A Year in the World (13 page)

The instrument came to Europe with the Muslim invasion of Andalucía, though its history goes back to 150
B.C.
Hipparchus of Bithynia is most frequently named as the inventor. A pilot today has the control tower; the medieval navigator had the astrolabe. The armillary performs similarly as sort of a three-dimensional astrolabe. The basic astrolabe function was taking longitude and latitude by coordinating celestial points and equatorial lines. A metal disk (the
rete
, “web” or “net”) engraved with a star map is superimposed over a larger disk marked with the earth’s circumference and markers. A movable ruler that Muslims called the
alidade
calculates relative positions. If you know the location of the sun or a star, your astrolabe can find time and place. The metal ring at the top allows it to be hung, as Chaucer carefully noted, in straight plumb. Though the church considered them instruments of the devil, astrolabes must have been sacred to the captains.

There’s more. Actual boats in a drydock warehouse. Slick blue fishing boats with the evil eye protection painted on the prow. Some designs look like Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs. A black rooster decorates a rowboat. We look at the yacht of a king, various types of war boats, and primitive rowboats. We pass on through the carriage museum, which just illustrates that almost everything rescued from history is interesting, if only mildly.

The tram doesn’t come. No taxi in sight. We begin the long walk back. Empty plazas seem to be waiting for some military parade to materialize. There’s an ease here; the traffic not frenetic. So many pastry shops and cafés. Cat tongues, almond tarts, fruit tarts, citrus tarts. At the blue-and-white-tiled Canecas, the bakers, visible through glass, are flattening rounds of dough, forming a dome, then folding over the edges, leaving a cleft. We buy one of these breads in an oval shape, the opening sprinkled with seeds. We already know the Lisbon bread is especially good.

Ed has learned to order a
bica
, the espresso equivalent. He is thrilled with the coffee. “Better than French. Certainly better than in Spain. It’s the old connection with Africa. They must have had good beans early on.”

“As good as Italian?”

“Umm, different.”

For
the next few days we follow tourist pursuits, interspersing each stop at a museum or castle or church with a visit to a new pastry shop. I become seriously attached to almond tarts. Ed prefers the classic custard tarts and wishes he’d been fed them in childhood. We loiter outside at Café Brasileira, which overlooks a statue of the unruly writer Fernando Pessoa. He might have sat in this chair when he wrote,

From the terrace of this café I look at life with tremulous eyes. I see just a little of its vast diversity concentrated in this square that’s all mine . . . perhaps my greatest ambition is really no more than to keep sitting at this table in this café . . . Ah, the mysteries grazed by ordinary things in our very midst! To think that right here, on the sunlit surface of our complex human life, Time smiles uncertainly on the lips of Mystery! How modern all this sounds! And yet how ancient, how hidden, how full of some other meaning besides the one we see glowing all around us.

Pessoa refused to limit himself to a single persona. His chameleon sensibility gave us many books seemingly written by different authors.
The Book of Disquiet
, one of my favorites, is written in the voice of an insignificant bookkeeper but feels close to autobiography. His translator, Richard Zenith, describes this monumental scrapbook as “anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man’s anguished soul.” The book, a wonderful travel companion in Lisbon, consists of small sections, perfect for reading in sips at all the cafés he frequented around town. Pessoa rarely left Lisbon in his adult life, and the city informs, infiltrates, and grounds his writing, no matter how far afield his personas pull his identity. The green sky over the river Tejo, “the potted plants that make each balcony unique,” sunset colors turning to gray on buildings, the cry of the lottery ticket seller, the “eternal laundry” drying in the sun—the myriad sensations of the city form the lively background of his pages. I love Sundays in European cities, the sudden quiet of the streets, with the parks full of strollers and children. Pessoa writes:

I’m writing on a Sunday, the morning far advanced, on a day full of soft light in which, above the rooftops of the interrupted city, the blue of the always brand-new sky closes the mysterious existence of stars into oblivion.

In me it is also Sunday . . .

My heart is also going to a church, located it doesn’t know where. It wears a child’s velvet suit, and its face, made rosy by first impressions, smiles without sad eyes above the collar that’s too big.

