A Year in the World

by Frances Mayes

  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 café, 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-scraper 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 furnishings. 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 palácio, which blocks all light in back. “These row houses must have preceded the palácio,” 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 passed earlier, Praça 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, flashing white-white smiles. Others catch the last rays at sidewalk cafés 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-shine 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, passes 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 Jerónimos (Monastery of San Jerome), built to honor Vasco da Gama’s passage 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 gods, 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 god who protected the region, Endovellicus. I love the gods of the crossroads. Throughout the world people always have recognized the metaphorical significance of the path chosen, the path forsaken. These pagan people worshiped all the usual gods of war, nature, and agriculture, but their religion included much more specialized gods of thermal baths, horses, darts, and the house. Pantheism appeals to me: god in everything. I don’t mind if God/gods 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 Janus 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, god 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 lustra, 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 Belém 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 space 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 repetitions. 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, pastéis de Belém. The Antiga Confeitaria de Belém, a crowded bakery-café, 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 Saturday lunch. The delicate layered pastry shell 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 passion for making models; the endless displays attest to this. From palm size to bicycle length, the types, sails, fittings, and furnishings are meticulously worked down to the teeny knots and flemished ropes. Probably thousands more fill the storerooms. Besides the models, the museum fathers also hoarded a vast number of uniforms worn on the discovery ships and their terra-cotta pots and vases for spices. Paintings and ex-votos reveal the peril of shipwreck, 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 compass. 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 associations. 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 Héloïse and Abélard. 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 Andalucía, 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 latitude 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 circumference 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 fishing 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 pass on through the carriage museum, which just illustrates 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 cafés. Cat tongues, almond tarts, fruit tarts, citrus tarts. At the blue-and-white-tiled Canecas, the bakers, visible through glass, 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 classic custard tarts and wishes he’d been fed them in childhood. We loiter outside at Café 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 café 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 café . . . 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 scrapbook 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 cafés 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 identity. 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: