A TALE OF TWO CHAUVINISMS, CODA

we probably won't ever know what christiano ronaldo whispered to rui patrício before the shootout that determined the semifinal of the UEFA EURO 2012 between portugal and spain, and in no small part because the spanish had secured their victory one spot kick before ronaldo had even had his chance to shoot. and probably, no one else in that irish bar next to the viapol building in seville had given that whisper even a first thought. and likely, it did nothing to influence the game as the final outcome was, arguably, decided more by the crossbar of the goal than the goalkeeping of patrício or iker casillas. that's what a portuguese would argue, anyway -- and that in any case it was probably impossible for patrício to hear what ronaldo whispered with all of the noise in the bar. spain, as he always says, is the country of cacophony. and it's true, the bar was loud. but probably, so too were the bars in portugal, although i don't know if i would have been nearly as uncomfortable wearing a spanish scarf there as i was with my portuguese one next to that angry man in that bar in seville, just one mile away from where the spanish keep their copy of the treaty of tordesillas. or maybe not. maybe he and everyone else thought me the example of the rule rather than the obvious exception: wherever you go, there's always that one sanctimonious portuguese. and of course the spanish always assume he speaks their language when they find him in their country -- or, for that matter, in his. it was, however, probably lucky for me that the spanish won, because that angry man might not have continued with the same gracious sportsmanship with which he congratulated me after the second period of overtime had the ultimate result of the match been different. he for sure wasn't interested in speculating over whispers. lucky for me, though, it ended with my speculation, and i was able to make an easy exit. i was okay. the portuguese like to grieve their bereavements anyway. and the spanish will keep making ronaldo rich. an appreciation of irony is better than any single victory, they'd say. so i wrote a note to myself to go to the archive of the indias to check out that treaty for myself. and afterwards i'd need to make sure to buy another scarf for the tournament final.

24 HOURS TO LEAVE ANGOLA

the outbound train. less than ten hours left. for a moment past the docks, gliding (if that can be done unsteadily) over the top of my ria. past the art deco…warehouses? then past where those give way to the ruins of the factory or cannery village -- and then along past. once again to the lighthouse -- or past it, anyway.  (“you live at the beach?” he had asked. “so are you an artist or a fisherman?” but the real fishermen get on in olhão.) off to the royal city rebuilt by the duke of pombal where the tuna don’t bite anymore. where the modernist who would build the beach was born and learned to work from the men and women who got up to can the tuna. past salt pools and the nature park. past the cyclists on the greenway that runs the length of my ria. past the faces that disembark for the beach at fuseta-a(mor). (my ria disappears for a moment behind an orchard of…figs?) on to tavira, but no stopping off for fish. a panoply of popular saints couldn’t save me now. (orchards. vineyards?) luz. by the beginning of the high season, once the stores at the forum have stopped stocking new swimwear, if you haven’t found someone at the beach to take on dates to the food court then you have to leave. and yesterday afternoon we were stopped at the airport roundabout; and he could see that we were only still friends. so he gave me back my smile without returning it, stood up from the window and spoke through the air above the car. twenty-four hours to leave angola. porta nova, and i lose sight again of my ria. the flamingos left when the season opened. conceição. orchards. i don’t cry when we pass through the tunnel and i lose sight of the man working alone in the fields. orchards. oranges or olives. repetition, they say, is the site of the trauma. and faster now. outbound. cacela. a windmill on a drying hill on the last stretch of the backward journey of maria la portuguesa. desde faro a ayamonte. castro marim. my ria. the egrets haven’t all gone. at monte gordo, the beatufiully composed mistress looks sadly at the two bastards. maybe i look sad, or else she wouldn’t look at me like that. but i don’t cry when i see the bridge. vila real de santo antónio. o algarve começa aqui, at the end of the line. but strangely, the tracks continue past the train. and you can almost hear the elegant and stately angolan woman at city hall as she takes a break from work to sigh: “fucking immigrants.” then god, we have the last laugh.

