This tripartite novel has a time span of fifty years, but distributed in a mirror image: 25 years before the 25th of April 1974 and 25 years after the collapse of the Estado Novo (the longest European dictatorship of the 20th century), showing the enormous social and political differences between life under dictatorship and life under democracy in Portugal. Thus, we follow 50 years of the life of the main character, a self-reliant woman named São, from her dismal early childhood in an orphanage up through her tempestuous adulthood and her reclusive old age. When she was six years old, São was abandoned by her father — immediately after her mother’s death — in an orphanage for underprivileged children run by nuns. In this space, girls were taught a series of tasks that would later allow them to become servants in the houses of wealthy families, making the asylum a literal maid factory. Life in the orphanage was very austere, the girls could have only two objects: a needle to mend their humble gowns (which was the only piece of clothing they had, all year round) and a hairpin to hold their hair while they ate. Of course, they didn’t have toys.
During the first half of the novel, we follow the characters living within the context of the dictatorship: the resistance to Salazar, oppression (women did not vote, could not leave the country or work in commerce, let alone open a bank account without their husband’s permission), illiteracy (half of the population could not read or write), alcoholism, poverty, domestic violence, the political police (PIDE), informers, the colonial wars, and, of course, prison, torture, life underground or in exile. Then, in the second half, we witness the changes that democracy brought, embodied in two different generations: the girl aforementioned— who grew up and escaped the fate of being raised to be a maid — becoming an independent woman, but still carrying the weight of decades of Salazarist oppression, and her daughter who was born after April’s Revolution and had access to education, becoming the first woman with a degree in her family.
Alfonso Cruz writes with psychological acuity that entwines the historical and political with the personal. The entire novel is told in brief vignettes: portentous episodes that grip the reader with their highly pictorial language. Though much of the subject matter is melancholic in essence, Cruz infuses his episodes with bursts of ironic humour. Fábrica de criadas is a dynamic novel of profound literary, historical, and emotional merit, akin to vibrant works by writers like Rachel de Queiroz and Elena Ferrante.
94,000 words – Original Language: Portuguese (Público, 2024).