Where I Dwelled

By: Angelina Morin

When I spent the summer in Portugal, everyone told me the street I lived on was dangerous. But in the daylight, the area appeared innocent. Clothing lines strung from neighboring windows, trash bags and cans filled with evidence of mundane lives: beer bottles, diapers, and old linens. From the view of my window, I could see a small woman pull laundry from the line and a man in his mid thirties lounge after a day’s work. My street smelt like cigarettes and in the early evening they sounded of laughter, shouts, and spitting motorcycles. 

I rented the studio from a Portuguese artist currently in an artist residency in another country. In this way, we mirrored each other. Two persons, leaving their country for the sake of art somewhere else. She called me to check that everything was in order, and told me where I could find the laundry pins that were squared away in an old scotch box. 

The studio was four open rooms and the apartment was a bright white. The trim of the windows were a dark green and the floors an auburn wood. There was a stained glass fish strung from a plastic line, nailed to the wall and framed, a drawing of a Japanese woman who was elaborately dressed and knowingly smiling, and above the bed was a lowly hung and bright orange lantern.

The studio was tucked in the middle of an alleyway. The alley was a hill that continued far past the length of my building. The stairs from the street up to my door were practically parallel to the walls, as steep as they could possibly be. Only half of my foot could fit on each step. Yet, I never fell, just slipped a few times running up or down them.

Under bar lighting, people would tell me they thought I was Portuguese. But the illusion dissipated the moment I stood up. I was tall, taller than almost every Portuguese person I had met. Then, there was my American accent and my slippery pronunciation of obrigado that would fully destroy my facade of belonging.

I was in Lisbon to study Doña Gracia Nasi, a Sephardic Jewish woman who lived in Portugal circa the 16th century. My time here would focus on Jewish presence, how the Inquisition impacted life, but ultimately, I would see how little remains of the Jews from Lisbon. Yet, through my research I would learn that Lisbon has always been an international, intercultural hub. For centuries, this port city had waved in immigrants from across the world. 

***

Drama Bar was an eight minute walk from my apartment. It was a gay-divey space that hosted a Lorde listening party. I walked the dark and rumbling path from my apartment to enter and slowly sip a white wine.

There, I met D, an expat, who took me under his wing. We spent the night discussing failed loves. He made his rounds of the bar, talked to every person, and then reported back to me who he thought was the most interesting. He would tell me about people who came from various corners of the world all to end up here. He would ask them of their homes, their culture shocks, their purpose in life and in being here.

Throughout the night we walked the stairs down into the bar’s basement. As we descended, there was an instant dampness. A few shallowed breathing fans circulated the hot air of the small room. Under a black light, sweat cinched the glowing white shirts of the men around who embraced one another. I danced carelessly and cheered as my new acquaintances twerked beneath the images of a projector and watched on as Lorde's music video encompassed their drunken twirls.

When I told D I lived in Intendente, he urged me to be safe on my street. At the end of the night he insisted on walking me home.

***

I sat on a windowsill with a coffee and watched from two floors above for the arrival of Simon, an expat and a friend of D’s who I met at a 4th of July party (an event I would have never imagined existing in Lisbon.) When Simon found my small door he shouted a hello, waved widely and I threw my keys down to him. Now that I write this I remember, just once, I asked him to sing up to me. When he finally gave me a verse, I rewarded him with the clank of my keys on the concrete. Neither of us belonged to Lisbon and yet, it housed the intricate moments we grew to love each other. What are the odds we would ever meet when we hailed from different continents? I have some immeasurable gratitude for Lisbon and the fate I found there. I know it as something invaluable, I could try all my life and never give back what this city has given me.

My kitchen was cramped but I was thankful for the sunlight from the window. How it shined over me and the mess of my homemade shrimp tacos. My oven was small to match and elevated from the white tile floor. There was a large space left empty behind it. I joked with Simon that my chef resided behind there, that that was his bedroom but we had just kept missing each other. Until one night, we spotted a roach perched on my stove and I screamed but, Simon jested, I had met my chef.

The studio reminded me of my childhood townhouse. It was similar in its smallness, the way the wood was striped by pacing feet, the leather shredded by cat claws, and the thin strip of detailed bananas, pears, and grapes painted on the kitchen tiles that was just like my mother’s fruit bowl watercolors. Even the Chef, who I did not have the agility or the heart to kill, reminded me of home.

