Philip Graham
Spends a Year
in Lisbon.
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Philip Graham, a writer who teaches at the University of Illinois, will be spending a year in Lisbon, Portugal. He will be reporting to us from there.
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D I S P A T C H 7
Isn't There a Law
Against Filching
a Calçada?
By Philip Graham
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Give me a spare hour or so in the evening and I'll gladly spend it wandering up and down the hills of Lisbon, letting the fictional characters inside me have a chance to jostle among themselves while I'm drawn to the sight of a tasca with chickens and rabbits hanging in the window, or the elaborately sculpted façade of a tucked-away church, or a bar where all eyes are trained on a small screen's soccer drama. Just as often, though, my eyes are down, attentive to the art beneath my feet: the cobblestones of Lisbon.
Unlike the eternal unrolling of concrete carpet you'll find in any American city or town, there's nowhere in Lisbon where you can avoid the sight of stone-cobbled streets or sidewalks. And why would anyone want to, since the alternation of these white and black limestone cobbles—calçadas—ripple inventively down the sidewalk in wavelike or checkerboard patterns, or as designs of flower petals, rays of light, interlocking chain links, even depictions of caravels with a crow in what I guess must be the crow's-nest. This entire idea of walking on art has a direct ancestry to the tiled floor decorations of Roman villas back when Portugal was a western province of the empire. In a culture so steeped in the mournful nostalgia of saudade, I suppose it makes sense that nearly every pathway in Lisbon would echo the past.
Yet tonight, as I stand here on a corner facing the Museu Nacional de Etnologia, I'm impressed by its broad sidewalks of calçadas not because of their designs—they don't have 'em—but because there are just so many of them, thousands upon thousands, a field of white stones stretching off into the distance. So many that I can't help wondering, how many are there?
It'd certainly be a long, long haul if I tried to count each one. Impossible. Yet the idea tugs at me—couldn't there be an easier way? Math for me is a vestigial organ—aside from counting out change at the store, or as long as the page numbers of any book I'm reading remain consecutive, the subject doesn't cross my mind. But I'm sure that I can remember enough of the stuff from the Paleolithic of my childhood to give multiplication a try. So, first I count a single line of stones across the width of the wide sidewalk, from inner border to the curb: 46. Damn, 50 would be better, considering my math skills, but I resist the impulse to round off—this is serious business, and I want to be as accurate as possible.
Now it's time for the next step. The curb itself is bordered along its length by a series of narrow cement tiles. I measure the length of three or four and discover that, on average, each tile is about eight cobblestones long. I take out the notebook I carry with me everywhere, and which I like to think of as my little portable idol, my rented golem ("Ídolo portátil / O livro é / um golem alugado," as the Portuguese poet Ana Hatherly writes). Pen in hand, and revving up my ancient computational synaptic connections, I multiply 46 by 8 and come up with 368 stones.
Ah, but my task has just begun. Next, I have to walk down the length of the sidewalk, to count the number of cement border tiles. I balance on the edge of the curb, arms out, feeling like a kid again, and set off, counting one, two, three, four, and I've got a long way to go; the end of the block seems far, far away—28, 29, 30—and though the street is deserted, what would I do if someone turned a corner and saw me—52, 53, 54—counting out loud in English (easier to remember that way), as if self-administering a Breathalyzer test?
I stop. Was that 67 or 68? Damn, I have to concentrate. I decide to play it safe and say 67, and walk on, slower now. No funny stuff, simply pay attention to this weighty matter at hand, but the Tagus River is in view and I love how the moonlight shimmers on its surface. After a couple more rough spots of concentration, I've balanced my way to the end, to the reward of knowing that the block is 135 border tiles long.
Now for the moment of truth. I multiply 135 by 368 and arrive at the daunting number of 49,680. Because there are four sides of sidewalk surrounding this museum, I then multiply this mouthful of a number (oh, I am on a roll) yet another time, now times four, and this delivers unto me a grand total of 198,720 stones. That's not even counting all the cobbled courtyards dotting the museum grounds, or the cobbled paths that connect to them, or the stone-cobbled parking lot—totaling those could jump it up to nearly a half million!
Unaccustomed to so much counting, I'm feeling a little drunk with math, crazy enough to dare guess how many stones there might be in the entire city of Lisbon: all those plazas large and small, and all the sidewalks, and all the streets and avenues. If merely two square blocks could add up to a million stones, and if a thousand million is a billion, then ...
