Rain was blowing in sheets across the facing treetops of the Japanese-style garden.
Three of us stood under the shelter of a concrete eave that covered a sunken side entrance to the Gulbenkian Foundation's main building. A little neglected amid the splendor of Lisbon's largest art collection, the entrance was used casually by staff and library patrons in the same way a nearby lawn was frequented by ducks, geese, and stray cats.
I had been on my way out for a smoke, and had stopped to hold the heavy bronzed steel and glass door for a woman whose long gray ponytail and colorful mismatched knitwear looked pleasingly hippie-ish.
Our third was a construction engineer from the ongoing renovations next to the entrance: reflective safety vest, button down plaid shirt, muddy work boots. The woman popped open a large purple umbrella, looked at me, and patted it. She was offering to share.
I explained that I was just there to smoke and return to the library. We wished each other good afternoon. Next, she invited the foreman. He was only on his way to get a coffee and check on his crew, he said, but he accepted, put away the phone, then said something that made her laugh. They linked arms and set off up over the slick mossy brick path like lovers.
I tried remembering the last time I'd seen such a spontaneous act of random generosity—also accompanied by playful good humor—between two people from such different walks of life, strangers to each other. This kind of solidarity—even against the relatively mild elements—would be unimaginable now in my former city, at, say, the crowded side entrance to the New York Public Library on 42nd street, or at a Brooklyn subway station.
Cities have energies and those energies can change, curdle, or waste away. It’s not that I’d never seen people being generous or kind in New York. But the aftermath of the pandemic became a kind of tipping point for everyday solipsism, when incidents of indifference or outright hostility crowded out the rest. The possibility of a more generous and open society that I’d sensed could arise from the lockdown times and had written about in late April of 2020 (https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/quarantine-pastoral/) proved elusive if not wholly illusory. Instead, it was the triumph of the opportunists, the leavers, and the speculators. The city now takes its character from them along with the jaded, the medicated, the addled, and the cynics.
There’s a younger writer I used to see a lot at parties before I left, many of them in my apartment: New Yorker like me, Ivy League educated like me, a serial winner of awards, fellowships, foundation grants, fancy residencies and plum teaching gigs. Also he’s from a different borough and socio-economic background, tougher, angrier, embittered despite his success. Drunk, he would tease me about my bourgeois sentimentality, my middle-aged stories of trying to coexist in neighborhoods and cultures where I didn’t belong, my resistance to the zero-sum, dominate or be dominated, win or go home ethos that was the land’s one true law. Events, if not his own attitude, have proved him mostly correct. He is the voice of the city, now. I heard he’s moved to an apartment in a better neighborhood.
Like this guy, many people I know from New York, when I tell them I've moved to Lisbon, assume that I did so for cynical hipster reasons of my own, following the chain migration of gentrifiers, preserving my bad faith attempt at integration into a better world order. Maybe they thought I was drawn to the city like the couple in Vicenzo's Latronico's recent novel Perfection, looking for, as they put it, "the new Berlin—only with Mediterranean food, mild winters, and the sea," plus decriminalized hard drugs. Here was the promise of a kind of libertarian lifestyle paradise on the Atlantic seaboard, albeit the other side. a city for connoisseurs of houseplants and old ceramic tiles, and where modest wealth in dollars, pounds, or euros can still get you an apartment in a building with Art Deco ironwork, Futurismo friezes, wood floors, or pseudo-Bauhaus balconies, a place where whole neighborhoods have been overrun by a kind of nonsense international English, stores have names like "Dear Breakfast," "Hello Kristof," and "House of Curated," and where the chief product is brunch. There was the digital nomad and brief crypto-boom era, when bros moved here chasing tax breaks and waves: "All we saw/heard was techies getting wasted at the vistas," a Brazilian-American friend wrote to me about his time there, shortly before my arrival. I too have seen those people, whose relationship to Portugal and the Portuguese—and also to each other—is almost purely transactional.
But also, in Lisbon, I have seen five people, commuters all, in the middle of rush hour, stop what they were doing to see if an old man needed assistance. He'd stumbled at the top step coming up from the metro and had fallen forward on his hands, in slow motion and with a kind of rough grace. He was with a companion, who had had to let go of his arm so as not to fall himself. Whereas in post-Covid, fear-ridden New York, the passersby would have used the companion's presence as an excuse to go about their business, no one here made that calculation in that way.
***
I was still thinking about the woman who wanted to share her umbrella, when, a few days later, I stopped in at Frederico's loja, an almost unmarked storefront at the bottom of Rua dos Anjos ("street of angels," for the poetical and literal-minded), where he sells so-called vintage furniture and records. The Portuguese word loja can just mean shop, booth, or stall, but carries traces of other Latin cognates—lodge and loge. While a loja can be any store, even the fancy high street variety, they are often just single small rooms off the entrance of residential buildings that indeed once doubled as lodgings for the concierges.
Fred—as he likes to be called—had asked me to bring a copy of my book. A bibliophile—in addition to a collector, dealer, and something of a fixer—Fred reads comfortably in at least four languages. His English is fluid, American-accented, if not wholly fluent, learned from films, TV, and a visit to New York in the early 1990s. He liked the Lower East Side and his dress sense and affect has a little of that Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie, Tom Waits moment of post-punk.
