The following Sunday I was in the Baixa district, crossing the immense Praça do Comércio. The Baixa is the only district of the old city that is flat and low. Surrounded on three sides by the famous hills, its fourth side is the estuary of the Tagus, known as the Sea of Straw because its waters, in a certain light, have a golden sheen. From the landing stages here during the fifteenth century, Lisboa’s navigators, merchants and slave-traders set out for Africa, the Orient and, later, Brazil. Lisboa was then the richest capital of Europe, trading in everything which defied the Atlantic: gold, slaves from the Congo, silks, diamonds, spices.
Stick two cloves into each apple, she’d instruct, and then we’ll bake them in the oven with brown sugar.
When she wasn’t looking I’d stick in a third, with the conviction that this would make the apple taste finer.
If she spotted the third one, she’d take it out and put it back in the jar. They come from Madagascar, she explained. Waste not, want not!
This was another phrase of hers that was like a refrain. Yet unlike It’s Too Late, Waste Not, Want Not was a warning rather than a lament. A warning which somehow applied, I thought as I walked across it, to the Praça do Comércio. All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisable dream.
A fatal earthquake, the tidal waves that accompanied it, the fires that followed it, devastated a third of Lisboa and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants during the first week of November 1755. Famine, disease and looting ensued. While the fires were still burning, and people had only the tattered clothes they stood up in, men bought and sold looted diamonds among ashes and rubble. Despite the blue sky above, despite the golden tan of the Sea of Straw, there was talk everywhere of Punishment and Retribution.
And it was the following year that the Marquês de Pombal began to dream of a new city of Reason and Symmetry. After a catastrophe that had shaken the optimism and sense of justice of philosophers the length of Europe, the rebuilt city of Lisboa was going to propose a prosperity, a security guaranteed by the flow of wealth alone! A banker’s dream of streets whose regularity, transparency, parallel lines and reliability would match those of perfectly kept accounts, and whose immense Praça do Comércio would open the city to the trade of the entire world. .
Yet in the second half of the eighteenth century Lisboa was neither Manchester nor Birmingham, and the Industrial Revolution had started elsewhere. The decline that would lead to Portugal becoming the poorest nation in Western Europe had already set in.
However many people there are in the Praça do Comércio, it always looks half-empty.
She kept little in her purse. Her movements, when handling cash, were neat and precise. She hid small sums that she had ear-marked for certain projects in different envelopes, or in the drawers of her dressing table, so she wouldn’t be tempted to spend them. Once she lost a ten-shilling note, which represented a third of a working woman’s monthly wage. It’s gone! she sobbed. It’s gone! She said this as if the note had chosen to go, as if it were an animal who had run away, ungratefully run away, for she was giving it a good home. Gone!
When she wept, she tried to turn away from me. This may have been to spare me, but it was also because her tears took her back to other times, before I had been thought of. While she was crying, I waited, like you wait for a long train to pass at a level crossing.
After a while she dabbed her eyes and said: We’ll manage. All we have to do is to make a little go a long way.
By now I was in the Rua Augusta, one of the straight streets of which the banker had dreamt. Being Sunday, the opticians and hairdressers, the travel agencies and maritime insurance offices were shut. People were on their way to have lunch with family or friends. Many were carrying little packages of sweetmeats to offer to their hosts; Sunday gifts, elaborately wrapped and tied with their ribbons knotted in bows.
On the corner of the Rua da Conceição a crowd waited on the pavement, peering towards the Madalena church. I decided to wait too. There was no traffic. Even the trams had been stopped.
I heard people cheering further down the street. Then 150 runners appeared, coming from the direction of the Madalena. They were running steadily, keeping together in a bunch, encouraging one another, with no bravura or overt competitiveness. Men and women, teenagers and seventy-year-olds, all with their heads held high, some snorting like horses when they breathed out. Their long strides beat out a slow regular rhythm on the cobbles between the tram lines.
A child, who wanted to see better, pushed me in the back and I stepped a little to one side. Certain runners clenched their fists, others let them hang loose. The women seemed to keep their hands more or less at the same level as their hips, whereas with the men the hands were often higher up, level with their chests. The child who had pushed me in the back turned out to be her. She quickly took my hand. All her life she had cold hands.
Nobody in this half-marathon, she whispered, knows whether they’ll make it to the end. And that’s part of the secret, not to try! The magic number is seventeen. What they’re all telling themselves now is: Make it to the seventeenth lap!
How many laps have they done?
Ten. This is the tenth. Seven more to go to seventeen. After the seventeenth, the last four laps — that’s when the lower stomach is in danger of cramps — the last four look after themselves! You needn’t worry about them, they’re beyond you. See that man’s face, see how his face is stretched by the effort he’s making.
It’s stretched into a kind of smile.
And the smile is acknowledging his own name!
What’s his name?
Costa. Bravo, Costa!
And her?
Madalena!
You know all their names?
Madalena’s face is stretched too. Madalena is smiling! Bravo, Madalena!
One man had Luiz written on his T-shirt. Luiz! I shouted, not to be out-done.
José and Dominique! she screamed.
Smiling every one! I said.
This is not a city, my boy, which fucks itself up. That’s why I’m here.
I glanced at her. She too was smiling and there were so many creases around her eyes that her old woman’s face looked like crumpled paper. Then she repeated: Not a city that fucks itself up, that’s something I know.
Her voice had changed. It had become the voice of a seventeen-year-old. It had the somatic assurance, the impudence, of being that age. Such impudence begins with the tongue, quite apart from what it says or doesn’t say, quite apart from being shy or brazen. The impudence of the tongue running with its tip along its own white teeth while saying nothing. Or, at a given unforeseeable moment, the impudence of its sudden proposal to enter and probe somebody else’s mouth — boy’s or girl’s.
I glanced at her. It was a century ago since she was seventeen.
We walked in the direction of the Chiado and, suddenly, on the spur of the moment, I found myself entering a baker’s to ask whether they had a dessert, a kind of custard flan with almonds called Bacon from Heaven. It’s sweet, tastes like marzipan and has nothing to do with bacon. Toicino do Céu. My mother stayed outside. Yes, they do. I bought two portions and the baker’s wife made a gift package with a ribbon, the colour of the Sea of Straw. I stepped out into the street.
It’s what I like best. How on earth did you know? she asks me in her seventeen-year-old voice. Every afternoon I have a Toicino do Céu, she added.