Lisbon – Sunday
I was going to be in Lisbon in order to attend a week long conference on Artificial Intelligence; I would be arriving on one Sunday and leaving the next. I’d spent the previous two and a half months — June, July and half of August — as a visiting student at Edinburgh University, commuting back and forth from Glasgow each week day. It was supposed to be summer but I didn’t see much of it: the skies were always gloomy and overcast and dark grey with the threat of the next downpour. I had been looking forward to Lisbon for a while; I saw it as belated compensation for the dire Scottish non-summer and was relishing the chance to lounge around idly in the sunshine – which actually, in the end, I didn’t get to do too much of.
I departed from Edinburgh airport, flying straight from there to Lisbon. The flight was uneventful, except that as the plane was banking on its descent into Lisbon airport my ears popped really badly. It got so bad that I started wondering whether my ear drum hadn’t punctured from the change in pressure. The worst thing about it, aside of course from the physical pain, was that as far as I could see I was the only one suffering this particular ordeal; there were the other passengers blithely chatting away and laughing amongst themselves, completely oblivious to my distress, without the consideration to look even mildly uncomfortable.
The view as we descended — and I had made sure to get a window seat on boarding the plane — was dazzling: Lisbon stretched out beneath us, basking in the bright morning sunshine beside a glittering azure sea; but there was no way that I could enjoy it as I sat there furiously wiggling my pinkies in my ears in the futile hope that that would somehow bring me relief. Mercifully, the torture wasn’t too prolonged and the plane landed on schedule. Once we were on the ground, the pain stopped. I tried inducing myself to yawn in order to restore my hearing, since I was semi-deaf at this point – and the method turned out to be partly successful, but it would take a full day before my hearing was completely restored, and my ears popped back to normal.
We disembarked at Lisbon airport and I was impressed at how shiny and new it looked; though the terminal felt a little cavernous for just the small trickle of passengers from the Edinburgh flight, trundling through its spacious and lengthy corridors and eager to get to baggage reclaim. After passing through the passport barrier, and locating the appropriate carousel for my flight, I stood and waited; there was a lengthy, and mind numbing wait before the luggage finally started to make its appearance, with little else to do but to gaze blankly around me. Eventually, it began to rumble along on the conveyer belt and the wait was over. I heaved my trolley case up from off of the carousel and made my way to the exit — stopping off first to buy an adaptor plug for my laptop and a small Lisbon guidebook from the newsagents in the arrivals lounge. The till assistant didn’t speak English too well and hadn’t quite understood what I’d asked for; when I looked in my bag later I discovered that she’d actually sold me a Europe to UK adaptor plug. Oh well I thought, perhaps B might find it useful.
I went outside and waited in the long queue for the taxi rank which was shielded from the oppressive mid-morning heat by the giant steel canopy overhead. Eventually, after yet another ponderous wait I got into a battered beige taxi and we pulled away from the airport and sped off down the motorway. The taxi driver wore a glum, forlorn expression on his face, and came across a bit of a stern, miserable sort, all of which I found intriguing: mightn’t this be an example of the famous Portuguese melancholy, the saudade, that I’d heard so much about? But no, I think he was just a cantankerous old bastard – I certainly didn’t encounter too many others like him in Lisbon, excepting maybe the restaurant waiters — plus he probably couldn’t speak much English anyway, was I expecting him to engage me in warm conversation to welcome me to the city? But, as always, actions speak louder than words. Halfway through our journey he rolled down the window, lifted the cigarette from out of his mouth, loudly cleared his throat and launched a thick fat bolt of phlegm out onto the side of the motorway. Welcome to Lisbon.
We arrived at the Hotel Radisson 10 minutes or so after having set off from the airport. It was built in an inoffensive art deco style, and situated beside an overpass and a busy main road beyond which, within walking distance, were the Campo Grande metro station and the Estádio José Alvalade; the latter a football stadium cum shopping complex which boasted its own Lidl – which I think I must have visited each and every day of my stay in Lisbon – and sundry other retail outlets. The receptionist at the hotel registration desk was a slim, pretty black girl. Unfortunately, my ears were still unpopped at this point and I had to ask her to repeat herself a few times while she ran through the usual guest instructions in her perfect English, after which I made for the elevator with my baggage.
