THE WHODUNIT WANDERER, DR. MANJIRI PRABHU*
Like all my destination thrillers, The Mystery of the Portuguese Hearts has Portugal as a core character. On my trip to Portugal for research, I visited seven northern towns – Porto, Guimarães, Viana do Castelo, Vila Verde, Penafiel, Amarante, and Freixo de Espada à Cinta. Each town was stunning, steeped in history and culture, with inviting gorgeous landscapes. I could have easily based a book in each place. But that wasn’t the purpose of my trip. The challenge was to incorporate each one of these places in the novel. So far, Re had always solved a mystery in one town – how could I justify the presence of seven towns in one book and yet have a storyline that would unfold logically, inviting the culture and monuments of the towns to play a role in the novel? Without it sounding either contrived or superfluous?
Well, the destination solved this issue for me… it offered me ideas which spun out of the very locations I wanted to include in the book.
Let me give you two examples.
Guimarães is situated in north Portugal in the Braga district. It is a 9th-century-old town of narrow cobbled streets, uneven large courtyards, colorful houses, and cafes. The pedestrian-only Centro Histórico Guimarães is divided by a long, narrow cobbled Rua Santa Maria which cuts through the heart of the historic town. Guimarães – the Cradle of the Nation – is mostly referred to as such because Portugal’s first king, Afonso Henriques, was born here in the early 12th century. It is associated with the creation of the Portuguese national identity and language and was the feudal territory of the dukes who resided in the Ducal Palace. Two features of the Ducal Palace offered me the perfect clues for Guimarães to be seamlessly blended into the book. Thirty-nine chimneys stuck out of the grand Ducal Palace – tall rust-colored chimneys between turreted towers formed the top façade of the Palace. The roof itself was a sight to see with the multiple chimneys, appearing more like candies on a cake at closer quarters, as they jutted out at strategic points from the conical roof.
The other feature that caught my attention was the ceiling in the great hall. The entire roof was a wooden marvel. Hundreds of thick and long strips of wood curved and intersected, arched and bent to join at multiple levels to form the most magnificent wooden boat structure I had ever witnessed. Elaborate woodwork and the many strands of wood that went into making the wood an inverted, conical boat were fascinating, and it all seemed like a representation of life in a physical model right above me. Intersecting moments, people, situations at different points in life, blending, bending, and molding of minds to accommodate diversity, and ultimately all connected, forming the big picture of life and the Universe. This was exactly Re’s thought in the novel too! If that was not all, two big gaps in the wall below the point where the wooden strands touched the walls were actually slits, very cleverly designed into the walls to allow sound from one room and some other rooms to be heard in the Duke’s room. Which is how the saying went – walls have ears and they listen. I found it absolutely ingenious, and this ingenuity and the other features found their way into the book, in the form of a poetic clue for Re.
In the cradle of the nation
Where the ceilings sail…
beyond the holy tree,
where the 39 smokes trail…
Where the walls listen
to the secrets that it keeps,
But the heart lands
where the chimney speaks.
The second example is what leads the entire story forward like a central thread: The Lenços dos Namorados. It was while I was researching for the novel, before my Portugal trip, that I discovered this charming, ancient custom of the celebrated love handkerchiefs of Portugal. It was an ancient Portuguese tradition – handkerchiefs were carefully embroidered with a message of love in them. Almost like a declaration of love. As the 18th-century tradition goes, girls in the Minho region of Portugal would use a piece of linen and cotton and embroider beautiful messages in Portuguese as well as motifs of love, like hearts, keys, flowers, and more. Often written in broken Portuguese, it was more about the sentiment and emotion than the grammar. They would then send this kerchief secretly to their beloved. At their next public encounter, if the beloved openly dropped or flaunted the kerchief, it meant that he had accepted her offer of friendship and the courtship had begun.
I found this custom not just beautiful but also thrilling, and that is why I specially visited the Espaço Namorar Portugal in Vila Verde, the first physical store selling Namorar Portugal products. Here, the local women came together to embroider beautiful and colourful messages of love on kerchiefs, and I tried my hand at embroidering a couple of love messages too! In a world under the constant threat of war, I had found a safe haven in Portuguese culture and tradition.
I often wonder – did the destinations sense that I would incorporate their uniqueness into the novel, hence allowed me to discover the lenços first and then led me to Vila Verde? And did the chimneys, the inverted boat ceiling, and the ‘listening walls’ nudge me to the Ducal Palace, prompting me to include them in the novel? When was my connection to the destination truly born and when were these subtle, imperceptible decisions taken? Did I indeed go to the destination, or did it, in reality, bring me to it?
I guess I shall never really know…
*Dr. Manjiri Prabhu is an award-winning international author, short filmmaker, and the curator & founder/director of two international festivals.
