Philip Graham
Spends a Year
in Lisbon.
- - - -
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.
- - - -
D I S P A T C H 1 2
Chama-Me Ishmael.
By Philip Graham
- - - -
Through your heart passed a boat
That without you still follows its course
—Sophia de Mello Breyner
- - - -
My daughter takes more than a few hesitant steps with her eyes closed, one hand lightly in the crook of Alma's arm, trying to imagine what it must be like to be blind. She's been doing this ever since moving to her new Portuguese school, which blends in the classroom blind or visually impaired students with the normally sighted; there's a spirit of empathy about the place that's remarkable. Hannah steps slowly, her feet trying out the feel of the sidewalk's landscape of cobblestones.
I'm doing my own navigating, getting us through a crowd of anti-abortion supporters handing out little Nao, Obrigado—No Thank You—cards to passersby. Next week Portugal votes on a referendum on whether or not to legalize abortion, and everyone we know is obsessed with the possible results. There are endless, escalating debates on TV, and the whole country seems cranky. Alma and I, however, can barely suppress our joy at finally escaping the apartment: this is our first outing since we slogged through January with the flu, chilled to the bone. (Like most apartments in Lisbon, ours isn't heated, the price one pays for a tiny carbon footprint.)
We make our way past the statue of Fernando Pessoa and then turn left, to a nearby theater, for the Saturday matinee of a Portuguese production of Moby-Dick. I'm still surprised nobody here thought to try an adaptation before, since it's a no-brainer for the Portuguese: their country shares borders with only two neighbors, Spain and the sea, and Spain will always be the least favored. While the sea ... ah, the sea has for over 600 years offered the Portuguese promises of adventure, mystery, and danger, escape from poverty, escape to a new life.
Unfortunately, I'm worried that this play could induce an allergic reaction in an 11-year-old girl: a whale, a crazy old coot of a captain, and a cast of sailors that, collectively, probably add up to less than one spoonful of Johnny Depp. Even worse, there's a very low prospect of singing or dancing. Hannah's coming along as a good sport anyway, since she's as happy as she's ever been, back to singing in our apartment at any odd moment, having just received from her new circle of friends at school her first invitation to a birthday party—the mother lode of social acceptance.
We present our tickets and make our way to our seats, where the theater's painted ceiling above us is busy with the fluff of 18th-century aesthetics—chubby winged cherubs floating between clouds while lush pink nudes loll across beds of flowers. This theater must go back to the times when the Portuguese mercantile empire still ranged from Brazil to Africa, from India to China, an empire fashioned before instruments were invented that could accurately measure longitude, at a time when conditions on ships were so harsh that often three-quarters of the crew and passengers would die before the final port of call. But something in those days drove the Portuguese vontade—will—and imagination to discover what no Europeans had ever discovered before.
The Portuguese also, to their great shame, instituted the European slave trade in Africa. Maybe it was karma that caused the wealth accumulated through their empire to be lost over a few centuries by mismanagement and cruelty. Like the rococo excess on the ceiling above us, it's an empire that hovers over the Portuguese today, a ghostly Once Was, a What Might Have Been that could be described as the country's own white whale.
We settle in our seats, page through the playbill, which certainly looks promising, as it includes 10 pages of nautical terms, information on the types and ways of whales, and descriptions of the biblical symbolism behind the names of the characters. Somebody's done real homework. Given my slow-lane pace of reading Portuguese, I barely get more than a glance at all this before the curtain rises, and the comedic first scene, of Ishmael meeting Queequeg in the boarding house, begins.
I quickly sense something is wrong. First, they've cut the opening line, "Call me Ishmael"—I so wanted to hear an actor say, "Chama-me Ishmael." Another bad sign: the actor portraying Queequeg, who wears a tan-colored body suit decorated with Polynesian tattoos, seems to think Frankenstein-style grunts are the way to go.
Soon enough, the action moves to the Pequod, and it's a little strange watching Portuguese actors portray American sailors, especially since so many of the ship's crew in the background of the novel were Portuguese. At the height of the whale trade, New England ships often sailed out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, with a skeleton crew, and picked up the rest at Portuguese islands, the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands, both rich resources of cheap, skilled sailors. The Portuguese were actually the hidden muscle behind the great energy quest of the nineteenth century, so couldn't the playwright have put at least one João or Zé onboard?
The stage scenery resembles a Zen version of the high seas, with a three-story tower curved like a prow (or is it the stern?—it's hard to tell) that hints at the rest of the Pequod; a full-size mast with a crow's-nest stands isolated in a corner, complete with rope ladder; and there's the bare frame of a rowboat, with wheels, which the actors push along with their feet while exercising invisible oars. Even a three-hour play can't serve up more than a sliver of a 600-page novel, so absence needs to be the aesthetic of the day. I sigh and rustle in my seat, thinking that the best we can hope for is a bonsai version of a redwood tree.
Even so, the minimalism of the sets seems at odds with the declamatory acting style, which rubs out the individual character quirks of Stubb, Starbuck, and Flask. Ishmael disappears as an important character in much the same way he does in the novel, once the voyage of the Pequod works up some steam. On stage he's just another sailor with not much to do, but in the novel, Ishmael's physical presence transforms into the narrative voice. That job, though, has been given to a female character invented for this production: She's a kind of Greek oracle dressed as a Quaker, speaking to the audience directly, intoning some of Melville's more poetic prose about fate and the sea. An interesting invention, this embodiment of all the women left on shore, but the role also feels like a misstep that undermines the necessarily claustrophobic world of the Pequod.
