Lisbon
A fado a man has carried out of a life he does not speak of, and the night the city that owns it sings it back to him.
The Climb to the Castle Wall
The plane set down at Humberto Delgado in the long Atlantic light, that white-into-gold particular to Lisbon in early October when the jacarandas have finished and the sea has not yet sent its rain, and the car was on the apron in the place such cars wait, the driver a man of about sixty whose hands stayed at the wheel while a second man took our cases, both moving with the economy of people who understood that the work of arrival is to make arrival feel like nothing at all. Her Highness slept the last twenty minutes against my shoulder and woke when the wheels touched, her eyes finding mine before they found the window, and she let her hand stay on my thigh as the plane rolled to the stand, neither asleep nor quite returned, in the small in-between that belongs to her after long flights. The driver took the river road into the city and then up through the lower streets of Alfama where the cobbles begin and the buildings lean toward one another across alleys laid out before any wheel had cause to climb them, climbing slowly, not because the stones required it but because to take an Alfama hill at speed is to mistake the city for itself.
Her Highness watched out the window with her chin tilted forward and her hair loose against the seat behind her, the late light catching the curve of her jaw. The Palacio Belmonte does not announce itself; we turned a final corner and the car stopped at a plain wall the color of the ramparts above it, a wooden door set into the wall without a sign, and a man was already opening her door before the engine had quieted, taking her hand for the half-second of the step down, leading us through into a courtyard of orange trees and worn limestone where a small fountain pushed water from one stone basin into a second with the regularity of a clock wound at the same evening hour for a hundred evenings. The traffic of the city we had climbed through fell off behind us as though a window had been closed against it; from a roof we could not yet see, a bell rang once for some reason that had nothing to do with us.
Our suite was on the upper floor, a sitting room with a stone floor worn into shallow hollows, two long windows folded back onto a balcony the width of a man’s shoulders, a bowl of figs and a small handwritten card beside it. From the balcony the Tagus opened out at the foot of the city wide enough that for a moment you forgot which side of it you were on, the red tile of the lower roofs falling away in steps to the water, and the sun, still well above the far bank, had begun the work of turning but had not yet committed. Her Highness walked the suite the way she walks new rooms, slowly, touching nothing, registering everything, and stopped at the balcony with both hands on the iron rail and breathed in the long breath she takes when a place has cleared the bar she had not told anyone she was setting for it. The wind off the river came up over the castle wall and lifted the white curtains and set them back, and she turned her head and gave me the small private version of her smile, the one that lives only at the left corner of her mouth. The house had set out a bottle of George T. Stagg on the writing desk, the high-proof thing they had found for me before I arrived. I poured two fingers into a heavy glass, no ice, as the good Lord intended, brought it to the balcony, where she took it from my hand and put her mouth to the rim for the small sip with which she marks a new country and gave it back without swallowing more than the taste of it.
I had not told her why Lisbon, and she had not asked, because she long ago stopped asking me why one city and not another; she trusts the choosing the way she trusts the driving. But there was a reason, and the reason was a song. Somewhere in the years behind me, in a country I will not name in this account, I had heard a fado sung once, and I had carried it out of that country the way a man carries certain things out of certain countries, folded small and kept in the dark, taken out only when I was alone and sure of being alone. I had never sung it to anyone. I had never named it to her. Fado is a Lisbon thing, native to these hills the way the light is, and I had brought her to the city that owned the song without deciding, exactly, what I would do if the city gave it back to me.
We dressed for dinner as we dress for dinner in any city she has agreed to come to, expected and unhurried. Her Highness came out of the dressing alcove in a cream linen dress that fell to mid-calf and moved against itself when she walked, a thin wool wrap the color of dry sand around her shoulders for the cool that comes up off the river after dark, her hair down and loose against the wrap, no jewelry that night but the small thin bracelet she had brought back from a market in another country and that lived now on her right wrist as if it had been made for it. I wore a navy blazer my Bangkok tailor had cut for the spring, an open-collared shirt the color of dry stone, the leather of the shoes worn enough now to belong to the cobbles. She looked at me once in the long mirror by the door and said nothing, which was the answer.
