the same token, though, Lisbon did not experience the large-scale post-war redevelopment that was prompted by bomb damage in, say, London or Dresden.

There is a further explanation for the run-down look: rent control is so fierce that even the most left-wing political parties acknowledge that landlords cannot afford to maintain their properties. Political neutrality and poverty have conspired to save Lisbon from bombs and developers, the things that have done most to mark other European cities. Unfortunately the neglect has gone too far: about once a month one or another building suddenly collapses, without warning, into the street.

To the wealthy foreigner, weary of modernity, the tattiness may be charming, confirming the anachronistic air created by the trams, the old-world shops, and the mode of dress of the average Lisboan, which displays a Balkan lack of chic. It is certainly hard to feel underdressed here; hard to feel you’re missing anything important on the other side of town. (And it doesn’t take long to get to the other side of town if you are.) Civility exists without prosperity. The visitor feels safe: safe from street danger and safe from overexcitement. And free to enjoy the air of relaxed goodwill and bars, cafes, and public places. If this style of life can survive a revolution, you feel, even another earthquake would not destroy it.

The Portuguese are wont to say, self-deprecatingly, that nothing much has happened in Portugal since the earthquake. And sometimes they say that nothing much happened before that either, not since Henry the Navigator and the anni mirabiles of the fifteenth century when the tiny and the recently established kingdom, with a population of less than half a million, led the way for European world domination, establishing a seaborne empire that covered three continents, making it briefly one of the richest countries in the world.

It was a hard act to follow. Today Portugal is the poorest country in Europe, an agricultural economy that imports a third of its food. In April 1974, though, something undoubtedly did happen in Portugal. A military coup, miraculously, almost bloodlessly, ushered in a new era of democratic freedoms and representative government. It was known as the Carnation Revolution—from the flowers that protestors put in the barrels of the guns of soldiers who took their side and refused to fight. The Carnation Revolution finally brought the imperial phase of Portugal’s history to an end, triggering the return of hundreds of thousands of Portuguese settlers from the former colonies.

Reliving the revolution of 1974

More than a decade later Portugal is still coming to terms with the revolution; there is a politics of disquiet that underlies the tranquillity that has reasserted itself in the country. On the walls of the city a record of the events and the years since 1974 is preserved in dim red outline by revolutionary slogans, denouncing backsliding and revisionism and reaffirming the spirit of the April events. When I was there the inscriptions were largely obscured by fresh wallpapering of posters and handbills with photographs of the undistinguished looking candidates in the recent elections. In a clash of acronyms, those of the victors, the PPD/PSD, the social Democratic party, stood out. But there were newly-painted revolutionary slogans alongside them. They bore the message of an ultra-left-wing group FUP, the Force for Popular Unity, and the name “Otelo”.

The Otelo of the painted slogans is Lieutenant-Colonel Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, the operational commander of the armed forces during the 1974 revolution. He was a popular hero then. But a decade later, at the time of my visit, he was under arrest, and on trial accused of organising a terrorist organisation, Força Popular 25. FP25 had claimed responsibility for a string of incidents that culminated in 1985 with a mortar attack on NATO ships anchored in the Tagus.

Otelo’s trial was taking place in a specially constructed courthouse in a forest on the age of Lisbon, a eerily deserted place where you can walk for miles through pines and cork oaks without meeting a soul before coming upon the closely guarded building. (Ten of the seventy-odd defendants in the trial had escaped from jail only a few weeks before. Had they not broken a skeleton key off in the lock of their cell they might have freed the others too. Now security at the courthouse was tight in the extreme.)

Inside, three judges listened while Otelo, a red carnation in his buttonhole in reference to the Carnation Revolution, testified from behind several layers of bulletproof glass. He described how, after 1974, he had watched Portugal move away from the revolution—drifting back, as he saw it, towards the status quo ante. He agreed that he had planned to organise a paramilitary organisation in the event of an attempt at a right-wing takeover. But he said, he had not actually done this. FP25 had taken things into their own hands. And he was innocent of involvement with them.

