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 2
So Who Says Objects
Are Inanimate?
By Philip Graham
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The apartment is larger, the rooms more spacious, than I expected. Something about the clean line of the walls seems typically European to me, though I'm not quite sure what I mean by that. Windows in every room—there'll be lots of light, even though now the sun is low on the horizon of our neighborhood of Belém. I'm not crazy about our location on the ground floor, but three of the rooms open to a patio that's part of the apartment complex's private garden, and if I crane my neck out through the living-room window, I can see a sliver of the far side of the Tagus River. So this is the space where my wife and daughter and I will be living for a year. I want to say something out loud, but how do you introduce yourself to a new apartment?
Somehow we'll make these rooms our own, breathe into them something of ourselves. Now, though, after a long haul of flights that has finally deposited us in Lisbon, it's a daunting prospect to even consider springing our clothes from their luggage prisons and relocating them in new rooms, new dresser drawers and closets. An unsettling time, this settling in, and we barely hear the rental manager as he gives us lots of apartment advice in quite good English—a blessing, since our Portuguese at the moment is not up to par.
Still, we have enough energy to pick up some essentials at a nearby store, and on our return Hannah summons a deep reserve of 11-year-old life force and begins organizing her room. Alma and I listlessly examine the furniture and the pictures on the walls, which all exude a cool aesthetic intelligence. The sun is setting and so we check the lights. In the kitchen, there's a raft of flat switches set together, and together Alma and I start to press them.
The lights shut off and an alarm begins a steady, aptly alarming whine. "Why are the lights out?" Hannah calls from her room, and Alma moans, "Oh, no, what did we do?" We start pressing the switches in various frantic combinations, but the damage has been done and we quickly give it up.
Alma runs down the hall to search for any helpful neighbor while I stay behind with Hannah and search for something, anything, in the apartment—I'll even accept help from the little scuffs of lint and dust in the corners if necessary—that might suggest an unlikely solution to our troubles: a magical Reverso button that erases blunders would be ideal, but I'm having trouble finding anything in this apartment that grows darker and darker. On and on, the alarm screeches, and I realize we've added this current mess to a family tradition of First-Day Settling-In Disasters. Like the last time we lived in Africa.
We'd just arrived in the Beng village of Asagbé, in Côte d'Ivoire, where Alma has been doing anthropological fieldwork off and on since 1979, and during the punishing 20 miles of dirt road that was the last leg of our journey, too many golden memories of that route returned to me: two cracked chassis, four shattered windshields, and more flattened tires than I cared to recount. I had another problem with this road: I'd once taken a nasty tumble off a bike, and some villagers believed not only that spirits were responsible but that they were still possibly gunning for me. I would have preferred navigating the unreliable rural bus system for this three-month stay, but we'd brought our then 6-year-old son, Nathaniel, with us and needed guaranteed quick access to medical help in case of an emergency.
Soon after we arrived in the village, as we began transferring the bags to our new two-room mud house, the car alarm set itself off with an unnerving howl, a rhythmic pulse of unhappiness that wouldn't stop, no matter how much I fiddled with the ignition and poked around the engine. All the rattling on the dirt road must have loosened the car-alarm thingy, but just where was that thingy?
Our friends in the compound gathered, eyes fearful, and were soon joined by a crowd of villagers. Still the siren screamed, and an animist priest in the next compound called for a chicken to sacrifice so he could appease any displeased spirits, who are the Beng people's usual go-to explanation for any confounding trouble.
No amount of poking about the engine and its mysterious wiry, hoselike whatchamacallits produced any solution, and I cursed myself for my cozy middle-class American ignorance of mechanical basics. I wasn't going to solve this, and the car alarm might eventually run down the battery. The only chance was to turn around and return the way we came, to the small town of M'Bahiakro at the other end of those nasty 20 miles of dirt road. There, any number of itinerant mechanics would be happy to take on the challenge.
Down we drove, a four-wheel caterwauling headache, and I found myself able to summon some sympathy for the car—it was simply registering shock at the job we'd be asking it to do in the next three months. "I know, I know," I whispered to the dashboard, with a glance at Alma to make sure she wasn't listening, "the road here is tough—hey, life here is tough—but can't you just suck it up?" But I was also pissed: that damn alarm was screeching out our arrival to any interested spirits who may not have forgotten me. "So you didn't like the road the first time?" I asked, sotto voce. "Well, now you're getting a bellyful of it, aren't you?"
The apartment is so dark now I can barely see. Thank God we bought matches at the little shop, for the gas stove, because now I can use them to search for whatever it is I'm looking for. Why aren't our neighbors standing in a curious crowd outside our open front door? Where is that helpful neighbor Alma went searching for? Helpful Neighbors are always important. They certainly were when our last First-Day Settling-In Disaster occurred. We were preparing to cook our first meal in a little country-house vacation rental on the outside slope of Sete Cidades, an extinct volcano on the Portuguese island of São Miguel, in the Azores. I wanted to rinse off some of the plates from the cabinet and, with a simple twist of the hot-water tap, I produced a stomach-dropping crunch of a noise from the sink, just before water spurted out of the pipes below.
