Part 3 (1/2)
The mosque. We've skirted it, looking at the portals that relieve the plain sandstone exterior. Each horseshoe-arch opening, with the door below, reminds me of a schematic human figure, with the radiating design around the arch like a nimbus. Since realistic images were forbidden, I wonder if this design had the hidden purpose of placing the idea of the body within the design. The portal openings are backed by geometric designs of great variety and complexity.
Our big cowboy who took over the town, Abd ar-Rahman, bought a Christian church, which had been built over a Roman temple, and began to enlarge it for a mosque. His heirs continued the work. This is the largest mosque in the world, where you can feel how the architecture guides you toward a philosophy of prayer. The immense, spreading horizontal s.p.a.ce keeps you close to the ground, with no sense of hierarchy, no sense of uplifting the spirit toward heaven. It is profoundly unlike the experience of the Gothic but does not feel totally foreign to the experience of the Romanesque. In a mosque, calligraphic inscriptions from the Koran replace the holy images in Christian churches. Wherever you prostrate yourself is holy, as long as you face Mecca; the mosque has no focal-point high altar. Any inspired supplicant can become a prayer leader in his part of the mosque. In the Cordoba mosque, the multiplied columns make it clear to the wors.h.i.+per that all the s.p.a.ce therein is equal s.p.a.ce before Allah.
The most often-used word to describe the mosque is forest. One writer compared the endless columns topped by arches to a petrified forest. I can support that conceit. There's even a lovely parallel of the inside to the courtyard of trees outside, where the faithful washed before prayer, and-this bends my mind-where scholars sat in appointed spots and discussed recent theories with anyone interested. But walking around the mosque, looking up at the layers of arches, I do not have the sensation of being in a forest. I have a more primitive instinct-that we are in the mind of Allah. The arches topped with other many-lobed arches form a great brain. The s.p.a.ce is intimate, even claustrophobic. At the same time I feel something is called for here. I've never had a similar reaction in a building before.
The columns and the sublime cream and terra-cotta colors resemble a paradise, and at the same instant the ludicrous additions later heaped upon the mosque by the Christians are hard to look at. They literally plunked down a large church right in the prayer room of the mosque, a hideous intrusion that disrupts the harmony of the structures. When Charles V finally made it to Cordoba three years after this monstrosity was built, he said, ”You have destroyed something that was unique to this world and replaced it with something that can be seen anywhere.” Despite his outrage, Charles did nothing to restore the mosque's integrity, so what we have today is this absurd combination, like a camel with a chicken's face. The Christians also walled in many of the arcades, reducing the light inside. Surely this is one of the major architectural atrocities of the world. Luckily, the size makes it possible to ignore the strange church and to dream awhile in the ancient Andalucian manner. In such places, the heart expands and admits the new.
Back in Madrid, we spend the last night at the Ritz in great comfort. The hotel notebook cautions guests not to appear in the lobby in sports attire. If you must wear such attire, notify the concierge and he will escort you out another door.
We dress up and have a fine dinner in the hotel restaurant, among all the Spanish families so formally dressed that we feel we've stepped back thirty years. The Gran Reserva Bodegas Muga wine smells like wet violets in spring and the antique rose called Paul Neyron at Bramasole. The cheese, garrotxa, tastes like the basket of herbs I pick there when I'm about to prepare a feast. Or maybe I'm homesick. Our neighbor Chiara has sent Ed his pa.s.saporta. He can leave Spain and enter Italy legally.
It seems like months since we landed, Ed sick, my bag lost. The little jet lifts off for Florence, its motor humming rather oddly, like a paper airplane propelling from an unwinding, twisted rubber band. Ed is sipping water and looking out the window, and I lean over to see Madrid receding into an abstraction. Goodbye to the azure and saffron sky over the vega; goodbye to the museum courtyard, where birds drench the air with their song; goodbye to the night when women named Agueda are serenaded; goodbye to the ”incorrigible bohemian” now immortalized in marble; goodbye to the Arab inscriptions on the tombs of Isabella and Fernando; goodbye to the sun high over the bullring; goodbye to the turkey thrown from the church tower and the good luck of the catcher; goodbye to the goat marooned on an outcrop; goodbye to the children carrying rosemary wreaths and colored birds in the Virgin's procession; goodbye to the brain of Allah; goodbye to the cold garlic soup of Ronda; goodbye to Machado's words Beneath the blue of oblivion, the sacred water/ sings nothing-not your name, not mine; goodbye, Federico Garcia Lorca.