My book is more about the uptown than the downtown scene during those same years, and from the perspective of a teenager, so I worried he’d be disappointed and that his interest was mostly polite. But that book is now a kind of meta-vintage object in its own right—out of print and a curio of two lost worlds: the New York where writers could still manage a living without becoming full-time self-promoters, grant writers, and position takers, as well as the New York of my youth when the spiral in the widening gyre of income inequality was more tightly wound. I write something like this on the overleaf when Fred asks me to inscribe his copy. Maybe he’d find things to like about it after all.
After I give him the book, Fred says he wants to show me something. He goes to rummage in a backroom about the size of a closet and comes back with two posters he says he found the other day at an estate sale, originals from the period right after the mostly bloodless "Carnation Revolution" that had ended four decades of Salazar's Fascist dictatorship.
The first poster is from Portugal's first official May Day celebration, in 1975. Put out by the Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores—an umbrella union organization—it features elements of the union blazon—wrench, fountain pen, and a sheaf of wheat. The wrench is white rather than the expected Commie Red, emerging at a jaunty diagonal out of negative space. It appears to be turning several brightly colored, circular nuts, which, released, float up like balloons above a blue field and up to the top, where bubbly cartoonish letters proclaim the May Day rally.
The second poster advertises a street festival commemorating the revolution and foregrounds two anthropomorphic carnations—sweet red bodies boogying amid a field of colorful, miniature mosaic-like squares that depict either the Portuguese flag, or the same colorful circles, or waves, or children's drawings: Sesame Street on LSD.
I tell Fred that these are the most upbeat, optimistic pieces of Marxist agit-prop I have ever seen, including the early days of Soviet Constructivism. He nods and catches my eye, "I remember this optimism. As a boy, I walked on the streets and I could see it on the faces of all the grown-ups. Everybody's face. You could really feel it. The whole country."
It's different now in Lisbon, Fred says, an outlook shared by many middle-aged men here, overeducated and underemployed. An uber driver who’s listening to Philip Glass says he's given up on politics and political parties. He misses the politicians of the 1980s, "at least they were smart and had ideas." The CGT too, Fred says, is stodgy and lacks imagination. The city is "dying of its own success," according to a recent headline in Madrid's El Pais. And Fred is in some ways the representative of many dashed hopes—a widely-traveled, well-educated and still curious man who deals furniture, books, and records but can no longer afford rent in the city he loves and whose past he has done much to preserve by selling it upstream to barbarians like me.
When I ask Fred how much he wants for the posters, he tells me hasn't made up his mind whether he even wants to sell them. "I thought you might just like to see them." We both know he's hedging. The Socialist past is valuable now, we both understand this. He has a kid, bills. But we also understand that the posters' value isn't just as commodities, as “art,” but in what they transmit. In another timeline, I am showing Fred around my subsidized rental apartment in New York's Greenwich Village and neither of us is buying or selling "vintage" anything, only keeping alive things we love: books, movies, records, images. What's contained in the posters is the same energy emanating from the woman's gesture with her purple umbrella.
It’s also the same energy that keeps the idea of a democratic society alive here, despite corruption, tourists, and gentrification. The revolution exists in living memory and is honored annually in street festivals, commune by commune, parish by parish. When the current government staged an instagrammable ICE-style raids on the Bangladeshi immigrant community here—perhaps intended as a distraction from the Prime Minister’s own corruption scandal that would lead to a no-confidence vote in the government a few weeks ago—enormous protests ensued, “Don’t Push Us Against the Wall!”
Among the protesters was an actor-friend here, well-off, always working, native Portuguese, he could easily have stayed home, but he didn’t. We all think he’d make an excellent MP; he’s handsome, well-spoken, and full of heart, and his usually sympathetic television and screen characters give him an easy mass appeal. Looking at the posters made me think of him.
As a sort of stateless person now, for the moment, I feel politically and culturally at sea most of the time. I know I’ll have no meaningful political voice in this place for a while, and no longer had one in my birthplace. This is part of what it means to give up one’s country. But maybe I can do my own small thing here, and so I tell Fred that if he decides to sell the posters, I’d like to buy one as a gift for this friend, to encourage him, maybe inspire him.
A couple days later Fred texts me and names a price for the two posters. I go by the shop to take them both and will keep one for myself. We’re both romantics, in our way.
***
I come home to find the latch on the front door to my building is broken. It’s been that way on and off, a neighbor says, the management company says they’ve ordered the replacement part, but it won't be ready for weeks. One night a homeless drunk sneaks in, gets wasted and smokes in the stairwell, startling the daughter of one of the residents on her way in. He's gone by morning, but the stench of the cigarette, the empty bottle, and a sense of disturbance remains. "Why not call the police?" an absentee landlord asks on the building group chat. "This isn't about whether the police should come, because we all know how our police work" the current head of the owner's association responds, "the issue is how will we fix the door." Another resident owner adds "I'm not going to get bogged down talking to someone who wants to criminalize poverty. If you need to call someone, call social services," then she texts everyone the number.
Without quite consciously knowing it when I made my decision to emigrate, this kind of even-keeled, level-headed response (an appeal to "basic decency" and "practicality," how novel, how refreshing!) is a large part of what I came here for and what sustains me: the old city that survives each day in parallel to the liberalized tourist wonderland. I know these "little, nameless, unremembered acts" are very much small potatoes in the face of other kinds of systemic pressures. I'm not naïve. but I find that my politics are becoming increasingly sentimental, not top down but bottom up. I am less interested in how people vote or what they tell a focus group about their interests than how they treat each other outside anything to do with the state. Societies and regimes not only define and regulate the range of actions we may practice with our fellow human beings, they may also come to be defined by them.
