Here Is Where We Meet (2 page)

The animals at least are here to help us, she said, looking at what she took to be a cat basking in the sun ten steps down.

It’s not a cat, I said. It’s an old fur hat, a chapka.

That’s why I was a vegetarian, she said.

You loved fish! I contested.

Fish are cold-blooded.

What difference does that make? If it’s a principle, it’s a principle.

Everything in life, John, is a question of drawing a line, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You can’t draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down by somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.

So time doesn’t count and place does? I asked again.

It’s not any place, John, it’s a meeting place. There aren’t many cities left with trams, are there? Here you can hear them all the while – except for a few hours during the night.

Do you sleep badly?

There’s hardly a street in the centre of Lisboa where you can’t hear trams.

It was a number 194, wasn’t it? We took it every Wednesday from East to South Croydon and back. First we shopped in Surrey Street market, then we went to the Davies Picture Palace, with the electric organ that changed colour when the man played it. The number was 194, no?

I knew the organist, she said, and I bought celery for him in the market.

You also bought kidneys, despite being a vegetarian.

Your father enjoyed them for breakfast.

Like Leopold Bloom.

Don’t show off! There’s nobody here to notice. You always wanted to sit in the front of the tram, upstairs. Yes, it was a 194.

And climbing up the stairs you complained: Ah my legs, my poor legs!

You wanted to be up there in front because there you could drive and you wanted me to watch you drive.

I loved the corners!

The rails are the same here in Lisboa, John.

Do you remember the sparks?

In the damned rain, yes.

Driving after the cinema was best.

I never saw anyone look as hard as you did, sitting on the edge of your seat.

In the tram?

In the tram and in the cinema too.

You often cried in the cinema, I told her. You had a way of dabbing at your eyes.

The way you drove the tram pretty soon put a stop to that!

No, you really cried, most weeks.

Shall I tell you something? I don’t suppose you’ve noticed the tower of Santa Justa, just down there? It’s owned by the Lisboa Tramway Company. There’s a lift in it and the lift goes nowhere really. It takes people up, they take a look around from the platform and then it brings them down again. Owned by the tramway company. Now, a film, John, can do the same thing. It takes you up and brings you back to the same place. That’s one of the reasons why people cry in the cinema.

I’d have thought–

Don’t think! There are as many reasons for crying in the cinema as there are people who buy tickets.

She licked her lower lip, a gesture she also used after applying lipstick. On one of the roofs above the Mãe d’Agua staircase a woman was singing as she pegged out sheets on a line to dry. Her voice was plaintive and the sheets were very white.

When I first came to Lisboa, my mother said, I came down in that lift of the Santa Justa. I have never been up in it – you understand? I came down in it. Like we all do. That’s why it was built. It’s lined with wood like a first-class railway carriage. I’ve seen a hundred of us in it. It was built for us.

It only takes about forty, I said.

We weigh nothing. And do you know the first thing I saw, when I stepped out of the lift? A shop for digital cameras!

She got to her feet and started climbing back up the staircase. She had a certain difficulty in breathing, and so, to make it easier, to encourage herself, she blew out in long hisses between her lips, pursed as if for whistling. It was she who first taught me to whistle. We at last reached the top.

For the moment I am not leaving Lisboa, she said. For the moment I’m waiting.

Whereupon she turned round and made for the bench she had been sitting on, and the square became demonstrably still, so still that she eventually vanished.

During the next few days she kept herself hidden. I wandered around the city, watching, drawing, reading, talking. I wasn’t looking for her. From time to time, however, I was reminded of her – usually by something only half-seen.

Lisboa is a city which has a relationship with the visible world like no other city. It plays a game. Its squares and streets are paved with patterns of white and coloured stones, as if, instead of being roads, they were ceilings. Its walls, both indoors and outdoors, are covered with the famous azulejos tiles wherever you look. And these tiles speak of the fabulous things to be seen in the world: a monkey playing pipes, a woman picking grapes, saints praying, whales in the ocean, crusaders in their boats, basilica plants, magpies in flight, lovers embracing, a tame lion, a Moreia fish with spots like a leopard. The tiles of the city draw attention to the visible, to what can be seen.

At the same time these same decorations on walls and floors, around windows and down staircases, are saying something different, in fact the opposite. Their crackly white ceramic surfaces, their vivacious colours, the mortar joints around them, the repeated patterns, all insist upon the fact that they are covering something up, and that whatever is behind them or beneath them, will remain, thanks to them, invisible and hidden for ever!

As I walked I saw the tiles as if they were playing cards which hid more of the game than they revealed. I walked and climbed and turned between deal after deal, hand after hand, and I remembered her playing patience.

Nobody seems to agree about the number of hills on which the city is built. Some say seven, like Rome. Others dispute this. Whatever the number may be, the city centre is built on steep, precipitous, rocky ground rising and falling every few hundred metres. And for centuries its steep streets have appropriated every device imaginable to banish vertigo: steps, enclaves, landings, impasses, curtains of washing, windows at floor level, little yards, railings, shutters; everything is used to offer shelter from the sun and the winds, and to blur any distinction between indoors and outdoors.

Nothing could induce her to go closer than fifty metres to a cliff-edge.

Between the stairways and the belvederes and the washing in the Alfama district, I got myself lost several times.

Once we were trying to get out of London and had taken the wrong road. Father stopped the car and unfolded a map. We are going far, far, too far to the west, Mother said. I have a good bump for direction, a phrenologist told me so more than once. He could feel it here. She was touching the back of her head. She had very fine hair with which she was never comfortable. He said my bump for places was here.

