My Blue Heaven

It’s my last Saturday here and I’m starting to grow a bit melancholic at the prospect of having to leave. Since I’ve been indoors for awhile packing and tying up ends, I decided to take a casual stroll through the city for a bit and then, for one of the first times since I arrived, I started to recognize the beauty of Lisboa behind its dirty façade.

I went to Rossio and did a 360, this route I take every day is like a ravine amongst a full-circle wall of buildings creeping up the hills complete with windows and dirty pastels. The occasionally ominous Castelo de São Jorge at the peak of the eastern wall, the Elevador de Santa Justa bolting up next to the ruins of the Convento de Carmo to the west. I pass through Martim Moniz (the metro stop that I use every day but couldn’t get the name right for three weeks) and the pathway by the Asian Mall where all the bums sleep and the familiar air of dehydrating urine makes me a bit misty-eyed. I pass by the elderly overweight tranny who has half her face paralyzed by a stroke (but according to my local grocer “was pretty hot in the first years after the dictatorship”) and she waves a coy hello. She actually saved me from going hungry one night when I went to the grocer with 20 cents to my name to buy a bola (a small ball of fresh baked bread for 17 cents). Since he had sold the last bag to tranny, he told me I could ask her, and she handed me one and said I looked too skinny and sickly.

There is a unique sound to the street here: the former dissidents who now have remained bitter and drunk for 30+ years that chatter in the square and feed the birds, the church bells each with their own tones and rhythms, the odd mufferless car, the click-clack of these two meter high billboards that constantly cycle through 3 different poster ads, and the pigeons, so many pigeons.

I spent so many afternoons reading on the beach in Estoril, a small villa outside Lisbon where Ian Fleming took notes on Yugoslav spy Darko Papov at the Estoril Casino to write his greatest work Casino Royale. It also housed the exiled Spanish Monarchy after the Second Republic was founded, a few years before the country exploded into a brutal Civil War. The castle beach was my favorite. Somehow, I never got a tan. I think my skin rejects the sun’s rays as an aesthetic choice.

I drifted often through Bairro Alto with my flatmates. Filled every night with drunks and fado or jazz spilling out of the bars, it was kind of like a slightly classier version of the warehouse district. There always seemed to be a puddle of puke every few blocks that added some color to the monochrome neighborhood and made you wonder who could vomit in such quantities.

During the mornings and early afternoon I would be in class at the Universidade de Lisboa. Many of the rooms had an inexplicable odor of wet dog hair. I wouldn’t say it was a very pretty campus. Every building was a sort of torn-up dirty white. Nevertheless, I did learn to speak Portuguese with near fluency in a very short time which I attribute to the underpaid genius of the teaching staff. During the final exams, my friend Harry didn’t let me down. He came in for two days with his arm in a sling that was signed all over in Chinese and Portuguese. All the signatures were done with the same pen and seemed to be in the same handwriting. The final day his arm had healed I guess because he didn’t need the sling anymore. I think he stole that idea from the John Candy movie “Spies Like Us”. He also kept belching loudly throughout the exam for some reason. I couldn’t stop laughing and had a hard time concentrating on my own test.

In between all this I would either wander through Lisbon or laze around at Casa Marvao. This house I’ve lived in is a bit filthy. It used to be a brothel for nearly a century and the bidets are still functional. After that it became a nursing home and I think for fifteen years now it has been slowly destroyed by Erasmus students and termites. My room is filled with graffiti in several different languages, most of it consisting of lame quotes that I guess were meant to be inspirational.

So that is my Lisbon, my blurry heaven, a bit tedious, a bit beautiful, a bit mind-bending, a bit ancient, nearly modern, still waiting impatiently for the return of D. Sebastiao, still doce, ainda abafada, abalizada, abarrotada, repleta, ocupada, brava, abobalhada, abrasada, alastrada chateada, cansada, alheia, vermelha, verdejante, ambigua, amena, amortecida, miserável, louvável, arraigada, atemorizadora, ativa, manuelina, gótica, avariada, aziaga, baldia, calda, campestre, bagunçada, barulhenta, cariativa, arregada, bêbada, coitada, colorida, congestionada, seria, simples, contradictoria, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.