The Monk Loses Face

Okay, we made it to the Bélem tower around noon. (Third day in a row without rain. Spooky.) Take your regulation castle and subtract everything but one of the towers and you’ve got a good idea of where we ended up climbing the spiral stone staircase to step around the obligatory cannons poking their barrels out of gun ports aimed at…the sea! Whoa, wait a minute, this is where the Tagus empties into the Atlantic. This is where the mad sea captains and their crazed confessors sailed out in their galleys to create an empire. Geographically the impetus to explore makes sense; the need to colonize, well, I’ll leave that to the crazed monk to explain.

Then, down the quay to the south, we headed towards Padrão dos Descobrimentos a gigantic white
sculpture looming over the Tagus. This monument in concrete is an upwardly aggressive tribute to Portuguese men o’war prodded (almost pummeled) by a cross-wielding priest as they labor to conquer the seas in heroic style. The entire monstrosity cantilevered in concrete to represent the prow of a ship made up of overwrought cartoonishly pumped up colonists reminded me of 1930s social realist propaganda, only in this case, with a religious twist a la Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, The Wrath of God.”

After figuring out yet another bizarre ticket machine which, because it was unable to make change, could only take the exact amount of cash (flashback to CNM vending nightmares), we tramped over to the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos. XXXL Sixteenth Century monastery three city blocks long with ropy baroque filigree festooning pillars, bas reliefs busying arched entrances, and echoing colonnades looking out onto the tranquil quadrangle where a single jet water fountain provides the only meditative disturbance. A tingle goes up my spine; my visitant from a previous incarnation seeking surcease from his ungovernable impulses must have come here as a desperate penitent. And then, when we find ourselves in the upper reaches of the lofty monastery church, I turn away from Ella, caught below a writhing crucified Christ, and peer into a dark chamber bracketed by two rows of stacked, extremely judgmental-looking seats. Lo and behold, carved on a stone slab to the side of this forbidding chamber, I see a religious figure dressed in monk’s robes…with his features removed! I sense this might be him, my disgraced karmic precursor, not only defrocked, but defaced.

Unsettling, but to make things odder still, reentering the monastery’s colonnade I stop in my tracks to see a niche with a plinth dedicated to my man, Fernando Pessoa. Huh? Fernando was a believer in the occult, a friend of Alastair Crowley’s, but definitely no Christian. Then Ella tells me his body is interred at the monastery! So okay, maybe the place is like Westminster Abby, it doesn’t matter how much you believe in God, it’s how much your culture believes that you’re godly.