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 5
Salvage.
By Philip Graham
- - - -
We're surrounded by glass cases filled with sunken treasure, the kind of booty that pirates would love to get their hands or hooks on: Spanish coins minted in Quito, jewelry studded with emeralds and diamonds, pewter plates, gold cuff links, bottles of cognac and port wine, an astrolabe, a gunpowder scoop, a brass candleholder that adjusts to the shifting pitch of a ship. All of it has been scrubbed clean of incrustations, after centuries underwater in the seabeds surrounding this former Portuguese colony we've been exploring for the past week, the African islands of Cape Verde.
I try to imagine I'm walking along the ocean floor in a diving suit among these neatly arranged treasures, but Alma and Hannah, peering into one of this small museum's glass cases, break the illusion because they're not wearing heavy canvas suits topped by portholed helmets; instead, they've dressed lightly for the African heat. So no invisible fish glide by as I approach a display case devoted to an English ship called the Princess Louisa, which sank in 1743 while carrying over 800 ivory tusks. According to the plaque on the wall, as the broken ship lurched on a reef, the crew, convinced that most of them would drown, broke into a shipment of brandy and drank it all, "in order to render themselves insensible to the impending tragedy."
When Alma shifts to researcher overdrive and approaches one of the exhibit's curators with her usual dozens of questions, Hannah slips beside me in front of a glass case devoted to the Hartwell. On its way from England to China in 1787, this ship endured a mutiny that lasted three days, at which point the exhausted officers hit a reef off the island of Santiago. Down it went, with a huge cargo of gold and silver goods. Before us in the case rest a telescope, two gold watches, and—most touching—a little gold box holding tweezers and such, along with tiny vials of perfume that supposedly retain hints of the original scents. This manicure set is centuries old but also a beckoning future for my daughter, who already longs for the day when she can enter the mysterious rituals of makeup.
Hannah rests her head against the glass and stares. This seems like the beginning of a private moment, so I leave her side and turn my attention to the center of the exhibit's floor, where surprisingly small cannons and cannonballs are displayed. Munchkin weaponry. Not that I'd like to linger in their line of fire, because they're still perfectly fine examples of the perversity of human inventiveness. The case shot on display, for instance, is a tidy package of over 10 lead balls bound in canvas and resin, ready to be fired into some unlucky ship's rigging; link shot, a close cousin, is a set of twinned lead balls connected by a coiled copper wire, perfect for spiraling through a crowd of sailors on a distant deck.
All that shot went unshot, though—poor defense, in the end, against sudden squalls and hidden reefs, the disasters that brought so much treasure to this museum, riches that weren't meant to stop here but to pass by on their way to and from China, India, Brazil: the once wide range of the Portuguese empire. I continue to wander among the displays of so many ships lost: the oldest wreck went down in 1650, and the most recent in 1850, when the USS Yorktown—commissioned to intercept and capture any ships trafficking in slaves—struck an uncharted reef. I pause at the thought of the Yorktown's mission, and wonder how many ships packed with human cargo might have sunk in these waters. So many souls lost.
When we leave the museum, I make another stab at that diving-suit fantasy, but it dissolves in the heat, in the beauty of this clear sky over Praia—the capital of Cape Verde, on Santiago Island. So far, this past week has been, for Alma and me, a return to an Africa we've long been absent from. On and off for over two decades, we'd lived in small villages in Ivory Coast, until the fever dream of political and ethnic conflict slowly infected that country with civil war. With the villages of the Beng—the people we lived among so often—held in rebel hands, we haven't been able to return in years.
Yet this isn't the lush West African landscape Alma and I have grown accustomed to. The islands of Cape Verde, parked 300 miles off the coast of Senegal, are scabs of rock in the ocean. Uninhabited when they were first discovered by the Portuguese, in the 15th century, and now bulked up with a population of over 400,000, they remain crusted stretches of volcanic soil scorched by frequent droughts. Small terraced farms perch on the driest of mountainsides, whose craggy peaks have been sculpted by millions of years of Saharan wind. Every tuft of green seems like the answer to a personal prayer.
We hail a cab and ride over roads of black basalt stone, past old colonial buildings, gleaming bank branches, and the new soccer stadium, on our way to Sucupira market. Hannah wants to search out one of those local tie-dyed, ankle-length dresses she's had her eye on since we arrived last week—the perfect outfit for her 12th birthday, coming up in a few days. We step out of the cab, jazzed right off the bat by the typical colors, smells, and sounds of a West African market. Women pass by bearing impossible loads on their heads—bags of rice, stacks of bright traditional cloth—while other women sit on stools or wooden boxes before pungent arrays of fresh or smoked fish, lettuce, hot peppers, onions, fresh bread, cabbage. Music from cassette and CD players tempt us into a maze of stalls (we'll worry about finding our way out later), past the friendly chatter of side-by-side competitors selling flip-flops or sunglasses, in search of that magical dress.
Eventually we stop at a tailor's crowded display, and Hannah chooses a dress of purple patterns that seem to vibrate against the cut of the long white cloth. She sports that classic look of shopping contentment, and I take the occasion to ask her a question I didn't know I was dying to ask: "So, kiddo, what do you think of Africa so far?"
