vagabundear

The last ten days are a blur of disorientating images and sensations – flavours seen, sights heard, sounds tasted.

An experience whose strangeness stems from the sense I had, throughout, of having stumbled into another’s narrative, of making my way not through the districts of a city, but the pages of a novel.

Streets I had visited in poetic passages suddenly manifested themselves ‘in person’. Words and phrases first encountered in text now emerged from the mouth of a bus conductor or tobacconist.

And there were signs, signs everywhere: a novel fragment reproduced on a building facade. A poem graffiti’d onto the pavement. The stencil portrait of the national poet, Fernando Pessoa, winking at me from the back of a garbage truck as it heaved its way slowly into the night.

I glimpsed these images, fleetingly, while crossing streets, while looking out windows, while walking a city that was not my own.


And now London. The persistent feeling that accompanies me as I walk home from the tube station dragging a suitcase twice as heavy as the one I left with, as I enter the house and greet my flatmates, as I set about re-inhabiting my old life with an ease and immediacy that scares me, is a desire to ‘fix’ those impressions. To ensure they don’t vanish.

I have brought back books. I have brought back food. I have brought back the habit of saying Obrigada and Ola and asking for um gerotto instead of coffee.

I have brought back postcards, maps, two memory cards’ worth of photos, and a notebook of phrases copied from every monument, billboard, street sign and shop window I came across.

Please let this assemblage be enough. Please may these objects continue to exhale life.

May they provide breath for me to blow back into my already deflating memories – those structures that like some kind of marquee of the imagination appear already on the verge of collapse, falling in upon themselves mere moments after they have been constructed. Please let these souvenirs help me souvenir.


Souvenir: From the Latin subvenire: to present itself, to come to the rescue
An object that recalls a certain place, occasion, or person; memento.
To steal or keep for one’s own use; purloin.
To come to mind.
To keep in mind.
To recall.
To recollect.

I want Lisbon to remain impressed upon my brain. I want a trace of its contours to be visible the moment I shut my eyes. I want it to come to my rescue. And, in turn, to let me collect it, gather it up in my arms like a foundling.

I want the paths that the Portuguese sun has charted on my skin to endure. Stopping just shy of my neckline, discreetly skimming the bottom of my skirt, this pattern of brown against white is itself an inscription. It says that I am taken. That my body belongs to somewhere else. That it has been laid claim to by another.

I want to continue seeing anew.

There is a Paul Simon song I used to love as a kid. I’d beg my dad to put it on the record player, then I’d spin around and around the living room while it played, spinning until I fell down.

‘A man walks down the street’ it goes. ‘It’s a street in a strange world. Maybe it’s the third world or maybe it’s his first time around.

And then: ‘Doesn’t speak the language. Holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by sounds. Sounds. Cattle in the marketplace. Scattering rings of orphanages. He looks around – around – he sees angels in the architecture.

Spinning in infinity.

He says Amen Hallellujah.’

I was that man.

As a child in my parents’ living room, and now, again, in Lisbon.

I looked around –around – and what I heard was the enigmatic sound of a language that privileges the sssshhh and oisshhh.

I saw streets named after states of being, and after the tradespeople whose shops originally lined them. Rua dos Cegos. Rua dos Sapateiros. Rua dos Douradores. Streets for blind people, shoemakers, gold merchants. I walked through signs.

On one building façade I read: Penso mas nao existo – I think but I don’t exist.

I spoke to others through gestures, smiles. I learned to widen my eyes to convey the strength of what I was feeling. By the second day, my eyes were perpetually escancarados. My mouth remained perpetually half-parted.


On the flight back from Lisbon, I was reading the London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842. The epigraph that introduces the third chapter, ‘On the Character of Londoners’, is an extract from ‘Great Britain in 1833’, by the Baron d’Haussez.

Who is the Baron d’Haussez? I have no idea. Who was Flora Tristan? No clue. I had picked up the book in a café in the Bairro Alto on my first day – there it was, amongst ten-year-old Lonely Planets, earmarked mystery novels and the French (Spanish, Italian, German) versions of Harlequin romances. Alongside these texts was the incitation to take one and, should it strike a particular chord, to make it your – my – our own. It was a veritable invitation to take, to feed, on words.

So I did. Or rather, I bit into the epigraph – swallowed, then choked.

‘There must be some kind of defect in the character, domestic arrangements and habits of the English, for they are not happy anywhere’ it read. ‘They care little for their comfort as long as they are somewhere else. That variety and diversion which other nations seek in the territory of their imagination the English seek simply in going about from one place to another’.

Standing in the café, half-leaning against that bookcase, I felt my face grow warm, as if I had caught someone scrutinising me deep inside. I’m not even English. I spluttered to no one in particular. And then: There is nothing wrong with my domestic arrangements. And then again, My imagination is plenty varied.

Imagining I was silencing the voice that had first uttered those words, I snapped the book shut, thrust it into my bag, and left the café.

