At last, seagulls and weed rule the cities of Navigators

 

 

Time, history, how the river flows into the sea, and the sea merges with the water. “The Tejo is salty”, I said, after a dip of my hand into the river of the city of Lisbon, by the Praça de Comércio. Street musicians were playing music by the riverside, a very young gypsy was sitting alone on the pedestrian street leading to the Praça, asking for, she knew what, a few cêntimos, or a life that was worthwhile to live, if at all.

 

Or shall we ask which side is the sea? The seagulls only come for food. They fly to wherever it can be found. Breadcrumbs, nuts, dead fish. Do they come for cadavers? So many years after war, fire, natural and human disasters in this sad, old city of Lisbon.

 

 

 

 

On our left was the longest bridge in Europe. Once it took me almost a full nap to cross the bridge. From the Expo, leaving Lisbon, we were on the bus, crossing the bridge. I fell asleep and when I woke up, we were still on the bridge. I suspected this was the sea, but no, on our right was the red bridge, by which we came in. 

 

We could see the bridge from almost all over Lisbon, as we could see the Tejo from all the small heights of the seven hills. I only know three, or four; the Castelo de São Jorge – no one can miss it – looks over the city and the city looks at it; the Graça, I had stayed at the Alfama; the Fado bairro; the Estrela, the terminus of Tram No. 28, which is always packed with tourists and pick-pockets. Or it is one of the small hills, next to the São José Hospital? I do not know. 

 

During our few visits to Lisbon, we had stayed at various apartments with views of the river or the city, so charming that I spent my time standing on the balcony, gazing at nothing. We understood why we always saw a figure protruding from a neighbourhood window; a woman in her pajamas, a young man with gelled spiky hair, or some forgotten old people, thinking about nothing. They must be. Time is slow and still in Lisbon, but not the Tejo, not the seagulls.

 

From our balcony we could see people walking by, over the “very dangerous” calçada cobble stones of Lisbon. There were so many elderly women walking with crutches and injured legs, one may ask why. At their best, the calçada along the hills are stairways. We would sit on the steps to listen to someone playing Bach, but one day we saw an ambulance parked at the top of a hill, to where a tram ran. When we walked down the stairs, we saw blood dripping along, fresh red drops, sprinkled on the steps. At the end of this trail sat a woman on a bench, her head bathed in blood. Two ambulance men attended to her, cleaning her face with cotton puffs, as if she were an actress. We did not stop. It was imprudent to witness pain and injury.

Those were the rainy days of Lisbon. A rainbow was not a rare sight. The arch stretched over the old city, with its hills of small houses with red tile roofs. There, is the empire of the weed. At the corner, between the steps of the calçadas and escadinhas you can find weed. On the rooftop of a pension in the most central Praça da Figueira, you can find weed. 

 

We stayed at one of these pensions before. At six o’clock in the morning, the rattle of engines was so thundering that no sound sleepers could stay in bed after that hour. So we left at eight o’clock in the morning, trying to find another pension in the back streets. When we left, standing at the corner of the Praça, there they were, weed on the small corners of the city. 

People come and go, centuries are human records of time passed and to come. 

 

On All Saints’ Day in 1755, an earthquake and subsequently a fire destroyed the city. Not much was left, but we can still find a few drawings of the fire at the Museu da Cidade. Centuries earlier, in June 1147, the city experienced another fire and destruction, from human themselves; Christian conquerors and Moors who held Lisbon fought over the city. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Jose Saramago rewrote the history of the battle, told by a proofreader installed in the neighbourhood of Castelo de São Jorge. Here, you can find weed, of course. The Castelo was first built in the 5th Century, was fortified by the Moors in the 9th Century, and was a royal residence from the 14th to 16th Century. 

 

History teller Gommes Eanes de Zurara was said to have worked at the Castelo. It is windy and cold up at the Castelo, and must have been so centuries ago. Weed doth know, thy enemy eternal. This story teller José Saramago remembers the Escadinhas de São Crispim, of Rua do Milagre de Santo António. The three miracles are sealed on the azulejos (tiles) of a building. 

