I do not usually approach women in public, for the same reason I don’t touch hot pans. There are circumstances, however, under which I will waive these rules:
- No one I know is in the area. I refuse to bomb in front of an audience that travels with me after the show.
- The girl is very clearly alone – she has no girlfriends around to yell at me. (The time-honored, chicks-before-dicks, got-your-back, intersectional feminist manifesto of the less-attractive best friend: “If I’m not getting laid, everybody in this room dies alone.”)
- She is likewise not part of group with guy friends. No matter if they’re all dating her friends, no matter if she’s personally shut all of them down, no matter if their girlfriends are standing right next to them; guys are always one intrusion into the campfire circle away from beating the intruder to death with an antelope femur: “Hey, he likes a girl near where I’m standing! I must fight him with a sharp stone!”
- The girl looks at me a bunch of times. Not once: fuck your lingering glance. I want a full data set of positive affirmation.
- She looks at me a bunch of times badly. I’m not good at any of this; I don’t want a subtle social operator who gets sex on demand with the right glance in the right bar. I want her to be at least a little nervous too. Because really, what I’m doing is going up to somebody, in public, and saying, “I understand I have 0-25 seconds to appear charming to you, knowing nothing about what you consider charming. My motives are blindly sexual. Please feel comfortable around me. People are watching.” She has to be a little bit willfully dumb this way, in counterpoint to my stupidity approaching her: She has to hope, in the back of herself, that maybe I’ll sweep her away; for a night or longer; who can say? Maybe she just wants sex, but even then, there’s a kind of ritual performance of getting swept away: “Oh my god, what is even happening to me? Here, I brought five condoms and I need you out of the room by nine.” Or maybe she’s just shy and nervous and intrigued by the attention. This last part is appealing, because it makes me feel more capable; and it then makes me feel like I am a vessel for unquenchable evil. Because I realize then, in me, experientially, the reasons why men over the centuries have sought virgins and ever-younger brides: the sensation of mastery and control. That the institution of marriage, which I still vaguely support and maybe even aspire to, has roots in formalized rape acceded to by tribes of men around campfires hefting antelope femurs.
- I am in a good enough mood that I don’t think too much about the tail end of Point 5.
On my third evening in Lisbon, I am in a very good mood as I survey all of Lisbon from the Castelo de Sao Jorge. There is no human I know within a thousand miles of me. The sun is setting, and I have a Super Bock in hand. I am sitting in a literal parapet, in a fucking castle.
The girl in the parapet over is also watching the sunset, and watching me. She times her looks terribly: every time I look back, she quickly looks away; but every time she looks, I’m already looking in her direction. She has dark hair, pulled back; light, freckled skin; a button nose that is just unreasonably cute; and she is awful at surreptition. I decide to talk to her.
There are strange days where I know exactly what to do and when. These days do not come around often. I remember the last one vividly, because I did more or less everything exactly wrong; and yet I had unshakable, religious conviction in my direction. I was out with a group of friends in the States, homeless and recently returned from China. One of these friends was newer to the crowd, and she seemed to like me alright. I received sudden divine inspiration that she wanted to go home with me, and that this was effectively God’s will. So I did what any prophet would: I told her. I said, “You want to take me home.”
This is a terrible thing to do. It is creepy and obnoxious and vile, unless you are reading her goddam mind, in which case it is charming and bold. (The uncomfortable truth in the American sexual jungle is that the difference between abhorrent and alluring behavior is whether or not she thinks you’re attractive – ask any woman if she prefers her date to ask permission before a kiss. [“You should just know!” is very dangerous advice.]) I wandered around with the group all night, bar to bar, and told her when she asked how I was getting home, “I don’t have the address; you have to order our Lyft.” I even managed to get in a fight with her about something unrelated. She left in a huff, and The Voice told me, “Do not follow; she will come back in about twenty minutes, and then take you to her place, because she wants to go home with you like you said.”
This is exactly how that shit went down.