I'm not sure if it's possible, but another part of me says Go on, give it a try. So I bravely crunch some serious numbers in my notebook and come up with the roughly scientific estimation of a zillion gazillion. Even if my calculations are off by several gazillion, that would still be a lot. Our galaxy is made up of 100 billion stars—how would all the stones of Lisbon stack up to that?
Once again I regard the museum grounds, its multitude of stones. My work here is done. So I continue on my evening ramble, past a section of shops, a botanical garden, then circle back past one of the smaller soccer stadiums in the city, huff up a hill, and turn a corner where a portion of the sidewalk has been broken apart by a work crew earlier in the day. Feeling a bit proprietary about these stones (after all, I am the Calçada Counter), I kneel down for a closer look. The white ones are as often as not cream colored, while some have hints of gray, blue, or pink. There's nothing factory-made about them—each one is a little "off." Then I pick up one of the loose stones, and its essential cubicity weighs in. I twist and turn it in my hand and feel the attentive craft, how each of the stone's six sides has been carefully chipped to a rough approximation of a smooth surface. That must be why I feel such affection for these stones—they're as individual as people. But it's an affection laced with sadness, because so much of their originality—their five other sides—is normally buried out of sight. And that's a lot like people, too.
Each one radiates so much personality that I regret having numbered them—they deserve names instead. But in Portugal, unfortunately, you can only bestow names from the approved list administered by the Direcçao-Geral dos Registos e Notariado. That must be the reason there are so many Joãos, Marias, and Miguels coming out of the woodwork. Just the other day, though, I read in the newspaper that 18 new first names have been approved by the Portuguese naming czars, newcomers with a little spice and verve, like Gildásio, and Umbelina, and Miqueias. This is more like it—who'd want a street full of stones named João João João João João João?
So what would I call this cobblestone in my hand? Probably not Atila, which is another of the recently approved names. Maybe Miqueias, because I'm guessing that for the rest of my life I'll never know how to pronounce this name properly, and a too-solid stone could use a little mystery.
Now that I've given it a name, how can I return it to the exposed, broken ground? And I could use a paperweight for my desk. I resume my stroll with little Miqueias, though when a couple cars pass by I cup the stone against my side, trying to hide the thing from the sight of the drivers. Thief, I think—isn't there a law against filching a calçada? I'm really only borrowing it, I fully intend to return it to the street before I leave the country, but then the voice of Miss Smith, my scary third-grade teacher (the one with the paddle and the pipe cleaners) intrudes from out of nowhere, and she's insisting, That's no excuse—if everyone did this there wouldn't be any streets in Lisbon!
Well, I reply (and I've been wanting to tell this woman off for decades), apparently you haven't been paying attention, Miss Smith, or else you'd know that earlier this evening I established that there are far more stones in Lisbon than there are people in the world, in fact—
A dog howls, and I almost leap out of my guilty skin. A quick glance at the snarling creature behind the fence and I realize that I'm walking along a street lined with a number of embassies, each gated and likely protected by many more ready-to-bark-at-a-moment's-notice dogs. Perhaps not the best route to be taking while holding in my hand a nice-sized, potentially throwable stone. I imagine the security cameras of every house pulling in for a close-up of my right hand, calculating, on hidden digital screens, when I might rear back and hurl this stone through the tempting target of a wide-paneled window. So I grip the calçada tightly, as if I could somehow squeeze it out of sight, and hurry off.
A block or so away I slow down and relax and realize that the variations of little Migueias's surfaces have made me attentive to the same sort of variations beneath my feet. Because each step I take feels different—the sidewalk's terrain is always slightly shifting, a new span of individually shaped stones supporting each stride. Maybe this is one of the reasons I've been enjoying these evening strolls so much: my feet are secretly hungry to read the streets' complex topographies. It's a kind of Braille that speaks of all the craftsmen over the centuries who broke large limestone blocks and tapped and shaped them into small cubes; of all the workers who placed line after line of them in the ground; and of who knows how many feet that daily step on this city's vast stretches of cobbled sidewalks.
I laugh, flip Miqueias in the air a couple of times, and keep walking. Given the chance, I could walk all night.
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