On the corner is the Rua da Saudade.  What a word; solitude, loss, the mourning of Lisbon and Coimbra. Hence the Fado singer Argentina Santos, who laboured in a market from a very young age, knew about the harshness of time and life. Now almost an old woman, she sings the song Vida Vivida (A Life Lived) 

 

 

 

 

She owns a fado restaurant in Alfama, earns good money I suppose. Reservations have to be made for a meal and the music. Saudades are not cheap these days. 

 

The red April 25, 1974 bridge was named after the incident on the day when the military coup took place. Named the Carnation Revolution, it led to the loss of the colonies in Cape Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea, the west of Africa… 

 

 

 

 

Nowadays you can find them everywhere, selling small things, pirated CDs, wooden African masks, key chains, doing manual labour jobs. Are they free as they perceive themselves to be? That is what we have to ask about Revolutions. Are they just chaos full of empty hopes and chants of “Down and Out”, “Revolution Hasta Siempre”?  

 

One day we walked down from the small hill and were overwhelmed by a sea of carnations. Everyone at the march was wearing or holding a carnation, along the Avenida da Liberdade, to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Revolution. The march started from the Marquês de Pombal, to the Praça dos Restaudores, where a monument has been erected to commemorate the liberation of Portugal from Spanish rule in 1640.

 

 

Will April 25,1974 be remembered, or it was just a minute incident, to be forgotten in a century’s time? How wonderful is time, that it performs magic. Some things stay, some are forgotten, as if they had not happened. In Lisbon, we see our mortal selves. Saudade is the magic word.

 

We met our seagulls, their eyes gaping at human hands, to see if or when breadcrumbs would be thrown. It was a very sunny morning and noon, the only day it was not raining for our short stay this time. We started with the queue for pastéis de nata. Someone asked why we had to queue up for the pastry and I replied that it is said it is the best in Lisbon. I had one, and kept thinking about it; the pastéis de nata from Belém café. 

 

This young man then said, “I shall have three”. He wanted to have two and keep one for the evening, but pastéis do not wait. It would become very soggy by then, I advised, so every one of us had two, warm and crispy tarts in the park next to the riverside. The garbage bin was piled up with empty boxes of pastéis de nata. Once we had these pastéis, sweets from the cake shops were no longer attractive; too sweet, the Portuguese taste.

 

 

 

 

On this limestone caravel, completed in 1960 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the death of Infante D. Henrique, we found our story teller Gomes Eanes de Zurara. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea can still be read nowadays. The poet Luiz Vaz de Camões, a park was named after him in Macau; Francisco Xavier, founder of the Society of Jesus, defender of Jesuits, one of the first missionaries to the East. The earlier maps of the Orient are archived in the Museum of the Orient.

 

On the very packed tram No. 15 from central to Belém, we passed by the Red Bridge of the Carnation Revolution.  There are very few visitors in the Museum, but it is here we can see the works of Jesuit Monsignor Manuel Teixeira, who spent most of his life in Macau, and died after returning to Portugal. His historical studies of Macau and other subjects can be found at the Macau Science and Culture Centre, near the Museum. 

 

 

 

 

These navigators were reincarnated as characters returning from the colonies to the metropolis Lisbon, colonists who left the colonized countries when the tides were against them. The countries were not theirs. Nothing was as before. Saudade. 

 

Fernão Mendes Pinto, the writer on the back of the limestone caravel, is placed next to his mother, D. Filipa de Lancastre.Present is a poor book seller, “the only white man in the neighbourhood sold bibles, erotic postcards, and record players from door to door in the city.” We might have read his Peregrinação (Pilgrimage), in which he was frank enough to admit he committed murder. 

 

Francisco Xavier, is now a pimp at Martim Moniz, a neighbourhood which is not flattering at all. Walls overgrown with moss, buildings patched up by crumbling cement, the revered servant of Christ. As his master called his disciples, Francisco Xavier called his girls “Where are we going? “To work as a whore in Lisbon,” he informed her as the dirty water ran down the coattails of his jacket. “My mother ought to be able to make something out of you.” 