Among his peers there was scepticism about Otelo’s convoluted defence, and an ambivalent attitude to his fate, but there was seldom indifference. In a pint-sized bar in Alfama I talked to Carlos, a veteran of the revolution who, like many other Portuguese of his generation had done national service in Guinea-Bissau, one of Portugal’s African colonies. The disillusionment of such conscripts in the 1960s and 1970s, fighting a colonial war they could not hope to win, had been an important factor in precipitating the revolution. Carlos described the unpleasant skills he had acquired as a soldier. He boasted of having been invited to join FP25, and explained how he had decided to become a writer instead.

He read me a passage from a recently-published novel by Portugal’s best-selling author, António Lobo Antunes, also a war veteran, whose books are cry of outrage against the country that sent the generation to die in the doomed attempt to preserve its African empire. It described the disillusionment of a conscript in Portugal’s war in Angola and his return to the mother country. In Lisbon, one senses, there are many such people; and many of them are unemployed, some of them indigent. The war in Africa was Portugal’s Vietnam. It’s not something that is immediately visible; indeed one of António Lobo Antunes’ accusations, echoed by Carlos, is that the whole business has been swept under the carpet by Portuguese eager to put their colonial phase behind them. But imperial history has inevitably, come home to roost in Lisbon: war veterans, immigrants, retornados and now political refugees from the newly independent countries of lusophone Africa. The human tide of Empire accumulates in the shadows of the monuments to the empire builders.

Portugal is not the only European country to have to come to terms with such a history, but it is particularly ill-equipped economically to deal with the influx of immigrants since the revolution. Like all previous governing parties, the PSD has promised to build more houses. Meanwhile, though, it is the shanty towns that grow, giving the outskirts of the city an increasingly Third World aspect, full of colour, but low on creature comforts. In the sunshine the houses of wooden corrugated iron and vinyl sheeting have a cheerful aspect; when it rains, though, the surrounds soon become a sea of mud. There is little chance of the shantytowns vanishing in the near future: The oldest, Casal Ventoso–Windy city–which lies picturesquely under the soaring eighteenth-century viaduct that brings Lisbon at water supply, has been there for more than 100 years.

Trams and churches

Such are the tremors in the Portuguese body politic. They are not so evident as to disturb most visitors to Lisbon. For those new to the city, the big distraction is the surprisingly chaotic road traffic. Cars are driven as if the drivers had no idea how dangerous they could be. This might not matter if there was enough street for them to weave around in, and if they kept off the sidewalks. But there isn’t. And they don’t. It would help if there was room to jump out of the way when a bus or a car comes careening round a corner, but in the steep walled streets there is often none. The trams at least stay on the rails. And the clanging bell and the hiss of the guide-wheel on the power-lines overhead warn you when one is on your tail. But cars and buses are perilous. Pedestrians be warned: the street is not big enough for both of you. You must seek higher ground, where they cannot follow.

Once safely on board a tram, the visitor discovers one of Lisbon’s greatest everyday pleasures. On the outside, these antique streetcars, mostly manufactured by General Electric in Wednesbury in the north of England in the 1930s, are all bright polychrome advertisements. Inside varnished wooden benches gleam, buffed by half-a-century of passengers’ behinds. Notices warn of stiff penalties for vandalism, spitting, drunkenness and evasion of the fare. But the fine for travelling without a fare has long ago been overtaken by inflation: it is 30 escudos, less than the price of a ticket. Riding the trams at night, when their cyclopean headlights glint on the rails and a low yellow glow lights up the dark streets, is a delight: this must have been the colour of reality when films were black and white.

If you have nothing better to do in Lisbon you can drift through the streets, alternately a passenger and a pedestrian, turning another corner, following an alley or a stairway, lingering by a bar or a fountain, discovering the joy of lurking. It is a city that keeps you interested without asserting itself. Interiors are richer than exteriors. Dilapidated streets may hide restaurants of oriental luxury; inside plain white churches are chapels solid with Brazilian gold.

There’s one church, though, São Domingos, in the Baixa, that has the inverse effect: gutted by fire a quarter of a century ago, unrestored, half open to the sky, its limestone columns cracked and blackened, its walls stripped of images, it has a rare austerity. To sit there during evensong with candlelight flickering on the exfoliating stone, surrounded by the glittering rosaries of the worshippers, the air thick with murmured Ave Marias, is to be momentarily transported to another age.

