A messenger

sunset in Foz, Porto, Portugal

About a month ago (it feels like such a long time), when the sun reached high in the sky but did not yet warm the air, a sort of paralysis set into me.

On the surface, nothing changed. I was there for my father and gave final grades; I continued the gargantuan tasks of indexing the family library and organizing thousands of photographs; and I started making important decisions about what I can realistically pass on to my daughters and what must be auctioned, or given away.

You could say those are practical, necessary things I had to do. But I have also done things not strictly necessary, like write papers (yes, those I could write), travel to England to give a talk, meet with friends, see a movie or two (please do not miss Wenders’ Pina Bausch).

I have also kept my ability to feel, and felt deeply. What I seemed to have lost was the ability to write about it. I simply could not find the words to tell the sadness and the beauty I live in; perhaps there is too much of both.

In the meantime, the sun grew warmer and the people walking the streets changed. Tourists replaced the portuenses (the people of Porto), who emigrated to the warmer seas of the south for the month of August. For the past two days TV has shown images of highways streaked with winding lines of cars, stretching, they say, from the northern tip of the country to the southern. The city was transformed by foreign sounds coming from foreigners holding large cameras and peering at iphones for street map instructions.

Mensageiro, by Irene Vilar in Porto, Portugal

Only a year ago I was much like them (minus the iphone). I looked at my surroundings through a real, and an emotional, photo lens. Now, I’m the blurred figure walking past the blue and white tiles of the church they just photographed. A local, a stranger – that’s me, I thought, as I walked along Foz yesterday, the place where the sea and the river blur into each other, no longer one or the other, but something entirely its own. I arrived there on time (which in Portugal means I was early) to meet a friend, and so had time to see the evening spread against the sky, as in Prufrock.

Everything was infused with a golden tinge. I felt a stirring, an impulse to write it down, but how could I describe the glowing quality of the light without sounding corny? To make it worse – and I mean, of course, better – the long glass walls of the riverside restaurants reflected it back onto those who did not join the southward exodus: old couples holding on to each other for balance, a few joggers, and me. On the glass we became one long wave of molten gold, taking in the water, the boats, and the palm trees, and shimmering off the angel standing a few feet away.

I know this angel well. It was carved by Irene Vilar between 2001 and 2012. She called it “Mensageiro” (Messenger). I photographed it often through these last months, in different angles and light conditions. Yet yesterday it looked as if it had just come down and was still suspended against the water and the bridge. I came close enough to see the tiny, delicate flowers someone had left at its feet. Light streamed down its dark bronze cloak, and I felt a surge of boldness. “Please,” I said, “I would like to write again. Something, anything. Really, I’m not fussy,  just desperate. Thanks.”

 

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F. and C., finally … and the right box to tick

I have been thinking about a comment in reference to my mention of maids in Oh Mother. The comment struck a nerve, precisely because I have been tiptoeing around this subject.

It is difficult to write about it without sounding over-righteous, snobbish, or something in-between. Yet I cannot change the fact that I grew up in a household in Portugal where people other than my family did the household chores. And since I returned to my family home last year, I have been adjusting to having maids again. Their names are F. and C., and I have permission to mention them as long as I tell them what I say in a language they understand (it’s a promise!).

I don’t even know where to start on this. When I left at 18, F. was already working in the house. C. arrived only 10 years ago. Both have been devoted to my parents and I am forever grateful. They still take care of my father, the family home, the dogs … and now me and my dog too. But I keep making blunders in a set up that has been settled and comfortable for all of them for a very long time; and I keep showing signs of what I can only call inverted social snobbishness.

Here is an example of a major blunder: When I first arrived, I sometimes tried to fix myself something to eat. But the kitchen is F.’s domain; her self-worth is woven into the superior quality of her cooking (to which I am witness). Rummaging through the pantry to get ingredients for spagetti “my style” meant I was tap dancing all over her self-esteem.

It is harder to write about inverted social snobbishness because I am still confused about this whole thing. I guess we’re all confused around here. To F. and C., my life choices are incomprehensible and I hold threatening beliefs, like: a house doesn’t always have to be spotless and shirts can be worn without having been impeccably ironed. To me, their contentment is hard to grasp. For a while I found myself wishing they did not love their job; everything would be simpler, more in tune with my beliefs, if they didn’t. But wishing this made me feel uncomfortable (what kind of person wants someone to feel bad about her life?).