In the morning, she turned over and asked how I was so confident. I did not tell her about the still, small voice guiding my sexual journey. This ended my streak of good decisions. Afterwards, hungover beyond telling, I launched into an acapella rendition of “She Drives Me Crazy” by the Fine Young Cannibals. I performed all the parts, with my voice. It was very loud, and not in what the sages call “tune.” I kept returning to the opening riff, which when you are delirious and well-sexed comes out like “BA NA NA NA!” This is most of the way to screaming “BANANA!” at the exhausted, sleepless person who was kind enough to allow you inside them.
But now in Lisbon the Spirit has returned to me. As the sun finally disappears, the girl with the button nose gives me another jerky glance – in the rhythm of a newborn deer learning to walk – and starts packing her bag. I wait a beat or two, then start walking, and happen to be right next to her when she moves to leave. I ask her if she speaks English.
A little, she tells me. She’s actually German.
This is when you know you’re in a romantic comedy: I speak just enough German to be amusing to a native. Well, you know because of that, and the sunset and the castle.
I ask her dumb questions about nothing, and eventually these don’t matter anymore and we’re just two people strolling the streets of Lisbon at evening. I receive tacit permission to walk her back to her hostel.
She’s traveling Portugal, it turns out: on leave from her last job. Just her and a backpack for a month. She comes from just outside Passau, which is kind of the German equivalent of hailing from Estes Park, CO: pretty, but also pretty out of the way. Her last job was attending patients in a nursing home. She’s not sure what she wants to do next, but she is determined, and likes to travel. She’s worried about the German election, and about America: she hates The Donald, but thought – and here she uses a dense German word that takes me three passes – Hilary was a warmonger. She understates, but is earnest and serious. She doesn’t wear makeup. The wind curls loose strands of hair around her eyes, which are deep and light and cerulean. She is ceaselessly adorable. Probably I have to marry her.
She walks carefully, and does not waste steps. I bound around her like a puppy, ending up at different sides of her on different streets. I try out intricate German pronunciations and ask her to explain the local dialect in Passau. She smiles very slowly, in pieces, over the course of ten minutes. By the time we have wandered down from the castle, into the city, she smiles completely whenever she turns to talk to me. Like herself, her smile is sweet, unadorned, and understated. It melts me.
She can’t stay, she says. I tell her that sounds incorrect.
“No, I have to call my sister,” she explains.
“And then?” I ask, in German. There are two kinds of “then,” and I’m pretty sure I used the wrong one.
“And then…” she turns, fighting the smile until it curls around her mouth.
She gives me her number, and says her hostel is close; we’ll meet in an hour. I try the number on the app we’ve agreed to, but it doesn’t come up – I explain to her and myself that it’s just because I’m not currently connected to the internet. I’ll find a café, and eat, and then we will find some wine. She furrows her brow. “Are you sure about the number?”
“Yeah,” I grin, as a confident moron might: “I’ll see you in an hour.”
So eager am I to stick this landing – to let her be; not to smudge the delicate agreement we’ve sketched – that I go bounding off without any contingency plan, certain that being the first one to turn away now means that I will not have to turn away later. Let her see that I don’t need to see her. Because I really want to see her. (You remember middle school, right?)
So, a word about contingency plans to the aspiring American lothario: fucking have one.
Contingency plans are cool. They are there, you might have heard, as a contingency, from the Latin for, “Maybe the beautiful German you just charmed doesn’t have WhatsApp like she thought, or you entered the number wrong; but anyway she is for real not showing up when you search for her, and she even offered to coordinate a place to meet in one hour, so she’s not trying to dodge you – because why would she even you’re going to get married later – and you don’t even know which hostel she’s staying at and she is one thousand feet away from this kebab place yet you will never be able to find her, you cuntfaced fucking arrogant-ass piece of drizzly, hairy shit.” (Latin was a very expressive language.)