Wandering round the city, I hoped I would stumble on one of the backstreet bars where they sing fado, the Lusitanian blues, accompanied by a guitar like a lute. These sweet, heartrending songs sound like the saddest in the world. The high priestess of fado—its Billie Holliday, its Joan Baez—is Amália Rodrigues. Alas, Amália is far gone in years; fado has faded with her; and, for the current generation, fado bars, once the heart of Lisbon nightlife, are no longer hip.

Instead, in the Bairro Alto, I fell in with some young people entertaining themselves with guitars and drums and a repertoire that seemed to be all American. They sang “New York, New York” and “Born in the USA” and “We Are Family”. They were keen to check the lyrics with a native speaker. I reproached them, only half-jokingly, for their surrender to Anglophone cultural imperialism. By way of response one of them launched into a passionate rendering of “Fado Portugues”, a song made famous by Amália. It’s a song that describes the birth of fado on the lips of a drowning Portuguese sailor who is bidding goodbye to his mother and his sweetheart, his last cry borne ashore by the wind.

It’s sad, as I said. There in the Bairro Alto, in the words of the song, and its mournful tune, you could feel the cold breath of the ocean. I could see why fado might no longer be the chosen soundtrack for a fun night out.

The march of post-modernism

The talk of the town for much of last year has been a new luxury housing development in an inner city suburb, Amoreiras, one of the first such large-scale developments in the city. This monument of post-modernism was my last stop in Lisbon. The buildings, now almost complete, are egregiously new: dark glass towers with a superstructure outlined in green neon, bright superfluous colonnades; rose-pink, sky-blue, custard-yellow, the shades favoured by postmodernist architects. In fact these colours, surprisingly, look more at home in Lisbon than they do on similar buildings in New York, where the effect is one of laboured frivolity. If Lisbon was repainted as it once was it would be in just such colours as these.

But the money would surely have been better spent repainting the city than building these buildings. The new development in Amoreiras rears up above the old suburb like a fairy-tale castle in a theme park, out of scale and out of style. It certainly doesn’t look like anything else in Lisbon. The architect of the development, Tomás Taveira, is a controversial figure, with a reputation as an iconoclast. On the last day of my visit to Lisbon I went to see him in his office. He was amusing himself by redesigning the national flag. A yellow canary flew about the room, flaunting its post-modern plumage. Taveira, with a gold pen hanging on a gold chain around his neck, was making sketches for a still more spectacular project in downtown Lisbon.

I asked him what he would do if he were in the position of the Marques de Pombal after the earthquake of 1755, free to redesign the entire city after some new catastrophe.

“Well, I would rebuild it,” said·the iconoclast, “exactly the way it is now.”

“Except, of course,” he added, “the modern part. There everything must go, because it has no connection with the history of the city. It was imposed by modernist architects, exponents of the international style, followers of Le Corbusier…”

But, I asked, was his own post-modernism not just as much of an imposition on earlier traditions of architecture?

No, no, no, said Taveira. Post-modernism had respect for the genius loci. It was organic, vernacular, small-scale. It was a return to a classical Mediterranean ideal of urban culture. In fact, he said, the development at Amoreiras was not so much post-modern as neo-medieval. It was going to be a twentieth-century castle to match the Moorish fortress on the far side of the city.

One could certainly argue this point. Amoreiras is hardly small-scale. And the medieval touches are reminiscent of Disneyland. But despite the flight of capital to Paris and Brazil, there is apparently no lack of wealthy Lisboans willing to pay Manhattan prices for neo-medieval dwelling places. Some have even sold their quintas, big old houses in the countryside outside Lisbon, in order to gain a foothold in Taveira’s towers. And now, he told me, the next project on his list is a shopping centre. It’s hard to see how that could be small or organic.

As I left Taveira’s office and made my way to the airport it seemed to me that his critics—who are many—may feel happier when the buildings have aged, when the paint has started peeling and they begin to merge into the rest of the city. The growth of prosperity in the new Portugal could yet threaten the riches that it has preserved from the past. In Lisbon, the decay, the azulejos, the pot plants, the caged birds, the fountains and tramlines form part of a whole that is rightly called organic—organically created and organically preserved, by accident of history rather than by planning or by legislation. Statues and stone steps, old revolutionary slogans, chestnuts sellers, fado bars and funiculars—these are the true terms of the vernacular. It is on such things that the life—and the liveability—of a city depends. ★