They will not indulge me, or do my any favors either. For a start, they would not trade places with me. I am a slave to deadlines, responsibility, and stress. “Slave” was the word F. used in a tone of compassion. She cannot imagine a fate worse than mine, and secretly pities my daughters, whose successful careers in the US confirm her suspicion that I turned them into stressed-out slaves just like myself.

On the other plate of the scale are their lives. Pay is good, they say; there is social security and a pension to look forward to; and they decide when to do what. I would add, from my own observations, that there’s no social stigma and plenty of affection. My father misses them when they’re not around, and F. is jealous of C., who lives in the house; she finds every possible reason to visit on a Saturday, bringing her grandson and her husband along to check on a loose doorknob or a leaky tap. It took me a while to get used to these “intrusions,” though I was the only one to feel this way about it. I no longer do.

I am also the only one who believes this arrangement is not universally good. Fortunately, I keep this belief to myself. I say fortunately because a few weeks ago, just before Portugal’s latest elections, I found out what they think of people like me, who are concerned about, say, the universal good. The choice was between Sócrates, the Prime Minister of the Socialist government that was in power for the past 6 years, and Passos Coelho, the head of the Social Democratic party (to my American friends: more to the center-right of the European political spectrum). As election day approached, F. and C. became more and more agitated. When Sócrates came on TV to make his final electoral speech, F. exploded.

“Soon we won’t have to listen to you anymore,” she mumbled to the TV set. “You’ll be gone, and good riddance.”

I was completely surprised. Hadn’t they always voted for the socialist party, I asked.

“I don’t know how he can show his face,” she said.

“But he’s a socialist,” I insisted. “He fights for things like your unemployment benefits, pensions…”

She was angry.

The new Prime-Minister

“Really! The country’s going to the dogs! And we’re going too. I only hope smart people will stop with the big ideas and vote against him.”

“Smart people?”

“It makes me mad to hear all those smart-talking people on TV going on about people’s rights. Will you please stop fighting for my rights, that’s what I want to say to them.”

“I see. I’d better vote for the right person then.”

“You’ll be voting?” she asked, alarmed.

“Yes, I think so. Why?”

“You’re American now. You vote there!”

“I can vote here too, you know. I am still Portuguese.”

“I see.” Clearly this was a worrying thought. “Just one thing: You need to be careful with the ballot. The party symbols look very much alike. You want to tick the right box.”

C. nodded. I nodded. Coelho won.

(In reference to a previous post, because so many readers were kind enough to offer advice – Flowers will be brought with some regularity. I will not be the one to bring them. We are both happy with the arrangement).

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things happen. or not

While pondering what to do, what to say (Yes, No, Yes, No?) to The Professor (previous post), I came upon the first paragraph of  The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami:

I’m still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

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Oh, Mother

About my Mother - University of Porto, Portugal

“Will you have a minute at the end?” whispered The Professor in my ear. He was sitting next to me in the auditorium where the third and final lecture in memory of my mother was about to start. The faces of her mentors and friends – Piaget, Inhelder, Klein, Trevarthan – were being projected on the screen. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he added.

I was curious. Perhaps he wanted to share memories of the time, the very long time he was a regular visitor at my parents. He was named The Professor by the cook, who complained to my mother he ate her croquettes before they were ready. Besides food, he loved Philosophy, Kant most of all, which he talked about continuously to students and anyone else who’d listen.

‘How have you been?” I asked him. He gave me his other ear and I repeated the question.

“Can’t get what people say these days – even in my own language!” he said. We laughed, remembering how upset he would become when my parents and their friends moved from philosophy to politics. French had become the language for anything political since the secret police had jailed a neighbor after receiving information from his maid. The Professor was not good with foreign languages, and insisted on going back to Portuguese.  ”French isn’t safe either,” he argued. “Words like democracy and freedom sound too similar in our language.” By the time I was a teenager, I was convinced he had a point. French was not so hard. The secret police could easily find someone who understood the language to pose as a maid. Did he not think so, I asked one day.

“Harder to plant a maid than a bugging device,” he answered. “I bet there’s one somewhere.”