A quick wet inspection told me I was out of my league here. (Where is my proficiency when it comes to the mechanical, besides being able to make a scissors snip back and forth?) While Alma, Hannah, and Nathaniel commandeered the mop, pail, and towels, I ran to our neighbors, who I knew could phone the housekeeper. My rudimentary Portuguese at least got across "Emergency!," and when João arrived he made a great show of pretending that he, too, wasn't out of his league, but the water continued spreading across the kitchen tiles and onto the stone floor of the dining room. I had the creeping feeling that, stone or no, we were in danger of floating out to sea.
Just then, a knock at the door, and an American couple made their unlikely appearance—they were friends of the owners and hadn't known the house had been rented for the week. The husband, it turned out, was a licensed plumber in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.
Alma finally returns with our latest "plumber," a harried fellow from the third floor whose poor English perversely complements our poor Portuguese. He locates the fuse box while I stand behind him with a match in the darkness, and with a flip here, a flip there, we're back in business. We offer embarrassed thanks in our newly lit apartment.
Alma and I are completely wired now. So we join Hannah in plunging into our suitcases, and while we empty and arrange the contents into their new nooks and crannies, I wonder what set off our First-Day Disaster today. Did the unfamiliar sounds of English echoing off the walls unnerve our Lisbon apartment?
Of course, there are perfectly mechanical explanations for all our Disasters—a weak joint in a pipe, a sudden electrical overload in an apartment left vacant for a few months, a car alarm nearly jostled to death by miles of washboard dirt road. But I know more than a few African diviners who'd smile at such a thought. All that is simply the effect, they'd say, merely a secondary physical manifestation of a hidden, psychic cause.
I contemplate the notion that no matter where you are in the world, you'll find objects—so-called mere things—that, just like people, are skittish in the face of newcomers or a novel situation. While people have doubts and silent screams of protest at too much change (too much!), machines will simply break down. And perhaps they do this to give us the opportunity to prove that we can and will repair them, that change is also marked by a return to wholeness.
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I'm still thinking about this a couple of days later when I read about the opening of Lisboa Mágica, a six-day street festival of over 20 magicians. A perfect treat for our daughter, Hannah, who has been wonderfully patient, sitting and reading a book beside us while Alma and I navigate the various unfamiliar bureaucratic mazes of banking, cell-phone plans, Internet access, and cable TV (gotta have the Disney Channel). We've been mostly trotting out our faltering Portuguese, and sometimes making complex financial arrangements in a language one barely understands feels like riding white-water rapids using a teaspoon for an oar.
We all need a diversion, so why not take in the likes of Flicto, Dr. Chango, or Mad Martin? After our first night, I'm in a magic mood, and there are lots of shows to choose from—seven or more a day, at various downtown street corners and plazas. Under the shadow of a statue of the great poet Luís de Camões, they perform; in the Rossio, where executions of the Inquisition once took place, they perform; in the Praça do Comércio, where a tidal wave during the earthquake of 1755 drowned thousands, they perform; in the Largo do Chiado, across the street from Fernando Pessoa's favorite café, they perform.
We decide to take in more than a few shows, and, as we join each semicircle crowd, I can see that the Portuguese make a good audience—polite but appreciative, compliant when prompted by a magician to participate. But there are always a few who don't pour so easily into that mold—an unshaven old man here, an overtaxed mother there—who display a sometimes loud and opinionated crankiness. Even if I can't completely follow what they're saying, the content is clear enough: Now that's a good trick. How in the world did he do that? Him, he really should practice more.
The range of magicians puts the "mixed" in mixed bag: some barely rise above the level of birthday-party entertainment, while others seek and receive our awe. Flicto, a Spanish magician, wears an outfit—tall dark hat and colorful floppy clothes—that takes him halfway to the realm of clown, giving him a persona silly enough to weather his indifferent skills. The English magician J.J. likes to balance on a misanthropic edge, at one point threatening to break both legs and one arm of a small child who keeps running in front of his act. Ray Francas, from Argentina, is wonderful with the kids, teasingly winning over each of his chosen helpers. And rubber-faced Dr. Chango, from Spain, flips a lit cigarette into his mouth and then amazes us with what he can do with the smoke.
We see too many rope tricks, too many scarf tricks. Personality, lots of personality, is needed to grease some of these old standards. Even so, it's all good fun, and on the metro line back home Alma, Hannah, and I chat up our favorite moments, but it's magic with a small m, the semblance of invisible power but not the power itself, magic without the eerie feeling that the uncanny is being held in difficult check. Certainly nothing like the weird energy we encountered our first night in Lisbon, when the apartment—awakened from a few months of empty slumber and perhaps alarmed at our alien presence, our own suppressed fears of the new—seemed to greet us with a yawp of surprise.
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