If only we were transparent

In the late​ 1990s, according to the historian Stewart Lloyd-Jones, Lisbon ‘transformed out of all recognition’. For a long time it ‘resembled little more than a vast construction site’. In 1998, the year Lídia Jorge completed The Wind Whistling in the Cranes, the city hosted Expo ’98, which brought in eleven million visitors (Portugal’s population at the time was ten million). The novel, published in Portuguese in 2002 and now translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott, captures that period of change, the ‘feeling of danger when the wind’s whistling in the cranes’. The action takes place in Valmares, a fictional village on the Algarve coast, and begins in August 1994, when 30-year-old Milene Leandro hears a knock at the door. ‘Two policemen asked if I knew where Grandma Regina was. And then, just like that, they looked away and told me the news.’ Her grandmother’s body has been discovered, covered in ants, outside an old factory. She was the matriarch of the family – wealthy, white and well known in Valmares – and the news of her grisly death is soon splashed across the local newspapers.

August has a special status in Portugal. It’s a time when everyone who can goes away. And everyone in Milene’s family has gone away, including her aunts, uncles and cousins. (Her parents died years earlier.) It falls to her to arrange the funeral, and to reconstruct her grandmother’s final movements. Her first stop is the former fish cannery where Regina Leandro’s body was found. The building has been owned by the Leandro family for generations, and is now rented out to the Matas, a Cape Verdean family. Milene wants to know what her grandmother was doing there, but the Matas, too, are away. When they return, they find her in their garden, sitting among the bedsheets stiffening on the washing line. This strange sequence of events suggests that ‘everything was getting muddled up’, as Milene puts it; she anticipates a ‘confrontation with the disorder of the World’.

Milene is herself a disordering presence. Unlike the rest of her family, she has no concern for bourgeois formality. She wears short shorts and white trainers, likes Cyndi Lauper and American movies, laughs at inappropriate moments and struggles to find the right words to express herself. Aged thirteen she was diagnosed as ‘oligophrenic’ – mentally disabled – but prefers to think of herself as living ‘in a state of shock’. Her aunts treat her like a ‘grown-up child’; with her uncles she senses some unspoken threat. The villagers regard her with mockery and disgust. But Milene is alert to things most of her family miss.

Jorge is one of the leading writers of the generation that emerged after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, which overthrew the Estado Novo. Born in the Algarve in 1946, she has published a dozen novels as well as short stories, children’s books, poetry, essays and plays. ‘I am not a philosopher,’ Jorge once told an interviewer. ‘I don’t put things in abstract terms. I see this land in all its concreteness and particularity.’ Portugal, as she understands it, is ‘a country of the sea, but also deeply rural, with a complex about how, in the past, we dominated the sea, and how, in the present, everyone dominates us’.

Jorge has often examined this imperial past in her work, particularly in the novel The Murmuring Coast. Portuguese critics read The Wind Whistling in the Cranes as a critique of lusotropicalism, the nostalgic belief in Portugal’s imperial benevolence that emerged in the early 20th century and grew under the Salazar dictatorship into a state-sponsored myth. The Portuguese were said to be uniquely at home in the tropics, their colonies places of multiracial harmony. Portugal’s empire was fated to endure. In the 1950s and 1960s, as anticolonial movements gathered strength, Salazar’s regime continued to insist that Portuguese imperialism was different from other forms of European colonial rule.

Jorge is alert to the hypocrisies of lusotropicalist rhetoric. When Milene gets together with Antonino, one of the Mata sons, her family is appalled by the interracial pairing. The Matas, meanwhile, believe no good can come of fraternising with whites. ‘If only we were invisible,’ Antonino thinks, ‘if only we were transparent, if only we could walk down the street like shadows without anyone seeing us.’ At first, the couple are forced to meet in secret. But by the time they marry, late in the book, the Leandros have rebranded themselves members of the new progressive Portugal, and claim to be in favour of the relationship. ‘They are going to marry her off to that guy just for the multiracial wedding photos,’ Milene’s cousin warns. There’s something sinister afoot, however. The family don’t have to worry about the couple producing a ‘nest of half-breeds’ because they have arranged to have Milene ‘spayed’ during a routine check-up, without her knowledge or consent. The ‘bisecting line’, as they call it, will not be crossed. Beneath the surface of multiracial modern Portugal, white supremacist and eugenicist ideas continue to thrive.

