The Pleasures of Portugal

Portugal – bless its heart – is the only country we know in Europe where wine is free with every meal at every restaurant, or at least included immovably in the table d'hote price. We've not confined our wine bibbing to meals only, of course: there's little else that will tone up the system as well or do more for the soul than an amber-hued white port, sipped of a sunny morning from the wicker depths of a chair on a cafe ter (continued on page 42)Portugal(continued from page 33) race. It heightens your joy in the wiggling walk of a sturdy varina fishwife, gaily costumed as she passes with a head-carried basket of glistening, fresh-caught octopus, or the green-water reflections of a fleet of slant-masted, high-prowed fragata fishing boats, bright-painted arabesques shimmering in the oily surge of a little harbor.

As you might have gathered, we like Portugal. In fact, we never go to Europe without starting or ending our trip there. And if we were to go back tomorrow (and tomorrow is the best possible time) we'd start the same way we always do – with a cable to Senhor Jorge Ribeiro in Lisbon for a reservation at his Aviz Hotel. It has only 26 double rooms and everybody, but everybody, wants to stay there, maybe because each room is furnished with genuine antiques, including the tapestried walls, all scrupulously matched in period. The bathrooms, by contrast, are modern – to make up for which, perhaps, the walls are inset with mosaic designs.

The Aviz, as we discovered on our first trip, used to be the home of the world's richest man, an Armenian-born oil magnate by the name of Gulbenkian. He didn't own it; he stayed there by choice, which will give you some idea of why the place has earned a reputation as one of the most luxurious hotels in all the world. Quite properly, therefore, the Aviz serves what is probably the best food in Lisbon (ask for iscas of thin-sliced liver very specially seasoned) and its bartenders pour the driest Martinis that side of the Atlantic. As if that's not enough, the Aviz maintains 100 servants to minister to the comfort and whims of a maximum of only 52 guests.

Our second stop in Lisbon is always the Port Wine Institute on Rua Sao Pedro de Alcantara. It's fortunate that we have to give the driver that address only on the way there, rather than after several happy hours teaching our palates the subtle intricacies of more than 300 varieties of Portugal's most popular product. It's an education that never ends, and one that should begin with a trip to Oporto and the terraced hillside vineyards of the Douro Valley.

It's almost a journey into another century, especially during the October vintage. There's music everywhere. To the gay tootings of a rural piper, long lines of men move out of the trellised vineyards at a dancing jog trot, lugging 140-pound baskets of grapes. To a faster tune picked up by a guitar, other men dance knee-deep in great stone tanks, treading the cold, red grape mash in breathless four-hour shifts, refreshed as they jerk and jump by quick pulls of a viciously raw brandy. The girls cheer, the music gets keener, the brandy passes faster and the dancing becomes more spirited until . . . but we digress.

Wine, of course, is lost without song and in Portugal, that means the fado. Lisbon's Adega do Machado is as good a cellar spot as any to start listening, but you're likely to find something even more typical (or something from a recent Broadway hit – it's a 50-50 chance) if you try any of the spots in Bairro Alto or in the Alfama, the hillside warren of narrow streets, heavy with the ancient passage of the Moors. There's a more lyrical, classical fado sung at Coimbra, the old university city whose students are still distinguished by long black cloaks slashed (often into tatters) every time they take on a new girl friend. But the street-song fado, soft with African under-tone – that belongs in Lisbon.

First, the guitarists come into the candle-lit room that is heady with the fragrance of wine. Two are strumming small round guitars, sweet and high pitched. A third man joins in, fingering the rhythm in a deeper tone. Now the singer gets up. She's in black, with a shawl over her head, face drawn and trancelike. Her eyes close in a mask of inner pain – and the melody flows out . . . gently, quietly at first, undulating like the great Atlantic swells that course ceaselessly up to Portugal's long coast.

Her voice sobs and murmurs, cries out at times, then picks delicately at the words. And she tells of black despair at man's unchanging fate, of the tragedy of a prostitute with a beautiful love, a prisoner's terrible lament, the awful longing for something that can never be defined . . .

You see why we will go to any pains to hear the real thing. (And why we reserve straight night clubs like Tagide, Pigalle and Maxime for another night.) The real fado has an overpowering beauty that somehow explains Portugal, the Portuguese and their proud history in a single flash of intimate insight.

The thing you remember about the Portuguese is that they don't give a damn whether you like them or not. Their land will spread its rich beauty at every turn, its people approve warmly of you for your good taste in going there. But as long as there's another chair somewhere in the room, they'll not get up to make you welcome. "We like you," they seem to say, "and that's that. Now come in and talk. And bring that wine off the table as you go by."

