As I walked, a man in brief, flared jogging shorts came running towards me. I decided I would look at him the way men sometimes look at women. I gazed at his ankles and shapely calves. I gazed at his thighs. I gazed into his face until he had to look back at me. He looked shy and compliant. The river roared and his neat hooves thundered. We both were blushing.
Today all I can think about is the moss that grows on furrowed wood; the sound of traffic, that reaches everywhere; my desire to sleep for a hundred years; the fact that not everybody wants to hurt people.
Supermarkets turn me into a raging misanthrope. I am never more judgmental than when dodging slow-moving families in the aisles. Artificial food substitutes reach out like glistening fruit arranged on extremely symmetrical trees. There’s the couple towing two listless children who have not one fresh product in their cart. There’s the urge to tap them on the shoulder and plead, You’re not feeding that stuff to your kids, are you? There’s the inclination (all too often indulged) to bail up ladies choosing toilet paper and ask, Have you ever thought of trying the recycled? Because, you know… this stuff is made from trees. (Last time I tried this, she listened politely before saying, ah, but it’s so scratchy, I like soft. “I’m sensitive.” I gave her a smile that was more like a snarl: “Maybe it’s softer. After all, it’s been Pulped Twice.”) There’s the corrosive stench of ‘cleaning’ products pervading the laundry aisle. And through it all there’s the dreary easy-listening music that’s somehow so painful to hear. Once you start hearing the lyrics, it’s a whole world of confusion and grief. If you DO get caught between the moon and New York City, where are you exactly? Are you on some extremely high-flying jumbo jet? Or have you died, and is this what purgatory smells like? And do they really play my favourite song in heaven all night long? Or does it just feel that way.
I ate my muesli on the river path and watched red insects furred with a fringe of legs investigating the slowly-rotting wood. The boatshed is held up by two felled but still rooted trees. The motorway roars a few hundred metres south, it carries a siren past. I saw a speedboat race upstream and then, twenty minutes later, return, in silence, with its engine cut: they were travelling sideways, simply letting the water bring them. As I watched, the man took his eyes off his wife’s hand on the tiller and folding his arms like a well-cared-for corpse he lay back full length in the bottom of the boat. The peace of people’s secret ambitions. After a long winter of empty skies the trees are full of song. Overnight I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s heartfelt but wry essays about the murder of migrating birds. I honour him. There should be many many more ducks and birds on this river, my friends say, at this time of year. What we have made very little resembles what I know of life. Sitting in a mossy hollow feeling a speckle of sun on my shoulders I realize I have taken refuge in the countryside and may never go back. Spend the rest of my life foraging round them and dwelling in the treetops like an airborne burrow: a nest ~ I imagine visiting cities like a honeybee to carry the gold dust away on my very many legs, darting in and droning away again, making a child’s drawing of a flower.
My friend lives by a rapid, cold river in northern Switzerland; her little village is a lot more built-up than it was when I was last here. We walked by the river in silence and a kind of sadness for what has become of the landscape. You have to kind of relax your mind away from the glaring new terraces with ancient trees felled in front of them to afford the new tenants a view; and concentrate instead on the mountains behind, the green meadows, the velvet of moss in the crannies of birches. I was tired from the eleven-hour train journey from Berlin with too many suitcases full of books. We saw a tree felled by a beaver, its stump whittled to a pencil point, its inner flesh fresh and not yet yellowed. We saw a man turning handstands on a promontory, again and again, his feet falling in front of him and his white shirt dousing his head. We saw a lamb curled in the grass and chewing very slowly, its expression consumed with a kind of passionate ecstasy that made us laugh again over dinner, hours and hours later.
On our walk my friend waved to a nearby hillside and said, You see: that’s Germany.
Well, I’m never leaving here. Restaurant down some tiny steps with a hand-lettered menu in the window and a tiny castle built out of corks. On ordering sardines what you get is a plate piled with whole grilled fish and a small mound of potatoes, boiled then tossed in butter. Everything perfectly simple. We ordered half the dessert menu and dipped our spoons contentedly. A very drunk man wearing double denim (I explained to my companion this could also be a verb: you’re not *double deniming*, are ya?) made his way up and down the stairs repeatedly, with determined attention and heavy breathing with effort. The owner stood in the narrow doorway smoke from his cigarette filling the room; his luscious daughter and her mother, a jowlier, fuller version, ran between the tables. In fact after poring over the Portuguese menu for a while I asked the daughter had they a menu in English. She summoned her father. He unfolded his glasses and peered into a few blue vinyl folders before triumphantly producing a version neatly typed in French. By comparing the two versions we could triangulate. Near midnight a man came in with his guitar and tuned up at the counter. His songs were written on laminated cards, he considered them for over half an hour. Then he turned to the long table of local people – there were only 14 of us in the restaurant – and began to play, inviting the room to the chorus. A bosomy lady in ferocious print danced, shimmying her hips expertly and directly in front of the face of the younger man, maybe 50, who had come in with his friend and who she evidently thought was a bit of alright. The singer sang on and she danced solemnly, proudly, stomping a little on the turns. Flushed and excited she raced up to the singer and whispered in his ear. “Another time,” he said in Portuguese: something like “Un autre mal.” I was mortified for her. She crossed between the head of the table and the serving counter with some difficulty and sat down, her bosom heaving. But within minutes she too was singing along with the rest of us, lustily but not loudly. When we left, the prize male and his elderly neighbour looked over their shoulders to say with careful enunciation, “Heff… a good… evening.” “Obrigada,” I said, “you too!” The beautiful one said, “Alfama! Ees beautiful!” Oh yes, I said, my hand on my breathing: beautiful. “And the people…” “Wonderful!” Steep, cobbled, gristly with careening streetcars: yes, wonderful.
