Leaving Lisboa (or the missing link)

This is the story of how it all ends, only it doesn't ever seem to end. An adventure quite unlike the first trip to Lisboa.

I began to write this on August first while waiting for K. to materialize through the doors of customs, but didn't finish until several days later as we navigated our way about A Coruña's thriving airport. As we know, our (collective) mishaps in travel did not end there, but I suppose we can all count ourselves lucky to have made it through mostly unscathed, or at least not permanently traumatized.

August 1, 2006
11 pm.

Brilliant. Fucking fabulous. 2 hours later and they lost her baggage in Heathrow.

I meant to ammend my comments about Portuguese particularities with the caveat that at Indian restaurants you indeed get a menu per person (even if the food lacks essential spice) and that in general while not a socially procured habit, there is a socially "accepted" habit of men hacking up grotesque and sonorous lugies (gargajos?) and spitting (cuspir) them in a rúa... I wanted to note that the affirmative, instead of "sim" (which in fact exists in the language) is "é", making me feel almost Canadian each time I utter the word, I even meant to comment on the pleasant government sponsored internet spaces, conveniently located about major cities (only to find that the one from which this would-be post was to be written was closed for August vacations) but alas, travels got in the way.

Kristina and I, to Sara's chagrin, convinced her to take the train in lieu of the bus... and were we ever sorry we did. Things had been rolling along so smoothly we just had to tempt fate and unleash a rain of colluding events.

Act 1, Scene 1
The train station: Coimbra B. A drunken man with a bag full of Sagres mumbles and stumbles about, circling us, proud for arriving with 5 minutes to spare and the entirety of our belongings safely in tow. "Cheia de turistas," he slurs as we parade by, and I mutter, "não precisamente" under my breath.

Fade to: Us struggling to accommodate our baggage at one end of car 5 (to which we had to run) only to realize that our seats are at the opposite end. Our eyes flit across numbers that ascend in haphazard starts and spurts. Apparently the system for enumeration follows neither a strict numerical ascension, nor an evens/odds system, but rather, as far as I can tell, does as it pleases, sometimes skipping large chunks of numbers in the middle, placing otherwise non-contiguous digits side-by-side.

I glance at the tickets clutched in my sweaty palm. 82, 86, 88.
86.
Drunken man rises and stumbles towards the passageway that separates car 5 from car 4, leaving his porta-bar behind in his wake. Mistake number 1 = "Ó, Senhor," I politely explain, "desculpe, este lugar é nosso." The single window seat across the aisle from our other two seats, flush against the cabin wall, has been assigned to us, nevermind that most of our half of the cabin is empty, being the good American girls that we are, we aim to sit in the seats assigned us come hell or high water. By the book. He makes drunkenly apologetic overtures, moves his suitcase with the clinking of sweating beer bottles and proceeds to look, cigarette in hand, for a light. I patiently signal to the symbol of a smoke-emitting cigarette with a red line through it, calqued on to the side of the smooth metallic interior wall, "O senhor não deve fumar cá dentro," I state firmly.

Scene 3: He sits, after smoking in the exterior passageway, and begins to shout in the progressively slurred speech that only truly inebriated people can emulate, growing louder as he sees the ticket master making his way towards our end of the train.
"É preciso
que a gente
deste mundo
for diferente!"
I make note of his use of the future subjunctive in this refrain, a linguistic structure largely absent from modern Spanish, but inescapable in Portuguese.

There are heated words exchanged and his tone rises in pitch as he, while not explicitly playing the race card, intimates that he is being discriminated against unjustly-- he paid for his ticket, and no one was going to remove him.

Repeat this scenario three or four times as the ticket taker tries to continue on and the drunken declaiming grows ever louder.

Scene 4: Tight camera angle on his face with furrowing brow and slow motion turning of his head, as his clouded gaze sharpens, if briefly, to focus once more on us. "No, we aren't interested in conversing. No, you may not take a swig of our water. Sir, you must leave us alone... O Senhor vai deixar em paz..." I raise my voice in that way that only a teacher or a mother can, which implies that there will be no further discussion of the matter, but he soon forgets, like a wayward child.
His breathing and encroaching on our personal space escalate, and in hushed whispers, we confer, Kristina's face poking through the crack from the seat iin front of us, concluding that we shall launch a missive. I squeeze by Sara's retracted knees, and he looks slightly panicked as I walk past his octopus arms and through the double doors despite his interpollations. "Fine! Go ahead and call the police!" he taunts, as I wave him away with a disinterested hand. Glimpsing from the corner of my eye the uncomfortably averted eyes of the passengers half a car back, and wonder why not a single flourish of good Latin machismo has interceded on our behalf.

