Vanishing in Sintra (Iberian Daydream, part 2)
A bourgeois disappearance.
For most of November, I will be on my honeymoon in Spain and Portugal. You would think that means I take a break from the obligations of writing and cultivating an audience, but no. I cannot, for whatever reason, tear myself away from this toxic need for a forum. The upshot of that is you get to watch me attempt a travel journal as I journey from Porto down to Lisbon, into Spain by way of Seville, up the eastern coast and into Barcelona. Castles. Cobblestone streets. Public toilets you have to pay to use. The first in this series can be read here. Also, if you haven’t subscribed or upgraded to a paid subscription, this is your cue.
VI.
If you didn’t know that Portugal had been a preeminent world power before arriving here, the country’s buildings and monuments leave no doubt. Most statues are of men on horses, and are positioned on pedestals so impossibly high that they can only be regarded as saints or conquerors (sometimes they’re both). An absurd number of buildings in the cities qualify as some kind of world heritage site. They include grand palaces and promenades and lavish cathedrals. This is a place that once, before the dictators and economic crises, before the financial collapse, before any of us had ever heard of the European Central Bank or the PIIGS countries, possessed an astounding amount of wealth. The kind that could only be pillaged.
The armillary sphere, the golden navigational tool symbolizing world dominance, is on the country’s flag. It’s at the top of many buildings, particularly those associated with the former royalty. Like most historical empires, Portugal had its monarchs, though only until 1910. Unlike, say, Spain, or the United Kingdom, Portugal ultimately preferred to abolish its royal family entirely rather than reduce it to an ostensibly ceremonial role.
This didn’t mean that Portugal had rid itself of a ruling class, of course. Only that a new one had taken its place. The traditional narrative, the one taught in AP Modern European History, was that the old ideas of inherent nobility that kept all the inbred dynasties in power had given way to the Enlightenment notion of universal right and earned greatness. The merchants and artisans who a few hundred years before wouldn’t have been good enough to wipe shit from the kings’ boots were now your new boss.
This may be a controversial thing to write, but I happen to think that there’s another reason that the royals and aristocracies lost power, or at least why the less careful ones wound up in assassins’ crosshairs. Everyone knew who they were. They were easy to spot, and, therefore, to pick off. Say you’re a disgruntled peasant or merchant (as most were by then). Say you have rudimentary knowledge of using gunpowder or bladed weapons. All you really had to do was wait for the next gilded coach to roll by. Even if you had no idea who was coming through, you’d figure it out from the size of the entourage. You would have to make your way through the personal guards, and you were almost certain to die, but it’s not like you’re making it past thirty anyway.
That’s not the case today. Our current ruling class is for the most part unrecognizable. This is one of the strengths of the bourgeoisie, during its rise, its height, and its later iterations. Sure, we all recognize Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos; we fixate on them a lot. Do you know who Amancio Ortega is? Could you pick Sergei Brin out of a lineup? Be honest. I rest my case.
The fact is that if Musk and Bezos were to disappear tomorrow, someone else just like them would step into their place. It would be their wealth we create in soulless warehouses and data mines. Their shitty decisions turning our zeitgeist into a tasteless, watery gruel. Their names we curse and their faces we dream of spitting in. It’s a clever sleight of hand. We turn a few individuals into avatars for our suffering when it is in fact the result of a highly intricate and highly structured system in which they are mere players.
The problem with the Portuguese monarchy was that after centuries of building palaces and obscene wealth around the globe, everyone knew who they were. What’s worse, they had gotten lazy in their impunity. By the time Carlos I’s sedentary ass was capped in 1908, people were offing Russian tsars and Italian kings left and right. Their kind had outlived their usefulness, and history’s needs must.
VII.
Still, the grandeur of Portugal’s royal past makes for easy tourist dollars. It is essentially the lifeblood of the economy in places like Sintra. Forty minutes outside of Lisbon, this is a town whose entire existence revolves around the bygone years of Portuguese monarchy. About five hundred years ago, kings and queens started spending their summers in Sintra’s cooler temperatures. Thanks to the mountainous Portuguese terrain, the Lisbon area is prone to microclimates, and Sintra is often a full ten or fifteen degrees below what prevails in Lisbon.
