The Year Lisbon and I Were Together

I want to tell you about the only year I lived for myself.

Not the best year — I’m not sure I have a best year in any conventional sense, and I’m suspicious of people who do, because a life that produces a single best year usually means everything else was pointing toward it, and mine has never pointed anywhere that cleanly. What I mean is something more specific: the only year where the life I was living and the person I actually am were, briefly, the same thing. No performance required. No survival strategy running underneath every hour. Just — me, and Lisbon, and the specific quality of being in a place that understood me in its stones better than most people have in conversation.

I was thirty-three. I’m forty-five now. That year was twelve years ago, and I haven’t been back to Lisbon since, and I want to tell you about it before I tell you anything else, because everything else — the forty-seven pieces that have already appeared on this blog, the fifteen books, the sanctuary, the Colombian mountains, the animals whose names I know and the ones I’ve had to hand to La Santa Muerte — all of it makes more sense with this year as the frame.

Before the year, there were thirty-three years of other things.

I won’t compress them here — they’re all over this blog, in pieces, arriving in the order they surface, the way memory actually works rather than the way narrative pretends it does. But I’ll say this much: thirty-three years of a life that began in a household that made growing up optional, that ran through a childhood I didn’t really have, that passed through a five-year depression so complete it had no visible floor, that cost me things I can enumerate and things I can only gesture at, and that produced, somewhere on the other side of all of it, a person standing in Lisbon at thirty-three, finally upright, finally functional, finally — for the first and, as it turned out, only time — with a year that was entirely his own.

I’m not going to romanticize the depression or the survival of it. I’ve written elsewhere about what the depression actually was, and what came during it, and what I had to do to climb out of it. What I’ll say here is that coming out of something like that doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like standing in a room after a very long time lying on the floor, looking at the room, noticing it’s still there. The room didn’t change. You did — or rather, something in you got reorganized, the way bones heal after a break and the healed place is sometimes stronger than it was before, even though you’d have preferred not to break in the first place.

I stood up. I looked around. Lisbon was there.

I had always had a complicated relationship with that city. Born there, hurt there, formed there in the specific ways a person gets formed when their household is what mine was. Lisbon was the backdrop of everything — the apartment, the telephone, the corridors, the staircase where my brother hid with blankets we brought him, the shopping center where nine police officers stood in a circle around my father and called me to come solve a problem they couldn’t solve. The city had absorbed all of it, the way old cities absorb everything, into their stones and their corners and their particular quality of light.

But the city was also greater than any of that. This is what I came to understand, during that year, in a way I hadn’t been able to understand before — that Lisbon had been there for centuries before my father, and would be there for centuries after, and the things he did in it were a small addition to an enormous inventory of things that had happened in those streets and those buildings and along that river. The city didn’t carry what happened to me. It carried everything, including that, and the weight of everything meant no single thing was as heavy as it felt.

I started walking.

I have always been a walker. This is one of the few things my father and I have in common, and I acknowledge it without pleasure — he would walk for miles and make us walk with him, always saying we were almost there when another hour remained. The walking was his, originally. What I did with it became mine.

I would take the metro to São Sebastião, near the Gulbenkian Foundation, and start from there. Campo Pequeno first — the Arabic-style bullring that is, architecturally, one of the most beautiful buildings in Lisbon, and that represents something I spent years fighting against, leading protests outside its gates, using the legal system to stop what happened inside it. I would stand outside it now and look at it, quietly. The protests had happened. The fights had happened. The building remained, as beautiful as it had always been, indifferent to what it had witnessed, as old things are indifferent to their own history.

Both things were true simultaneously: the building was beautiful and what it contained was wrong. I had learned, by then, to hold two true things without needing to resolve them into one. Lisbon taught me that, in its own way. A city built on contradictions — the ornate gold of its churches beside the crumbling plaster of its buildings, the imperial history alongside the melancholy of its fado, the Tejo river that opens to the ocean and once sent ships out to build an empire and bring back spices and slaves and strange animals, all of it held together by the specific quality of Lisbon’s light, which is unlike any other city’s light, which has something to do with the latitude and the river and the Atlantic nearby and which I cannot fully describe except to say that it makes old things look exactly as old as they are, which in most places is considered unflattering, and in Lisbon is the whole point.

From Campo Pequeno I’d walk to Saldanha, then to Marquês de Pombal, the great rotunda with the Marquis on top of his column, the man who rebuilt Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 with the specific rationalism of the Enlightenment — ordered streets, practical buildings, the city redesigned from catastrophe into something functional and beautiful. I’d walk down the Avenida da Liberdade, alternating sides so I didn’t miss the details. Some days the right side, some days the left. The avenue is wide enough that both sides feel like different streets, different decades, different conversations with the same city.

Down to Rossio, the central square that has been the center of Lisbon’s public life for centuries — executions, celebrations, daily commerce, the specific hum of a place where everything happens and has always happened. The Praça da Figueira beside it. The Rua Augusta running south, a pedestrian street with the arch at the end, the arch you walk through and suddenly there is the Terreiro do Paço and there is the Tejo.

