In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira [...]. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: […] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Praça dos Aliados, Porto, Portugal; photo from Flickr's Portuguese_eyes stream
So the steps and the degree of the arcades’ curves are the facts of a city, and the relationships between space and time its story. A millenary city like Porto is a never-changing, ever-changing story told in granite and feldspar by the millions of people who shaped it through time, whose steps carved holes in cobble stone alleys, whose boats rubbed chunks off the riverside quay, whose blood trickled down police-lined avenues, whose yearning for beauty sprinkled it with art.
Porto rises and falls, contracts and swells, breathes in and out with each one of its dwellers. As I walk its streets, I pass the shop window where I saw reflected my boyfriend’s arm awkwardly holding my adolescent waist; I wait for the bus by the blue-tiled church where my brother’s death stood before my eyes long before he died as he tried to stand up and, in a haze of alcohol, did not recognize me; I sit in the café where my mouth opened to the tiniest bit of croissant held by the man whose fingers lingered on my lips; I enter the bookstore where ceiling paintings first competed against words for my affection, a conflict settled by my refusal, ever since, to choose between the two.
Everybody else around me is going past their window and their church, their budding love and pain - stories gathering in squares, spilling into drains, carved into stone, day after day after day.
What a wonderful way to explain the life of a city through memory or events imprinted in windows and churches and bookstores….beautifully expressed!
Thanks Laura. And let me congratulate you again on sending off your book. I am so looking forward to reading it!
Clara,
Porto sounds like such a beautiful place of mystery, its history full of pain and joy –both personal and collective. As you can tell by now, I have been trying to respond to your weekly blogs as an impetus to my own writing. I have been trying to combine memory with some sense of story, particularly story told between the lines or crevices. What is left unsaid is often as important as what is said. I love the intermingling of history and personal narrative you brought to this particular post. I apologize for the length of my response. I was trying to capture a sense of place using scent.
The scent of a shirt brought back a hundred yesteryears. It was an old flannel one left draped across the top of a stone gatepost. Faded now and nearly pink where it had once been red, the cuffs were completely frayed. What was left of the collar was a few knotted tufts and some puffy white interfacing peeking out through threads. Buttons were broken or gone, button holes torn. Both elbows were worn through. One of the sleeves with its elbow hole stuck out at a rakish angle as though it had blown for some time in a stiff wind and maybe some icy snow. But when I picked it up and started down one of the paths that led through that woods, I could, to my amazement, still smell its scent, a mind tunnel that drove me back years and opened upon my childhood and the woods and fields from where it had absorbed and consolidated its scents and where I had once roamed like a kicking spring colt feeling the freedom of warm spring breezes. With that shirt over my arm, I walked through the gate my father built and past the stone wall my brothers had stacked stone upon stone and over which my younger brother turned the tractor one day, an accident that held him in traction for months and nearly cost him his life and the only time my mother ran, or so I’m told. I was not there to see it happen. I could smell the heat of the tractor oil mixed with gasoline and the loamy dirt of spring, a smell so much fuller and richer than any other time of the year. That dirt smell seems to announce everything good and rich about to come straight out of the ground. I took the shirt off my arm and wrapped it around my waist. Then I lifted up a tattered cuff. Its sweet odor of sweat and sawdust and oil made me turn around and look back at the house my father had built with his own hands at seventy before he’d lost his memory and couldn’t remember where his glasses were or if he’d eaten lunch. Then I continued walking. Spring flowers were everywhere under a canopy of old growth hardwoods. I could smell hickory, oak, walnut, maple, cedar, and pine. The trillium were particularly abundant with their spicy rose and geranium scent, but also there were bloodroot, violet, jack-in-the-pulpit, lupine, and spring beauty, their melodious aromas mixed in a bright nosegay. Lacy white and pink dogwood were in bloom in the lower canopy. You have to put your nose right up to the dogwood blooms to smell them at all and my sister used to claim it smelled like dog and that’s how it came to its name. But when I rubbed the petals together, they smelled faintly of lavender and old books, maybe a little moldy. I was searching for mayapples and found some, lifting them gently and searching under their umbrella leaves for morels. I found some. There is no scent so rich, so fecund as that of a black morel. I gathered a basketful and walked on through the woods, past the lone apple tree standing triumphant against the ravages of two lightening strikes. Black branches held the tiniest buds with pale green leaves; I could smell apple and cinnamon and warm pie. I passed a fallen-down line of fence, against which last summer’s milk weed still reclined. I passed the dump now covered over with stone and dirt and new grass. As a girl, I’d hunted through it for treasure, hoping to find an arrowhead or a chipped crystal vase, emerging dirty and covered in brambles, reeking of stink weed. I passed corn fields and could smell corn-on-the-cob and perfectly ripe beefsteak tomatoes and buttered green beans. At the top of the hill I looked down across the fields towards the red barn and old white farm house. The smell of paint came back to me; I’d painted fences most summers. The scent of horses and leather and sweaty blankets was also there, and the stench of cow manure. Sheets were flapping on a clothes line, conjuring up the perfume of fresh laundry. When I returned an hour later, I untied the shirt and placed it on the post like the ghost of a past worn thin. I left it there where it now collects air and rain and present storms and the scents of the trees, flowers, mushrooms, and fruit, and dirt, especially the dirt, storing scents for some future time when I will walk again through that gate.
Such different experiences from mine, yet I can see you there. I find this so compelling, the smells so powerful. Yes, smell and memory…Thanks.
How beautifully you write… I find there are many older posts that I did not know existed. So these will be my reading tonight.
Padmavani
Thank you, Padmavani. You write beautifully too.