“What, in the house?”

“Oh, sure,” he said.

“OMG,” I thought, though not exactly in those terms as everyone was an atheist then; my father is the only one still carrying on that tradition.

University of Porto students/copyright@mariaclarapaulino

In the auditorium the first speaker took the floor. The Professor leaned forward trying to hear. It was sad to think of him living on his own. I should visit him, listen to him again. The speaker finished, another one started, and then it was time for me to leave. The Professor came too. I helped him up the stairs and we walked together into the sunlight.

“So,” he said. He hesitated.

“Is everything alright?” I asked.

“Well, you know, not really. I have a request.”

“Yes?” I said, bracing myself. I had had half a day of intense emotion. I’d give anything for some light conversation.

“I loved your mother. No, wait, that’s not true. I love your mother.”

“Excuse me?” someone said. I think it was me, the me about to faint. The other me was busy Being Positive: You can deal with this, yes, you with your gorgeous grown-up daughters, your travels and nationalities, your cultural in-between-ness, your hundred ways to navigate an airport, your skyping, your loves and losses and successes, you. But the me about to faint just wanted to faint.

“Sorry, there was no other way to say this,” he went on. “Would you be kind enough to put flowers on your mother’s grave when I’m gone? I mean, on my behalf?”

So, that’s who they are from, the roses my father finds there almost every Sunday; they have become an on and off topic of conversation in the family.

“The roses – is that you?”

copyright @mariaclarapaulino

“Yes, but let me assure you, your mother never knew. I never interfered.” He looked thinner and frailer than minutes before.

“I don’t know what to say. Sorry. I need to think. There’s my father to consider.”

“Quite. You must think. But there’s very little time left.”

“I see.”

“You’ll let me know soon?”

“Soon, yes.”

“Thank you. Or shall I say, Merci?”

I had to smile. I hailed a taxi for him and saw him disappear in heavy traffic; young people in an open red bus went noisily by, celebrating Portugal and soccer. And all I could think was, Oh Mother!

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Blind space

"Eyes" by Louise Bourgeois, 1982, marble

“Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, soda?” he asked, getting up from the bench we’d been sharing in the hospital waiting room. He was there to see a friend, admitted the day before. I, as my readers will guess, was waiting for news of my father.

“How about a cup of tea?” he insisted. I hesitated. The vending machine was on the other side of the room and I had burnt myself before trying to get a steaming cup through a hole too small for human hands. I was about to suggest I’d get something for him instead, when he said, “I can manage.” I chose tea.

He walked with sure footsteps across the room, his cane lightly touching the floor, right and left and center, like an animal’s antennae. I watched the nurse watching him from behind the desk, hands on patients’ files, eyes on him, eyebrows arching in rhythm with his steps. She raised her head when he went round a column, and then again when two nurses came through the swinging doors, inches away from the tip of his cane. But he moved assuredly and efficiently. Coins soon clanked through the metal slit. Two drinks, two trips.

We sat side by side again sipping from our cups and talking. It is not often people strike a conversation in hospital waiting rooms. We avoid each other’s fears and hopes, try to keep our composure, knowing a word from a nurse may have us sobbing in the presence of strangers. We hold on to our privacy by staring at photos of Paris Hilton in magazines, or at the drama on the TV screen, though we do not follow the plot. At times we gaze at the blue walls with strange intensity; or we hide behind laptops like I had done that morning. I was trying to get some work done and might have succeeded if it wasn’t for the man sitting beside me. He was not pretending to read or watch TV; he was not quite staring at the wall either.

We’d been sitting there for some time when he exclaimed, “I was afraid this place would feel more claustrophobic.” He seemed to be talking to me. I looked up and saw his eyes moving erratically in their sockets. “Really?” was all I could think of saying. How does a blind person experience claustrophobic space?

Earlier in the week I’d listened to a radio program about blindness. A blind man told the journalist he had fallen in love with “a beautiful woman.” Here is what I remembered from that program:

“What do you mean when you say that?” the journalist asked.

“I mean I loved her smell. And her shape too, the shape of her body.”

“There was physical intimacy, then?”

“Oh no, it never got that far. But, I could see she had a beautiful body.”

“So, how did you see that? Did someone tell you?”