As a rule, I hate myself. This hatred provides a focal point in my generally aimless existence. But rarely have I so despised my idiot semblance of functional personhood more than I do in this moment. Two seconds. One. Two. That’s how long it took for me to ask, “Hey, I don’t see the number; did I enter it correctly?” in the world in which I am still talking to her. Two seconds. Instead, I am racing through the streets of Lisbon, in its garish shopping-mall guts – yes, even beautiful Lisbon is desecrated by shopping malls – trying to find which of the five hostels in the neighborhood might house the cutest woman on earth. Even if I find the correct hostel, what can I say? “Please let me in! I’m probably in love! What do you mean, do I have a room? Do you have a room? I’m sorry; I’m sorry; let’s just start over. Hmmm? Well, just her first name. Julie. Yes, I can see that this might be ‘common,’ or whatever. I don’t think you’re very helpful, okay? Uh… she’s about this high, her smile will redeem your soul, and she’s from Passau. The one in Germany. No, fuck you, ma’am!” (I like to end poisonous interactions with a politeness ambush. No one knows where they stand or what just happened, which kind of levels the playing field between me and the universe.)
I trace circles around the places she might have been, and isn’t. In the flat, open road linking the river to the main plazas, men sidle up to me. “Hashish? You want?”
“No, no,” I mutter.
“Cocaine?”
It is all I can do not to wail, “Julie! I just want Julie!” But I refrain, because I like to avoid shaming myself for no reason; and also there is a legit danger one of these guys will produce a child prostitute. (“Julie, see!”) I brush off the heroin offers – which at this point don’t sound so bad – and walk on to nowhere. I get an espresso at an empty, gaudy open-air bar to check my phone. There’s nothing. There is no Julie from Passau.
I go back to the corner at which we parted, and I wait. I know I’m waiting for nothing. A trolley climbs a hill a block over, grunting “Put me under! Do it!” I know how he feels. There was this wine bar I’d looked up, too – I was supposed to be walking there now, with a beautiful girl grinning at me as I stumbled through German sentence construction. The bar was supposed to be a real treat: traditional Portuguese singing this very evening, capped by dry reds in the national style. I have an entire memory that never happened.
I wait. Ten minutes. Fifteen. It’s thirty minutes past the time we were supposed to meet. I boil in self-loathing until I grow tired, and then I just simmer. But out of the steam of hatred, The Voice returns to guide me. It says: “Go to the bar anyway. There’s a good chance another beautiful European will be there – you can buy her some wine, learn her story, and leave with her under the moonlight.”
This is exactly how this shit goes down.
—
When I arrive at the bar, there’s already a line out the door. Or I think that, when I see a line: It’s really a line outside the door: No one is allowed in while the singer sings. But I learn that later. What I learn immediately is that there are two very attractive women at the back of the line, and that one of them gives me a once-over. I’m still planning to marry Julie (from Passau), so I am ashamed for noticing (I don’t know what fundamentalist Christian cult you grew up in, but where I’m from it’s like two steps from glance-acknowledgment to bestiality). I walk past. If the bar is full, what’s the point anyway? I turn as I pass, with a studiously quizzical expression – “What? This is a locally famous wine bar?” – and the woman at the back glances at me again. Unlike Julie from Passau, she is good at it. I decide to break one of my rules.
“Take three more steps, then turn back,” advises The Voice. I do. I stare at the door of the bar with actorly confusion.
“Lie,” explains The Voice. “It’s for sex.”
I do. “Excuse me,” I start. The woman at the back of the line is icy blonde; hair nearly white. Light eyes lost between green and blue – a color I’ve seen exactly once, in a shallow beach a few miles off the coast of Lanta, in Thailand.
(Don’t you fucking gag reading that sentence. That’s where I fucking saw that color. We can’t all be me. 99.7% of the time, that’s a goddam mercy for the people who I’m not. 0.3% of the time there are islands, and girls with islands in their eyes. I don’t make the rules; I just write ‘em down.)
The point here is that this woman is blonde and under 40, which means she speaks English. So I lead with that “Excuse me…” and she says, “Shoot.”
A Brit.
“What’s going on here?” I ask, feigning ignorance in the proud, deceitful tradition of mischievous sprites and serial killers.
