WaKOWchive--Archive of the WaKOW Art Collective: from Portugal

I take the liberty of posting this missive Nathan and I got from David while he was in Portugal with Mindy on retreat/vacation:

racheotom

the

clouds

murmured

nifesta

glishma

love

replied

--Tom Phillips, A Humument

Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God?

--Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Dear Wa-kow!,

Greetings from grilled-fish land, my friends. If you were here, you would by now be having dreams about grilling fish and being grilled as fish. Your highest plot would be to be fried like whiting, with your tail in your mouth. Your nickname would be peixe grelhada, and I don’t have to tell you what that means, os meus companheiros.

Or your nickname would be bacalhau and you, like myself, would be soaking in water for a day to soften you up. Or by now you would be referring to yourself as a famous flaky egg yolk pastry while you stroll down the street, your proud head held high and crisp and light.

Ah, would that you were here to revel in the fantasyland that is Sintra. Forget about the delight of the food, which Marinetti called “a sword through the heart of disquietude and malapropism.” Forget about the Moorish castle in our backyard (our backyard goes straight up for about 300 meters), with its view over half of southern Portugal. Forget about the whimsically burnt-out palaces that front cobblestone streets once drawn by a capricious god in the days of Gandalf the Grey. Forget about the annual Sintra Festival of Music and Dance, at one of whose concerts, held on the grounds of a former palace south of the city, we recently sat amidst the multinational bridge club of a charming Italian expatriate and former Lisbon university professor dressed in a tailored cream-colored suit, while we sipped white wine from the Douro and nibbled our pastries, some of which we promptly named ourselves after, and listened to a lusty band of Germans and Norwegians play the fuck out of some pieces for piano, cello, and clarinet. (On another occasion we subjected ourselves to a Spanish dance company specializing in a genre of performance one might call flamenco-moderno schlock. Each dance was damp with symbolism, and most were choreographed to a very loud mélange of taped club music, a club with which they beat the poor audience mercilessly.)

Forget about Lisbon, with its tourist trap fado bars, its hole-in-the-wall billiards parlors, its rows of antiquarian bookstores tantalizingly closed for the holidays, its huge white squares connected by pedestrian streets populated by discount Spanish clothing stores and bars selling cups of coffee as potent as they are tiny. Forget about the city’s rich little poems of pastry, such as the donut the size of an ipod wheel, made of phyllo dough and encased in an egg yolk and sugar crust, a neutron bomb’s worth of sucrose. Forget about the little art gallery on a little side street with its little art exhibit of art you can fit on a space the size of a tile, whose small owner sent us across the street to a restaurant that serves grilled octopus so astonishing that octopi should crowd into it from miles around for the privilege of being cooked so perfectly, but they don’t so were able to get a table. Forget about Lisbon’s barrio alto neighborhood, where life begins at midnight.

Forget about the park two blocks south of our house bursting with exotic plants and Portuguese teenagers who tend to form impromptu bands consisting of tuba, bassoon, and African drum. Forget about the owls hooting at night, the bees heavy as hovercraft that forage on our patio by day. Forget about the lubricious wonder of a country where the smallest beer you can order is called an “Imperial.” Forget about the tiled fountains scattered throughout the town, where entire families line up late into the night to fill up huge plastic bottles with spring water rumored to be good for the kidneys. Forget about the twice-monthly market in the town square up the street, where you can buy bread stuffed with sausage and cooked in an ancient oven in front of you, a practice that dates back to the 12^th century, while behind you stretch rows of vendors selling Gap t-shirt knockoffs and Ralph Lauren towels made with a dye that comes off on your back. Forget even about the pronunciation of the Portuguese language, which is like trying to eat garlic sausages while skiing down the side of the Kremlin.

Nao, os meus amigos, you should have come here just for the house. The casa da confraria is so weird that all we can think about here is Alice in Hobbitland. The rooms are small, cozily cramped, crammed with a menagerie of graceful old furniture and whimsically arranged objects (I am sitting now in the library of the main house, where I have placed a quartz frog as a doorstop and am pleased to inform you that I can now recognize “Vienna, Capital of Germany,” if shown the city from the perspective of the “Accurate Prospect” according to “MILLAR’S New Complete Universal SYSTEM of GEOGRAPHY” captured in the arrestingly colored 18^th-century lithograph above the desk--along, indeed, with similarly accurate prospects of Edinburgh, Islington, Dresden, the Hague, Quebec (the Capital of Canada), Madrid, and Paris, of which latter we are afforded only a General View. The desk is flanked by glassed-in bookcases holding mostly books written in Russian, plus Winters in Algeria, The Complete Urban Gardener, and Maus II), whose aesthetic is too rarefied to be concerned with matching. Although neither house is particularly big, the rooms within them are disposed so mysteriously that we are still not certain we have found them all. On our first day here we both entirely missed one of the bedrooms in the second house, having mistaken its doorway for a mirror. Above and behind the house lies the garden, a tangle of fruit trees, doll-sized close-cut grass lawns, rusting water pumps, secret passageways cut into the rock walls and barred from curiosity-seekers by latticework gates, all presided over by what appears to be a statue of St. Peter. If you climb up one of the flights of tiny stone steps, you get a view of the Estremadura plain stretching to the Atlantic on a clear day, which most are. This view also obtains from all of the house’s front windows, as well as from the narrow balcony that fronts the library in which I am now sitting.