“No, I never talked about her. I saw by the way she moved.”

"Blind #14" by Sophie Calle, 1986

I kept thinking of this interview the following day as I discussed Sophie Calle’s Blind series with my students – the human eye, the eye of the camera, and what beauty means to someone who cannot see. Now at the hospital blindness crossed my path for the third time in a matter of days.

“I like wide, open spaces,” he continued. “They’re beautiful.”

Here’s this word again, I thought: Beautiful. I chose not to ask him about it though. Instead, I asked where he went when he wanted to be in an open space. The beach? The city park?

“A park isn’t open space, is it?” he answered. “Too many trees breathing, moving.”

“Moving? In the wind, you mean?”

“No. Have you ever touched a tree? They’re never still.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not keen on the beach either. It’s hard to walk on sand. The sea is too loud; it sounds like it’ll swallow everything up.”

“So, where do you find wide, open space in this city?”

“My house,” he said. “My friends too, like the friend I’m here to see. I can breathe when I’m with her.”

A nurse called out his name. He sprang up, said goodbye, and walked lightly down the hallway. I thought of opening my laptop, but decided to go for a walk instead. Outside, there were some trees. I wondered if they would move for me.

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Now, the sea

Beach café in Foz, Porto, Portugal (photo copyright @mariaclarapaulino)

Waves bloom into white froth, then fall, thinning out onto the shore; they play hide and seek with the crabs, sprinkle salty droplets everywhere. I lean against the beige and blue cushions of a Modernist sofa; like many others, this one sits on a layered wooden platform on the sand.

This is a Porto beach and the wind whips the sea hard; the waves rise higher, roll around themselves again and again, and crash against the rocks. Glued to the surface, mollusks sparkle as the waves subside and seagulls dive for tiny fish left in the water-filled crevices. Children run to the sea, and then away from it, giving out short shrieks. It looks so much fun.

And this is all I want: to be where fun happens. I will stay the whole one day. It is Saturday, after all. And it is the month of May.

To my right a young couple lean on mossy green cushions laid against an off-white sofa. The wind blows the pages of their newspapers but the waiter brings two softly rounded stones to  keep them still.

Drinks before lunch, beach café, Foz, Porto (photo copyright @mariaclarapaulino)

A little lower down, following the natural slope on the sand, a man sits under a white umbrella. I see his head from above: his salt and pepper hair almost touches his shoulders, but not quite. The hair falls perfectly around his skull, and I think of the high-end hairdressers along the street not too far behind us. This is Foz, after all – literally, the place where the river Douro meets the Atlantic and, also literally, the residential abode of old wealth. The world’s troubles dissolve in this cushion-filled beach.

It is but 15 minutes away, yet a world apart from my everyday life in Porto, a city of hard-working citizens whose labor drains into Portugal’s leaky vaults. There are graduates to supervise, workshops to organize, and teaching to do in the understaffed state university; there are traffic jams to sit in, suicidal drivers to keep away from, crowded hospitals to train skills in (the art of negotiation, patience, acceptance), and mirrors to avoid (yes, really; it has been a hard year)… But I have written about this before and I don’t wish to bore you.

... could be anywhere (photo copyright @mariaclarapaulino)

So, come back to Foz with me, where I will stay till the sun goes down. A tanned young man just placed a glass of white wine on the wooden table by my knees. Soon he will bring a salad of goat cheese and red pepper paste, Italian-style. Not much Portuguese traditional cuisine around here. Today I’m glad I can pretend this could be anywhere else in the world. It is Saturday and the sun is shining.

Around me people read, eat, drink, and talk to each other silently because the sea roars every sound away. I see a German shepherd and a Mexican Chihuahua. There is Brazil in some bikinis and Paris in high-heeled shoes; a mix of tanned and milky skins, young and older lovers, babies in strollers, toddlers kicking the sand and trying it for taste. There are long-haired teenagers next to grandmothers quick to loosen their bikini tops; and a man in long trunks has just dived into the sea; his oiled-up bronze skin shimmered in the sun before waves rolled over him.

Pity I can read everyone’s newspapers, though. There are headlines on Portugal’s bankruptcy, EU and IMF loans, 13% unemployed, Colombian doctors replacing Portuguese doctors, who are leaving in droves (where to, I wonder),  nursery school teachers applying for jobs in Madeira and Azores, Mozambique and Angola.