Astrolabe
and Cataplana
Portugal The taxi driver whistles as he leisurely parallels Avenida da Liberdade's long park just coming into leaf. A young March spring with jacaranda and fruit trees at bud break. ”Europe, really, really Europe,” I say. I'm already under those trees sipping coffee at an art nouveau cafe, writing new Portuguese words in my notebook. We circle an immense open plaza of fountains, wind up, up, switch-backing into increasingly narrow streets lined with sky-blue and blue-going-to-purple facades and a few of frosted pink with tiled fronts. He stops in front of a dismal funeral parlor with a window full of dead plants warning you of what's inside. Opening my door, he points down what Ed calls a mirror-sc.r.a.per street. The driver won't enter but motions us to take a right at the end, then a left. Our rented house is there, he gestures, turning over his hand three times. We drag our bags over rough cobbles. The area looks seedy but not threatening. The funeral home is tucked in among small restaurants, produce stands with mounds of cabbage, and dim bottegas.
”Looks like a real neighborhood.” Ed tries to ignore a mongrel snarling from a doorway. Though the dog strains toward Ed, it does not lunge. A sudden shout from inside causes it to go limp and lie down. Mothers are retrieving toddlers from a day care center. A stooped man sets out a plate of food for stray cats just inside an abandoned house. One house looks bombed; several are long gone in decay.
”Everywhere we go will be downhill,” I notice. ”That means we'll have to climb back up.”
”Good,” Ed says. Not good, I think.
Our block-long street has taken a modest turn toward gentrification. Freshly painted, tiny row houses line both sides, each facade with a window, a door, and a stoop onto the street. And so we arrive at our ”home” in Lisbon.
Our house has been well outfitted as a rental, with yellow walls and practical furnis.h.i.+ngs. There's even fruit, wine, and a friendly note to welcome us. We inspect the kitchen first, and it is the best room, well equipped for the dinners we expect to cook. We will use the twin bedroom for our baggage and clothes. The double bedroom-oh, so dark-is small but okay as long as the lights are on. We find a large bedroom downstairs, dark as an oubliette. I close the door and won't go downstairs again. The heaters taking the chill off the March afternoon burn paraffin. The oily, medicinal smell makes me woozy probably because I am wary of paraffin. My friend Susan was burned over twenty-five percent of her body when the paraffin she was melting to seal jars of apricot jam caught fire and leaped to her cotton nightgown. Since then I've hardly been able to light a candle. I turn off the heaters and pray for a clement March.
The house was built for servants' quarters adjacent to a looming pink palacio, which blocks all light in back. ”These row houses must have preceded the palacio,” I speculate. ”If not, why did they bother to build windows that just face walls?”
”Maybe. Or maybe they just wanted the illusion of light, as though you might pull open the curtains in the morning and receive a benison of sunlight.”
A later owner cut a skylight in the hall. Other than that, light comes in the front window. I lift the lace curtain and look out into the sunny street, packed with cars. ”If it were not for cars, the street could be a patio for all the people who've renovated these places.”
”Yes, in summer they might catch a breeze.”
”They could set tables at the end and dine with the marvelous view of the city. There could be pots of flowers and small trees.” Instead, the cars are so closely jammed in that you have to edge through them sideways to reach your door. To exit, they back up. Cars, our boon and freedom, are also the disaster of our time. ”Look, the house across the street is for sale.”
Ed comes to the window. ”Awaiting your cosmetic touch.” But I don't think so. I would not be attracted to a one-window house.
Twilight. We make our way down to the enormous plaza we pa.s.sed earlier, Praca dos Restauradores. At one end throngs of very black-skinned people congregate. Several of the women, dressed in the brightly patterned cottons of Africa, have tall turban arrangements swaddled around their heads. Ed remembers Portugal's colonies, Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique. ”Didn't they have Goa, too?” Ed asks. ”And Macao? Where is that? They were all over the place.”
