Lisbon, Farewell

The morning of the night before we left Lisbon we agreed that we should make the effort to find some Fado.

We’d caught a glimpse of some through a window into a bar in the Barrio Alto one night. We didn’t go in because we were on the way to nowhere in particular and we thought we’d seen signposts just up ahead. We looked in a guide and came across a place where you can be sure the “stars of tomorrow” would be appearing. That sounded a little touristy but we were up against the wire.

We booked a table and caught a taxi. I had the address on a flyer I’d picked up someplace and I read it out as best I could to the taxi driver. He took his right hand off the gear stick and held it back to me asking to see the flyer. I surrendered it to him and he unfolded its many folds into a pleated triptych and said “Ok I know the place”. That seemed to mean he didn’t need the address, just the name.

The taxi took off in a direction we hadn’t ventured before. Down the back of the Alto into residential streets with cars parked too close together. The taxi skirted as if on tram rails between the parked cars on either side and we descended from high streets into lows.

On entering a short street with nothing to attract the traveller the taxi pulled up outside a restaurant whose walls to the street were illuminated by lights that were invisible to us. Or maybe we were distracted by the head waiter who greeted us by reservation name as we disembarked from the taxi. He ushered us into a porch and then on into the main dining room-cum-performance area. Some twenty or thirty diners were already there relaxedly witnessing sprucely dressed waiters cork bottles of expensive wine.

We had not enquired about the prices in this haunt but a cursory glance at the menu made it clear that the cash we carried would not get us out of there. Resigned to that fact, we ordered as if we were spending someone else’s money. A superb fish dish with fine Portuguese wine topped off with the house speciality dessert, coffee and liqueur.

At certain well orchestrated points in the meal the lights were dimmed and two musicians, one playing something akin to a bouzouki, the other a guitar, emerged from an alcove over there behind a column. Having struck up the first cords a singer followed cloaked in black and lost in the shadows. A voice full of the heartfelt love of place and the anguish of loss and distance spilled forth, increasing in intensity as the song built and grew to the closing crescendo of emotion and grave tones.

And after a triad of songs the lights went up and burned holes in the retina. And more feasting ensued. And more drinking led into the next of many dimmings of lights. And then a face we had seen all about Lisbon on posters advertising a two-night-only-not-to-be-missed concert entered over Glen’s left shoulder. Hands were clasped and two kisses endowed on head waiters as she moved towards the alcove and out of site.

Mariza, all in black, light textiles hanging about her in a fashion that memory cannot recall. Her fierce white-blonde short hair played counterpoint to the low-lit defused ambience of the place. Her elegant passing infused an eager excitement into those who knew, inquisitive wonder into those who didn’t.

The triads continued, intensified now by the presence of a force that seemed closer to the heart of it all. The lights were dimmed and raised again as the night grew old for those who consulted watches, young for those for whom tomorrow was negotiable.

The taxi was called and the bill was paid with a plastic card that misrepresented our poverty. The head waiter adjusted himself in his suit and opened the car door. I turned to look at this place that had charmed us and left us warm inside.

I cannot say my mind was clear and filtering focus from blur. You see, tomorrow was negotiable for us. The night was now perhaps younger than we were. We gave the driver vague directions towards the high ground where the bars and bistros blurred into one like lampposts on a fast moving street.

These are the last words from Lisbon. Fare thee well my dear and companion on this journey. I brought no books to distract me from you; you gave me reading aplenty.