She pauses a moment, then says, "Africa is beautiful ... and hard." Hannah has long been a tad jealous of her older brother Nathaniel's stories of African-village adventures with Alma and me when he was 6 years old, and she's been looking forward to this trip for a while. But she's never seen poverty like this, the small, squat concrete homes of the poor ringing the hills, the begging children. Yet, for all the explicit evidence of the world's unfairness, there's beauty everywhere as well—the buzz of this market, for one, and above all the confident gait of so many people we pass, their features and skin color a singular map of cultural and racial crosscurrents, a centuries-in-the-making creole blend of European and African ancestry.
The afternoon is waning, but ever-energetic Alma has one more spot she wants to explore today—she's heard there's a small section of Jewish gravestones in the cemetery that sprawls along the edge of Praia. Even though I'm a little beat and Hannah looks slightly wilted, we both shrug and agree. After another short cab ride, Alma is chatting up the lanky groundskeeper stretched out by the cemetery entrance. Whenever her anthropological antennae are out, Alma is a super charmer, and I sometimes wonder if anthropology is basically gossip with footnotes.
Eventually, the groundskeeper leads us to a desolate corner where six plain stone markers—half of them chiseled in Hebrew characters—lie flat and partially covered in the sandy soil. They date from the 19th century, but there are Jewish gravestones centuries older in the cemetery of a town down the coast called Cidade Velha, a resting place for early escapees from the Inquisition. Alma clicks away with her camera, takes notes, and before we leave we pause, trying to imagine the lives buried there. Then we brush away the sand and respectfully place small rocks on the headstones.
In the evening, back in our hotel room after a three-story walk up, Alma is downloading the photos to her computer when she gets a phone call. "Sim?" she answers, curious at who could possibly be calling, and slowly an I-can't-believe-this-is-happening look spreads across her face. Her hand over the mouthpiece, Alma whispers, "It's the Israeli ambassador to Cape Verde!"
The conversation done, she fills us in. The ambassador has just arrived for his first visit, to present his newly minted credentials to the government, and at the reception afterward he heard about Alma's research from someone she'd interviewed a couple days ago. Small island, small world. And not bad timing, either: he wants to meet tomorrow, which will be our last day in Santiago before we fly to São Vicente, another island in the archipelago.
The next day, we're sitting poolside at his four-star hotel, ordering lunch. This is as fancy as it gets in Cape Verde, and Hannah eyes those kids splashing about nearby. I wish we'd thought to bring bathing suits—she could do with a little fun after being dragged here, there, and everywhere—and I flash her an apologetic glance. She nods her disappointment and then turns her attention to the ambassador, who's handsome in what I assume is the stereotypical diplomat's style: sculpted jaw and a dusting of distinguished gray hair at his temples. He's grumping that the Saudis are building water desalinization plants for some of the islands, but me, I'm more skittish about all the gated retirement communities the Brits and Italians are building on various islands. Sure, construction jobs help the economy, but when the work is done those projects will be just the kind of "look, don't touch" displays of wealth that could bring more than a few simmering poor people right up to boil. The ambassador nods, then tries drawing out tips from us, as if we were old hands at navigating African rituals. We are, in a way, but with a shaky knowledge earned mainly through countless mistakes.
Then Alma mentions our visit yesterday to the Praia cemetery and he leans back in his chair, suddenly quiet—this is news to him. She's brought along her computer and offers to show him the photos, and soon we're zooming in on the gravestones until the Hebrew characters are large enough to read. As the ambassador translates names and dates, we feel the excitement of recovery, and then he pauses. "This is an interesting epitaph," he murmurs. He points out a line beneath Moises Auday's birth and death dates and reads: Out of his time, out of his place.
We fall quiet for a moment at this voice dredged from the past, at this eight-word epic of exile.
- - - -
I'm sitting in the open bed of a truck because there's no room in the seat up front, where Alma and Hannah sit next to the driver. That's OK by me, since he keeps making stops in the winding streets of Mindelo, collecting the musicians who'll be performing today at Calhau, a town on the other side of the island where the restaurant Chez Loutcha hosts Sunday buffets serenaded with live music. It might be a tourist trap, but this is the best birthday party Alma and I have been able to conjure up for our daughter, with the promise of another party with her Portuguese school friends when we return to Lisbon.
The last of the musicians, a guitarist and a violinist, nod to me as they hop aboard. Then the truck's noisy mechanical soul amps up as we leave town, too loudly for us to do much more than smile at each other. Today's buffet performance must be just another gig for these guys, but for me this trip, with the arid wind whipping through my hair, has the feel of a possible adventure. The island of São Vicente is even drier than Santiago, the clear sky smudged by windswept dust off the bare mountains. An occasional tree or bush offers meager evidence that we're still on a planet resembling Earth. If we don't globally warm ourselves to oblivion in the next century, this is what the world might look like to future humans millions of years from now, when the sun's inexorable expansion into a red giant begins to bake the life out of us.
