Just as the fog to Lisbon and the Tagus river isolated from the world, making it not a but in a landscape of time, he perceived for the first time in his life the absolute insularity of their actions: it was becoming so alien to his own past and his future as the objects around him at night in the hotel room. Maybe it was in Lisbon where he met the reckless and hermetic happiness I found in it the first night I saw him perform at the Metropolitan. I remember something I once said that Lisbon was the homeland of his soul, the only possible country of those born abroad.
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| Rua Aurea and Praça de D. Pedro IV (Rossio) |
had imagined a city as foggy as San Sebastian and Paris. He was surprised by the transparent air, the accuracy of pink and ocher facades of the houses, the unanimous red roofs, golden light static that lingers in the hills of the city with an effulgence of recent rain. From the window of his room at a hotel in dark hallways where everyone spoke in whispers, saw a square of identical balconies and the profile of a statue of a king on horseback strongly pointed to the south.
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| Tram in Alfama |
Biralbo heard a familiar noise and creeping away as metal. A tram was approaching slowly, tall and yellow, swinging on the rails, between the blackened walls and slag dumps. Went up to him, did not understand what he explained the driver, but he did not care where you were. Far above the city, shone misty winter sun, but the landscape had crossed Biralbo greyness of evening rain. After a very long journey that seemed the car stopped in a place open to the estuary. Courts had deep and pediments crowned with marble statues and a staircase that was sinking in the water. On its pedestal with white elephants and angels trumpets rose bronze, a king whose name never knew Biralbo held the bridle of a horse sitting up with the serenity of a hero against the sea wind, smelling of rain and port.
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| José I equestrian statue at Praça do Comercio |
was still daylight, but the lights began to dim light in the high wet porches. Biralbo crossed under an arch with allegories and shields and then was lost through the streets he was not sure he had visited before.
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| Arc between the Praça do Comercio and the Rua Augusta |
ran again, but could not see his left, a darker side street, a staircase, a narrow tower higher than the roofs of houses, absurdly alone and was erected between them, with Gothic windows and iron ribs, ran a light and an open door where a man, a collector who had a waist a bag of coins and gave him a ticket.
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"Fifteen shields," he said, pushed him inside, quietly closed a kind of rusty fence , turned a crank of copper and the place which still Biralbo had not looked began to shudder and creak like the timbers of a steamer, to get up, had a face on the other side of the fence, both hands clasped to her that the shaking, Malcolm, who was sinking into the subsoil, which Biralbo disappeared completely when not yet fully understood everything that was in an elevator and it was no longer necessary to keep running.
extracts Winter in Lisboa by Antonio Munoz Molina.
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