“It’s a Fado bar. An old tradition here; you come in and have a glass and watch the music.”
“Fado?”
“Traditional Portuguese singing.”
(“Hesitate,” says The Voice. The Voice is very good at this.)
“Huh…” I start, as if considering. “Is it packed out?”
“No,” says the companion of Island Eyes: “You must stop when they play, and then you can come inside.” Companion is German. She has milk-chocolate hair, and is made of curves. Lisbon just really, really wants me to get some. (“Get some,” advises The Voice.)
“Well, damn,” I say, sort of about the bar. “Can I join you?”
Island Eyes is Vesper, and her friend is Radler. They met at their hostel. Vesper seems a bit old for hostels, but she has the right world-weariness to pull off couch-surfing and to nap in airports. She edits videos; sometimes for commercials, sometimes for major companies. She seems suitably bored of that, too. Radler is too buoyant a person to conceive of boredom: she says things like “magical!” and “Oh, it is so very nice!” about anything she is describing. She is describing opera, first: she sings, and lives to sing: singing is magical. Radler is cheerful, charming, and 10:1 a fire hazard in bed. Vesper’s default armors are boredom and bemusement, and she is made – figuratively and in elbow – of sharp corners. There’s a non-zero chance she murders men with icepicks.
Because my chief aim in life is to wound myself psychically, I spend my quips and glances on Vesper. Happiness is for people who are not artfully bored.
The doors open. We jostle for space: there’s only room to stand. Well, I assume there’s only room to stand: Radler thinks we can find seats. She has the confidence of pretty women and the gregarious blithe, which assumes other people like you, and will not refuse you, because surely they want the things that you want. Why, they want us to sit! (They do not want us to sit.)
So I balance my tailbone on the edge of a bench, and then stand for a while. Later in the evening, I muscle through ancient Portuguese on my way to a seat that is very clearly not meant for me. (I am happy for the corks in the wine, because the staff would have a hard time spitting in it.) Through it all, Radler beams; untouched by human resentment.
The room is tiny: low-roofed and intimate. The bar and some partitions are wood to waist-height. The walls are tile, with wooden slats defining sections. Pictures of famous singers smother the tile from the middle of each wall to the ceiling. Famous is maybe the wrong word: these singers are known to the Fado community, which comprises about 37 wizened Portuguese and say one ür-hipster in her twenties. One man appears in all these pictures; the owner, presumably.
Fame is a bizarre thing. I was homeschooled as a kid (“Go Fightin’ Fundamentalists!”), and I’ve often come back to the central option for the sheltered: Know the standards – best athlete; most popular song; wealthiest person – are set far beyond your door, or assume that what you can see constitutes the world. From that childhood universe I know medical doctors who think the earth (plus the seas and all that is in them) was created in seven 24-hour days by a sky god who will burn your flesh from your bones somehow forever unless you apologize to him, once. And now in Philadelphia, I know adult men who have lived grittier lives than I could achieve by trying, who are genuinely excited when someone in their neighborhood enters a southeast Pennsylvania amateur bodybuilding competition. You can attune yourself to the frequency of the world, or you can get lost in your backyard. Most of us seems to do both, a little bit. Staring at signed photos of local heroes, I am reminded that literal millions of people don’t know who LeBron James is.
After some tense negotiation with the waitress re: the legality/advisability of our seating arrangement, we procure a bottle. For a high-functioning alcoholic, I don’t know much about wine. It seems to require an unreasonable amount of time to understand one drink. It also seems like you’re always wrong, and that only a few high priests of the religion can explain why, and the explanations have a self-referential vocabulary so dense it either constitutes its own language or isn’t part of one. (This part, at least, feels kind of comfortable and familiar from the homeschooling thing.)
This said: when I sip my first Douro, and understand it, it is a new experience. No one has to explain to me why I should enjoy the thing I’m supposed to be enjoying. It’s brutally dry, but still sweet – very sweet – and smooth; and hold the bone-dryness to the back of the throat before dissolving into something more ephemeral, yet sticky: like red grape wallpaper pasted across the back of your teeth. I decide that the best way to recover from my ongoing hangover is to drink as much Douro as they have.