O PORTOLANDIA

“entonces me arrastré y el baño y me metí, vestido, en la bañadera. el agua fría empezó a calmarme y en mi cabeza comenzaron a aparecer algunos hechos aislados, aunque destrozados e inconexos, como los primeros objetos que se ven emerger después de una gran inundación:” the clouds above the square in front of city hall -- in front of the statue of the viscount of almeida garrett -- and the stalls of the book fair there where there would be none of antunes’ books in english; excuses; the secret inside the door of the [lello] bookstore, where there were neither that elusive “knowledge of hell” nor any pictures; one euro bifanas on the way down the hill to a bar called cris; the clouds and the rain; the infante henry and, higher up, the dragoon, the city incarnate, petrified; the absence of the moors; the bridge to the gondola to the factories; the other bridges from that one -- and a river looking cold under the clouds; the grey light outside as seen from inside the majestic, where i’m sharing a smile with maybe a french woman after the pianist starts to play george michael; my pen breaking in a bathroom at the fine arts faculty of the university, and the mid-century force of the central staircase outside, over which i break my pen wanting to write something in speculation about salazar; having the special and not seeming to like it; backtracking from trindade to the statue of garret and then the coin lockers, again, at trindade; a still unbelievable sandwich; asking her if i could change in the parking garage; all those beautiful boys; a street full of noses; the same street, but asses the second time around; the sayonara napkin when it finally started to rain; the boys and the beer and the rain; a giant mirror -- and us, in a giant mirror; excuses; under a bus shelter under a tree; dancing; talking about dancing; one last time past the giant mirror (zoom); being surprised that the morning birds were seagulls; being asked about dancing; hitting the tree. and dreams too. but we’d already made our excuses. i needed to go collect my camera.    

KNOWLEDGE OF HELL

so there's this book, and there's an english translation from the portuguese because i found one that i could have bought online, but the thing is that, well, it was one of those things: i didn't want to pay the international shipping. also, and serendipitously, i was going to take the trip that serves as the background for the plot -- and in a car, even, although not over the course of so much time. (the description of "knowledge of hell" that i found online says that antunes takes "one long day and evening" to get his psychiatrist from the algarve to lisbon, but i think that we made it in something like four hours, and that with stopping for lunch with the three sisters in alentejo.) unfortunately, i couldn't find the book anywhere in faro in the week before we left. or, rather, i should say that i couldn't find it in english translation, because each of the four bookstores to which i entrusted the fruition of my plan had a half a shelf at least of antónio lobo antunes, and two of them copies of "conhecimento do inferno" in portuguese. but oh well. anyway, i didn't really think that i was going to be reading the book in the car. and, of course, even if it would have been nice to have had it before arriving, i shouldn't have any trouble finding the book in lisbon. that's what they said, anyway. it's lisbon, they said. no problem. lisbon, however, had been thinking differently -- and it didn't bother to say. ler devagar has about a million literature titles in french, but the only english books it sells are nonfiction. not at the fnac in benfica, nor at the one in chiado. the room that was supposed to have the books in english at the old bertrand up the street was just full of tourism books and magazines, and the woman manning the counter at the bookstore where i stopped just in case (on my way from not finding the book at the bookstore at the british institute) just seemed confused. but maybe i wasn't asking for what i thought i was. in the end she recommended i try at fnac, and so i said good afternoon.

it was a pretty good afternoon, too, except that i hadn't brought with me anything to read, because, you know, they'd said that i'd find the book in lisbon. instead, i found a barber in alfama, to whom i think i must have communicated myself even more poorly than i had to the woman who had all but pushed me out of her bookstore to try fnac.

luckily it didn't stay light forever. but by the time it got dark it was time to have my ride tell me where i'd be staying that night and then start trying to find wherever that was, so i texted the gallega (who had texted me while i was at the barber to say that she was, in fact, the one that i'd met in the wee hours of the feria that morning and thanks for finding her and getting in touch with my number) that i wouldn't be able to get together with her that time around because i didn't want to inconvenience my host by arriving too late and because, sadly, i was heading north in the morning. (i hadn't yet forgotten my camera, so i didn't yet know that i'd be back two nights later.)

