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Três Crônicas

de Guilherme de Almeida[1]

vertidas para o inglês por Andrea Lawrence (University of Birmingham, Reino Unido)

 

Lis…Ótima!

Lisbon, February 1933

 

Lisboa[2]… Only “boa”?[3] No! It is Lis...ótima![4]

 

It was the youthful audacity, sporty, happy, brave, warrior-like nature of my fellow countryman, Tito Pacheco, which thanks to his rapturous and tumultuous disposition, inadvertently brought about, over tea one afternoon, this precise calembour.

 

Ótima!

 

It is the same, all around, an opulence, a richness, a surplus of kindness which overflows.

 

Incidentally, it seems that this overflow is a racial characteristic. It comes from faraway; it comes from the depths. When this nation became too large for this particularly small land, it overflowed from these western beaches and flooded into unheard-of seas in search of anonymous worlds…

 

And the typical virtues are the same. When, in the people’s taverns, the red berry falls into the cup of ginjinha,[5] the liquid is so full that it spills over and licks the tabletops… The garçon who serves a Port wine at a leitaria[6] does not utter “Say when!” in an economising style: he lets the wine touch the rim of the lengthy chalice and frankly spills it onto the coaster… The “éclairs au Chantilly” from Bérnard’s are not just the rhetorical flower of the menu, they are an overindulgence of flawless and weightless cream which is not just contained within the bun, it also completely envelops it and profusely oozes out…

***
 

And it doubles, and it multiplies by ten, and multiplies by a hundred for all of us – touristes of the Paulista[7] revolution – this nurturing overflow.

 

The Paulista women arrive on board a transatlantic English vessel. Also arriving at the same time, is another liner; rheumatic Englishmen who come for the therapy ensoleilée of Estoril. In the hustle and bustle of customs, everyone is thrown together. But the bags belonging to the English are meticulously examined, piece by piece: even the most intimate and delicate undies, unmistakably “post-Victorian”, are scrutinized in the meridian daylight… And our bags are barely open, not even a sideways glance and they are marked with chalk and pass through…

 

I go into a stationers to buy a box of writing paper:

 

“That is sixteen escudos.”

 

“Deliver it to the Hotel…”

 

“Oh! Pardon me Sir, are you exiled?”

 

“Paulista.”

 

“Have a 15% discount!”

***

 Lisboa... Only "boa”? No! It is Lis...ótima!

 

Sintra

Sintra, February 1933

 

The tourist guide speaks. Recites. A lot. Too much. He is a scholar. A wise man. An authority. I mean: an insufferable man.

 

He shows how the stone was worn away under the footsteps of Lord Afonso VI, the Prisoner-King, from so much pacing, like a lion in a cage, back and forth, back and forth, in front of the window from where he could see the Moorish turrets on the cliff, there above… He indicates the bench of Mozarabic azulejos[8] on which Lord Sebastião was seated to listen to Camões’ reading of Lusíadas… He points towards a sad void in the armoured ceiling of the Stags’ Heads Room, where the Marquês of Pombal erased forever the infamous Távora Coat of Arms…

 

And while he speaks, recites a lot, too much, I prefer to be over there, looking, alone, at any piece of ancient wall.

***
 

I love to look at stones. A stone wall, without anything, has everything. It is a map of the Time. It establishes, permanently, the Space; the stone sets the Time. And with this advantage over the mundane reality of maps: it does not have anything written, it does not bring the precise names which disenchant, the actual latitudes which bore, the mathematical altitudes which bother. It does not teach: it suggests. It does not aid knowing: it aids imagining…

 

I travel distractedly, along one of these maps, back centuries. There are crevasses in this stone, which resemble rivers where the hours of white sails were navigated, absent-mindedly… There are glimmers from the mica flakes which resemble stagnant, blue lakes, from where beautiful days unfurled like daffodils… There are protrusions, golden from the sun, which resemble mountains over which the dense and dark nights tumbled over, like stones… There are patches of green moss which resemble islands where the shipwrecked minutes of any life were spent and lost there… There are…

 

There are, primarily, in these stones, the reflection of many, many things which they saw and which nobody else saw; which they know and which nobody else knows; which they tell and which nobody else tells; which they keep and which nobody else keeps.

 

And what is it that can, more than anything else, interest people, if not the things which others ignore? At least, the beautiful things which even the tourist guides do not know…

 

Before the grave of Lord Dinis

Odivelas, 19th February 1933

 

The country road, rough, stony, was playing diabolo with the car tyres.

 

“Stop!”

 

The halte is fresh and luminous like a forest clearing during a well-transpired “steeple-chase”. It is an unassuming town square: the lightness of lime, the colours from the oil-painted façades. Silence.