My room was on the third floor and despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the hotel was only mid range and that it was run by a faceless multinational hotel chain, it is one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed – although, rest assured, I did atone for having enjoyed this relative luxury by staying at the Hotel Drozgba in Brno the following week. It wasn’t that my room at the Radisson was particularly lavish or that – apart from the gorgeous bathroom suite – the amenities were anything special. No, what I really loved about it was that everything was done so tastefully and without too much fuss, but with no little panache: the décor unobtrusive and the lighting subdued. (In fact the lighting had been very subdued at first and it had taken me a while to realise that the hotel key card had to be inserted in the slot beside the door before the light switches became operative.) And of course it helped that the room was spacious, the twin beds were extremely comfortable, and that everything was spotlessly clean — Plus each floor had its own ice machine. Yes, ultimately it was a bit bland and a bit soulless and, certainly, it lacked any real character of its own, anything that would distinguish it from any other Radisson room anywhere else in the world — but that’s what made it so reassuring. The fact is that I was to spend most of the following week out and about in one of the most soulful cities I’ve ever visited and I needed somewhere to cool off.
I took a shower to wash off the morning sweat and then went downstairs to ask for directions to the university: I thought I might as well register for the conference that afternoon and save time later, start off the day’s aimless wanderings with a concrete aim in mind. At the reception desk, I was given a cheap foldaway tourist map that missed out the names of a lot of the small winding streets in the centre of Lisbon — it was, after all, free, and there are a copious number of such streets — but that served me well in the following days. (I’ve noticed this in a few cities now, tour companies producing reasonably detailed maps and giving them away for free, something that didn’t used to happen so much before: it used to be that you were supposed to buy your own maps.) The receptionist with whom I had checked in earlier had trouble locating exactly where the University was and went to ask her colleagues. After a brief discussion they came up with a tentative location and circled it on my map, and I asked her if it was within walking distance. No, it wasn’t, and she was quite adamant about this; she advised me that I should take the bus or the metro – which I remember thinking was a bit odd given that the distance didn’t seem that great on the map.
I can kind of understand her caution here. Outside the sun was shining fiercely with scarcely a breath of wind or a hint of breeze to mitigate the heat. There was a real risk of dehydration or sunburn for anyone foolish enough to stay out too long — and me, a gringo fresh off the plane after all (dark skinned, but still). But the damned university was only about five minutes walk away from the hotel. Basically you had to cross a busy main road, the Campo Grande, either via an unnecessarily elaborate bridge or by taking your chances and running across the road itself. After the first two or three crossings I decided to avoid taking the bridge which always seemed to add two or three minutes onto my journey.
On the other side of the road, on a grass verge beside a tired looking bus shelter were two resident peacocks that would spend most of their time strutting and picking at the turf, tail feathers packed away for less banal occasions; and behind them stood my objective, the Faculdade de Ciências de Universidade de Lisboa – a rather anonymous looking, rather ugly complex of dirty white concrete buildings which could easily have been mistaken for a hospital or a factory. In their defence these buildings did, after all, constitute, the Faculty of Science and Engineering — so that I realise the primary intent was not to create an environment in which to stimulate the poetic and philosophic impulses — but did they have to make it look so barren and so utilitarian? It didn’t seem like the kind of place that would inspire much in the way of creative or technical endeavour in whichever field.
It took me a few minutes to work my way around the maze of walkways on that first day, following paper signs that had been posted on walls and pillars, until I finally located the registration desk. I hadn’t even checked that registration would start today; I thought that perhaps, the Portuguese, like their Latin brothers, the Italians, might hold the Lord’s Day as sacred. But no, I managed to arrive at the registration point five minutes before registration was officially due to commence, and so I sat and waited with three or four others. And as a reward for my patience during this brief wait, I was one of the first to register and get the registration pack which included the conference proceedings — a big thick thousand page doorstop of a book which I ended up leaving in my hotel room when I left to go to Brno – and a cheap satchel inside of which were pamphlets with conference details, some leaflets with local tourist information, and a little bottle of port wine.
