Josep Pla - Life Embitters

The Lisbon earthquakes stirred deep emotions throughout the world. The scenes of chaos and pain they threw up, the astonishing number of dead and injured they caused, were an obligatory topic of conversation for years to come and were deployed in the intellectual polemics that raged at the time. Voltaire used them to fight Leibnitz’s philosophy of sufficient cause, pre-established harmonies and all that amusing nonsense: that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Candide and Dr Pangloss are in Lisbon during the earthquake: “Streams of flames and ashes covered streets and public places; houses turned to sand, roofs collapsed, foundations were obliterated; thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.” Candide was injured. A thoughtful Pangloss asked himself: what could be the sufficient cause of this phenomenon? A deep, grotesque, erratic disciple of Leibnitz, a complete nonentity, Dr Pangloss witnessed the Lisbon earthquakes and posed the problem of what might be its sufficient cause. He couldn’t find one. However, this lack of explanation didn’t lead to a change of criterion. He continued to affirm that this is the best of all possible worlds — “ car tout est bien. ”

An urban amphitheatre rolls over the hills of the Marquês de Pombal’s Lisbon. This constant up and down of the city’s streets gives it huge character and the liveliest sense of movement. Strolling along its labyrinthine streets, you find yourself at roof level as easily as you feel you are going underground. To look at a terrace roof, you must sometimes look down; at others, you must raise your eyes to the heavens to find a front door. The upshot is that you enter houses through the attic or the cellar. It all makes for a most entertaining urban agglomeration: a fascinating, animated place. Perhaps in the long term, life apparently lived on scales constantly going up and down may become rather irksome. One thing, however, is undeniable in my opinion: this part of Lisbon is unique, a sight that can never leave you cold; it’s what Lisbon has that thousands of other cities will never have.

I think the color of this district is particularly beautiful. The frantic urban bustle brings out its best. Towards dusk, when a pink or even crimson bank of clouds comes between city and sun, and diverts and dissects the sun’s rays, as the fan of cloud opens and closes, the city seems to refresh one’s face and chest …

Lisbon’s light and color is so malleable, has such a quivering, fleeting movement it is hard to pin down adjectivally. Sometimes the light — for an instant — is a youthful, fleshy pink, as if the city were blushing like the skin of an adolescent cheek; a second later the pink vanishes and the light turns an ivory pale. The atmosphere over Lisbon becomes a crucible of glinting carnation tints that airily finger the red roofs, the warm whites of the walls, the fresh or watery green of the shutters, the pumpkin hue of the façades, the crumbling toast of the old walls, where parasitic creepers hang down or a lofty palm tree soars in the sun, shamelessly lethargic, suffused by a reek of perfume. Sometimes the air has a crystalline purity that never hardens — a warm, amicable purity; sometimes watery damp creates atmospheres that seem to give weight and density to the color, imbuing it with an intense life. This fleeting passage of carnal tints across the Atlantic light — the light in the wind — sweeps over the undulating hills relishing their flight, giving each moment a distinct mark, determined to be born, to live for a moment, and then die …

The earthquakes in the eighteenth century didn’t destroy every trace of the past. It is very likely, for example, that seismic movements didn’t demolish all the Gothic. However, the Marquês de Pombal was a man of the Enlightenment and the Enlightened thought that the Gothic represented pure barbarism. The rebuilding of Lisbon was probably lethal for medieval architecture. It hardly needs to be said, on the other hand, that Pombal conserved and restored buildings in the so-called Manuelline style, even though they were probably less valuable than the older style.

When Portuguese navigators reached the Indies in their journeys around the world, they ruined the Republic of Venice’s trade. The Venetians bought in ports in the heart of the Mediterranean everything that was transported there by caravans from the remotest parts in Asia. Using all their ingenuity they organized and sustained highly complicated expeditions, which paid countless tolls to the authorities at different points on the caravan routes. The Republic of Venice’s influence on Asia is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in history and one of the most fertile in its consequences. Marco Polo penetrated deep into China … However, Venetian trade was built on a system — caravans, tolls, and tithes — that made the merchandise very expensive. The Portuguese transported goods by sea and sold at much more reasonable prices. Venice went into decline. The Mediterranean experienced a reduction in shipping that lasted for centuries. The opening of the Suez Canal reinvigorated it.

The Portuguese were the masters of world trade, though briefly. They almost established a monopoly over this marvel. Nevertheless, the Dutch and the English, equally seafaring peoples, soon challenged them and their system. In any case, wealth flowed into Portugal to a degree it had never known before, and this concentration of riches gave birth to the particular tone late florid Gothic and Renaissance styles possesses in this country. This is naturally very visible in Lisbon.

This distinct tone is what is called the Manuelline style — because it coincided with the reign of Dom Manuel — and consists in exuberant, decorative motifs in the styles we have just mentioned. This exuberance generally runs out of control and is excessive for my taste. Characteristic features are the abundant detail, coils, twirls, and filigree imitating the marine world, and not only that world in the strict sense (fish, shellfish, snails, crustaceans, and multiple shapes of marine fauna and flora), but also imitations of the world of navigation at the time: rigging, barrels, navigational instruments, ships’ wheels, not to forget the full pomp of wet sails billowing in the wind. The Manuelline style, a reflection of the Portuguese expertise at sea, is the artistic consecration of Portugal as a seafaring land. Its forms penetrated the interior of the country along its rivers and reached the eastern lands of Spain, where they took root, perhaps not so much because they came from Portugal as from the renown brought to the Peninsula by the discovery of America and the hopes raised by the birth of that life from the sea. This explains why decorative detail so abounds in the Manuelline style in towns of the interior.

The expressions of this style in Lisbon are usually over-flowery and far too heavy, even if they are a clear indication of the wealth that flowed into the country from across the sea. Lisbon has two monuments that are typical of the Manuelline style: the monastery of the Order of St. Jerome and the Torre de Belém.

This desire to embellish a model, perfect form with decorative over-elaboration, showy, intricate exuberance, a generally inert baroque — and I say “inert” because the Manuelline style doesn’t come with the meravigliosi gesto di muoversi described byVasari in his life of Michelangelo — isn’t a feature exclusive to sculpture and architecture. The style imbued many aspects of life and can be found, naturally, in furniture. In Lisbon I have seen beds that display huge mussel shells and mirrors framed within giant oysters … Perhaps it’s all too much.

Then I headed towards Estoril.

Social life in Lisbon at the time wasn’t particularly appealing. One choked on a surfeit of politics. Everybody was conspiring. Six or seven conspiracies were inextricably on the boil, each with its own particular version of redemption. People had no time to do anything. Cafés were forever seething. As the Portuguese are so attached to this kind of establishment and cafés closed late, one formed the impression that conspiracies worked night and day from the first of January to the thirty-first of December. It was completely mad. The far right and far left were conspiring, and so were the right and the left, the center right and center left, not to mention the centercenter. I always imagined the Government must be conspiring too. At every hour of the day strings of men propped up walls in the Baixa district, hands in pockets and smoking cigarettes. There were a good number of glassy, yellow-eyed negritos in white trousers and black jackets with carnations in their lapels. The backs of the heads of those idle, unpleasant fellows who seemed rooted to the spot left what appeared to be a grimy line on the wall, the same line left by flood waters, the one that brings to people’s lips the ritual phrase: “The water reached thus far.”