I ask the blowing wind
For news of my country
And the wind silences the tragedy
The wind tells me nothing.Manuel Alegre in “Song of the blowing wind”
Wind in Portugal is illegal. Blows without a license from the county. It always rains without the Government’s consent. Meteorology is the only force in this country that refuses to fill in forms. The Portuguese state requires the wind to be accompanied by a receipt.
Twenty-two thousand people sat in rooms without a roof, with moisture seeping into the bones, to submit a form with the correct attachments in a computer portal that jams every fifteen minutes. This March storm didn’t just rip off roofs. It inaugurated the bureaucracy of calamity. Twenty-two thousand souls were asking for official permission to take pity on themselves. An entire city begging permission not to rain in the corridor.
At least the weather has the decency to be brutal. It doesn’t apologise. The public administration, on the other hand, asks that the tragedy be digitised in PDF format. Less than two megabytes in size. To fit in the database. The family lost their car. They lost their roof. They lost sight of their future. But the most urgent problem is the password. Without a unique digital key, misfortune has no legal value. In the country of Simplex, analogue misery is an offence to the homeland.
The geography of fragility does not appear on weather charts, nor is it read on the rosy maps of television news. It is designed like a tapestry made of certificates of poverty passed in a hurry at the Parish Council. For decades, we have built an entire country in the conviction that the sky was, is – and always will be – blue. Concrete is expensive. The licensing of the work, a mere suggestion. The aluminum marquee is our mosque. It is there that people kneel to pray to the goddess of fragility. Misfortune, when it comes, should knock softly on the door and ask permission. And come in slow motion. It is the triumph of exposed brick. Of plasterboard holding up the façade with faith and spit. Of the asbestos-laden lusalite roof, which survived the 1980s and European funds intact.
We manage this collapse as one manages a toothache. You don’t go to the dentist. You take a cheap painkiller. You chew on the other side. You wait for the nerve to rot away in peace. And you worship the word “calamity.” Calamity absolves. If the climate is to blame, the blame dies single, virgin, and pure. The storm cleanses the sins of uncontrolled urban development. How we love our “desenrascanço”! The dirtiest word in the dictionary. Desenrascanço is the glorification of incompetence. We are proud of our flaws. We fix things badly. Our norm is improvisation. And so it remains. The temporary in Portugal lasts beyond death.
Civil Protection blasts out a warning. The cell phone vibrates in the middle of the night. It’s a text message announcing the end of the world. People read it. They shrug their shoulders. They roll over and turn away. Structural disaster is silent. It doesn’t send notifications. And the twenty-two thousand requests for support are not a cry for help. They are a census. An audit that no one ordered for a country built with duct tape, ignorance, and the unshakeable belief that Our Lady of Fatima diverts anticyclones to Spain. The average Portuguese lives in a state of permanent exception, but only gains the right to complain when the wind speed exceeds 100 kilometers per hour, and the television channel shows up to film the roof tiles on the ground. Television validates the tragedy. Without the video cameras, the end of the world is just a big nuisance.
Our mistake is to think that the storm was the disaster. The storm was just the tax inspector. A tacky, strict, relentless inspector with no patience for the usual excuses. The real tragedy was already there on the previous Tuesday, on a wonderful sunny day, when those people were already living on the brink of ruin, waiting for a stronger gust to push them into the warm embrace of the state’s portal.
The scandal is not that the wind blew the roof away. The scandal is that the State only recognizes the existence of that house when it ceases to be. Fragility needs a catastrophe approved in the Official Gazette to exist in the eyes of the law. Without a storm, misery is just a statistic with no right to subsidies. It remains hidden. Ashamed. Behind a freshly painted wall. The storm merely conducted a forensic audit of our moral desert. The wind swept away the cosmetics. It was the only moment of true national transparency. Poverty suddenly found itself in the spotlight of television news. It had its fifteen minutes of fame. March destroyed nothing. It merely pulled back the curtain. Rewarding our poverty, for a brief moment, with the status of national emergency. For the rest of the year, our ruin must behave discreetly. It must be tidy. It must know its place and not cause trouble.
All this will end. It is the supreme melancholy of time. The money from the subsidies will arrive in August. When summer has dried the dampness from the walls, and the urgency has dissolved in the slowness of the bureaucracy. Our elastic memory is the people’s most powerful weapon. The summer heat melts the memory of fear. And the Portuguese have an inexhaustible capacity to archive their own suffering. Forgetting is our sport of choice. The only sport in which our country wins regularly. And forgetting saves a lot of work.
Then they will go out and buy some new bricks, replace the lusalite with zinc, reinforce the joints with cheap silicone from the do-it-yourself chain store. They will close up the aluminum awnings, praying that the next winter will be mild. The wind blows. The state stamps the tragedy, transfers the funds, and washes its hands of the matter. Misery finally returns to its natural state. It ceases to disturb public order, only to rot away in its usual corner, hidden and docile, until the next orange alert.