Beside the Seaside

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In Which I Briefly Wonder If This Is Kazakhstan

September 30, 2007 by Mike

Viana do Castelo

I sat this afternoon in intermittent sunshine, in the Public Gardens of Viana do Castelo, down on the riverfront. (Viana is BesideTheSeaside but the centre of town is just upriver from the sea itself.) My horizon, when I looked up from my book, and this was often, consisted of the cranes of the dockyard, and a children's play area, swings and roundabouts and chutes and more, all being played on by adults. The men all have moustaches that would shame Borat: there were no children to be seen.

To my left, a bridge across the River Lima built by Gustav Eiffel himself. It probably looks like the Eiffel Tower fallen onto its side -- a skeleton of iron girders -- but the bridge is closed for repairs, the iron girders are themselves encased in steel scaffolding, a metal skeleton wrapped around a metal skeleton.

Behind me, atop the low hill that dominates the town, sits the church. This is Portugal: I've already worked out that everything here comes back to the church (or the Church) in the end. But this being northern Portugal at the dog-end of September, the church on the hill is shrouded in cloud one minute, fog the next, then rain. Even when the sky clears for a moment, there remains the hint of a mist on the hill, so that the features of the church are never completely clear, never wholly real. It looks instead like the painted backdrop of a theatre. Not quite real, never revealing itself, not quite honest. Nevertheless, that church -- the Church -- is always there, somewhere in the background, even when you can't quite make it out. Here endeth the (somewhat clunky) analogy.

Besides, Viana has a new religion: shopping. There used to be a large railway station in the middle of town. In fact, it must have been more than that -- sidings, workshops, warehouses, the works -- because it covered a large area right under the nose of the church on the hill. No more: this area is now a vast indoor shopping mall (called 'Viana Station') and this is where everybody is. All day. The streets of the old town are deserted.

No doubt the architects and engineers enjoyed reworking this huge space. They had even more fun constructing the underground car park that stretches 100s of metres from the station to the river. It's a whole world down there, micro-managed from a state-of-the-art operational HQ by guards with more buttons, switches, TV monitors, computers, lights and gizmos than ever NASA used to send man to the moon. The car park has 2,800 spaces. It's full of the cars of the shoppers in the mall.

But why (thinking back to paragraph one, dear reader) was I looking up from my book so often? Because I'm reading the turgid Journey To Portugal by Jose Saramago, that's why. He may have won the Nobel Prize for his works of fiction, but when he came to write a travel book about his own country he came up with the likes of this:

"It may cause a degree of surprise to see how a style which to achieve internal harmony encountered repeated obstacles in maintaining an equilibrium between form and goal was capable, in its external design, to delight in games of curve and counter-curve, integrating them with every demand and potential of the materials used."

A Nobel Prize winner, remember! And while I'd love to give him the benefit of the doubt on this occasion, he has also adopted a particular device for his narrative, by referring to himself at all times as 'the traveller.' See how annoying this can be:

While the traveller starts the traveller's journey in the north of the country, as I have, our itineraries are not similar. In every town and village that the traveller stops, the traveller does two things: the traveller visits the church, to admire whatever statues or paintings the traveller can find, and the traveller eats seafood. I admire the traveller's ability to swallow the latter; indeed, the traveller doesn't always swallow the message in the churches either.. if he doesn't like something, he says so.. but he keeps going back for more. More churches, more chapels, more saints, another church. I've managed 100+ pages so far but it's heavy going.

Anybody want to buy a secondhand, half-used book by a Nobel Prize winner?

Beside the Seaside

In Which I Briefly Wonder If This Is Kazakhstan

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