I cut across the Principe Real, thinking, I am fine just where I am, in this place between places. And when I got to the Mirador de Caterina, I stopped, felt the heat of the sun on the nape of my neck, and said to no one in particular, Pleasure resides precisely in this going from one place to another.

Pleasure resides in imagining one’s self em outra parte.


It was on the flight home that I pulled the book out again, reading and re-reading that epigraph, and then reading the narrator’s own diagnosis of a people who, in her view, had lost their sense of place, resigning themselves to a life of relentless wandering and searching, an aimless quest to find that displaced – what? Home? History? Destiny?

And surely it wasn’t – isn’t – only the English who felt, or feel, this way.

It was, after all, the words of the ever-wandering, ever-seeking, Alvaro de Campos that first captured my imagination – that spoke to my restless state before I even set foot in Lisbon: ‘Não posso estar em parte alguma. A minha Patria é onde não estum.’ (‘I don’t belong anywhere. My country is wherever I’m not’). And ‘Eu não vou ficar muito tempo, pois eu nunca ficar muito tempo’ (‘I won’t stay long, for I never stay long’. And again: ‘Giro, rodeo, eu engenho-me’ (‘I turn, I spin, I forge myself’).


Since the flight back – a flight I only narrowly caught, boarding precisely seven minutes before take off – the phrase ‘She cares little for her comfort as long as she is somewhere else’ has continued to echo in my mind.


As long as I am somewhere else.
As long as I can re-capture Lisbon – take those small, still-frame images I can still recall, and transfer them carefully, one by one, onto the landscape, the objects, the things that surround me here.


I will superimpose images of Portuguese tomate, pepinos and pimentos onto the vegetables in the Sainsbury’s produce aisle. Over each pallid tomato will go one whose vivid colour re-affirms all that should be.

I want to hide the taste of sardinhas up inside the roof of my mouth, and ensure that there it stays.


On the commute to and from work, I deliberate how best to preserve these impressions. How do you write a travel experience?

How can you ever adequately narrate what you’ve seen? There are the images in my mind. There are the photographs I’ve taken.

There is the page here in front of me.

And there is the sense that whatever I will write will be inadequate, that nothing will be able to replace, or re-produce, Lisbon herself.


This is possibly the reason why, in the eight hours between landing and going to bed, I did everything but write.

Why, when I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep, looking at the silent walls around me and resenting them for not reverberating with the movement of lumbering trams or the sound of that old garbage truck, I turned to books already written.

Digging out Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon from the pile of the books I’d bought during the trip, I hoped to find those motifs already fully formed – transposed from city to page, ready for me to re-discover.

But they weren’t. Or rather, they weren’t enough. It wasn’t my experiences that I read. And it wasn’t the Lisbon I remembered that I found: neither the one I had first encountered, in the poems of Pessoa and the stories of Tabucchi (texts read sleepily in my grandmother’s reading room one summer years ago, then read again in the university library this past winter), nor the one that met me as I stepped off the plane, hurling itself at me in a bombardment of colours and sounds.

300 pages and no feeling. No spirit. And – ironic, for a novel so concerned with the proclivities of the mind and intellect and the longing of the soul – it didn’t have the necessary depth. The espessura.

Espessura: density, depth, volume. Oh, the wonders of a language that has a word that both denotes the concentration of content, and itelf re-enacts that concentration! A word that both conveys substance and elicits a desire for it…


I am drunk on Portuguese.
I am subsumed by a language I barely know. In my hand I hold five or six words. I hold them, touching them gingerly with the reverence you reserve for those things you still can’t believe you’ve found. And they, oh so few, hold me.

Pessoas. Ciudade. Dessossego. Extraviado. Abstraiendo-se. Amor.


There was a Spanish woman staying in the room next to mine: a Madrilena. We’d meet, almost every day, in passing – each on her way in, out, to, from someplace in the city.

Propped in the doorway, she told me how Lisbon was but one stop in an itinerary she was making up as she went along. Last year had been a clown workshop in Dublin followed by a photography course in Philadelphia. This year, backpacking in Cambodia and perhaps – because yes, this city was enchanting, more enchanting than anyplace else she’d been – Lisbon again. Or maybe not.

‘I like life more, now that I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow’ she said. ‘I have my translations, which I can do anywhere. And they keep money in my pocket – Portuguese is very good that way, very remunerative. Is that the right word? Remunerative?’


In Italian, my mother tongue, the word for ‘wandering’ is vagare. A vague person is vago; a person who wanders vaga. He ‘vagues’. The Portuguese equivalent is vagabundear, like the Italian vagabondare. In other words, to vagabond.

I know this not from the pocket dictionary I carried with me, or from Google translate, which I’ve been relying on since I returned, but from an Italian biologist I met on my last day in the city, in the sort of encounter you only have on holiday.

When your mind is already creating stories – when the people around you have started to appear as emblematic as the signs you see on buildings.


I had been walking in the Jardim Botanico, the botanical gardens, when it had started raining – suddenly, the way it does at the end of summer when the season is ready to turn.

