NOVA KINO FILMS

The Typewriter Museum of São Brás, Portugal

 

                  by Mark Warren Boswell

         São Brás, Portugal. September 22, 2022

 

 

            The white, hot heat of summer saturated the Avenida de la Libertad, the main avenue of Sao Bras, Portugal, as I lightly stepped through it feeling like a Raymond Chandler subject. São Brás is a laid-back, arid town, remotely situated between Faro and the Spanish border in the splendid Algarve region. As I ambled down the avenue, I noticed some enigmatic, large rectangular windows with the word “Seguros” emblazoned on one, in an evocative seventies font.

 

            What was inside the windows was hard to discern because they were all shuttered by aged Venetian blinds. At the bottom of one window, written in English were the words “Typewriter Museum. Free entry. Door number 32. “

I looked around further and saw that door number 32 was the entrance to the Seguros office. I came into the dim lit, old school office space and was greeted by a stylish secretary who told me in excellent English that “Yes, this is the Typewriter Museum.”

 

            She pointed to the rear of the large, noirish office and an elegant older gentleman was seated at a big desk. He stood up and spread his left arm out towards the entrance of the museum. This must be Vitor Lourenço, the insurance writer of São Brás for more than

six decades, whose name is written above the entrance. He first started working on typewriters when he was eleven and became a notary when he was fifteen. His parents owned a prominent Brandy distillery in the region and yes, “they used typewriters.”  

           

            The Typewriter Museum occupies three rooms in the rear of Vitor Lourenço’s Seguros office. A small room to the left contained an archive of neatly packed, aged ring binders spread out across numerous metal shelves. Vitor lead me into the middle room, where on perfectly arranged shelves, stood a plethora of outstanding typewriters; Olivetti’s, Adlers, Smith-Coronas, Remingtons, Hermes and others. He proudly showed me a Braille typewriter and presented a printed page from the machine, inviting me to rub my fingers on the Braille embossed paper.

 

            We moved over to the last room in the museum. I was immediately overwhelmed by the scope of the meticulously arranged typewriters in the large room. Surrounded by a proverbial wonderland of text producing apparatuses, I thought: “Who were all the faces behind these marvelous machines, if only they could talk?” William S. Burroughs, the experimental American writer and author of The Naked Lunch, claimed his IBM Selectric was an actual living creature capable of launching words into outer space. Or maybe one had once been used by the famed Portuguese writer Fernando Passeo, whose statue rests just a mere block away down the Avenida de la Libertad. Passeo wrote under 73 different pseudonyms he coined as heteronyms. An under-appreciated translator by day, he left voluminous amounts of unpublished works in a giant trunk. Like Passeo, the untold stories behind these machines are fading away in the dusty corners of time.

 

            On September 25, 2020, mid-afternoon, a well-dressed man flanked by secret service agents is casually strolling down the Avenida de la Libertad. He is no other than António Luis Santos da Costa, the President of Portugal, on an official visit to São Brás. He is known to be a quite humble person with a spontaneous side to his personality. He spots the enigmatic, detective like windows of Vitor Lorenço’s Seguros, steps closer to find the Typewriter Museum announcement. He enters the office and is greeted by Vitor’s secretary, Edite Palma. Vitor is back home on his couch taking his habitual siesta. The President is floored by all the outstanding typewriters. A flood of great emotion comes out as he recalls all the letters and university work he banged out over the years on machines like these. We must call Vitor he tells Edite. She rings his line and he groggily answers –“Vitor, the President of Portugal is in your museum right now and he wants to talk to you.” The President is exuberant in his admiration for the collection. He is almost at a lost for words, but he wants to know one thing: “Why doesn't the city put this museum into a bigger exhibition hall? ” Vitor is mum and gives no straight answer.

 

            Vitor Pires Lourenço was raised in a well-to-do Portugues family with 6 other siblings. He is currently 85 years old and has overseen the insurance matters for the region of Sao Bras Aportel since the 1950’s. When the Photography Museum of São Brás comes across a new collection of old photos and they are unable to identify some of the individuals in the pictures, they call on Vitor Lourenćo for assistance! At 85, he looks much younger than he appears. “I never drank or smoked, I have many great friends that I visit regularly and the food that I cook comes straight out of my garden” He told me when I asked how he looks so young.

 

            Vitor always loved these “enchanted machines” while working with them for many years as the chief notary and insurance writer of the region. When he heard about the last typewriter factory in Portugal closing, he decided to put all the typewriters he had in his possession into a museum in order to “bring them back to life.”

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          “Is there anything else you would like to ask him?” Edite asked me at the end of my interview with Mr. Lourenço. Actually, yes I thought. Just like the President wondered “why does the city not provide an official museum for this very important collection?” Edite explained, “Vitor grew up very comfortable and he realized that not everyone could be so lucky. So he chooses to remain humble and he wants his museum to be humble. “Anybody can walk in here and see these máquines da escrever and it costs nothing!”