Forget about the doomsday foretold by António Lobo Antunes, the limestone caravel of Belém’s Monument to the Discoveries is a piece of majestic sculpture. Thirty-three figures on board – painters, sailors, mathematicians. 

 

We could hear the seagulls squawk, asking perhaps, who are you, what are you doing here, thou and the small ‘i’? Even answering, squawk, squawk, squawk, signifying nothing. 

 

 

 

 

In Lisbon, in Porto, in Coimbra, the few cities that the small ‘i’ know, people do not smile, do not laugh. They are not sulky, or hostile, just, a little back from stage, no drama, no magic. 

 

It was a beautiful day in Belém. When we came back to central, on the very packed tram again, all of us fell asleep. A Spanish-speaking woman, a South American maybe, was chatting delightfully with a Portuguese woman, each in their own language. I was woken up by their vehement goodbye “Adios”, to God. A few tourists from Brazil were fined for not having tickets.

 

 

 

 

Porto is not as “dangerous” as I was warned it would be. Maybe one gets used to sloping peddled streets. At least there are not so many “must see” or “must go” places in Porto, so we could spend most of the day in the small apartment, since it was raining. Or at a Brazilian bar. The Brazilian owner loved the bar so much that he decorated it with old wine bottles and many of his naive drawings. We spent an afternoon there, drinking Caipirinhas one after another. The building on the opposite side was abandoned, its entrance sealed, with ample space for graffiti, and earth for weed. 

 

We crossed the bridge, once and again. The old town of Porto is very small. On the other side of the town are port wine cellars. One can pay five euros for a visit and a tasting of a few small glasses of port wine.

 

The apartment we stayed in was in the centre of the town. A few of the old buildings were refurnished, still empty. There was no one. The patio was quiet. A few newly installed glass panes were smashed. Walking down the Rua dos Flores, a century old commercial street, we noticed that many of the buildings were half ruined, some were being rebuilt. A gypsy shouted at me when we crossed the road to the São Bento train station. I stopped and she picked up my stole for me. At six o’clock in the evening, it was getting dark. The town was deserted as if it were midnight. 

 

It was raining, from day into night. The only creatures that were heard in town at this time of the night, were the seagulls. 

 

There they were. From the Ribeira along the Rio Douro, it took a two-hour walk by the riverside to reach the shore of the Atlantic. We could see seagulls with cormorants on the sandbar of the estuary. Cormorants were black birds stretching their wings as bats did, when they were resting. The waves of the Atlantic were so huge that they could be seen from a distance. 

 

The ocean is as untamed as ever. When it reaches the shore, it roars with a furious rush. The beach was littered with skins and bones and half rotten flesh of dead fish.  Seagulls had their treat of the dead here. The smell of the dead was reminiscent of the odour of the catacomb of the Igreja de São Francisco, or of the dim wine cellars, stale, quiet, inutile.

 

We left Portugal by the modern airport not far from the Expo, Lisbon. The train ride between Lisbon and Porto was mostly enjoyable. At the Expo new town, we could leave behind the 500 years of saudades, for a while. I was relieved when I saw modern architecture, or when I visited someone at the Rádio Televisão Portuguesa. A journalist who formerly lived in Macau received me, took me to the newsroom, and there, as in any other newsroom in different parts of the world, people were wearing jeans, and had cups of coffee on their desks, working on computers or chatting with one another, speaking on the telephone. They brought me back to the world of today. That is why one apartment owner who was educated in the United States, said he hated Fado, he hated that sort of mourning and complaint.

 

We could of course have gone to the bars of Bairro Alto, or a midnight street of Chiado, where Africans played jazz and danced tap. Or we could have gone to a football match, the stadium would always be an arena of exhilaration. Amidst the music and the cheers of modern city life, we may not hear the squawks of the seagulls, though they are there, rampaging for dead matter or simply scraps. 

 

And the weed grows silently.