“I will find a purse and a hat for you.” She scurried out and, although I followed her as quickly as I could through the cluttered kitchen, she’d vanished by the time I came to the hall. I stopped where I was, rather than wander off and get lost. In a moment, Rafa returned with a wide-brimmed straw hat, a blue silk scarf, and a sort of purse made of the same soft, woven straw as the hat. Giving me no time to object, she gathered my hair back and tied it with the scarf, then put the hat on my head and looped the purse over my arm. “You look perfect now.”
Apparently I was doomed to be dressed by strangers whether I liked it or not.
She walked me to the front door and handed me another key. “This is for the front gates. Be back before sundown and don’t lose the key.”
She stood behind the door when she opened it, keeping to the shadow, and shooed me out.
THREE
I was in a tiny courtyard facing iron gates across an expanse of cobbles. A car no bigger than a shoe was parked on the cobbles to my left next to a small fountain in the shape of a leonine face mounted to the tiled wall of the courtyard. The fountain looked slightly surprised to see me as water dribbled out of its oval mouth into the small basin of carved stone beneath it. I waved at it and walked over to unlatch the gates and let myself into the street. I used the key to lock the gates behind me—the ironwork looked like the vines of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, closing out the world from a secret realm within. I took note of the number carved into the stone above the gateway and started down the steep, stone-paved street. I tried to tuck my things into my skirt pockets, but the keys were too large to stay securely in the shallow spaces. I put them into the purse and folded Rafa’s map into my pocket instead.
At a bend in the street, I paused to read the street’s name off a tiled plaque on a wall. I checked the map, turned to continue on my way, and found myself looking out at a sea of red-tiled roofs and hidden courtyards, tumbling in a maze of streets down the slope toward a wide band of glittering water that must have been the Tagus River. For a moment I just stood there and stared at it. The hill was so steep that the houses were almost like terraces in a photo of Asian rice paddies, each little bastion bounded by its own short sweep of walls that fell sharp and straight down to the next. The angles were all higgledy-piggledy and random, like the honeycomb of disturbed bees. And they were old . . . so old that the narrow, twisted streets thronged with more of the dead than the living—the dead of centuries stretching back so far, I couldn’t even guess the eras. They climbed, ran, strolled, and urged their beasts of burden through the stone-paved passages, between tall houses real and ghostly, their collective voices twining into the noise of the Grid as a song both beautiful and sad that coiled through the twisted streets like fog. The houses they passed, current and not, were mostly plastered in cream, red, blue, and yellow, the colors faded and peeling from the unremitting sun. The rest were covered in tiles glazed with repeating geometric patterns that crazed the eye, broken by symmetrical ranks of windows with small iron balconies strung with drying laundry, or piled with flower boxes drooping red and purple blossoms over their filigreed metal sides. Here and there, the ghost of an older house or a terraced Moorish garden of tiled fountains and orange trees hung over another, but the overlay of phantom buildings was rare—at least from the outside.
I couldn’t afford to stand and stare, but it was a hard sight to turn from, so unlike anything American. I had to keep an eye on my feet as I continued down the road, the twisting slope so long and precipitous that it made the Counterbalance up Queen Anne Avenue North in Seattle look like a speed bump. I was glad it wasn’t raining, as it would have been at home. The dust in the road was dry and tamped down too much to make the sidewalks of laid flat stones slippery with grit. All stone and plaster, wood and iron, Alfama was old the way things in the Americas never are.
I wended my way down until I passed through an arch in a wall and out into a sort of arrow-shaped intersection of two narrow streets shaded with trees. A sign on the wall to my left gave information about the Castelo de São Jorge, which now lay behind me. I could no longer see the river and I wasn’t sure which direction I was facing. I looked at Rafa’s map and recognized the switchback hard on my right where the pedestrian path doubled back on itself, past a row of shops, and downward to a flatter bit of road. My shins and knees ached from the activity after so many hours of lying still.
I rounded the corner and the river reappeared as an aqua ribbon that seemed to float above the end of the street as if the paving rolled down into it. It didn’t. The street turned abruptly after a block—though “block” was a complete misnomer here—and I turned to my right with it and continued.
The route was necessarily twisted and longer than the distance point to point, but with a few more turns and a walk past a small triangular plaza created by the high, pink-painted embankments that held up the streets, I was into much flatter streets that first went down and then rose gently upward again, turning away from the river. The architecture changed from the close-packed old houses of Alfama and its yellow stone walls to broader, younger buildings with flat fronts and stone pediments—a sort of plain-Jane version of Baroque.
The road was covered in tarmac now instead of cobbles, but the sidewalks were still paved in small squares of pale stone. The farther I walked, the wider the doors and windows of the buildings became, evolving slowly toward the eighteenth century and away from the medieval maze of the castle’s hill. This road was mostly shops at street level. Ground-floor frontages were more frequently of dressed stone than painted plaster, though the tiling continued in fits. One front I passed had a vibrantly glazed tile mural of fish and seaweed. Signs from the simple to the slick hung over doorways, businesses as divergent as a sleek contemporary furniture retailer side by side with hole-in-the-wall taverns and shops selling medicines and herbs.
I tired to puzzle out some of the words as I passed, some like the Spanish I had grown up with in Southern California, but many more utterly meaningless. English words stood out in odd places, “snack bar” and “seaside” jostling with words like “malhas.” I wondered what a “mundo das malhas” was. “World of Sweaters,” judging by the window display—an item I wasn’t feeling much use for at that moment, even on the shady side street that was busy with the cold spirits of merchants and farmers driving goods to some long-gone marketplace.
An old-fashioned-looking yellow tram clanged its bell and rattled along the tracks in the street past me as I stepped out into a large public square shrouded in the memory of several past buildings that had disappeared long ago to leave the acre or so in the middle nearly empty. One of these buildings was a Victorian monstrosity that reminded me a little, in kind more than style, of London’s Smithfield Market. Another was a much older building I couldn’t peg. A bronze statue of someone I took to be a soldier or a statesman was riding his bronze horse on a huge white stone plinth beside a tree off to the side of the square’s central expanse of white and gray stone tiles. There was no tarmac or road paint here. Every street and sidewalk surface was paved in the black or white stone squares, right down to the lane markers and pedestrian crossing lines. I turned right and paused, looking in the window of the World of . . . whatever, sweating a little from the change of exertion and the heat rising in the nearly shadeless square. The buildings facing the square were much more formal than the areas I’d already walked through, the shops giving off a higher-class sheen. This was saying quite a bit, since the last few blocks had been increasingly swanky in the modern era, in spite of being more working-class in the lingering past.