”All I remember is Brazil. Macao is in the Philippines, no, near Hong Kong.” They visit and talk on cell phones, flas.h.i.+ng white-white smiles. Others catch the last rays at sidewalk cafes or a stand-up sidewalk bar, taking a nip of ginjinha, a favorite drink made from distilled cherries. Everyone is out, as in Tuscany at this hour, picking up bread for dinner, meeting a friend, or stopping for a bunch of flowers at one of the vendors. Lisboans must have the best-kept shoes in Europe-shoe-s.h.i.+ne stands are everywhere. In a doorway, a man with elephant man's disease holds out his hat for change. Plum-colored tumors balloon all over his face. He's all tumor, except for one wild eye trained on the world that does not want to see him. Everyone looks instead at a Gypsy boy playing an accordion, while his little dog, who looks uncannily intelligent, pa.s.ses a cup for donations. The scene feels oddly out of time and at the same time familiar, as though we've stepped into an archetypal scene that will always be played this way.
Our guidebook mentions a street lined with restaurants jutting off the plaza. The Michelin tasters approve of these restaurants, and we walk down the street hoping instinct will guide us. They look tired. Some have barkers to lure customers. We pick the highest-rated one and have a perfectly nice, if uninspired, dinner of grilled prawns and fried calamari. We don't know what to expect from Portuguese food. We do have wine suggestions from Riccardo, a wine merchant friend in Cortona, so right away we try a Morgada de Santa Catherina, white, silky with a touch of peach.
The climb back somehow doesn't seem as steep as it looks. So much to see along the way-a woman ironing on her balcony, caged birds in open windows, the streets full of boys playing soccer, shop owners sweeping and taking out the trash, a young girl reading at a cash register with overhead neon casting a nimbus around her black hair. From the end of our street, we look out, over the domes and lights and rooftops of the city. How thrilling-an unknown country to explore.
Lusitania, early Portugal, may have been settled by Celts who intermarried with indigenous people. But those first migrants instead may have been from Lusoni, in central Spain, or maybe they were Carthaginian mercenary soldiers. And where were the indigenous people from? We always fall back on Indo-European, a nice catch-all answer. Whoever they were, the first-millennium Lusitani became fiercely bellic when threatened by the Romans. They battled through defeat after defeat before they were once and for all conquered by Augustus. At the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos (Monastery of San Jerome), built to honor Vasco da Gama's pa.s.sage to India, we have started in the archaeology wing, where we find an exhibit of religious artifacts of the Lusitani people. This is lucky because it starts us at the beginnings of Portuguese history.
We are alone in the cavernous room of recently excavated carved stone and marble altars, gravestones, and sculptures. A young girl's pure face stares back at me from a time when this land was rife with G.o.ds, spirits, and protective forces. Labeled a nymph, she may have been a village girl who owned the displayed gold circle earring formed into a tiny hand at its tip. Her first love may have slipped onto her finger the ring engraved with private symbols. Many monuments are dedicated to the strictly local G.o.d who protected the region, Endovellicus. I love the G.o.ds of the crossroads. Throughout the world people always have recognized the metaphorical significance of the path chosen, the path forsaken. These pagan people wors.h.i.+ped all the usual G.o.ds of war, nature, and agriculture, but their religion included much more specialized G.o.ds of thermal baths, horses, darts, and the house. Pantheism appeals to me: G.o.d in everything. I don't mind if G.o.d/G.o.ds take many forms. Catholicism channels this deep human need differently; you may pray to the particular saint of parachutists, telecommunications, fertility in mares, hemorrhoids, lost objects, and housework.
Ed leads me to the sculpture of a Ja.n.u.s head on one nape, looking as always toward two different possibilities, but this one looks with male and female faces. The sentiments of the artist spiral outward from one glance at the beautifully modeled faces-the reconciliation of opposites or, it occurs to me, maybe the inevitability of opposite points of view. Imagine excavating marble fragments-fingers, whole hands, unidentifiable bits-then coming upon this head in a heap of rubble. Here's our friend the bull, ever a powerful symbol, this time as a miniature votive statue, then as a larger figure sacrificed to Jupiter, G.o.d of divine light and its accompaniment of thunder and lightning. The collection of amulets brings me close to the human hand that held these small jugs, acorns, and fruits, and the inscriptions on funeral markers startle me with poignant voices from such distance in time. One bids farewell to a son who lived only a year and twenty-three days: Salve, so it is. Another says: Italic land begot me, Hispania buried me, I lived five l.u.s.tra, the sixth winter killed me. In this territory I remained ignored by all and as a guest. Many bear the inscription: May the earth be light on you. The last is an inspiring wish. When I next light a votive candle in a church in memory of my friend Josephine, I will say this for her. The whole exhibit inspires-we see how the land was alive with secret forces.
