António Aleixo, the lottery seller who became the Algarve's poet

On Easter Sunday, 25 April 1943, at the Ateneu Comercial e Industrial de Loulé, a spring poetry contest held its closing party, and a man of 44 began selling copies of a book with his name on the cover. António Aleixo had sold lottery tickets for a living. Now he was selling Quando começo a cantar, “When I begin to sing”, at 7$50 a copy (seven and a half escudos, then the price of three one-kilo loaves).2 sources2 sources

The book had come off the press of the Tipografia União in Faro eleven days earlier. It held 113 quadras, the four-line verses Aleixo made up in his head, plus a handful of longer pieces. A teacher had written them down, fixed the spelling and added the commas. Within two months all 1,100 copies were gone.2 sources2 sources

Aleixo had been born 44 years before, on 18 February 1899, at the far eastern end of the Algarve. He could read but barely write. Until that spring his verses had reached print only on loose sheets, in the programmes of poetry contests and in a few local newspapers.2 sources2 sources

António Fernandes Aleixo was born in Vila Real de Santo António, a small town on the Algarve's border with Spain. He was baptised there on 24 June 1899. His father, José Fernandes Aleixo, born in Loulé in 1870, was a weaver who could read and write.2 sources2 sources

José was also a labour organiser. He helped found weavers' associations in Faro in 1902, in Vila Real de Santo António in 1903 and in Loulé in 1915. In 1906 he took the family back to his home town of Loulé.1 source1 source

The boy went to school in Loulé but left during his third year, because, according to the historian João Romero Chagas Aleixo, the family had run out of money. Joaquim Magalhães, his later editor, also remembered “an incomplete third year”. The Brazilian scholar Robertson Frizero Barros, author of one of the few academic studies of his work, has him leaving before finishing the second. From 1912 to 1919 he worked beside his father as an apprentice weaver in the factory of Manuel de Sousa Ignez.3 sources3 sources

According to Barros, his first verses were sung for coins. At Christmas and New Year children in the south of Portugal went from door to door singing janeiras, short songs that praised the owner of the house in return for a coin or a gift. When his group ran out of verses, ten-year-old António began inventing new ones.1 source1 source

After the loom came the army. Aleixo served mostly in Faro and Tavira as a bugler in the 5th Company of Infantry Regiment No. 4, first as an apprentice and then as a corporal. Barros writes that it was in the army that he properly learned to read and write, if only roughly.2 sources2 sources

On 7 July 1922 he joined the civil police in Faro. He never settled into the job and resigned on 8 January 1924. Two months later, in March 1924, he married Maria Catarina Martins, who worked in the same factory. They had seven children, one of whom died young.1 source1 source

In 1928 he emigrated to France and worked as a builder's labourer in Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse and Paris. He came home in 1931 and, until 1933, sold lottery tickets and ties. Selling cautelas, fractions of lottery tickets, was the trade people remembered him by: he became known as the poeta cauteleiro, the lottery-seller poet.3 sources3 sources

For a time he also kept goats. Back from France with a stomach ulcer, Magalhães recalled, he had an operation and could drink nothing but milk, so he borrowed money from friends to buy a few and fed his ulcer on their milk.2 sources2 sources

Aleixo improvised in public, at village festas and romarias, the pilgrimage fairs held on saints' days, and the habit became a second income. As Magalhães described it, Aleixo would say his verses, someone wrote them down, a printer set them in type and the poet sold the sheets from fair to fair. In Loulé he was a regular at the Café Calcinha, opened in the late 1920s, where he wrote many of his quadras.5 sources5 sources

His themes were social injustice, the misery of a poor man's life and the small events of the day. Barros points out that there is almost nothing in his work about love, or about the saudade so common in the Portuguese poetry before him. What there is, again and again, is irony, sometimes turned on himself.2 sources2 sources

Joaquim Magalhães was born in Porto in 1909 and studied Romance philology before arriving in the Algarve before dawn on 17 October 1933. From 1935 to 1974 he taught Portuguese and French at the liceu, the state secondary school, in Faro, and he was its rector from 1968. He married a teacher from Loulé.2 sources2 sources

He first came across Aleixo in 1937, at a poetry contest, the Jogos Florais, held by the Ginásio Clube de Faro. Aleixo took fourth prize under the pen name “cantador algarvio”, the Algarve singer. The two became friends for life.2 sources2 sources

Magalhães remembered that Aleixo had borrowed a suit for the prize-giving from Othman da Franca, son of the Algarve poet Cândido Guerreiro. The next day, back in his own clothes, he made a quadra of it.1 source1 source

Barros adds a step. In 1942, he writes, a watchmaker in Loulé who was a friend of the poet had about two dozen of his quadras typed up and printed as a single sheet. A copy reached Magalhães, who offered to collect enough verses for a book and to act as Aleixo's secretary while he did it. The essayist Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins also names a Loulé watchmaker, José Rosa Madeira, with Magalhães as the first two people to take notice of the poet.2 sources2 sources

Aleixo made up many verses on the spot. Magalhães recalled walking down a street in Loulé with him in the rain, past a man with a hoe who was turning the running water aside. Aleixo answered with a quadra: whoever dams running water fools himself, because the stream does not die, it runs off somewhere else. He also turned their partnership into a verse.2 sources2 sources

The book was Magalhães's idea, made with Aleixo's agreement in the spring of 1943. It was published by the Círculo Cultural do Algarve, a cultural society Magalhães had helped found and would preside over until 1970. The title is the first line of a six-line poem in the book.1 source1 source

