Edition: U.S. / Global

'The Return of the Caravels'

Published: April 7, 2002

He'd passed through Lixbon eighteen or twenty years earlier on the way to Angola and what he remembered best were his parents' rooms in the boardinghouse on Conde Redondo where they were staying in the midst of a clatter of pots and women's exasperated grumbling. He recalled the communal bathroom, a washbasin with a set of baroque faucets in imitation of fish that vomited out sobs of brownish water through their open gills, and the time he came upon a man on in years smiling on the toilet with his pants down around his knees. At night the window would be open and he'd see the illuminated Chinese restaurants, the sleepwalking glaciers of electrical-appliance stores in the shadows, and blond heads of hair above the paving stones of the sidewalks. So he'd wet his bed because he was afraid of finding the smiling gentleman beyond the rusty fish or the blond heads of hair that dragged clerks along the corridor, twirling room keys on their pinkies. And he'd end up falling asleep with dreams of the endless streets of Coruche, the twin lemon trees in the prior's grove, and his blind grandfather, with blank statue eyes, sitting on a bench by the tavern door as a flock of ambulances wailed along Gomes Freire on their way to S&#227;o Jos&#233; Hospital.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; On the day we sailed, going through a narrow street with the residences of demented countesses, the shops of hallucinated bird dealers, and tourist bars where the English went for their morning gin transfusion, the taxi dropped us off beside the Tagus on a strip of sand called Bel&#233;m, according to what could be read on the nearby train stop with a scale on one side and a urinal on the other, and he caught sight of hundreds of people and teams of oxen that were bringing stone blocks for a huge building, led by squires in scarlet habits, indifferent to the taxis, the vans with American divorc&#233;es and Spanish priests and the nearsighted Japanese who were taking pictures of everything, chatting in their sharp-beaked samurai tongue. Then we put our baggage on the ground beyond the agapanthuses that mechanical sprinklers were aspersing with circular spurts, near the laborers who were working on the drains in the drive leading to the soccer stadium and the high buildings of Restelo, as the Cape Verdeans' tractors crossed paths with the carts carrying the tombs of princesses and piles of arabesques for altars. Passing by a plaque that identified the unfinished building and said JERONYMITES, we came upon the Tower in the background in the middle of the river, surrounded by Iraqi tankers, defending the nation from Castilian invasions, and, closer by, sitting on the frilly waves by the shore, waiting for the colonists, held fast to the sludge of the water by roots of iron, with admirals in lace cuffs leaning on the rail of the bridge and seamen up on the masts preparing the sails for the open sea that smelled of nightmare and gardenias, among rowboats and a swirl of canoes, we found the ship of the discoveries waiting.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And now as the aircraft was landing in Lixbon he was startled by the buildings in Encarna&#231;&#227;o, the vacant lots where broken pianos and rupestrine carcasses of automobiles were ossifying, and the cemeteries and military posts whose names he didn't know, as if he were arriving at a foreign city that was missing, in order for him to recognize it as his, the clerks and ambulances of eighteen years before. He'd been delayed for a week with the mulatto woman and the child in the waiting room of the airport in Loanda, lying on the floor, rolled up in blankets, gnawed by hunger and the urge to urinate, in a confusion of suitcases, sacks, children sobbing, and smells, hoping for an opening in order to flee from Angola and the machine guns that were singing in the streets every day, brandished by blacks in camouflage, drunk from cups of aftershave and authority. An official who leafed through papers and leaped over the reclining bodies would dribble out a name every hour or so, and behind the glass windows militiamen of UNITA, with horsehair bracelets and plumed lances, led by American and Chinese advisers, kept watch over us under the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling.