Philip Graham
Spends a Year
in Lisbon.
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Philip Graham, a writer who teaches at the University of Illinois, will be spending a year in Lisbon, Portugal. He will be reporting to us from there.
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D I S P A T C H 6
Let's Throw
a Festival!
By Philip Graham
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We're tucking into our meals with real gusto in this restaurant overlooking the Tagus River, trying to finish before a fireworks display begins at the nearby marina of the Parque das Nações. In two days Hannah will start sixth grade at a Portuguese public school that's a few minutes' walk from our apartment, and Alma and I want to give our daughter a booming sendoff and add a celebratory air to a big step that we're all nervous about. Hannah has long hoped for her own adventure (to match the months her bother Nathaniel, now in college, spent living in an African village with us before she was born), and though Lisbon is far from the dangers and raucous joy of life in a small African village, it's nothing to sniff at. Hannah will soon be trying to pass tests and make new friends, all in a new language, and maybe dealing with the risks of contracting malaria or of encountering snakes and scorpions would be less challenging.
So, eyes on the clock, we scarf down our food. Usually I love the pace of Portuguese dining, with food a leisurely punctuation to good conversation. But Alma and I are already calculating that we'll pass up dessert so we won't miss the excitement, because tonight will be no ordinary popping of firecrackers: it's the second Saturday of the Mundial de Pirotecnia, Lisbon's international fireworks festival. Last week, the Italians showed off their stuff; tonight it's the Germans' turn. On the following Saturday nights, the United States and then Portugal will get their chance to sizzle a decent expanse of sky. Everyone in the world, it seems, loves to blow up stuff to celebrate something, and for this festival, the fireworks experts get a chance to simply celebrate themselves.
While Alma promises Hannah we'll stop at a pasteleria later on the way home, I search for a glimpse of our waiter. As far as I can tell, the fellow must be off in some other busy corner, because he's certainly not hiding in the shadows—the lighting is chain-restaurant bright. (The "traditional" Portuguese cuisine in this place has an Olive Gardenish assembly-line taste.) We gotta get that check—the fireworks should be starting any minute, and, while I scan the room again for our seemingly invisible waiter, I wonder what the peaceful contemporary nation of Germany is up to these days when it comes to big bangs. Thanks to the Portuguese love of festivals of all kinds, we're going to find out soon.
That's the Portuguese for you—they can turn anything into a festival, and they stretch out bunches of them across every month of the calendar. This month a commedia dell'arte festival overlaps with a Shostakovich music festival, which competes with a festival of contemporary Chinese music, not to mention the Lisboa Dança festival, the Festival de Cinema Gay e Lésbico de Lisboa, and a Festival de Flamenco. These are followed by the Luzboa public-art festival. Already on next month's horizon a festival of live music approaches, alongside the documentary-film festival Doclisboa, and the Festival "Temps d'Images." Farther down the line, preparations are being made for an electronic-music festival, a digital-art festival, a festival of African film.
They're the secular equivalent of the country's religious calendar, with its panoply of saint's days and holidays as regular as stages of the cross. It's hard to escape Lisbon's festival mania, even if you're minding your own business, with no ticket in hand. One evening, while Alma, Hannah, and I were strolling through the Chiado district, we turned a corner and came upon a band participating in a Dixieland music festival. They were setting up just outside the Café a Brasileira, dressed in white shirts and pants, red suspenders, and toting the requisite trumpets, clarinet, trombone, and stripped-down drum kit. And they spoke Spanish among themselves—not, I thought, a good sign. But when they ripped into "Sweet Georgia Brown" it was clear they'd done the necessary homework on New Orleans–style jazz.
There's a particular Portuguese genius to all these festivals. If you can't go to all the events, you at least know that other aspects of, say, flamenco dancing, or new Chinese music, are being covered elsewhere, thank you very much. A single concert or performance simply can't exhaust a subject—it's just one color of the art form's full spectrum. This is reminiscent of Fernando Pessoa, that great Portuguese writer who invented multiple poets within him in order to express his full artistic range.
Now we can hear the first telltale distant booms through the glass wall beside our table, and we can just make out, through the reflection of the restaurant behind us, the first soaring patterns in the sky outside. Finally I catch the waiter's eye, and when he returns with the conta, I leave a bigger tip than usual because I don't want to wait for the change. It's too late now to run down to the marina, so instead we settle for the wooden deck surrounding the restaurant, and we lean on the railing, our heads raised to the ruckus above. Flaring red spirals coil and hiss in the sky, staggered multiple discharges overlap, and a circle of green tracers expands like an exhalation of breath, until the boom kicks in. There's always that delay between the inventive flash and the roar that set it off, because light always travels to the eye faster than sound travels to the ear. It's a little like the delay between the punch line and the laugh, and part of the pleasure of fireworks, I realize, is anticipating what any particularly robust, flaring design will eventually sound like.
