Clapham omnibus

Another portuguese caf? has opened in the Wandsworth Road. My mother's countrymen are now thick on the ground around me, but I slightly fear these simple people. I have lunch at the caf?, and wish that I had not. I am the only customer, and talk my best Portuguese, but the waiter, with his hangdog expression and dislocated eyes, does not respond. I know this look; I have seen it often, in Portugal and here.

I have brought with me the Lisbon newspaper Público, 7th October 1999. It is almost entirely devoted to Am?lia Rodrigues, the great fado singer, who had died the previous day. Three days of national mourning followed her death, and campaigning in the general election, on 10th October, was partially suspended. The paper's editorial said that Am?lia embodied the Portuguese soul, "at once universalist and particular, melancholy and joyful." But I am disturbed to read that many fewer people than expected followed her coffin. In the end, the Portuguese didn't care about their great heroine.

My encounters with Portugal usually have this ambiguous, unsatisfying quality, and leave me feeling depressed. After lunch I get ready for the Barbican Hall, where I am to hear a concert in the evening. I look forward to spending several hours in the long, slow absorption of art and thought which is one of the principal purposes of my life. I take several books with me to the Barbican, and there I can browse through many more, learn of future events, drink and eat, and sit on the terrace, mildly washed by the fountains.



It occurs to me suddenly, as I wander round trying to find the theatre box office, that for the first time in history, and in London above all other cities, the whole of human culture over the last two or three millennia is readily accessible, as if on a map. Being unemployed, I even get cheap seats for it.

With an hour to go before the concert begins, I am in the theatre and music bookshop, leafing through a biography of Schubert. A Brazilian popular song is playing, and near me I hear two middle-aged women talking in Portuguese. On an impulse, I address them in that language. "I'm hearing Portuguese all the time in London now," I say. "I hear it spoken, and I hear it sung." "Português falando, português cantando." One of them answers, and I realise that she is Brazilian: "Well, we're all travelling a lot now."

"Pleased to meet you," I say. "Prazer."

"Prazer," she answers, smiling,

The concert begins. It is a wonderful performance of the St Matthew Passion. But now and again the two encounters earlier in the day where I spoke Portuguese come back to me. The music I love does not involve that language. The bookshops I browse in contain nothing about Portugal's great contribution to history. My commitment to my mother's country comes purely from the circumstances of my birth and is tangential to everything else that attracts me-literature, music, Christianity-causing a sort of permanent fissure in the soul.

It is among the oddest of facts that Portugal has kept itself independent for eight centuries, has influenced every part of the world, and has exported its language to all the continents-it dominates one of them-yet everyone of Portuguese origin feels an ineffable depression, even shame, about the country. To discuss the reason for this would take many books. But I think the curious artistic blankness of the world which Portugal created, the continuous overshadowing by Spain, and a history of being trapped in a disciplined and cohesive society, have a lot to do with it.

I wonder if this depression will vanish. Lisbon hums to a disco beat in the harsh sunlight of 2000, and there is nothing sweetly melancholic about the aggressive people in their four-wheel drives. It will be too late for me, but perhaps a general Latin identity will soon swamp the strange particularity, the unreasonable sadness, of which Am?lia Rodrigues was a representative.

Meanwhile, as Portugal grows less individual, it becomes more known. Recently the country featured not once, but twice, in a BBC radio news bulletin. The first item was the gas attack on a Lisbon nightclub; the other was that Ant?nio Pinto had won the London Marathon. In a newspaper the following day, I read that he is now considered the greatest runner there has ever been. That was a good moment. Meanwhile the Portuguese caf?s, with their distinctive yellow paint and awnings, spread over Clapham, Brixton, Stockwell and south Lambeth, and in the 88 and 77 buses I often hear the language, in its mysterious European version, its playful Brazilian one, and the African variety which touchingly mixes the two.

This greater visibility, these occasional triumphs, give me ever more confidence. Once I hesitated to tell people that I was half-Portuguese. I did not want to discuss the negative feelings I mention here. Now I know that the foundations of knowledge about Portugal are present, and I can talk and write freely.

And, as Portugal is better known, so shall I be. People will understand where I am coming from-and some of the reasons for my strange character. Then the talent which has long been blocked, but is now almost released, will be savoured in its fullness. And perhaps I shall finally be at peace with the English side of my nature, and reconciled to the mother who bore me.