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Standing in the square full of crumbling buildings and faded, long-past-useful signs, I realized it was time, here in this moment of desperation on our last night in Lisbon, to use my year’s worth of Brazilian Portuguese. I straightened my back, checked my fashionable all-black outfit for any egregious sloppiness that might make me look as though I lacked respect for the city, and strode over to the ancient lady selling earrings at a small table.
“Desculpe, onde fica a rua Espírito Santo?” I asked, letting a “j” sound slip into the second syllable of “onde” without fighting it. I had spent the past two semesters learning Portuguese from a paulista and a lifetime listening to samba and bossa nova. In fact, I had decided to begin Portuguese a year earlier after watching City of God and finding myself equally as transfixed by the sounds coming out of the Brazilian actors’ mouths as by the mix of beautiful and horrifying taking place on the screen in front of me. It wasn’t my fault, I felt, that my accent and the ones I heard around me were virtually incompatible. After all, all I had really known about Lisbon before my mid-August visit was that it had suffered a devastating earthquake in the 18th century and was the birthplace, the black-dressed, smoky-voiced motherland, of fado.
Saying fado is the traditional music of Portugal would be incorrect; it is specific to two particular cities in the country, with Lisbon fado being more well-known than the fado from the smaller city of Coimbra. Sadly, I use the term “well-known” somewhat liberally since many of even the most knowledgeable musicians I’ve met have never heard of fado. I hadn’t heard of it myself until a bright November Friday about nine months before I stood on the Largo do Chafariz de Dentro trying to find a tiny street with a tiny fado place that was maybe going to be somewhat authentic. On that faraway, much colder Friday, my Portuguese professor decided to show us a scene from Carlos Saura’s Fados documentary. I have always loved how Saura takes an art form and spends so much obsessive time on it that the dance, music, performance, whatever feels like it makes complete sense by the end of the hour and a half. The clip of Fados was only nine minutes long and all it featured was different people dressed in black, of both genders and all different ages, standing up, singing something I couldn’t understand, and sitting back down again. All the while, two men played instruments that looked like lutes and sounded like a cross between a mandolin and a guitar. My classmates were bored. Meanwhile I went back to my room thinking about the documentary, found the clip online, and let it play on repeat while I went about my life. But I found myself drawn not only to the sound, but to the visual, drawn to watching these people stand in a shadowy, low-ceilinged room that looked like a wine cellar and sing. Soon, I had bought the soundtrack to the documentary, still only having seen that 9-minute clip. And by December, “go to Lisbon to hear fado” had somehow written itself on my bucket list—in indelible ink.
The woman smiled and took her attention away from the friends to whom she’d been talking, but she shrugged as she did so. “Não sei,” she said, apologetically. I allowed myself only a moment to bask in the fact that my Brazilian Portuguese and her Portuguese Portuguese had made sense to each other. She didn’t know where the street was, and the sun was slowly beginning to sink down over Lisbon, casting shadows over the broken sidewalk tiles. We stood in the Alfama, the oldest neighborhood in the city, where brightly-painted buildings leaned over emaciated sidewalks so dramatically that walking around the area felt bizarrely at times like walking through Lower Manhattan. Because of this, the Alfama didn’t bask in the white sunlight of overexposed film that the rest of the city experienced during the summer days, and now at sunset, the dark alleys looked positively menacing. I feared for neither my life nor for the safety of my family, but for my dream. Our reservation at the Parreirinha de Alfama was for 8:30; it was well past that time now. Perhaps we wouldn’t make it.
My father tried to search for the restaurant on Google Maps, but his phone had stopped working; technology was appropriately failing us in this district so full of history paint peeled from walls seemingly because it couldn’t contain the past. I decided to be a little more like Henry the Navigator, one of Portugal’s heroes from a time in Portuguese history much more golden than the time we’re in now. I ran toward a musty, shadowy alleyway that sprouted off the plaza. It was old, it lacked sidewalk cafes. It seemed promising.