 

“Taste this marmalade: it is the famous marmalade from Odivelas!”

 

Just acclaim… Such pleasant sweetness from the convent; dry, sugary and shaped like little hearts.

 

“There was a lot of love in this area, don’t you know? Hearts are still used and abused around here… Look! There is the Odivelas convent, with that house next door, don’t you see? The earthquake respected the porch’s stone columns where she…”

 

This “she” is the Honourable Lady Paula Teresa da Silva or “Madre Paula”: a sinful nun whom the monastic Honourable Lord João V led into perdition.[9]

 

I thought, for a moment, about the human nature and the practical piety of that amorous nun, that red lily, preferring one heaven on earth to two in the sky… I gravely stepped on the old stones, between the Mozarabic azulejos,[10] of the arched gallery which forms the front of the convent in Odivelas.

 

The temple is sad and indign and colourless. But, it is inside a small chapel where my eyes and my dream stop. A flagrant, arid, gothic, simple arch of ordinary glass. In the centre, a tall mausoleum. On the lid, the stony effigy of the dead, crowned, reaching out with clasped hands. Hands? Only one hand, the other, I imagine, broke off during the earthquake and so, emerging from the long, rigid shirt sleeve is just an old iron hook.

 

“But who lies here?”

 

They do not know. They know everything with regards to the tasty marmalade, everything with regards to the scandalous nun… They do not know anything with regards to a great king…

Silence. 

***

The Honourable King Dinis of Portugal: a good poet and a bad husband (naturally), husband of the saint who performed the “Miracle of the Roses” and a saint himself because he performed the miracle of verse; Lord creator of the “cantons”,[11] inventor of the first rhythmic and rhyming love to exist in the world; King of a poetic kingdom, where poetry was law, song was the sermon from the throne and the “songbook”[12] was the national treasure; the King who descended from his highness to walk amongst “female franklins” at the foot of the “conduits”, along the bosks and beside the bourns and to walk amongst “maidens” and fine “lemans”, asking the flowers of the green pine trees “if thou dost know of my new friend” … The Honourable Lord Dinis of Portugal, now scanted by everyone:

 

“Thou might not but know that hast thou ‘ere at thy feet, a troubadour from another time, who in that other time, tendered himself thee to ‘laud’ … Now, I make before thou, abhorred: I make to dilate thee of the ‘teen’ which hast I in my heart for seeing thou so dun and eyeless by general assault, already in the oblivion of thy indign and ruined chapel…”

 

… And my footsteps, which left, seem to repeat on the large tiles, the compass of a ballad which rose from the lips of that stony effigy, crowned, reaching out with clasped hands, praying:

 

“And I avise that my good friend will reverb

a hummed tune which will bewray my self-bounty,

either he will reverb or has already reverbed one…”

 

 

1 Estas crônicas foram publicadas por Guilherme de Almeida em seu livro O meu Portugal (São Paulo: Cia. Ed. Nacional, 1933).

2 Lisboa is the Portuguese name for Lisbon.

3 In Portuguese boa means good.

4 In Portuguese ótima is the superlative form of boa.

5 Ginjinha is a typical, Portuguese cherry liqueur.

6 Originally, a leitaria was a milk farm. Nowadays, shops and cafes which sell milk, dairy products and other local produce are also known as leitarias.

7 Paulista is the term used to denote something or someone from São Paulo.

8 Azulejos are traditional Portuguese, ceramic tiles.

9 According to the legend, the Honourable Lady Paula Teresa da Silva was romantically involved with King João V. When she went into the convent, aged just 16, the Count of Vimieiro was a particularly notorious lover, something which threatened King João V. As such, King João V started to visit his lover every night and she would prepare the little hearts of marmalade for these meetings. As such, even today, this story is used as a marketing tool to sell the marmalade from Odivelas by associating it with this act of pleasure. (ALMEIDA, G. de, 2012, commented edition by MORÁN CABANAS, M. I.; Infante, U., pp.116-117.)

10 Azulejos are traditional Portuguese, ceramic tiles.

11 D. Dinis wrote many medieval Galician-Portuguese lyrics in the style of the “cantares de amigo”. A translation in medieval English might be “cantons”, written in a style which projected the female voice.

12 This is a reference to the “Cancioneiro d’elrei D. Dinis” or “Songbook of the King D. Dinis” in medieval Galician-Portuguese.

13 This is a suggested Elizabethan English translation of the medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric written by João Airas de Santiago called “Cancioneiro da Vaticana” or “Songbook of the Vatican”.

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