The monastery complex out in the Belem neighborhood faces the Tejo River, where the watery unknown pulled the explorers out of their safe harbor, their sense of adventure probably as strong as the capitalistic impulse to hunt for black pepper, gold, and spices. The monastery originally was close to the water, but over time the river receded, leaving an expansive s.p.a.ce for gardens. Unfortunately, a rail line and a busy highway buzz along in front, seriously disturbing the grandeur of the site. We explore the church and sublime cloister, the refectory with azulejos (hand-painted tiles) on the walls. Walking along the three-hundred-meter exterior, we examine the portals. The ornamented doors seem even more precious because they survived the epic earthquake of 1755, which shook down most of the city. The building, started by Manuel I in the heyday of the discoverers' voyages, is considered the apex of the architectural style that flourished under this ruler. Manueline is a hybrid style, Gothic on the way to Renaissance, with a touch of the Moors in its horseshoe arches and rhythmic repet.i.tions. The particularity of the style lies in the details. Doors and windows, built of local stone, are exuberantly carved with anchors, ropes, seahorses, palms, elephants, and even rhinoceroses, all recalling voyages out from the port of Lisbon. Vasco da Gama, buried inside, must rest well in this spot where his accomplishments are celebrated. The site and history intertwine, giving me the impression that each gives light to the other.
Down the street we come to another cause for celebration-this one dedicated to the famous pastry of Lisbon, pasteis de Belem. The Antiga Confeitaria de Belem, a crowded bakery-cafe, lures you from yards away with the toasty scents of the tarts that children must be given from year one. A chaos of mutable lines forms at the counter, where people order sackfuls to take home for Sat.u.r.day lunch. The delicate layered pastry sh.e.l.l is filled with voluptuous custard, a creamy, irresistible treat. Ed has two. And will, I imagine, every day for the remainder of our trip.
Thus fortified, we walk over to the tower guarding the port entry. It looks like a giant golden chess piece. Every postcard stand features images of this ante-earthquake Manueline torre, which was the last glimpse of Lisbon the navigators had as they sailed away. It has the unsettling aspect of appearing to be a mediocre watercolor painting of itself.
We return to the monastery for further wonders. Anyone who loves boats should see the Maritime Museum. Also all ten-year-olds and those who remember being ten. Was there ever another craze in the world such as the Portuguese had for sailboats? Every citizen must have had a mad pa.s.sion for making models; the endless displays attest to this. From palm size to bicycle length, the types, sails, fittings, and furnis.h.i.+ngs are meticulously worked down to the teeny knots and flemished ropes. Probably thousands more fill the storerooms. Besides the models, the museum fathers also h.o.a.rded a vast number of uniforms worn on the discovery s.h.i.+ps and their terra-cotta pots and vases for spices. Paintings and ex-votos reveal the peril of s.h.i.+pwreck, fire, and earthquake. In the remains of a ”pepper wreck” recently recovered, we see spoons, coins, belt buckles, and blue and white porcelain dishes. Amid all this we come upon Vasco da Gama's portable altar with a statue of San Rafael, which traveled with him to India.
My favorite cases display the instruments of navigation. There's a travelling set of globes in little round cases. One shows the animals representing the constellations, the other the earth. Someone's pocket sundial in ivory was fitted with a compa.s.s. These instruments of beauty performed useful, sometimes life-and-death functions-the inclimator, which takes the angle of heel to port; the gimbled barometer, a gadget fitted with needles that measured azimuths, the horizontal angle between north and the point observed. Armillaries are spheres of circles within circles, usually with a sun positioned in the middle; they show the relative positions of poles, equator, meridians, and the sun. The armillary's value still symbolically reigns: you see one emblazoned on the Portuguese flag.