***

On the 4th of July, we walked to Casa Independente, just a few blocks from my apartment. On the outside of the building was a tattered black flag waving from its upper story. The building was once the Civil Registry Association; it held the records of local’s birth, marriage, and death certificates. Years later, it was known as Casa de Figueiró dos Vinhos and the Admiral Cândido dos Reis Mutual Aid Association, offering social and economical support to Portuguese citizens. Perhaps, eager investors and the owners themselves would say this rebirth of Casa Independente is one that brings the community together and harnesses culture in a place that has always been central to the community. The government building turned bar now spotlights local, some Portuguese and some not, DJ’s and creatives. It advertises itself as a hub that attracts Lisbon’s ever growing international community.

D did his rounds again in this bar, leading strangers to the empty seat next to me. I indulged in some half hearted conversations that circled the usual questions: where are you from, how long have you been here, and why, why are you here in the first place? Tonight, Casa Independente was packed with expats.

Even I could see the dissonance, feel it, between the neighborhood and those that pass through here for a summer, for a week, for a night. I was part of it. I had not met a single Portuguese person here other than the bartenders.

At the end of the night, it was them who herded our party out into the sidewalk and exposed Simon’s drunken smile beneath the streetlight.

***

The days were hot. My studio had only two windows. This was just enough to move a slight wind through the apartment in the early mornings. But on particularly bad days, I sat in darkness, boarded up my windows and chose the coolness of a shadow over a wimp wind. And at the peak of the heat, I dripped wet from a cold shower and rested, belly down, on the wooden floors and tried to write. Or I paced the floors with bare feet and poked at the random materials left by past occupants: books, watercolors, thick art papers, pens, and paintbrushes. It was hard to decipher what items belonged to the owner and what came from those who have just passed through.

I would take the materials and make small paintings. I would leave behind a rainbow of stains on white rags.

***

Frightening was the dead bird on my morning walk out into the alley. He laid belly up, freshly passed and talons relaxed. I screamed at the sight of him and wondered if it was the heat, or just the city, its sediment inevitably swallowed by the pigeons who pecked between rock and cigarette for a few grains of bread, that killed him. It was grim, the irony, that these pigeons were brought and bred here centuries ago. They survived, adapted even, in a city they do not belong in just to die on a concrete road with no way to decompose.

***

When I was not trekking to Lisbon’s center to study the landscape for my research or poking through the library archives, I walked the streets around my home investigating the little shops I might write in. I walked an incline and passed the Templo Indiano where I heard music stir from the inside and smelt the savory spice of lunch all along the street. Next, a Lidl grocery where after a few visits, the security guard knew that the bulky items that remained in my bag were only books. And finally, a laundry mat that doubled as a cafe. Its pink, blue, and white marketing contrasted the orange-yellow street.

It became a running joke, I knew a cafe for everything. I could tell you where you could get an espresso and vintage sunglasses or an overpriced laundering or red bean pastry within the mile stretch of my street.

There are roots here that do not belong to me or to some of the indie hipsters who come to populate this street. And it is obvious, the impact was the laptop filled cafes, the vegan pastel de nata’s, the No Smoking signs, the card only policy, the english menus, the shattered storefront windows and the graffiti that reads, Lisbon is not your daydream.

***

Before bed, I opened my window to retrieve my laundry from the line. I learned quickly the flimsiness of laundry pins when it came to the night winds. (My downstairs neighbor hung my fallen shirts at the top of the staircase railing.) Yet, my Portuguese neighbors had mastered this art, their clothes immovable on the line.

Most evenings, I heard two brothers argue then sing over their guitar and the curls of the snores from the man who lived across from me. When the brothers began to strum, I turned down my music. When the sleeping man went silent for too long, I waited, anxiously, for the comfort of his next snarl.

I only locked myself out of the apartment once, firmly closing my front door just to realize I had left the keys on the table. I waited at D’s apartment until I was provided instructions for the retrieval of new keys. Then, I crossed through Lisbon on foot, metro, and bus in a surprising and rare summer rain just to retrieve a copy from the wife of the man that had the spare.

When I made it to her front door, I turned around to see the wide expanse of Lisbon's Tigris river. It beamed blue and rushed like spilt dry rice.

***

Among my first few searches of Largo do Intendente’s history “Red light district” appears and “A place people once avoided” and a “place popular for drug deals… until a more recent policing” that began to shift Intendente’s dynamics. One article talks about the reformation of Intendente and is titled “Where The Tramps Dwell.”