I want to tell you about the river.

The Tejo at Terreiro do Paço is wide enough to look like the sea, which is what it’s becoming, a few kilometers downstream where it opens into the Atlantic. Standing at the riverside, looking south, you can feel the ocean in the quality of the air and the movement of the water, and if you know — as every person who grew up in Lisbon knows — that this river connects to everything, that the ships that left from here went to places that didn’t yet have European names, that everything the Portuguese version of the world became began somewhere in that water — then standing there has a specific weight that isn’t nostalgia, exactly. More like vertigo. The sensation of your own smallness in something enormous, but not an unpleasant smallness. The smallness of being inside something rather than outside it.

I would stand there for a while. Not thinking anything in particular. Feeling the sun on my skin, which is Lisbon’s sun — not the punishing heat of Colombia’s Tolima, where the sun is something to survive, but the specific warmth of a southern European city in summer, the warmth that makes stone warm to the touch and turns the light golden in the late afternoon and makes everything seem slightly more real than it normally does.

Then I would walk back up through the Baixa, past the old bookshops.

I want to tell you about the bookshops.

There are old bookshops in Lisbon that sell antique books — not rare books in the collector’s sense, not always expensive or significant, just old. Books from the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, from the early twentieth, books whose pages have the specific texture of paper that has absorbed decades of air and handling and the particular humidity of a city near a river. I would go in and touch them. Not to buy, usually — though sometimes. To touch.

I’ve always been drawn to old things. Old architecture, old art, old music — my favorites are from the early twentieth century, Sinatra and Dean Martin and the Rat Pack, the sound of a world that was assembling itself into something, the specific elegance of a period that took its time with things. I don’t like modern aesthetics. I don’t think this is nostalgia for a time I didn’t live. It’s something more like recognition — a sense that the things made when people took their time have a quality that fast things don’t, and that quality is physically present in old objects in a way that can be felt through the hands.

When I touched those pages, I was touching something that had been touched before, by people I didn’t know, in circumstances I couldn’t imagine, in a Lisbon that no longer existed except in those pages and in the stones of the buildings and in the specific way the light came through certain windows at certain hours. I was connecting, through the object, to everything that had happened before me in that place.

I have always felt old. I wore ties at eight years old. I couldn’t connect with children my age — not because I was unfriendly, but because I was already somewhere they hadn’t been yet and I couldn’t explain where. I felt, even then, that I had been here before, in some form, in some century, walking streets that felt familiar in a way that had nothing to do with having walked them recently.

Lisbon confirmed this. Walking those streets at thirty-three, I felt recognized by the city in a way that had nothing to do with being known. The city didn’t know me. But it was the right age for me — old enough, complicated enough, beautiful enough in a way that doesn’t apologize for its own contradictions. We were suited to each other.

And then A Brasileira.

A Brasileira is one of Lisbon’s oldest cafés, in the Chiado neighborhood, with the statue of Fernando Pessoa sitting outside at a table — Portugal’s greatest poet, also the strangest, a man who invented multiple complete personalities and wrote from each of them and whose entire work is an extended meditation on the question of who is actually there when you strip away all the versions. There is something appropriate about his statue sitting permanently outside a café he used to frequent, as if even in bronze he can’t quite bring himself to go home.

Inside, A Brasileira is everything old Lisbon is: dark wood, high ceilings, mirrors that have been reflecting the same kinds of faces for a century, coffee served in small cups the way coffee should be served, the specific smell of a place that has absorbed the smoke and conversation and silence of generations of people who sat in it and thought things and left and were replaced by other people who sat in it and thought things and left.

I would walk in after the Tejo, after the bookshops, after the churches — and I want to tell you about the churches too, those enormous baroque interiors decorated in gold so dense it seems impossible that a religion founded by a carpenter killed on a cross could end up here, in this specific excess, in these specific gilded walls, and yet there is something the gold communicates that is not wealth exactly, more like the accumulated weight of centuries of belief, concentrated into a material that doesn’t decay, the faith of people who are long dead pressing against you in every square meter of those interiors, and the smell of them, old walls and old wood and old incense and the specific breath of closed spaces where people have been coming for five hundred years to ask for things from something that may or may not be listening — I would walk into those churches and stand in them and feel the same thing I felt touching the old pages: connection to the enormous amount of time that had passed here before I arrived and would pass after I left.

And then A Brasileira. Coffee. Sitting alone. The afternoon light coming in, or the evening light, depending on the day. No plan. No purpose. Just being there, in that room, in that city, with the jacarandas blooming purple somewhere outside and the sun of Lisbon on the streets and the Tejo a few minutes’ walk away, opening to the ocean.

I have never time-traveled in the literal sense. But I think A Brasileira is as close as I’ve come — not to a specific time, but to the experience of being outside your own time, connected to many times simultaneously, sitting in a room that holds them all without distinguishing between them.

I want to be honest about what that year was, and what it wasn’t.

It wasn’t a break in any complete sense. A person with my history doesn’t get a complete break. The formation was still there, the things that had happened were still there, the specific constitution built from forty years of a certain kind of living doesn’t dissolve into twelve months of walking beautiful streets and drinking coffee in old cafés. I wasn’t healed, or transformed, or any of the words the redemption arc would require.