when my ride picked me up (again, although we were now two and a half days out from the algarve), she told me that we might as well check the bookstore at the fábrica braço de prato, which just happened to be celebrating its fifth anniversary as a bookstore-gallery-studio complex that night. and it wasn't far from where we were staying. and, it was more than worth it just to see the bookstore -- not to mention for the fifty cent beers and the butoh performance. the bookstore clerk, however, told us that anyone with a computer could have told us that although the book had been translated it hadn't been published by a portuguese publisher and so wasn't going to be available anywhere in portugal. the news could have been quite sobering, except for the fifty cent beers.

the french like to use the area around the fábrica braço de prato to shoot movies, my host told me the next morning as we were passing through the neighborhood on the way to take her son to school. because there aren't any modern buildings around. but they're everywhere around her son's school in olivais. after the dictatorship, she told me, it was a kind of utopian project. they integrated subsidized housing with private housing development for the middle class, and in the spirit of the years immediately after the dictatorship, the project was a success. the spirit of unity and equality and excitement for the future, she said. and drugs. and the urban planners didn't plot any sidewalks until a year after the area had been inhabited. how could they have known from the outset, she said, how people would want to get around? they couldn't know so early where the café with the best coffee would be, or where and how long it would take someone to have a cake before he had to rush to the bus stop. they were optimistic, she told me, i don't know if i would have shared in the spirit of olivais had she not told me its story.

the story of the area around the train station at oriente is different, and much simpler: don't go the way of the site of the ninety-two universal expo in seville. when lisbon hosted it in ninety-eight, the city wanted to make sure that its construction investment wouldn't go to ruin as it had across the border. and from the looks of it, the city's fear has wrought success. the office buildings around the calatrava skeleton that comprises the station building and the shopping mall across the street are occupied, including by the employer of my host, who works nearby as an architect. at a glance, there's no sign of the continuing crisis. people have forgotten for the time being, anyway, distracted by the national soccer team's success so far in the european cup. the flags are out, and they're singing the national anthem in the streets. her son sings too, because he dreams of being a singer, and it's a song he knows, whether or not he knows exactly what it means or why the old men in the neighborhood are so proud when they see a five year old walk by singing it. but i understand. because i know how ever present at is at the same time that it's also completely occulted. that knowledge of hell.

 

SANTOS POPULARES, AND MORE SAINTS YOU MAY NOT KNOW

when the cock of barcelos would have crowed two in the morning had he been awake, we decided finally to stop to eat sardines -- and not so much because we were hungry for sardines (although we were hungry) as because we decided that we should probably do what they do for the feast of saint anthony of padua (or of lisbon...if that's where you're from) while we were ostensibly out to celebrate it, and much sooner than later (if later at all), there weren't going to be any sardines left for eating. and because they weren't very good, the surly, buxom blonde who had clipped my arm with her tongs when i tried to take a napkin from her grilling accessories table told us we'd be getting a free chouriço, which turned out to be two bifanas instead, and which we nonetheless happily ate after finishing the bread on top of which we'd cleaned the skeletons of the sardines on a hill somewhere in between bica and bairro alto when the cock of barcelos would have been crowing about three. unfortunately, the party was all downhill from there, although we still had to walk uphill to get us to the cab that would deliver us to dessert at galeto. and although what we had was good (and would have been described as better if it had been described that same night at the end of the night), it's a good thing that we didn't try the chocolate mousse, because it's impossible that it could have been better than what we had the next afternoon after lunch. there's a factory across the tagus where they work with metal, and they work with metal exclusively for set designs and other, well, art and stuff, and we were there in the late morning of the day after the feast of saint anthony picking up a secret piece of custom craftsmanship for a living statue project (which is big business right now in the crisis countries). maybe the factory is used to dealing with artists (or just with stuffers) and that's why the staff gives the five star reception that it does, but i don't think that any of us -- even the commissioner of the project herself -- thought that we'd end up being taken to lunch at the restaurant to which we were taken to lunch in alcochete. of course, the owners of the factory and the restaurant probably knew each other (or were each other themselves), and the free lunch might not have been the first in the history of either endeavor's business. still, the sardines to which we were treated were in a different world altogether from the ones we'd been served the night before (even with the sweetener of the bifanas). and when our host pulled the back of that spoon over the top of the first chocolate mousse to arrive at the table and then filled the hollow he'd made with a long pour of brandy (from a bottle that he'd pulled from somewhere out of the other world of the sardines we'd just finished), it wasn't so hard to forget that saint anthony the matchmaker hadn't done all that much for us the night before when we were dancing his glory to all those polkas. this, they said, was portugal. and portugal tasted good as a steamed cheese cake too. then, after we'd had the brandy that our host used to rinse our coffee cups, portugal was the place where we remembered that what we'd been drinking with our sardines at lunch was wine. we either did or did not need the further round of espresso we had back at the factory when we returned to pick up what it was for which we'd crossed the river in the first place -- which had been modified and painted while we were at lunch. there's no such thing as a free one, though, and you can be sure that the same adage exists in portuguese. the trip to the factory unfortunately wasn't our only errand. after the effects of the five star treatment had worn off, we were still at ikea; and there was nothing in hell, padua or lisbon that saint anthony could have done to reconcile the couples there.

