Lisbon Stories (16)

Friday morning at Café Africano, in the riverside neighborhood of Dafundo, Lisbon coast: the usual gathering of unemployed men, oddjobbers, and retired elders. I carry with me a small thermal transfer printer (think of the system as a souped-up Polaroid,) set it at a table and ask the guys who would be the first to have his picture taken. Most of them know me and feel at ease with my work, so I have no trouble getting volunteers. Mr. Sequeira, a retired gentleman who never drinks anything, is the first. I ask Fernando to hold the speedlight for me. Fernando lives under a railway bridge by the riverside and is trying to save €5 to pay for a haircut, but his coins always find their way to Euclides’ counter to be exchanged for wine cups. He soon becomes an expert at flash photography. When his turn comes, I ask Mr. Marinho to hold the speedlight and Fernando gives him some professional hints. ’You have to see me through the little hole in that white card,’ he says, and Mr. Marinho nods. Damn, I had never thought of that.

Lisbon Stories (15)

After months gathering stories and taking photographs at the working-class neighborhood of Dafundo – this small area of the Lisbon Coast being doomed, its once well-attended beach now conveniently classified as ‘sandy area’ and reserved for a marina – I proposed to Euclides, who runs the 'Café Africano' with his father, to hang on the tavern’s walls pictures of the place and the people who frequent it. We’ll have a vernissage – a posh thing, as you can imagine – and wine will be served to whoever crosses the door.

This ‘permanent exhibit’ wouldn’t be complete without a picture of Mr. Sequeira: he is part of the furniture at Café Africano. Always ready for a domino game, he talks very little, maybe not to ruin his shy, everlasting smile. Now that I think of it, I don’t remember having heard his voice before today. Mr. Sequeira loves football, so I took a picture of him caressing a table football dummy painted with the colors of his team of choice. He was clearly amused.

I took three or four shots and told Mr. Sequeira they looked pretty good on the lcd screen. I said I would leave a print for him with Euclides. He gave a start and looked straight at me with tiny, inscrutable eyes. Then he asked, the voice trembling a bit,

‘Do I have to pay anything…?’

Lisbon Stories (14)

A couple of days ago, Dona Francisca celebrated her 93rd birthday (she shyly says 82, but Euclides, who runs the ‘Café Africano’, says she’s been 82 for many years now.) A Cape-Verdian from the island of S. Vicente, Dona Francisca is a delight to talk to, even though she’s almost completely deaf and keeps asking Como é?, ‘How’s that?’. She reads the newspaper’s headlines out loud, she laughs at them, she sings, Estás no meu coração, ‘You’re in my heart.’ We sit at the same table and I ask her to take a couple of photographs. ‘Why not?,' she says, 'While the wind is blowing outside, I can’t go for my walk.’

Rushing Things

‘Dad,’ Daniel said, ‘it’s moving!’ He had been up and down investigating the mechanics of the thing and had pushed the pier bridge a meter or so. ‘No brake shoes,’ I remember thinking, ‘how odd.’ But hey, I’m not an engineer, so what did I know. The people at the pier were taking photographs, unaware of my son’s scientific inquiries. ‘Dad, it’s MOVING,’ he insisted, laughing nervously. I told him ‘Son, I’m taking photographs. Please wait until I’m finished.’ Kids are always rushing things. Eventually, one of the men on the river noticed the movement of the pier and started running up, crying like a madman. The others followed him and were able to put the brake shoes behind the wheels. This is wild guess, for at the time I had finished taking photographs I was half a kilometer away.

Addendum: I had lunch with Daniel today and asked him to forgive me for having been such a clown as an educator. After all, I’m a humorist: I earn my living mostly by drawing and writing very silly things disguised as deep truths about Man and the Universe (or was it the other way around?)

I added that it is highly unlikely that I change in the future. Not after 50, I won’t. He said he was glad we have always been such good ‘accomplices.’ He wasn’t using the wrong word. But I can assure the ethical reader that no human being, irrational animal, or plant was ever hurt in the course of my fatherhood.

Lisbon Stories (13)

(Dafundo quarter, Lisbon Coast) Many, if not most, of the ‘habitués’ of Euclides’s Café Africano are retired fishermen, unemployed workers, and homeless people. Unlike what would happen in any café of a more fortunate neighborhood, they aren’t required to consume. The sharing of space and time happens naturally.
The first to arrive sits at a table – most have preferred seats – and waits. It doesn’t take long before he is challenged. As the duel begins, other locals gather to witness the skill of the players and comment on the game. Quarrels are so rare an event that they become legend and are told in a murmur. The place has its doors always wide open, but not even the cold keeps the players at home: today, I’ve seen one of them appear with a pajama showing under his pants and sweater.
If for some reason there is no challenger, Euclides himself is happy to sit at the game table and be miserably beaten by the seasoned folk.