Cut To: Me asking in the food car if they can send someone to deal with him. The attendant looks pained and she replies that if the police are called, the train will have to stop mid-journey and will be detained several hours or for who knows how long, implying, of course, that such an outcome would be almost entirely our fault and that we should just suck it up.

Cut Back: Bêbado leaning in over Sara, alone in the seat, who is trying to repeat, "leave me alone" in such a way that he will think it is the only phrase she knows in Portuguese and will therefore desist attempts to converse. Meanwhile Kristina, who has a self-affirmed talent for sleeping, continues to play opossum, slouched down in her seat.

Enter: I return to this scene, and immediately elevate my voice a bit more. "Um... dois... quando eu chegar a dizer tres, vou ligar à policia!" I thrust him back towards his seat verbally. No one comes, no one comes. Sara is tapping her knee nervously and compulsively nibbling Muesli. He leaves the car for a second, returns, raises his voice to chant his refrain of protest against the world, as I wave to the servers pushing the food cart slowly down the aisle, and swat away his hand as he flails in an attempt to grab my bottle of water.

When the servers finally arrive, in a matter of seconds that feel like an eternity, I explain, "O Senhor não percebe que não queremos conversar," at which point an argument ensues between him and the female server (as her male counterpart stands dumbly by). She explains in no uncertain terms that despite the fact that he has paid for his ticket, so have the rest of the passengers, and that no one (contrary to his protests) is obliged to speak with him if they don't so choose. She lures him several rows away from us with a coffee that he wanted her to give him on the house (he had just offered to buy us coffee earlier after we declined his invitation to his beer). As soon as the door hisses shut behind the service cart, he begins complaining loudly about the bitterness of the coffee, and is soon leaning back in over us, practically grabbing Sara's arm.

"Não toque a minha amiga," I growl, having lost the last ounce of patience in his failure to comprehend. "AFASTE-SE!" I command, drawing myself up to a standing position in my seat. Kristina snaps, grabs her pack and is about to push past him in search of another more peaceful car when four men beg pardon and barrel by her, shoving the drunken man backwards into the passageway with a loud thud.
"Kristina, sit down!" I command, breaking her liminal paralysis. She sits obediently back down, "yes mom..."
We hear scuffling, a hollow thump (presumably his back against the wall). The ticket master comes running (finally) from the far end of the car, and the three others restrain the man whose eyes have been observing surreptitiously with each ofmy escalating attempts to rid us of this imbibed plague.

Finally a fifth man, fiftyish, all in black with a shaven head and a military look about him, intervenes on behalf of all parties, letting the nervously twitching ticket master off the hook (our aggressive "saviour" had just posed to him an ultimatum of "You have to resolve this problem by stopping the train and either he goes or I go." and threatening to report him upon arrival in Lisbon.) The man in black occupied the offending party, seated once again in the corner opposing us, by using the logic: if no one can keep him from harrassing these girls, no one can keep me from standing in the aisle and making him stay in his seat. The man in black asks if we are ok, if everything is ok, suggesting that we can resolve this without a police intervention. The ticket master is semi-hysterically hissing into his phone at the far end of the car, undoubtedly giving the police at the first arrival station the details of the soon-to-be detainee. "Look," I state simply, "I have no desire to give this man any trouble, I simply ask that he leave us alone." The man in black nods, and the bêbado protests in muted grunts from behind. "I am a married woman,(how in the hell did this escape my mouth? God, I am playing into all the macho stereotypes possible) and I have no desire for another man to be on top of me!" (I play the offended woman role well)... "I wasn't asking for love!" the bêbado proclaims, "just a little conversation." "Ok, Ok, tranquilo..." the man in black tries to soothe the situation, "Why don't we go for a walk," he suggests, forcing the slumping man to stand and walk towards the food cart.

Just before arriving at Estação Oriente, 45 minutes later, they walk back to retrieve his goods, the drunk man has another store-bought beer in his hands. I muse that it must have been the only way to keep him away from us. Between there and Santa Apolonia, the man in black comes over to bask in our grateful praise. He blushes and flirts in that toe-in-the dirt sort of humble hero way, and we are grateful to disembark at our own stop, having avoided further distasteful situations. Or so we thought.

The taxi driver teases and jokes with us for the three minute ride to the hospedagem that I reserved a few hours before in Coimbra. I sit in the front seat, and converse, as per my usual m.o. in order to guarantee a safe delivery. He pretends to keep mixing up the name of the street, it becomes a game, we make up names and go back and forth. Have you seen Lisbon yet? Yes, we have. Where? Belém. You've eaten the pasteis? yes. No wonder you're fat, he states. I don't flinch. I smile. Guess that must be it, I reply. He continues, "Well, as they say, gordura é fermosura" so they say, so they say... What can one do but accecpt oneself as is?

"Ilana, you go up to check out the room..." Ah yes, damn this being the tongue... as we huddle, surrounded by luggage in the stairwell four stories below the supposed hostal landing. I painfully ascend and the man in a wife-beater reeking of alcoholic sweat shows me the room, as drunken cheers roar from the most proximal common space. I glance quickly around me, taking in the decidedly lived-in space (by all men from the looks of things): a kitchen covered in filth, empty chip bags and soda containers, ash in bottles of green glass. The room itself looks reasonably clean, with a large shower and clean wood floors, but it doesn't set my unease at bay. No thank you. Merda. Now what? "I'll go down and consult with my colleagues," I politely offer, trying to maintain a straight face.

We decide to move on, and after several minutes of near panic as we cannot find a way to escape this seemingly hermetic, yet crumbling building, we stumble back out into the waning daylight, armed with several hundred pounds of luggage. First hotel we see is not only way too expensive, but booked for the night. We navigate back through the dusky throngs that disperse paulatinely from the peatonal that extends from the arches of the Praça comercial to the Rossio.

"Ragazza!" I hear and make the mistake of turning my head, thinking perhaps that I had dropped something, only to catch the interloper making a vulgar gesture, surrounded by his cohort, and a petition (in Italian) for me to suck his dick, to which I reply, with a hand waved in disgust, (in Mexican) to fuck his mother. When we finally encounter a decent room, after minor haggling at the Pensão Estação Central, I am exhausted and trembling from the multiple cups of Portuguese coffee (galões to boot) that I felt obliged to drink as they were offered after a late lunch with the Brazilian sociologists before our "graduation".

After eating Indian food, and settling back into our room, we set our alarm and walked Kristina to the taxi stand across the plaza at 5 am. My marked mistrustfulness (and who could blame me after such and ordeal?) may well have offended the driver, as I clearly ascertained that the price was what the taximeter marked, and quite obviously checked out his plates before she climbed inside her chariot, but she made it safe and sound to her destination, and that is all that counts.

Finally, after we succumbed to our need for real food (store package tortilla de patata and gazpacho Del Valle - not as bad as it might sound), Sara and I wandered about the city, one last time, winding our way most aimlessly through the Alfama district with the hope (but absolutely no idea of how to acheive this) of finding the flea market held on terça feira and sábado. And lo, after having long given up our search, we serendipitously stumble upon the Panteão Nacional, an imposing white building, gleaming in and empty square above us. We are drawn towards it, but decide we have no real interest in entering. "Let's check out what's around back," and we do, only to discover the mysteries of all the junk known to man. We are unable to haggle prices at all, but things are markedly below retail value, so I obtain a few gift-like objects, and then we move on.

We continue to ignore maps and allow the pulse of the city to guide our leisurely stroll, finding ourselves up on a Miradouro overlooking the city. I allow my vivid imagination to run wild and invent stories (I still have my doubts) about the pederast to our left, as we watch him elicit information from the children that bubble about him. We decide to stay nearby to protect the little kids from this predator, only to discover that he is the father of one of them (I swear there was something wrong about the whole scene and his insisting that it was ok to trust people, and commenting on how much more mature 10 was than 7). Of course the strangest part of all this aren't my wild, and unproven (and unconfronted) allegations, but rather that the man who had been happily napping on the lap of a French girl on the bench to the right of us was none other than Eduardo, a friend of Francisco's that Sara had met just two weeks prior. These bizarre and unlikely encounters in cities of millions never cease to amaze me.

We wind our way back, without incident, that is of course, until I wait for K. and her missing luggage, still gone while I look out over the bay at La Coruña.

(And still gone, after we have succesfully encircled the entire Iberian Peninsula, but that is a topic for another day.)