One in five
Some things are not even worth dwelling on for too long. I have to admit that my morning showers are often flooded with comments from people I do not even know, but whose words I end up reading on the news sites I follow. Once the tap is turned off, though, these irritations follow the water the same way: straight down the drain.
It is harder when the comments section invades real life.
Despite being the proud owner of an estate car, I am not particularly fond of using it when parking is uncertain. In practice, that means I barely take the car out of the garage for trips within the city where I live, especially when heading into more central areas.
Public transport, although extensive, is quite unreliable and painfully slow. But for a Saturday morning trip with the family, it more than does the job. With a free monthly pass, there is even more incentive to leave the car tucked away in its little corner.
The problem is that my family and I take up space. Luckily, the city buses have an area for pushchairs, which can always be used as long as there is no wheelchair on board during the journey.
That space, ostensibly designed for monstrosities such as the Cybex contraptions I see scattered all over the country, also has two seats that are almost always occupied. They are usually taken by older people who want a little more room than they get in the already cramped regular seats spread around the bus.
It is always awkward having to ask these people to move. But those are the rules, and the space reserved for pushchairs or wheelchairs exists precisely to make it easier to move around a bus that is already narrow enough. Circulation would be far worse if the contraption had to remain in the aisle where people get on and off, stop after stop.
Our city has a few fashionable bakeries that deserve the hype, with genuinely excellent products even if the prices are fairly steep. I decided that a Saturday morning like today was the perfect time to walk to one of them, which would mean about half an hour on foot.
That was fine for me and the little one, but not for my partner, whose tiredness has been fairly constant lately. So, with the car safely parked in the garage and neither of us willing to turn around and go back home, we headed for the bus stop.
The bus routes that pass through our neighbourhood are among the busiest in the whole city. They are usually quite crowded on weekdays, but not at weekends. Apparently, the bus we were about to take was the exception.
We got on creating the usual chaos. "Sorry" and "excuse me" were thrown around in every direction, often unnecessarily, just so the pushchair could make its way through, whether or not its wide wheels ended up rolling over a few feet in the process.
Two elderly gentlemen were sitting in the two seats. One stood up immediately. The other seemed not to understand what was going on.
The man who had stood up acted as an intermediary, telling his generational peer that he also needed to move so the pushchair could occupy the space. Without hesitation, the man who had seemed confused also made room, and we settled ourselves there as we always do in situations like this.
It seemed that everything had been resolved. The two men quickly found seats in the areas reserved for elderly passengers, and the aisle was clear.
Apparently, I was wrong.
"That is why Ventura has to win the election", said a man who had decided to take offence on behalf of the two elderly gentlemen, who themselves had shown no sign of being bothered by the inconvenience of vacating the space reserved for the pushchair. And for anyone unfamiliar with the name, "Ventura" is André Ventura, leader of the CHEGA party and the leading figure of Portugal's current far right.
A few years ago, I would have replied in some way, probably acidly, as I often do in this space. I may be vulnerable as an immigrant in an increasingly prejudiced country, but I am no pushover. At the same time, I am no longer young enough, nor do I have the patience, for that kind of exhausting nonsense.
In a way, I actually like it when people like that man, who was not as old as the other two but looked as though life had beaten him up quite thoroughly, openly declare preferences like that. It is much better to know who you are dealing with than to wonder who else on that bus might have thought the exact same thing and simply kept quiet.
Still, it is worth asking why he felt the need to say it. It should be said that while I am visibly an immigrant and non-white, my partner could not be more Portuguese. Our child is, naturally, a mixture of both of us, but his skin tone is much closer to mine than to hers.
Trying to put myself in that man's shoes, I think the starting point is "disrespect". These are Portuguese elderly men being forced to obey a rule imposed by the municipality and/or the city's transport company, having to give up their space for a pushchair. A hierarchy that makes no sense, in his eyes, because the baby and the parents have not contributed as much as those old men who had to move for a few seconds and find somewhere else to sit on the bus.
Then comes simple prejudice.
Besides me, there were many other non-white people on the bus. Most likely people travelling to work at the weekend, while people like me and my family were enjoying the privilege of spending a few dozen euros on bread, pastries and snacks.
The man who declared his support for Ventura was not even particularly white himself, as is true of many Portuguese people who, after enough time spent working in the sun, end up revealing why they are often seen as closer in appearance to Arabs than to the Europeans they hold in such high regard. But as someone who sees himself as a native Portuguese man, with a lineage probably not especially rich in material wealth but at least rich in documented history and hard work, or perhaps not, a bus filled with people like me and even, why not, my son is something that bothers him at his core.
Once again, I wish there were more people like him. People willing to openly declare that visceral reaction to what feels foreign to them, and consequently to announce how they intend to vote in the elections ahead.
It is much easier to talk to someone like that than to the anonymous commenter on newspaper X or Y whose libertarian prose conceals the most extreme forms of cruelty. On that bus there was a man disturbed by the mere existence of one or more people, regardless of whether that discomfort had any rational basis. That is a far easier wall to cross than trying to navigate opinion polls in which CHEGA consistently has the support of at least 20% of the country's electorate.
As I see it, that 20% means that at least one in every five adults around me carries that discomfort somewhere inside them. It may not be directed personally at me or at my son, because it is perfectly common among voters of right-wing parties to disregard personal experience and even scientific evidence in favour of conservatism and prejudice. But these are people who, at the very least, put my existence and the existence of people like me at risk every time they are called upon to take part in the highest exercise of democracy in this country.
And that is without even counting the 30% or more who vote for the "centre-right", which has adopted Ventura and company's anti-immigration agenda as its own. Those people are even more hidden, and perhaps even more dangerous.
In the end, the bus journey continued without incident. We got off at the stop near the bakery, not before creating a little more chaos on the way out, and my partner wanted to make a few comments about what had happened. I had very little to say in response, other than: "I always prefer to know what my enemies look like".