Lisbon Stories (12)

A few days ago I talked for a while with Costa, an old fisherman from the working-class neighborhood of Dafundo, on the Lisbon Coast. He had some stories to tell – mostly dealing with the life of the fishermen in the old days and the hard times that never really went away. Separated from the beach by the railway line and the coastal road connecting Lisbon to the exquisite village of Cascais, the few remaining fishermen prefer to take their chance and risk being run over by a car or the frequent trains than walking all the way to the closest pedestrian crossing.

I knew there had been accidents in the area, but had no idea if they were frequent. I asked Costa about it. He told me the story of Rui, ‘a son of the neighborhood.’ Rui is a machinist at CP, the company that explores and maintains the Portuguese railways, and works at the very same Lisbon-Cascais line his Dafundo friends cross all the time. ‘The first time he ran over someone,’ Costa said, ‘he couldn’t eat breakfast, lunch or dinner. The second time, he managed to eat dinner. The third time, he ate dinner and lunch.’ Costa became silent. There really was no need to go on.

Today, a train coming from Cascais had problems on one of its carriage’s wheels while passing in front of Dafundo. I’ve been told later by Euclides, whose father rans a tavern on the roadside, that the train passed by releasing sparks and smoke. The operator managed to reduce the train’s speed, but couldn’t avoid the derail of one of the carriages. The accident must have caused damage to a switch, for another train, though warned and following the first one at low speed, had half of its carriages sent to another line.

As I took some shots of the rescue team trying to remove the derailed carriage, I couldn’t help but thinking that at least today Rui would have all his meals.

Lisbon Stories (11)

The backstreets of the trendy 24 de Julho Avenue, in Lisbon, pay some of the price for the ‘movida’ that keeps the bright side alive all night – dawn included. I prefer to walk in there on Sundays by daybreak, when you can witness the slow death of the weekend nightlife, sometimes with the colors of agony, and the only dwellers are the homeless and a few early-rising locals. Once, I stopped in front of the pile of junk you can see in the photograph; I inspected it for a while; I took some pictures of it. Except for the mattress, it was business junk – most of it labeled with the TAP Air Portugal logo and mailing addresses.

A man appeared on the corner carrying a Bershka plastic bag. He gave a start when he saw me – apart from a flock of sorry-looking pigeons, we were the only non-crawling creatures in there – but he recovered when I uttered a cheerful ‘Good morning’. He answered back and went his way down the street. I started walking up towards the elegant, inaccessible villas that little by little took the place of the old working-class houses and shops. A mouth-watering smell denounced the existence of a bakery somewhere in the vicinity. I stopped to try to figure where it was coming from. Then the Bershka bag man made a reappearance. This time he didn’t see me. He probably backtracked to check if there was something in there worth salvaging. Or maybe he was just moved by curiosity – what could have I found in a pile of junk that made it worthwhile photographing?

What's in a name?

(Belmonte, Northeastern Portugal.) The expression ‘cynic’ comes from the Greek and means something like ‘relative to the dog’. Oscar Wilde carved the word’s modern denotation in stone when he made one of his characters define a cynic as ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. In Classical Greece, however, Cynicism was a school of philosophical thought. Its better known proponent was Diogenes of Sinope, who famously lived inside a tub or a huge pot on the streets of Athens. He held in contempt all social conventions and did everything – from eating to defecating to masturbating – in public. Talk about practicing Philosophy. The general idea, which Diogenes took to an extreme, was to eschew all possessions and live ‘according to Nature.’ The philosopher himself used a bowl to drink water until the day he saw a little boy drinking from his hands. In shame, he immediately threw away the bowl.
You can easily guess what would happen to someone behaving this way in any modern city. Luckily for Diogenes, he lived in Classical Athens – like a dog, but you can't have everything.

Lisbon Stories (10)

(Dafundo, Lisbon Coast) João tells me that sometimes things get stolen in here - mostly iron for the scrapheap, but also flatware, cups, and dishes kept under the fishermen's boats covers for festive gatherings. He raises the tip of one of the covers to reveal the boat’s contents and parades some extraordinary fishing lures, holding them between his thumb and a forefinger once cut short by a mishap with a fishing hook. He then walks towards the truck wheel rim the locals use to grill food and points at it with the cigarette locked between the fingers. 'They once tried to steal this,' he says not without pride, 'but were unable to carry it.'

It's hard to believe that this strange place used to be one of the trendiest beaches of Lisbon, but you know what they say: photographs - at least those taken 100 years ago - don't lie.

Would You?

A tourist looks down at the stadium of the ancient site of Olympia, Greece. She’s seeing more than any Greek woman of the Archaic and Classical periods could ever dream of: the usual penalty for a woman caught at the site of the games was to be thrown off a cliff. We can imagine the ladies sneaking in with false beards and phony voices – like the stone-throwers of Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ – but chances are they didn’t go that far. Would you?