(February 14) 

How many steps does it take to haunt a street?   How many hours pacing back and forth - waiting - longing - until a piece of you takes up residence?  The ghosts of Lisbon waft off the Ruas with the incense of petrichor - a brief drizzle enough to stir this resurrection.  



The evening sky slouches behind the hills of Alfama. The oldest neighborhood in Lisbon and the only to survive the 300 year-old earthquake by the blessing, or perhaps the curse, to refuge the love, loss, and longing of the Celtic founders, the Moorish inheritors, the impoverished usurpers, and now the thronging cacophony of afternoon spectacle.  Despite the designation of ‘low season’ the city is a high-tide of tourism.  A magnet for apartment offers flush with Russian cash and the stranded dreams of shrewd opportunists - French, British, American, Korean, Chinese,  and on and on.  Even I came here to imagine a new life in 20 years.  The truism becomes the platitude - ‘we can’t afford to live here anymore.’  The domino of economic turmoil careens across continents and twists the tongues.  The locals assume a lively English as the modality for strangers, but whisper fears that Portuguese is dying in Lisbon - give it 20 years.   The longing for living-lost confronts the lost long life-to-live.  Who will die first?



We walk uphill from the Clube do Fado at 2am - the silent street beseeched by the spirits: ‘remember me, please? think of me.’  The songs stalk me… ‘foi por vontade de Deus… a culpu tua… que somos dois Fados desencontrados.’  Fado is not merely a style of singing, but a tacit acknowledgment of mis-recognition and entanglement.  The lonely evidence of our condition - of the soul.  Each person is their own ‘Fado.’  Joni Mitchell writes “I remember that time you told me, you said, ‘love is touching souls.’  Surely you’ve touched mine - cause - part of you pours out of me in these line from time to time.”  

Dinner before: 8pm-1am.  The singer enters without applause and wedges into the band - backing herself into a corner, and she has nowhere else to go.  Out of this vulnerability, this threat, she surrenders to the guitar and cries out her life.  She grounds her exhausted voice to the pillar at her back, pushing into the imprint of one-hundred-thousand Fados, and that multitude pushes back - a cradle; a grave.

—



Our being here necessitates imperfection.  Sin.  The Brazilian chef, Alex Atala says, “Behind every dish there is death.”  Dining this close to Fado, your life ends on the plate, no matter this extraordinary new life, renaissance, or gentrification.   We die in every moment - resurrected just as frequently.   In Fado, in each other.  In the dusty pavement, waiting for the wet tears of rain.

(Feb 16-19)

Magnolias bloom in Porto, and the roads reach in long sloping branches to flower as small parks and plazas. Walking through the litter-foliage of the city - paper streamers and refuse from echoed celebration, cigarette butts, and construction boulders -  It was impossible to find a dead-end street. Or a truly quiet one. Each pathway makes an essential contribution to the valence here, with cars flying deftly through the narrowness and busy bustlers backed to the wall.  A 5-storied canyon of buildings twists along the street, and for a long time I am not afforded a view of the river.

My first impression of Porto was severity.  A tour guide would later explain that people here are cruelly sarcastic with each other for fun.  A girl at the hostel says “Lisbon is for common sense, Porto is for rules.”  Instead of the youthful momentum I felt through Baixa-Chiado, Alfama, and Alcântara, my pace breaks against the patriarchs of the praça and their pleasantries of afternoon errands.  A piece of old Europe.  I arrived by bus at the station Campanhã; a concrete block dangling off the highway.  My plan to walk to the hostel encounters highway lanes and maximum capacity bridges. I loop and trace the facade of the station instead, way-finding a path toward the metro.  Anxiously, I jump on the first train and transfer at Trinidade, tying up a conversation with a Mexican tourist in the same predicament.  Through and around, up and down - a microcosm of what will be my time here.
In the hostel situated in a convent, converted to the train station, converted to a hostel, the spirit of the last nun still remains.  She refused to move and spent 30 years alone amongst the traffic and travel.  An anchor to the old world.  The hostel itself is tastefully done, celebrating the bones with new furniture and chic lighting.  And while every square foot of the building is taken up by the buzzing commerce of tourism, the far room of the top floor remains forfeit to this last spirit.  An empty clock tower lit only by the sun.
I emerge with the afternoon to spare. The concierge instructs me to find and consume francesinha, a 5-meat sandwich toasted under cheesy fried egg and bathed in tomato soup with a moat of fries.  Not for the faint of heart.  Perched just before the corner, I find a local cafe Marbellas.  Later I understand that I misunderstood the directions of the hostel staff and ended up in an unvetted cafeteria.  Uncharted territory.  I eavesdrop the local chitchat with my feeble Portuguese.  Prompt and attentive service, very clean.  They have an incredible selection especially considering the drip-drop pace of patronage and petty prices.  Far from enough people that any cafe in the US would tolerate.  Yet, no one places an order, the food just comes to the table as naturally as a tide carrying driftwood to the shore. When the denizens stumble out, it’s not thank you, but “até amanhã, sim até.”