These royals also, predictably, started building massive homes for themselves here. A National Palace was in what is now Sintra proper in the 1400s. It was inhabited more or less continuously until the 19th century. More impressive is the Pena National Palace, whose construction was initiated by King Ferdinand II in 1838 to supplant the original Sintra palace.
He needed something to do. Four years prior, the powers of the Portuguese monarchy had been greatly diminished in the Portuguese Liberal Wars, which was the closest thing he country ever had to a bourgeois revolution. The liberal constitutionalists backed Ferdinand’s wife, Maria II, the traditionalists her uncle, Miguel. Miguel had tried to declare himself sole ruler in 1828 and take Maria, his niece, as his fiancée, and nullify the new constitution. Maria would have none of it, and neither would the liberals.
In 1834, Miguel relinquished his claim to the throne, and Maria II was once again and unthreatened queen. The constitution remained. Armies continued to roam the mountains, periodically carrying out attacks in Miguel’s name for a decade hence. Whether anyone had informed them of their figurehead’s surrender isn’t known.
Maria married Ferdinand in 1836. Unlike Miguel, he never aspired to be the one calling the shots. He couldn’t even claim the title of King until he and Maria produced an heir, Pedro V, in 1837. If was going to be more ornamental, then he was going to make for some very shiny ornaments. Pena was finished in 1854. Standing at the top of the mountain overlooking Sintra, the estate spanned 200 hectares, including a large number of small parks and fountains scattered throughout. The palace itself was a magnificent, colorful building with six turrets and seven floors, encompassing sensibilities that touched on gothic, Renaissance, romantic, and Islamic influences. Several other structures, from greenhouses to chapels, were also constructed on the estate.
It was a stunning palace, dwarfing most others in the country in terms of size and spectacle. Clearly, this was a perfect home for any royal family, but not long after Pena was completed, that family was greatly diminished. Maria died in 1853, one year before Pena was completed. Rule passed to Pedro, though Ferdinand would continue as regent until 1855 when Pedro turned 18.
Pedro would only rule for six years. In 1861, he and several other royals died of cholera. Rule passed to his brother Luis, by which time Ferdinand had mostly outlived his usefulness. He was still a member of the royal family, though, and continued living periodically at Pena. In 1869, he remarried, taking Swiss-American opera singer Elise Hensler, as his new bride.
This union ruffled some feathers at court. It was bad enough he was remarrying, and bad enough she was commoner. But an American? And an entertainer to boot? A shifty, low-life opera singer? These were people worthy of tossing a few coins to, in appreciation for amusement, but never to bring into the nobility’s inner sanctum.
If Ferdinand was violating one of the unspoken cardinal rules of Portugal’s old ruling class, then some part of him also understood that those rules were quickly becoming outdated. How could he not? He was only in his position thanks to the support of a gaggle of merchants and industrialists who wanted his wife to have less power. As for Elise, she was clearly ambitious and talented. While these weren’t necessarily traits that made for a good hereditary monarch, they were undoubtedly valued in the emerging capitalist order.
Ferdinand’s pragmatism apparently extended both ways. As a compromise, he agreed that Elise would not live in Pena National Palace. He constructed a chalet on the estate grounds, where she would dwell when the family was at the palace. Whether they were allowed to fuck in the palace, or only in the chalet, has been lost to history.
Ultimately, the next fifty or so years only brought a more radical decline to the Portuguese monarchy. Luis reigned until his death in 1889. His successor was the same Carlos I who was gunned down in 1908. After Carlos’ death, his mother, Maria Pia of Savoy, locked herself up in Pena National Palace until the liberals found the last of their spine and overthrew the monarchy entirely in 1910. Ferdinand died in 1885. Elise died in 1929, the commoner outliving the monarchy by 19 years.