What I was, was briefly not fighting. Or fighting less. Or fighting for things that were mine rather than fighting to survive something that had been imposed. That’s what those months were — the first extended period of my life where the energy that usually went into managing, surviving, reading rooms, staying alert, holding walls, wasn’t required at constant full deployment. And the energy, having nowhere urgent to go, went into the walks. Into the old doors I would touch. Into the specific pleasure of being in a beautiful city that was mine, that I belonged to, that I felt I had belonged to in some form for much longer than one lifetime.

I also want to be honest that some of what I was feeling, in those months, was the specific quality of light that follows severe depression — the way color comes back, slowly, after a long time of not being there. I’m not claiming the Chiado as transcendence. I’m claiming it as contrast. After five years of a place with no floor, ordinary beauty was extraordinary. A cup of coffee in a beautiful room was almost unbearably good. The sun on the Tejo was the sun on the Tejo, and it was also proof that the sun still existed and that I was still there to feel it.

And then Colombia.

At thirty-four I came here, which was nobody’s idea but mine, which is important to say plainly. No one forced me to come. No one forced me to start building what became a sanctuary. I came because of who I am — this strange creature that consistently does irrational things, that sees a sheep tied to a pole during a pandemic and stops the car, that takes on more than can reasonably be managed because more than can reasonably be managed is the only quantity that’s ever felt proportionate to something.

My father can’t be blamed for this. He can be blamed for many things, and this blog has said so, in detail, without apology. But this — the irrational consistency with which I build things that exceed me, that cost more than I have, that turn into prisons made of love — this is mine. This was always going to happen. Maybe the depression delayed it. Maybe Lisbon was the runway it needed to gather enough speed. Maybe that year was the preparation for everything since, disguised as rest.

Twelve years ago I walked out of A Brasileira into the Lisbon afternoon and didn’t know it was the last time I’d do that for the foreseeable future. Didn’t know that Colombia was coming, or El Guamo, or the gate with the four men on motorcycles, or the heat stroke alone three kilometers from the house, or the last six years of the hardest work I’ve ever done in a life that has never been easy.

Didn’t know that twelve years later I’d be here — in the Colombian mountains, with two hundred animals, with Nani who chose this life with me and whose warmth is the warmth I never had and can’t fully replicate but can hold and be grateful for, with La Santa Muerte beside me, with the bulls whose eyes tremble when they’re afraid and go quiet when I speak to them, with the wall and the finger and the drops that get through.

Didn’t know that Lisbon would become unreachable — not forever, I don’t think, but for now, because the sanctuary is too dependent on this one person showing up every morning to permit even a week away.

I miss it. I’ll say that plainly.

I miss the walks. I miss the particular smell of old Lisbon churches, which is unlike anything else — old walls and old wood and old gold and the accumulated breath of five centuries of people who came there looking for something. I miss the bookshop pages under my fingers. I miss the jacarandas. I miss the Tejo, which connects to the ocean, which connects to everything.

I miss A Brasileira. The coffee, the wood, the afternoon light, the Pessoa statue outside who can’t quite bring himself to go home.

I am, apparently, unable to bring myself to go home either — or rather, I have built something here that is home, and home holds me here, and Lisbon is twelve years away and the sanctuary needs the finger in the wall every single day.

This is not a tragedy. I want to be clear about that. The animals are alive. The work is real. Nani is here. La Santa Muerte is here. The things I’ve built, at enormous cost, are standing.

But Lisbon is the year that was mine, briefly, between the thirty-three years of everything before and the twelve years of everything since. The year the city and I were in a relationship, just the two of us, without an audience, without anything being required except the walk and the coffee and the specific pleasure of being old, in an old place, in the only life that was ever going to be mine.

This blog is that conversation, continued.

Everything that appears here — the memories, the lessons, the questions, the things I’m still working out — is the same walk, taken in a different medium. Some of it is the formation, the household, the father and what he was and what growing up inside him produced. Some of it is the search, the depression, the guardian angel in the shopping center café who sat down and said you’ll be okay son and then disappeared into the shadow of a pillar. Some of it is Colombia, El Guamo, the gate, the animals, the ongoing work of being the person I am in the life I’ve built.

None of it is resolved. I’m not offering resolution. I’m forty-five years old and feel like I’ve lived a thousand years in them, and the thousand years haven’t produced resolution, they’ve produced this — an honest account of what a certain kind of life actually looks like, told without performance, given freely, because the bird is still owed something and the animals are still waiting and crumbling is still a luxury I still don’t have.

Read it if it finds you. Take what’s useful. Leave what isn’t.

I’ll be here, in the mountains, with the wall and the finger and the bulls.

And somewhere, twelve years away, Lisbon is still there, still old, still beautiful, still carrying in its stones the memory of a man who walked it for one year and loved it and had to leave and hasn’t been back.

The Tejo still opens to the ocean.

I’ll get there again, one day.

Born of Asper. Built by Fire.