But: service is suspended. The doors close. (The term for this exitless box is “fire hazard,” but it feels more like a fire altar; as if – getting on with the religious motifs – we’re all on the menu for the god of Portuguese folk singing, show he or a loose match deem us appropriate kindling.) The lights dim. A guitarist I can’t see and a singer I can barely distinguish ready themselves. There are no microphones. The crowd hushes. All is calm.
A few lush chords, mostly arpeggiated string by string, and some lonely melodic lines between the chords. Then a long strum and a stage pause. We’re off: the singer takes a long windup, and pitches as the guitar rolls back in. The singing is very nasal, yet deeper and richer than that adjective usually connotes. This is not Broadway; this isn’t even pop: thin and pinched. Nor is it opera, or American folk, though they’ve each got some thin connective tissue to this style. There’s maybe, in the tone of voice, a little Irish folksong in there, but I only know that music in caricature and can’t say for certain. What I can say is that this music is many opposed things together: spare and rich, florid and tidy, flagrantly expressive and very formulaic.
The closest thing I’ve ever heard to this singing is Egyptian popular song from the 40s – and I’m not trying to be god’s perfect hipster here: The only reason my brain makes this connection is that I was assigned, in Shanghai, to teach “Arabic Music,” with no other teaching parameters provided. So I walked over to the nearest café with semi-functional internet, and scanned YouTube, and stumbled upon grainy archival footage of Umm Kulthum, an Egyptian diva of the time. Fado is a lot like that: Relatively simple music framing passionate, theatrical singing. The form is rigid enough to please the ear of a musical civilian: you can pick up the patterns easily. But there’s enough nuance in each delivery of each line that the old heads dotting the bar are pleased. I can tell this form is all about the poetry, and I can’t understand the poetry. But watching the singers’ faces and gestures, I can, sort of. The complete effect – the rapt, silent room; the sticky grape residue; the unamplified, quivering vocals – is deeply pleasant.
I use that word casually, to mark this experience as something easy and close to neutral: a coffee outside in nice weather. I’m going to have to rethink this word. I have rarely felt so much of anything stripped of force; of heat. Fado, and the social architecture of Fado, is immersive – easy, simple, light, but somehow enveloping; somehow intense. Many opposed things together.
Singers come and go. Usually, the singer is only on for three songs. The crowd thins. The hours peel off the clock. Once, as a singer takes the typical dramatic breath before their first note, I lean over to Vesper and whisper, “Ladies and gentlemen: Tom Waits!” She laughs at this, which is how I know she likes me.
Her left arm is in a cast. She injured it surfing, somewhere on this coast. “And it’s really shite” – British, remember – “because I was gonna be going to this yoga camp out in Madrid.” This seems to me exactly the sort of shit Vesper might be about.
She is also about fucking with me. On the last stop of Radler’s seating tour, we end up in a dim crevice of the bar, packed along a table. Beaming, Radler subtly evicts an old local, who may or may not have been “leaving anyway,” as she explains; but who is definitely leaving now. The clinger, at the edge of the table, is an older Portuguese woman with a pinched face and dark, biting eyes.
She quite apparently hates Vesper, at first; near as I can tell for the same reason the queen had a thing about Snow White. But Vesper, working her side grin and bemusement, charms the woman into explaining a little of herself, in snaps of English. The woman explains more of herself by rising to sing three songs. When she sits back down, Vesper wants to know if there’s a recording. (“Sim!”) The singer pulls a goddam compact disc out of her purse, and brandishes it before us. “Oh, he would like one,” Vesper points to me. They invented the word “deft” for this shit.
I glare at Vesper, in anger slightly undone by my desire to throw her across the table and fuck her senseless. (Listen: I like pretty women with jagged edges.) I don’t bother arguing with her, because she is aided anyway by my traitorous penis, which is all, “I dunno, dude, maybe fifteen Euros is a sweet deal for some music you will never listen to!” (I want to remind my penis that he is responsible for minimum 66% of the morning I wake up wishing I was dead; for reasons limited by no means to booze.)