VIII.
Mrs. Elliipsis and I traveled to Sintra from Lisbon in a small tour van. The other people in our little group were an older American couple, two college-aged women from Italy, and a British couple who very clearly couldn’t stand each other. We walked through the town of Sintra first, grabbing some pastries gawping for a while at the first National Palace built in the town. There is a vague, Old World charm to the place, and you can see why some people fell in love with it. Byron did, and is on record calling Sintra “the most blessed spot on the whole inhabitable globe.” There’s a cafe named after him.
Pena, several hundred feet up the mountain, was completely obscured by fog. After we drove there, it became clear just how massive and intricate this estate was. You could just make out the top of the palace itself, but it was also obscured by huge trees and hills, even the top of other structures that peeked through the canopies. We were told that, given the size of the estate — the sheer number of gardens and paths and other buildings — and the size of the palace — a rather large number of rooms and items to take in, we had little chance of taking in both before we had to be back at the van.
Most people opted to see the palace. That didn’t interest me or my wife. We wanted to go see this chalet where Elise had lived. How grand would this place be, and how pointedly less-grand than the palace? Would there be any evidence that Elise felt slighted being exiled to the chalet? Or did she make the best of it, dismissing the concerns of both court and her feeble husband? What kinds of parties did she have? Lovers? Orgies? How easy was it to simply live the life of insane wealth and privilege? Did she know that, even as Portugal’s nobility thought her lesser, she would in the end have the last laugh?
The map etched out a massive, sprawling estate with winding paths that twisted in every direction before turning back into each other. Given how literally mountainous the grounds could be, it was often difficult to tell which way one was headed without signs. Luckily, there were plenty of these.
And so we familiarized ourselves with them the map as much as we could and set off in the direction the sign pointed us toward the chalet. The walk was long, lush and woodsy. It was also vigorous, filled with steep inclines that left us out of breath.
All the more reason to follow the signs. When one of the arrows pointed us back the way we came, we naturally thought we had missed a turn and doubled back. We didn’t find a missed path. Only the previous sign pointing us right back where we had just come from.
We stood in place, dumbfounded and confused. Again, there has been no missed path, no trail with a sign we should have followed. Just two arrows, pointing at each other, about a hundred yards apart. And in between? Nothing but trees, grass, and plant life.
We were determined to find this chalet, however. So we doubled back yet again, looking for alternate routes, thinking perhaps one of the signs was mistaken, throwing off the carefully plotted path of the rest. We mixed turns we hadn’t taken with those we had, second-guessed whether we had been at a specific fork before, and tried to peer through the trees for anything that looked like a chalet. At one point, we went through a row of stone columns, past a pair of greenhouses and by a stable of horses. The chalet must be close we thought. But no. We were taken in a circle back to the columns.
Around this time, two explanations occurred to us. The first was that we had fallen through a wormhole of some sort. A fold in space-time. An impossible overlap of two universes: one in which the chalet exists, one in which it doesn’t. The slip between the two happens at the exact spot the chalet should be. Meaning the signs pointed to something that is there but isn’t.
The other explanation was that the chalet had never existed in any universe. Ferdinand had Elise killed rather than deal with the unfolding embarrassment of having married an opera singer. He told everyone she had retreated to a chalet to live out her days hoping nobody woul care enough to look. The Portuguese trust that took over Pena National Palace had put a chalet on the map, with nobody having ever been there, hoping in Ferdinand’s footsteps that nobody would bother to look. And nobody did. Until now.
On balance, the first explanation seemed more plausible. Everyone knows by now that alternate universes exist. And making up a chalet seemed a rather elaborate ruse, even for a regent.
What’s more, we were starting to get a distinct Narnia vibe from these paths. Not only were we enclosed in a verdant canopy that invited you to get lost in the fertile tangles, but we would frequently encounter lampposts like these along the path. Elise mostly achieves a status in the history books just barely above footnote, though she probably understood how elastic her time had become. She stretched it to her advantage. When you stretch time, those who believe themselves its masters don’t approve. They’re likely to cast you out, disappear you. But someone like Elise clearly saw how feeble their chess moves had become, how inconsequential the game was when you could live on your own terms. It’s as good as hiding in time itself, and damn anyone who tries to find you.
Not that we didn’t find anything of interest. The horses at the stable were gentle and friendly, and well taken care of. Periodically we would encounter a clearing with a small man-made pond, a fountain in the center, exotic plants from around the world standing stolidly nearby, beckoning us into a thick world of rich moss and leaves reaching ever upward. It was an enticing invitation, but not one we were searching for.
And so we wandered. Searching for… the chalet? A way back to the tour van? We weren’t sure. Perhaps this is what the Miguellist militias felt as they roamed the mountains in the decade after their figurehead conceded. Or maybe this was the fate of innumerable peasants exiled from their lands in the tumults of rising capitalism, wandering aimlessly in the cracks of civilization, bound for the doldrums of repetitive wage labor or the invisibility of vagrancy. The detritus of history can only float until someone or something pulls it out of the torpor.
IX.
It was quite late until we found our way back, but we eventually came across others, including others in our group. We were sweaty and in desperate need of wine and food. We joked that if you told us we were gone for ten years we would believe you, but it wasn’t as much of a joke for us. We told the tour guides that the chalet doesn’t exist. They showed us pictures. Clearly they were from this dimension, but that’s not the one from which we had returned.
We piled back into the van, exhausted, disoriented, convinced that we had seen something just beyond convention’s understanding of space. Everyone else had opted for Pena Palace. The older American couple smiled, satisfied with the trinkets and furniture they’d seen inside. The Italian students were polite and mildly interested. The dissastisfied Brits just looked disgruntled. Mrs. Daydream and I, however, had escaped the oblivion of what Marx described as capital’s ability to annihilate space with time.
The next stop was another forty minutes away, in Cascais. As our guide told us, Cascais is the contemporary jewel of the Portuguese Riviera. Lots of rich people live here, including some of the country’s most powerful CEOs. It even, for a time, became a place into which other displaced royals could vanish. In 1946, King Umberto II of Italy, a man described by one historian as having a less “compromising” fascist past than his father Victor Emmanuel III, abdicated after the country voted for a republic. He had reigned for a month. The new constitution forbade all male former heirs from returning to Italy. Portugal took him in, and he lived, very comfortably but also obscure, in Cascais, until he died in 1983.
Fulgencio Batista, exiled Cuban dictator deposed by the 1959 revolution, also lived I the town for a while. The Casino Escorial in Cascais was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. It is one of the wealthiest cities in Portugal, with one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.
Cascais is pretty, idyllic even. It is right next to the ocean, and a large handful of quaint sailboats are anchored in the harbor. All the buildings are pink or cream. The commercial district is all that kind of rustic artisanal that is only possible when profit margins don’t matter, when you can run your shop as a hobby. This was the only place where we felt we had to double check the prices, to make sure we didn’t overspend our vacation budget. It is for these people that taxes are cut, that wages stay stagnant. For the most part, they are as unremarkable as they are unrecognizable. Another nameless toff in a pastel sweater. They like it that way.
Mrs. Daydream and I stopped for lunch at a sidewalk restaurant. It was delicious. We gazed at the ocean. It was gorgeous. We walked the town streets, listened to a guitarist troubadour with a portable sound system that probably costs more than our rent. It was fine.
Even with so many older buildings and cobblestone streets, there was something generic about Cascais. It could have been Calabasas or Cape Cod or any other super-affluent seaside suburb. Tranquil. Smooth. Nondescript. Anesthetic.
A place whose history sits in the folds of time. The kind of town that disappears into the background of people’s consciousness, mostly set apart from anything like strife or consequence. At least that was how we felt as we looked at the town’s roundabout.
“I think we found the chalet,” I told her. She agreed.
All photos by the author or Kelsey Goldberg.