There we were, in the middle of the Jardim, by a moss-covered fountain full of goldfish, and with only trees for shelter. Drenched within minutes, we stood under the trees, and smiled foolishly at each other, making gestures towards the sky and towards ourselves, expressing little beyond a kind of mute solidarity.

We watched the rain cut through the sunlight, creating prisms in the air. We watched it strike the surface of the water while the fish underneath continued swimming, unperturbed.

We shifted our weight from one foot to another. It seemed rude, in a sense, for one of us to leave the other there – and yet for my part, I was too embarrassed to actually look at him, either to gauge where he might be from, or to initiate conversation based on those impressions.

It was only when I saw the book in his hand – a mystery novel with an Italian title – that the awkwardness broke. I could say something.

And so it went: Sei Italiano? Anch’io. Nervous, then relieved, laughter. E di dove? (From where?) E perché Lisbona? (And why Lisbon?) And why the Jardim? And why this rain? And, after all, why not the rain? What a perfect place to be caught in it, no? And then the shared enthusiasm at being caught unawares. Of being away from home, without a plan, vagando.

He had just returned from a year abroad, at the University of Texas. He would have to go back to Siena to do some teaching, yes, but he had no intention of staying long.

‘Like you’, he said, ‘I am vagabundeando.’

We talked.

‘Texas?’ I said. How funny – I had grown up in the Midwest. In Minnesota.

‘But your accent –?’ he puzzled.

‘My parents are Italian’, I clarified. ‘They met in the US. But now I live in London – moved there ten years ago. It is –‘ I almost said ‘home’ but stopped short.

‘Ah, so you were born a wanderer’, he laughed.

It kept raining. He took a photograph of me with my camera (I couldn’t resist asking – I’d been doing this for the whole trip), grinned as I squinted through the showers. Then, while handing back the camera, he pointed out a plant, just inches away from my foot.

‘See that?’ He asked, crouching down by my feet. ‘It’s a gameophyte Psilotum. They’re not-quite-ferns’. He touched one, gently. ‘You see? No true leaves, no true roots. It’s why biologists used to see them as primitive. The way –’ he smiled. ‘Perhaps the way the first American settlers viewed the nomadic tribes. Inferior beings for what must have appeared to them as a lack of place, or “community” in their sense of the word’. His smile broadened. He fingered the wet plant, then straightened up.

‘Except scientists found out, more recently, that these early plants are far more complex than they had originally thought. They have this structure, this vast’ he splayed his arms wide, ‘ this vast, branching, underground structure. They are rooted – but more like –’ he paused again. ‘Have you read Deleuze?’ I shook my head.

‘No but tell me’ I said. Thinking – this is not happening.

He smiled. This man’s face, when he smiled, was so open.

‘Deleuze sees nomads as more fixed than anyone else. Their fixity, so to speak, lies in their always moving between places. That is what centres them. And for Deleuze, societies, and knowledge, should be modelled less like a root-tree structure, and more like a – ’ He spun his wrist around and around, opening and closing his fist, ‘more like a rhizome.’

I didn’t ask what a rhizome was.

He knelt down again, at my feet, at the plant’s feet, and plucked a miniscule bulb off its top. He looked up at me. ‘It’s okay,’ he smiled, seeing my look of surprise.
‘It’ll grow back.’

He stood up again and handed me the bulb. ‘I look at these plants and I think this is how we should be. Like Deleuze says. Like these plants have known for centuries. Growing – evolving – by vagabundear.’

I nodded – stunned. And then we watched the rain. When it stopped, we smiled at each other, exchanged emails, and went our separate ways. Before parting, he squeezed my shoulder, briefly, as if we had known each other a long time, long enough for it to be difficult to say good-bye.


In the space of 30 minutes – 40, at most – I had travelled in space and time and language and – and it had all felt so immense.


I have sat in the lap of a city whose softness, whose enveloping embrace, has turned me into a being who again sees the whole world in texture and sound.

Somewhere along the way between reading a poem and descending from a plane, between booking a flight and walking in an urban garden, between finding a book and rejecting its argument, something in her awakened. Something in her came alive.


The tan, the city’s inscription of itself onto my flesh, will fade. Soon, I will no longer wake up at night, attuned to the slow heaving sigh of a garbage truck as it trundles its way through the alley below my window with the deliberation of a mule. I will no longer expect to hear the shattering of glass bottles against the pavement, or of garbage collectors vociferating amongst themselves.

The phrases that had become second nature will no longer spring from my mouth without my needing to recollect them. I will once again go back to ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’. I will forget to look up Deleuze. My emails to the biologist will, very likely, remain unsent drafts. But before that happens –

Antes –
Antes –
Antes –

Let me get this all down.

And once I have, let not me, but something – someone – somewhere – else translate all of that which I have seen… into all I have yet to see.

And may it allow me to maintain alive this new-found desire to wander. To vagabundear.