Having become newly burdened with this stack of objects, I decided to return back to the hotel, managing, rather amazingly, not to die of heat exposure on the way. After dumping everything in my room I decided that now the boring stuff was over and done with it was time to go and explore Lisbon. So I went straight back out, first to the stadium Lidl to buy some supplies: apples, bananas and bottled water. For some annoying reason, this branch of Lidl had decided not to refrigerate any of the bottles of water they sold: instead they were all laid out in stacks on the shop floor. So when I left the store I ended up buying another bottle of water from a street vendor just outside the stadium, this it was time ice cold; but it was worth it, it tasted so good and it just cut straight through my thirst.
I caught a train from Campo Grande station to…well I wasn’t sure where I was going; I just wanted to get off somewhere in the centre of town and spend the rest of the afternoon exploring, so I took a train that was heading towards the coast. I sat on the train gazing at the map of the metro system laid out on my lap and decided to get off at Baixa Chiado, the last station but one on the green line — it seemed as good a starting point as any.
A husky, rather sensual female voice announced each metro station in its turn over the speaker system. I noticed that the names of the stops were pronounced in a way that sounded almost nothing like I’d guessed from reading my map. Portuguese is rather like Gaelic or Polish in that respect: it’s a struggle for native English (or French or Spanish, etc) speakers to match the way things are written to the way they’re spoken: a result of the necessity of fitting a large number of quite distinctive sounds into the same 20 or so letters as everyone else.
If nothing else this discrepancy made it fun to try and second guess the pronuncation of the next station to come– and I struggled, even after I’d been riding the same line for a week and hearing the same roll call of stations repeated over and over.
Baixa Chiado station was a grand cavern tiled in shades of russet and caramel; the neatly arranged light fittings casting sleek patterns on the bare subterranean walls; and everything so immaculately well-kept. It was a long way back up to the surface, too far for one single continuous escalator, instead you had to ascend up three successive stepped levels of escalator; or alternatively, climb a whole lot of bloody stairs.
I left the station and emerged out into the blazing sunshine and had the idea of making my way down to the River Tagus, which I kept catching glimpses of in between buildings as I wandered the streets around Baixa. Eventually, I found myself on the Rua Do Alecrim (Rosemary Street), a long narrow thoroughfare which slopes all the way down to the river, and is flanked by buildings that get ever more derelict and graffiti disfigured the closer you get to the coast. At one point, peering down from the overpass of R. do Alecrim at the rotten tenement blocks in the street below, I found it hard to believe I wasn’t looking at some squalid ghetto in Havana or Bogota — rather than a neighbourhood in a city at the farthest Western fringe of Western Europe.
Finally I escaped the narrow confines of Alecrim and walked down to the sea wall, upon which I clambered and sat, and then I gazed: gazed at the sparkling blue serenity of the Tagus, at the sparse vegetation of the banks opposite and, dim in the heat haze, the grand Ponte 25 de Abril which spanned the river to the West. It was a lazy scene; the air was calm and still and the esplanade was mostly deserted; beside me two or maybe three men were standing fishing, beers in hand, their poles hooked up to the stone parapet; while two young women chatted away behind me, sat in one of the brightly coloured spherical plastic pods that had been scattered around the esplanade in lieu of benches. I lay on my back, and soaked up some bright rays.
However I didn’t stay supine for long; I was too eager to see more of Lisbon. So I got up from off the wall, took a swig of water, and headed back towards the tight labyrinth of streets at the city’s core. This time I wound up wandering the slums round about Bairro Alto, a neighbourhood just west of Baixo and Rossio, the area which constitutes the commercial and touristic heart of Lisbon; it was simply a matter of choosing to follow those streets that looked most run down and dilapidated, and to be honest they weren’t hard to find. I had decided that I wanted to get a glimpse of the seedier side of Lisbon, but I was surprised to find such squalor so close to the city centre; I shouldn’t have been, since everything is so closely packed together here.
Walking around the older neighbourhoods of Lisbon that day reminded me a little of being back in Italy: the architecture was similar and the buildings were of a comparable age to those I’d seen in the North and in Tuscany. The major difference being that, whereas the Italians maintained their old residential buildings in a reasonable state of repair (or at least this was true of the towns and cities I’d visited in the North), it seemed as if, in contrast, large swathes of Lisbon were just being left to moulder away in an advanced state of deterioration.