I wish everyone had left their newspapers home because this makes me think of my father and my loyalty struggles (to stay by him, or to go on with my life); and of my daughter S.’s recent visit. The look she gave me as her Portuguese childhood friends – well-qualified, multi-lingual young women holding a variety of MBAs, yet unemployed – mocked their maids’ uneducated accents spoke volumes.

I want to forget ... so I can write (photo copyright@mariaclarapaulino)

I want to forget. I can write if I forget. So let the sea and the wind wipe all memories clean, if only for a day. I will write a new blog post, perhaps, today. There will be time to see students, hold meetings, put on black robes for Ph.D. performances, wait in hospitals, dream of normalcy, struggle with doubts, be with friends. There will be time for all of that as soon as … well, Monday.

Now, the sea; now, the sand.

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Letter to my brother L.

This letter was published last week in fellow She Writer Cathy Kozak‘s “Letters from the Edge” series in her wonderful blog While the Dervish Dances … I wrote it for my brother L., who left us too early, too long ago.

————————-

Yesterday you would have been 54. I brought you white and red carnations – white, for perennial youth; red for splattered blood. I lingered a little longer than usual to tell you about how things have been around here.

How strange it is that I come, year after year, and talk to you, and leave you letters in the flower vase, knowing the rain will soak the paper into mush, and the words will swell up, distorted into scary shapes; and the sun will make the paper dry, shriveled like a leaf burnt around the edges, parched so thin the words seem to stand on nothing, on transparency.

Yesterday, in remembrance of our conversations on the meaning of life, I talked to you about the unexpected as if you were really listening. ‘Life is the unexpected, that which you do not see till it grabs you and stares you in the face,’ you used to say.

Like your death.

But as I sat on the white rectangle that covers what once was you, I glimpsed several threads, some twisted, some full of knots; they danced in the air, connecting things. I was overcome with the feeling of something beginning, a new way of seeing; and of something coming to an end: my diffuse look upon myself and others, upon a life too odd to be made sense of.

I knew this was your gift to me.

A thread connected me to the woman who walked from the block of marble nearby and explained how the flowers would last longer if I placed them a certain way; the wind would pass them by without disturbing them. Another danced between the man sweeping the alleyways, and the trees swaying in the breeze. Yet another pulsated from my heart, carrying my anguish of living in a planet empty of you. And then one broke, as I began to tell you of your nieces. It is still hard to see the sense in this: that you, alive only as memory, and they, whose life I wish happy and long, missed each other so completely, scattered pieces of an unfinished quilt.

I got up without leaving you a letter and hurried home to write this one – which won’t be soaked, or dried, or blown away, but will be my last. What a long goodbye ours has been! It is time to stitch the pieces together and finish the quilt to keep myself warm. Thank you, dearest brother, for the thread.

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A bridge for Portugal

city center, last Tuesday morning, Porto (all photographs were taken by me; protected by image copyright)

The day before my father was admitted to the emergency ward, he read Mr. Fishman’s piece in the New York Times. Portugal’s bailout, Fishman argues, was unnecessary:

Portugal had strong economic performance in the 1990s and was managing its recovery from the global recession better than several other countries in Europe, but it has come under unfair and arbitrary pressure from bond traders, speculators and credit rating analysts who, for short-sighted or ideological reasons [....]

My father’s eyes watered.

“He’s right, you know,” he said, putting down his glasses. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Then he became very quiet, even more quiet than he has been lately as his health declines at the same pace, it seems, as his beloved Portugal. I wish it didn’t have to be this way too, mostly for him.

Before he was admitted to the Hades-like emergency area of a large hospital in Porto, he had been paying attention to the endlessly circular debates on Portuguese TV channels about “The Economic Catastrophe.” I could see this was making him sadder; he shrank a little with every round of breaking news.

Evening pause Tuesday evening at the Marina do Freixo, Porto

‘Why do you keep watching?’ I asked, knowing full well he can’t take his eyes, or his heart, off the sight of this ship sinking, taking down his own web of beliefs, affects, assets, and identity. He was born in this rectangular country, which has been  independent since 1143. Here, most of his loved ones have been laid to rest; here, he fought for democracy and widespread literacy through his 30s and 40s, at great personal risk. It was a fight with clear goals and obstacles then, goals as unifying as a repressive, fascist regime. And he won. We all won.

