Somewhere south of Ourém Francesco nods off, his head rolling back between powder blue seats and those three twists of beard that he has been carefully cultivating since Coimbra raise up with his chin like a hairy little cocktail fork; a triumvirate of curious worms. He snores.

We reach Lisbon late in the afternoon, and after a quick cigarette/ice cream break ride the subway in; staring down at old women with their carefully folded shopping bags, at stripes of bowed light trapped in the grimy window glass, at the girls coming in from the university stop. After some confusion at the turnstile (you need your ticket to escape from the Lisbon subway system, see) we surface among a bored gaggle of coeds lounging in the shade of a big tree, identically clad in red SUPER BOCK t-shirts and distractingly high-cut cutoffs. This particular gaggle has clearly been hand picked by the same people who cast SUPER BOCK's eyeball-blistering billboards and are sexy to the point of looking imported;  out of place, but exotically out of place. Somehow they all possess that smokey, come-hither look from the billboards and so it takes us a while but we ask them where we can find a particular street. They shrug, take a drag and point in exactly the wrong direction, which we happily follow a good kilometer or so before a policeman politely turns us around, suggesting we buy a map.

Tonight is the Festival of Santo António de Lisboa, for which the city has quite literally exploded in to party mode. Yellow streamers and string lights and big paper lanterns hang like cartoon constellations between pink plaster buildings, casting candy colored light across long wooden tables and squat sooty grills covered with sardines. A few hours after sundown, I'm back under the girl tree, beer in hand, this time with my Oklahoman bunkmate Robert the Redhead. The girls are gone and have been replaced with throngs of camera toting Portuguese, leaning forward against an overwhelmed looking police fence to catch a glimpse of the main parade. (Sequins, batons, dance numbers repeated every hundred meters or so.) Friendly in a bland, daydreamy sort of way, Robert is in Lisbon taking a breather after "four long months" in a Spanish study abroad program. I act sympathetic. We find dinner in a narrow little restaurant full of steam a few streets away, and talk about Oklahoman politics, which does a number on my appetite. The last I'd heard, Oklahoman statesmen were working hard to get guns in to schools (their measured response to the Virginia Tech shootings) but Robert informs me that that's old news. Most recently, they passed a state law against Sharia law, which we agree is probably the wrong way to address that particular issue. An tidy older gentleman leans over from the next table over to inform me that I am disassembling my sardine the wrong way and gives me a brief primer in the fine art of de-boning the little bastards with a butter knife. I remain skeptical until I actually take a bite, and am pleasantly surprised to find that when tackled properly, sardines aren't crunchy.

After dinner, we head in to town to see just what kind of celebration this parade has turned in to. Although Francesco had warned me that the party stretches long in to the night, I am not ready. Not by a long shot. The real action is up in the Graça neighborhood, and ends up being less party than boozy tsunami of flesh, flowing thick and fast along medieval-width corridors and narrow white stone staircases. Chaos. Exodus. Humanity packed in so tight it's viscous. Obvious parallels to that terrible Steve McQueen movie The Blob come to mind. There is no escape. When it's not drinking, the blob is shouting fight songs and jumping up to get a better look and breaking out in to little drunken skirmishes over pilfered beer, spilled beer, beer-induced bouts of surprising honesty, etc. Its surface is a rippling sheet of slippery skin and greasy black hair, oozing downhill against a few wiggling conga lines that push bravely upstream, tapeworm-like, occasionally stopping so that their momentum - their brain, their raison, their motivating molecule - can bend over and vomit; elbows on knees, offering up whole liters of more or less unprocessed beer back to the street. Friends sidle up to coo reassuringly and pat the poor molecule on the back while they laugh and shake their head and take long swigs with their free hand. Robert, appraising the situation from a safe distance with pursed lips and a thoughtful little nod, explains that the first step in his normal girl-getting process "is to get completely shitfaced". I posit he's in the right place.

We make it back to the hostel by three, collapse on to bunks and are told the next morning (ok, afternoon) by a squad of bleary eyed Australians (bed-head preserved by absolutely archival amounts of hair gel) that things didn't really pick up until four and why didn't we stick it out and see what a real Portuguese party is like? After breakfast, I tap through laptop projects until twoish and work up a good head of righteous self-pity about being trapped inside doing work, which pity is good fuel for sightseeing. Sightseeing, when it (finally) happens later that afternoon, translates to finding a quiet place to read and sip caffeine until my brain sputters to life. After an hour or so of meandering through the old city, I happen upon just such a place, qualified in part by the table of disaffected (read: intellectual) looking Portuguese thirty-somethings near the bar. All bearded, all poking lazily at a mound of cigarette-making materials that someone has dumped unceremoniously between them, they go down in my journal as : Wayfarer 1, Wayfarer 2, Spectacles and Squinty. The view from this particular cafe is spectacular: a broad swath of red-clay roofs sit barnacled across the slope like moss, creeping up to a warm weathered castle, flat and orange in the evening light . Wayfarer 2 is comparing Tarentino to Fellini in a soft voice that reminds me of certain, particularly tweedy professors I've had and Squinty is having none of it, shouting names of Felini favorites while he blows smoke upward in little puffs, simultaneously pounding the table with one hand and delicately tapping the ash from his cigarette from the other which looks breezy and unconscious but probably isn't. In the distance a tiny tongue of river gleams in the low light, blinking out a lazy signal that seems to send a soft breeze through the leaves overhead.

Naits off Cabeereeuh! Dolchee Veetuh!

Comments

Seston
I could watch Schindler's List and still be happy after reading this.

Biological Father
According to the SUPER BOCK website, those girls are advertising the favorite drink of Arcade Fire, the Arctic Monkeys and the Strokes! (And here I had to google Super Bock just to find out what the hell it was. To look at Rolling Stone and Spin you'd think the youth demographic only drank flavored vodka and spiced rum.) Wish those bearded Portuguese intellectuals could have eavesdropped on the heady discussions of Oklahoma multi-culturalism you Americans were having; why argue about something over espresso when you can ban it, bomb it or shoot it instead? No wonder Rumsfeld had it up to here with those damned Europeans.