This text belongs to ‘Penínsulas’, the newsletter that Enric Juliana sends to the readers of ‘La Vanguardia’ every Tuesday. If you want to receive it in your mailbox, sign up here.
The taxi was slowly going up one of the streets in Lisbon’s Chiado neighborhood and near Camões Square I noticed the window of a small stationery store. Some blue notebooks that I had never seen before caught my attention. I collect pads and notebooks. I especially like notebooks that come from the past and bring with them the memory of slow times. I take pleasure in observing them and usually use them for quick notes, without any literary intention. I must confess that I write very little by hand, with an undisciplined, almost illegible handwriting – metge letter, we say in Catalan -, which I don’t even understand when I review my notes. I admire people who are able to conclude the day by reflectively summarizing the day’s impressions in clear and well-organized handwriting. We could call mine fetishism. I was interested in those blue notebooks and I told the taxi driver that I was getting out.
The owner of the stationery store showed them to me and the crush was confirmed. Hard cover of blue bound cloth, with a white label with a double border. Some of the labels were visibly crooked. Manual work without thinking about what they will say. Self-sufficient notebooks. Three sizes: pocket size, table size and a very long one for old accounting. Perhaps in one of those blue notebooks, María Jesús Caetano, the legendary housekeeper of the dictator Oliveira Salazar, wrote down the number of eggs laid by the hens of the presidential palace, which she herself sold every morning to a nearby store. In one of those notebooks, perhaps a young Portuguese army officer wrote down the passwords for the uprising of April 25, 1974. They were very different. There was no notebook the same as another. The number of pages always varied, which could be white, lined or gridded. The spines of the paper were lightly tinted pink or blue, as if reams of leftover paper had been used. Battle notebooks. Rough notebooks. Nothing to do with the stylized Moleskine, the old pad of Parisian artists relaunched as a successful product by the Italian designer Maria Segronbodi.
The person in charge of the stationery store spoke to me in Portuguese and I responded in Spanish. Before saying goodbye, I asked him a slightly snooty question. I told him: “There is an American writer called Paul Auster who talks about some blue Portuguese notebooks in one of his latest novels, could these be these?” Mr. Luis Bordalo looked at me smiling and reassured me: “I think they are.” I climbed the slopes of Barrio Alto happier than a child with new shoes. I had found the blue Portuguese notebooks that appear in the novel The Night of the Oracle, I was staying at the London pension, with a phenomenal view over Lisbon, and at night I read fragments of the Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa. The only thing missing was a Madredeus song as background music. I felt like a Wim Wenders character in the movie Lisbon Story. Fetishisms.
Back in Madrid I wrote an article about Portuguese blue notebooks that caught the attention of some traveling readers. End of February 2007. The economic crisis had not yet begun and people were traveling a lot. In July I returned to Lisbon and began to make friends with Luis and Sandra, the owners of the small stationery store on Largo de Calhariz, just a stone’s throw from Camões Square. They had expanded the business. She primarily took care of the small stationery store and he tended a nearby kiosk where all types of international magazines were sold.
Word spread about the Portuguese blue notebooks, which could evidently be bought in other stationery stores in the country. The TAP magazine, the Portuguese airlines, dedicated a one-page article to them, which the Bordalos immediately hung in the window. At that time in Portugal there was a strong attachment to traditional products: colognes, perfumes, shaving soaps, packaging, sardine cans with the old brands, posters, baskets… A chain of stores called A vida portuguesa has a wide catalog of products that refer to times gone by. This year they have put on sale a red carnation infusion to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the April Revolution. The blue notebook was also part of that catalog.
The world before the definitive emergence of the Internet. Europe before the financial blow of 2009. Portugal before the troika intervention in 2011. Lisbon before the tourism explosion in 2014. That modest stationery store in Largo de Calhariz told us that in one of the most visited areas of Lisbon there were still small interstices for local commerce, spaces for self-propelled individual effort. The big brands and international chains had not yet devastated everything. The survival of that small local business was one of the attractions of the city. Lisbon and Porto seemed to walk a little slower in the great circuit of globalization. And the blue notebooks could be considered a symbol of that slowness. A small, modest stationery store also appears in Auster’s novel, where the protagonist of the story, the writer Sydney Orr, buys some hardcover Portuguese notebooks with blue fabric, with which he returns to work after a severe illness. The shop is called Paper Palace and is run by a Chinese merchant named Chang. Sydney Orr will discover that he only manages to write when he has a blue Portuguese notebook. And then he must also discover why his wife cries inconsolably.
Luis and Sandra became interested in Auster’s novel, they scanned the market and prepared to do battle. They wrote to the manufacturers asking for greater stylization of the product. While they were thinking about it, the small stationery store in Chiado was selling the blue notebooks along with a thick elastic band to keep them closed. With that elastic band they built a small legend. After a few years, when tourism began to overwhelm Lisbon, the manufacturers finally decided to stylize the blue notebook: more elegance, better paper, an initial sheet to write down the name and address, plus an elastic band of blue fabric perfectly incorporated into it. the lid. With that change also came bad news for the Bordalos.
After the crisis, Portugal was exhausted and the big funds began to look first at Lisbon and then at Porto. New hotels began to be built, tourist apartments arrived, new restaurants and all kinds of stores opened, while many old businesses began to close. Nothing that we have not experienced in the big Spanish cities. One day, the Bordalos received notification that their leases would not be renewed. The stationery store and the kiosk should close. “The blue notebook stationery store has closed,” a friend who had just returned from Lisbon told me one day.
After a few months, the music of chance began. Luis and Sandra Bordalo wrote to me informing me that they had moved to a town in the interior of Portugal where they planned to open a stationery store. And here the hand of Paul Auster appeared, which today is in the heavens. The place to which they had moved is called Covilhã, at the foot of the Estrella mountain range, an old textile center not far from the border with Spain, today converted into a university city. And in that city there is someone who knows very well the magic of blue notebooks.
The music of chance. Professor Gabriel Magalhães, a dear Portuguese friend and monthly contributor to La Vanguardia for more than a decade, lives and works in Covilhã. I notified Magalhães and he soon met the owners of the new stationery store. A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to visit them. In addition to school supplies and supplies for university students, they sell international magazines and blue notebooks. They work a lot. Sometimes they open on Sundays. Life is calmer in the interior of the country, funds and real estate agencies do not harass like in Lisbon, but the cost of living has also risen. Living modestly in Portugal today is not easy. Perhaps this will help us understand the results of the last legislative elections in that country. Beneath the good Portuguese ways, there is also a strong tension. It was an endearing meeting in which they talked about Paul Auster and the night of the oracle.
The Covilhã stationery is called ‘Next Paragraph’. The Following Paragraph.