It would be a huckster trick anywhere else for waiters at one of the better restaurants to wear baggy blue overalls whitened by many washings. It's the most natural thing in the world at the Monte Mar in Guincho where they wear 'em because they're easier. And wearing white tie and tails, they might argue, isn't going to add to your enjoyment of their giant santola crabs, waiting for the broiler in a seawater pool of slimy green rock.

Don't mistake the casual manner of the Portuguese for cold indifference; it is a graciousness, a perfect courtliness that you will see everywhere. As hosts, they want you to feel free, unrushed to savor the place: the walled cities of hilly Estremadura and the gothic wine cellars of Oporto, the almond groves of moorish Algarve province and the smart gambling resorts of the Costa do Sol, the little fishing villages like Nazaré and the cosmopolitan capital, Lisbon, with its pastel hillside villas and street elevators that reach up to them.

If the Portuguese are casual, it is probably because they wish to mask a quiet, burning pride in their land and the way of life they've built through the centuries, a rather solemn but painfully unobtrusive effort to see that you enjoy it all as deeply as they do, whether your tastes run to bull fighting in the amateur ring at Lisbon's Feira Popular or lounging on Estoril's high-society sands.

Estoril during the last war counted more honest-to-god and would-be spies to the square inch than any other neutral point on three continents. It was quite a place. Ask any of the barkeeps there about those days – when murder was committed ("accidentally," of course) for a scrap of paper and less, when even we were questioned by police because our typewriter late at night in a hotel room sounded like a secret transmitter key in fast operation. Today, however, it's just a grand resort with miles of awning-dotted white sands, a lot of good looking girls and unemployed kings living on very little money. This you can do as well as the kings since a good room at the Estoril Palace will set you back only $3 a day.

We always try to stay a while and to fan out from there, to Guincho for a huge $1 lobster on buttered rice at the Monte Mar, to Cascais, its bay dotted with bobbing, bright net floats, and the Fim do Mundo restaurant near net-draped fishing wharves where owner Antonio serves as fine a codfish bacalhau as you'll ever meet and an even better bottle of white local Porca de Murca. To the orange groves and native markets of Setubal and sweet local pastries at little bakeshops on narrow side streets, to the castle of Pamela, massive with the weight of eight full centuries, and the lovely beach of Portinho de Arrabida, and further off, to Cape St. Vincent.

You follow a winding road there, along which the fragrance of pine gives gradual way to the tang of heather. Then even that fades in the strong sea wind and you're standing on a high rocky point by a ruined hermitage with an inadequate compass traced in cobbles on the grass. The sea sucks and howls in tunnels and blow-holes it has cut under the cliff and in its agonies you hear again the cries of seamen tacking tiny caravels past this point to push the boundaries of the medieval world out to America and across Asia.

Of an evening at Estoril, of course, there's the Casino – with its night clubs and bars, dining and dancing. And like everybody else, when we've eaten as much as we possibly can and marveled at the slight bill, we go off to finish paying for our meal in a more civilized way at the gaming tables. These rooms are nominally a private club so you'll present your passport and pay a membership fee for the privilege of tossing away your money at roulette, baccarat or craps. Oh, it's honest, mind you – there's no fix; (concluded on page 62)Portugal(continued from page 42) the house gets its legitimate percentage, no more.

The delicacy of this operation always reminds us of the difference between Spanish and Portuguese bull fighting. For the relatively bloodless Portuguese version, rather than Spain's violence and death, is the true survival from the original fights of the Sixteenth Century, when the nobles showed off the skill and grace of their steeds against the stupid brutality of the bull. The chief figures in the opening parade are not the men but the highly trained horses. And the highlight of the battle is not the kill, as in Spain, but rather the opening stages when the horseman challenges the bull, spurs him into a charge, turns at the last moment and plants a small dart in the animal's great neck. Only when all the skirmishes are over does the toureiro work on foot, making the classical Spanish passes. Even then, the bull, whose horns are shortened and leather capped, is never killed. Instead, a team of men throws itself at the beast, drags him down and then, his rage apparently spent, they let him get up and be driven out of the ring with a herd of other bulls.

The spectacle may lack modern excitement; it may be a little archaic. But it's in good taste; it has charm and grace and meaning all its own. As a matter of fact, that goes for Portugal as a whole.

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For one-way fares, New York-Lisbon, allow between $200 and $330 by sea, $300 to $400 by air, depending on class and season. For more details, write Casade Portugal, 630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20; Trans World Airlines, 380 Madison Avenue, New York 17; Italian Line, 24 State Street, New York 4.