So I buy a digital compact disc for fifteen Euros. But first, Vesper sweetens the pot: “Ooh, can you sign it?” So if a sexagenarian Fado singer with resting bitch face ever hits the international big time, look out, Ebay.
We finally leave. Radler is glowing, from wine and joy. “That was just magical,” she tells us, and I have to agree with her. We make it to an intersection down the way from the bar, which is an apt metaphor, because now my penis is asking me, “Bro, what if like I can get with both of these chicks though?” and I have to tell him, “I don’t trust the rest of me, or you, for that matter, to manage that eventuality.”
Radler reads the writing on the wall, and departs with a hug. It’s just me and Vesper, at one in the morning, in Lisbon, under moonlight. Ostensibly we are looking for food. We pass down the bridge over Cais do Sodre – the street itself, not the train station. Vesper keeps calling it “Pink Street,” and I ask her why it’s called Pink Street. She throws me one of these looks that’s sort of an underhand dagger toss, and I look down at the very pink street below us. I’m good at stuff.
Vesper just wants fries, and I want kebab, because – look, I don’t know how often you’re drunk in Europe, but Christ Jesus is that shit divine between the hours of midnight and “What even is time, man, if you think about it?” We can’t find fries, though, so I’m shit out of luck.
We get out of Pink Street, serenaded by drunk Australians. Pink Street is the only street turned on in Lisbon this late: a block off, the city dies. You can hear the waves licking the rocks from across the plaza, so we move to the plaza. It’s calming, and we talk less as we get closer to the water. We stand on the lip of concrete dividing the plaza from the seaweed stone. “What should we do now?” asks Vesper.
There are guys who have The Voice following them around, always. They know when exactly to put an arm around a woman and exactly when to put a hand somewhere else. They can banter about nothing for hours. They know when to respond and when to ignore a text. (N.b. there are many guys who think they are this first type of guy, but are in fact just sort of assaulting women willy-nilly. The world is not a good place.) I am not one of these guys. And The Voice has abandoned me to my own devices. But Vesper is holding up a neon sign that says, “Okay, now is that time.” She asks, “What should we do now?” and I tell her I have an idea. I lean in, and she hesitates for just a second. She looks in my eyes, an inch away. I can’t tell if this is a play or an actual manifestation of excitement, and it is the first time in a long time I haven’t been able to tell when a woman is performing a show for herself. It’s a nice feeling, sometimes, not to know. I kiss her, and she’s great at it and I’m terrible at it, and she doesn’t seem to notice that I’m terrible at it. (Homeschool doesn’t really lend you this kind of technical facility – it’s like trying to learn how to ride a bike as an adult.)
After a while she leans back to look at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever, anything really, with an American.”
I stifle the urge to tell her, “I’m so sorry; I promise some of us are great at this.” Instead, I ask if she’s sure she wants to turn left; back to her hostel and away from my room.
She shakes her head. “I can’t. You’re just a man from the street! [A valid point.] I don’t even know your last name!”
I tell her it sounds sort of like Middle English for “Man from the street,” which it does. She doubles over when I pronounce it.
“What’s your last name?” I ask.
“Hill.”
“Did you grow up on a hill?”
“Shit. I did.”
I like Vesper.
We walk down the water to the grand plaza. It’s abandoned. The moon lends the statue a ghostly sheen. It seems to move, very slowly. It doesn’t go anywhere. From here, you can see the view of traders and merchants as they stepped off ships into the city. And slaves: you can see their view too. You can see the king, gliding through time, implacable, unmoved, watching. Directing. Monuments are fearful things. They celebrate, but they also condemn. I really have nothing to lose, so I tell Vesper what I’m thinking about the monuments. She apparently likes it, or is drunk, and curls around me. I think I finally know how low-watt undergrad philosophers feel: I am deep! I have ideas about stuff, and these girls get it. I begin to see the appeal of Ikea profundity. I think I am going to learn 4-7 chords on the guitar, and rhyme “pain” with “your name” on the cassette demos I release. (Tape is just like a more conscious medium.)
