Palavras lidas #243

Later, with Douglas back in England, Cunrad prodded him in written notes to recall his experience in France and Portugal.

And Lisbon [she asked him]---you were there for many months. Did you find the Portuguese in general---or which classes in particular---as friendly to the British as tradition states them to be? Do you think it is a hotbed of international political intrigue, with a great many Nazi agents? And on which side do you think is public opinion mostly?

To which Douglas responded:

I noticed no Nazi agents in Lisbon, thought there may have been thousands of them. The few Germans I met were refugees. And the few Portuguese avoided politics like the plague. And the few newspapers were censored, and therefore no guide to the country's political feelings. (p. 129)

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Lisbon was reached at dusk, and Peabody was introduced to the city's display of light. "The sight of a million lights," she wrote, "blazing in the sky went to my head: it was champagne: it made me dizzy. Lisbon was like a beacon emerging out of the European blak-out. It looked like a dream-city." "The whole place," she added, "resembled a Christmas tree. I wanted to blow the trumpets and throw confetti and sing and dance. Light after darkness. It was thrilling!". When she came to her hotel, the Palácio in Estoril, she had the feeling she was aboard an opulent ocean liner: "In the bar, after the third Martini, I could almost feel the gentle roll of this incredible refugee ship." (p. 131)

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer and aviator, luckily found a hotel room in Estoril after he reached Lisbon. But the nearby casino and the exile throngs within only intensified a feeling of unreality that was rooted in his qualms about leaving France in her darkest hour. The figures at roulette or baccarat---men in stiff shirtfronts, women with glittering pearls---stimulated what he called "a kind of anguish---the same feeling that you experience at a zoo when looking at the survivors of an extinct species." Just as Lisbon and its ongoing centenary celebration seemed to him to be playing at happiness, the exiles played at clinging to their past identities: "They still pretended to be someone. They clung obstinately to some semblance of meaning. They said, 'That is who I am. ... I come from such and such town. ... I am the friend of so and so. ... Do you know him?'" (p. 158)