You Must Finish!

It’s been a week to the hour since I’ve been back from my Lisbon adventure and only now am I beginning to emerge, to face the question of, What is real life anyway? And to also see with more clarity than ever that I must finish. Frank X. Gaspar exhorted those of us in Disquiet’s Luso-American writing workshop—“You must finish your projects!”—as if our lives depended on it. Because, in fact, our lives do. (Although the smartass in me wants to retort, would Finnish-American writers finish?”).

And so, I will finish this Lisbon 2011 blog, even if it kills me, even if I am late for my Gotham Girls roller derby bout in Manhattan tonight.

A week out it’s hard to remember details, and cryptic jottings in three different notebooks don’t help. What stands out are moments: Almodovar film-like flashes. Like the one of me sitting with fellow writers and friends at one of Antonio’s fabulous 9-Euro four-course/unlimited wine dinners at the Living Lounge hostel. Across the table is a Spanish family of four. The tall teenage son plays basketball. The lanky father pours us all wine and appreciates the women at the table. The green-eyed, olive-skinned pre-teen daughter smiles shyly. The talkative raven-haired mother replies, when I note my parents are Portuguese and I am American, “Pero, tienes la cara de pura Espanola!” Then, when I add that I really want to learn Spanish, “Claro!” as if, of course, why waste time on Portuguese? Who cares what Cervantes said about the “softer language.” We conquered them anyway. th th th

After dinner, a handful of us—Melissa, Jacob, Marisol, Marge, Sally, Traci, Amy, Linette, me and Carlos, sleep-deprived, high culture saturated, and grooving on each other’s company, get punchy. We make space in the hostel’s living room—or rather, the narrow swath between the dining table and the sitting area expands—and we begin to groove on the tunes pouring out of DJ Tight Jeans Italian Shoes Carlos Q. The Spanish family hovers as Traci, who could have been the stunt double for the two dancers who perform various times for Stephen Dorff's character in the Sofia Coppola movie, “Somewhere,” schools us all on how to really dance to Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. The Spanish family watches and smiles. The Spanish father would pour us all wine if there were any left in the box (and believe me, this is no insult: The boxed wine there would rate as a $50 bottle in the U.S.).

Suddenly, a group of Swedes shows up (or was that after? wait, I’m getting ahead of myself).

We dance until the hostel front desk guy tells us to tone it down. We decrease the decibels by one or two. The Spanish family takes this as their cue to call it a night. Amy and Traci, mindful of the last green line metro back to their digs across the city, peel away from us. Sally and Marge too call it a night and go to their rooms upstairs. We diehards continue, and I revel in the most exercise I’ve gotten since I arrived and was promptly bombarded with wine, cheese, bread, beer, bicas, and pastries, leftovers of which I carry in the new hamster folds of my midsection. Lord have mercy. Despite our having lowered the volume earlier, it has somehow creeped back up, way beyond its original max. DJ Carlos shimmies and spins in the center of our circle and we howl. The Ironbound boy’s got moves. Ah yes, this is when the Swedes, who have been sitting chatting on the couch, glancing at us now and then, get up the nerve and join our Solid Gold retro tribute. The nightclerk, beside himself now, has had it, comes very close to tossing us out. I glance at the doorway as he is motioning frantically and notice the little Spanish girl half hidden behind the post, her green-eyed gaze intent on us rowdy Americans. Above her, her mother’s very Spanish face appears and the little girl is gone in a blink.

No matter where we were or what we did, the days had this intense, mercurial quality that a chronological accounting doesn’t do justice to, but here’s a brief continuation anyway:

Thurs. 6/23. National holiday. I slept in and gathered with the Disquiet group in the evening at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa uptown to hear the talented 37 year-old writer Jacinto Lucas Pires read a story from his latest collection. Although, of course, Pires writes in Portuguese, he read the excellent English translation and spoke writing in and about Lisbon with an a Latin expressiveness that we fell in love with. I looked for his collection in bookstores a few days later but only came across one of his earlier books, “Azul-Turquesa,” which I’m reading now. It didn’t occur to me until his reading that Pires had actually sat at dinner in the Coliseo with a few of us and another prominent writer, Rui Zink, a few days earlier. In Lisbon, one takes such things for granted.

Fri. 6/24. Workshop in the morning and an excursion in the afternoon to the Arpad Szenes/Vieira da Silva Foundation, which is essentially a museum showcasing the work of, respectively, the Hungarian painter and the Portuguese painter. Artists, married partners, and mutual muses, they split their time between Paris and Lisbon. I had never heard of either, but their works were captivating, and Vieira da Silva’s line paintings capturing the winding freneticism of Lisbon in particular were a revelation.

The pair were close friends with the Mozambique-born Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda (1928-2007), and appropriately, the event that followed the museum trip was a tribute to de Lacerda at the Fundacao Mario Soares. De Lacerda clearly had a poetic muse in Walt Whitman, and, although the presentation by Luis Amorim de Sousa, a close friend of the poet, and addenda by Alfredo Caldeira and Scott Laughlin, were robust, at no point did anyone mention De Lacerda’s homosexuality, which seemed to be an important factor for a poet whose work so modeled Whitman’s sensual, corporeal expansiveness. This omission was especially glaring in light of the fact that: two of the de Lacerda poems read were clearly love poems to men, and an important component of the earlier discussion and presentation of Szenes and Vieira da Silva’s work was the impact of their marriage, their love story, on their work. Hmm…

To be continued...