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 catap
lana? 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.
What the fresco is to Italy, the tile panels are to Portugal—elaborate scenes record events and tell stories. Most precious at the museum is the scene of Lisbon created about twenty years before the earthquake ravaged the city. The convent chapel’s lower walls depict scenes from the life of Saint Anthony, the shine of the glaze cooling down the heat of the baroque and rococo decorations that cover every square inch of the rest of the chapel. I like all the Moorish geometric and floral designs, so like Persian rugs, which in turn look like gardens. But there’s something eternally fresh about the blue and white. We take dozens of pictures, almost all of which turn out to have the glare of flash in the center.
We're living in a quiet part of Lisbon. At the dining-room table we spread all our books, notebooks, and maps. We play CDs of fado while I attempt to read José Saramago’s turgid Journey to Portugal. Throughout he refers to himself as “the traveller,” a stylistic choice I find arch: “Now the traveller is ready to move on from works of art.” Delete “the traveller” and “he” and just be straightforward! The writing is studded, however, with bright perceptions and jewel-cut paragraphs that keep me reading. Ed watches an Italian movie with Spanish subtitles, rather an odd activity in Portugal. We have cooked and served our dinner on the coffee table covered by a yellow cloth and set with a glass of freesias to ward off lingering odors of paraffin. Cooking a pan of mixed local sausages and roasted potatoes contributed a few aromas, too. We brought home a box of tarts from the Pasteleria Suica on the plaza. This night offers the pleasure of renting a house—not going out, making a simple meal, and having a few hours with each other and books.
We’re getting to know our Calcada de Sant’Ana neighborhood. The crammed corner grocery, open till midnight, has most everything we need. A sweet park at the top of the hill offers green respite and the sound of a fountain. Nearby the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria, the Field of Martyrs, draws me on my walks because of the clutch of people around the statue of José Thomaz Sousa Martins, a nineteenth-century physician and pharmacist who still wields the hope of cure. Propped around the monument are stacks of marble plaques engraved with thanks, letters of supplication, and wax ex-votos. Notes describe illnesses and ask him for favors. A woman sells bracelets and necklaces with the blue stone for protection against the evil eye. She sells the wax arms, hands, feet, legs, and even eyes that you can buy and then offer at the base of the monument. I buy a few of the ex-votos to take home for my collection and also several of her candles that exorcise bad spirits from the house or promote health. They’re primitive, rolled in seeds and grains and herbs. Because of the wind, candles will not stay lighted. People hold them down in a metal drum with fire in the bottom, praying with them for a while, then dropping them into the drum. Sacks of old wax are piled on the side. Sousa Martins’s monument is an active spiritual spot. He has been dead 107 years, and how brightly his memory burns. I light a candle in the drum and think hard about the health of those I love. For good measure, I buy two of the evil eye bracelets and slip them on my wrist.
Then we meet Carlos Lopes. That’s Carloosh Lope-shs in Portuguese. This language uses many sounds that previously I have heard only from the washing machine. Italian and a smattering of Spanish help—thousands of words are similar—but mostly we are lost.
We drop into the tourist information office in our Rossio neighborhood and ask about cooking schools in town. We’re told that none exist, but then the two young women confer and finally come up with an address of a cookware shop in a residential neighborhood where some classes are taught. Also, they tell us, we have to try the owner’s chocolate cake, his secret recipe, baked in his nearby shop every day. All the best restaurants serve it. We jump in a taxi immediately and go. At the cookware shop the clerk, a friend of the women at the tourist office, tells us that Carlos is out. We leave our number and ask for directions to the cake shop.
The taxi driver waits while we run in. We buy the last pieces in the shop, one for each of us and, to his astonishment, one for the taxi driver. The three of us eat in the car. The only sound is slight moans. The light cake is rich, and the quality of the chocolate speaks of tropical earth and rainforests. This is a taste of the heaven that is someday to come to all of us.
When Carlos rings us the next day, we again make our way out to his shop. Even if nothing comes of this, we can eat another piece of his cake. Maybe a whole cake.
