TORMES,THE HIGHPOINT OF 'QUEIROSIAN' GEOGRAPHY

A. CAMPOS MATOS

To travel to the various locations contained in the ‘Queirosian’ atlas is to enrich the literary transfiguration via which they are presented in Eça’s work with added feeling and knowledge. We thereby obtain a better understanding of the way in which he saw those places and of the osmosis – so significant and so perfect – that he engendered between them and his characters.
It is thus possible to say that his use of the description of locations and spaces that existed in the real world is one of the most important aspects of his literary ‘process’.
The feeling of verisimilitude that Eça manages to transmit is not produced solely by the naturalness and the colloquialism of his dialogues, but also by his unequalled art of situating his characters in their own surroundings and of being able to portray or recreate that environment as though it were a living reality, as well as by his capacity to provide us with an unmatchable representation of its visual appearance. In short, this is what is truly meant by ‘creating the illusion of reality’.
The farm and the house at Tormes – the place in which Eça found inspiration for the novel A Cidade e as Serras (The City and the Mountains) – formed part of the inheritance Emília de Castro, the writer’s wife, received upon her mother’s death in 1890. She, however, never visited them herself. In 1892 her sister Benedita went with Eça to look at the properties that the two women had inherited. Brother and sister-in-law rode on horseback up the hillside from the railway station that is now called Tormes-Aregos. At that time the rooms of the house must have appeared much as they were in the description that Zé Fernandes gives of them in A Cidade e as Serras: "They were enormous, with the sonorous quality of a capitular house, their thick walls darkened by time, neglect and repeated frosts; they were desolately bare – only the corners still contained the odd heap of wicker baskets, or a hoe, lying amidst some sticks. Patches of sky gleamed through gashes in the oak panelling of the distant roofs. The glass-less windows retained those massive shutters – the ones with fastenings for the bars – that scatter darkness when they are closed. Beneath our feet, here and there, a rotten board creaked and gave way".
Restored by his descendants, transformed into a Foundation, the centre of a variety of ‘Queirosian’ activities, Tormes is the most important of the ‘highpoints’ of that magical world created by Eça’s exceptional literary art.