We took dinner that first night at the hotel itself, in the small room with the long window onto the orange-tree courtyard, the kitchen Portuguese with a French hand, the menu less a menu than a conversation with whoever brought the first plate. She asked for a small soup of clams and coriander and then the bacalhau done in the Lisbon way with broken bread and a soft yolk on top; I asked for grilled prawns from the Algarve and the suckling pig from Mealhada. The room held perhaps eight other people. No one looked at us. She broke a piece of her bread and dipped it into the green of the olive oil and put it into my mouth before she took her own, which is her habit and which I have stopped resisting, and we did not talk about the days ahead, because the first night of a trip is not a night for the days ahead.
Walking back across the courtyard to the stairs, the fountain was still working in its regular small voice, and from a lower terrace a guitar played a phrase, stopped, played the same phrase again differently, and stopped, the unmistakable shape of a player teaching his fingers a thing rather than performing it. She stopped to listen. I listened too, for the song I carry, the way I had already begun to listen for it in every doorway of the city, and it was not the song, and the phrase did not come a third time, and I was steadier than I wanted to admit that it had not been.
Belem in the Morning, the Gulbenkian in the Afternoon
The morning was the white-light morning Lisbon does in October when the rains are a week away and the sky has not yet decided how serious it is going to be. The breakfast came up at nine, a clay pot of yogurt, halves of a pao de Mafra still warm, a comb of dark honey, a pot of coffee for me and mint tea for her, a soft sheep’s-milk cheese from Azeitao at room temperature, which is how that cheese has to be eaten to do what it does. She ate the figs from the welcome bowl with her fingers and read the morning paper in Portuguese, which she does not speak, looking at the pictures with the concentration she gives to anything she does not understand and refuses to be hurried through.
The car took us down to Belem at ten, the same driver as the night before, putting us out in front of the Jeronimos in the gap between the early tour groups and the next wave. Her Highness walked the upper gallery with her hand trailing the stone of the balustrade and stopped twice without telling me what she had stopped for; on the second I came up beside her and she was looking down into the inner garden where a single orange tree had been let to grow older than it ought to have, and she did not name what she was seeing, and I did not ask, because the discipline of a long shared traveling is to know which silences are for you and which are for her.
Pasteis de Belem is a few minutes east on foot. We were taken through to the back room with the blue azulejos, and the woman brought four on a small white plate without our asking, the shaker of icing sugar already on the table. The pastry was hot enough that you had to wait. She did not wait. She bit the first one cleanly across the middle and closed her eyes for two seconds, no more, and opened them. “That is the one,” she said, to the pastel and not to me.
The Tower of Belem we did not enter; the line ran long, and it is best seen from the outside with the water around it. From the MAAT roof afterward we stood looking down the river at the bridge and at the Cristo Rei on the far bank with its arms out over the water, and somewhere below us, from a phone or a doorway or a car with its window down, a recording of a fado came up on the wind, a woman’s voice a few bars long and then gone under the traffic. I did not hear enough of it to know it. But my chest had already done the thing it does now in this city, the small readying, the bracing of a man who has walked four days toward a door not knowing what is behind it, and she felt the readying through my arm where it was threaded with hers and she did not ask; she rested her head briefly against my shoulder and lifted it again, and we walked back down to the car.
Lunch we took at a small fish house near the docks run by a man who buys off the boats at six, and he fed us percebes, the goose barnacles that look like the feet of small dinosaurs and taste of the salt of the rocks they grew on, and a grilled robalo split for two. She ate the percebes with her fingers and laughed once at her own untidiness and let me watch the laugh without making a thing of having watched it.
The Gulbenkian we took in the afternoon, the Modern Collection across the garden, the room of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso whose work I had not seen since a museum in another city many years ago and which had not lost any of what it had had. Her Highness stood in front of one of the Paula Regos for a long time and then turned to me and said only, “She knows,” and I knew which she meant and what she meant by knew. We walked the garden until the light softened and sat on a bench by the long pond and watched a duck make a private journey from one end of it to the other for purposes the duck did not share.
We dined that night at a tasca a few streets down from the Palacio, five tables and a stove run by a woman who had been doing what she does since before the city thought to call it cuisine, a soup of stone bread and coriander with a poached egg in it, a plate of polvo a lagareiro with the small smashed potatoes taking up the oil off the octopus. We finished with a glass of an old Madeira that tasted of the long room it had been in. The climb back up was slow, the Tagus a dark band beyond the lower roofs, and she put her hand into the pocket of my jacket on the last stretch and left it there. Two more days, I thought, and did not say, and I did not know whether I was counting toward the song or away from it.