Nobody, I retorted from the back seat, takes phrenology seriously any more. They were a bunch of crypto-fascists.

Why do you say that?

You can’t measure a person’s gifts with a pair of calipers. And anyway, where did they get their norms from? From the Greeks, of course. Narrowly European. Racist.

The one who felt my head was Chinese, she muttered.

They divided people into just two categories, I said, pure and degenerate!

They were right about me anyway! I have a good bump for places! We’ve come too far, we should have turned left miles back, where we saw that poor man without any legs. Now we may as well go on – no point in turning back, it’s too late. If we can, we should take the next on the left.

It’s too late! was one of her favourite phrases. And hearing it, I was invariably filled with fury. Some event, trivial or grave, would have prompted her to use it. Yet the phrase seemed to me to refer not to an event, but to the way time folds – something I began noticing from about the age of four – the folds ensuring that some things can be saved and others cannot. She would pronounce the three words lightly, without pathos, almost as if she was quoting a price. And my fury was partly against this calm. Maybe it was the example of her calm, combined with my fury, which later made me study History.

I thought of this while I drank a small cup of sharp coffee in an Alfama bar, the size of a caravan. I looked at the faces of the other men, all over fifty, weathered in the same way. Lisboetas often talk of a feeling, a mood, which they call saudade, usually translated as nostalgia, which is incorrect. Nostalgia implies a comfort, even an indolence such as Lisboa has never enjoyed. Vienna is the capital of nostalgia. This city is still, and has always been, buffeted by too many winds to be nostalgic.

Saudade, I decided as I drank a second coffee and watched a drunk’s hands carefully arranging the accurate story he was telling as if it were a pile of envelopes, saudade was the feeling of fury at having to hear the words too late pronounced too calmly. And Fado is its unforgettable music. Perhaps Lisboa is a special stopover for the dead, perhaps here the dead show themselves off more than in any other city. The Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, who loves Lisboa deeply, spent a whole day with the dead here.

The following Sunday I was in the Baixa district, crossing the immense Praça do Comércio. The Baixa is the only district of the old city that is flat and low. Surrounded on three sides by the famous hills, its fourth side is the estuary of the Tagus, known as the Sea of Straw because its waters, in a certain light, have a golden sheen. From the landing stages here during the fifteenth century, Lisboa’s navigators, merchants and slave-traders set out for Africa, the Orient and, later, Brazil. Lisboa was then the richest capital of Europe, trading in everything which defied the Atlantic: gold, slaves from the Congo, silks, diamonds, spices.

Stick two cloves into each apple, she’d instruct, and then we’ll bake them in the oven with brown sugar.

When she wasn’t looking I’d stick in a third, with the conviction that this would make the apple taste finer.

If she spotted the third one, she’d take it out and put it back in the jar. They come from Madagascar, she explained. Waste not, want not!

This was another phrase of hers that was like a refrain. Yet unlike It’s Too Late, Waste Not, Want Not was a warning rather than a lament. A warning which somehow applied, I thought as I walked across it, to the Praça do Comércio. All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisable dream.

A fatal earthquake, the tidal waves that accompanied it, the fires that followed it, devastated a third of Lisboa and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants during the first week of November 1755. Famine, disease and looting ensued. While the fires were still burning, and people had only the tattered clothes they stood up in, men bought and sold looted diamonds among ashes and rubble. Despite the blue sky above, despite the golden tan of the Sea of Straw, there was talk everywhere of Punishment and Retribution.

And it was the following year that the Marquês de Pombal began to dream of a new city of Reason and Symmetry. After a catastrophe that had shaken the optimism and sense of justice of philosophers the length of Europe, the rebuilt city of Lisboa was going to propose a prosperity, a security guaranteed by the flow of wealth alone! A banker’s dream of streets whose regularity, transparency, parallel lines and reliability would match those of perfectly kept accounts, and whose immense Praça do Comércio would open the city to the trade of the entire world . . .

Yet in the second half of the eighteenth century Lisboa was neither Manchester nor Birmingham, and the Industrial Revolution had started elsewhere. The decline that would lead to Portugal becoming the poorest nation in Western Europe had already set in.

However many people there are in the Praça do Comércio, it always looks half-empty.

She kept little in her purse. Her movements, when handling cash, were neat and precise. She hid small sums that she had ear-marked for certain projects in different envelopes, or in the drawers of her dressing table, so she wouldn’t be tempted to spend them. Once she lost a ten-shilling note, which represented a third of a working woman’s monthly wage. It’s gone! she sobbed. It’s gone! She said this as if the note had chosen to go, as if it were an animal who had run away, ungratefully run away, for she was giving it a good home. Gone!

When she wept, she tried to turn away from me. This may have been to spare me, but it was also because her tears took her back to other times, before I had been thought of. While she was crying, I waited, like you wait for a long train to pass at a level crossing.

After a while she dabbed her eyes and said: We’ll manage. All we have to do is to make a little go a long way.

By now I was in the Rua Augusta, one of the straight streets of which the banker had dreamt. Being Sunday, the opticians and hairdressers, the travel agencies and maritime insurance offices were shut. People were on their way to have lunch with family or friends. Many were carrying little packages of sweetmeats to offer to their hosts; Sunday gifts, elaborately wrapped and tied with their ribbons knotted in bows.

On the corner of the Rua da Conceição a crowd waited on the pavement, peering towards the Madalena church. I decided to wait too. There was no traffic. Even the trams had been stopped.