Praça do Comércio. The Baixa is the only district of the old city that is flat and low. Surrounded on three sides by the famous hills, its fourth side is the estuary of the Tagus, known as the Sea of Straw because its waters, in a certain light, have a golden sheen. From the landing stages here during the fifteenth century, Lisboa’s navigators, merchants and slave-traders set out for Africa, the Orient and, later, Brazil. Lisboa was then the richest capital of Europe, trading in everything which defied the Atlantic: gold, slaves from the Congo, silks, diamonds, spices.
Stick two cloves into each apple, she’d instruct, and then we’ll bake them in the oven with brown sugar.
When she wasn’t looking I’d stick in a third, with the conviction that this would make the apple taste finer.
If she spotted the third one, she’d take it out and put it back in the jar. They come from Madagascar, she explained. Waste not, want not!
This was another phrase of hers that was like a refrain. Yet unlike It’s Too Late, Waste Not, Want Not was a warning rather than a lament. A warning which somehow applied, I thought as I walked across it, to the Praça do Comércio. All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisable dream.
A fatal earthquake, the tidal waves that accompanied it, the fires that followed it, devastated a third of Lisboa and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants during the first week of November 1755. Famine, disease and looting ensued. While the fires were still burning, and people had only the tattered clothes they stood up in, men bought and sold looted diamonds among ashes and rubble. Despite the blue sky above, despite the golden tan of the Sea of Straw, there was talk everywhere of Punishment and Retribution.
And it was the following year that the Marquês de Pombal began to dream of a new city of Reason and Symmetry. After a catastrophe that had shaken the optimism and sense of justice of philosophers the length of Europe, the rebuilt city of Lisboa was going to propose a prosperity, a security guaranteed by the flow of wealth alone! A banker’s dream of streets whose regularity, transparency, parallel lines and reliability would match those of perfectly kept accounts, and whose immense Praça do Comércio would open the city to the trade of the entire world . . .
Yet in the second half of the eighteenth century Lisboa was neither Manchester nor Birmingham, and the Industrial Revolution had started elsewhere. The decline that would lead to Portugal becoming the poorest nation in Western Europe had already set in.
However many people there are in the Praça do Comércio, it always looks half-empty.
She kept little in her purse. Her movements, when handling cash, were neat and precise. She hid small sums that she had ear-marked for certain projects in different envelopes, or in the drawers of her dressing table, so she wouldn’t be tempted to spend them. Once she lost a ten-shilling note, which represented a third of a working woman’s monthly wage. It’s gone! she sobbed. It’s gone! She said this as if the note had chosen to go, as if it were an animal who had run away, ungratefully run away, for she was giving it a good home. Gone!
When she wept, she tried to turn away from me. This may have been to spare me, but it was also because her tears took her back to other times, before I had been thought of. While she was crying, I waited, like you wait for a long train to pass at a level crossing.
After a while she dabbed her eyes and said: We’ll manage. All we have to do is to make a little go a long way.
By now I was in the Rua Augusta, one of the straight streets of which the banker had dreamt. Being Sunday, the opticians and hairdressers, the travel agencies and maritime insurance offices were shut. People were on their way to have lunch with family or friends. Many were carrying little packages of sweetmeats to offer to their hosts; Sunday gifts, elaborately
Stick two cloves into each apple, she’d instruct, and then we’ll bake them in the oven with brown sugar.
When she wasn’t looking I’d stick in a third, with the conviction that this would make the apple taste finer.
If she spotted the third one, she’d take it out and put it back in the jar. They come from Madagascar, she explained. Waste not, want not!
This was another phrase of hers that was like a refrain. Yet unlike It’s Too Late, Waste Not, Want Not was a warning rather than a lament. A warning which somehow applied, I thought as I walked across it, to the Praça do Comércio. All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisable dream.
A fatal earthquake, the tidal waves that accompanied it, the fires that followed it, devastated a third of Lisboa and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants during the first week of November 1755. Famine, disease and looting ensued. While the fires were still burning, and people had only the tattered clothes they stood up in, men bought and sold looted diamonds among ashes and rubble. Despite the blue sky above, despite the golden tan of the Sea of Straw, there was talk everywhere of Punishment and Retribution.
And it was the following year that the Marquês de Pombal began to dream of a new city of Reason and Symmetry. After a catastrophe that had shaken the optimism and sense of justice of philosophers the length of Europe, the rebuilt city of Lisboa was going to propose a prosperity, a security guaranteed by the flow of wealth alone! A banker’s dream of streets whose regularity, transparency, parallel lines and reliability would match those of perfectly kept accounts, and whose immense Praça do Comércio would open the city to the trade of the entire world . . .
Yet in the second half of the eighteenth century Lisboa was neither Manchester nor Birmingham, and the Industrial Revolution had started elsewhere. The decline that would lead to Portugal becoming the poorest nation in Western Europe had already set in.
However many people there are in the Praça do Comércio, it always looks half-empty.
She kept little in her purse. Her movements, when handling cash, were neat and precise. She hid small sums that she had ear-marked for certain projects in different envelopes, or in the drawers of her dressing table, so she wouldn’t be tempted to spend them. Once she lost a ten-shilling note, which represented a third of a working woman’s monthly wage. It’s gone! she sobbed. It’s gone! She said this as if the note had chosen to go, as if it were an animal who had run away, ungratefully run away, for she was giving it a good home. Gone!
When she wept, she tried to turn away from me. This may have been to spare me, but it was also because her tears took her back to other times, before I had been thought of. While she was crying, I waited, like you wait for a long train to pass at a level crossing.
After a while she dabbed her eyes and said: We’ll manage. All we have to do is to make a little go a long way.
By now I was in the Rua Augusta, one of the straight streets of which the banker had dreamt. Being Sunday, the opticians and hairdressers, the travel agencies and maritime insurance offices were shut. People were on their way to have lunch with family or friends. Many were carrying little packages of sweetmeats to offer to their hosts; Sunday gifts, elaborately
Similar Books
The Legacy of Gird
Elizabeth Moon
No More Dead Dogs
Gordon Korman
Claiming Her Innocence
Ava Sinclair
Warrior
Zoe Archer
Find My Baby
Mitzi Pool Bridges
Love, Chocolate, and Beer (Cactus Creek)
Violet Duke
ARC: Cracked
Eliza Crewe
Silent Witness
Diane Burke
Bea
Peggy Webb