A band of about twelve serious-faced musicians plays in the plaza in front of Pessoa’s statue. They seem about to slip into a dirge at any moment.

The funiculars are fun, like rides at a carnival, and with the taxis so plentiful and amazingly cheap, we get all over town with ease, walking one way, riding back the other.

The Fiera da Ladra, the Thief’s Fair, has no ship models, no baroque candlesticks, nothing to covet. The thieves must have gone into real estate. Instead I flash on everything I threw away in my whole life—Barbie with one leg, paperbacks missing their covers, sad bathrobes, and old computer keyboards. We leave and meander until we’re lost in the Alfama, the labyrinthine historic Arab quarter. You’d need to drop stones to find your way back to where you started. Arm’s-width streets twist, climb, double back, drop. Whitewashed houses with flowering pots and crumbling ruins with gaping courtyards open to small plazas with birds competing in the trees for best song of the morning—a soulful neighborhood for spending your days. If I lived in Lisbon, I would choose to live here. Redolent of the souk, the bazaar, the roots of Iberia, the Alfama does not seem just quaint and interesting. At heart, this area remains deeply exotic. Open this door and find the memory of a Muslim mathematician consulting his astrolabe, pass this walled garden and imagine the wives of the house gathered around the fountain under the mimosa. Easily, memory seeks a guitarist playing by moonlight at an upper window, a designer of tiles in a workshop, a child weaving on a doorstep, a sailor packing his duffel. The spirit of the Alfama feels close to the spirit of the artifacts of Lusitania that we saw on the first day. Here’s where mystery lingers, where ritual and alchemy and magic take place. This is the center, naturally enough, for
fado
, meaning “fate,” the music whose
saudade
rips out of the heart.
Saudade
. We have no equivalent English word. Does that mean we have no equivalent English feeling? A line from Yeats comes close to the meaning: “A pity beyond all telling is hid at the heart of love.” But
saudade
connotes, too, a pervasive longing and reaching. It seems to be a lower-voltage force than the Spanish
duende
but springs from the same taproot: we are alone, we will die, life is hard and fleeting—easy realizations but, when experienced from within, profound.

Colors: Islamic turquoise, curry, coral, bone white, the blue layers of the sea. The scents of baking bread, wet stones, and fish frying at outdoor stands. The aromas of coriander and mint and big stews and roast pork emanating from the small neighborhood restaurants, the
tascas
. Menus of today’s
prato do dia
are posted in the windows, and we choose a
tasca
with everyone seated together at crowded tables. As we wait, I admire a walnut cake with caramel frosting served to a man across from us. He sees this and reaches over for my fork, handing me back a large bite of his dessert. The waiter brings platters of fish fried in a gossamer, crispy batter, and a spicy eggplant the old Moors would have loved. We are astonished. Here’s the real local food. For dessert, old-fashioned baked apples are served to Ed, and to me a flan with cinnamon, a whiff of the Arabs. The bill—twenty euros, a fourth of what the guidebook restaurants cost, and ten times better.

The Alfama slows for afternoon. Music drifts from a window, not
fado
, not fateful, but a whiny Bob Dylan relic inviting a lady to lay across a big brass bed. Instead, a woman hangs her laundry on a balcony, her mouth full of green plastic clothespins. Cheery old trams, red and yellow, ply the main streets. At an antique shop I find blue and white tiles from the 1700s in dusty stacks around the floor. Ed steps outside to call our friend Fulvio in Italy. I see him gesturing to the air like an Italian as I look through a hundred or so tiles and choose four to hang in my California kitchen.
Souvenir
—to come to the aid of memory. I always will like to be reminded of Lisbon. From the castle grounds up top, all of terra-cotta–topped Lisbon spreads out for the viewing, a fortunate city on the water.