PEOPLE IN TREE HOUSES SHOULDN'T THROW STONES

an olive tree aficionado had told them how many liters of water went into making their glass of orange juice, and they were appalled. not when the noble, native olive tree was being displaced! but, of course, not either that the displacers who had come with their dog in their camper (that doesn't run on olive oil) had volunteered to drink olive juice... still, they decided to leave the capitalist-eat-idealist terrestrial world of orange-groved golf courses to live in the trees. they had heard, they said, smoking, that it could improve blood circulation and was conducive to deep thinking. a japanese man, they said, had been living in a tree house for years, and his wisdom had become so sage and respected that a crowd of people came to him daily for advice. (although, of course, the decision to move should have been easy for a many living in a country that so valued orange juice and golf.)

tree living wasn't exactly as simple as the hippie family robinson had thought, but they nonetheless thrived. where ingenuity and invention weren't sufficient, stubborn defiance won the day. the camper was permanently parked, and the dog -- permanently a puppy since the move to the tree -- had a pulley system elevator for going up and twisty slide for going down. even though there wasn't enough regular rainfall for their rainwater collection system to support the family's needs, let's say that's what they used, because, come on...we can't really ask these people to dig a well, now can we (although a photo of the puppy wearing a water bucket yoke would make for an undeniably great christmas card). anyway, it wasn't long before the tree family became all of them gurus, which was convenient because gurus don't need to eat, and the family didn't have enough water to maintain its subsistence farm. without a proper sewage system, it was also convenience to not have to poop.

tired after all of the courses across the region started to play the same, and with an irreconcilable feeling of emptiness inside their golf bags, the rich and the power brokers (who had magnanimously been saved the guillotine) started to come to the tree for advice. then it wasn't long before the majority was on the path to guruhood, and their new polity made it difficult for the ground dwellers to continue with their old traditions. become enlightened! the benevolent guru kings said. who could want for orange juice when you could learn to survive on the beauty of an orchid! (native variety, of course.) don't ask what they were feeding the dogs. ...what did the ewoks eat? it was probably that.

the third time that my friend fell i petitioned the community for structural improvements in the tree house cluster. the next morning, at the bottom of a tree around the world in japan, the old guru spoke: "people who live in tree houses shouldn't wear high heels." but it was too late for my friend. after three falls, it was only doggie elevators and slides for her.

one day a wave came and knocked the houses out of the trees. sadly, my friend would never walk in high heels again.