Now he’s old and tired, and it is difficult to see what rocks gashed these wounds in the country’s core. We are all both problem and solution; we all need to be rescued; and nothing is clear. Why go on strike? Why not go on strike? Whom are we fighting against? What is to be gained? Who is telling the truth? What is the truth? Which political party leaders are lying, and which are genuinely deluded? What is the way forward?

shopping mall in Porto on a Monday afternoon

Perhaps they’re wise, those who choose not to believe we are about to drown. The shops are full of people; it is hard to walk in the city center for the crowds; on a Saturday night, one waits hours for a place in any restaurant; along the seaside, they serve mouth watering plates of baked and roasted sea bass, hake, cod and the delicious desserts of arroz doce (sweet rice) and home-made chocolate mousse doused in brandy. The beaches begin to fill with youngsters, mums, granddads, and surfers of all ages. Beach bars open for the season. There is a schizophrenic gap between the media and the sand beneath my feet; it is hard to think straight when the waves lap at my ankles during lunch break.

Back at the hospital, doctors and nurses are overworked, understaffed, afraid for their pensions, irritable. Spanish doctors, who used to come work in Portugal in their thousands, are leaving en masse. Stretched on makeshift beds along the corridors, patients moan. Among them is my father. I pull a sheet over his body as if I were dressing him in his well-ironed clothes, perennial tie, and long, dark socks, but the angry voice of the nurse awakens me from the dream. I know I am not supposed to be there, but he’s been lying, unattended, for 11 hours. I refuse to tell her how I lied to make my way to his side, and I take the opportunity to voice my protest before I join other families in the waiting room outside.

There is one thing I must ask him before I go.

“Will you consider moving to a private hospital? Please? I mean…”

We both know what I mean: He can afford it.

“That’s not what I fought for,” he says; that is all he ever says on the subject.

Bridge over the river Douro taken in Porto at a stop light

The nurse’s stare draws straight lines between me and him, then focuses on him.

“You might want to listen to your daughter. Some fights have lost their luster.”

He closes his eyes.

“You have to leave” she tells me.

I bend down and whisper in his ear,

“Sorry, dad.”

In the evening I take the longer route home. The river is a sheet of silver threads framed by the wide arc of the bridge. That’s what we need: a long, forgiving bridge leading us far from here. All we need to know is: Where?

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A raft and a sinking country

Discovering new worlds - The Portuguese Caravel

Dear blog readers –  If you’re still with me, here is what I’ll bring you from now on, and for as long as the sea is this turbulent: a raft-blog.

Almost a year ago I wrote my first blog post (I was then in the US). It began,“Dear blog readers, This is a big day. [...] my shiny new blog is being announced in On Being today. I am working on my first post which, I am sure you’ll agree, is all-important in the history of (my) blogging. And I won’t drag my feet, and I will not shoot for perfection – I will simply write it…”

But lately I haven’t written much. So, earlier this evening I took myself out for a serious chat. I slipped by everyone at work, phoned home to say I’d be late, and sat in a riverside café with a plate of shrimp rissóis (sort of fried rolls of shrimp in batter shaped like a crescent moon) and a glass of wine. What to do about my growing blog paralysis was the question I wanted to ask myself, and answer too.

Boats filled with tourists went up and down the river right before my eyes. They looked as surreal as the TV anchors’ smiles when they tell us – which they do at all hours of the day – how much the national debt increases at every breath we take. The President speaks to the nation, the experts fight among themselves, and the politicians play navel-gazing games.

On most days, someone I know files for bankruptcy, loses a job, leaves a spouse, starts taking pills for anxiety, or depression, or both. ‘Why don’t you write about what’s going on, an article, an essay, a report, something?’ I hear. Because I can’t, is the answer – not an essay, not now, not yet.

But it was a good idea to get myself out for a drink, for I did get my answer. As I watched the elegant boats, the image of a raft began to form – a raft of words written in short bursts, in response to  a sentence, an image, a thought. A patchwork blog, perhaps, but one I can keep stitching: shorter stories, musings, and anything in-between. Paper and pencil, a laptop and the internet will keep it going. The truth is, without writing, I don’t breathe so well.