Milene and Antonino’s relationship subverts the vision of racial mixing promoted in the ur-text of lusotropicalism, Gilberto Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala (literally ‘the master’s house and the slave quarters’), published in 1933. Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist, argued that Black women’s wombs had to be conscripted to the cause of a mixed-race lusotropicalist future, producing the mestiço children who would be its protagonists. But as Black critics such as Beatriz Nascimento have long argued, this project entailed the erasure of Blackness and Black agency. By switching the gender roles, Jorge exposes the contradiction: a Black man can’t be allowed to form a union with a white woman.

When The Wind Whistling in the Cranes was first published, many critics considered it a radical statement. Twenty years on, Jorge’s critique seems more limited. Her depiction of the traditional family is unsparing, yet the characterisation of the Matas at times comes close to stereotyping: the Mata sons sell drugs and cheat on their girlfriends; their mother, Felícia, is obsessed with the prospect of her son becoming a famous singer; their grandmother, Ana Mata, mutters to herself about the perils of Western consumerism as she dreams of Cape Verde. Still, by showing the way lusotropicalist thinking targets dissidents and outcasts, Jorge sketches paths of solidarity that reject the ‘bisecting line’.

The novel also unpicks lusotropicalist ideas by establishing an opposition between Villa Regina and the Old Factory – a reconfiguration of the casa grande and the senzala. Villa Regina, in which Milene now lives alone, is detached from the surrounding world: ‘The light from the open windows spilled out over the dark surroundings … and the deserted houses all around were absent and opaque. It was as if Villa Regina were not quite connected to the earth.’ In the Old Factory, by contrast, the extended Mata family live ‘enclosed in a circle’. But the Leandros can’t maintain their pretence of separation. After all, the money from the factory paid for the villa, a dynamic that endures in the relationship between landlords and tenants. They refer to the cannery as ‘the Diamond’ and see the Matas’ role as being ‘to polish the Diamond, to hide it, guard it, keep it warm until it hatched and multiplied by a thousand’. They make good on this plan later in the book by evicting the Matas (despite Milene’s marriage to Antonino) and selling off the building.

The couple’s transgressions are spatial as well as racial. Antonino’s secret visits to Villa Regina and Milene’s to the factory breach the bisecting line. Immigration to Portugal from its former colonies, particularly Cape Verde, increased after the end of formal empire in the 1970s. Migrant workers were housed in neighbourhoods on the peripheries of cities. In The Wind Whistling in the Cranes, Jorge transposes this urban ghetto to the landscape of Valmares: the connection between the villa and the factory is shown to be at the heart of Portugal’s political economy. The dead matriarch and the old canning factory tell a broader story about the country’s transition from recalcitrant imperial power to neoliberal EU member state.

But although Jorge describes herself as a writer ‘bound up with the social’, her project isn’t straightforwardly realist: ‘the poetics have to be stronger than what we might call their context.’ One of the advantages of the novel, as she sees it, is the temporal disruption it offers. Over more than five hundred pages, Milene ruminates and eventually comes to decisions and half-decisions, by way of detour and impasse. ‘She didn’t know what to tell her aunts and uncles. As often happened, she had all the right elements lined up in her mind [but] even though she knew what she wanted to say, she couldn’t.’ Much is left unresolved, including the manner of Regina’s death. ‘It’s slow, too slow,’ Jorge has admitted of the novel. ‘Some readers find it a bore.’ Yet this slowness has a frictive quality. Milene’s deliberations stand in contrast to the speed with which the other characters act. Everyone is always in a rush.

The novel is unsentimental in its depiction of Portuguese society, but it does have its moments of nostalgia. After their return to Valmares, Milene urges her uncles and aunts not to remove the furniture from her grandmother’s house in case she returns. There are references to happier times, particularly the summer of 1985 – ‘the best summer of our lives’, before the Matas moved in, when Milene and her cousins were allowed to run around the factory. Antonino wonders for a while whether he and Milene ought to ‘emigrate to a country where they didn’t need to be transparent’. But they do eventually bring the relationship out into the open – progress of a sort.