Ceramics,
Tuna-Fisheries and Copper Mines
by Miguel
P. Corrales, from Salamandra #8/9, 1997, pp.
75-7.
translated
by E Bragg. Special thanks to Javier Galvez for help with
the translation.
In the abandoned
temples of industrial madness, it is beautiful to witness the triumph
of Nature over the calculated forces of the stupid and exploitative
intelligence. If the beauty of the old castles and medieval palaces
not recuperated by the bourgeois makes us think about the fall of the
powerful and of the ruins of industrial archaeology (being worthy of
this ludicrous designation), it invites us much better to see the disparity
of a world that has always depreciated the essential for the superfluous,
the greedy, the deification of work, the useful and the comfortable
as the supreme values - what ideals, what nightmares!
At the same time,
these archaeological ruins possess the same "poetic transfer"
of which Cirlot spoke, by "the old, corroded, partially destroyed,
peeled and cracked walls." It is not without a shudder how this
poet, in the same way his great-grandfather, Gustavo Adolfo, is oriented
- or disoriented - towards these deserts of catastrophe that are much
more preferable than their actual antipodes or the pharaoic commercial
centers of the new consumerist planet of garbage.
a rope creates the most enigmatic
figure...
In Portugal, a country
which for the past two decades I have passionately investigated its
secular and millennial nature (i.e. preindustrial and pre-eucalyptical),
and its moving traditions - a country illuminated by I-don't-know-what,
yet already in irreversible extinction and ruined in a certain way also
- I have examined three spaces which have brought me that disorientation,
that shuddering without which no true impression exists and without
which the invisible doors of the unknown could not be opened.
The first of those
spaces is in reality found scattered among the areas near the central
shores of the country. They are the numerous ceramics factories, with
their imposing smokestacks and naves, all of them glaring of blood-red
bricks. The most spectacular of them could be the one in Pamphilosa,
next to the train station where the northern border connects with the
Beira Alta. It has not been violated for that long, being recently invaded
by a tribe of gypsies, and by contrast of shape, those immense shadows
among hellish furnaces, indecipherable tools, broken windows and stagnant
waters, as well as the shouts of the untamed - such natural children
of that admirable village. It seems as if the arrival of the gypsies
had augmented the strangeness of the sensation; it is an old woman completely
dressed in black that hangs clothes in a room illuminated by a candle,
or the voices that soon appear from a habitation to the side, or the
barking that arises from no-one-knows where. Here are some of those
spaces which we have been accustomed to calling Kafkian, and that doubtlessly,
to the great writer of anarchy and laughter (because this is the way
I view Kafka), they would have appeared suitable for a Wellsian scene
from The Process.
"In us persist
the obscure corners, the mysterious landscapes, the blind windows, the
dirty patios, the noisy taverns and the hermetic passions. We walk through
the wide streets of the new city, but our steps and gazes are indecisive.
In our interior we still tremble as in the old streets of poverty. Our
heart knows nothing of the works of sanitation. The old, unhealthy city
of the Jews we see as no more real than the new, hygienic city that
surrounds us."
I find these lines
memorable by which Kafka made manifest "the other" that was,
to the propagating bourgeois world and their values of functionality
and hyper-cleanliness (i.e. the rejection of Life in all of its exuberant,
fascinating richness and terror), unsuitable for their cowardice and
guilt, unsuitable for the anaesthetized, pasteurized and desiccated
bourgeois.
From the Pamphilosa
we leave - by train and then boat from Lisboa in order to cross the
"Sea of Paja" - to Tavira in El Algarve, in southern Portugal,
to the gorgeous mouth of the Gilao river in the region that is called
the "four waters." Behind a few pyramids of salt and an almost
camouflaged fort against pirates, through roads among flooded grounds
and birds in freedom, the low and strikingly lengthy walls of a phantom
town await us: Arraial Ferreira Neto (the Superior Blacksmith Encampment),
founded in the 1840s by the Algarve Fish Company in order to house the
tuna fishermen with their families. Through a worm-eaten doorway, we
reach the interior which is divided into two areas: personal dwellings
and shops. The entirety displays the air of a small village from the
south, with two plazas, five streets and sixty-four Liliputian houses
for the more or less four-hundred people who had come to inhabit them.
All of it is situated beneath the most sightly sky of Portugal, and
next to the ocean and a river. The entrance building, a round, fortified
tower where the Company's offices are situated, exhibits above the old,
golden wall some pleasant and colorfully glazed ceramic tiles, of four
fish in the sea - a unique indulgence, together with the small naïf
tiles of the school, found in the middle of such disaster. Three of
the streets also have their names volutedly inscribed on these tiles
(this quite popular Portuguese art): in this manner, the street of Patron
Joao Lopes (1800-1890), a "meritorious Algarvian seafarer"
and the originator of the Company in 1835, with his name among two anchors
and a harpoon. Everyone remembers the savage art of catching tuna -
almost mythical, as that of the whale hunt in Madeira and above all,
in the Azores Islands.