Most beautiful is the astrolabe. Etymologically the word means ”star-taker.” It looks like a big magical pocket watch. The metal face, engraved with numbers and zodiacal designs and cursive words, could be something an angel might hold aloft. For me, astrolabes have poetic a.s.sociations. Chaucer wrote ”A Treatise on the Astrolabe,” an early (1391) exacting work blending science and art. One of my favorite love stories is that of Heloise and Abelard. After they chose to live apart in religious orders, she wrote him to announce with ”exultation” the birth of their son. She named him Astrolabe.
The instrument came to Europe with the Muslim invasion of Andalucia, though its history goes back to 150 B.C. Hipparchus of Bithynia is most frequently named as the inventor. A pilot today has the control tower; the medieval navigator had the astrolabe. The armillary performs similarly as sort of a three-dimensional astrolabe. The basic astrolabe function was taking longitude and lat.i.tude by coordinating celestial points and equatorial lines. A metal disk (the rete, ”web” or ”net”) engraved with a star map is superimposed over a larger disk marked with the earth's circ.u.mference and markers. A movable ruler that Muslims called the alidade calculates relative positions. If you know the location of the sun or a star, your astrolabe can find time and place. The metal ring at the top allows it to be hung, as Chaucer carefully noted, in straight plumb. Though the church considered them instruments of the devil, astrolabes must have been sacred to the captains.
There's more. Actual boats in a drydock warehouse. Slick blue fis.h.i.+ng boats with the evil eye protection painted on the prow. Some designs look like Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs. A black rooster decorates a rowboat. We look at the yacht of a king, various types of war boats, and primitive rowboats. We pa.s.s on through the carriage museum, which just ill.u.s.trates that almost everything rescued from history is interesting, if only mildly.
The tram doesn't come. No taxi in sight. We begin the long walk back. Empty plazas seem to be waiting for some military parade to materialize. There's an ease here; the traffic not frenetic. So many pastry shops and cafes. Cat tongues, almond tarts, fruit tarts, citrus tarts. At the blue-and-white-tiled Canecas, the bakers, visible through gla.s.s, are flattening rounds of dough, forming a dome, then folding over the edges, leaving a cleft. We buy one of these breads in an oval shape, the opening sprinkled with seeds. We already know the Lisbon bread is especially good.
Ed has learned to order a bica, the espresso equivalent. He is thrilled with the coffee. ”Better than French. Certainly better than in Spain. It's the old connection with Africa. They must have had good beans early on.”
”As good as Italian?”
”Umm, different.”
For the next few days we follow tourist pursuits, interspersing each stop at a museum or castle or church with a visit to a new pastry shop. I become seriously attached to almond tarts. Ed prefers the cla.s.sic custard tarts and wishes he'd been fed them in childhood. We loiter outside at Cafe Brasileira, which overlooks a statue of the unruly writer Fernando Pessoa. He might have sat in this chair when he wrote, From the terrace of this cafe I look at life with tremulous eyes. I see just a little of its vast diversity concentrated in this square that's all mine . . . perhaps my greatest ambition is really no more than to keep sitting at this table in this cafe . . . Ah, the mysteries grazed by ordinary things in our very midst! To think that right here, on the sunlit surface of our complex human life, Time smiles uncertainly on the lips of Mystery! How modern all this sounds! And yet how ancient, how hidden, how full of some other meaning besides the one we see glowing all around us.
Pessoa refused to limit himself to a single persona. His chameleon sensibility gave us many books seemingly written by different authors. The Book of Disquiet, one of my favorites, is written in the voice of an insignificant bookkeeper but feels close to autobiography. His translator, Richard Zenith, describes this monumental sc.r.a.pbook as ”anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man's anguished soul.” The book, a wonderful travel companion in Lisbon, consists of small sections, perfect for reading in sips at all the cafes he frequented around town. Pessoa rarely left Lisbon in his adult life, and the city informs, infiltrates, and grounds his writing, no matter how far afield his personas pull his ident.i.ty. The green sky over the river Tejo, ”the potted plants that make each balcony unique,” sunset colors turning to gray on buildings, the cry of the lottery ticket seller, the ”eternal laundry” drying in the sun-the myriad sensations of the city form the lively background of his pages. I love Sundays in European cities, the sudden quiet of the streets, with the parks full of strollers and children. Pessoa writes: I'm writing on a Sunday, the morning far advanced, on a day full of soft light in which, above the rooftops of the interrupted city, the blue of the always brand-new sky closes the mysterious existence of stars into oblivion.