Confident, catching us eye to eye with a sherry-brown gaze, Carlos looks as though he could have been one of the navigators. He’s a sturdy man, not young, not old. The Portuguese generally look affable, unlike the more chiseled Spanish. He’s in a loose cardigan he’s had for a long time. I immediately see a person comfortable with himself. Fortunately for us, his English is excellent. After five minutes his wit and irony already shine. We tell him we’d like inside information about the national cuisine, that we’re getting whiffs of the real thing but would like to know more. After the first tasca lunch, we began to discover the cuisine. Our tome of a cookbook reinforces our instinct that levels and levels of taste exist, beyond the good grilled fish, fried calamari, and crab salads we’re ordering each night. He explains that in his classes he teaches local people about sushi, Thai food, Polynesian dishes. “No Portuguese cooking—we all know how to cook that.”
“Any chance of a private lesson or two?”
“You come tomorrow to my restaurant in the market building in the Alfama. We will cook a lunch together.”
Mercado de Santa Clara, Carlos’s restaurant, is on the second floor of the market building, which could be a nineteenth-century train station. It overlooks the Thief’s Fair. Lined with windows, the decor is simplicity itself—white tablecloths, little bowls of flowers, and on a serving table one of the chocolate cakes. We meet in the galley kitchen, and Carlos starts to cook. And talk. “The main herbs are coriander, parsley, and oregano. But above all coriander.” He chops a large bunch and places it in a bowl beside the stove, at the ready. First he splits each side of a sea bass, filling the cut with the excellent local sea salt, then dips the whole fish in olive oil. He picked up the fish at the market this morning, he tells us as he grills it over a hot, hot flame for five minutes on each side. Done. Then he cooks pork ribs he’s marinated since last night in lemon, salt, and the local ready-made pimiento sauce that is essential in every kitchen. I’ve never seen ribs cooked this way. He melts a dollop of lard in a frying pan, and when it is very hot, he tosses in the ribs. In another pan, he cooks some steamed and chopped rape in a little of the fat from the ribs. He stirs in a couple of handfuls of breadcrumbs.
He’s fast. He washes a bowl of clams and adds them to another pan with garlic and olive oil. He squeezes lemon juice over them, then adds a lot of coriander and some white wine. Then he puts it all in a copper cataplana and cooks it briefly, shaking it as though it were popcorn. What a lunch we are going to have. “This is very simple,�
�� he says, breaking eggs into a bowl. “What you have alone at home on Sunday night. It’s all in the eggs.” And plain to see, the yolks are the wobbly gold of a setting sun. To the eggs he adds diced tomatoes and onion. He scrambles them in a moment. All the while he talks about ingredients, praising the Portuguese mustard, Savora; piri-piri, a white-heat sauce made from Angolan peppers; and cumin, which always seasons pork and beef meatballs. When Ed asks if port is used in the kitchen, Carlos laughs. “The Portuguese don’t drink port,” he claims. He’s frying some tiny sole filets, which he first dipped in lemon juice and olive oil, then floured. We ask about restaurants, and he praises the cooking in tascas, along with a few other restaurants. He drains the sole on empty egg cartons. “The Portuguese have more restaurants per capita than any other European country,” he tells us. I’m sure that’s accurate. Every neighborhood is full of tascas, and all of them are jammed. “Don’t expect salads here. I don’t know why, but we never have taken the salad to heart.” He sprinkles the sole with parsley and unties his apron.
We eat. Portuguese food is for those who are really hungry. Carlos pours a simple “green wine,” Vinho Verde Muralhas de Monção, and then a red Azeitao Periquita Fonseca. The moment for dessert arrives. He has the waiter bring a puff pastry filled with something he describes as a cross between crème brûlée and egg custard, the now-familiar pastéis de nata. Which brings me to the famous chocolate cake. When I mention the recipe, he gets a little Mona Lisa smile and asks the waiter to bring over two slices, but he will divulge nothing. I tell him about an almost flourless chocolate cake with ground almonds, a recipe I learned years ago at Simone Beck’s cooking school in the South of France, which I have baked at least a hundred times. He brings over tiny glasses of Amarguinha, a dessert digestivo made of almonds. As we leave, he will not allow us to pay. I am stunned at this generous man, stunned that he has given his morning to strangers and shared his knowledge and traded life stories over a long, long lunch.
A Year in the World Page 10
