(Portugal)...It was to no real surprise when England went out of the World Cup on penalty kicks. We simply cannot take them; I imagine the psychological weight of all those previous penalty-kick hiccups is forward in the English strikers' minds when they step up to shoot. When the game against Portugal went to its dreaded and unsatisfying conclusion, we England supporters knew our time was up, despite Portugal doing its best to miss two of its own spot kicks. Four days later, and Portugal are out, too, which is the first time in World Cup history in which the team that defeated England did not go all the way to the winners' podium. Italy is the team we are supporting now. It is just coincidence that I started reading José Saramago's Journey to Portugal (Viagem a Portugal) this week. It is excellent. I have been to Portugal twice, and as I read I am eagerly awaiting Saramago (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/) to go to some of the places that I have been to in that beautiful country.
I travelled there first in 1990, the year Viagem a Portugal was published in Portugal, so I am assuming that the Nobel Laureate went on his own trek around the country in 1988 or 1989. I was following in his footsteps, which I feel quite warm about. Here is a passage from the book's English translation published in 2000: "In front of [Saramago] lies Mire de Tibães, an old Benedictine monastery, and an imposing edifice dwarfing the surrounding countryside, visible from many miles away. Only monks are capable of such excesses. The monastery is an utterly dejected ruin. When the traveller went into the first cloister, he assumed that restoration might be in progress. Disappointment swiftly set in: building there was, but only that connected with the families living in the monastery's dependencies and, going from bad to worse, it always seemed to rain everywhere but in their improvised homes. As far as he can tell, he does the rounds of the cold and labyrinthine corridors, where blackened portraits still hang on the walls, coated with wood-dust, the whole also covered with the smell of mould, an irrecoverable death. The traveller entered the church in low spirits: it's a giant ship, its vault a block of segmented stone. The scale is abundantly ample and rich, as ever."
I found Mire de Tibães in the same manner Saramago did, after visiting the impressive, huge church of Bom Jesus in Braga, where the night before camped hill on a hill I had a perfect view of Braga, the local football team lose 3-4 to fellow Portuguese side Setúbal. Bom Jesus' most impressive attribute was its grand outdoor staircase in which the many individual staircases that make up the whole criss-cross each other in a mathematical conundrum that repeatedly tricks the eye.
Back to Mire de Tibães, I also found it in much the state Saramago did, but I also found it wonderful. There was no entrance fee, and the floorboards everywhere creaked under one's feet. A heavy wooden door, scuffed and punctured with heavy metal studs, led to an inner courtyard with tatty art left open to the elements. I could hear voices everywhere, but I could not see anyone, a mystery that I thoroughly enjoyed.
At the end of the first side of the cloister I walked along was a stairway that led down to a small chapel in which I sat hearing those same voices, but still not seeing anyone. A door on the other side of the stairway that contained the inner door that led to the chapel had a large keyhole that espied the monastery's gardens. I looked through and there was my first sighting of a person all morning, a monk hoeing an allotment. Altogether a majestic place, and it was with some alarm that I read shortly afterwards that the Portuguese government was considering turning the building into a pousada, upscale accommodations in historic properties similar to the Spanish chain of posadas.
I have no photographs of the monastery, so instead I post a shot of equally decrepit masonry taken in the central Portuguese town of Montemor-o-Novo on the road to the majestic town of Evora. The architect in charge of putting the drainage pipes in obviously cared not one hoot about staying true to the doorway's original architecture. Looking on the Internet, I see that the gardens surrounding the monastery won a prestigious award, the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens (http://www.fbsr.it/eng/pagine.php?s=&pg=104), in 1998, so improvements must have taken place, although not as many as would have resulted in an unfortunate hotel; indeed, photos taken this year show an admirable sprucing-up without the loss of the site's obvious character.
The award-giving jury mentioned in its address that the monastery contained a "vast estate with woods, orchards, vegetable and flower gardens, lakes and canals, buildings and stone sculptures, created by Benedictine monks on the slopes of the São Gens mountain towards the town of Mire de Tibães and the River Cávado, near the city of Braga in the region of Minho in the far north of Portugal."
As I left the monastery, I turned up a steep road, which soon ended. I got out of my car (at the time, a 1978 Austin Princess) and pushed open a dusty door that felt as though it had not been opened for centuries. On the other side was a site as equally as mysterious as my monastery, an almost indistinct path leading past fruit trees to a damaged series of steps by a whitewashed house and on which sat three children, who all stared at me before coming over to say hello. A mother appeared, but I could not speak a word of Portuguese, so the conversation was comprised of smiles and many instances of saying "sorry."