Still, the play belongs to Ahab, a captain robbed of some essential part of his soul as well as his leg, and whose eloquent obsession with the white whale enlists the crew into what is essentially a suicide pact. No doubt about it, Ahab is a hard role to play, but the actor here interprets him as an unmodulated exclamation mark, an Old Salt leaking out of his shaker.
I know the type. When I was 18, I crewed on an 80-foot staysail schooner in the New England waters. It was a ship searching not for whales but for tourists who were in the mood for a placid cruise from New York to Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Mystic Harbor, or Block Island. My captain was Teddy Charles, a former jazz vibraphonist who'd played with greats like Charles Mingus and Miles Davis in the '50s, and he even won himself a couple of DownBeat poll awards. Bitter about the rising popularity of rock-and-roll swamping jazz, Teddy plunked his savings into a boat, left the music behind, and ran roughshod over whatever crew came his way—he was loud, but also quietly cunning. Sometimes, if I'm in an expansive mood, I like to think of him as a minor Ahab whose white whale had the face of Keith Richards.
At intermission, we're released to the lobby, where flat-screen TVs show whales gliding underwater, surfacing, and then diving back to the depths. It's a shock to see images of real whales, after the enclosed world of the stage, where, when the hunt is on, the poor actors in that dopey rowboat have to hurl harpoons at an invisible whale offstage. I have a hunch we're not going to see a dramatization of the novel's beautifully macabre chapters that detail the rendering of a whale from a formidable giant into a row of barrels filled with oil. Beside me, Alma and Hannah mutter justly ungenerous opinions about the play, but I'm keeping my mouth shut.
"What do you think?" Alma asks, and I know if I join the club there's no reason for us to stay; we can simply escape out the lobby to the street. While none of my usual optimism can alter the feeling that this play is as doomed as the Pequod, a morbid curiosity about its final throes has taken hold of me.
"I think it's pretty good," I reply, with my best straight face.
Back in our seats, we watch Ahab ignore the warnings of one, two, then three captains of passing ships who've had disastrous encounters with the white whale. Stiff neck! He continues the chase, Pip—poor cabin-boy coward—goes mad, and Starbuck from time to time muses portentously here and there on the ship's prow. Hannah suppresses her yawns, Alma seems ready to nod off, but I'm pinned to my seat by the slow sinking of this theatrical ship.
Just in time, down comes the white whale from the rafters, attached along its length to three wires, and it hovers over the Pequod. There'll be no head-butting with this prop; it looks to be made of a material too delicate for that kind of job. I suppose it's meant to serve as a malign cloud, the cumulous shape of destiny, but the meticulous realism can't quite do the necessary haunting heavy work.
Ahab calls for the chase from that crow's-nest in the corner of the stage. Then the whaleboat is launched and Ahab and his crew row off toward the side stage. Don't they see Moby-Dick floating in the air above that abstract prow of the Pequod? Hey, throw the harpoons up there! Instead, they fling their harpoons offstage and then creak their way after them. Once they're out of sight, we hear various noises of disaster.
Water starts to leak down the shining metal curve of the ship's prow, a sign that the Pequod must have been rammed by Moby-Dick, though the whale's image still floats, immovable, in the air. The novel's feverish, drawn-out three-day chase and battle has been reduced to five lousy minutes of stage time. Curtain down, and there's polite clapping, though not enough to reach the heights of hypocritical enthusiasm. I'll bet everyone in the theater is more than ready to leave behind that hovering whale, and those hovering cherubs on the ceiling.
There's still light outside when we leave the theater, and still the anti-abortion pamphlet pushers remain in force, repelling or attracting passing Lisboetas. Maybe it's because I've just left a world where harpoons clatter offstage, but I can feel the simmering white whale behind every encounter. This week, one half of Portugal is on the hunt for the elusive, liberalizing spirit of modern Western Europe, while the other half chases after what they see as the waning of traditional values.
As Alma, Hannah, and I cross crowded streets in a search for a restaurant, Hannah goes back to trying out the mysterious steps of the blind, and I find myself wondering what other white whales might be hidden in the people we pass. Maybe this is why the power of Melville's novel has endured beyond the end of the whale trade, since we all have our yachts, dinghies, and inner tubes of obsession, malign or benign: a whale, a lost empire, an abortion referendum, rock music, or, in my case, Lisbon. It's a sprawling, friendly whale I've picked, and my daily search for why I love it is friendly, too.
Not so strangely, we're in the mood for seafood, and we stop before a promising tasca. Hannah stands before the posted menu, her eyes closed, while Alma reads aloud the specials of the day: cherne grelhado (grilled turbot) or lulas recheados (stuffed squid) or bacalhau com natas (minced cod in a cream sauce). Not a bad way at all to feed an obsession. No danger, I like to think, of drowning here.
- - - -
The excerpt from the poem "Drift" by Sophia de Mello Breyner was translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith and is from Log Book: Selected Poems.
MORE DISPATCHES
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.