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 4
Alchemy:
From a Rube
to a Local.
By Philip Graham
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Our three tickets rest on the desk beside the exact change I gave the ticket clerk, and outside I can hear the echoing clack of the train approaching the station. From the realm of his glass box he gazes down at it all, then stares at the computer screen before him, and then, turning his head (at such a leisurely pace I can imagine hearing the shifting of his neck muscles), he regards a posted train schedule on the wall, lines and lines and lines of little numbers.
We need to catch this train. My normally vivacious daughter, Hannah, stands outside on the platform with Alma. Hannah's seemingly placid, but she's deep in the land of stir-crazy, overwhelmed by our recent move and a language she doesn't understand, in a funk about the temporary loss of her friends back home. So Alma and I have come up with the band-aid of a movie that's in English, not dubbed. And there will be Portuguese subtitles, which will give Alma and me some needed language practice. All we have to do is catch this train.
The train comes to a stop, and there's a hiss of opening doors. I can hear behind me the scrape and scuff of people stepping off, getting on, while the ticket clerk again turns to gaze upon the three tickets (and I try to will forward the careful pivot of his spinal column). Once again he looks at the money I gave him, which he has already counted. I need those tickets—there are no sales on the train, we've heard. I can't read his face, but it's blank—no confusion, no boredom, no squint of malice. Everyone outside has boarded, though the doors remain open. There's still a chance that we could catch this train, with a quick snatch of the tickets and a leap through the open door. Wanting to say something encouraging, I painstakingly construct in my mind the sentence "Faz favor, o Senor, pode dar-me os meus bilhetes?"—Please, sir, can you give me my tickets?—but I don't want to slow his deliberations by any mangled pronunciation or grammar.
Another examination of the schedule on the wall. Another long gaze at the money on the desk. The doors of the train close. Only then does his hand slowly rise with the tickets, an echo of the deliberate pace of the train pulling away from the station, as if his gesture were attached to its departure. Though his face remains an indifferent mask, I take in the reflection of my shocked face in the window of the glass booth.
Without a word, I accept the tickets and walk out to the platform, where Alma and Hannah stand, disappointed, in the sun. Alma quickly consults the movie and train timetable while I console Hannah and try to explain what I think happened. "We're in luck!" Alma says, relieved. We can make the next showing, easy.
When the next train finally arrives, we take a smooth, swift ride along tracks parallel to the Tagus River—beautiful views, but I can't stop pushing the replay button on that encounter with the ticket clerk. His behavior seemed intentional, but why? Had I insulted him by some ritual behavior I hadn't performed, some local knowledge that would be obvious to anyone living here, but invisible to me? I have to figure it out, because his glass booth is parked in our neighborhood train station, and there are surely encounters with this fellow in our future.
It's always the little things that crowd you when you're new. How much—or not—to tip. Why are some seats on the bus different colors? How to start the damn dishwasher or light the hot-water heater. How to quickly tell the difference between a five- and 10-centavo piece when a line of people behind you wait to buy their own morning paper. It's like existing in an adult amalgam of babytude and toddlerdom, where life is not yet a walk but a waddle. I remember this feeling from years back, during our long first months of village life in Africa: Who knew that sniffing a simmering pot of food and complimenting the aroma was a terrible insult? Who knew that whistling in the forest annoyed certain spirits?
I'm already working hard to keep on point with my best behavior here. Before we left for Lisbon, Alma and I studied a couple of books on Portuguese manners and customs, and two short entries waved their flags directly at me: the Portuguese aren't crazy, apparently, about loud sneezing or loud laughing. At home, at the sound of my rhythmic "eh, eh, eh" preamble to a sneeze, my children place their hands over their ears and close their eyes. (Why the eyes?, I wonder. There are no auditory nerves in the cornea.) Hannah claims she has heard me sneeze from across the street at a friend's house. I can usually control this—with enough warning the explosion can be suppressed within normal bounds. Laughing, however, is an entirely different matter. My booming laugh simply happens, a guffaw I'm not aware of until I've already guffawed it. It's nearly instantaneous plug 'n' play: amuse me and then run for the hills.
We arrive at the movie theater, which is part of a two-storied mall, which in turn is housed in the base of one of the largest soccer stadiums in Lisbon: the nested dolls of a Portuguese consumer's paradise. So we stand in line and I take out my change to examine and finally it clicks: the 10-centavo coin is smaller than the five-centavo coin. Ah, like the dime and the nickel, I can remember that, and this triumph is one of those welcome moments when the clueless Rube takes another tiny step toward being one of the locals. It's an alchemical process: transforming newcomer dross into another nugget of insider gold.
But when the woman at the counter starts asking me questions I don't understand, there's the rub: show a little local competence and people will assume you know everything else. I stare, she repeats her questions, this time pointing at the sodas and the popcorn machine behind her, and I realize that here in Portugal, you buy your snacks together with your ticket. In a moment I've gone from alchemy to Zeno's paradox: a flying arrow, speeding from bow to target, passes first half the distance, then half of that, and so on, with each division of space smaller and smaller so that the arrow never gets to the end. Well, there are a lot of dead and buried souls whose corpses prove that arrows do hit their targets, but still I feel Zeno was on to something. In another country, it's those half steps that'll do you in.