We arrived in Lisbon on a day that explained to me why fado pulsed through Lisbon like a heartbeat—and vice versa. The sun hung so dry and baking-hot over the city that day the clock-thermometers displayed a temperature of around 90°F even at sundown. It was a Sunday and a Holy Day of Obligation in a Catholic country. These two factors combined made the city crackle with a self-aware and somewhat industrious lethargy, or a very energetic emptiness. Hot buses that advertised air conditioning pulled up to the stops—eventually. Natives and tourists circled through the flat streets of the Baixa—the least hilly district in this city of exhausting peaks and valleys—but strangely silent, placid as they went about their souvenir shopping and photography. There were few traffic noises. I thought of the music of the fadistas—simple, lacking harmony, requiring only two or three people to create—and the need for these singers and their songs clicked into place for me. Fado songs are generally about love, Lisbon or love for Lisbon. You hear the city’s circulatory system in the music: the singers’ voices and words caressing Lisbon like a lover, mourning for its past like a widow. The roadways stumble and curve so dramatically up the hills and in between slanted buildings I found myself thinking of the low-ceilinged, crowded room in the fado documentary. The same use of a challenging space for whatever beauty possible.
I ran back from my explorations with my arms flailing, yelling at my family across the plaza. At least I was dressed nicely for such indignity, but I no longer cared what I looked like.
“It’s over there!” I gasped. “In that alley. I found the place.”
The Beco de Espírito Santo wasn’t even really an alley. It looked more like a carved-out pathway between some buildings, a pathway that then turned into a staircase because the hill it went up was too steep for a simple sidewalk (this is a common occurrence in Lisbon). It may not even have had a plaque with a street name. Still, a neon sign glowed brightly over a basement door a few paces down the alley: PARREIRINHA DE ALFAMA. I collected my family and we burst through the door.
Inside, a brightly lit hallway led to an interior that looked amazingly like the restaurant that had been featured in Saura’s Fados. The ceiling, covered in wooden beams, hung low over the room. Black and white pictures filled the walls, featuring fado singers who had performed there in the past. The place was small, with fifteen tables if that many, and at the tables there sat not tourists with guidebooks, but groups of older people ordering wine in Portugal’s sibilant Portuguese. Our waitress, bringing us the bulky menu, spoke very little English. Underneath her ruffly white apron she wore a Twilight shirt.
The restaurant was quiet enough, yet I felt an electric current running through the walls, myself, the people around me. I could almost hear this electricity, crackling and flickering like a dying lightbulb, if I closed my eyes. There were no signs of any fadistas as I paged through the monotonous menu that featured, as most restaurants in Lisbon did, seafood dish after seafood dish; yet, occasionally, I heard a guitar string sounding somewhere in the distance or a shuffling of feet that didn’t belong to the buzzing diners or the chatting waitresses. Somewhere in the Parreirinha de Alfama, I knew, fado lurked in the wings.
And then suddenly the overhead lights were off and the only lights that filled the room were the sultry haze from the red-shaded wall lamps and the intimate spark of the candles on our tables. Two older men came out with the instruments I had seen in Fados, followed by a tall elderly woman dressed in all black with a shawl draped over her shoulders. With her hair up in a tall bun, her shoulders back and a fierce glow in her eyes, her presence nudged itself into even the smallest, farthest corners of the tiny room. Without any introduction, the men began playing. I felt the sound of their music rush through me and I began to cry completely unexpectedly. Tears ran down my face as the woman’s rich, deep voice began singing a piece about a lover who left her to go far away. I could not stop my tears. They quietly poured out of me through the woman’s four-song set.
By the time the next, younger woman came on to sing, I had stopped crying, but I was left with a feeling of solidarity with the city. The fado had connected with something in me I hadn’t even known about. True, I was only in Lisbon for five days, and have no Portuguese ancestry that I’m aware of, but the tears the fado had produced made me feel as though I’d signed a pact with the city in my own blood. I felt the fado, the city’s voice within me, so deeply that like the cracking peeling walls, I had to let it out.
Now, home in New York, I listen to fado and feel the same way the fadistas’ music feels—homesick for a city. I find myself dreaming of a city filled with longing and nostalgia, one whose past jostles against its present and shocks the visitor with its dichotomy of roaring and stilled. The word “fado” means “fate” in Portuguese, which makes sense to me. My desire to come to Lisbon and hear fado was not something I had sat around thinking about. It was driven by an impulse, a passion, a longing to make a connection I still have not quite comprehended. So I turn up the music of Carminho and Amália Rodrigues and my favorite, Ana Sofia Varela, and I think: I miss you, Lisboa, minha Lisboa, cidade do fado. My Lisbon, city of fado.
