Portugal, luckily we have left
They never let me pass the crossing. My little BH, and my little world too, skidded at full throttle –never underestimate a BH– before the narrow road became entangled with another two-way road, just where the sign announced the distance to Portugal: 7 km . I did not care. He knew very well that the foreigner was even closer; that, if I pedaled with my SUV through all those shortcuts bursting rockroses, holm oaks and chiviteros, reached the cliff in a flash . And there Portugal was waiting for me, don't say separated, close to Spain thanks to a conciliatory and wild Duero/Douro.
Although the epic feat would have been to swim across the river, an unthinkable and impossible plan, the easy thing was to get in the car, cross the border towards Trás-Os-Montes and live endlessly the emotion of setting the clock back an hour in just five minutes of travel. Be careful, in that hour that you beat the cosmos it gave you time to do a lot of things: stuff yourself with pastéis de nata when pastéis de nata still lacked free circulation, say obrigado to everything you wanted to make you pass (fatal) for portuguese , try the pernas de rã at the house of those villagers, always ask for vellum posta with a lot of cogumelos and buy very white sheets with infinite cotton threads.
But that was a long, long time ago.
XXI century . The first time we went to Porto we felt such a longing for reality that we didn't even dream of it. After an endless night, the next thing was a shower that tasted like a spa in the decadent, and that's not an understatement, Pensão dos Aliados It looked like a Ritz from the outside and yes, it was our Ritz. After devouring a francesinha and drinking a galão –that colossal coffee with milk that only in Portugal they know how to put in a grandmother's glass–, sleepy and fast, we want to think that at band to part , we went to the Serralves Foundation to take selfies –oh no, there weren't any– jumping from warhol to warhol. It was the year 2000, go if it ran, and there are the newspaper archives to confirm it.
At that time had to live in Coimbra , where the first thing I learned was that fright means surprise, exquisite it's weird when you jump it's because you're joking, if you add sauce you're getting fed up with parsley and with the vassoure so I swept so so. Also a saying that, normally, makes them infinitely funny, “ From Spain nem bom vento nem bom casamento ”, which makes it very clear how little they trust us if the winds blow from the East or an Iberian wedding is coming up.
Of those days I will always remember the brave baths in Figueira da Foz at the beginning of spring, bowls of green broth , throwing at everything piri-piri, the fado serenades Next to the Be Old , road trips through the Serra da Estrela , the gargantuan breakfasts with torridas when the toasts did not get fat because we were young, the Journey to the beginning of the world of Oliveira , to duplicate ourselves with Saramago , wanting to write as Antunes Wolf , the early mornings dancing this, the stumbles back clinging to a puppy-quente.
And it was time to live in Coimbra...
So going to Portugal was not cool. Or worse, we thought we were very cool, we were so smart, and pretended that Portugal didn't have posters to show off on the wall. He was missing a Truffaut, a Fellini, a Berlanga too . A Bardot, a Vitti or come on, a Montiel. A Gainsbourg, a Mina or okay, Marisol. Perhaps it was because while France was surfing in the cocky disdain of the nouvelle vague, Italy was weathering the issue between maggiorate and neorealism and Spain was doing what it could, Portugal was struggling to save itself from Europe's longest dictatorship of the 20th century. , which was no easy task. Yes, always with Amalia Rodrigues in the pick up , that Amália was a huge artist and nobody had her. But not even with her rainha do the Portuguese boast of more, Atlantic them and contrite fanfare. Oh the healthy . Nor do they lack a certain British phlegm that – one supposes – will come from June 13, 1373, the day on which an alliance still in force and the oldest in the world was signed, the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty . All in all, our neighbors have managed today to change the poster for the tile, even the flamenco for the rooster, and, while the rest of the world falls in love, we, with a certain envy and relative dissimulation, sigh incessantly: “Luckily we have Portugal left”.
Goodness.
In the following years the visits followed one another for any reason, with any excuse. That was how we bathe in kilometric beaches, endless , which began in Comporta when nothing started in Comporta , just to bite the mosquitoes as you left Alcacer do Sal . And I told about it around here and people said why go there if there's nothing there. It was also like once again we got lost in the Alentejo steppe looking for the same thing, nothingness, a shadow if anything. and we sail on Alqueve , and we step on carpets in Arraiolos , and haggle between sails of Estremoz , and we border the Vicentine Coast like the young foreigner in the song Familia , drenched in poetry, until the waves of Carrapateira They doused us with salt. And already in Algarve we arrived at Tavira but we immediately turned around, lest Spain appear with her watch ahead of time to say that it was hours.
Detail of Marina Espírito Santo Saldanha's house
and in between Lisbon of course . Lisbon a thousand times and always at the wrong time so as not to run into anyone else but Lisbon, a difficult matter now that the entire world has taken a fancy to it. Fado nights through the alleys of Mouraira, almoços overflowing with sardinhas in taverns that later turned out to be hipster, trips to Cacilhas in pursuit of seafood marathons, mornings of Barks Fair and nights of stealing minutes from the sun sitting next to person to tell him that he wrote the most beautiful travel phrase in literature: As travelers are travelers. What we see is not what we see, senão or what we are.
I do not forget the cool wind of winch nor the thousand waves and seven skirts of Nazaré , the Obidos chocolate , the fairytale houses of Piodão , Colares wines, the stadium of Grove of Moura in Braga , fried cuttlefish on the terraces of Setubal , the imposing villas of Peso da Régua . And let no one remember that there are Azores , let's not all go, not even the Madeira's Jungle Islands , whose waters are the cleanest and most transparent that Cousteau ever saw.
Anyway, in these uncertain days, so bad , in which the Portuguese have once again extended their hand to us, to hold us tight, a huge thank you and a smile escapes you when you think about that of Carlos III: “ As long as Portugal is not incorporated into the dominions of Spain due to the rights of succession, it is convenient for politics to try to unite it through the bonds of friendship and kinship.”.
Done.
Portugal, do you want to marry us?
Portugal, do you want to marry us?