Like some kind of cracked, once pretty, crone of a whore, the face the city presented to me on that first day had more than a little of the grotesque about it; street after street, walking along the fronts of crumbling tenement blocks where the visible scars of long decades of negligence were all too vividly manifest.
And really, it was the visual impact of these outward signs of dereliction, rather than some deeply misguided desire to be a poverty tourist, that fascinated me and that urged me on. I was drawn in by the weird haunted beauty of it all: by the myriad organic forms and patterns of decay that were gradually working themselves deep into the structures of these buildings: the great green patches of mould which manifested in a grand variety of shades and tones due to the effects of the salt sea air; the cracked masonry, from which there sprouted various forms of spindly, dark green and brown plant life; the peeling paint work and the missing tiles; the smashed, dusty windows and graffiti everywhere. The cobbled streets were heavily stained and stamped with cigarette butts, and had numerous loose and missing cobbles. And over everything there was the additional joy of a heavy stench of rotting food.
And yet, even if the places I visited that day looked a mess and it was obvious that most of the inhabitants lived lives of relative poverty, I still didn’t get quite that same overpowering sense of hopelessness and despair I usually feel wandering around the more destitute parts of Glasgow — the mid 20th-century estates that were the heirs to the old Gorbals and Calton slums — which may well appear superficially less derelict, but which seem so much bleaker and feel so oppressive just to walk around in.
I’d noticed quite a few Indians since my arrival in Lisbon earlier in the day; and, given that the Indians are, along with their Pakistani cousins, a diaspora of shop keepers, it was inevitable that I would run across a desi-run convenience store somewhere or other in town. In fact during my long, hot, afternoon stroll, both of the stores where I stopped off to purchase bottles of cold water were Indian run. In one of them I had been tempted to speak in Hindi to the girl behind the counter — she’d been conversing with a colleague in that language a few seconds before noticing me at the till, after which she snapped into a reflexive Portuguese. But I chickened out; my Hindi is too shaky. The upper parts of the walls of this store were covered with vivid and garish posters of scenes from Hindu mythology, and the shelves were stocked with the same spices you might find in `oriental’ stores back in the UK.
I had given up consulting my tourist map soon after entering the slums, and had been pleasantly lost for most of my walk. Eventually I found my way out and into more salubrious surroundings: now the streets were cleaner, the surfaces of buildings were no longer broken up with cracked, dusty plaster, and the broad pavements were even occasionally lined with trees offering shade and respite from the strong sunshine. I found a little patch of green space near the Assembleia da Republica building: a small public garden with an ornamental fountain and plenty of trees for shade – not that I was feeling the heat all that badly. Indeed I chose a spot of grass that was exposed to the sunshine to lie down upon before taking off my t-shirt. There was hardly a soul around, except for two dark brown kids frolicking around the fountain with their mother sat at a bench nearby, so I felt comfortable in shedding my top and exposing my flabby torso. I practised the talk I was due to give the next day at the student session of the conference. But it was just such a dreadfully boring thing to do. So I only ran through it once, and my lack of preparation was all too apparent the following afternoon when I stumbled awkwardly through my slides in front of what was, thankfully, a very small audience.
I stopped off at the Brasiliera café to admire the bronze statue of Fernando Pessoa that was sitting at a table outside. Pessoa was the only Portuguese poet that I had heard of up till then, and that was thanks to my Lisbonese housemate. He had brought up the name during a discussion we were having about poetry in the kitchen; and his eyes lit up as he talked about what Pessoa’s verse had meant to him as he was growing up.
He explained that Pessoa wrote his poetry using a variety of pseudonyms, but that they were actually more than just names. And in fact what he had done had been to develop a whole series of different personalities and give them authorship of `their’ own works. The wonder of it — aside from the brilliance of the verse itself — was in just how carefully crafted, how convincing these `heteronyms’ were: there seemed to be more than a touch of madness to it.
I took the metro back home. I really didn’t want to spend too much on food this first night without B, so I went to Lidl and bought tinned tuna, some mild, pale slices of cheese, and bread and water. After eating, and resting for a bit, I went back out in the evening for another random wander.