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I say, "Com licença,"—excuse me—and I say, "Faz favor"—please—and I ask for three tickets and hand him the correct change. And smile. He doesn't seem to remember me—good. He takes out the tickets, counts the money, and then slowly turns his head to examine the schedule posted on the wall, and we're off to the races again. Another gaze to the tickets, another long take on the computer screen, and I can't believe it (not again!)—there's the sound outside of the train approaching. This is not a recurring dream, but it plays like one: the clerk's same glacial attention to who knows what, and then his carefully choreographed bestowal of tickets just as the train pulls away.
I resist any expression of dismay or anger. I'm an American living abroad, after all, and so have the entire sorry record of the Bush administration to live down. I accept the tickets, without comment. Though I can't resist glancing back before I set out onto the platform. His head is down, preoccupied with something. At least he doesn't gloat: I'm already forgotten.
Again Alma and Hannah stand waiting on the platform, disappointed. But what really catches my attention is a man standing a few feet away from them. His look of astonishment as I leave the ticket office registers as something like: Why in the world were you in there? Then I notice a line of people standing before a green rectangular box attached to the wall outside that immediately comes into focus as a ticket dispenser. (Oh, how could we have walked by this so many times and not seen it?) They're staring at me, too, looks of surprise that say it all: Are you crazy? Nobody deals with that guy, ever. And I realize that none of them are queued up for the clerk, just a handful of steps away.
Though we have tickets in hand, Alma and I get in line. We're determined to figure out this machine, because it's a kind of anti-nasty-ticket-taker device. A very nice anti-nasty-ticket-taker device, we discover, because it will sell us 10 trip fares, and, after a few false starts, we manage to push the right buttons.
So, não faz mal, as they say—no harm done. We have no pressing engagement downtown, the train ride is air-conditioned and smooth, and we settle into our seats with the contentment that comes from having deciphered a good-sized chunk of local knowledge. I relax and page through my dog-eared copy of The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa.
He's one of my favorite writers, an odd bird of a poet who identified and named the multiple possibilities of his personality, gave them birth dates and biographies, and allowed them to write, through him, their very different styles of poetry. An entire literary salon met regularly inside him. Actually not an odd bird at all, but the cartographer of what we know about our hidden selves but mostly ignore. He's a Portuguese national hero, and you can buy Fernando Pessoa T-shirts, coffee cups, and key chains almost anywhere in town.
One of Pessoa's alternate selves was Bernardo Soares, a disaffected, philosophical sort who worked in an office, and the "author" of The Book of Disquiet. As the train passes under the impressive soaring curve of the 25 de Abril Bridge, I flip through the pages (it's that kind of book—short, prose-poem-like passages, good for dipping into) and read, "I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self."
Mulling on a nugget like this could take care of the rest of the ride, but something makes me flip the pages again, and I read, "I have before me, on the slanted surface of the old desk, the two large pages of the ledger, from which I lift my tired eyes and even more tired soul." Pessoa himself worked in an office, was virtually unknown throughout his life, and I can see his now famous face—thin and mustached, wearing thin-rimmed glasses, a hat above—rise from the ledger. Again, I press on and search further—I'm not sure why—here and there, until I find, "If I lift up my eyes from my thinking, they smart at the sight of the world."
I glance up at the window, and see the faint reflection of my own surprised face as I remember the ticket clerk, a few miles of train track safely behind me, and wonder if I've stumbled on the method behind his madness. What if invisible, convoluted strands of his imagination fill that glassed-in booth, and he sees anyone approaching as an alien unable to breathe his own brand of air. If so, what are a few strangers' missed connections to the unwelcome loss of his dream-state? His reputation has given him the solitude he craves, with the help of an accomplice, that ticket dispenser right outside on the platform.
Maybe everyone in the neighborhood gives him wide latitude in that booth, recognizing his artistic disposition, his need to defend an interior domain against all comers. Maybe those looks of shock and surprise I received weren't sympathy for me, but for the clerk who'd been interrupted by an insensitive newbie.
I blush, and then an alternate, Pessoa-like voice inside me rises up and says, Or maybe he's just a pain in the ass.
So who knows? A dreamer, or trouble that everyone else has learned to avoid? Either way, my new friend is that ticket machine on the train platform. Still, it's an unanswered question that I know is going to gnaw at me from time to time. Maybe Alma or I will bump into someone in the neighborhood who knows the guy's story. Maybe not. I sigh, look out the window across the aisle at the passing tile-roofed buildings on one of Lisbon's hills: so many people there I'll never meet, or, if I do, never understand. Always a Rube, never one of the locals. Or maybe the alchemists had it right—they were indeed transforming outwardly unpromising substances into gold, but, like an earnest foreigner navigating another land, they were locked in a Zeno-ish process that always kept them an increasingly tiny half step from the glittering prize.
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Fernando Pessoa quotes are from the Richard Zenith translation of The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics, 2003).
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