Lisbon Tales by Helen Constantine & Amanda Hopkinson

Author:Helen Constantine & Amanda Hopkinson [Constantine, Helen & Hopkinson, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192521323
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Walking in Lisbon

José Saramago

Here is the collar. The traveller made a promise and now he keeps it: as soon as he gets to Lisbon, he will go to the Archaeological Museum and look for the collar worn by the slave owned by the Lafetá family. On it can be read the following words: ‘This negro belongs to Agostinho Lafetá do Carvalhal do Óbidos.’ The traveller is repeating it again here in order to impress it on forgetful memories. If a price were put on this object, it would be worth millions upon millions: as much as the monastery of the Jeronomites next door, as much as the tower of Belém, as the presidential palace, as all the cars put together in one huge traffic jam, probably as much as the entire city of Lisbon. This collar is just that, a collar that hung round the neck of a man, soaked by his sweat, and perhaps also some drops of blood from a lash of the whip aimed at the back but which missed its target. The traveller is truly grateful to whoever picked it up and did not destroy the evidence of such a horrendous crime. Since he has never refrained from speaking his mind, however outlandish his views may have seemed, he will now make another judgment: that the collar of Agostinho de Lafetá’s black slave should be placed in a room all of its own, so that there will be nothing to distract visitors from it, and no one could say they had not seen it.

The Archaeological Museum has many thousands of exhibits that the traveller will not mention. Each of them has its own history, from the Palaeolithic age to the nineteenth century, and they all have something to teach us. The traveller can imagine starting with the earliest and going down through history to the most recent. Apart from a few well-known gods and Roman emperors, the rest are unknown, faceless and nameless. Every object has its description, and the traveller discovers to his astonishment that when it comes down to it, the history of mankind is the history of these objects and the words used to name them, the links between words and objects, their use and subsequent neglect, how, why, where, and by whom they were made. Envisaged like this, history does not become cluttered with names, it is the history of material acts, of the thoughts that shaped them and the way they shaped thoughts. For example, it would be good to take one’s time to find out about this bronze goat or that anthropomorphic plate, this frieze or that chariot dug up in Óbidos, so near to Carvalhal, in order to show that it is both possible and necessary to relate one thing to another in order to understand each.

The traveller regains the street and feels lost. Where should he go now? What is he to visit? What shall he leave aside, either on purpose or because of the impossibility of seeing

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