Then, incredibly, we're passing small farms that dot this blasted landscape, most no bigger than a patch of parched ground bordered by stone walls. Cornstalks stake their fragile claims beside windmills built to salvage unlikely drops of water from an elusive water table, and once again I'm reminded that, in such unpromising terrain, Cape Verdeans have managed not only to survive but to fashion a distinctive culture, one jam-packed with artists. Everywhere you wander, there's music music music emanating from hotel courtyards, café verandas, tiny stages set up in the corners of restaurants, and in the middle of plazas where lovers stroll hand in hand. The major towns on this and other islands are dotted with bookstores that feature the work of local writers, and cultural centers host art exhibitions and original dance and theater productions. Just yesterday, I lounged in a café, sipping espresso while pushing my Portuguese reading skills to the limit with a quite good short story about a man's attraction to a cloistered woman he's never seen, a story I'd picked out from an anthology of Cape Verdean fiction titled, aptly enough, Tchuba na desert—Rain in the Desert. Then, as I paged through my pocket dictionary, searching for the definition of abalroado—collided—a man with a short-cropped white beard stopped at my table, his face a puzzled squint, as if he were trying to recognize me.
Maybe my own blank look made him blurt out, "Chama-me Carlos Araújo." He waited patiently for my response, and though his name sounded eerily familiar, still I stared until, on a hunch I couldn't quite believe, I looked down at the anthology in my hands and saw that he was the author of the story I'd been reading. It turned out that he was also the owner of the café. Small island, small world indeed! After a few attempts in my fumble-mouthed Portuguese, we switched to English and discussed art and politics for an hour, while I kept shaking my head at yet another example of the kind of crazy coincidence that has blind-sided, haunted, and delighted me all my life.
Finally, we rumble to the outskirts of Calhau, a small town facing a semicircular bay that curves against the ocean's deep blue. We park in the small lot beside the restaurant and Hannah jumps from the cab of the truck with a child's coiled energy. Then, almost as an afterthought, she stands as straight and grown-up as she can manage, though the look of that snazzy new dress is undercut by sneakers peeking out beneath the hem.
Inside, long tables lining the side of the large room are filled with tourists from various Scandinavian countries, a British family or two, and a handful of American businessmen. In the center of the room wait the buffet fixings, Cape Verde's typical delicious blend of cuisines, where the Portuguese love of soup meets the West African love of stew, and the Portuguese craze for pork and sausage rubs elbows with African manioc and goat. And that's not including the encyclopedic offerings of fish and shellfish. Even the names of the various dishes sound savory: Cachupa, Canja de Galinha, Carne Gizado, and Supida de Xerem.
The musicians have set up by now, and they start to play a beautifully fluid and melancholy tune. Cape Verde's music, like its food, is a thrilling mix, and in any song you can hear the pain of Portuguese fado, the breezy joy of Brazil, and the rhythmic ease of Africa. It's a music that makes you want to dance and weep at the same time, music so beautiful it can make your teeth ache.
The people sitting around us, though, want to chow down and listen, not dance. I'd love to work off some of this great grub, grab Alma's hand and lively up the joint, but this would surely mortify our daughter, and it is her birthday. So I content myself with the memory of the night last month in Lisbon when Alma and I took in the music of Boy Gé Mendes at a Cape Verdean nightclub, a venue that was once the comfy home of a 17th-century family of the Portuguese nobility. This home, which had likely been built on profits from the labor of slaves in Cape Verde, Brazil, or elsewhere in the Portuguese empire, was now claimed by the descendants of those slaves, and their transforming music ringing off the walls offered an irony so gratifying that Alma and I found it impossible not to step out and pretend that we were even one-tenth as good as the couples who carved out breathtaking territory on the dance floor around us.
The music pauses when the hostess approaches our table and sets down an oversized cupcake topped with a sparkler that sparkles itself down to nothing, leaving one lone candle for Hannah's wish. Then the band starts up with "Parabéns a você," the Portuguese version of "Happy Birthday," and, as everyone in the room joins in, her face flushes with embarrassed pleasure at being the restaurant's brief center of attention.
The feast finished, we stroll outside the restaurant for some fresh sea air, and Hannah settles into one of the veranda's hanging chairs, made of hemp and ripe for swinging. Alma and I take turns pushing her, and it's a moment to savor, parents indulging in their child's pleasure. There are precious few remaining, I imagine, since Hannah's new age of 12 tacks just a little too close to the dangerous reefs of Teenage Wasteland. Soon we'll likely have limited chances to salvage a moment like this except in memory, reclaiming our daughter's fading childhood as if it were a cluster of sunken gold coins.
We continue on to the water's edge, examining the ebb and surge of the volcanic beach's various small tidal pools. In the distance, the uninhabited island of Santa Luzia seems to rise out of mist, and behind it loom the cliffs of a larger island, São Nicolau. Following her curiosity, Hannah wanders along the shore, then stops as a windy gust snaps the folds of her long dress. She sweeps tangled hair from her forehead with an assured gesture, and I blink my eyes: she seems years older, the young woman she's about to become. Alma catches her breath beside me and I'm sure she's thinking this, too. Hannah sees our gawking, begins to walk back, and then—a surprise—she skips. She skips, and I count each step.
MORE DISPATCHES
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.