Many travel writers describe it as Lisbon’s cultural development, giving the vibe of a melting pot and describing the population on this less than a mile sect of Lisbon as populated by “Southeast Asian” and “West African immigrants.” Travel websites encourage tourists to take a “chance” on this historical area as it reaches its “rebirth.”

***

D tells me he has bought a place in Martim Moniz, an area bordering Intendente, which he hopes to rent out. He complains of the unhoused man who lives on the opposite side of his apartment building. Simon and I try to assure him it’s not a big deal, the man was just trying to get by, and the man was here before D.

We are the intruders, we are the problem.

We walked to his apartment and D began to spin off ideas of how to repel the man: cacti, ants, and strobing streetlights. We told him these are cruel and terrible ideas. Then, he complained that his street smelled like piss, and we told him that his idea to put up a ‘No Pissing’ sign would certainly, only, encourage it.

***

I decided to stay in Europe until the end of the summer. At the end of my trip, I would follow Simon back to his village in France before returning home.

If I could not stay in the studio, I would have to find another place to spend my last few weeks in Portugal. I messaged the owner, asking for more time, and she replied with a quick no and that “Lisboa has that effect on people, they always want to stay.”

***

On the streets men gathered in thick crowds and relented their days to one another. They ask passerbyers to step into their homegrown restaurants and their family owned convenient stores. Tucked away on this street was a small school for those eager to learn Portuguese.

During Santos, the square a few blocks away from my studio turned into a stage. Music plays into the night. In an AM stroll, the streets are filled with beer cans, cigarette buds, and damp and dirty red, yellow, white, green party streamers that remain until the cleaning crew crawled out from what seemed to be the walls themselves. I stepped around them on my walk, tried not to slip, and the street felt so oddly empty, sounds so strangely quiet without the people there to warm it.

And if there is something I am meant to fear here, I have missed it.

***

In Matim Moniz, a few blocks away, was Prisma Bar, a sticky, dark, independently owned and sustained bar and creative space. From the street, I hopped a small gate and light seeped from a crack of a large door. I walked a narrow hallway riddled with low couches, amd tables-turned-chair. People sat lazily, buzzed, and drank as the musicians streamed into a line for an open mic sign-up sheet.

The space was small but open. There was a drumset on top of a red rug, mic stand, multiple guitars, and a few random percussion instruments. The musicians are no strangers to each other though their order of playing together was seemingly random. When they began their songs, jamming and riffing off each other, they leaned closer together, mouths ajar, jaws locked and teeth bearing, with fingers gliding over strings, and backs arched as they rocked side to side. A well anticipated saxophonist joins in late with a band, they all come to a calm beat as he sweats to a rhythm long and smooth.

***

I dwell over every sunrise, every day spent on blue beaches beneath a kissing sun, every afternoon turned evening on an overlook where I am splayed in bright grass, every night I slipped on slick stone and my shoes stuck to bar floors, and that 2 am in Intendente, beneath streetlights, when I could not bear to let the man before me be a brief sojourner in my summer.

***

After a few weeks, my Portuguese was still nonexistent, this street, and this studio was not mine. I was just a moment here and that was all I should be. Anything more and I was too much. I have found a great love for Lisbon, when I return it will be only to dwell. To thank her, for all she has given me but I wish to take no more.

The building owner knocks on my studio door, asked me if I lived here and I was not sure what to say, 

yes, but no. 

I told him I am a friend of the full time occupant because I did not know if leasing out this apartment was actually legal. So, I lied: I am her friend.

***

I cleaned the studio regularly, spent my mornings sweeping, scrubbing last night's dishes, and ringing out my laundry to put on the line. At first, I thought there was a trick to the laundry hanging. A way to firmly stick them down so that they would not fly off. But now, I wondered if it all had to do with the winds which, after a lifetime of American dryers, was something I could have never known before.

Maybe it was less about the way and more about the when: to know when the air would still, when the sun would peak, and when to strip the line. Part instinct, part habit, that could only be known by those who have lived a full life here.

–––

Angelina Morin is a Jewish and queer nonfiction writer from North Carolina. Her work appears in Hatkivah Magazine, GatherDC, and The Colton Review. She spent the summer traveling Portugal, Italy, and Greece researching the life and legacy of Doña Gracia Nasi, a 16th century resistance leader thwarting the Inquisitions persecution of Sephardic Jews. She hopes to complete and publish Nasi’s story as a lyric biography.