In me it is also Sunday . . .
My heart is also going to a church, located it doesn't know where. It wears a child's velvet suit, and its face, made rosy by first impressions, smiles without sad eyes above the collar that's too big.
A band of about twelve serious-faced musicians plays in the plaza in front of Pessoa's statue. They seem about to slip into a dirge at any moment.
The funiculars are fun, like rides at a carnival, and with the taxis so plentiful and amazingly cheap, we get all over town with ease, walking one way, riding back the other.
The Fiera da Ladra, the Thief's Fair, has no s.h.i.+p models, no baroque candlesticks, nothing to covet. The thieves must have gone into real estate. Instead I flash on everything I threw away in my whole life-Barbie with one leg, paperbacks missing their covers, sad bathrobes, and old computer keyboards. We leave and meander until we're lost in the Alfama, the labyrinthine historic Arab quarter. You'd need to drop stones to find your way back to where you started. Arm's-width streets twist, climb, double back, drop. Whitewashed houses with flowering pots and crumbling ruins with gaping courtyards open to small plazas with birds competing in the trees for best song of the morning-a soulful neighborhood for spending your days. If I lived in Lisbon, I would choose to live here. Redolent of the souk, the bazaar, the roots of Iberia, the Alfama does not seem just quaint and interesting. At heart, this area remains deeply exotic. Open this door and find the memory of a Muslim mathematician consulting his astrolabe, pa.s.s this walled garden and imagine the wives of the house gathered around the fountain under the mimosa. Easily, memory seeks a guitarist playing by moonlight at an upper window, a designer of tiles in a workshop, a child weaving on a doorstep, a sailor packing his duffel. The spirit of the Alfama feels close to the spirit of the artifacts of Lusitania that we saw on the first day. Here's where mystery lingers, where ritual and alchemy and magic take place. This is the center, naturally enough, for fado, meaning ”fate,” the music whose saudade rips out of the heart. Saudade. We have no equivalent English word. Does that mean we have no equivalent English feeling? A line from Yeats comes close to the meaning: ”A pity beyond all telling is hid at the heart of love.” But saudade connotes, too, a pervasive longing and reaching. It seems to be a lower-voltage force than the Spanish duende but springs from the same taproot: we are alone, we will die, life is hard and fleeting-easy realizations but, when experienced from within, profound.
Colors: Islamic turquoise, curry, coral, bone white, the blue layers of the sea. The scents of baking bread, wet stones, and fish frying at outdoor stands. The aromas of coriander and mint and big stews and roast pork emanating from the small neighborhood restaurants, the tascas. Menus of today's prato do dia are posted in the windows, and we choose a tasca with everyone seated together at crowded tables. As we wait, I admire a walnut cake with caramel frosting served to a man across from us. He sees this and reaches over for my fork, handing me back a large bite of his dessert. The waiter brings platters of fish fried in a gossamer, crispy batter, and a spicy eggplant the old Moors would have loved. We are astonished. Here's the real local food. For dessert, old-fas.h.i.+oned baked apples are served to Ed, and to me a flan with cinnamon, a whiff of the Arabs. The bill-twenty euros, a fourth of what the guidebook restaurants cost, and ten times better.
The Alfama slows for afternoon. Music drifts from a window, not fado, not fateful, but a whiny Bob Dylan relic inviting a lady to lay across a big bra.s.s bed. Instead, a woman hangs her laundry on a balcony, her mouth full of green plastic clothespins. Cheery old trams, red and yellow, ply the main streets. At an antique shop I find blue and white tiles from the 1700s in dusty stacks around the floor. Ed steps outside to call our friend Fulvio in Italy. I see him gesturing to the air like an Italian as I look through a hundred or so tiles and choose four to hang in my California kitchen. Souvenir-to come to the aid of memory. I always will like to be reminded of Lisbon. From the castle grounds up top, all of terra-cottatopped Lisbon spreads out for the viewing, a fortunate city on the water.