APPELLATION STRICTLY UNCONTROLLED

One who was born in 1934 - before the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War - is necessarily contemporaneous with the history of the latter half-century, which, in this particular case, began in 1945 rather than in 1950 (or 1951), as calendar logic might suppose.

In short, these 55 years have been spent thinking a great deal - thinking more and more, in the case of philosophers, and less and less, in the case of scientists - about a name for the universe, as the emperor's poet will have found (or not), the name for the empire, its people and it palaces, as in "The Parable" by Jorge Luís Borges.

Give me a name, "aprivoise-moi", the Boa Constrictor asks The Little Prince - and the author, Saint-Exupery, asks God?

1. Macao smells

The empty-minded young ladies of Lisbon have said this and repeated it many times.

An ugly but loved person is seen as attractive by the person who loves him or her, arid to someone in love everything smells pleasant, like Jean Genet when cleaning the urinals in prison. A saint, Genet was to Sartre, with the crooked eye, as Simone was Beau (de) voir. And Lévi-Strauss, not the one who makes jeans, but the structural anthropologist, was searching for savage thoughts in the sad tropics whilst "taking refuge" from the savage action of Nazi thinking. In Brazil, where some twenty years later Chico Buarque encouraged us - but this time, in the "left-wing" sense - to act twice before thinking. What an excellent motto for intermingling modem Nazism, nowadays even by an "aprivoiser": can it be that the painter will re-emerge at the walls of Vienna?

2. On "A do floreiro" (the flower-seller's)

When he was working here in the studio, a young and respected architect gave me that answer when I asked him where someone lived.

On Adolfo Loureiro Street, I contradicted him, once I had got over the bronchial spasms that have been choking my uncontrollable laughter for ages. When told that it was on "Adolfo Loureiro", he took it to mean that the street had been named after a flower-seller (in Portuguese, "a do floreiro") and that in addition, it was the street where at the end of the 1970s we had designed, together with Manuel Graça Dias, a building for a most difficult client, so that from then on, in the intimacy of studio jargon, we called it Adolfo (Dias) Loureiro. The street, of course!

3. Dom João Paulino the Transformer...

There were five of them, four men and one woman - mine at that time, I am glad to say - three of whom were graduates and two trainees - as I was able to clarify some years later in a succinct letter to Lionel Borralho, who published it in the "Gazeta Macaense".

Always friendly enemies. I even thought of suggesting we had dinner to celebrate the silver wedding of such a stable hatred, but he was weak and ill at the time and for the first time in my life I had no wish to provoke him. What luxury to have faithful enemies like him!

So there had been five of us but there were only three left, an architect and two trainees, and at some point we were looking at the "Plano de Urbanização" (Town Plan) by Penha-Barra.

On the map of the city used at that time, a (sidewalk? street? road?) was marked by the name of Dom João Paulino, Reverend Bishop of this diocese and a notable figure in the history of Macao. Except that, in identical calligraphy of the same size, there followed without any break the word "transformer", indicating the artifact manufactured by "Melco" that was situated by the roadside.

That was all, but as far as I and the others were concerned, the Venerable Gentleman lost his original epithet: "Dom João Paulino the Transformer" is the name that - without so much as a wink - we use even now when we refer to the street during normal conversation.

4. The Mofatardo, the quadrupeds, the faitiões and the motion pictures

More about streets, passages and alleyways according to their spellings on successive updated versions of city maps between 1950 and 1970.

The local draughtsman (I believe the plural form would not have been applicable in those days) used all his skills to copy and complete the preliminary drawing on transparent paper, sparing no detail - he had been trained at the Portuguese Military Engineering school which, since the 19th century, had played a leading and exemplary role in depicting, conserving, restoring and building the city.

However, when our draughtsman moved on from the drawing to the written part he did this by sight, without using the tracing paper. Because of that, the names became increasingly different from the original ones.

So it was that we came to "Mofatardo", an intriguing phoneme that to us sounds definitively Malaysian: a fearsome pirate? A loyal and heroic servant of Christ?

As I was outlining a plot of land for Travessa Maria Lucinda I went to see what was there in the street behind. It was simple - the Travessa do Mata Tigre (Tiger-Killer Alley). Although more mysterious, if possible, than the corruption of the word, who could have been that fearless hunter who gave his name and reputation to a city street? He whose knowledge of tigers was confined to those made into coats worn by the elegant ladies of the night in Macao?

Could this Mata Tigre be related to the "Fatiões" that we Portuguese-speakers used to imagine were powerful creatures that walked very fast, taking long strides - Fai-ti, Fai-ti-la!? [faitiões were Chinese cargo and passenger boats].

But on the flip side of the pataca coin - as if money grew on trees - was the world of retroversion into Portuguese, which some law (unquestionably patriotic) had rendered obligatory when naming any company or firm that would be publicly active and visible.

Thus the well-known sign-board for the "Quadruped Birds Shop", which, the owner explained, simply required the missing "and" (quadrupeds and birds) to restore the meaning.

But, quadrupeds? Perhaps this was some kind of insult hurled by author Eça de Queiroz - great beast, stupid lump of a donkey, silly ass, quadruped - how could such an insult have landed so far away? And what kind could the shop be selling? Real ones or symbolic ones?

I also remember my father-in-law calling the Sunday drivers he encountered "cambears", therefore economizing both phonetically and temporally by combining camels and bears.

I have the feeling nowadays that we no longer call anyone an ass. Is it because if we did, we know we would be risking an unexpected and probably simultaneous turning of shocked and irate heads?

Back to the issue of retroversion, but in a more mechanical (or perhaps electronic) sense, at the end of the 1980s, on Avenida Conselheiro Ferreira de Almeida, there was a motion pictures shop (literally translated as "quadros em movimento" - pictures in motion) that in advertently ended up revealing to us a NAME for Macao.

Pictures - of life, of interpretation, of nomination, of representation, of ritual; motion -simple, combined, manual, mechanical, digital, pedestrian, affectionate, mercenary, spontaneous, calculated, gentle, agitated, ferocious, desperate, intermingled, moved, heedless, catastrophic, lethal, marine, airborne, road-bound, lascivious, convulsive, compulsive, popular, religious, playful, gymnastic, infamous, sublime, total, foetal, automatic, unrestrained, spasmodic, retrograde, direct, exhaustive... yet always "con brio".

Named conjointly, at last - the inevitability of its becoming and of its condition, always unforeseeable.

Translated from the Portuguese by PHILOS - Comunicação Global, Lda. www.philos.pt

* Architect (Esbal, 1960). Master of Architecture degree awarded by the University of Pennsylvania (1962). He has worked in Portugal, Goa and Macao in both the public and private sectors. As an architect he has had connections with Macao since the 1960s, involved in activities covering the most varied aspects of architecture and town planning. He has received several prizes, in particular the AICA/ SEC National Award for Architecture (1987) and the ARCASIA Gold Medal (1994).