The overturned safe,
found in the middle of the Company's main hall within the fortified
tower, among a multitude of forever useless papers, makes the most symbolic
statement to us. In the tavern from where I carry away a curious checkbook
of sales to ships from the 50s (whose bills should have been signed
"master of the ship") the marble counter and the wooden crossbeams
sigh for the abolition of contradictions, or from the burning waters
- although not exclusively - that would come from the hours of suffering
and poverty. Through here, after the dismantling of the Company, some
years passed and there wandered beneath the deChrican arches some refugees
of the colonial wars, who finished destroying what remained, although
for an unknown purpose. These silent, lonely and ghostly places now
only serve the wanderings of the mind.
An unknown dialogue...
What attracts us
more than the stripped houses of the fishermen are the innumerable shops,
all replete with memories of tuna fishing. In one, nets and poles are
accumulated; another surprises us with an unknown dialogue between two
watchtowers; the next one chaotically stacks tens of enormous barrels;
in one to the side, a rope creates the most enigmatic figure; in another,
worthless boats and oars; another still, with a hundred baskets; far
away, where a stupid cot presides, a door on the floor receives us as
if below it would lead somewhere; and here, finally, three broken chairs
of dark wood represent a horrific judgement (as all judgements are,
ultimately), with two of them interrogating a definitively subdued third
one.
*
With all of this,
nothing can be compared to the apotheosis of the desolation that awaits
us in the Sao Domingos Mine, a few kilometers from Guadiana and the
border of Huelva, where the Baixo Alentejo ends to give way to Algarve.
To speak here of "rare beauty," as a magnetic needle would
point, is almost euphemistic. Ghostly beauty, atrocious, pitiless and
underneath a violent light on eroded soils that would all be a challenge
to the most hallucinatory of colorist painters - to a multiplied Tamayo,
for example; and what extraordinary textures, as of rough lunar soils,
those of fragments of divided and anguished grounds. The Sao Domingos
Mine is the most terrible space of all Portugal.
represent a horrific
judgment...
Exploited since
the time of the Romans, in 1858 the Portuguese became modern, through
an English concessionary of the Spanish company La Sabina, and until
its definitive close in 1966. More than a hundred years of the exploitation
of land and men explain the breadth of all that is found here. The town,
unchanged since 1966, is the most impeccable example of traditional
alentejano architecture bearing the stamp of honest labor, practically
without any of the adulterations which the last decades have foisted
upon the entirety of the country; a true paradise of plasticity and
fairness, in the Moorish reign of tile and cement with the characteristic
hermeticism of the popular, architectural creations of Portugal. It
was only until a few years ago that the magisterial water-man went from
door to door with his cart (painted with the typically vibrant colors
of the south), a couple of mules, and a blue, wooden drum. Beautiful
carts are remarkable here and there, in fact, as are the horses, ducks,
burros, little pigs and ultimately the entire rural world, that complemented
the life of the miner. Upon the departure for Serpa, a doll-like house
beckons us, next to a statuette of a woman with a pitcher, with the
taste for edification in the old-fashioned and extremely Portuguese
style: "good day, good voyage." Perhaps it is the only thing
that remains of the "happy and pleasant aspect" of which a
chronicler spoke in the 50s, when the Mine had more than three-thousand
inhabitants (these days there were some seven hundred that chose not
to leave). Yet the remnants of the theater, hospital, library or post
office no longer remain (or are unrecognizable), even though they are
survived by the market (of 1951), the football field (the "Cross
Brown Playing Field," 1952) and the movie house, with its green
screen for the "program," although in front. The tennis court,
beside the remnants of the music kiosk, and surrounded by iron benches
equally victimized by the invisible bombardment of time, is reduced
to a skeleton, requiring us to make it out with difficulty, so that
we remember the reflection of Bernardo Soares: "The beauty of the
ruins? It still serves nothing." All of it, in a very broad space
which was maintained in the shade by an abundance of trees, and which
in its corners the "palace" of the English is displayed, was
once visited by the ridiculous queen of England; of course to its side
we have the soldiers' barracks of the Republican National Guard, always
quick to defend the capitalists and beat down the miners. In 1929, at
the request of the miners, the Mine was visited by the celebrated novelist
Ferreira de Castro, who wrote in the periodical O Seculo a
rapidly censured report that would only become published after the dissolution
of the dictatorship as well as the mine itself. The "Central Barber's
shop" of Francisco Pires Guerreiro, with its atmosphere of the
1940s or 50s, conjointly exhibits erotic photographs and communist declarations.
Another Guerreiro, an old miner, displays his amazing paintings of the
Mine in its golden years among the walls of the various bars. Because
of the memories that reside in the Mine, the humiliation and slavery
coexist with the nostalgia of a time in which life was present, where
everyone was young and there were celebrations, dances and castigas
- and I do not know of popular poetry more intensely keen and lyrical
(and obsessively romantic) than that of the Portuguese village.