"because one day a wave is gonna come, and it won't matter if it kills orange trees or olive trees. a wave from the ocean, which is part of the water cycle. when we talk about the environment, we're talking about social resources. about muh-ney." one of the two from the camper left the table to play with the dog.

the morning after the tree house debacle, after everyone had sobered from enough revolutionary wine that no one was sad not to have had to climb a tree house ladder to get to bed, there was orange juice on the breakfast table. and although they said that they had already eaten and would be fine with coffee (which, of course, is totally native to the south of portugal), there was orange juice for the two who had slept in the camper as well. seeing that they didn't want it, the host reached across the table and helped herself.

that same morning, at the bottom of a tree around the world in japan, the old guru spoke to his devotees: "people who live in tree houses shouldn't throw stones. because they're liable to get a thousand glasses of water tossed in their face."

TAVIRA, VIVE CULTURA; or, THE PROVERBIAL COUPLE (SO TO SPEAK)

the husband and the wife wish the same thing for each other: that the eventual widow or widower be taken care of as well as trevora, whom the couple meets on a patio by the river in tavira. the conversation starts naturally enough:

"do you know tavira well?" asks trevora to the wife. and the wife says no but asks her what she's looking for. the wife doesn't know where that is, but the portuguese woman that the wife asks does, and she also speaks trevora's native french.

"and are the shoes open all day?" trevora asks the wife now, but the wife doesn't understand trevora's accent in english. "the shoes," the husband says and points to the shoe store across the street. the wife doesn't know, but she walks across the street to ask. when she comes back, trevora is happy to find out that the husband and the wife speak spanish, because she needs a lead on an eight euro pair of shoes.

"but eight euro shoes aren't going to last you the week," says the wife. but trevora doesn't care because they can fall apart after a week if they want -- she has piles of shoes at home.

and where does she live? the wife wants to know. "seven months of the year in the south of france, and the other five in toledo," trevora says in spanish and with her fingers. she met her spanish husband in paris, but toledo was where they spent their married life until he drank himself to death. it isn't clear whether it was the husband who was the dentist or if it's their daughter.

trevora, however, doesn't need a dentist. she came to tavira to see her doctor, who moved here from france eight years before. she went to the clinic the day before, but it was closed.

"and what kind of specialist is this doctor?" asks the wife. "not a specialist, just a doctor," says trevora. apparently trevora has come to tavira from france not only without an appointment but without any idea of why she wants to see her doctor. maybe just to catch up. it's been eight years, after all. but what trevora does know is that she wants a pair of shoes for eight euros to get her between her hotel and the bus stop until she has to leave for faro to fly back to france -- probably without having seen the doctor (who may or may not know that trevora exists and may or may not exist himrself).

it's good to have a daughter who is maybe a dentist looking out for you after her father who was maybe a drunk is dead. so, "i think we should have kids," the husband says, "so that i can drink myself to death with a clear conscience." the wife laughs. because better, as they say, the devil you know than a thousand trevoras.

anyway, that's probably what the couple that the husband and the wife meet at the church on the way to the castle would say. the church is open, so the husband and the wife go in. they don't think to stay very long, but the guy with the grey moustache would really like them to see the temporary exhibition in the back. as he's talking the couple through the exhibition, he doesn't appear to have any affiliation with the church or any special relationship with any of the artists. his devotion to the exhibition is cast in any even rarer light (or maybe it's just him that the light illuminates) when he introduces the wife to his own and the older couple starts talking to their younger guests about the international proverb conference that they've held in tavira every year since they retired there. the wife gives them her email address because, well, the more you run over a dead cat, it's not going to encourage sleeping dogs to stop lying.

the thing is, even if after all that climbing the husband and wife just want to eat in silence over their periodicals, the moustache's wife's face is light and happiness itself, and when the older couple waves so enthusiastically for the husband and wife to join them when they step out onto the patio of the restaurant, the husband and wife aren't able to seat themselves alone as they would like under the lemon tree. so they talk to the retired math professor about proverbs, and his wife, who was a professor of biology, makes light and happiness. then the math professor gets the husband and wife a bottle of wine. and the wine they really need after having seen the price tags on the handmade, recycled plastic handbags at the store that was also selling prints of photographs of neighborhood doors for forty-five euros. paco rabanne by bangladesh, apparently; and the husband and wife are getting a big smile from the face of the markup. they might not care about proverbs, but the wine is refreshing, and there just isn't any kicking a portuguese power moustache in the face.