So I am one of the few who can say that near Estoril I have witnessed the victory of innocence.
From Estoril to Cascais the road follows the river estuary. When you reach this town, situated above the sand bar of the Tagus, the Atlantic comes into view in its all raw splendor. The road makes a right-angled turn and heads northwards. The landscape changes completely. The ocean stays on the left, and a desolate, deserted coast, eroded by the presence of the sea, rises above the narrowest strip of sand. The coast isn’t high but is precipitous, rugged, jagged, and inhospitable. A reddish swath of earth and rocks, stained by the scorched green of gorse, runs parallel to the depression. From this elongated balcony you get a view of the white-flecked Atlantic: its subdued colors and mute wildness, impressive in its solitude, furrowed by depressions and swells that churn slowly and monstrously. The horizon fractures into a gray, leaden haze. A black steamer looms like a phantom out of the swirling mists. Though your balcony isn’t high up, it does create the sensation of an abyss. This sensation charges the air with all manner of dreams and imaginings. The lines by Maragall come inevitably to mind:
Sweet Lusitania — by the side of the great sea —
sees how the waves come and how the stars flee:
dreams of worlds arising and worlds already gone
Its dreams ever expanding as it faces the infinite.
On this cliff, the four lines have an astonishing geographical, cosmic, emotional precision. They sum up Portugal.
As I was saying, the road to Cascais runs northwards; at specific moment it turns right and climbs inland. This is the Sintra road properly speaking. This famous town is located in a recess in the chain of mountains that separates the Portuguese hinterland from the Atlantic rim. Lush vegetation springs up immediately on either side of the road. Colhares is halfway up the mountain — a “romantic village,” says George Borrow in his book. I mean The Bible in Spain that is so fondly remembered by all who have read it. After Colhares comes Sintra.
Borrow speaks enthusiastically about Sintra — and emphatically. “If there be any place in the world,” he writes in the first chapter of his book, “entitled to the appellation of an enchanted region, it is surely Sintra: Tivoli is a beautiful and picturesque place but it quickly fades from the mind of those who have seen the Portuguese Paradise.”
This is merely Mr Borrow’s personal opinion, and it is understandable given tendencies in matters of taste at the time. It is a comparison that has no objective basis in reality.
By Sintra he means the whole area: the city, the palace — the Pena castle — the buildings, woods, and Moorish ruins … “Nothing is more sullen and uninviting than the south-western aspect of the stony wall, which, on the side of Lisbon, seems to shield Sintra from the eye of the world, but on the other side is a mingled scene of fairy beauty, artificial elegance, savage grandeur, domes, turrets, enormous trees, flowers, and waterfalls, such as is met with nowhere else beneath the sun.”
Borrow’s description is rather superficial and stagey, but the final list has a serious tone, and is a broad brushstroke that really fits Sintra.
Set on a lofty peak, surrounded by a wild garden with wonderful foliage, the castle of Pena is hugely theatrical. However, it’s not at all significant architecturally. It is simply an accumulation, I’d almost say a heap of different building styles from mudéjar to modernista, and done quite gracelessly. That’s to say, Pena has suffered the worst that can happen to a piece of architecture: a process of one restoration being superimposed on another. This stylistic chaos is, nonetheless, saved by the veneer of the place and its historical importance, because it holds within it the history of the Portuguese monarchy in miniature. It isn’t a building like El Escorial or Versailles, constructed all of a sudden, in the course of a reign and according to the taste of one prince, but is a building elaborated over time that reflects different tendencies.
From the parade square, through the empty almond of a semi-arch, you survey a stunning landscape. In the foreground the tops and foliage of ancient trees drift across a large expanse of terrain. Seen from above, this thick woodland, in autumn the color of burnt gold, with vinegar, sulfur, and cinnamon-hued tints, spreads out like a sumptuous carpet. Beyond that, over sloping land, are cultivated fields, green in spring, flaxen in summer, ocher and reddish now. And beyond that, the gray, immense Atlantic.
In Sintra you lose touch with your intellect: everything is pure, thrilling sensual bliss. It is a shadowy, recondite mirage, an ecstatic atmosphere of vegetation perpetually dissolving into trickles of green, moist softness, incandescent moss, liquid yolks, iridescent molds, glittering cobwebs, slimy dead leaves, green insects and gleaming black beetles. Sintra is an alkaloid, not a naïve picturesque romanticism, of the most morbid literary kind. Against the sickly backdrop of decomposing greens, the castle is a relic of Walter Scott as in a yellowing print.
When the Republic was established in Portugal, Sintra went into decline. It was a royal residence, and the new institutions preferred to locate themselves in sunnier, more open terrain. The regime kept a guard in Sintra. When I reached the front of the castle, the studded door was opened by a poorly dressed, ten- or twelve-year-old girl, the daughter — she later told me — of the man keeping guard in Pena. This girl showed me the castle and its gardens. A remarkable guide. I recorded her name in my diary: Lucília Trindade Martins. The visit proceeded like this: she went in front and I followed. As we walked, she’d sometimes turn her head and look at me with her large, still dark eyes, her small snub nose, a tiny black freckle under her pale cheek, a dimple on her cheek … and a minute later she’d start walking again. As she turned round, she smiled. In my lifetime I’ve come across an infinite number of guides. The dark-haired, pallid, petite Lucília of Sintra is the only one whose memory remains distinct.
Silently following her footsteps I wandered at length through the halls of the great castle. Most of the rooms are full of memories of the last kings who were murdered. They seem untouched and shot through with the grim melancholy prompted by what is trite and dismal. The big surprise of my visit is the bad taste of the most recent kings. It is even shocking. Magnificent tables, next to a fine painting, are strewn with countless items of no value at all, cheap baubles. On a bedside table, next to a three peseta alarm clock is a cameo or a most beautiful miniature. Next to a genuine Saxony vase, a beer mug from Munich, the last word in Teutonic trash. And when I ask Lucília to show me the books and library, she shrugs her shoulders in bewilderment. There is not a single book in the castle. Only the odd photograph album or sports magazine — some of the very first — on tables and a yellowing copy of the Parisian L’Éclair.
After roaming through the castle rooms, we paid the gardens a visit. Black swans with bright orange beaks swam over tremulous water, full of the ponds’ green plants and dead leaves. We walked under brown trees, along undulating paths, between rustling leaves, smelling the scent from the dense, shadowy woods, the vista under the spell of moist, golden air. Lucília always walked in front; she occasionally turned round and smiled a pleasant, vaguely sad smile.
We said goodbye by the tall gate, wrought iron in the shape of slender spears — wrought iron from Versailles — that enclosed the garden. The royal crown sits atop the gate. When she received her tip, Lucília bowed and flashed her eyes. Then, as the taxi prepared to drive off, I saw her struggling to shut the great wrought iron gate. She walked off, then suddenly turned around and I saw her dark eyes, her little nose, and delightfully messy hair for the last time. She waved her hand and disappeared. Lucília, Lucília, what path did your life follow? Are you still of this world? Or did you die away, and do you wander now through a castle of dreams in the other world as you wandered through Sintra castle?