Magalhães wrote a three-page preface, which he called an “indispensable explanation”. He was frank about his friend's schooling and generous about his talent, praising the “concise and original expression of a bitter philosophy, learned in the pitiless school of life”.1 source1 source

Barros writes that Faro's booksellers waived their commission to help the poet. In January 1944 the Jesuit review Brotéria praised the “surprising ease of rhythm” and “very considerable poetic depth” of this “poor lottery seller”. Drawing on the preface, the reviewer also mentioned his poverty, with a wife and children to feed and a daughter wasting away with tuberculosis. A second edition came out in Coimbra in 1948 and a third in Lisbon in 1960.2 sources2 sources

Aleixo's health had been failing for some time. In March 1941 he had an operation at the Santa Marta hospital in Lisbon for a stomach ulcer and a hernia. Early in 1943 he was found to have pulmonary tuberculosis, the disease that was already killing one of his daughters; Magalhães remembered a lesion appearing on his lungs that summer.3 sources3 sources

Magalhães sent the book to Tóssan, the artist António Fernando dos Santos, who came from Vila Real de Santo António too and was then in Coimbra. Tóssan took it to Armando Gonçalves, director of the Hospital Sanatório da Colónia Portuguesa do Brasil at Covões, on the edge of the city. Gonçalves put the case to the Coimbra medical professor Bissaya Barreto, together with one quadra from the book: if he asked in song, it ran, people listened, but if he asked in tears no one would pity him.1 source1 source

Aleixo was admitted. He stayed at Covões as an in-patient from June 1943 to July 1949, more than six years.1 source1 source

In Coimbra he met writers, actors and doctors, among them the writer Miguel Torga and the poets Afonso Duarte and Joaquim Namorado. Tóssan saw him every day at the sanatorium from June 1943 and drew him that year; it is the best-known portrait of Aleixo.2 sources2 sources

Tóssan also told Paulo Quintela, a Coimbra professor and theatre director, that Aleixo had it in him to be a great author of popular theatre. Aleixo then wrote the Auto da Vida e da Morte, an allegory of life and death in the old Portuguese form of the auto, a short verse play of the kind Gil Vicente wrote in the sixteenth century. With Tóssan's help he also wrote the Auto do Curandeiro, a satire on the healers he had known who claimed to cure people with prayers and home remedies.3 sources3 sources

In the sanatorium, for the first time, Aleixo began writing his verses down himself; Magalhães said the 1943 book had given him the push. A second book of verse, Intencionais, came out in 1945, and the Auto da Vida e da Morte in 1948, both from the Círculo Cultural do Algarve.2 sources2 sources

The treatment did not work. In July 1949 Aleixo went home to his family in Loulé, to a house at number 11, Rua Bernardo Passos. His wife and six children, four daughters and two sons, had been struggling to get by.2 sources2 sources

In his last days Aleixo sent for his friend Fernando Laginha, who had written a preface for the Auto do Curandeiro that August. Laginha described the visit in a letter to Magalhães, probably written a day or two before the end. Aleixo was “dreadfully wasted” and had not eaten for two days. He wanted to cancel the book and spend the money set aside for it on feeding his family; Laginha talked him out of it, arguing that the book would bring the family an income later.1 source1 source

António Aleixo died in Loulé on the morning of 16 November 1949, aged 50. According to Barros, neighbours who had looked after him in his last days, afraid of contagion and not knowing what they were, burned some of the many notebooks in which he had written his verses.2 sources2 sources

The Auto do Curandeiro was printed in Faro early in 1950, a few months after his death, and reissued in 1964.2 sources2 sources

In 1969, twenty years after his death, his son Vitalino Martins Aleixo published a larger collection in Lisbon, prepared with Joaquim Magalhães: Este Livro que Vos Deixo, “This book I leave you”. It gathered his quadras and three autos: the Auto da Vida e da Morte, the Auto do Curandeiro and a third, the Auto do Ti Jaquim.3 sources3 sources

It came out a year after a fall had left Salazar incapacitated and Marcelo Caetano had taken his place. Barros writes that the book topped the bestseller lists for several weeks in 1969, and that the censors, who saw only the folk verses of a poor man, let it pass.1 source1 source

Aleixo's quadras are short, rhymed and easy to say aloud, and many Portuguese know a few by heart without knowing his name; Barros notes that people recite them as if they were anonymous folk verse. Academic attention has been thinner. The journalist António de Sousa Duarte observed in 1999 that Portuguese encyclopaedias said “significantly little” about him.1 source1 source

Magalhães said Aleixo's popularity exploded after the revolution of 25 April 1974, which ended the dictatorship. Before that, the singer José Afonso and others had already sung and recorded his verses, and the actor João Villaret had been the first to read one of his quadras on television.1 source1 source

In 2022 the historian João Romero Chagas Aleixo counted 55 editions of the four books and three autos. He also writes that Miguel Torga, in his published diary, judged Aleixo's quadras better than the “quadras in the popular style” of Fernando Pessoa, Portugal's best-known modern poet. In 2019, the 120th anniversary of his birth, Loulé named a street after him in the parish of Quarteira, and the council's announcement called him “unquestionably the greatest Portuguese popular poet”.2 sources2 sources

He also knew what he was not. One of his best-known quadras opens with an apology: “I beg the learned authorities' pardon, for I can barely read.” Barros took the line for the title of his study.1 source1 source