Lisbon, like San Francisco, inhabits the edge. The first or last edge? In California along the Pacific coast, I always have the sense that I’m perched on the sharp shoulder of the end of the country—nowhere else to go. On the other side of that cold ocean, waves break on far, adventitious shores. The harsh terrain of the California coast remains a lonely and wild beauty. Geographically, Lisbon feels quite opposite. From here the old navigators ventured south to Africa, around to India, and west, reaching both Newfoundland and Brazil by 1500. Prince Henry the Navigator—I’ve known his name since fourth grade—charted his sea lanes outward from here, though he never set forth on the waves himself. Magellan, funded by Spain, did. And this was the pin-pricked spot on Vasco da Gama’s maps, the home shore. “Bartolomeu Dias,” Ed remembers. The names float back from long lost quizzes.
What was the name of Vasco da Gama’s ship?
The
San Rafael
, with the
San Gabriel
and the
Berrio
sailing with him. My teachers always were interested in the names of ships and the horses of Confederate generals.

Although the city of Lisbon might remind me also of San Francisco—from the harbor rises a city of hills climbed by picturesque trams, where one lives with the peril of earthquake—it does not. My initial impression dissolves the natural tendency to compare the new to the familiar. This is the first edge of Europe, not the last.

In the Principe Real park we order coffee at a glass café and drink it under an enormous magnolia. A cedar has been trained out over a circular pergola, and men sit under the branches playing cards. The houses around the park speak of the life of the city. Yellow, dark liver-red, pink, they are substantial and not at the peak of perfection but worn to a comfortable patina. A slender girl opens a door and squints up at the sun. Her life inside remains a mystery. Mystery—ah, that word. It appears throughout Pessoa’s work, the mystery of the ordinary, the mystery of one life in one place.

The number of bookstores confounds us. Every street! I stop in one to look at cookbooks. We’re finding the food good but feel we are missing something. The clerk becomes enthusiastic. She takes down several books, shaking her tight curls and quickly reshelving. She discards the idea of any cookbook other than
Traditional Portuguese Cooking
by Maria de Lourdes Modesto. The first page she shows us features lard water soup. “She does everything right. Look at this recipe for
rissoles
.” The pronounciation is something like
ree soysh
. We’ve seen them in the café display cases. “It’s pastry—savory—filled with prawns. Or fish or pork. I have to have
rissoles
every day.” She motions at her colleague. “He has to go get them for me,” she laughs. “You can tell I like to eat.” Her circumference suggests many
rissoles
.

“What are your other favorites?” I take out my notebook. What she likes, we will seek.

“Stuffed spider crab. Baked
bacalhau
, dried cod—oh,
bacalhau
every way. My mother-in-law just puts it in the oven with potatoes and onions and parsley and lemon. We eat cod a thousand ways.” As soon as the Atlantic water routes opened, the Portuguese began fishing the Newfoundland seas for cod, drying them like starched white shirts to bring home months later. At every market in Italy and all over the Mediterranean you find piles of stiff cod, but nowhere as often as in Portugal.

“Cabbage,” she’s saying. “You should come to my house and have my green soup with sausage. You have to slice the cabbage so very fine. The soups of my country! The green bean with mint!” She describes several bread soups with fish or vegetables. We feel more and more famished the longer she talks. I wish she’d send that colleague out for something now. She moves from various preparations of eel to an unlikely-sounding dish, a classic of the region. “And the next time you eat, you must try the
cataplana
of clams and pork.”

“What is
cataplana
? A place?”

“My dear, a
cataplana
is what cooks it. The pan with a lid that lifts, the lid pinned together. Like a clam. Every house has one.”

“We’ll look for that on the menu,” Ed promises, as we exit to find one more
sonho
, a fried sugared pastry that lives up to its name,
dream
.

Of
the many sights, I’m most awed by the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, housed in the former Convento da Madre de Deus. The history of Portuguese tiles hangs on the walls. The whole city is a wild museum of
azulejos
, but the museum establishes the five-hundred-year context. The history starts with earth-toned Moorish tiles, their colors held separate by ridges, almost like cloisonné. By 1700 Portugal had its own distinctive way with tile, the cool and fresh blue and white. It “wallpapers” churches, banks, entranceways, benches, fountains. All over town blue and white tile pictures announce the pharmacy, butcher, and house number. Art nouveau picked up the tile tradition. We look for those facades with the characteristic curving pinks, yellows, and aquas. Noticing tile patterns and sidewalks of waving stone patterns is part of the joy of walking in Lisbon.