Chic girl in the sunny gardens by the duck pond, at an outdoor cafe where we had lunch, cutting her toenails at the table while her companions ate their bowls of sardines.
In the Metro yesterday from the airport a man climbed onboard wearing immaculately pressed charcoal-coloured windbreaker and pleated pants, the uniform (according to his bright yellow logo) of a security firm: securidad. Later in the afternoon we saw two of his colleagues guarding a castle. He sat down and pulled out a beautiful copy of George Orwell’s 1984 and began to read. The cover was black with a big red slightly bleeding or tearful eye drawn on it.
Last night was the first evening in Portugal for either of us & we wanted to hear fado. Went for an evening stroll, and lo! on the first hilly corner was a handwritten sign saying, Fado Tonight. And on the next corner! And the next! We’re in the old quarter and fado is a boom industry. Touts walked backwards in front of us, crooning, Just buy one drink & entry’s free. Prices in the fado restaurants are oddly Scandinavian. We kept climbing. Up a side street festooned with colourful laundry, pelargoniums spilling from plastic pots, was a stooping little bar with crumbling steps. The bar owner was affable and had a genial, rubbery face. We ordered dessert. In a shadowy corner two fellows were playing guitar. One of them tilted his curly head back against the wall and began to sing. After his first song there was a modest commotion at the doorway: up there at street level stood a small, gleaming, bald man of 70 or 75 resplendent in a cream suit with wide lapels and the most gorgeous pale blue tie. He came down the steps and conferred with the musicians. Then standing easily with no affectation of manner he closed his eyes and sang. His voice was throaty and weathered, from time to time it throbbed. Caramel rice custard dissolved down my throat like sweet tears. He sang two songs and then vanished with a kind of conqueror’s wave. Then it was the turn of the bar owner, who turned up some canned background music and puffed out his chest. His voice was big and round, his gestures dramatic, he was a natural-born ham. His wife kept serving, stoically. He slid past all the tables and with three pinched fingers took up a trilby hat from the top of the cash register. Setting it on his head he went on singing, oh so roundly, oh so bigly. His wife behind him gestured to a table of Germans “two beers? oh, three? three beers” and as her husband simperingly launched a second song (“I sing just one more,” he said, “one more,” so apologetically that my heart rushed to love him and their hard-working marriage) she glided round the bar with three beers and presented them, carrying a little last-minute shimmy of the hips. He had tears in his eyes when he finished. Because music makes queens of us all.
Felt overcome by everything today & could not get out of my room until 4. So I went for a bike ride and found this basement cafe with a fireplace in the corner, right down the toe end of the sock on some higgledy-piggledy medieval street. O, comforting, o, deliciousness! But oh, no. Going up to pay I realized I had left my bank card lying on the desk at home. I could see it: scarlet, round-sided, shiny. The guy serving had made me the richest hot chocolate of my entire winter and didn’t look as though he wanted to call the police. We spread all my coins on the counter and sifted them. Australian cents with bandicoots on them, or are they bilbies? Or tiny wrinkled dugongs? A coin from the United Arab Emirates – on a long flight you pass through so many airports. There were three flattened rusted bottlecaps, valid in my own personal parallel universe, a shard of blue-painted china thrown out by the sea, and a badge which says Without Me You’re Just Aweso-
I turned over the docket and grabbed his pen. “Can you draw me a mudmap so I can find my way back here? These little tiny streets. I’m not used to them.” He did, with much head-scratching, and then we both looked at it: a long, wavering straight line with a dot on one end (the cafe) and a dot on the other (an intersection I would recognize). “This is a terrible map,” he said. I said, “It’s a great map. And it has your address on the back so I can ask someone. See you in two hours, max.” Probably his name is not Max but I daresay we understood each other.
