LOOKING IN ON LISBON
By ROSE MACAULAY
IT is probably presumptuous for someone who has only spent two recent months in Portugal, and only part of that time in Lisbon, to attempt even the most superficial comments on Lisbon life. All, naturally, that I can do is to set down a few notes from the point of view of a passer-by who was allowed to loiter for a brief space in this enchanting city. There has been plenty written about Lisbon lately ; Europeans have grown Lisbon-minded ; a western oasis in the frightening desert (like Switzerland, but acces- sible to many to whom Switzerland is a moated fortress, impregnable, enemy-barred, without approach), Portugal shines like a mirage to those still fettered in the wilderness ; to these it must wear the improbable air of the golden gates. When and if at last the gates open for them, it still seems improbable, a dream : they do not quite know that they are there ; bewilderment, exhaustion and relief must disqualify them as detached observers of the scene around them. For the rest of us, the visitors, the travellers in transit, the residents at work, the scene is admirable drama, in which tragic and comic strands are nicely interwoven, and people, great and small, from all (nearly all) the nations, arc unceasingly shuttled in and out.
This applies, of course, mainly to Lisbon, the port of transit. Lisbon is rather like a parish, in that everyone knows who is in it at the moment, what they are doing and why, and probably when they will leave it. If they happen to be English, their comings and goings are recorded in that admirable weekly journal the Anglo- Portuguese News, and often if they happen to be Portuguese. Should they happen, as they extremely often do, to be German, Italian or Japanese, they may, for all I know, be mentioned in one of the journals sympathetic with their aims which are also sold in Lisbon. Anyhow, one way and another, and quite apart from the Press, it is difficult not to know, at any given moment, who is in Lisbon ; even the spies, like other professional men and Women, are known about, though not, through etiquette, mentioned in print. This publicity, this sounding-board quality of Lisbon, makes the Lisbonese deride the idea that the Nazis shot down a British Airways passenger plane because they hoped it might contain Mr. Churchill. The arrivals and takings-off of the British Airways' planes are invested with complete publicity. Unless those who shot down that plane were acting on their own initiative, and out of mere wantonness, they had instructions to get Leslie Howard, a most effective anti- Axis film propagandist who had just had a great success in Portugal and Spain.
This agreeable compactness of Lisbon society must have made the outbreak of war a very awkward social solecism. Diplomats, Embassy staffs and other residents who had been dining, lunching and cocktailing with one another, meeting and talking at clubs, cafés and gatherings (though, it seems likely, with decreasing enthusiasm and ease as the European chasm yawned ever wider) now found themselves rudely severed, with echoing straits between them thrown. At first, I was told, reserved and chilly bows were the mode when late friends turned enemies encountered one another in the street ; then, as war asserted itself, one would hurry round a corner or into a shop to escape meeting ; later, when the affair had, so to speak, frozen solid, most people did not even trouble to do this ; enemies looked past one another with nonchalant impassivity ; • though I have been out with people who still turned aside when a German C.D. car swept up to the kerb and began to disembark German C.D. I suppose it was a little awkward to meet the enemy when the enemy was with neutral and mutual friends. Did one take off one's hat to an enemy lady in these circumstances? I imagine that one did. But no doubt diplomatic training and - Portuguese tact were equal to such social emergencies.
The giving of parties in war-time is naturally badly hampered by ' all the people who must not meet. I do not know if any mischievous or careless hosts ever ignored the war and threw unmeetables together ; I imagine not ; the Portuguese do not do things like that. But there are lesser complications. One was told of a distinguished Portuguese who was preparing his rooms for a reception he was giving, and who usually, having rather a taste for the European dictators (or for some of them ; he had no portrait of M. Stalin), kept their photographs on his table. A courteous and careful man, he said to the friend with him, " The English are coming ; we must put away Adolf and Benito. And some of the French, so we won't have the old Marechal. But Francisco can stay : I have no Spanish tonight."
Though it may seem absurd that civilised beings in a neutral land cannot continue personal acquaintanceship while their countries are at one another's throats, there is, in practice, some sense in it, apart from the suspicion that they might be dropping unguarded words. I discovered myself that such acquaintanceship had its difficulties. On the day after the call at Lisbon of a number of repatriated British and Italian wounded prisoners, I talked at Estoril to a Portuguese countess, Italian by birth, passionately Italian in affections. She spoke of the Italian prisoners: they had been brutally ill-treated by us, she said. " In England? " I asked. " Surely impossible." She shrugged her shoulders. " By the Australian soldiers, when they were captured. Those great brutal Australians, they hurt them, they knocked them about in the most frightful manner. It was terrible." Terrible, I echoed, for I expect it was, and anyhow I did not wish to make an international incident of it over tea. I feel sure that, in a rough-house between an Australian and an Italian, my sympathies would be with the Italian. " And," she went on, bitterly, " the English wounded prisoners were so well treated in Italy, sent to the mountains for their health, given every- thing." I said I was sure they had been ; and added that I was sure also that the Italians had been well treated in England ; we liked them so much, I said. I think I made no impression, and that she was convinced that her fellow-countrymen had been ill- treated both by Australians in the field and by English in England. In the bitter gaze of that patriotic Italian eye I saw myself engrossed into an Australian soldier, huge, brutal, a kicker and puncher of small wounded Italians. It was then that I began to see reason in the convention by which enemies do not converse . . .
But some patriots overdo this aloofness. Among the cosmopolitan and ever-shifting crowd at my small hotel there were at one time a few Japanese. (I think that before they came the Chinese from France, several families with the most attractive ivory children and trousered nurses, had departed.) An Englishman who arrived just before I left Lisbon found that his table at lunch was near that of a Japanese. He told me that he had gone straight to the bureau and informed it that either he or " that yellow monkey " must be shifted, for he was not going to eat within view of him. I said, " There may be other Japanes' here." He said no, there were not ; he had demanded the list of visitors and the nationalities of all of them ; there was only the one yellow monkey, and he wasn't going to see him while he ate.
Such heated patriotism must make life difficult, not only for the patriots but for their Portuguese hosts. Indeed, these have in many ways a delicate task, steering through all the hostile sensibilities: all their finesse, sympathy and goOd manners are required ; fortunately they have plenty. So too have some of our countrymen in Portugal, who have acquired through habit that cosmopolitan outlook on foreigners, even enemy foreigners, which is too instinctive to be called tact, too casually tolerant to be called sympathy, which is part of the easy heritage of those who rub up every day against other races, other traditions, other tongues, other ways and are used to friendly acceptance of both sides. This habit of sophisticated acceptance, which tacitly persists even among estranged enemy nationals, is part of the unconscious good manners which, together with their friendly hospitality to strangers, makes both the English and the Portuguese in Portugal charming to be among.
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