In this manner,
as if uprooted from a chapter of Pedro Paramo, and upon daybreak, en
route to Guadiana, I remember a dialogue with an old miner who did not
hide his pride for the splendid Mine of yesteryear, despite the signs
of the silicosis or respiratory disease which constantly interrupted
his words. For her part, the sweet and cordial senora Maria Joana Goncalves,
in her small, green food store (also very 50's-ish) at the town entrance,
has retained from the past the weights, the coffee grinder, the codfish
knife, the board of thread spools, which speaks of the suffered life
as much as the solidarity and joy of people.
with ominously open
eyes...
All of this constitutes
the "friendly" side of the Mine. There is nothing tragic if
we limit ourselves to renting a room in the only guesthouse, as do the
sport-fishermen who come to the nearby dam, and to strolling through
the old village (but less so if it is August), in which everything is
fleetingly animated by the return of those who mainly work in the industrial
area that faces Lisboa. Here is definitely a different atmosphere from
any other town of Alentejo. We take a few more steps and find ourselves
in front of the four or five cypresses of a small, abandoned cemetery;
with some difficulty, the history of young Englishmen can be read on
the tombstones, whether killed at sea, by tuberculosis or on course
to the Mine. And if we penetrate through to a neighboring road, we find
a physically brutal and wrenching drop which is impossible to ignore;
there is a gigantic void where "strong waters" lie immobile
in its abysmal depths. The walls of this stagnant lagoon possess the
shape of a ziggurat, with each step more than three meters in length,
creating a succession of intense colors. By circling the opening with
caution inspired by the stories of more than one person who had already
fallen in, it actually looks like a rickety armchair, and far away,
like the skeleton of a sheep.
Starting from here
begins the excavated valley made for the extraction of mineral products:
ruins everywhere, and nature recovering its rights and re-emerging on
all sides. Pulley wheels, wagons, rusted chains, corroded remains of
girders, iron bridges and well towers...A little further ahead, we see
the station of the train line that transferred the copper pyrites to
the port of Pomarao on the Guadiana river, eighteen kilometers below.
Only the walls remain, with some sufficiently disturbing graffiti, and
the roof - more like giant yellow spools of cables and another artifact
with an unknown purpose, which looks like a small iron pan or a ship
anchored to the bottom. The valley narrows over the next two kilometers,
along which we advance among canals of dark waters, along the path of
the train, whose rails were removed decades ago. The smell of the nearby
eucalyptus, that was planted in order to retain the soil, is quenched
by the ferocious intensity that emanates from these low places and that
catches the wind. In the surrounding hills are the ruins of small villages,
the only ones that remained standing - such sad sentinels, those leprous
walls. Above the enormous, decapitated smokestack of the smelting furnaces
there suddenly appears the nest of a stork which cannot counteract the
bad augury of a flock of crows that start to cackle and swoop during
the rare times that anyone dares to venture close to these places. The
valley finally widens to give way to the most oneiric and overwhelming
space of the entire route; it might be said that we are within a volcanic
landscape of unlimited color. Here, the towers of ceramic tile factories
seem to be at the point of crumbling away, and perhaps only a shout
is needed to make this happen. Face to face, with ominously open eyes,
they maintain a monstrous dialogue - or perhaps they defy each other,
so ridiculously high above?
Mounds of debris
remain here and there on the eroded ground. In this rarified scene,
on a midday of July, 1994, I stood perplexed before the apparition of
a red ball of string, tied to a stone resting on top of a wall; nothing
less predictable, nothing more enigmatic...
nothing less predictable...
The route to Pomerao,
although practical when following the path of the derailed tracks, is
hardly recommended, with no less than twenty-nine viaducts and seven
tunnels - some flooded and full of brambles - and in the efforts to
avoid these, we would probably soon find ourselves lost. The arrival
in Pomerao is dazzling, with the village situated within an amphitheater
next to the Guadiana and the ruins of the dock where the minerals arrived
to be loaded onto six ships. Like the Mine, Pomerao now lives only in
memories. And almost the same could be said of the surrounding towns:
Salqueriros, Bens, Santana de Cambas, Sapos...or the admirable Montes
Juntos, two kilometers through the battered land of the Mine, between
the train line and the Chanca river, the natural border with Spain.
A ribeira quando
anch
vai de pedrinha em pedrinha
O homem que leva a barca
leva meu bem na barquinha
I went there, in
Montes Juntos, where I heard, during an unforgettable nightfall beneath
the moon of July, this beautiful alentejano song uttered by a sad and
rousing voice that suddenly invaded the silent night. The voice of poetry,
eternal alchemy, the only treasure we have, scratched the torrid night
during the demise of the Mine of the Red Ball - abandoned thirty, a
hundred, or thousands of years ago.
