Light light Lisbon

India seems to be everywhere, presenting herself sometimes in highly unlikely forms like this restaurant in central Lisbon that marries Bengal with tandoori food. The mascot: dancing Shiva. Well, why not?

I check into my hotel on Liberty Avenue on Wednesday afternoon and decided to make the most of the remaining sunlight. I’ve been to the city once before for five days so I decide I can make it without a map. Within two blocks I tire of the traffic on the main road despite the large shady trees and the two teenagers in a sweet embrace by a fountain. I turn off into a narrow side street and find myself at Alegria Square where a madman is directing the odd car here and there. The park in the square has a seedy feel, a corner theater announces some kind of doubtful spectacle featuring women and dance. Lisbon is hilly and soon I recognize a set of stairs leading up to another level of the city. If memory serves me right then I’ve been here six months ago after dinner with some friends. Despite the wind and the cold we sat in the open night and had lemonade. At that time I hadn’t been able to figure out how we got there so now I give up all hope of orienting myself toward the Chiado and just continue to where my nose takes me. Soon I’m on a narrow street with tramways and even narrower sidewalks. I’m expecting somehow to reach a large square in the Chiado with nothing but the compass that was included in my urban brain at birth. The light is beautiful today as always, the patch of green on the Principe Reale that was closed off last fall is still out of bounds. No construction workers are in sight so it’s likely that prohibitive green netting will hide the city’s most magnificent vista overlooking the old fort for many more months to come.

Paris is the city of light. So how come Lisbon has this kind of light? A light light. An unavoidable pun that you must excuse. There is a lack of heaviness in Lisbon’s light morning, noon, and dusk. It’s not because of the sea. After all Greece is on the sea. It’s not the proximity to Africa. Morocco doesn’t have this light. My own theory is that the undulating off-white tiles that pave all of Lisbon’s many sidewalks have much to do with the quality of this city’s luminescence. They bounce off the light differently than the sidewalks and buildings in Paris (for example). The red roofs tinge the light with a rose accent and round it off. If the lumière in Lisbon is light and young and fresh there is a lot in the buildings and the roads that is old and sage. Even with little understanding of Portugal one can end up feeling nostalgic and old world when one is here. Beauty is to be found in hidden corners and by the way. Nothing announces it. Nothing celebrates it. That is Lisbon’s charm. For a walker like myself it is impossible not to notice the uneven undulating sidewalks. A few black stones provide shapes and patterns against a background of white. The sidewalks are functional and the stones are all in place but they rise and dip, there are no straight lines. A topographer would be able to map as much relief on the sidewalks as on the very hills of Lisbon. The tiles are wavy along both a two dimensional and a three-dimensional axis and I’d like to ask an expert in optics if flat even stones would create a different effect and alter the light. Even as I ruminate over this I’m spit out into the square I’ve been anticipating but from the opposite direction that I expect. This happens again a few hours later. Walking after dinner I wait for the Chinese pavilion, an odd eccentric nightlife venue with an improbable collection of objects to loom up on the opposite side of the streets but it is to my left just ahead of me. The next night heading to Buenos Aires, one of Lisbon’s small, charming, and perpetually overbooked restaurants I huff and pant up the steps once again approaching it as if in a mirror. To be in Lisbon for me is to be at once lost and not lost, to recognize something familiar and yet to find myself perplexed. For these and other reasons I know I will come back many times.