Until tomorrow.

The next day I’m eating francesinha at Marujinho with a more dour style of service.  This was my original destination (I’m not sure how hostel recommendations always send you to places with less-than-effervescent energy).  But the food is truly decadent; the most calories packed into 10 Euros you’ll ever spend.  The waitress’s face sits broad, with an olive complexion and granite-sharp Portuguese nose - her stolid brows parallel her frown.  And then, her gaze shifts - a smile dawns.  A sudden Halloween parade: matadors, princesses, all types of masks and streamers screaming ‘Carnival!  Carnival!’.  The waitress insists that everyone go out and watch, her beaming face a beacon of joy long after the tricking-treaters leave our view. —————-
And before.

I cut into the hills and dribble down walkways.  Porto is actually two cities connected by the river: Oporto houses the politico-religious center and the commercial harbor that gives the wine its name; Villa Nova de Gaia keeps the caverns, patiently biding the years in the shadow of her socialite sister. 
In my wandering, the Douro appears suddenly as a dark ribbon strewn about the bottom of a wide canyon. A bridge funnels you over the top - a supine Eiffel tower.  You climb across, precariously avoiding the crowds and the train sharing the same plane.  But for the first time, my view escapes the labyrinth of old town and flitters over every crag.   Sun dust scatters over the valley.

(February 19-21) 

Amarante In a local tourist town, bells still swing. The gamelan clang creeps its amplitude cry through the alleyways, a Doppler effect in micro-distance.  Emerging from a dripping arch, I walk by gated glamour stairways for the next high season and construction projects frozen in quasi-gesture: unfinished skateparks, a remodeled movie theater, new apartments, groomed gardens, elevators to the park, etc.  Amarante is more Urban than I expected - and growing. I exhaust the historic walking ways that afternoon and stumble into the calm mundanity of people living, causing a sensation of being here either 5 years too early, or 5 too late.  Lexus, Mercedes, Tesla, BMW, Peugeot: luxury cars hairpin-chase me down the precipice.  I flee into the fog of the river.

The Tâmega submits into the mountain; placid and laconic, she seems to flow in place - I’m convinced that the same ripples have lived here a thousand years.  The sun struggles to overcome the clouds as oaks stare with stern vanity at their long reflections. I walk across abandoned fruit to reach the opposing bank. A carpet of crushed figs and overripe citrus rolls into a park flanked by grape vines, but poking around the hill-bound huts I lose my nerve and hope to forgive my own intrusion.

Something about travel, about tourism, we mistake for permission.  By paying, we are assured that we are within the ‘allowed’ boundary to be there.  The new development in Amarante seems to expand this boundary of flea market permission: will I see it in the travel guides 5 years from now?  But what is for sale?  Authenticity?  The doctored image in an era of images beaming bright in phone frames.  We’re acutely aware of this framing: of stories, of politics, of instagram posts, of proscenium 4th walls in restaurants and on TV, and even of pictures of a reasonable room in a Portuguese mountain town.  And so we come.

The ringing of the bell becomes incessant: the hour, the tenths, the fifteens, halfs, and three quarters.  Later I discover that the bells are struck by automatized mallets - not even the mountains escape simulation. I retreat to the final authenticity of rest, enclosed in my room to most enjoy the view of the river and town.
I feel guilty having come all this way only to alternate reading and gazing out the window-frame.  But in going anywhere without getting somewhere, isn’t the point just to be at all?

—–

The next morning.  The fog breaks for breakfast as I’m forced sunward by checkout time.  I wander out of my complacency and into an abandoned train station, across churchyards, into plazas, through the shadows of laundry drying.  An old woman smiles with a ‘bom dia’ as animated conversation breezes over the terrace. I let go of the need for an experience.  I finally arrive in Amarante.