As the flashy hubbub continues, Hannah leans tentatively, first against me, then Alma—unusual, since she's the type of child who will whirl down a hallway with a cartwheel, or burst into her latest favorite song with no warning. At 11, she's young enough to still be impressed by tonight's display but old enough to think that she's, well, too old for it all, though I suspect that the approach of this Monday's first day of school is what really has her distracted. Alma has a faraway look in her eyes, too, and probably for the same reason. For the past week or so, my wife has been in Full Mother Jacket—at the local papelaria she ordered Hannah's school books and supplies for the year, and she even managed to locate another girl in the school who speaks English. Meanwhile, I've been doing my best to keep Hannah's spirits up with my goofy jokes and shenanigans, and with my bright ideas like taking in tonight's slice of a fireworks festival. We're a family, after all, in for this year's adventure together.
Soon enough, we warm to the busy doings above and relax and release our obligatory ooohs and aaahs at shivering white centers of filigree, which crackle like enormous sparklers in the sky. Though I don't see what's particularly Germanic about these spectacular flourishes, I find myself filled with memories of other displays, from my own personal fireworks festival. When I was much younger and (only slightly) stupider, I stood on a wooden bridge in a small town in Japan and watched bursts of cranes and flower blossoms explode out of the darkness for the Bon Odori celebration. Another time, Alma and I stood at the railing of a friend's rented boat in the East River and watched fireworks celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge, an extraordinary fanfare that was mirrored by the river and by the glass windows of Lower Manhattan's office buildings and skyscrapers, including the World Trade Center. That image—of festive explosions rippling across the sides of the Twin Towers—haunted me years later, when I did volunteer work near Ground Zero.
So, while tonight's sky is impressively frisky, there's this other reason that I'm still lagging behind in the enjoyment department: last week was the fifth anniversary of 9/11. On the day, the three of us took a bus across the Tagus River to the town of Setúbal, to catch a boat that offered dolphin watching in the local freshwater inlets. But we just missed the cutoff and were left to stand on the dock and watch the sailboat glide off into the bay. Only then did I realize how much I'd wanted to be distracted by the frolics of Flipper's Portuguese cousins. I should have remembered that there's no running away from what you can't forget.
These hearty booms and streams of burning sky are not only a metaphor for joy and celebration; they remind me of real-world explosions with real-world consequences, and I think of a novel I've been reading, Sleepwalking Land, by Mia Couto, a writer from the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique. It's a hallucinatory look at the ravaged landscape of Mozambique's civil war, with often harrowing images balanced by the poetic grace of the prose. Every few pages I've had to take out my notebook and write another sentence I simply couldn't let escape through the porous cheesecloth of my memory. One line that's wrapped itself around my brain is that each of us is a "sleepwalker strolling through fire." Uh-huh—I've collected enough psychic burns of varying degrees and of my own making to say amen to that, brother. But there's another quote I've collected that comes back to me now, one so apt that I wonder if it led me, unconsciously, to suggest, days ago, that we all take in some fireworks: "They should invent a gentle, more affable gunpowder, capable of exploding men without killing them. An inverse powder, which would generate more life. And out of one exploded man, the infinity of men inside him would be born." Now wouldn't that be a great addition to a fireworks festival, a thrilling new pyrotechnic tradition. And what a welcome innovation it would be in the art of war.
Fat chance.
So we'll certainly be passing on next week's entry in the festival, the United States—we've had enough of our country's Shock and Awe and its ilk to last us a lifetime. (And I can't say that Alma, given her Jewish heritage, has been entirely thrilled that this evening's explosions are brought to us by Germany.) On the other hand, I might not have worked myself up like this if these fireworks tonight had been their own singular event instead of an entry in a multinational festival. The Portuguese get it right—there's more bang for your buck when a single performance doesn't pretend to be the last word. Everything can change—"depende do contexto," as our language tutor Rui often says.
Finally, the night sky reclaims its darkness, its silence, and the crowd begins to disperse. Alma, Hannah, and I hold each other's hands and set off for our delayed dessert at the closest pasteleria we can find. There, we return to our own particular context: a family in a foreign country, sweetening our awareness of this year's uncertainties with a pastel de nata, or a bola de chocolate, the swoosh and burst of skyrockets still ringing in our ears.
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