So here’s a toast to my first raft-post, which will go up in the next few days. I hope to see you then!

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The Lonely Man

E. Hopper, Sunday, 1926

He sat alone at the back of the bus on our way back to Portugal, the top of his head barely visible above the plush striped seats. Everyone else sat in pairs, switched places to chat, shared chocolate and memories of our long “museum weekend” in Madrid, just come to an end.

“Who is he? Did anyone know him before this trip?” asked my friend Gabriela on our first evening at a Spanish bar, where we sat eating delicious tapas. We had not laid eyes on the lonely man since our arrival at the hotel.

“I can’t say I know him,” said Carlos, a bushy-bearded sculptor from Braga. “But my wife does. He teaches art at her school.”

“Has he talked to anyone since we left Portugal? He avoids us,” said Amália, voicing what many had been thinking.

“He’s probably trying to forget the French teacher,” said Carlos’ wife, who had just joined us. “They used to go out together but it didn’t work out, apparently. He’s been like this ever since. But he’s good-looking, and he can’t be more than 40 … Plenty of fish in the sea, I say.”

“He looks so sad,” whispered Amália, sipping her third glass of wine; soon she’d be telling us all we never wanted to know about her ex-husband and how he’d left her for her younger cousin. “Why do you think he’s so sad?” she insisted.

A tapas bar in Madrid

“Just let him be,” said Carlos. “It’s obvious he wants to be left alone.”

And so we did. I don’t remember seeing him until days later when we stepped into the bus to go back home to Portugal. We left early in the morning, stopped at Segovia for a break, and were back in our seats soon after for another five hours of Spanish motorways. The soft movement of the bus and the rolling hills going up and down past my window made me sleepy. I was about to close my eyes when a small red car, screaming color against the beige and brown countryside, overtook the bus – once, twice, three times. Three times? I opened my eyes wide. The car returned, as if it was about to overtake the bus, and then slowed down again; the driver was a woman, who looked up at me through her side window. She seemed to be looking for someone.

At the same time, I heard loud voices by the driver’s seat. The bus came suddenly to a halt and the large front glass door opened to let someone out. The engine purred away.

“Why did we stop?” asked an elderly man who had to be in Porto in time for the big soccer game. The Dragons (Porto Soccer Club) would surely crush some major opponent. “How long will we stay here?” he kept asking.

The man who had organized the trip tried to convince us that everything was under control. “António had to go out for a minute,” he said. “He won’t be long.”

“Go out? Here in the wilderness?” whispered Amália. “And who’s António, anyway?”

We looked around and noticed the sad man’s seat in the back row was empty.

“He probably needed to get some fresh air,” I suggested.

“Here?” she asked again, a little louder. “He’s weird.”

We went outside to stretch our legs. As we came down the bus steps, we saw the red car parked not too far away. Inside, a man buried his face in a woman’s neck; her full black hair covered him from our view. But as they kissed a very hot kiss,  they moved, oblivious to the world, and his face was revealed.

“OMG,” shouted Amália. “It’s the lonely guy!”

And indeed it was, yet lonely no more. We climbed back in the bus, happy for him, though a little confused. A few minutes later, he came in too, and said in a lovely baritone voice we had not heard before,

‘I would like to thank you all for the company and for your patience with me these past few days. I’m leaving now. Have a great trip back.”

Roman aqueduct, Segovia, Spain

He smiled nervously as we stared at him, and then, as if on cue, we cheered and clapped. “Well done, man” someone shouted. “That woman has guts. Hold on to her tight.”

“Yeahhh, Yeahh!” we shouted in chorus.

The red car drove out onto the road, faster and faster, till we could no longer see it.  Amália turned around to say something. I leaned forward to listen.

“Yes?”

“I sure hope she won’t replace him with his younger cousin one day. That’d make him sad again. And the second time … well, it’s got to be worse.”

I wanted to assure her that things would turn out well for her too, but I didn’t, as indeed they may not. Night had fallen and we settled down again. As the bus rolled quietly away, some of us slept, some spoke to each other in whispers, and some simply stared in the dark.

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