(Also, since you’re curious, I will also be rhyming “ocean” with “emotion” and “your love” with “above.” I will also use a version of the couplet, “I used to know her / Back when I was young,” and talk about what it takes to be a man, and say shit like, “I know now / The stuff that I didn’t used to know / When I didn’t know that stuff / Because I was young.” I will sing in 100% whisper that is more breath than note. I will never stop getting laid, and every woman in Denver, Colorado will tell her friends that I’m just sooooo good [heart emojis]. I will play Red Rocks every autumn with a string quartet laying down whole notes behind me. I will lay senseless waste to Midwestern college towns. All the bros will pretend to like me, and all the men in gender studies programs will argue that I’m actually misogynist, if you really parse my dense lyrics about like youth and feelings and shit, and they will argue that because I am fucking the women in their graduate seminars and they are not allowed to say that they do not like that I have breached the campfire circle.)
We walk the hills slowly, stopping at churches and stopping to kiss a little more. There’s no one awake in a mile around; no cars, no bikes. No lights, except the ones on the street. We dance around stone and tile. When she’s excited, she tugs at my shirt with the fingers poking out of her cast. Her back folds cleanly around my hand.
I finally leave Vesper. We make it to her hostel, and she tells me every few steps that I don’t have to walk her back, and that I can’t come in. I know. I say goodbye outside the gate, and then we kiss some more, and so I say goodbye in the courtyard. When I do, I don’t leave a number, and I don’t make any plans. I kiss her cheek and turn out the gate in one motion.
I don’t want to let go – of her snaking back or pastel arms – and I also feel the death rattle of chemical lust: I’m walking away from the biological fulcrum of existence, and about 60% of the musculature required to walk places is fighting me. I thought, after spending high school as a religious zealot, that I was past this feeling. But here I am: shuffling uncomfortably in splotched underwear and asphyxiated balls. I feel like my penis is bruised purple. (“The fuck, bro!” he wheezes.) I think it’s safe to say I have conquered the Iberian Peninsula, romantically.
—
I do not feel safe on the walk home. At the rate I’m going, I fully expect to meet a Frenchwoman on the street; charm her, share tiny secrets, slip my hand into her hand, make cooing love against a tile wall, write, find each other years later, marry, see her contract a fatal and impossibly rare blood disease, and watch her die in my arms and I sob in her hair; all before I make it back to my room.
But it’s just me: The streets are naked and cold. They are not terribly well-lit. I see no other pedestrians; street after street. I finally see the Alfama, by myself, draped in moonlight. It’s gorgeous. Everything in Lisbon is.
I’ve had a lot of these walks. Back in Boulder, it was 3.2 miles from downtown to my house. I made this walk at 2:30am more times than I want to know about. It was a good way to straighten out, and there was a weird, perverse pride in paying $7/cocktail for many, many cocktails but refusing to spend $10.50 on a cab back. Plus, if it was cold you had to wait in the cab line, which was where you learned what your drunk ass sounded like to other drunk people, which was way too much perspective for that hour of night.
Of course, I’ve gotten older – fast – and I don’t love walking three or four miles when I’m tired and soggy anymore. It hurts my legs, because as previously discussed I’m old now. I decide that I’m not enjoying myself at all. I decide this until I pass a line of cabs in central Lisbon – the only vehicles I’ve seen for hours – and walk on. It turns out that Lisbon at dark is magical too: draped in a thick blanket, and dipped, like a pen, in ink; and it turns out I’d rather be in it, a little longer, than get a lift. My steps ricochet lightly off the walls and bound back to me. The stars are bored of me, but they keep grudging company. This isn’t as good as dropping everything to travel Portugal with Julie from Passau. It’s not as good as waking up next to Vesper. But it’s a bit of wonder, private to me, all the same.